A recent episode of Between Two Cairns opened with a discussion on what to do when a reaction role doesn’t jive with the idea you have in your head for the situation. Yochai’s sentiment more or less mirrors my own: if you roll the dice, you should just go with what the roll says. There is something chaotic and fun in trying to figure out why the troll in the middle of the dungeon is actually excited to see you. But what if the roll doesn’t make any fictional sense whatsoever? In that case I would question why you are rolling in the first place! I try and assign modifiers to creatures encountered when I want them to have a default disposition that is more negative or positive than a plain 2d6 spread. I also only include any charisma modifiers where it would make fictional sense for a characters charisma to come into play. Finally some monsters are truly mindless and will always want to eat the players, like zombies, perhaps. It’s easy to fall into the trap of rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice. I like Chris’s post on this topic: Information, Choice, Impact.

— Ramanan Sivaranjan, microblogging, October 06, 2025 [osr ] #