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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7306625" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, but [MENTION=22362]MoutonRustique[/MENTION] is right, you need SOME SORT of infrastructure to hang that on. Keywords can obviously 'attach' the whole thing to the narrative side of the game, but someone has to at least specify their mechanical interactions up front. Also, if it is left to each power, then you end up with a soup of overlapping implementations of basically the same thing, which adds complexity without adding expressiveness (and in fact can harm expressiveness as people are forced to grapple with various realizations of the same narrative concepts). So, I have done this for HoML, although its an area of rules design that hasn't 'gelled' that much. In effect creatures have a sort of 'morale defense'. At first I thought this might be its own thing, but then with more thought I concluded that WILL serves that purpose pretty well. So, that lead to the determination of different reasons why WILL might be higher or lower. Highly trained and motivated combatants have high WILL (relatively to their levels). Thus they resist the types of 'psychic' attacks which are being discussed here, as well as intimidation tactics (which I argue do psychic damage instead of 4e's clunky and not very good intimidation system).The upshot being that your opponents may well take damage if they witness the deaths of large numbers of their compatriots or of key leaders. Exactly what the parameters of that are can generally be left to the scenario, but I have been working on a 'morale level' concept to express it succinctly so it doesn't have to be spelled out in game terms for every encounter. That way goblins may have a 30% morale factor, or something like that, so they tend to start losing hit points to morale at 30% losses. Of course defining exactly what 30% means is another question, and maybe there's a better way to express that. I'm open to ideas. As for the effects of morale loss... I have pretty much left it alone. The enemy goes to zero hit points and the normal debates can then begin. If you have some enemy which gets crazier when its desperate, just give it a bloodied effect. That might come about due to morale loss, but it seems equally applicable when the creature is personally feeling injured (IE bloodied) so it seems appropriate to me. For undead or such you can simply give them a 0% morale rating, they fight to the death with no quarter given or expected and never suffer morale loss. You could also give them immunity to WILL-based attacks, but of course that does lead down various paths 4e avoided.</blockquote>

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