Why was morale removed from the game?

[Rechan]

In my experience, PCs always kill surrendered enemies, always try their damdest to chase and kill fleeing enemies. So it's sort of an exercise in pointlessness to have them do either.

 

[MerricB]

In my experience, PCs always kill surrendered enemies, always try their damdest to chase and kill fleeing enemies. So it's sort of an exercise in pointlessness to have them do either.

Part of this is due to the different balancing of the later editions. In AD&D (1e), I feel you really felt that you had limited resources, so chasing down enemies in many cases could overextend you...

Cheers!

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I have always found Morale to be a troublesome thing to implement as a straight up d20 roll, and I always figured it would be better left to DM Fiat.

Also, I think that the 3rd Edition Intimidate skill basically 'killed Morale and took its stuff'.

Also remember the 3rd Edition introduced Feats. I am sure that if there were a Morale rule, there would have been feats to interact with it. And if there was one feat, there would also be magic items, and a particular prime stat and or skill to interact with it in an opposed roll.

In 3rd Edition, Opposed rolls were basically broken. Consider Grapple, where you got bonuses for being strong, and being large, and having high Bab. Large creatures are always strong, so you had mid level creatures with a +12 (even more with improved grab). This meant that against a large and strong creature, you either needed to have a massive Bab advantage or you needed to roll higher then 17 and for the monster to roll 3 or less to fail the check.

Now, consider a 3rd edition style Morale check where you could have a build optimized for it which would have a PC able to make checks that would cause an Ancient Red Dragon to piss its self and run away unless it could roll 18 or higher and have your PC roll 3 or less to fail.

That mechanic would not have made it out of playtest.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Dausuul]

In my experience, PCs always kill surrendered enemies, always try their damdest to chase and kill fleeing enemies. So it's sort of an exercise in pointlessness to have them do either.

Your PCs do things differently from mine, then. My party just made itself a long-term ally (and possibly a mentor for the rogue) by allowing an enemy to surrender.

 

[harpy]

I hardly played 2E so I'm not sure how morale was handled in that version, I'm going off of AD&D.

Flipping through to page 67 of the DMG it was made quite clear that morale was only used for "non-leader NPCs" and "intelligent opponent monsters", just to clear up any confusion people might have that morale was intended for PCs.

Looking over the rules it looked like the DM I had that used it often must have had a much simpler system, because I know he didn't use all of the percentages and modifiers that the official rules used. My foggy memory recalls something more like:

If the leader is slain and there are more PCs standing than monsters then 50% each turn the rest will run.

I know he was just rolling a d6 to see if they fled.

In the games we played the morale only seemed to be used for intelligent humanoid types, like orcs, town guards, goblins, etc.

One of the big perks of morale was that if you did break the enemy and made them flee (and to point out, the morale roll was for the whole group of monsters) was that you'd get a free attack with huge bonuses to hit as they fled, using the rules pg. 70 of the DMG. So when those goblins freaked out and ran it usually meant all of them getting hit and mowed down as they turn and fled.

What also allowed morale to give a lot of flavor was that while some monsters did have morale, others did not. Skeletons and zombies were more creepy because you couldn't break them, they just kept marching forward and you had to smash and slash them all to pieces.

I do think it is unfortunate that they discarded morale. I think with all of the other math that got pumped into 3E that they could have come up with a streamlined system with strait forward conditions, and also be able to factor the creature's "break" value into their final CR value.

While DMs can and do toss off the cuff morale into their games, the fact that the rules don't highlight standard psychology creates the overall effect that there isn't any, and so it's only been in 3E that I've seen the standard situation is that creatures fight to the death. The only times I've seen DMs use morale was usually when they wanted to bring a scene to a close, knowing that it was only a mop up situation at that point. It never seemed to be weighed as a real strategy to try and break the enemy, which is unfortunate as that is a big factor in real conflicts.

The funny thing I've noticed is that what is left of morale in 3E is mainly only applying to PCs and not to monsters. For the most part the fear effects are things monsters perform on PCs. The end result is that most fear effects involve a player running from an encounter and the player have tons of fun waiting for several minutes to pass in-game before they can get back in the action. Thus they have to sit around, or go grab something to eat, or play on the xbox, while everyone else plays.

True, you can demoralize with intimidate, and spellcasters can cast some spells, but... come on... how often are spellcasters casting those spells, and you can't (surprise!) see the fighter driving his enemies before him.

Another effect is that in living games like Living Greyhawk and Pathfinder Society, because you need to stick to RAW as much as possible, it also disinclines DMs to use off the cuff morale house rules and thus even more games go without guidelines that would help breath a bit more realism into the fights.

