It’s the end of another crappy, disaster of a month. So, it’s a good time to amuse myself by digging through the ole mailbag. Yes. It’s Ask Angry time again.

Do you want to risk my ire and expose yourself to ridicule by having a question answered in a future Ask Angry column? Send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Just cut to the damned chase, tell me what to call you, and give me explicit permission to do so.

Dan asks…

How do you run monsters fleeing from combat? You’ve previously given some rules for monsters breaking morale which I’ve started to incorporate, but the players don’t usually want to let them escape and the [D&D] 5E combat rules don’t allow fleeing creatures a chance to escape. The 5E chase mechanics are also quite heavy and not a smooth transition from combat.

Thanks, Dan, for reminding me of all the crap I’ve said about the mechanical issues with fleeing from combat in D&D. Oh, sure, you could have written a one-line e-mail, but you thought it best to treat me like a senile octogenarian. Maybe later you can come by and mush my corn into a fine paste for me.

Now, let’s get something straight, Dan: whatever the rules of the game, fleeing from battle’s not a guaranteed Get of Death Free card. When you run from a fight, you’re depending on — or praying for — the opponent deciding you ain’t worth choosing or shooting in the back. Of course, only a complete monster murders someone who’s not an imminent threat, so maybe that’s fair.

And yes, I know some asshole’s already typing, “Well, if they’re just going to do more evil if they escape…” in my comment feed, but that’s just a long way of saying, “The ends justify the means” which rhymes with “for the greater good” which are things monsters say. If you cut someone down who’s at your mercy and running away, you’re a monster.

But I digress…

Whether it makes them monsters or not, the player characters are totally allowed to gank fleeing foes. That doesn’t stop their foes from fleeing. So I don’t sweat it. I just say, “That goblin’s trying to escape; what do you?” If a player says, “I put an arrow in its back like the bastard I am,” I respond with, “Roll your attack and take advantage because the panicked creature has its back to you.”

And if it hits, I usually just call the critter dead unless that doesn’t make sense.

As for the rules? Who gives a crap if the rules make flight technically impossible? We’re talking about a creature who is either too panicked to think rationally or else is taking a calculated risk that the heroes won’t bother chasing. So it doesn’t matter whether escapes are mechanically possible.

You are right about the chase rules in D&D. They’re abstract horseshit and you should never, ever pull them out. You don’t need them anyway. Just describe what’s happening and resolve the actions the players take.

Honestly, the real problem here ain’t the lack of Chase and Evasion rules, it’s the lack of a good rule for characters running all out. Combat happens at a brisk hustle. A jog or a run, but not an all-out, pell-mell sprint. It’s fast enough to cover ground but slow enough to dodge, maneuver, and change direction. Creatures should be able to move faster than their speed.

Moreover, that faster option needs some variability to it. Unless you’re an Olympic sprinter totally warmed up on the day of your big race and running on a prepared track, you don’t have a single set speed limit. Or a set acceleration. Your top speed varies from one situation to the next based on internal and external factors. In Savage Worlds, creatures have a Run die. When they go all out — when they push beyond a normal, sustainable, maneuverable hustle — they roll a d6 to see how much extra ground they chew up.

Me? I’d love an Acceleration Die. If you spend a round running all-out, you roll a d6 to see how much your speed increases that round. Spend another round running, and add another d6 to your speed. And make an increasingly difficult Constitution check every round to avoid flagging. Or something like that. I’m spitballing here.

The point is to add enough variation to allow creatures that move at about the same speed to sometimes open a lead or close a gap or whatever without letting everyone consistently outrun much faster creatures while also allowing endurance to play a roll so that, if you can get a good head start, you can escape someone who can’t keep pace. Basically, running all out’s a risky gamble but it ain’t a guaranteed failure unless you try to outsprint a cheetah at ten paces.

But I really digress…

I don’t worry about any of this shit at my table. When a critter’s morale breaks, it breaks, and the creature does whatever it does when that happens. I telegraph such breaks immediately, but then I telegraph everything, so that’s no surprise. I say shit like, “Your attack hits. The goblin screams and drops his weapon. He’s backpedaling, clearly getting ready to make a break for it.”

