Animals

Many of the monsters in B/X are animals. While there are differences among them, their are enough similarities that it’s worth having a general reference.

Reaction Tables for Animals

Animals’ main priorities are survival and reproduction. Their reactions should reflect those priorities. Animals ordinarily will not fight to the death if they can escape. If an animal has been injured, is not engaged in melee, and has a route to run away, it will usually flee. Animals protecting their nests, lairs, young, or territory are less likely to flee.

Predators go for the easy prey. Their ideal target is small, weak, and separated from the group. If a party has pack animals, predators are no less likely to attack the animals than to attack the characters. In many cases, the predators are more likely to attack the animals.

Here’s my standard reaction table for animals:

Roll	Reaction	Notes
2	Immediate Attack	The animal is either attempting to eat someone, to protect its young, or to protect its territory.
3-5	Hostile, possible attack.	The PCs may have come too close to the animals young or its territory. The animal makes itself known and attempts to scare the PCs away. It will follow up and attack if the party does not leave quickly. A predator may instead want to eat someone in the party. It stalks them, waiting for an opportunity to attack someone who looks weak and who might be separated from the group.
6-8	Uncertain.	The animal is unsure whether the party is dangerous, whether it is food, or whether they can be ignored. Until it makes up its mind, it keeps its distance and waits to see what the party does, fighting only if provoked.
9-11	No attack.	The animal will leave if it can, unless offered food or some incentive to stick around. Some monsters might approach the party, looking for a handout.
12	Friendly.	The animal is not hostile, and it thinks the characters are its friends. It is likely to approach, hoping to play or expecting the party to give it food. If the characters don’t respond with friendship, the animal will eventually leave. If the party is hostile, the animal will defend itself until it can get away.

Animal Morale and Escape

An animal’s behavior in a fight depends on why it is fighting. If it is defending only itself, its aim is to get away with its life. As soon as it has a path of escape, it will run away unless engaged in melee. It won’t engage enemies in melee unless they are blocking its escape.

If an animal is on the defensive in melee, it will retreat after taking any amount of damage. There is no need for a morale check. The monster’s goal is to get away alive. Its best chance to get away is to go as fast as it can (retreating), while it has enough hit points to survive attacks it takes on the run.

Animals ordinarily aren’t smart enough for fighting withdrawals. When they want out of melee, they retreat.

Predators are trying to get a meal. Again, their aim is survival, and they can’t eat if they’re dead. These animals will try to attack weak party members (including mounts and pack animals) separated from the group. A lone predator will flee if it takes damage before it can damage its prey. Predators in groups are bolder. They’ll keep attacking a tasty target until they fail a morale check. However, injured animals without a target will run away, and their departure might trigger a morale check for those who remain. Give a +2 bonus to the morale of individuals who are about to kill their prey.

The only animals who will fight to the death are those who are protecting their territory and their young. If they are merely protecting their territory, the animals will behave like predators; their territory is worthless if they are dead, so they will leave if they get hurt. If it is protecting its young, however, an animal will likely fight until it and its young can run away, or until it dies, whichever comes first.

When an animal is protecting its young, you could give it a morale rating of 12, or you could give it a +2 bonus to its normal moral rating. In the latter case, it’s possible for the animal to fail a morale check. If it does, that means its sense of self-preservation has overcome its desire to protect its young, and it tries to run away. But it won’t abandon its young. As soon as it gets away, it will come back to see if the threat is still there. If the characters are still there when the animal gets back, make another morale check to see if it runs away again.

Fixing 5e Initiative, Part 5: Initiative with a DC

I decided the combination of speed factor and initiative scores wasn't helping the game enouhg. The declarations phase just bogged things down too much. So, I tried a different way.

The monsters use their initiative scores. At the beginning of combat, the PCs make initiative rolls. All that matters, though, is which monsters they beat. In the simplest case, the initiative rolls divide the PCs into two groups—the Befores and the Afters.

The thing is, I don't care about what order the PCs in a group go in. They can act in whatever order they like. They can even interrupt each others' turns.

