Reaction Rolls Are Smarter Than You

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Why, Aaron, what an overly clickbait title you have, right?

Reaction rolls.  If you've come across this blog, the likelihood that you know not only what reaction rolls are but also exactly how to use them is staggeringly high.  For the sake of everyone else, this is the idea.

If you're unsure how a creature is going to react to the player characters, you roll two six-sided dice.  The higher the result of the roll, the more favorable they are to helping the player characters.  It uses a bell curve, so typically 7-9 is your fairly neutral average.  This is the chart from back in the early days.


It may not be a surprise to anyone, but I don't use this chart exactly as it's written.  While I see the purpose of multiple rolls, I favor a single one, and I use it more than just for monsters.

2-5 Extreme hostility
6-7 Somewhat hostile
8-9 Neutral
10-11 Favorable
12 Helpful

One may ask, "but Aaron!  This is completely random!  Why can't we consider external factors, such as how likable you are and stuff like that?"

By golly, you sure as hell can!  Several OSR systems take this into account, suggesting that you add the Charisma modifier of the lead character / speaker to help determine the result.  In OSR games, the highest modifier you can get is a +3.  This means that a character with +3 Charisma would have to roll snake eyes to get the shit beat out of them on my chart.  I would reflect this with Fifth Edition by halving the character's Charisma modifier and rounding it up.  Or using that godawful persuasion roll (gross).

Secondly, you can also take into consideration any faction-related affinity they may have toward you, or whether they hate you because you burned down their last swamp (don't ask me how that works).  You can use modifier to represent that to add to the roll.

So, you're using reaction rolls.  Here's where it gets interesting, though.  Say your party just encountered a patrol from a tribe of bloodthirsty orcs.  For one reason or another, the party decides to greet them rather than shoot them dead.  Now, you don't want to be a total dick and just say "Well, roll for initiative," do you?  (actually you totally can and I don't judge you for it)  Time for a reaction roll?

Wow, a 12!  This begs the question: what made these orcs so giddy that they wanted to help this li'l old party?  These orcs could be nothing more than a random encounter you rolled, so maybe you had absolutely nothing planned.  Well, shit, son!  Time to improvise.  Maybe the patrol is actually a band of renegades that seeks revenge on the tribe.  Maybe they're a troupe of wandering adventurers raised by a benevolent Elf (TMNT style?).  This is your chance to fill in a corner of the world that you didn't know you needed to fill.  Am I asking you to change/create things in your world on the fly?  Hell yes, I am.

This is why reaction rolls are awesome.  Not only do they take away the arbitrary dictation of the GM just saying yea or nay, but they also provide a means by which you can add depth to the world that you may not have thought of before.  This is an incredibly useful tool for dungeon crawls, for more socially oriented games, for just about anything you can think of.

Why was the Baron so incredibly hostile to us today?  Maybe he found out that he was betrayed by one of his friends.  Maybe his mistress is refusing to see him any longer.  Maybe he was disrupted in the middle of banging his friend because his mistress caught him and THAT'S WHY she doesn't want to see him any longer.  Who knows?

This is why I say Reaction Rolls Are Smarter Than You.  Friends that follow me and my thoughts on RPGs are well aware that I am a proponent of the idea that the emergent narrative is far better than any backstory or any predetermined on-rails adventure path.  I am even more adamant that using improvisational DMing tools such as reaction rolls, random encounters, and random tables will make any DM's game significantly better.

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