Hacking 2e: Surprise

I touched on Surprise in a prior post, but it’s time to solidify it. Surprise is codified in every edition of the game, so it’s a must-have. However, it’s worth a look at how those other games (and later works) handled surprise, and how 2e stands apart from them.

 

1. Surprise Over Time

The evolution of surprise rules in D&D presents a microcosm of the changes between editions. Let’s throw it into a table:

System	Side or Individual	Determination	Effect
OD&D	Side	DM decision; d6 roll	Unsurprised get a free ‘move segment’ in which to move and take actions.
Basic	Side	DM decision; d6 roll	Surprised can’t act in the first round.
1e	Side	DM decision; d6 roll	Surprised lose segments in the round.
2e	Side or Individual	DM decision; d10 roll	Unsurprised get an extra round but can’t cast spells. No definitive rule on movement. Surprised lose Dex AC bonus.
3.5	Individual	Listen or Spot Check	Unsurprised act in the Surprise Round, but can only attack or cast spells; no movement. Surprised are ‘flat-footed’.
4e	Individual	Perception or Insight Check	Unsurprised act in the Surprise Round, but only get a standard action, move action, or minor action. Surprised grant Combat Advantage.
5e	Individual	Stealth vs Passive Perception Check	Surprised can’t act in the first round.
5.5	Individual	Stealth vs Passive Perception Check	Surprised get disadvantage on their Initiative roll.

 

There’s some descriptions of effects that one could quibble with here, but it’ll serve. No surprise, the big change here is the move from DM fiat to skill checks, though all these later editions (except for 4e, of course) note that it’s the DM’s call. However, the most interesting story is found in the effects. The game weaves back and forth between providing a restricted Surprise Round and just kicking the player to the next round, aside from its odd pivot in 2024.

Off-topic, but this breakdown also shows something many have forgotten: 5e used to be old-school. That may seem absurd in the OSR culture, where 5e is held up as the antithesis of old-school sensibilities, but when the first playtest packets dropped in 2012 it was a revelation to those of us who cut our teeth on 4e. It came with a conversion of the Caves of Chaos! A Knight at the Opera has an amazing write-up on this. 

 

1.1 OSR

What about the OSR? As expected, the majority are Basic’s d6/lose turn. Cairn, The Black Hack, GLOG, and MÖRK BORG don’t bother with surprise at all; everything is left to initiative. For alternative methods, let’s throw out another table. We can scrap the Side vs Individual column, as no one is doing side initiative.

	Determination	Effect
Into the Odd	DM decision; Dex save	Surprised can’t act in the first round.
Knave 2e	Contested Wis check between closest PC and creature. If won by 5 or more: other side is surprised.	Unsurprised go first and gets +5 on all combat checks in the first round.
Whitehack	DM decision; failed ‘detection roll’ provided as example	Surprised can move and ready weapons only.
Shadowdark	Looking in the right place or Wis check	Surprised can’t act in the first round.
Mothership	DM decision; Fear check	Surprised can’t act in the first round.

 

Knave has a rather elaborate system and Whitehack turns it into a ‘get ready’ round, but for the most part they all have a preference for skipping the first round. It’s dead easy and aligns with both Basic and 5e, so it just seems the best choice for this hack.

Also, DM adjudication is king again. While checks are provided, they’re only a stand-in for the bespoke surprise roll.

 

2. Surprise in 2e

You can see 2e’s slow evolution into the modern era. We get Surprise Rounds, but they’re not called that. Individual surprise makes its appearance here, though side-based surprise is still on the table. Truly, 2e is the missing link between modern D&D and its antediluvian ancestors.

As in later editions, 2e’s unnamed Surprise Round has a restriction: no spells. These restrictions make sense in the later games, where the round is 6 seconds long and action is meant to be heartbeat fast. Here they seem odd, considering that PCs can use this extra round to fire off two arrows or run and attack, which means that this is a full round. The restriction on spells is likely to counter the abuse of sleep and charm spells, which I see no reason to do; if they’ve won surprise, let them cheese.

