harpy
2011-10-13, 09:40 AM
AD&D had a morale system. Each creature had a morale rating; which sadly was not included in the actual creatures stat block, but instead had to be calculated before hand or on the fly. There were also a number of circumstantial modifiers, such as being outnumbered, which could further modify the morale rating. There was ANOTHER set of modifiers that affected not the rating, but the morale roll.
Finally, there were guidelines on when to make morale checks. For players used to every creature in the fantasy world fighting to the death, they'd be quite surprised to see that just losing a lot of hit points, or just having one opponent drop might be all that is needed to see the enemy scatter. It is realistic, but does throw off the conception of 3.x combat.
Once all of that was established then there was the roll itself. It was a percentile roll and had degrees of failure that delivered the results. If you failed by up to 25% of your rating (percent of a percent... I've already lost almost everyone) you just fell back fighting. If it was 26 to 50% then you ran and fled, and then finally if it was 51% or less of your rating then you'd surrender. Players never made these rolls for their character's, just the baddies.
I want to try out morale in Pathfinder, and AD&D (or more specifically the OGL version OSRIC) is a good base layer to see what the dynamics of morale are about. However two big design hurdles need to be overcome.
First, you have to simplify the system. Even back in the day when we did use morale, it was a stripped down version used at the DM's discretion, such as when fighting mobs of weak willed opponents, such as goblins.
Do you make a new sub-system, or do you integrate it into existing systems, such as making a Will save? How to you modify for the wide array of psychologies in the game, such as constructs which would never make morale checks? How do you deal with battle hardened vets who have a poor will save if you go that route?
There are a wide range of factors to try and distill down into something that is easy to monitor. Plus you need to have nice clear conditions in which a morale check is made. When x% of hit points are gone for an individual? For a group when one of their number drops? Where is the fine line between abstraction for ease of play, but accounting for enough of the broad factors that it doesn't feel artificial?
Pathfinder does already possesses in a very fragmented way a morale system with the condition effects of shaken, fear, and panicked. Shaken can be done by basically anyone with a intimidate check, but the fear and panic conditions can only be triggered in a very specific and fantastical fashions, something that any common person has no access to. You can be a big brutish warrior and spend all day intimidating someone, but ultimately you're only going to be able to make the target slightly uncomfortable and never actually drive them away or make them cower. A morale system would intentionally dismantle this assumption and make it possible for a common warrior, under the right conditions, make people bow down and surrender.
The second hurdle is how does this affect the CR system? If you can “win” an encounter by just performing a shock and awe alpha strike in the opening round, triggering the opponents to all scatter, then this makes opponents potentially more brittle and thus the CR system needs some kind of adjustment.
AD&D got away with this because there were other core assumptions at work, such as wandering monsters every 30 minutes, and a great deal of experience points being earned for gaining treasure. Thus, time was of the essence and getting past monsters quickly was more important than outright defeating them. With Pathfinder both of these assumptions are not in any significant way stressed. Instead the emphasis with experience points is in defeating the CR specific encounter.
You can bring back an older system of rewards, but that is a whole other sub-system of math that would need to be evaluated. You could bring back wandering monsters, but it might not fit with the vision of a campaign, and the time it takes to resolve combat is longer, and thus it might not be practical to start grinding through encounters... not unless you have a morale system that can speed them up.
Some basic alterations to the CR system might be to simply up the scale by a point or two. Give more of a pool of points to construct an encounter, and thus increase either the number or potency of the opposition, but in turn now there is a mechanism to drive them off without going through all of their normal defenses. If certain creatures are immune or highly resistant to morale then their particular CR value would need to be adjusted to fit this new scale. That might be tedious to go through the catalog, though the number of creatures like that would likely be small in number compared to the overall number of creatures in the system.
Overall, the challenge is finding an easy and reliable morale check and being able to calculate how much of an impact this has on the overall CR.
One possible approach:
Say one trigger is when an opponent falls then any other opponents that can perceive the fallen comrade need to make a check. It's clean and simple and draws upon hits points being a rating that gives a binary “on or off” status to a creature. When a creature goes down it even has a measurable effect on the remaining CR of the encounter.
If you have a CR 2 encounter (600xp worth of creatures) with four goblins, then when two goblins fall unconscious the encounter is in some murky way becoming a CR 1 (400xp worth) encounter from that point out, assuming the party hasn't really drained much of their resources to get those two goblins to drop. With a morale system where a check were made and the final two goblins flee, then in a sense (it is more complicated and murky) the encounter was more of a CR 1 encounter to begin with.
