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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 5880831" data-attributes="member: 1879">I fail to grasp this. Do your PCs never go to cities? Or come up with a plan that you failed to forsee? You've never had to come up with a baker, or street urchin, or sewer worker on the fly? You've never had PCs ignore your planned dinner with the Mayor to go off to see the swamp orcs you never got around to fully detailing?I'm sorry, but there are fundamental differences between PCs and NPCs, not the least of which is time. Both development time, and screen time. Even under troupe style systems like Ars Magica you have different classes of characters/npcs even though which is which may change from session to session. A Magus or Companion is a more fully developed character than any Grog. And that is because you have few Mages/Companions and lots of grogs. They can't all get equal treatment because there simply isn't time. Likewise unless your world only contains a dozen people your NPC cannot be as fully fleshed as a decent PC as you simply don't have the time to fully develop all the hundreds, or thousands of people/monsters they might bump into in a years campaign.In any event, as has been mentioned, morale listings are valuable even if the mechanical system is completely ignored. Even a plain language listing with no supporting mechanical system but a single line entry like "Pathetic/low/Normal/high/fanatical" is still a tool to inform you what, in general, this race is meant to be like. You as a GM are always free to ignore it, or decide that these goblins are hopped on "magic" potions and won't retreat, or that these kobolds are a bunch of slackers and will run away at the drop of a hp.Incidently, in Ars Magica your character may have passions which drive their lives and yes, the players might have to make rolls to allow common sense to overcome the yearnings of the heart or ambition. So some games do have reaction systems that can overrule players desires for his PC, but D&D has never been one of these.</blockquote>

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