Something I've discussed in reddit too...

There are two distinct moments when the referee could gauge the disposition of NPCs: (a) on first sight, and (b) after a few words/offers are exchanged.

How do you deal with that, in practice? Let's say a pack of wolves appear. Do you roll immediately to see if they attack? Using whose Charisma? What do amicable wolves do?

What if a few bandits appear, you roll, and THEN the PCs make an offer (bribe) so both sides can walk away uninjured. Roll again? Add Charisma then?

Are people with Charisma 18 exempt from being immediately attacked by wolves?

Or do you roll twice (I'm tempted to do this), start with the most obvious disposition, roll then roleplay, other solutions, etc.

Thanks!

EDIT: I'm accepting both "this is how we do" and "this is what the official tules we use say!".

We've been playing Barbaric! 2nd Ed from Stellagama. And I kind of like how they do it.

There is a table from good to bad, which is kind of standard. Start the creatures on the correct scale or roll randomly, possible with a plus or minus if there is some sort of inherent reasons for like or dislike. The PC can use charisma to influence the scale to one band better.

I kind of like it because it is an improvement, but it isn't an instant "win".

But I'll also throw all that out for good role-playing (rule of cool). I had players talk to opponents because everybody kept missing in combat. Opponents found out the person who paid them to attack the PCs was betraying them. They ceased combat, and came back as friendlies in the next session.

Great questions. Wolves don't give a shit about PC charisma. So the reaction roll is to determine if the wolves have the fortitude to attack or flee.

Same goes for random encounters. Those are meant to punish dawdling dungeon crawlers. If you don't use these, then early D&D games and derivatives are a meat grinder.

If I have a neutral planned encounter then the reaction roll is used after the roleplaying. I also use it for bartering, again, after roleplaying.

If you're a GM, not a random content generator, I suppose you know in advance if this encounter the players just met is or isn't hostile. And if it's on the fence, some roleplaying is going to fix that.
I guess.

I have to be honest and say that I've never used a "reaction roll" in my DM'ing/GM'ing career, at least if that means simply using a pure chance die roll to decide how a creature/NPC will act when I introduce them. If I bother to introduce a creature/NPC at all it's usually for a reason, which means I already have in mind its starting point for reactions. Even random encounters, I think, should usually have a preset "starting attitude" -- rolling once for the encounter and then again for reaction strikes me as unnecessary duplication of effort, especially if the latter roll can wind up rendering the former pointless. A pack of wolves that appears in the firelight but vanishes away upon seeing the party is just narrative colour, not an encounter.

Now if the PCs want to take actions or make rolls of their own to influence that reaction, then certainly the NPCs/creatures get rolls to resist it. But that falls under more active PC-NPC contests, which involves much more player input.

IIRC in Rules Cyclopedia, it implies that if as the GM you don't already know the basic disposition of the encounter, you roll once for that.   Then if a parlay develops in some form or another, you'd roll at the appropriate time to see how it came out--if not obvious.  At least that's the way I understand it.

If a group of hungry worgs finds the party and they look tasty and not very tough, I don't need a roll.  If a group of plain old wolves have been hanging around in the area, they might trail hoping for a straggler, or at least a left over carcass.  Don't need a roll for that either.  Desperately starving wolves in a big pack with a party they've been trailing all day by haven't worked up the nerve to attack yet?  Might roll for that one.

Likewise, sometimes what the players do or don't do, what they offer, etc. means I don't need a roll for the parlay.

As for charisma, I'd use that as needing some way to at least communicate intent.  Whether you'd let that apply when, say, offering the remains of a deer to a wolf pack, will depend on what kind of precedents you want to set.   Though that's one of the reasons I don't have charisma in my own system.  Instead, I use a combination of certain traits, skills, and will power.  So a character with the "Beasts" skill and the "Survival" trait would have a whole lot better chance of convincing wolves to go away, whereas the person fluent in several languages and the "Conversation" trait instead that does a lot of the talking normally  is out of luck. 
 

I imported the reaction roll into my Dragon Warriors campaign, as it was one of the few things I thought that system was missing. I use it in one of two situations:

1) For random encounters. I've dropped a lot of the randomness in my campaign over time, but held onto random encounters as a way of keeping a little feeling of chaos in the campaign. I generally roll a few days worth of random encounters before each session, so if one comes up I roll a reaction for the NPCs' initial disposition.

2) as a kind of "tie-breaker". If the PCs say or do something where as the GM I feel like an NPC might plausibly react either way, I'll roll the reaction table, add a +1 or -1 for the character's "Looks" score (charisma equivalent), and then translate the result into the roleplay.

