Why was morale removed from the game?

[ExploderWizard]

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.

Please do not attempt to tell me what I do and don't accept.

Again with the telling me what I think and want. Stop that. It is rude, and also incorrect.

Please stop doing the types of things to other posters that you do not appreciate being done to you. Have a nice day.

 

[Orius]

Personally I think removing morale as a concept was a sad loss for the game. It had descriptive qualities (for instance if goblin morale was shoddy and zombie morale was unshakable, it tells you something useful about running the creature as a DM).

When I look back on late 2e though, I don't think morale was a popular rule. I might be remembering things wrong, but I think it was the sort of thing that got bashed in the D-Mail and Forum section of Dragon (not as often as exceptional Strength and gnomes and halflings though), and I don't think people were too sorry to see it go.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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.

Well, let's take on our "verisimilitude" hat on. Should there really be a way to play a hulking creature wielding a two-handed axe larger than yourself that wrestles polar bears and dragons to death and can probably rip out your arms out if he wanted that is not intimidating? I mean, he got the muscles, he got the rage, he got the kills, he good the blood stains and scars.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of creating such a character*. Shouldn't this be a less common result?

*) And to be fair. It still is in 4E. Intimidate might be a class skill, but it is still based on Charisma that only one type of Barbarian "needs", and a Fighter has even less reason to focus on than the Barbarian.

 

[Gimby]

Theres another factor here if you are going for a realism arguement - the change in length of the combat rounds.

With a 1 minute round, you have a chance to assess the situation, see the flow of the combat and how it's turning for/against you. With a 6 second combat round, a large number of fights will be over in 30 seconds or less - you may not notice that your side is being cut down due to the suddeness of it.

 

[Starfox]

that means realizing that if YOU know the orcs are losing and the PCs are going to win, then the orcs probably know that as well, and would probably run.

Which means the orcs should run BEFORE the battle; battles in RPGs are hugely stacked in favor of the heroes. They have to be, or the campaign would literally have a half-life.

Not saying morale is bad, just saying using your DM knowledge as the monster's knowledge doesn't really work.

 

[Starfox]

Well, let's take on our "verisimilitude" hat on. Should there really be a way to play a hulking creature wielding a two-handed axe larger than yourself that wrestles polar bears and dragons to death and can probably rip out your arms out if he wanted that is not intimidating? I mean, he got the muscles, he got the rage, he got the kills, he good the blood stains and scars.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of creating such a character*. Shouldn't this be a less common result?

if this was so, Intimidate should not be a skill but a class feature - a class feature with utility, which would inevitably have to be balanced by removing some of that barbarian's whopasedness. You get what you pay for. By not taking Charisma, you have made yourself an unimpressive thug, a follower type. The really scary ones tend to be the small guys with lots of attitude. There are lots of big and potentially scary types that are meek and undaunting and you rolled yourself one of them, thanks to your low Cha. You need a leader type standing behind you, telling people how badass you are, telling YOU how badass you are, in order to make you scary. Mr Hobbit McWhimpy might be a physically weak, but he is a showman scaring people by pointing to you, thereby MAKING you scary.

If your character is so badass that such showmanship is not needed, because you can take people down with one swipe anyway, then its a case of poor game balance or maybe game-table intimidation rather than in-game intimidation. Besides, role-playing a low-Cha character with too much attitude really is to step out of character.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

if this was so, Intimidate should not be a skill but a class feature - a class feature with utility, which would inevitably have to be balanced by removing some of that barbarian's whopasedness. You get what you pay for. By not taking Charisma, you have made yourself an unimpressive thug, a follower type.The really scary ones tend to be the small guys with lots of attitude. There are lots of big and potentially scary types that are meek and undaunting and you rolled yourself one of them, thanks to your low Cha. You need a leader type standing behind you, telling people how badass you are, telling YOU how badass you are, in order to make you scary. Mr Hobbit McWhimpy might be a physically weak, but he is a showman scaring people by pointing to you, thereby MAKING you scary.

