On Social Interaction

I'm not one of those people who thinks Dungeons & Dragons needs a "social combat" system, of all things, I swear. I think social interaction in D&D is, like many aspects of the game, best left as a conversation between the players (via their characters) and the Dungeon Master (via their non-player characters). However, in my experience, the structure (or lack thereof) for social interactions in D&D (and 5th edition in particular) leaves a bit to be desired.

Side Note: In this post, I'll be using the term "NPC" to refer to any creature the PCs might talk to. This could be an ordinary human, demihuman, humanoid, etc., as well as intelligent monsters and mundane beasts which can be talked to using certain abilities and features, such as a speak with animals spell. In 5e, if there's a 6th-level or higher College of Eloquence bard in the party, this could be any creature, due to that subclass's Universal Speech feature.

Reaction Rolls

In old-school gaming, the social interaction structure usually boils down to the use of reaction rolls to determine the NPC's initial disposition. The player characters and the NPCs go back and forth until the DM decides it's appropriate to make another reaction roll. Depending on the edition, this may be modified by the negotiating PC's Charisma score. The reaction roll might improve or worsen the monster's disposition, and the structure repeats itself unless the players decide they've gotten what they wanted or the DM decides the interaction has run its course (for better or worse). The exact method for determining NPC reactions is highly variable depending on the edition being used.

Reaction rolls, as far as I can tell, aren't present at all in 5e until Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants (published in 2023). The book uses reaction rolls in its random encounter section (referred to as "Initial Attitude", page 44). 

Interestingly, each encounter in this chapter has its own prescribed die roll depending on the monsters or NPCs present (a cloud giant's reaction might be determined by rolling d8, whereas a fire giant's reaction might be determined by rolling d10, for example). This is a neat way of representing the fact that some creatures may be more likely to react one way or another. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the book doesn't give the DM guidelines for how to recreate this mechanic themselves (though it's not difficult to extrapolate).

According to the section on Social Interaction in the 5e Dungeon Master Guide (page 244), the DM determines the NPC's initial disposition (no reaction roll - the DM just decides), and that in turn determines a difficulty class that the PCs have to overcome using Charisma checks in order to convince the monster to do something. As before, social interaction is largely an informal conversation, and the DM decides when the players need to roll. 

Alternatively, a 5e DM can do what most 5e players apparently do and skip all the boring talking - the players just yell at the DM that they roll Persuasion, and if they get higher than a 20 then they automatically succeed at whatever outlandish thing they're trying to get the NPC to do, and if the DM refuses then it's "railroading", or something.

I'm mostly fine with the old-school procedure. It works for the type of game it is, which is much looser, more natural, and less mechanic. My problem with the new-school way of handling this is that it's often trivially easy for specialized PCs to hit the DCs that the DMG offers up, despite the fact that elsewhere in the DMG (page 238), DCs are listed as going much higher than is typical for social interaction. 

A DM could fix this by abandoning the guidelines for Charisma check DCs altogether, and setting the DC for each "ask" the PCs make as being from 5 to 30 based on how difficult the DM thinks it would be to convince the NPC to do something. This works well enough, but I am sympathetic to those DMs who feel that social interaction in a more skills-oriented new-school game should have more structure.

On the NPC

Courtney Campbell of the Hack & Slash blog has a great product on DriveThruRPG called On the Non-player Character. It provides a number of tools and advice to make NPCs come to life, but what I like most of all is its list of actions PCs can take during social interaction. The product is geared towards old-school games, but as 5e is the edition I run most often, I set out to make it applicable to that system.

The product includes a discussion as to whether or not these options should be player-facing, and I err on the side that they should not. One of the trends in new-school play that I find troubling is that players too often look to their character sheet or to the Player's Handbook for a codified list of actions they can take or rolls they can make, rather than imagining their character as existing in the fantasy world and roleplaying them as such. The last thing I want is for players to yell at me that they want to take the Converse action and then start rolling Persuasion checks. 

The rules for social interaction presented in this post are for my use as the DM only, to inform what rolls I call for and how the results influence my roleplaying of the NPCs.

Alignment

Let me preface this by saying that I still use alignment in my games. I know it has fallen out of favor amongst players and DMs of all playstyles, but I still find it to be a helpful shorthand for determining what motivations and actions an NPC is more or less likely to have/take. 

In my games, alignment is mutable among humanoids of all kinds, but is fixed for outsider creatures like celestials and fiends, for whom alignment is a core part of their being. Other creatures that exist in the Material Plane, like dragons and giants, are still a bit fuzzy for me. I've had good chromatic dragons and evil metallic dragons, but this tends to have an unsatisfying dissonance for my players who are more familiar with the assumptions of D&D's typical setting - when I play with them, I tend to stick with the alignments that are typically suggested for these creatures.