Initially, I let them actually resolve their turns at the same time. I found I couldn't keep track of multiple turns at once, especially with players making automated rolls on a VTT. So now, I let them choose the turn order, and a player can interrupt another player's turn if they want to. They usually don't want to.

This injects a little bit more player choice into initiative from round to round. Using initiative scores for monsters speeds up the beginning of a combat significantly.

It isn't perfect. Since initiative is circular, it often turns into a cycle of : Fast PCs, monsters, slow PCs, fast PCs, monsters .... The PCs get bunched together, but they don't have full control over their order at that point. The fast PCs share a turn, followed by the slow PCs' shared turn. Why not one shared party turn at that point?

There are a couple of modifications I'd like to try.

Add initiative rerolling. At the beginning of each round, the players reroll their initiative. In this way, there's always a possibility that fast character goes goes with the Afters one round, or that a slow character gets lucky and goes from the After group to the Before group one round.

Initiative as a group check. If half the characters beat the monsters' initiative score, they all go before the monsters. Otherwise, the monsters go first.

Fixing 5e Initiative, Part 4: Choice, Uncertainty, and the Feel of the Game

I previously proposed combining two variants from the 2014 DMG: Initiative Scores and Speed Factor initiative. The idea was to replace the chanciness of rolled initiative with uncertainty, and to make the initiative order depend more on what characters are doing, rather than merely on how they are built.

Does it work?

My earliest experiment involved two combats in which the PCs were facing groups of identical opponents—giant spiders and harpies, to be precise. Due to their size and Dexterity, giant spiders have an initiative score of 9. Harpies have an initiative score of 11, or 13 in rounds when they plan to use their clubs. They always plan to use their clubs.

Declarations. The declarations phase tended to go smoothly, but players were worried about being locked into their actions before they knew what was going to happen in the round, potentially winding up doing nothing. That was as intended from my perspective: I wanted there to be fog of war in action selection for both sides.

There were some twists that arose and required ruling. First, a harpy was caught in the area of a web spell, and so had to make a save at the start of their turn. If the save has not yet occurred, the harpy has to make their decision about what to do before they know if they'll be restrained by the web. I decided to go ahead and make the save during declarations, but not to apply the result until the harpy's turn.

In another case, a harpy was incapacitated by a hypnotic pattern. Can that character declare actions, for the case that they are free of the pattern when their turn comes up? I ruled yes, but it couldn't declare attacks, due to its being charmed.

In both cases, I'm tempted by the other possibility—force the webbed creature to choose an action in the fog of war, and don't allow the incapacitated creature to choose an action at all.

I had precalculated initiative scores for most of the things the PCs would be doing, and it wasn't unwieldy. One player did wonder if there were time savings overall, because this system requires me to write down what everyone is doing each turn, while the standard system doesn't require any writing. I try to write fast, but it's a good point. The procedure of getting everyone's declarations each round, without resolving them yet, was as annoying as getting everyone's initiative results each round would have been.

What's more, after the declarations phase, there are very few additional decisions to be made. Players we not more engaged during combat while others' turns were being resolved.

Decision-making for Declaration. The point of the system is to make initiative order depend more on player choices. My experiment had only three players, with initiative scores of 14, 11, and 10. The 11 was an artificer who could go as late as 9 (casting a 2nd-level spell), but usually just went on 11. The 14 was a bard who had no action options that would put him later in the initiative order than the artificer. The 10 was a cleric who was sure to go last among the PCs, unless the artificer cast a 2nd-level spell.

So, the only decision in the fight that affected PC initiative order relative to each other was the artificer's decision whether to cast a 2nd-level spell; which wasn't much of a decision, generally speaking.

What about their position relative to the monsters?

The giant spiders have an initiative score of 9, due to size (-2) and Dexterity (+1). The init 14 bard could not possibly go after them. The init 11 artificer goes after them if and only if casting a 2nd-level spell. The init 10 cleric goes after them if and only if casting a non-cantrip spell. So, two players' decisions make a difference to their order with respect to the spiders. Neither the artificer nor the cleric were even tempted enough to cast leveled spells for the question of "cast X before the monsters or cast Y after them?" to come up much.

