Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 4942186" data-attributes="member: 5890">I don't really think that morale/fear/sanity/horror rolls are a good mechanic. For starters, they tend to end up with ridiculous situations ("My character is mortuary worker. Having just discovered a body of someone whom I do not know, he goes stark raving mad and develops a phobia of fish.").The cthulu stuff is the worst: reading the fiction, characters going nuts with fear typically black out (which almost inevitably saves their life) or take a short term course of life-saving action. Playing the game, characters going nuts attack their friends or develop bizarre phobias.Possibly the only system I actually like for morale is the one from godlike, which eliminates rolls in exchange for choices.When threatened with a morale/fear/horror situation you make your roll and if you faile, you have a choice. Run in panic or cower in fear and generally don't contribute for a while, and you get to lose half your current willpower. Tough it out and ignore it, and it costs all of your current willpower.Losing all your willpower is a bad thing. It means you don't have it to spend, and in godlike it means your super powers don't work. It also means your actions are all penalised. It also means you start losing points from your maximum willpower if you fail another morale check.And then there's a ton of easy ways to get your willpower back through medium term actions (having a good nights rest, visiting family and friends, defeating foes and rescuing damsels). You can also permanently decrease your willpower limit in order to gain some back (which is really the only option if you chose to tough it out and want to use your powers or be effective). If your maximum willpower ever hits zero, THEN you go crazy.The big difference is that insanity under this system is a choice: You effectively have to deliberately sacrifice your sanity for effectiveness in order to go insane, and even then you could potentially do it over and over again and just buy back the willpower (or alternatively spend the points in making sure your cool stat plus the appropriate skill is 10, in which case you never fail a check that isn't incredibly difficult). In order to go insane otherwise, you would have to be repeatedly subjected to terrible situations, always lose and never get any respite.</blockquote>

Verification