That being said, I wanted alignment to have some influence on an NPC's initial disposition. I wanted evil creatures to be more likely to be hostile, and good ones to be more likely to be friendly, but I didn't want to eliminate the possibility that a pit fiend might be unsettlingly amicable, or that a gold dragon might in its righteous wroth assume that the PCs have sinister intentions.

Disposition

All encounters with NPCs begin with a reaction roll, which is 2d6. A result of 6 to 8 is neutral, higher is good, and lower is bad. Specifically, 2 or 3 is hostile (the NPC is likely to attack imminently), 4 or 5 is unfriendly (the NPC doesn't attack, but may make threatening demands of the PCs or otherwise seek to impede or oppose them), 9 or 10 is friendly (the NPC greets the PCs warmly, but isn't unconditionally helpful), and 11 or 12 is helpful (the NPC is sycophantically friendly and eager to aid the PCs).

The 2d6 roll is modified by the NPC's alignment: a chaotic NPC's reaction is modified by -1, an evil NPC's by -2, a good NPC's by +2, and a lawful NPC's by +1. Modifiers are cumulative, meaning a chaotic evil NPC's reaction is modified by -3, whereas a lawful good NPC's is modified by +3 (and so on for all the alignments in between). As a result, a chaotic evil creature is never immediately helpful, but might be friendly (the highest it can roll is a 9), and a lawful good creature is never immediately hostile, but might be unfriendly (the lowest it can roll is a 5).

The disposition of the NPC has riders on subsequent social DCs: an NPC with a neutral disposition has a social DC of 15, and the DC increases or decreases by 5 for each disposition below or above neutral (so a DC of 5 for a helpful NPC, or a DC of 25 for a hostile NPC). Additionally, any subsequent reaction rolls made by the NPC have a bonus or penalty based on their disposition: an NPC with a neutral disposition has no modifier, and the modifier increases or decreases by 2 for each category above or below neutral (-4 for a hostile NPC and +4 for a helpful one).

Lastly, the total of the initial reaction roll, modified by alignment, determines the number of "actions" the PCs can take before the NPC ends the interaction. The DM should be generous as to what constitutes an action - convincing, threatening, deceiving, bargaining, questioning, etc. 

In the case of a hostile NPC, it attacks immediately, unless the player characters attempt to convince it not to, in which case the number of "actions" they can take determines how many chances they have to do so. When they run out of actions, the creature attacks, unless it's been convinced not to. 

For other NPCs, PCs can attempt to extend the encounter, in which case they gain an additional 2d6-4 actions, and the NPC's disposition lowers by one category (in the case of the result being 0 or a negative number, the interaction ends regardless). This represents the NPC's patience being worn thin - an unfriendly NPC might make one final demand of the PCs before attacking, whereas a friendly or helpful NPC might have some other business they are eager to attend to.

The Procedure

Social interaction proceeds the way it should - as a conversation. Whenever the DM thinks that the players are trying to do something and is unsure of the outcome, they can refer to the list of actions and decide which best fits the PCs' approach, and resolve the action as described.

This is probably a good time to share my writeup of these rules. The document covers the reaction roll mechanics I described above, plus actions, some other things I'll get to, and my morale rules, which I may cover more extensively in another post - they're essentially a combination of 5e's barebones optional morale mechanics (DMG, page 273) and 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons's more robust rules (2e DMG, page 97). Update: More on morale here.

Some actions require only a reaction roll from the NPC, while others require an ability check from the PCs, which may modify a subsequent reaction roll (the PC may nail a Persuasion check, but if the NPC still has an unfavorable reaction, this represents that the argument, while sound, doesn't appeal to the NPC in some way). Other actions require no rolls as all.

Bonds and Recurring NPCs

Another element of NPC interaction covered by Courtney Campbell is NPC bonds, which come into play when NPCs become recurring characters. The way I run it, reaction rolls are only used to determine initial disposition upon first encountering the NPC. After that, referring to the NPC's bond level with the PCs is more appropriate. Essentially, as the PCs interact with the same NPC multiple times, spend time with them, and help them, they can improve their bond and, in turn, the degree to which the NPC is willing to help them.

This is useful for faction leaders like rulers of kingdoms and guildmasters, as well as service-providing NPCs like clerics and wizards (assuming the PCs won't simply pay them for their services, or the NPC doesn't accept payment for such) - NPCs who the PCs will interact with often, and will often be asking for help from.