The harpies were much faster than the spiders: Base initiative 11, 13 when using their clubs (which they always used). In this fight, none of the PCs were affected by the harpies' songs.

The harpies were always going on 13. That meant that they went before all PCs except when the bard cast a 2nd-level spell. So, the decision of what to do again didn't have much effect on turn order round to round.

Fog of War. While player decisions rarely made a difference to turn order, the need to declare action did introduce uncertainty for spell casters. They had to anticipate whether the enemy would be in position to target with their spells. If they weren't going before the enemy—either because they were slower innately or because they were casting spells with long enough casting times—declaring the spell meant risking the loss of action for the round. In the harpy fight, both casters had to adapt on their turns to new conditions in order to cast the spells they had initially declared. There is no equivalent, commonly occurring complication that non-spell casters have to deal with.

Actions. The actions phase gave me some, but not all, of what I hoped for. It was pretty quick to resolve, as almost all the decision-making had been done ahead of time. It was just movement and dice rolls to resolve the previously declared actions. It felt frenetic because turns went by so quickly. On the other hand, because movement was involved, it still felt like everyone was taking their turns in order, but much more quickly.

Future investigation. So far, the fixedness of the initiative scores looks more significant than the variability from action choice. The declarations phase introduces fog of war to action selection, and the jury is still out as to whether that enhances or detracts from the game. Even with the fog of war, it only presents some PCs with interesting choices, and only in some circumstances.

The declarations phase alone did not introduce the feeling of simultaneity I was hoping for, but it came close. Next time: Can anything do that?

Fixing 5e Initiative Part 3: The Solution?

We've looked at what's wrong with the default 5e initiative system and several alternatives that won't solve the problem. Now it's time for a proposed solution. Here's what I tried. (It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort.)

Here's what we need from a solution:

Initiative as player-managed risk or uncertainty. The initiative order should respond to players' decisions during the combat encounter itself, but the players' decisions should be subject to risk or uncertainty. That is, their decisions should make it more or less likely that they go before or after others, but it should rarely be a matter of certainty.

Initiative should reflect both dimensions of player agency. The consequences of player decisions about Dexterity scores and anything else that affects Dexterity checks should still matter in the background, even as player decisions in the combat round itself matter.

Initiative order should be a consequence of action selection. Player's shouldn't choose their initiative position directly. Instead, their initiative position should be a predictable (but not determinate) consequence of the action decisions they are making anyway.

Initiative resolution should not interrupt game flow. Stopping the game for the initiative ceremony must end!

And here's a bonus criterion I haven't said anything about so far: The initiative system should reinforce the idea that, in combat, everything is happening all at once, not one turn at a time.

With those things in mind, here's my proposal for a solution. It is probably deceptive in its simplicity. I think that's good.

Drum roll .....

Use both the Initiative Score and Speed Factor Initiative variants from the 2014 DMG. Together. At the same time.

Here's how that will play out.

• At the start of each round, the DM decides what the monsters are going to do and notes their modified initiative scores, usually 10 + Dexterity modifier + speed and size factors. At the same time, players are deciding what they are going to do that round and noting their modified initiative scores.
• Next, the DM asks the players for their actions and modified initiative scores, noting them all down.
• Then, all the actions get resolved, from highest initiative to lowest. Ties get broken by Dexterity score or by random roll.
• Then, we move to the next round and start over.

This system should reduce disengagement in two ways. First, players spend less time waiting for others to make decisions about what to do on their turn. Almost all decisions about what to do in a turn are made by everyone all at once. Second, the initiative-rolling ceremony is replaced by players telling the DM what they are going to do, which is something that happens on each player's turn in the default system already.

