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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8935281" data-attributes="member: 70468">Reaction rolls are more similar than morale. Morale is a way to provide a default end condition to combat that’s not just killing all the monsters. If you can break their morale, you can drive away something that is otherwise strong enough to kill you. This helps PCs survive and stay alive when they’re otherwise pretty fragile. It’s one of several release valves OSE provides to keep combat from being too dangerous (another being the escape and pursuit rules).Anyway, reaction rolls are similar to PbtA in that they are used to determine the default disposition of the monsters instead of having the referee making a ruling on that. You just don’t know if Old Gregg is going to be hostile or not until it’s put to a roll. Where they differ is OSE leaves the rest after that to rulings. If the roll finds that Old Gregg is friendly, he might just help them without any parlay. If he’s not (say neutral or indifferent), then it comes down to the rulings the referee makes. The party might make an excellent argument, and the referee will describe how Old Gregg tells them what they want to do know. They might try to parlay, and the referee will ask them for a Charisma check, and that will continue until the situation is resolved (Old Gregg helps, gets upset when the PCs make a ridiculous demand, a patrol wanders by, etc).In a PbtA game, the system takes over where OSE would have the referee make rulings. That’s not to say it’s a mechanical process. The MC has to describe the situation and say what happens as the PCs interact with it in the game world. It’s just the mechanics and principles work together to indicate when and sometimes what they are supposed to say. Note that it’s not the degrees of success or moves structure that enable this. FitD games have a very different mechanical interface compared to traditional PbtA games. However, they’re both based on the same approach (tied together by principles they enumerate).Could one do this with OSE instead of PbtA? My homebrew system started off as a hack of OSE and WWN before it evolved into what it is now, so I’d say yes. There are obvious starting points (such as using reaction rolls for a skill system or repurposing the skill system from WWN). However, you’d need to make sure there’s the same principle-based approach to indicate when and how those rolls are being deployed. That’s what took me a few iterations of the skill system to understand. It was actually a similar situation to the one described above. Deirdre (the barbarian) had been trying to climb one of the tanks when she failed the check. The consequence was the tank was coming down, and she and Dingo (the thief) had to scramble to safety.</blockquote>

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