Risk/Reward Mechanics and Dungeons and Dragons - Three Cases  

Image by Yuankai Li

I run a sandbox 1e AD&D game and as it’s 1e resource management is key. Also, magic is not “bought” at the magic store, it’s earned in combat, stolen from someone else who has it, or found through research and exploration (e.g. consulting a sage). My players understand this, and have adapted to it in game.

So a little while back one of my players asked if he could have an “axe that throws lightning”. I told him that he was welcome to find one or have one made. He opted for having one made, and consulted a warlock to determine the process. He started with a magic axe +2 he had picked up a few adventures ago. He was told he had to find an element to be used in enchanting the axe that was “sympathetic” to it’s function. In AD&D magic is sympathetic, e.g. the material component for a spider climb spell is a live spider, that sort of thing.

So he took the axe to a storm giant, and made a bargain. If he helped the fighter to get the sympathetic component for the axe the party would undertake a job for the giant. The giant called down lightning from the sky to strike the axe. I told the PC if the axe failed its save it was toast, but if it made the save it would be imbued with lightning and ready to be enchanted. The axe made the save, and the party took on a task for the giant. 

They travelled to a nearby spot in the valley where villagers had been disappearing, and found a druid who was commanding giant wasps to protect his grove, within the grove was a wounded gold dragon the druid was healing. The party told him that the storm giant didn’t like him killing the villagers. The druid requested that he be allowed to stay until the dragon was healed (about a week or so). They parlayed with the druid and got him to agree to leave the villagers alone if they wandered by, and went back to the giant to convey the agreement. The giant agreed, and they are now on their way back to the city to have the axe enchanted. When it is done it will essentially be the same as a wand of lightning.

The “cost” to getting the magic item here was:

Consulting the warlock/sage

Travelling to the storm giant (random encounters along the way)

Bargaining with the storm giant 

Risking the destruction of the axe

Completing the task for the giant

Payment to the warlock for enchanting the axe

And of course, they got an adventure out of it, so the “cost” here comes with fun gaming, and that’s all good.

In another case, a player asked if he could have a magic hammer that would come back to him if thrown. I gave him the same options, but he chose “stealing it from someone”. Well, my homebrew city is pretty big, so there was a chance that someone in the city could have such a weapon. 

So the first thing I did was roll to see if someone in the city did indeed have such a weapon. I gave it a 5% chance (the city is VERY big, but this was a pretty specific request), and rolled an 3, so someone did! But of course I didn’t tell the player that piece of information, they had to do the legwork. 

So the player decided his PC would go to a sage and see if they could help him. He took a bit of time finding a sage with a specialization in supernatural and unusual, and then he paid him to do some research to find out if there was a hammer of this kind anywhere accessible. I rolled for that, and it did not come up. So the first sage was a bust. He went to two more sages and the same thing, none of them knew of the possible location of a hammer of this kind. So sages were a dead end.

The PC in question is a thief, and a member of the guild, so he went to the guild and asked them for help. He agreed to a service to “pay back”  the guild for any information they might have. I rolled to see if they knew about such a weapon, I gave that a higher chance, as the guild in my homebrew city focuses on theft of high profile items from powerful city personages, its essentially a form of public humiliation to have a powerful item stolen from you. 

So I gave it a 20% chance, and that came up! So they did know of someone who had a hammer of the kind he wanted, and they gave him the information. As it happens, the theft was botched and the thief was captured, we will see how that turns out, but again, there were costs to the process of finding a magic item:

Finding, visiting and paying sages (time and gold)

Agreeing to a job for the guild to pay for information

Going to the location of the item and stealing it from a secure location

The idea was the same in both cases, magic items are powerful, and you can’t just “buy” them, but if you are willing to do the legwork and face real risks, the rewards can be yours!

In my Friday game I had another variation on this theme. My group was about to get involved in a fight. They had befriended some rebels who were ousted from a local Duchy as it had been taken over. The Duchy had been at war for two years, to win the war they brought in a significant number of mercenary soldiers, when the war was over and they won one of the Duke’s commanders staged a coup with the mercenaries and took over the Duchy. They slayed the Duke and his family, and all those loyal to him. 