The first thing that comes to my mind when talking about Barbarians swinging Greataxes is not: "Hmm, that guy is probably a good liar and well-spoken" I will just think "If I bring this guy up against me, he might kill me."

The same would be true if it was not a Barbarian but a Wizard that can throw Fireballs. "If I bring this guy up against me, he might turn me into a toad." might be my thought.

Actual, physical danger for my life should count for something. But it doesn't by "RAW". It is not even if Intimidate should be on Strenght. I don't think it should be, since it wouldn't work for the Wizard.
But Intimidation has something to do with the actual threat you can bring to bear, and not just the intonation of your voice.

If your character is so badass that such showmanship is not needed, because you can take people down with one swipe anyway, then its a case of poor game balance or maybe game-table intimidation rather than in-game intimidation. Besides, role-playing a low-Cha character with too much attitude really is to step out of character.

But it is an error that is very easily made in many systems (not just D&D). "Hey, I want to play a badass. But he's not good at talking and stuff. Etiquette, Leadership, Diplomacy, that's nothing for him. But he is a dangerous, brutal guy. People should react to him physically."
"I am a Wizard. I don't need to talk with people, I don't need to trick them. I don't "parlay". If people want to ignore me, I can just point out that I can turn them inside out with a single gesture of my hand."

 

[ExploderWizard]

Theres another factor here if you are going for a realism arguement - the change in length of the combat rounds.

With a 1 minute round, you have a chance to assess the situation, see the flow of the combat and how it's turning for/against you. With a 6 second combat round, a large number of fights will be over in 30 seconds or less - you may not notice that your side is being cut down due to the suddeness of it.

The Basic D&D game features a 10 second combat round and uses morale rules.

Keep in mind that the "rules" for when to check morale are like any other rule, merely suggestions. If a battle looks positively hopeless the DM might not even need to roll.

 

[Janx]

If your character is so badass that such showmanship is not needed, because you can take people down with one swipe anyway, then its a case of poor game balance or maybe game-table intimidation rather than in-game intimidation. Besides, role-playing a low-Cha character with too much attitude really is to step out of character.

WHen the PC started, he had an 8 CHA, by the time he was done, he got to 10 or 11 (I did some stuff to improve CHA).

Whether we were out of character or not is a tough one. I played him as the big guy who knew he always got what he wanted, but seldom spoke. Like all half-orc barbarians, his INT was also not stellar. I just happened to not have totally bad modifiers on those stats, and I had a pretty high wisdom. So I played him as somebody who didn't do dumb things, but also wasn't the guy proposing plans, particularly complex ones.

His most complex emotion was regret as in "I knew I should have killed that #%$#$%#^%$ gnome instead of let you fools talk to him!"

He wasn't clumsy, he wasn't dumb, he wasn't badly mispoken or socially awkward. Particularly in a frozen tundra setting where darn near everybody is a barbarian and the core PH races are exceptions rather than the rule for societal norms.

Anyway, the core point of talking about my character was really to illustrate the silliness of the Intimidate skill. Where I had a PC built to be physically intimidating. The DM and other PCs were intimidated, the fluff said I was intimidating. The dice rolls, not so much. And part of it was just bad rolling.

Granted, if it did work a lot, my character would get the new emotional scene of "Come back and fight me!" a lot.

My main beef with the skill was that it was a class skill. I actually took ranks in it, and it was NEVER useful. Given that there wasn't a critter in the MM that I needed to be scared of (from his perspective), I took ranks in it because it made sense from a role play sense (he was intimidating, back it up with points in the skill). Its simply that the game mechanics failed to deliver on what I payed for. Granted, pretty much all the skills a barbarian gets suck...

 

[Dausuul]

Which means the orcs should run BEFORE the battle; battles in RPGs are hugely stacked in favor of the heroes. They have to be, or the campaign would literally have a half-life.

So, a dozen or more orcs should see four or five human warriors and choose to run away?

PCs don't have signs floating above their heads announcing "I am a 10th-level character. Ph33r."

As regards Intimidate: IMO, the Intimidate skill should complement morale rules rather than substituting for them. It should enable you to force a morale check when monsters would not normally make one.