A take on Reaction Rolls and the Charisma modifier anomaly

The Basic/Expert rules are the system that keeps on giving. At only 121 pages (of which 43 are monster and treasure descriptions), they would make a pretty thin rulebook and still I keep coming back to them to reread various sections over and over. I’ve seen people considering the ambiguities and unfinished nature of some rules to be a virtue many times, but I don’t consider it good design or even intentional. I’m quite certain that Moldvay and Cook mostly had specific rulings in mind but were not aware that they didn’t sufficiently communicate them in a clear way, and possibly in some cases simply copied things that Gygax had written before without really understanding how it’s supposed to work either. I’m usually not too hard on this, giving them some leeway considering that they had no real reference for what they were doing and making things up as they went. And with rules that into only 78 pages, filling in the gaps is not that much amount of work.

One section I was going over again recently are the mechanics for Reaction Rolls. The reaction roll is used to determine how randomly encountered creatures react to the party, if their behavior isn’t already obvious given their nature and circumstances of their encounter. Creatures like zombies always attack everything they encounter. Goblins always attack when they encounter dwarves. And if you have the party trying to sneak into a guarded enemy stronghold and they run into a guard patrol, the attitude of the guards is also obvious. The Reaction Roll is for situations in which the reaction of the creatures could be anything. But there’s still a lot of ambiguity left. What are you supposed to do with “Uncertain, monster confused”, which is the most likely of all reactions? How is it different from “No attack, monster leaves or considers offers”? The reaction roll is also modified by a character’s Charisma score. But whose charisma score? And if the Charisma score is 13 or higher, the result of “Immediate attack” is impossible to happen. So after pondering the issues over several days, I came up with the following procedure. I believe it mostly just fills in some blanks without really changing anything that is printed on the pages.

Beginning an Encounter

An encounter can start in two ways: The party enters an area in which monsters are already present, or the GM made a roll for Wandering Monsters for that turn. In the order of events for every turn (10 minutes of dungeon exploration) the first step is rolling for wandering monsters. The second step is “moving, entering rooms, listening at doors, and searching the environment”. Dealing with monsters comes as the third step. I think this order is significant because it can mean that wandering monsters can stumble into a room while the party is in the process of searching it. The random encounter is something that happens within the turn, not between turns.

Surprise

If the party and monsters encounter each other, the next steps are determining the distance at which they can become aware of each other, and rolling for surprise. These two steps happen basically at the same time and it doesn’t appear to matter which of the two rolls you make first. But I think it’s actually more convenient to roll surprise first and determine the distance after.

To roll for surprise, both the party and the monsters roll a d6. By default, a 1 or 2 means that they are surprised, while a 3 to 6 means that they are not. Two d6s allow for 36 possible results that cover four different outcomes.

Odds Outcome
4 in 36 Both sides are surprised.
8 in 36 Party is surprised, monsters are not.
8 in 36 Monsters are surprised, party is not.
16 in 36 Neither side is surprised.

Some monsters have a special ability that makes the party getting surprised by them on a roll of 1 to 3 or even 1 to 4, which significantly changes the odds to get the jump on the party in their favor. (A monster ability that modifies the party’s roll instead of their own roll isn’t very elegant, but it’s probably the least complicated way to get the desired result.)

The results of both sides being surprised and neither side being surprised are basically identical. However, I’ve seen a rule somewhere, and to my actual surprised it’s not in B/X, that in the case of both sides being surprised, the encounter distance should be half of what it would be in the other three outcomes. I really like it and so I’m mentioning it here anyway. This is also why I would make the roll for the encounter distance after the roll for surprise. Inside a dungeon, the distance is 2d6 x 10 feet, outdoors it’s 4d6 x 10 yards (or 4d6 x 30 feet, because we really don’t need two different units of measurement).

Something that surprised me coming from later editions is that the rules for surprise don’t really seem to take into account that one side or the other could by lying in ambush, or have time to quickly set one up. However, the Expert rules state that a group of three or more gains surprise outdoors they could be set up to have surrounded the other side. Maybe the idea is that even when you see a light at the next corner or hear footsteps approaching, there just isn’t enough time to set a proper ambush indoors. But I am a big fan of sneakiness myself, and I think it should absolutely be possible for players to avoid getting noticed by the wandering monsters, or quietly retreat from an area that has unaware monsters inside.

The rules as they are written only state that “those not surprised my move and attack the first round, and the surprised enemy may not”. I think the whole game becomes much more interesting if the side that has surprise can use its turn during that first round to back away without the surprised side becoming aware of them. Not only can it be a great opportunity for fun shenangians on the players’ side, it can also be interesting to have monsters stalking them in secret and wait for a good opportunity to strike.