The rebels had fled the Duchy and were hiding in the valley of the storm giant. The giant liked the rebels and let it be known they were under his protection while in the valley. The PCs had a RP encounter with the rebels and liked them, and the rebels asked them to help out by aiding them in a raid they were about to make. The party would help them bloody the nose of one of the new Duke’s elite units, and this would help inspire the resistance.

So one of my players asked me if there was any way to get an advantage in the upcoming fight. Normally to do this sort of thing they would have to follow steps like those I outlined above. But they wanted to have the fight soon, and I didn’t want to delay them for the sessions necessary to do the legwork necessary to get whatever advantage they were going to get. 

So I came up with a shortcut. 

I created a druid who lived in the marshes near the valley. The druid was a true neutral, in that he did not take sides with any local power struggles, but he would aid or harm travellers based on divination. In essence, if you wanted help you went to the druid, he would do a tarot card reading and based on the result would either aid you or harm you. If the reading was positive, he would offer to cast a spell to help you out, if the reading was negative, there was a carrion crawler in his company who would paralyze the party, and the druid would feed them to the crawler. Anyone who the crawler did not eat the druid would toss into the marshes to feed the crocs. 

So the leader of the rebels told the party of the druid, they weren’t willing to go to the druid as if things went badly that would end the resistance, but if the party wanted an advantage, the druid would either help or harm them. I made it clear to the players that the druid’s reading would help or harm them, and that it was beyond their control. 

So they had a conversation, did they want to risk a significant negative consequence for the possibility of a significant advantage in the game. Risk/reward is the bread and butter of D&D, but in this case it was compacted. Rather than an extended process of research and travels to get what they wanted, they could get an advantage immediately, but they would face an immediate risk. Compacting the process like this was like rolling the dice, it could help you out or damn you, but the choice was yours. 

They spent about 20 minutes discussing this, going back and forth between the view that they should go to the fight without the help of the druid, as if things went bad on the reading they would be at a disadvantage, and the view that any advantage was worth the risk.

I love conversations like these, players weighing the risks and rewards of a course of action when it is entirely up to them if they want to take the risk. Eventually they decided to go and see the druid. 

When they found him, he had built up a roaring 10’ diameter fire, seen for miles, and he was throwing bunches of different flowers onto the flames while praying and chanting, every bunch that hit released a scent into the air, and the air on the way to the fireside was rich with wild smells. He was communing with nature.  

When they arrived, the druid, Micerine Daj, introduced himself, then asked them to sit, showing them low grass mats to sit upon. He pointed at a small table with food, and asked if he could play a song. They say yes, so he played his pipes for a time. Unbeknownst to the party the pipes were magical, and anyone who heard them was enchanted such that if they attacked the player of the pipes, the player would be under a sanctuary spell with respect to their attacks. 

They told him what their task was, and asked for a reading. He then drew out his tarot and drew three cards. One card was Immediate Future, one was Intention, and the third was Challenge. I had decided the following, with an inverted card being a negative reading, and a card right side up was a positive reading. Because the orientation of the cards was a factor, I took the deck and laid out the cards in a mass on the table, then put the deck back together in such a way that some cards would be right side up, some upside down.

If two or three of the cards came up reversed then the druid would have the carrion crawler attack (the seats were arranged so the crawler was hidden in the foliage behind them). If two were positive the druid would cast a minor spell for them. If three were positive then he would cast a major spell for them.

So I drew the three cards and interpreted them according to their mission and their placement as detailed above. The first card was drawn, right side up, the ten of swords. That was for “immediate future”, so that was an easy read. 

“Micerine Daj spoke in a low, plain voice, betraying no emotion at the card he flipped, ‘a ten of swords, your immediate future has violent conflict with a large number of armed opponents.”

There was chatter amongst the players at this point, they were wondering if they were going to be able to achieve their goals without a direct fight (they had been discussing some spell related options for that, or the possibility of taking out the leader of the enemy’s unit to get the soldiers to surrender), they weren’t sure what the card implied for that. I let them speculate amongst themselves, players will figure out how to make the reading make sense for you, just let them riff on it for a while. 