I certainly wouldn't have wanted to see the rules in the AD&D DMG retained after all of these years, but a revised system would have been great, offering a viable mundane strategy to the game and making things feel less like a video game where the icon of the monster just keeps swinging until its health bar is gone.

 

[Rechan]

Your PCs do things differently from mine, then. My party just made itself a long-term ally (and possibly a mentor for the rogue) by allowing an enemy to surrender.

I've played with many, many groups.

In general the reasons are:

1) He'll run back and get reinforcements/come back to haunt us in the future.
2) He's evil, no mercy.
3) My character has an itchy trigger finger.

 

[pawsplay]

The problem with this approach is that it gets awful... "swingy". You can add it to the math, and it works out in the long term. But for any particular fight, it can make or break things for the party. If you do the math, and add critters expecting that a specific percentage are going to break and run, and they don't, you might have a TPK on your hands. On the other side, if you don't bulk up the enemy, but more than expected break and run, you suddenly have a cake walk. This makes encounter design a bit of a pain.

4e got rid of "save or die" for a reason - it puts too much emphasis on the results of one single roll. Failing a morale check doesn't actually kill the monster, but it removes it from the fight, so it is mostly the same thing as far as the PCs are concerned.

In Basic D&D, IIRC, you checked morale the first time you downed a bad guy, the first time they downed a PC, or if the bad guys got reduced down to half their numbers. In other words, the monsters might flee if they took out a PC, or if they were likely to lose anyway. Morale didn't simply grind away at the monsters during the encounter.

The math could be bad if the PCs lose somebody early on and the bad guys pass morale, but in that case, I would hope the PCs might consider a retreat rather than a TPK. Honestly, the math is just as bad if the monsters NEVER retreat. If a couple of monsters do some real damage when they are themselves down to only a handful of hit points, that can be swingy, too.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Because monsters running away often interferes with the PCs' ability to kill them and take their stuff. In a game where gaining XP and treasure depends directly on the PCs' ability to kill things and take their stuff, monsters that run away tend to reduce the rate at which the PCs gain XP and treasure. This may annoy the players.

There are a number of solutions to this:

1. The DM has to explain to the players that hunting down every last one of the monsters they encounter is part of the challenge of killing things and taking their stuff. If they allow the monsters to get away, they only have themselves to blame for losing out on the XP gained from killing the monsters and the treasure that they carried.

2. Make the gaining of XP and treasure independent of whether the PCs killed all the monsters. However, some DMs do not like this approach because they believe that killing things is to only way to get better at anything, and that the only way to get treasure is to loot it from an enemy's corpse.

3. Remove morale so that all enemies fight to the death. This approach has the advantage of being both simple and direct. Without the need to track and check monster morale, the DM only has to think about which attack to use next.

Yes, I am only partly joking.

4. As a creature flees, it can attain higher speeds by desperately throwing off its gear and various trinkets, along with all spare coin. Even worn armor can be desperately jettisoned in this manner, contrary to basic common sense. Aside from the speed boost, PCs must make a will save (DC = 10 + 1/2 monster's HD + number of items dropped the PC can see, every 1000 gp counts as one "item") or immediately halt their pursuit of the withdrawing enemy to pick up each and every item, even if they could just retrace their steps and grab it all after slaughtering the fleeing enemy like the "heros" they are.

 

[Orius]

Morale doesn't cause game balance issues - well, not significant ones - especially considering the PCs are normally meant to win. (Morale only affecting monsters favours the PCs significantly).

Admittedly, if you have a Challenge Rating, the CR of a monster with morale is less than a monster without morale, because in X% of combats, the monster will run and thus is less of a threat than its stats would otherwise suggest.

Interesting. The reason that was stated for removing morale was that it should be the DM's call, and not subject to a dice roll. But I can understand the would CR bit. By the book, PCs get XPs for overcoming challenges. In terms of live foes, it means defeating them, not necessarily killing them. So if enemies ran, I awarded full XP, since the PCs overcame that challenge. Still, if morale had a significant effect, then monsters that run often should probably have a slightly lower CR - and thus award less XP than normal. Maybe monsters that run less often should have more, though that could probably end up giving more XP than normal, as there are whole classes of monsters that should fight to the finish like constructs, non-intelligent undead, perhaps oozes and some plants, etc.

Part of this is due to the different balancing of the later editions. In AD&D (1e), I feel you really felt that you had limited resources, so chasing down enemies in many cases could overextend you...

And I believe in 1e you got a lot less XP for killing something than you did for taking its stuff.

 

[Korgoth]

You're not a wargamer, are you.

I just spent several hours painting 15mm American WWII combat engineers.

I was being facetious.