As a referee/game master, creating a living breathing and, importantly, reactive world for your players can be quite daunting. Luckily many brilliant people over many years have developed tools to help with this task. One such tool is the NPC reaction table. To borrow from Knave:

There are a few variations, each with different reactions for the results, but they are all quite similar. Using this table when the PCs first encounter an NPC, whose reaction to them is uncertain or not predetermined, is a great way to create interesting and unique interactions with the world. But I've been wondering if there could be a bit more nuance to the results.

I recently read a post on Marcia's blog about deconstructing 2d6. Essentially you can map the individual die results to a d66 table, using the one die as the tens digit and the other as the singles digit. This gives us an array of possible permutations for each sum, as such:

This turns our 12 results into 36 results, ripe with possibility. It is like we are unpacking the 2d6. Looking closer to see more detail, if you will.

As you may have noticed, the 2d6 roll is weighted towards the middle, this also happens to be where we get the most unpacking. Math is funny like that. This means we can give the most common results more nuance and the least common results remain as singular extremes.

Ok so let's try come up with a 2d6 NPC reaction matrix using this method. Remember one die is taken as the tens digit, the other as the singles digit.

Another way to do this would be to use 2 differently coloured dice and map the horizontal and vertical results to the colours.

There you have it. 36 reactions for NPC encounters all while keeping the same 2d6 roll and not making it over-complicated. The referee can make a traditional reaction roll and decide whether they want to unpack it for more detail or not.

What I particularly like about this method is that it adds more detail to the most common, and often most boring, results. Getting the frequent result of "6-8 Unsure" can be tiresome when you have to keep thinking of news ways for an NPC to be "unsure". You can instead simply just unpack the result, reference the table, and see what variety of unsure it is.

P.S. This method sort of breaks down when you bring in modifiers. You can decide to modify the singles digit, tens digit, or both. Either way it'll move your result across the table.

Originally Published: 14 Sep, 2022

If you liked what you read, click here to see my other posts.