PCs can improve their bonds with NPCs simply by having non-violent interactions with them (even initially adversarial NPCs may find themselves becoming amused by or growing to love the ragtag group of murderhobos who talk their way out of drawing weapons whenever they're encountered), or they can take downtime to deliberately make efforts to improve their relationship.

Gifts

I'll admit that I often have trouble determining what amount of gold is appropriate to convince a given NPC to do something. How much gold does a goblin want to look the other way while the PCs sneak past them into the larger camp? How much does a dragon demand in tribute before it agrees not to roast the PCs? How much does a genie expect before it will consider granting the PCs a wish?

The section on Gifts in the above document is my attempt to roughly quantify this. The numbers probably look arbitrary, but I determined them by averaging out the amount of gold found in the treasure hoard of a Challenge Rating X-Y creature and then distributing that amount across each CR within that range...somehow. It was a while ago so I don't remember, and it's probably mathematically flawed in some way. It's not meant to be exact - just an estimation that I can quickly eyeball to see if the goblin is over the moon or if the dragon or genie is insulted. 10 gold sounds like enough to get a goblin to do just about anything, right? Gifts, like many of the rules in the document, are mutable, and constantly being playtested in my games. 

It's all a bit more involved than old-school D&D's reaction rolls and new-school D&D's loose DCs. I don't necessarily think that anything like this should be in the next DMG (and it's probably better for it not to be), nor do I think everyone should use it at their table, but I've found that having this extra bit of structure has helped make this aspect of the game feel more satisfying and "real". I'll give an example.

Convincing a Lich to Go Away

My last 5e game - which lasted three years and went from levels 3 to 24 or so using epic boons, ability score improvements up to 30, feats, and multiclassing to advance beyond 20th-level - ended not with an epic battle, but with a conversation. It wasn't the climax of a big story arc - the players had accomplished all that they wanted to in the sprawling sandbox I had set up, were ready to move on to a new game, and this was the last item on their to-do list.

They had been recruited by an allied NPC wizard (one with which they had a strong bond, who they had helped and requested help from a number of times prior to this) to investigate the ruined sprawl outside of the city, where more novice adventurers had accidentally unearthed the ancient lair of a powerful lich and gotten themselves killed. More adventurers were flocking to the site in search of treasure, and the NPC wanted the threat removed (note that the objective was not to kill the lich, though it could have been - the objective was to make it so the lich stopped killing hapless idiots).

So, the party battled their way through twisted Zuggtmoy cultists (the lich and its acolytes worshiped the Demon Lady of Fungus), shambling corpse mounds, and fungoid-shelled beholders, and finally made their way to the lich's inner sanctum. I had rolled that the lich was unfriendly, and decided that it was doped out of its mind on a hallucinogenic mushroom cocktail. I figured it would rasp at them threateningly about how the PCs will never grasp the deeper truths which the Lady of Rot reveals to her faithful, how they're blind to the role they play in Her grand rhizomic scheme, in their fear of death, they fail to understand life, etc. Then, knowing my players (so I thought), they'd fight.

To my surprise, the wizard character starting talking the lich down. The character was a very old time traveler (long story), and beforehand we had agreed that his character probably knew this lich when it was a mortal and an apprentice at the academy. He approached the lich as an old friend, chatted it up, slurped down some potent fungus goo, passed his saving throw to not dissociate completely, joked with the lich, questioned it, and found out what it was doing there and why.

The lich was cultivating and consuming sacrilegious fungi in order to commune with its Demon Lady. It could only do it here, for magical reasons. What if he could do it somewhere else? The wizard suggested an alternative location which he had learned about in his adventures, and convinced the lich that his work could continue there. The lich eventually agreed, and the wizard used wish to send the lich and its lair elsewhere. After having a good long think about how I might pervert the wish to something unintended, I realized I couldn't in any way that felt legitimate, so I ruled that it was a success.

It took a few hours to resolve - about as long as a big dumb fight - and most importantly, it felt earned. There was danger that the lich might attack the PCs, but they just barely talked him down. There was danger that the wizard might dissociate from the hallucinogens, that the lich would deem him unworthy, and the rest of the party would have to fight it minus their wizard. There was danger that the lich would refuse the party's solution. There was danger that the wish might backfire. But everything worked, and it worked because of a combination of player skill, problem solving, and die rolls. It totally caught me off guard, and you'll just have to take my word for it when I say it just worked.

And then, our campaign ended - not with a big dumb fight, but with a conversation. And then, of course, we talked about epilogues. But that's another conversation.