What happened to Morale?

Elfcrusher said:

You are so right. I should have looked more closely.

Still, I'm curious why it's an "optional" rule and somewhat vaguely defined. And Intimidate isn't even mentioned.

It seems like Morale has somewhat fallen out of favor. Is that true?

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My guess is that is is in line with 5e's "Rulings not rules". So the DM determines when morale breaks and it can differ by table, by campaign, by foe, etc.

This also sidesteps the 3.x "Intimidancer", someone focused on Intimidate and able to mechanically force encounters to end well before they should.

Elfcrusher said:

That's exactly what I was just thinking. 5e is so un-deadly (by default) that you generally want to kill everything rather than let them run away. In older editions HP were more precious.

And, yes, I was not thinking of applying morale to PCs. In line with my philosophy about Warlords, I believe the character's thoughts belong to the player, not the dice, "unless magic".

I guess I yearn for the days when combat was scary, and chasing away monsters was as good or better than fighting them.

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Generally when I see players wanting to kill everything on the board, it's often in the context of not wanting the ones that are trying to escape to warn others. Which never made a lot of sense to me a lot of the time. You just pasted these monsters, bad enough where one or more are trying to flee. If they warn others, that means more XP is coming your way shortly. So why not let them escape?

My combats can be pretty scary. But to get players to chase away monsters rather than kill them, the DM should probably not award XP for killing/defeating monsters and instead make it tied to the acquisition of treasure (or something else appropriate to the campaign theme and goals).

It could have been a side-effect of the NPC equality movement, from 3E. If the DM is expected to role-play NPCs in the same way that players role-play their own characters, then you wouldn't want to take away that free will by replacing it with a die roll. Any rule that treats NPCs differently from PCs is a bad rule, from a certain perspective.

My honest guess is just that it was too much complexity for too little utility, though. The DM should have a pretty good idea of when circumstances might convince someone to flee, and rolling for it might give unintuitive results, so they just dropped it.

It failed its Morale check and ran away?


/hides

Elfcrusher said:

You are so right. I should have looked more closely.

Still, I'm curious why it's an "optional" rule and somewhat vaguely defined. And Intimidate isn't even mentioned.

It seems like Morale has somewhat fallen out of favor. Is that true?

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I just think that, more simply, most DMs prefer to make those decisions themselves instead of rolling.

I could see using Morale rules if I had a campaign centered around war or fear or something like that. It would feed into the overall concept. I wouldn't just add it to any old game. I would also have to add an XP incentive to push for the rout instead of stomp everything into a fine paste.

Well, there are the lay-offs, hiring freezes, pay freezes and...oh, wait you are talking about the game mechanic. Okay.

I only use morale for mass combat. When you have groups of employed or pressed into service. Morale is not the same as fear and not even the same a loyalty. There are other mechanics for fear in 5e. Also, I see HPs as including your mental well being. You can literally be beaten down and finally can't force yourself to go on. So fear, hit points, and also exhaustion--plenty of ways to make characters "give up" in an adventure until they get some R&R. I've used loyalty for hirelings, especially when the party has a ship or business from which they may be absent from for long periods of time.

Morale is best used as a tactical resource--a measure of how close a combatant is to giving up in a battle or in a war as a whole. For gaming purposes, I use the secondary, more narrowly scoped definition: "a sense of common purpose with respect to a group : esprit de corps The ship's morale improved after two days of shore leave." (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morale). Do I need to determine at what point combatants will go AWOL or surrender and how many in a group do so? Morale is a nice mechanic for that.

But it just has not come up in my 5e games.

I did, however, back Matt Colville's Strongholds and Streaming Kickstarter though. I'm looking to bring castles and mass combat into my campaign and I suspect I'll use morale at that point. Whether I use the optional rule in the DMG depend on whether Matt offers something better.

Elfcrusher said:

I drifted away from D&D (and TTRPGs in general) during 3rd and 4th editions, so I'm ignorant of a lot of the history that gets us to 5e.

Why did morale checks as a mechanic not make it into 5e? It bothers me that, by default, bad guys fight to the death. Was it determined that it's easier/better to just let the DM decide if they surrender or flee?

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IMX, not many people used morale in AD&D, and one of the common complaints was that DMs that did use it would use it to be rather mean to the PCs. This was, after all, before DM vs PC mentality was challenged and dispelled by 3e and 4e, and a lot of groups played the game in adversarial ways that resulted in not a lot of fun. That is, use it to deny treasure and XP to the PCs, or use it to constantly harass the PCs if they so much as let one creature escape ("Remember that one goblin? Well, there's another ambush overnight in your camp! This goblin is friends with every goblin ever and they're all going to hunt you down for the 50 gp reward from the treasure you let him get away with!"). It got especially unpleasant if you had the monsters surrender and a Paladin (code violation!) or other good-aligned (alignment shift!) characters were in the party. It could then be used by DMs to simply burden the party with the unappealing logistics of prisoner management when the only equipment most adventuring parties carry to help with that was several coils of rope. Nobody wants to play Detentions & Detainees. It's Orc babies all over again, except now you're likely to get stabbed in the back at random!

Further, the rule sometimes lead to paradoxical situations where the NPCs would or wouldn't flee because of die rolls and, again, it kind of harmed the game. When 10% of the bandits are killed and suddenly they panic even though they're protecting their only hideout and treasure hoard, but you exterminate 80% of the kobolds and the last few choose to die to protect an empty forest clearning, it just didn't always work sensibly. Sure, maybe that's realistic for creatures to make bad choices, but it doesn't really aid the narrative that the DM might be trying to present.

The rule itself was basically fine mechanically, but, IMO, since the rule easily led to toxic play styles and it didn't do anything the DM couldn't decide without rolling dice, it was dropped.

Don’t need morale rules really. Foes will run/surrender/fight to the death based upon who/what they are and what they want.

MNblockhead said:

Well, there are the lay-offs, hiring freezes, pay freezes and...oh, wait you are talking about the game mechanic. Okay.

I only use morale for mass combat. When you have groups of employed or pressed into service. Morale is not the same as fear and not even the same a loyalty. There are other mechanics for fear in 5e. Also, I see HPs as including your mental well being. You can literally be beaten down and finally can't force yourself to go on. So fear, hit points, and also exhaustion--plenty of ways to make characters "give up" in an adventure until they get some R&R. I've used loyalty for hirelings, especially when the party has a ship or business from which they may be absent from for long periods of time.

Morale is best used as a tactical resource--a measure of how close a combatant is to giving up in a battle or in a war as a whole. For gaming purposes, I use the secondary, more narrowly scoped definition: "a sense of common purpose with respect to a group : esprit de corps The ship's morale improved after two days of shore leave." (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morale). Do I need to determine at what point combatants will go AWOL or surrender and how many in a group do so? Morale is a nice mechanic for that.

But it just has not come up in my 5e games.

I did, however, back Matt Colville's Strongholds and Streaming Kickstarter though. I'm looking to bring castles and mass combat into my campaign and I suspect I'll use morale at that point. Whether I use the optional rule in the DMG depend on whether Matt offers something better.

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I backed the same thing. I used and still own his Fields of Blood system and it is excellent for kingdom management and mass combat. Morale and command are much more important in those situations.