When the goblin’s turn comes up, he flees. If someone ganks him with an Opportunity Attack, he gets ganked. Oh well. Otherwise, it Dashes away. If the players ignore a fleeing creature, I generally remove it once it hits whatever I’ve arbitrarily decided is the edge of the battlefield, usually, as I say something like, “The goblin flees into the woods at his best speed, zigzagging between the trees.” If someone asks to give chase or take a shot, I resolve that shit. But often, by the time a fight is over, my players have forgotten about the stragglers that escaped into the woods.

To sum up this long-ass story, I tell the players what their characters see, hear, perceive, and know and I resolve their actions. If they let a creature escape, it escapes. If they kill it, they kill it. And if they’re good-aligned, honorable characters, I make them feel like shit for it. Then again, I also make my players feel like shit for leaving critically injured, crippled animals alive too.

You’d think this crap would change my players’ behavior, but they’re players. What can you do?

James asks…

You have spoken about Reactions before, pointing out how they break up good flow specifically for things like counterspell. How would you handle situations like that alternatively?

You’re right, James! I have pointed out that Reactions are a shitty mess of design and really fuck with combat pacing. Is this, “Remind Angry of the Shit He’s Said” day? I especially love how y’all leave out the detail and nuance and critical analysis and charisma.

Anyway…

First, let me say this: I’m not opposed to players screwing with the turn order. A bit, anyway. I’m all for rules that let players hold actions until later in the round and I’m definitely for players preparing actions to unleash in response to specific triggers. Hell, a constrained Ready action is a great piece of game design. If I made a list of the top five undervalued and misunderstood combat mechanics vital for strategic and tactical play, the Ready action would totally make the list.

There’s a difference, though, between risking your turn to prepare a specific action to unleash in response to a trigger you guess will arise and a Reaction. A Reaction is a freebie action between turns. Everyone gets one. The designers used it to anchor Opportunity Attacks in the action economy but then hung a bunch of other shit off it too. And while 5E isn’t drowning under the weight of Reaction bullshit the way 4E was, it’s still pretty bad.

Fortunately, as you noted, I’ve explained all this shit before. Thank God you reminded me of that. Otherwise, I might have explained it all again.

But this is where I think counterspell specifically is an utter fail in 5E. It’s both way too constrained and not nearly constrained enough.

The constraints come from the fact that counterspell is a spell. To use it, you’ve got to know the spell, have it ready to fire, and have a spell slot ready to burn. If you’re a wizard, that means specifically choosing to prepare it because you think you’ll be facing a spellcaster that day whose spells will be dangerous enough that counterspell is a better option than hitting him in the face with a fireball. If you’re a spontaneous caster, you have to decide it’s worth knowing counterspell on the assumption you’ll be doing enough witch-hunting to make it worth more than knowing how to fling a fireball.

The option is unconstrained in that if you are ready and able to cast the spell, you can just counterspell without any tactical thought. If you’ve got the spell prepared and any spellcaster anywhere in sight starts waving his arms, you can just shut that down without losing a turn.

The point is, that counterspell is strategically expensive and tactically cheap. Which is backward. It needs to be a strategy available to pretty much every spellcaster, but requires tactical thought to use right.

Basically, wizards should be able to unweave other wizard’s spells as a matter of course. It shouldn’t be a spell. Just a thing wizards can do. If you can cast spells, you can uncast someone else’s spells. Or try to. But it should require some deliberate in-the-moment preparation. It’s the sort of thing you need to Ready. Why? Because it’s an option that changes the game whether it works or not. It’s like being on magical overwatch.

Suppose you’re a wizard and you’re planning to unleash a spell. But then, you spot the enemy wizard dropping into counterspell stance. Now what? Do you count on winning whatever opposed check you have to win and risk losing a spell slot on a countered spell? Do you cast a different spell? One you don’t care about losing? Do you hold back and wait for a more opportune moment to cast the spell? Do you shout to your archer buddy to peg the wizard and cast the spell after the wizard’s been ventilated?

Now counterspelling is this nasty tactical game between two wizards. Just the threat of the counterspell is enough to change the battle. This means, effectively, it allows wizards to neutralize each other or drag each other into bluffing games or games of magical chicken. And that happens before anyone even rolls a die.

In 5E, though, you get none of that shit. You get a strategy that’s hard to justify even bringing along, but, if you do, you have a one-time automatic magical veto without any tactical cost. Such depth!