Surprise also removes the PC’s Dex bonus to AC, as with a rear attack or when the PC is restrained. It’s a minor extra to remember, but it’s got great flavor so it stays. To mitigate the overhead, I can give that bonus loss a name: I really like 3e’s designation of this state as “flat-footed.”

 

2.1. Ambush 

Lastly, 2e adds in an extra ‘not surprise but still surprise-like’ state of play: The Ambush. If an attack is prepared in advance, and the other side would have no way to know it’s happening, then that’s a free full round for the ambushing side and a surprise roll at the end of it for a potential one-two punch. It’s cool and it provides a huge incentive for players to think things through and make plans.

Its problem is that it’s clearly designed for side initiative (if one PC in the party is aware of the Ambush, does the entire Ambush fail?) and it represents a state of play that is already covered by the existing surprise rules. The PHB gives an example of surprise: a leopard attack from the trees. By the rules, this qualifies as an ambush, yet our leopard doesn’t get a pre-combat round.

In short, an ambush is literally a surprise attack and that’s what the surprise rules are for.

 

3. Revising Surprise

In my posts on converting 2e rules into roll-under mechanics, I proposed a reversal of the current Surprise die roll. Instead of surprise occurring on a 1-3, it occurs on a 8-10, which means we can give the PC a “Surprise Score” of 7 and have the player attempt to roll at or under this score to avoid surprise. Easy enough. I’ve dabbled with the idea converting this into a straight Wisdom check, but the numbers don’t add up and I would like to keep ‘status check’ rolls for d10s.

The failure state is being Surprised, wherein you skip the round and are Flatfooted. As noted above, we’re not losing much by giving wizards and clerics some magical utility in the first round, and the tradeoff for a simple rule is worth the potential abuse and the temporal dissonance that comes from one minute rounds. By adopting the ‘Flatfooted’ state, I can pop that onto the character sheet and help to ensure the rule actually gets used. (In 3e, you were considered to be Flatfooted before your first turn generally, which extended to surprise rounds. That’s not the case here. If that causes any future confusion, it’ll require a different term.)

 

3.1 Modifiers

Modifiers are necessary. We’ve already got Wisdom’s modifiers, detailed in this post where I gave surprise mods to that ability. A Wis score of 18 gives PCs an auto success on surprise, which I like. As always, we can mitigate excessive scores with situational modifiers. Let’s look at what we already have in 2e:

That’s a –4 to +2 range, which is in line with the Initiative situational modifiers which I poked at earlier. The arrangement needs work; attempting to separate the modifiers into “those created by your enemies” and “those created by your situation” is a bit messy.

If we attempt to simplify the list and smooth out the modifiers, we get:

Situation	Modifier
Clues that enemies are near	+2
Anticipating attack	+2
Still environment	+2
Lightly obscured environment	–1
Heavily obscured environment	–2
Enemies are invisible or silent	–2
Fleeing or Panicking	–2
Darkness	–4
Ambushed	–4

 

I’m throwing ambushes into the modifiers. If the party is trying to force the other side into a surprise roll, that’s an ambush. As such, the surprise rules should be used to adjudicate it. The –4 to the Surprise Score sets the chance of surprise at 70%, which should do the trick.

 

4. Conclusion

This revision brings roll-under mechanics to surprise, the removal of some edge cases, and simpler modifiers. I’d like to go further, but this will serve for now.

I’m iffy about those modifiers. There is much to keep track of and, by extension, to calculate. My preference would be to create a singular modifier to apply to surprise (and use the same type of single modifier system for reactions, initiative, etc). That, however, is not today’s work.

Revising the Thief’s backstab ability to use the surprise rules seems appropriate. That’s definitely for another post, and a reminder that I need to stop poking around the edges and get to the race and class rules.