IC: Warlocks patron is disgusted at his recent fall in battle and bestows upon him the ability of fiendish vigor to cast spell of false life, warlocks uses spell, feels bolstered with a facsimile of life , tries it again, it works, discovers he can cast it at will and there is some variance in its effect.  After time and circumstances permitting Warlock tends to cast it a few times until he feels well invigorated.

OOC: Warlock levels up and player chooses invocation Fiendish Vigor, when out of combat player casts False Life spell several times to get a decent roll:

• RAW: RAW: invocation Fiendish Vigor: “You can cast false life on yourself at will as a 1st-level spell, without expending a spell slot or material components.”
• RAW: spell False Life: “Bolstering yourself with a necromantic facsimile of life, you gain 1d4 + 4 temporary hit points for the duration.” Cast time 1 Action (6s).
• RAW: PHB: Chapter 9, Temporary Hit Points: “If you have temporary hit points and receive more of them, you decide whether to keep the ones you have or to gain the new ones”
• RAI: Sage Advice Compendium: spellcasting “You’re aware that a spell is affecting you if it has a perceptible effect”

With the above RAW seem clear, and if the character cannot perceive the effect of temp HPs how would the player follow the RAW above and further exampled in the below entry from Sage Advice Compendium:

“Keep in mind that temporary hit points aren’t cumulative. If you have temporary hit points and receive more of them, you don’t add them together, unless a game feature says you can. You decide which temporary hit points to keep. As an example, let’s say you’re a warlock with the Dark One’s Blessing feature, which gives you temporary hit points when you reduce a creature to 0 hit points. You currently have 2 temporary hit points remaining from armor of Agathys, you just slew a monster, and your Dark One’s Blessing can now give you 4 temporary hit points. If you take those temporary hit points, they replace the ones from armor of Agathys and end that spell, so you might not want to take them and keep the spell going instead, so as to continue benefiting from the cold damage it delivers.”

What do people think? is this RAI? Or a case of negative metagaming?

Thanks Stormknight, it has just been bugging me with the way the Temp HP rules are written and that Sage Advice Compendium entry.

If a player say received more Temp HPs from Dark One's blessing or even an ability like Inspirational Leader would they be able to choose to accept the larger number in that instance or would they still not know and have to stick with the lower amount?

Feindish vigor is not a terrible strong invocation, and is only worth taking at very low levels.  It what you're doing works 100% with RAW.  Also it's a max change of 3hp,  I think it's kind of petty for your DM to quibble over something so small when it's you using your characters abilities intelligently to get the most out of it while RPing your pact.

I tend to agree with you Bodanger, and when I looked up the ability before thinking of taking it your view seemed to be a popular one within the community,  but equally I strongly believe in playing games fairly and by the rules and don't want to upset anyone, and hence it bugging me the rules seem to conflict on this one.

Am new to D&D and there seems to be a couple of schools of thought on this, I was reading an article the other day on metagaming and while I didn't agree with author on all points, these 2 quotes resonated with the way D&D felt to me, now I'm less sure...

“people often claim that acting based on the knowledge of numbers and skills and probabilities is metagaming. I like to point out that those numbers and skills and probabilities are our way of translating the game world the characters can see into terms we can understand.”

“the numbers of the game MEAN something. They exist as analogs for things that have a reality in the game world. Armor class, hit points, skills, DCs, all of that stuff is the language used to describe a world we can’t see or understand completely. But our characters can.”

Edit: Double ninja'd

My view is in opposition to Stormknight's take.

Feeling more or less invigorated is very much an experienced phenomenon. Just ask Scarface. A little bit of a stimulant versus a lot of a stimulant can drive someone from alert to manic. It isn't really specified how filling yourself with necromantic energy is supposed to "feel", but I bet if feels like something, especially at low levels, where 8 temporary hit points doubles the character's durability.

Aside from that, multiple castings could be interpreted as the Warlock taking a little more time to collect themself. The practice could be more psychological than mechanical. (3 castings only takes 18 seconds, which is pretty negligible outside of combat.)

A DM could easily rule one way or another, but I'd personally be willing to give the Warlock the option of defaulting to full during downtime.

I 100% agree with Memnosyne.  The fact that "Temp HP don't stack" thus you must decide which Temp HP to take suggests to me that the character does somehow "feel" something in regards to the amount of false life. 

The Players Handbook, page 198 says "you decide whether to keep the ones you have or gain the new ones".  This seems pretty straightforward. Both RAW and RAI. 

Otherwise, the rule would just be "you take what you get, chump!"

“If you have temporary hit points and receive more of them, you decide whether to keep the ones you have or to gain the new ones”


This is really all you need to know, and it's as clear as can be.

1) False life is not that good a spell, particularly when cast at first level and Fiendish Vigor says it is always cast at 1st level.