Reaction

After surprise and distance have been determined, the sixth step is the Reaction Roll. As I mentioned earlier, the reaction roll is modified by Charisma. But whose Charisma actually? I long assumed that it would be the character who is walking at the head of the column or perhaps the party member with the highest Charisma, but that never really felt right since there is no indication either way.

The new idea I got recently, and which is the reason for this entire post, is that the reaction modifier for high or low Charisma only applies if a PC has the opportunity to talk to the monsters before a fight breaks out. If the monsters are surprised but the party is not, one of the PCs can hail the monsters and they make a reaction roll modified by the PC’s Charisma. If both or neither side are surprised and the party wins initiative for the first round of the encounter, the players also have an opportunity to hail the other group.

There is also the possibility that the monsters surprise the party or they win initiative, and their reaction is “Uncertain, monster confused”, which is the most likely result for an unmodified 2d6 roll. I’ve seen some retroclones rephrase this result as the monsters waiting to see what happens, which I think is a great interpretation. What you get is the monsters simply doing nothing for now. Then when it’s the party’s turn and the party is aware of the monsters, the players have another opportunity to hail them. At which point you could make a second reaction roll, but this time modified by the respective character’s Charisma.

And there’s actually something in the order of events for each exploration turn that supports that. Step six is making a reaction roll, but step seven, the resolution of the reaction, says “If both sides are willing to talk , the DM rolls for monster reactions and initiative, as necessary.” Making two reaction rolls is already written into the rules as they were printed. And I think it makes perfect sense to have a character’s Charisma modify a reaction roll only in those cases where that character is talking to the other groups. In situations where the monsters spot the party but the party is not aware of them, I think the reaction roll should be done without any modifiers at all. It’s of course also possible that the players might think of something so convincing that no reaction roll is necessary at all. If for example they encounter a group of guards and know the password to identify themselves as people who have permission to be in the place, then making a reaction roll can become moot. In the same way, if the party has surprised and decides to attack immediately and ask questions later, no reaction roll is necessary either. (Though a morale check might be.)

The Charisma Modifier Anomaly

Unlike in AD&D, the modifiers to various things based on the various ability scores are quite consistent in Basic. An 18 in Strength gives you a +3 bonus to melee attack rolls and melee damage, an 18 in Dexterity gives you a +3 bonus to ranged attack rolls and Armor Class, and an 18 in Constitution gives you a +3 bonus when rolling your hit points for each level. But Charisma stands out. An 18 in Charisma gives you only a +2 bonus to Reaction rolls instead of +3, and a 16 or 17 only a +1 bonus instead of +2. Some retroclones fix this by applying the same modifiers to all six ability scores, and I actually did this myself in the past. But I now think that this inconsistency is not an oversight but actually a deliberate choice.

The modifier in question is not a generic modifier to Charisma rolls, but specifically an “Adjustment to Reactions”. Reaction rolls are its only intended application (though this includes retainer hiring reactions for which the following calculations apply equally). The Reaction roll is 2d6, and the Reaction table lists results from 2 to 12. The “Immediate attack” result can only happen on a 2 (or lower, one presumes), and the “Enthusiastic friendship” result happens on a 12 (or higher). If you get a +1 bonus to the roll, a result of 2 becomes already impossible. You can’t go lower than 3 and get “Hostile, possible attack”. Which is one more argument why some Reaction rolls should be done without applying Charisma modifiers. But not only that, the 2d6 also give us a bell curve and shifting a bell curve sideways results in often very significant changes in the odds for any given value. When you get a +3 bonus to the Reaction roll, even the hostile result only has a probability  of 3%. Pretty much anything would be somewhat friendly if you’d happen to have someone with 18 Charisma doing the talking for the group.

But I think the +3 bonus from an 18 is not even the main reason for why the modifiers are different for Charisma. The chance for any given Character to get a randomly rolled 18 on 3d6 is under 0.5%. In a group of four characters, that’s still below a 2% chance for any of the characters to have an 18, and that player might not even want to do all the talking with everything they run into. It’s an unlikely scenario. But the chance for any character to randomly roll a Charisma score of 16, 17, or 18 is almost 5%, and getting someone in a party of four with a 16 or better is 17%. And a bonus of +2 to Reaction rolls is still really big. At +2, you have a 17% chance for a friendly reaction and only an 8% for a hostile one. With a 42% chance for monsters to negotiate. That frankly doesn’t sound particularly fun to me. Having the odds for this scenario being only 2% for any given party of four instead of 17% seems a very sensible change to me, even if it breaks the beautiful symmetry of ability score modifiers.

