Why was morale removed from the game?

[James Jacobs]

Yup... our solution for morale is to just design each monster's morale conditions as needed for each specific monster/encounter combination. It seems to work pretty well.

 

[Janx]

One of the things that I also find unfortunate with 3e/4e not having morale rules is that there are a lot of elements in these newer systems that could play into a "break their morale" strategy as they currently exist.

Cleave or Whirlwind feat - with both of these feats you could potentially drop several opponents in a single round. Depending on how the morale rules were structured, these kinds of instances could cause a morale check, increase the likelyhood of one, or modify a check.

Massive Damage Threshold - This is another rules instance that could trigger morale in some manner. If a PC dumps out 50+ damage, not only is a creature have to save vs dying, but that impressive blow could also cause some kind of morale effect.

It's an area of the game that would have potentially bolstered the martial characters further, giving them a psychological attack that would help lessen the gap between the martial and spellcasters powe scales. It wouldn't solve it, but it would play into what being a bad ass is all about.

That's the kind of thinking I'm talking about. I like it.

 

[Umbran]

Anything that helps step out of that model is a good thing for me at least.

I'll bet you don't want anything. If you did, you'd just flip a coin and if it came up heads the party wins, and if it came up tails they'd have lost. No grind at all, there.

That's an absurd example, of course, but it is demonstrative of "swinginess". In reality, there's a spectrum - and morale was found to be a bit too far to the "flip a coin" side.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

And, if you examine the arguments against “Save or Die” and “Save or Suck” effects, they boil down to the same thing – so-called “swinginess”….which means nothing more or less than “unpredictability”.

Not exactly.

When I make an attack roll against something around my level, it is unpredictable. For some values of the dice, I hit and for some I miss. But either way that occurs, it does not break verisimilitude or make the game un-fun for others.

On the other hand, when we open the door to the Big Bad's summoning chamber (cue dramatic music) to see a small army facing us, but our wizard casts one spell and the Big Bad turns into a pile of ash, and then the entire small army gasps and runs away because they failed their morale check.... Why am I playing this game again?

Anytime the entire narrative weight of the situation is dissipated by a single random event with no associated build up, as a player you feel a notable lack of agency.

 

[Doug McCrae]

The really bizarre thing is, if you invested all those resources into Intimidate, chances are you were actually worse at combat than somebody who just invested everything into butt-whoopin'. So DeathDealer the Barbarian (who dump-statted CHA and instead of Skill Focus: Intimidate took Ultra-Murder Cleave) and JR Oppenheimer the Pyromancer aren't intimidating in the slightest, but have to rely on Pipsqueak Wussensissy the hobbit to bully the monsters.

I concur. Intimidate based on CHA sucked so much, that my half-orc barbarian that kicked so much butt he killed an 18th level sorcerer in 2 rounds in his first encounter ever and he NEVER successfully pulled off an Intimidate check throught 20+ levels.

Everytime I could remember, I'd roll intimidate. Never once did it work. And this was a guy with a track record for killing things in ridiculously brutal order and generally being a bad ass. Everybody was scared of him, even the party what had his tribe's tattoo on their back (thanks to some friendly gnolls who respected how bad ass I was and were kind enough to brand my slaves for me while we were all unconcious after being mauled by a bear). All this bad-assedness was thwarted by crappy rules. Every time.

...

Oh yeah, Intimidate sucked. It was another rule that used the wrong freaking stat to model something.

Intimidate used entirely the right stat. Being scary is about showmanship. It's front. It comes from attitude, confidence, voice and poise. Your half-orc didn't have any of that, he was a non-entity with muscle, as scary as a big block of wood.

Sure, if an NPC has just seen him cut the head off of a tyrannosaur, the NPC can choose to run away. But it's a perfectly rational, sensible decision. It's not Intimidate. The NPC hasn't been taken in by performance.

JR Oppenheimer and Deathdealer just ain't scary, not until they demonstrate their mad killin' skillz. Pipsqueak the hobbit has the ability that great actors and great gangsters possess. Even though he can't kill you, he can make you believe he can, and will.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Funny thing is, with Initimidate as they designed it, it took Morale out of the kind of setup it used to have and expressly put it INTO an opposed check kind of situation which gave the very problem you describe... and made it happily through playtests. 3.0 was particularly funny, with a 2nd level Rogue having maxed out intimidate, & bluff, with skill focus in Intimidate and an 18 Cha would be rolling 1d20+14 and trying to get higher than 10+ class level or 10+HD of an opponent to intimidate them. Automatic success against 4th level opponents!

I had not considered that. However, what exactly does a successful intimidate check do? As far as I know, it just inflicts 'Shaken', and a -2 to hit. Nice, but not overwhelming. Outside of combat it can force co-operation. I do not recall exactly if it could make something run away outright.

But a failed Morale check, circa 2nd Edition and earlier meant you were running away.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[pawsplay]

It's a misunderstanding of the rules. You check morale with the side's first death in combat. Obviously, if a monster is first to die, you check the monsters' morale. If it's the characters' side that had the first death, you're checking morale for their npc allies, cronies, and hangers-on, which all pre-2e versions of D&D assumed were regularly present.

I think it's pretty clear to me:

"In Combat: When the first death (on either
side, PC or NPC/monster) takes place; the
DM makes one morale roll for the remaining
creatures to see if they wish to continue."

This always struck me as a particularly realistic result. If the monsters take down a PC, they may flee, hoping the PCs will not pursue them. It's not what you would expect in a military situation, but it's realistic in many other scenarios. Imagine a botched liquor store robbery, or a nasty bar fight. Combat is scary. If a goblin kills his opponent, you don't think he would seriously consider leaving? The first time someone goes down, the fight has gotten serious.

It may seem strange to someone who is used to thinking of goblins as carnivorous XP packets on legs.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I'm just joining the crowd going down old-school memory lane. Why was morale yanked from 3e? The structure and math behind 3e seems like it would have easily accommodated morale, along with rules that would trigger a cascade of effects.

The same reason we don't have hard-coded aggro rules like in WoW.

In a game like WoW, which is run by a computer and not a DM, the computer needs a set of rules to tell it when to attack, run away, etc.

In a game like DnD, which is run by a DM with some amount of intelligence, the DM can determine when a monster or NPC will run away. The sheer number of factors involved defy calculation; the DM is probably better off using a "guesstimation" method instead. Or, if they prefer, their own set of rules (sort of like the zillion alignment rule variants).

Furthemore, morale had this weird side effect of making monsters too aggressive sometimes. If a reasonably intelligent monster rolled really well on morale after some or all of its buddies died, should it still run away? And if so, why did the DM bother rolling for morale?

 

[mxyzplk]

I also totally miss morale rules. You can claim "the DM should decide blah blah" but in reality what ends up happening is every random animal fights to the death.

"DM decides" is a copout. The DM can just dispense with XP and decide when people level - and that's perfectly legitimate, I'm doing it in my current game. The DM can just decide who hits in combat, too. Heck, the first D&D I ever played was like this, it was in the back of a car in the dark going to Boy Scout camp and was diceless. But those aren't reasons to not have rules for XP or combat.

 

[pawsplay]

Oh yeah, Intimidate sucked. It was another rule that used the wrong freaking stat to model something.

With all due respect, I suspect the problem may be using the wrong stat to model an intimidating half-orc. As it is, half-orc barbarians get Intimidate as a class skill, which already scales faster than SLA DCs. Many people confuse being scary with being intimidating. A 15' iron golem is intimidating only in the metaphorical sense; it can't convince you of anything.