2) I agree that you decide whether to keep means you know which is better.  

I would let a player roll 4 times and pick the best one.  Not a guarantee of getting max, but a reasonable compromise.

I am new to D&D… I struggle to see how this is metagame-y?, the Player would literally be basing their decision on number that represents how their Character feels a spell effect.  I could see how this is min/max-y, but to say it was meta would depend wholly on reason or personality of the Character the Player is playing.

I have been reading/watching around this topic and seems to me DM/Players (at least those that prioritise role-play) fall mostly into two schools of thought:

1. Characters do not think in numbers; therefore, any Player decisions made based on numbers are meta and should be avoided as they detract from the experience, effects like this are binary on or off
2. Characters do not think in numbers; however, they are the best representation a Player has of how their character feels and using them enhances the experience allowing for better Character decisions

I get this is a pretty minor thing and temp HPs do not seem common in D&D, but a genuine question for those in school 1, how do you deal with temp HP effects in your games if a Character cannot feel the difference? if a character does receive more temp HP from another source do you house rule it that they always have to keep what they have? what happens if they have taken a hit and only have 1 temp HP left, are they unable to accept anther source of temp HPs until they lose it removing the whole effect?

To me the school 2 just deals with this so much more elegantly, it follows the RAW/RAI without issue and it also means as a Player I get more information to feed my imagination as I get to actually feel how much my character is affected by any given spell rather than it just being a binary on or off.

Which is why I would let 4 rolls.  He does not know he hit the max, he just either knows it is the best he got or assumes he can't get any better

Even at max it’s still only 8 extra HP. At low levels that’s incredibly powerful. At 3rd level it’s nice to have. at 5th level or higher it won’t make enough of a difference to matter. 

I actually agree a character would not necessarily know the max effect and that is metagame-y.

The suggestions of allowing a handful of rolls and letting player choose from that I like, it stays with the spirit of the class ability being cast at will, and the spell having a varying magnitude. This would also  remove the metagame-y/silliness of a character just walking around casting a spell continuously.

I am not so keen on the suggestions a player can only cast it once as they cannot feel the difference as this just does not work IC for me OR with the rules the player is following and has some conflicts with other temp HP sources if done this way.

I can also see why because it is only a single d4, in this specific instance why a DM would just say out of combat have a max role to save on bookkeeping.  I do think many of those DM/Players would probably agree if it were like 10 d4s it could be a bit meta/OP to just say it was a max role every time out of combat.

I consider it to be Negative Metagaming.

Yes, because of how the spell works the player character can perceive the effect. And they may know that with each casting they get a different dose of temporary hit points. So if the dice don't grant the maximum number, what does the player do? Do we let them roll over and over, slowing the game down until they inevitably roll the maximum? Do we simply grant them the maximum to speed play up?

Or do we play the die where it lies, say, "This is all your patron is giving you right now," and deny them another casting until their current pool of Temporary Hit Points is depleted?

I like that one.

Not metagamey at all. HP is simply a quantitative mechanic to help us govern combat. In an RP scenario they represent how good the character feels. At a low level, the character might not have enough experience to know "hey sometimes when I cast this, I feel a bit better than others and EVERY NOW AND THEN I feel amazing." That's not meta-gaming. That's the PC interpreting how the character would notice inconsistency in how the spell works. A smart character might realize that if "I cast repeatedly, I might be able to duplicate that amazing feeling it sometimes gives me." That's a player recognizing the idiosyncrasies of magic as a character. That's not meta-gaming.

If you are a DM who doesn't just let the character assume max roll on an at will ability, you are either unnecessarily strict/rigid or you hate fun lol. Just give them they full 8 HP and be done with it. It ain't gonna swing the battle that much one way or the other.

If we're talking purely about this invocation with no other agenda behind the discussion, forbidding your player to roll until they get the max is just nerfing an underwhelming and situational Invocation. At this point we shouldn't ask whether it makes sense for the character to do that but what the point is changing the 8tHP to, at the worst, 5tHP. In the end they spent their resources into this Invocation and a difference of 3tHP is barely changing any fight.

However, if we're discussing the underlying logic of a character repeating their actions and working on the feedback they receive, we run into already mentioned problems.

Has the character problems comparing two pools of tHP? This seems to work against the players choice of which tHP pool to keep. It's taking agency from the player, as they might as well flip a coin.

Does the character know when he hit the max? Not at first, but eventually you will learn where your maximum lies. If you cast it 100 times and are never able to overcome one quantity of feeling empowered, this is probably your maximum. This is not even that unlikely in this scenario as you can cast at will. You should expect your characters to know their spells.

Can you expect the character to notoriously perfect their preparation until they feel they're ready? Definitely. What for some of us is just a game, for the character it's pure survival. I don't expect the NASA to shoot their rockets based on their first results either, but to check and correct their calculations until they're sure everything is right.