Prime Requisites are pointless

The original D&D edition, AD&D, and Basic all had the Prime Requisite mechanic, in which all classes have one main ability score that affects the amount of XP they get. It’s a modifier that gets applied to all XP a character gets before they are added to the character’s XP total. In B/X (where I will be taking all further numbers from) the modifier ranges from -20% for a score of 5 or lower, to +10% for a 16 or higher. Which sounds quite significant when you put it like that, but actually makes a much smaller difference than you might expect, because of the way XP requirements to reaching the next level increase.

The way it’s supposed to be done is that the GM announces the amount of XP every player gets, and the players have to remember to apply their relevant modifier to that number before adding it to their total. (I don’t exactly have high trust in this.) Since the players might encounter various magical effects that increase or decrease their ability scores, and potentially change their XP modifier, I can see why this approach was chosen, instead of having five different columns for XP needed by each class based on the prime requisite score. But to make the comparison easier, I did just that with the XP requirements for fighters. Because adding and subtracting percentages changes the outcome based on the order of operations, a -20% to all XP gained translates to the character requiring 125% the amount of XP to reach any given level. And a +10% bonus to all gained XP means a requirement of 91% the XP to reach the same level.

How does this translate to characters advancing through levels faster or slower? Of course, a character with a very high prime requisite score will reach Nth level before a character with a very low score. But how big is that advantage in the long run?

  • At 10,000 XP, a Fighter with a -20% penalty will have reached 4th level, and a Fighter with a +10% bonus will still be 4th level.
  • At 50,000 XP, a Fighter with a -20% penalty will have reached 5th level, and a Fighter with a +10% bonus will still be 5th level.
  • At 100,000 XP, a Fighter with a -20% penalty will have reached 7th level, and a Fighter with a +10% bonus will still be 7th level.
  • At 500,000 XP, a Fighter with a -20% penalty will have reached 10th level, and a Fighter with a +10% bonus will be ahead at 11th level.

It is only at the point where the GM has awarded all characters 72,000 XP and a Fighter with no modifier has reached 13th level that there’s an actual gap to Fighters with a -20% penalty, who are still at 11th level. And that’s for the extreme cases where a player with a Strength of 5 or lower decides to play a Fighter anyway for shits and giggles. Such characters being played up to 11th level probably isn’t going to happen in a terribly high number of campaigns. If we narrow the scope to only penalties of -10% and bonuses of +10%, the effect becomes even significantly smaller.

It’s even more marginal in AD&D, where characters can’t have any penalties and it’s only the default XP or +10%.

This does not seem like something that is worth accounting for. Having players with high or low prime requisites remember to apply the modifier every time they get XP does not seem worth the near undetectable difference in results to me. If you have two characters with the same class start at the same point, then yes, sometimes one player might announce that he reached a new level before the other player. But if either of those two characters misses out on a single session, or gets disabled and gains no XP in one session,, that pattern will already be completely out of whack anyway.

In my opinion, prime requisites make too little impact to be worth bothering with. I’ve come around on my earlier opinion that all classes should just use the Fighter XP requirements because the level difference between a Thief and a Wizard with the same XP really is quite substantial. (A wizard needs +100% the amount of XP that a Thief needs!) But prime requisites is something I threw out right when I started running B/X games, and that  under closer statistical observation, I still see no reason to bring back.

A simple system for supplies and hunting

Way too dramatic fantasy hunting scene, but this is what I got.

Kaendor is a continent that is very large and very sparsely populated, with almost all land covered in trees or steep mountains. For campaigns in a setting like this, especially when it ‘s intended for parties with numerous followers and animals, tracking food and water supplies and dealing with the consequences of hunger and thirst is something that really should be part of the game and the everyday travel procedures. While B/X provides a neat simple system for hunger and thirst, the rules for hunting are very vague and appear implausibly inefficient.

So here’s my take on it. The foraging system is taken straight from the Expert set, and expanded with the hunting mechanic. With how often players will likely go hunting throughout a full campaign, I really don’t want to bother with having combat encounters with rabbits and deer that might just run away. The mechanic for hunger and thirds is straight from Basic Fantasy, though I added the time limit to die from dehydration regardless of remaining hit points.

