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Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 6356905" data-attributes="member: 6777696">So my 4 PCs 1st level PCs run into a room full of 40 kobolds. (They had listened at the door and heard the hushed conversation of a lot of kobold voices, but felt the best plan was all-out assault.)My players are a little better with math than tactics, so they knew it was time to parley, and I had no trouble believing that a significantly superior force would be willing to hear a final plea. After a little back and forth, the charismatic fighter makes an extremely long case for a "partnership", along the lines of a Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars scenario. This feels reasonable to me—the kobolds are no longer afraid of these 4 wannabe-heroes, and they might as well let them kill a few rival tribesmembers before getting slaughtered. (The kobolds haven't seen Yojimbo and don't know how these deals usually work out in the end.)The player now feels like she deserves a roll of the dice in order to "win" her fate. Sounds good to me! Can't have deus-ex-roleplay be entirely risk-free, and she's got a lot going for her — 14 charisma and inspiration from the wordcount alone of that speech. But I still need to set a DC for her roll, and at these moments, I feel like I'm fudging the DC in about the same way as I might later fudge the dice. I want her to succeed, so I set a DC of 10, which she easily hits, and that's that. What I would love to have for these moments is some sort of more objective guideline on monster reactions, a little like the reaction tables of B/X. A high roll gets a friendly and helpful reaction (sure! pull up a bedroll here in the common room and we'll get to work tomorrow), and a very low roll gets an immediately violent reaction. (The kobolds have every reason not to trust you and rip you into tiny pieces. Let's roll for new characters.) Rolls in the middle have middling results. (Indifference — they march you off to an enemy cave and send you in at spear-point. Hostile — they drag you off to fight a pair of ogres.)Anyway, these are obviously all things that I can improvise at the table, but I find, when I improvise, that I always err on the side of softballing my players, because if there's going to be a TPK, I want it to feel fairer than fair. And I could see this adventure having a lot of monster interactions, parleys, pleadings, etc.Does anybody have any system that they use and like?thanks,redrick</blockquote>

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