The second card was drawn, again right side up. This time it was the Hierophant, this was for the category of “Intentions”. That one was a bit harder, but I was inspired,

“The druid raised an eyebrow at the card, mused for a moment, then spoke, ‘The Hierophant sees the future, in the position of ‘Intention” it suggests that you are seeking to change the future with your actions. You will be successful in this.”

The key to prognostication is not to be TOO specific, even if they failed completely they would “change the future” in some way, so this works as an interpretation. The party again chatted a bit about this, arguing over whether this meant they would win, or if their success could involve some of them dying or not. I kept silent and let them speculate.

Then the third card was drawn, also right side up!

“Micerine Daj closed his eyes and prayed, humming ancient words that mean nothing to you, and turned over the last card, ‘It is the Tower, in the Challenge position this indicates that your primary challenge in this task is a fortified opponent, so the biggest challenge in your task will be armor, or a fortification like a castle’”

They burst out into conversation about this one too. Now that they knew that their biggest challenge would be armored opponents or opponents in a fortified position, they started to talk about what spells they had that would ignore or at least not be hindered by armor or fortification. 

The important part for role play purposes was that that the cards all “fit” the future situation, they were going to fight an elite unit of the new Duke’s soldiers, they were doing it to try and enact change (inspire the rebellion) and they would be dealing with armored knights. 

For game purposes, they had taken the risk, rolled the dice (or in this case flipped the cards) and they won. So they got the reward immediately, without having to take several sessions to get it. I don’t do this sort of thing all the time, compressing the process like this is tempting, and can lead to hand waving the challenges just to move things forward. But every once in a while this sort of approach is both atmospheric and fun.

So the last part of the process was to decide what spell the druid would cast for them. He offered them three choices, he could come with them and cast a heat metal spell on their armored opponents, he could cast a hallucinatory terrain spell at an important juncture to ambush the soldiers they would be fighting. Or he could cast an animal summoning spell and then use speak with animals to get the beasts to help the PCs with their fight (two of the PCs could speak with animals as well, to direct them).

They ruled out the first two as they didn’t want the druid to come with them, I think they didn’t trust him at this point, or at least didn’t want to risk a true neutral possibly turning against them. So they went for the animal summoning. Micerine could cast this spell two times per day, so he did so, and summoned 16 giant spiders to his side (each casting gets 8 animals, the druid gets to pick, so to make it fair I rolled on the wandering monster tables in the back of the DMG for subtropical climates and got giant spiders).

Next session they are going to have their fight.

On one side:

The party (a monk/warlock, a ranger, a fighter, and a priest), 25 rebel fighters (0-level mercenaries, chainmail, shield, longsword and crossbow) and their leader (a 5/5 fighter/priest of Poseidon), all riding giant lizards, which are slow but strong, and 16 giant spiders. 

On the other:

The elite “Hammer squad” of the new duke, Duke Ragim Brokkasam the Mighty, 20 plate mail clad soldiers (0-level) armed with lucerne hammers that double as lances (each one has a foot long spike at the top), their leader, Grem Shathross, a 5th level fighter, and one squealer, a monster that the Duke had captured and enslaved, it wears a magical collar that makes it subservient to anyone wearing the crest of the Duchy (a black tiger on a red background). 

Squealers are 10 HD monsters that are EXTREMELY DEADLY. The catch here is that the “elite unit” has no missile weapons, so they will send in the squealer to engage the party then charge in with their hammer lances on armored horses. The squad is faster on the horses, and they are armored, but the horses are weaker than the giant lizards.

It should be epic, and the party is primed for their first set piece battle with soldiers. Next Friday can’t come soon enough. 

In all three cases there was risk, resource management and reward, but in the last case I compressed this into a single encounter that delivered the same formula, but without the wait. I wouldn’t recommend doing this often, but every once in a while it is a flavorful way to get the risk/reward element into the game in a shorter period of time.

Game on!