Honestly, counterspelling is just one of several things that shouldn’t be spells. Basically, there are several things that wizards can do with magic, and casting spells is just one of them. Countering and dispelling are others. There’s more, too. And if I were designing a roleplaying game, that’s how I’d handle this crap.

JP asks…

In what situation would you consider it better to reveal the DC of a roll before the roll?

Man, this question stopped me cold. It seems simple enough, but suddenly, I had ten different answers scrumming to get out of my head. Well, not ten, but a few. Maybe more. I don’t know.

The problem is that my big, overarching, gut-instinct, first answer — and the best answer I’ve got — is, “It doesn’t frigging matter.” And that’s because this is one of those things I’ve seen a lot of bits and bytes spilled over on the Internet. Basically, on Reddit and Twitter and on the YouTubes, I’ve seen lots of people take really, really strong stances on whether to reveal or hide DCs.

Are there reasons to share them? Sure. Are there reasons to hide them? Also sure. But, really, this whole thing is so minor it ain’t worth committing brain space to. There are so many other things that have a much bigger impact on how your game feels and runs that this shit just isn’t going to nudge the needle one way or another. And yet, people treat this like it’s as important as how you handle death or whether female dwarves have beards.

Which they don’t.

I don’t even want to get drawn into the morass by talking this out. But, that said, I’ll look at one sorta pro and one sorta con and then give you my very minor and unimportant — but still strongly stated and correct — opinion.

The con is this: when players know the numbers, they play the numbers. This is obvious at tables where the GM puts a card with the monster’s AC on the table. The players at such tables take more time to consider the odds and they use those odds to decide what resources to spend pushing their attack modifier up. And while that does make sense given the characters in the world would be making the same qualitative decisions that the players are making quantitatively, it still leads to the players seeing the monsters as clouds of math and their character sheets as tools to nudge the odds.

In short, they’re seeing the world through a filter of game mechanics. They ain’t engaging with the world as a world.

The trouble is that players like doing just that. Having information helps people feel like they’re in control. This means, given the choice, players will choose to know as much of the game’s math as you allow them. Even if it distances them emotionally from the game and their characters. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to read in your postscript that you enjoyed knowing the DCs when you were a player at someone else’s table. Of course, you did. That doesn’t make it a good thing.

Also, I wish you fuckers would recognize that postscripts count as part of your e-mail. You ain’t being brief if you tack three paragraphs on below your sign-off. And I delete e-mails based on how many words I see at a glance, not the length of the body text alone.

The pro is this: when the players know the numbers, it streamlines play. At least, it can. It is possible.

Lately, I’ve been running an AD&D 2E campaign — AKA, the best edition of D&D ever — and I’d forgotten just how quick that shit plays. See, the players have pretty much every target number they might need to roll right on their character sheets. Ability Checks and Skill Checks require the player to roll against their Ability Scores directly. Saving Throw DCs are printed right on the sheet. And Attack Rolls are computed before the die roll by subtracting the target’s AC from the attacker’s THAC0.

And there are very few modifiers on anything.

This, the players know the moment the die hits the table whether they succeeded or not. Provided they can remember whether this is one of those “roll under” situations or whether they’re trying to exceed the target. Because AD&D 2E mixes that up a bit. Thus, instead of them saying, “I got a 12” and me saying, “That’s a success,” the players can just roll the die and say, “I succeeded.”

And man does that keep the game moving at a brisk pace. Especially given the general lack of post-die-roll math.

Of course, that ain’t quite the same as showing the DCs. And D&D 5E offers provides way too many opportunities for the players to play the numbers. There are ways to spend resources before a roll to get a bonus, ways to spend resources to change the result after the roll, and several obnoxious ways to adjust the result “after you roll the die but before the Game Master reveals the outcome.” So I’d never try to pull this shit off in 5E. The players are disconnected enough as it is.

I think revealing the DC works best if you can do it after the action’s been finalized and when there’s little to no math to be applied after the roll. If the math’s predone and the players can’t do anything to tweak the numbers, letting them have their target numbers in advance speeds play. Otherwise, it puts a fog of game mechanics between the players and the game world that ain’t great for a roleplaying game.