In both cases I'll freely veto the results on the table if I don't think they fit. Having a vampire roll "enthusiastic friendship" can be fun, but when Jerry the Gate Guard rolls "immediate attack" I'm just going to skip it.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 03, 2023, 10:31:11 PM
IIRC in Rules Cyclopedia, it implies that if as the GM you don't already know the basic disposition of the encounter, you roll once for that.   Then if a parlay develops in some form or another, you'd roll at the appropriate time to see how it came out--if not obvious.  At least that's the way I understand it.

If a group of hungry worgs finds the party and they look tasty and not very tough, I don't need a roll.  If a group of plain old wolves have been hanging around in the area, they might trail hoping for a straggler, or at least a left over carcass.  Don't need a roll for that either.  Desperately starving wolves in a big pack with a party they've been trailing all day by haven't worked up the nerve to attack yet?  Might roll for that one.

Agreed with first paragraph, makes sense.

Second one, I'm not sure - a random encounter table will only give you wolves, not starving or well fed; so you decide by GM fiat instead of rolling reaction?

Quote from: Eric Diaz on May 03, 2023, 10:46:17 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 03, 2023, 10:31:11 PM
IIRC in Rules Cyclopedia, it implies that if as the GM you don't already know the basic disposition of the encounter, you roll once for that.   Then if a parlay develops in some form or another, you'd roll at the appropriate time to see how it came out--if not obvious.  At least that's the way I understand it.

If a group of hungry worgs finds the party and they look tasty and not very tough, I don't need a roll.  If a group of plain old wolves have been hanging around in the area, they might trail hoping for a straggler, or at least a left over carcass.  Don't need a roll for that either.  Desperately starving wolves in a big pack with a party they've been trailing all day by haven't worked up the nerve to attack yet?  Might roll for that one.

Agreed with first paragraph, makes sense.

Second one, I'm not sure - a random encounter table will only give you wolves, not starving or well fed; so you decide by GM fiat instead of rolling reaction?

I don't want to answer for Steven, but I do it the opposite way. If the table comes up "hostile", that's what tells me that the wolves are starving.

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 03, 2023, 10:39:35 PMI'll freely veto the results on the table if I don't think they fit. Having a vampire roll "enthusiastic friendship" can be fun, but when Jerry the Gate Guard rolls "immediate attack" I'm just going to skip it.

Out of curiosity, how often do you find yourself doing this? Have odd results like the vampire who rolls Enthusiastic Friendship made real contributions to the game?  (Serious question -- I'm always interested to hear if other ways of doing things actually turn out to work better than I would have expected.)

Quote from: Eric Diaz on May 03, 2023, 08:54:03 PM
How do you deal with that, in practice? Let's say a pack of wolves appear. Do you roll immediately to see if they attack? Using whose Charisma? What do amicable wolves do?

I had to...

Quote from: FingerRod on May 03, 2023, 09:42:11 PM
Great questions. Wolves don't give a shit about PC charisma. So the reaction roll is to determine if the wolves have the fortitude to attack or flee.

I'd say that depends on how your group want to interpret charisma.  I could totally see a PC doing a Grizzly Adams or intimidation against wolves with a high charisma.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on May 03, 2023, 08:54:03 PM
There are two distinct moments when the referee could gauge the disposition of NPCs: (a) on first sight, and (b) after a few words/offers are exchanged.

The reaction roll is for first sight, which influences how the following words will be taken. It's like Walt and the kid in Gran Torino. Walt knows the barber so has a good reaction roll, the kid doesn't and gets a bad reaction roll (obviously the DM imposed modifiers like "kid is young and not my race" etc), so even though they use basically the same words, they get very, very different responses.

First people decide how they feel about you. Then they react to your words. If their reaction isn't to just pull a shotgun on you, of course.

I typically check for initial NPC disposition without reference to PC Charisma. Then PC interaction & CHA checks can modify NPC disposition up or down. I rarely do the RAW thing of rolling for initial disposition modified by PC Charisma since I don't grok how that makes sense in practice. The monsters take one look at the Paladin and think "Wow, what a guy!"?!

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on May 04, 2023, 04:04:01 AM
First people decide how they feel about you. Then they react to your words. If their reaction isn't to just pull a shotgun on you, of course.

Hm. So now I kinda see why RAW adds CHA mod to initial disposition!  Even in the example though, the characters do say a line to the barber before the "reaction roll". Hmm.