Hunger and Thirst

Humanoid characters need one ration worth of food and one waterskin of drink every day. Characters who do not get sufficient amounts of food lose 1 hit point per day. If they don’t get sufficient amounts of water, they lose 1d4 hit points per day. In either case, the characters are unable to naturally heal any damage without magic until they receive enough food and water again. In addition, characters who go without water die after 3 days. Characters with a Constitution score of 13 or higher can survive for an additional number of days equal to their Constitution bonus to hit points.

Foraging and Hunting

In most circumstances, parties come across enough sources of drinkable water in the wilderness to refill all their waterskins to full. So unless the GM specifically states that no water source was encountered during the day, water consumption does not need to be tracked. If the party stays in areas without natural water sources for an entire day or more, one waterskin has to be subtracted every day, but finding any source of drinkable water is usually enough to refill all waterskins to full.

Rations of food have to be tracked every day the party spends outside of settlements. While traveling through the wilderness, characters can gather edible plants they find along the way, and the party has a 1 in 6 chance to collect 1d6 rations worth of food on any given day. In practice, this number is simply subtracted from the number of rations that are consumed on that day. (Assume the characters eat food that is close to perishing first and keep any food that keeps well for later, so there’s no mechanical difference between preserve rations and fresh plants or meat.)

Alternatively, the party can decide to not travel on a given day and instead spread out around the campsite to hunt for food. Each group of hunters has a 1 in 6 chance to collect 1d6 rations worth of food, but also makes separate checks for random encounters at noon. (Random encounters in the morning and evening are assumed to happen at the camp.)

The Essentials Version

Hunger: Characters who do not eat one ration worth of food in a day, suffer 1 hit point of damage and can not heal damage naturally without magic.

Thirst: Characters who do not have one waterskin worth of drink in a day, suffer 1d4 hit point of damage and can not heal damage naturally without magic. After 3 days + 1 day per CON bonus, the characters die.

Foraging: A traveling party has a 1 in 6 chance to find 1d6 rations worth of food per day.

Hunting: A party resting at camp for a day can send out hunting parties that each have a 1 in 6 chance to find 1d6 rations worth of food per day.

Sometimes I think nobody at TSR knew what they were doing

When you pay a little bit of attention to discussions about rules interpretations in old D&D systems from the 70s and 80s, you run into people all the time who say things like “this is the way to do it, because that’s how Gary did it”. And Gygax created the game, he must know what’s best.

When you look at OD&D and the AD&D rulebooks, I find that very hard to believe. And if you pay a bit more attention, you also very often come across people saying “Oh, you should just ignore those pages from the DMG. Gary never used those rules himself.” I believe Gygax didn’t really have any clue what he was doing. Which isn’t to say that anyone else did either. For one thing, this new Fantasy Adventure Game was a new concept with pretty much no pre-existing foundations to build on and compare to. There was very little data to work with, and also no real established procedures for designing such games. And those early designers literally worked out of their living rooms.

But sometimes I see things that just make me grasp my head in disbelieve. Why did anyone think that was a good idea? The completely backwards math to roll against Armor Class is the obvious black sheep. But sometimes there is also stuff that makes me feel absolutely certain that nobody ever playtested it before it went into print. And possibly the writer didn’t even check how the math works out.

What I am looking at in particular right now are the wilderness movement speeds in the 1981 Expert rules. I am generally a huge fan of Cook’s work, he’s probably my favorite of the TSR designers. But this overland travel system? What the hell was he thinking?

To determine the speed of a character, you first need to look out the base movement speed based on Encumbrance in the Basic rules on page 20. Then you go to the Expert rules on page 20, which has a list that tells you the miles traveled per day based on the base movement speed. Then you have to go to another table that tells you the speed is 2/3 the normal rate in forests, 1/2 the normal speed in mountains, and 3/2 the normal rate on roads.

Why not simply give us a table like this?

It’s so easy. With this table we could easily travel along our 6-mile hex map (as implied on page 56).

But what do I spot there? 27 miles per day? 9 miles per day? 16 miles? 4 miles? Those aren’t divisible by 6! Did nobody notice this when the Expert rules were written? Did they notice it and not thought about maybe changing the system so it works with 6-mile hexes?

At least the movement rates for ships are all in 6-mile increments. But I think for sea travel, I’d rather use 30 mile hexes instead.

Moldvay Basic and Cook Expert – 40 years and still going strong

It’s already two months late, but everyone else seems to have missed it too. The first printings of the Basic and Expert rules by Tom Moldvay and David Cook were done all the way back in January 1981.

And what a game they made!

After I started playing D&D when 3rd edition came out, I went for many years before I ever even heard of something that was occasionally mumbled about in the background called B/X or BECMI. And it completely stayed under my radar until six years ago when I took my first actual look at it, having it filed away as “that D&D light version where elf is a class”.