Of course, I’d never reveal a DC if the action’s outcome wasn’t immediately obvious anyway. For example, with Stealth, players don’t know they’ve fucked up until the lookout says, “Hey, what was that noise? Someone check by that bush!” Of course, in such cases, I roll the checks myself behind the screen, so that doesn’t matter.

But I can’t stress enough that this is a piddling little thing that’s barely worth the 750 words it took me to answer. It definitely ain’t worth losing sleep over and it’s not a game changer. So, in the end, it’s best to err on the side of keeping the players away from the mechanics. This means my default position is, “Just keep the DCs to yourself.”

Jin Beifong asks…

How do True Game Masters handle NPCs from player characters’ backgrounds like people from their hometown or family members?

Be warned, Jin, this is one of those short answer, “Yes with an if…”; long answer, “no with a but…” things.

On the one hand, True Game Masters handle every NPC the same. It doesn’t matter who brought the character into the world, the character’s still a non-player character. And that means it’s under the Game Master’s control. When a player invents a character other than their own, they must hand it over to the Game Master. “Here you go,” says the player, “I made this for you. Do as you will with it.”

Players get to play their own characters. That’s where their agency begins and that’s where it ends.

I know some of you are itching to disagree. Skip the comment; you’re wrong.

Given that, you — the supposedly True Game Master — must be careful which NPCs you accept from your players. If a player invents a character as part of their backstory and you approve that backstory, you’re assuring the player that everything they’ve written is true. Or at least, it’s true from the character’s perspective. If a PC’s brother served in the king’s guard — as written — they served in the king’s guard. Or, at the least, the PC has good reason to believe that’s true. The NPC can’t show up in the game and say, “King’s guard? What are you talking about? I’ve always been a wizard. I wasn’t a guard.” But that NPC can say, “I must confess the truth: I was never a king’s guard. I’ve been lying all these years. The truth is, I didn’t make the cut and I was too ashamed to come home. I fell in with a band of mercenaries and I’ve done terrible things. I know you must hate me, but I can’t keep hiding the truth.”

The point is, by approving a character’s backstory, you’re saying everything written is true as far as the character knows or approves. So be careful what you approve.

But that’s on the one hand. And that hand isn’t the only hand. Because, on the other hand, True Game Masters handle Backstory NPCs with care and respect. And they use them sparingly. Why? Because players are whiny little crybabies who throw fits if you ruin their stuff.

Seriously, though, despite that every non-player character is under the Game Master’s control and players cannot and should not expect to have any sort of creative control over them, most players do see their backstories as a part of the character. And that isn’t totally unfair. Thus, whenever you bring a Backstory NPC into play, you’re waving a lit match in the powder room. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.

Remember: it doesn’t matter whether a player’s right or wrong; what matters is that they’re upset and you’re going to have to deal with that shit.

The fact is, some players would absolutely sink their roleplaying teeth into their brother’s revelation that he’d been lying about being a guard for years out of shame. Others would consider it akin to you changing their character’s class against their will. And there’s no way to know what kind of player you’ve got until they blow up.

But beyond the fact that some players can pitch a fit if you use their Backstory NPC wrong, there’s another good reason to use Backstory NPCs sparingly. And that reason is that there’s no way to fake the organic relationship that’s supposed to exist between the player-character and their old friend or mentor or sister or whatever. Relationships are revealed — and developed — through interaction and nothing a player writes in their dumbass backstory counts as interaction. So the relationship’s unlikely to feel right from a cold start. It definitely won’t feel natural.

Of course, this varies from player to player and Game Master to Game Master. I’ve had — and currently have — players who can slip seamlessly into an existing relationship defined by one line of backstory text and a few cues and nudges from me. But I’ve also had a lot of players who think they can handle that shit and can’t. Players like that are rare.

So, 99 times out of 10, I leave Backstory NPCs right where I found them. In the backstory. If I need a friend or mentor, I bring in a new character and mold them gradually into that role. It leads to a way more organic relationship and an ultimately much greater player investment and it avoids the hurt feelings that might arise from me misusing someone’s precious Original Character Recolor (Do Not Steal) Backstory NPC.

And if a player insists they really do want their Backstory NPCs to matter — to be a part of the game — I sit them down and explain to them exactly what that means and how it works.

And I make them sign a waiver.

And I make sure I’ve got someone on the waiting list to fill their seat when that player storms off in a huff.