The system replaces randomness with uncertainty. Your decision about what to do tells you what your initiative score for the round will be, but you don't know what the other side is going to do. So, you have to make an educated guess as to whether that will be higher or lower than the other side's modified initiative score for the round. You are, in effect, choosing your actions based on the calculated gamble that you can take them at the most opportune time.

The system makes a PC's precise initiative score entirely a matter of player choices each round. It is determined by choice of action and other decisions that affect Dexterity checks.

In theory, then, this system will meet all the criteria for solving the problem. It even meets the bonus criterion. Everyone decides what to do at the same time. Action resolution is orderly and turn by turn, but it amounts to just the systematic resolution of things we all understand to be happening over the same six-second time span.

Later, I'll report on why this didn't work.

Fixing 5e Initiative Part 2: More Solutions that Don't Work

Last time, I talked about what's wrong with 5e initiative, and why none of the variants in the DMG solve all the problems. Now we're going to solve it.

Let's start by looking at what a couple of recent games have done to address the problems.

In Shadow of the Demon Lord, there are fast or slow actions. Your choice of action determines whether you go before or after the opposition. This is not disengaging, and it makes initiative depend on what it should: player decisions about what they are going to do.

The trouble is that there isn't an obvious way to convert that system to 5e. You could look at every possible action and decide whether it's slow or fast. But when you do that, you'd also break everything that is supposed to interact with initiative by modifying characters' Dexterity checks, and you eliminate the advantage of high Dexterity for initiative. It might work, but it's a lot of work.

In the upcoming Delve RPG, player characters get three actions per round, and monsters go first each round. Player characters can sacrifice one of their actions to go before the monsters do. This system does away with the disengagement of rolling initiative, but your choice of action doesn't have a lot of effect on the decision whether to go before the monsters. The main questions for players are (a) is there a good reason to make the monsters go between my turn and another player's turn?, (b) do I need to do three things this turn anyway?,  and (c) will it be good for me, having gone last this turn, to go first next turn?.

Unlike Shadow of the Demon Lord, Delve doesn't make your place in the initiative depend on your action choice. However, Delve asks the player to think about and make decisions about their initiative directly, in conjunction with their choice of action. For anything you can do with one or two actions, you ask yourself, "Should I do this before or after the other side's next turn?" That can be an interesting decision, but it's also a deterministic interaction with a purely mechanical aspect of the game, turn order. Those decisions would be more interesting and immersive if they involved risk or uncertainty derived from player choice.

The Delve system could, maybe, be implemented in 5e. You could try having the monsters always go first, unless players sacrifice their bonus action, movement, or action, to go first instead. That would probably have unintended bad consequences. For example, characters such as rogues are likely to use their movement, bonus action, and action each turn. In unmodified 5e, they are also likely to go early in the round. In the 5e-converted Delve system, they'd go last. The system also removes any initiative benefits that come from high Dexterity or bonuses to Dexterity checks.

Next: The Solution?

Fixing 5e Initiative Part 1: The Problems

I don't like the way initiative works in 5e. Really, I don't like the way initiative has worked in D&D from 3rd edition onward. Really really, I don't like the way initiative works in any edition of D&D. This time, I'm going to try to fix it for 5e, though.

You can't fix a problem until you know what the problem is. Here's my diagnosis of the problems with 5e's initiative system:

Rolling initiative is disengaging. Just as something very exciting is about to happen, everything stops as the DM and players roll dice, add modifiers, and then take notes of all the results. Once that's done, you begin cycling through characters and monsters one at a time, deciding on each creature's turn what it's going to do, and then resolving it. This is disengaging in two ways. First, rolling and recording initiative itself breaks everyone out of the game's imaginative space for a few minutes to deal with something purely mechanical. Second, there's not much for players to do when it's not their turn. They could be planning their next turn, but conditions might have changed a lot by the time that comes around. Or they could see what's new on Instagram.

Rolled initiative results are mainly randomization independent of player choices at the table. The main influences a player can have on initiative results are decisions made about ability scores and class features, which provide modifiers to a d20 roll. In almost all cases, the roll itself is the most significant determinant of initiative. As a rule of thumb, though, mere randomness is almost as bad for player agency as pure determinism. The ideal is player-modulated risk or uncertainty; there is a chance element, but player decisions in play can influence the probabilities.

