Upgrading reaction rolls

Reputation and opinions as a reaction

The more I write adventures, the more I dislike traditional reaction rolls for monster behaviour. If you like those rolls, that’s ok. Stick with me.

When I write an adventure, I want to give GMs creatures that have wants and behaviours that already inform the GM how to run the creature: stuff that’s more useful than rolling ‘hostile’.

This is a punctuator from Inkvein. It is the Ink’s twisted aspect of honour formed into death-seeking inky steel. They are formidable, but only care for fair fights…

A traditional reaction roll is really just filling in something we could have taken the time to prep. For a given creature, we can think about its wants and nature ahead of time and establish that. Inkvein does this for most creatures and NPCs in the dungeon, with the bestiary having clear behaviours that you can fall back on.

So. Are reaction rolls dead to me? Not quite.

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Reputation and opinions

What I can’t do as an adventure writer is accommodate how all creatures and NPCs view the specific actions of PCs within the adventure.

I can say things like ‘this faction doesn’t like this sort of behaviour’ but I can’t tell you what a random herbalist thinks of the fact that you forgot to wash your clothes recently. We can improvise this based on general traits of NPCs, but what if we want to generate some NPC opinions on your PCs to make things a bit easier or more emergent?

Here, a reaction roll can help. We’re going to turn reactions into a reputation and opinion pair.

The pair of dice approach is inspired by Dreamshrike’s Overloaded Reaction Roll, and we’re going to use dice of different sizes (since Among Cats and Books pointed out using dice of the same size can make parsing order of results trickier).

Reputation (d20)

Reputation is going to be based on a simple reputation table a la Luke Gearing. Make a d20 reputation table. When the PCs do something of note, fill an entry in the table.

1: Saved a local from a wolf attack.

2: Stole jewels from a local merchants and got caught.

3: Seen looking for strange books in the abandoned library.

And so on…

There’s a trick here. Before beginning to fill this table with actions-of-note, fill the whole reputation table with some PC details.

Get players to write stuff about their characters mannerisms, appearance, and other details that could make an impression e.g. Darlis’ clothes are always filthy. As you go, replace these detail entries with actions-of-note. This makes sure the table is always full, prevents null results and mirrors how first impressions work in real life.

Whenever we want more detail on an NPC reaction, we roll on the reputation table, then we figure out their opinion with another roll.

Opinion (d8)

1: Extreme dislike

2: Strong dislike

3: Mild dislike

4-5: Neutral

6: Mild like

7: Strong like

8: Extreme like

Example

Let’s say we have a thief NPC that the players meet in the dungeon. We roll on the reputation and opinion tables. The reputation entry is “Stole jewels from a local merchants and got caught” and the opinion is Mild Dislike.

It tells us that the thief doesn’t like this action… why? There’s options here:

• The thief doesn’t like others on their turf. Territorial.

• The fact the PCs got caught means the thief views them as unprofessional. Uptight.

• The thief doesn’t like this line of work and wishes people wouldn’t get into it. Regret.

This is way more interesting than a traditional 2d6 reaction roll to me, because I cannot prep this consistently for all NPCs. Some NPCs are detailed enough that what they would think is obvious, but for plenty of creatures and smaller NPCs this approach can work really well.

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Building NPCs through opinions

This has a side affect: we start building NPCs using their opinions. Let’s carry on the thief example. We could end up with a list like this:

• Mildly disliked the PCs getting in on their turf (territorial).

• Neutral about the PCs killing bandits (business is business).

• Strongly liked the PCs setting up the militia captain (vendetta).

This enables us to continue to build the psyche of the NPC through gameplay if they are persistent, without doing extra work out of session. The more they turn up, the more detailed they get.

You’ll also find that evolution or conflicts appear in the NPC. If the thief strongly dislikes the PCs for killing another thief, that conflicts with their opinion about the bandits. Juicy.

I’m going to try this out in Inkvein playtesting and see how it goes!