From the way that I remember it, the oldschool revival seemed to have started very much as an AD&D thing (though Basic Fantasy was actually the first retroclone) and that was a game I had tried getting into but bounced off very hard. But in the later years, when the return to older games morphed more into a forward evolution of those old concepts, B/X really seems to have established itself as the primary focus and reference point for oldschool roleplaying. Hard to say how things will be in another 40 years, but I am quite confident that this game will be staying with us for a long time to come.

Balancing of Treasures in B/X

Since I first discovered the actual Basic/Expert game almost exactly six years ago, I’ve taken out the Basic rules a couple of times for relatively short games, but never really got into any of the Expert material. I also did not make much use of the wandering monsters and morale mechanics and mostly ran it pretty “modern conventional”. And I certainly did not use the random treasure tables. When I started work on my next campaign, I made the choice to try to really understand all the rules as they are written and follow the procedures as they are presented by Moldvay and Cook, to see how that plays out before I start making significant changes. It’s a game that is meant to be highly flexible and customizable, but it’s generally a bad idea to start making modifications to something before you understand what the default setup does.

A line of thinking that I encountered in the wild over the years of listening to the words of the elders, is that the tables for wandering monsters and generating randomized treasures are the main reference for how you set up dungeons with appropriate challenges and corresponding amounts of rewards. I’ve seen discussions about how some magic items are more valuable in Basic or AD&D because of the greatly different chances of them appearing in treasure hoards, and how this is indicative of the original assumptions how the games would be played and why some classes have different advantages with the rarity of those items in mind. I’ve long had my doubts about that and suspecting that that very little actual thought went into the creation of these tables and the resulting chances for certain encounters and rewards. And when you look at how the tables are constructed, this really seems very likely. On the wandering monsters tables, there are 20 entries, each with the same 1 in 20 chance. On the same table, you have 1 HD creatures appearing in numbers of 1-8, and 2 HD creatures in numbers of 2-12. This is not adjusted to be roughly equal in challenge on average. The magic item tables in Basic are just alphabetical lists numbered from 1 up, all with the same chances. The Expert tables are a bit more elaborate using a d100, but in the end all potions have either a 3% or 4% chance. I think these were all just eyeballed without any thought to intended play or adjustments for balance.

But I still was quite surprised when I scoured the texts again, and discovered what exactly Moldvay wrote on these topics.

Treasures are determined randomly or chosen by the DM. The DM should always determine the contents of a large treasure hoard before play in order to determine how best to hide and protect the treasure from theft, and if magic items are present.

 

The DM may choose treasures instead of rolling for them randomly, or may choose a result if rolls give too much or too little treasure. The choices should be made carefully, since most of the experience the characters will get will be from treasure (usually 3/4 or more). It will often be easier for the DM to decide how much experience to give out (considering the size and levels of experience in the party) and place the treasures to give this result.

The method advocated here is to start with the total amount of XP that characters will be able to make in the dungeon or dungeon level as a choice by the GM and work backwards from there. One quarter of that amount should be in the form of enemy encounters, and the remaining three quarters in the form of treasures. Or to get the same effect, just populate the dungeon with whatever monsters you want to use, then calculate the XP for defeating all of them, and multiply that result by 3 to get the appropriate value of the treasures you should distribute among the creature lairs. The treasure tables seem more to be intended to be used when you don’t really have an idea for what treasure you might want to put in the dungeon and to give you some suggestions. But since the tables don’t know how many of the creature lairs will be of creatures that have treasure hoards or not, this can’t get you that rough 3 to 1 ratio for XP except by pure accident.

For my setting, I have a lot of custom creatures (though most of them are plain reskins), and I had been thinking about how I would assign treasure types to all of them. But I don’t think I really should bother with that. I don’t believe the treasure tables and treasure types have much logic behind them I could figure out and apply to my own creatures. It’s always only been eyeballed to look good enough.

Another small detail that I noticed is that something that I considered a new house rule of mine is actually tucked away in the text already.

Treasure is normally found in the lairs of monsters, but may be paid to a character by a high level NPC for performing a mission or job.

The basic formula of “you’re treasure hunters, so go hunt treasure for the sake of hunting treasure” never really worked for me as a basis for compelling adventures. I thought that carrying a rescued prisoner back to town for a 500 gp reward is mechanically the same as carrying a big gem from the dungeon that is worth 500 gp, so players could get the same amount of XP for this. Turns out this was already suggested 40 years ago.