Here's why none of the initiative variants in the 2014 DMG solve the problem.

Initiative Scores. Instead of rolling initiative, use passive Dexterity checks. 

This approach reduces disengagement, because the DM can have all the relevant initiative scores written down ahead of time. It eliminates randomization as well. Unfortunately, it replaces randomization with an absolutely deterministic mechanic that is still entirely separate from decisions players make in play. It is a little better than the default system, but it doesn't give players enough control over when their characters act.

Side Initiative. No modifiers apply to initiative. Instead, each side rolls 1d20, high roll goes first, and the two sides alternate thereafter. Creatures on each take turns in whatever order they choose.

Like using initiative scores, this approach reduces the time spent dealing with initiative. It also lets players decide their place in the initiative order round to round — relative to their own side. Those are good things.

However, this system amounts to flipping a coin for which side gets first action in combat. No decisions anyone makes can help or hurt their initiative. So, features like Jack of All Trades, simply having a high Dexterity score, or cat's grace lose some of their benefit. Relative order within a side rarely matters as much as going before or after the opposition, so this approach still leaves the most important part of initiative up to chance in a way player's can't influence.

Speed Factor. Every round, everyone declares their actions and rolls initiative. The roll is modified by penalties for slow actions, bonuses for fast ones, and the size of a creature.

This approach makes initiative depend on player decisions about what they will do in combat. That's good. That's really good. It injects an element of risk or uncertainty into the system that was otherwise a matter mainly of chance.

The main problem with this system is that it replaces the once-per-combat ceremony of rolling and recording initiative with a once-per-round ceremony of declaring actions, rolling initiative, and recording everyone's results.

Next up: Some other possibilities.

Measuring Hexcrawl Movement

In wilderness adventures on a hex map, some DMs like to track the precise location of the party in each hex. Not only is that more trouble than it's worth, but it renders the hex grid itself a bit redundant. Why not get rid of it entirely and track movement with a ruler and a specified scale for the map? Tracking precise locations in a hex violates my cardinal rule of not mixing scales. If you need to know the location of the party more precisely than +/- 3 miles or so, you should be using hexes that are less than 6 miles across.

When all you care about is what hex the party is in, it is a simple matter to track their movement per day. You just need to know the party's base mileage per day, the size of each hex in miles, and what sort of terrain is in it.

To get the party's base mileage per day, divide the slowest member's exploration movement by 5. If the slowest person in the party moves 60' per turn, the party has 12 miles of movement per day.

To enter a hex, the party has to spend mileage. The cost of a hex depends on its terrain. For six-mile hexes, here are the costs:

• Clear, grassland, or along a trail: 6 miles
• Forest, hills, desert, broken: 9 miles
• Mountains, jungle, swamp: 12 miles
• Road: 4 miles

A party must have the mileage to spend in order to enter a hex, and their mileage resets each day. You might make an exception if a party moves only 6 miles per day, so that they can enter 9-mile or 12-mile terrain by dedicating 2 days of travel to the task.

For hexes of other sizes, the costs are:

• Clear, grassland, or along a trail: hex size
• Forest, hills, desert, broken: hex size x 3/2
• Mountains, jungle, swamp: hex size x 2
• Road: hex size x 2/3

An alternative method does without counting miles and just counts hexes. When you know how many miles the party can travel in a day, you can easily find out how many hexes they can travel per day. Every hex then costs 1 hex to enter, modified as follows:

• Clear, grassland, trail: every hex costs 1 hex
• Forest, hills, desert, or broken: every other hex costs 2 hexes
• Mountains, jungle, swamp: every hex costs 2 hexes
• Road: every third hex is free.

The nice thing about the alternative system is that you don't have to recalculate movement costs for different map scales. Instead, you recalculate the number of hexes per day based on the map scale and the party movement rate.