If you wanted to make an adjustment with morale in play; then if you upped the APL rating by one, and thus upping the CR by one, then the party would be facing 5 or 6 goblins (depends on how strict you want to be with rounding xp values) which helps bolster reducing the effect of dropping the goblins and could also create adjustments in terms of when the trigger comes into effect, or the morale rating itself.
Another element that might help keep a break on the system is to use the existing conditions as a break mechanism. First failed check causes the shaken condition only to an individual, the second check causes fear in the individual and triggers a shaken check for the rest of the group. A third check causes panic. What is good about this is that it slows down the overall effect, but the downside is a lot of individual checks which can also slow down play via dice rolls and keep track of conditions. For ease of play it would be preferable if there was a more global check for the encounter as a whole, rather than at a individual level.
Finally, there were guidelines on when to make morale checks. For players used to every creature in the fantasy world fighting to the death, they'd be quite surprised to see that just losing a lot of hit points, or just having one opponent drop might be all that is needed to see the enemy scatter. It is realistic, but does throw off the conception of 3.x combat.
Once all of that was established then there was the roll itself. It was a percentile roll and had degrees of failure that delivered the results. If you failed by up to 25% of your rating (percent of a percent... I've already lost almost everyone) you just fell back fighting. If it was 26 to 50% then you ran and fled, and then finally if it was 51% or less of your rating then you'd surrender. Players never made these rolls for their character's, just the baddies.
I want to try out morale in Pathfinder, and AD&D (or more specifically the OGL version OSRIC) is a good base layer to see what the dynamics of morale are about. However two big design hurdles need to be overcome.
First, you have to simplify the system. Even back in the day when we did use morale, it was a stripped down version used at the DM's discretion, such as when fighting mobs of weak willed opponents, such as goblins.
Do you make a new sub-system, or do you integrate it into existing systems, such as making a Will save? How to you modify for the wide array of psychologies in the game, such as constructs which would never make morale checks? How do you deal with battle hardened vets who have a poor will save if you go that route?
There are a wide range of factors to try and distill down into something that is easy to monitor. Plus you need to have nice clear conditions in which a morale check is made. When x% of hit points are gone for an individual? For a group when one of their number drops? Where is the fine line between abstraction for ease of play, but accounting for enough of the broad factors that it doesn't feel artificial?
Pathfinder does already possesses in a very fragmented way a morale system with the condition effects of shaken, fear, and panicked. Shaken can be done by basically anyone with a intimidate check, but the fear and panic conditions can only be triggered in a very specific and fantastical fashions, something that any common person has no access to. You can be a big brutish warrior and spend all day intimidating someone, but ultimately you're only going to be able to make the target slightly uncomfortable and never actually drive them away or make them cower. A morale system would intentionally dismantle this assumption and make it possible for a common warrior, under the right conditions, make people bow down and surrender.
The second hurdle is how does this affect the CR system? If you can “win” an encounter by just performing a shock and awe alpha strike in the opening round, triggering the opponents to all scatter, then this makes opponents potentially more brittle and thus the CR system needs some kind of adjustment.
AD&D got away with this because there were other core assumptions at work, such as wandering monsters every 30 minutes, and a great deal of experience points being earned for gaining treasure. Thus, time was of the essence and getting past monsters quickly was more important than outright defeating them. With Pathfinder both of these assumptions are not in any significant way stressed. Instead the emphasis with experience points is in defeating the CR specific encounter.
You can bring back an older system of rewards, but that is a whole other sub-system of math that would need to be evaluated. You could bring back wandering monsters, but it might not fit with the vision of a campaign, and the time it takes to resolve combat is longer, and thus it might not be practical to start grinding through encounters... not unless you have a morale system that can speed them up.
Some basic alterations to the CR system might be to simply up the scale by a point or two. Give more of a pool of points to construct an encounter, and thus increase either the number or potency of the opposition, but in turn now there is a mechanism to drive them off without going through all of their normal defenses. If certain creatures are immune or highly resistant to morale then their particular CR value would need to be adjusted to fit this new scale. That might be tedious to go through the catalog, though the number of creatures like that would likely be small in number compared to the overall number of creatures in the system.
Overall, the challenge is finding an easy and reliable morale check and being able to calculate how much of an impact this has on the overall CR.
One possible approach:
Say one trigger is when an opponent falls then any other opponents that can perceive the fallen comrade need to make a check. It's clean and simple and draws upon hits points being a rating that gives a binary “on or off” status to a creature. When a creature goes down it even has a measurable effect on the remaining CR of the encounter.
If you have a CR 2 encounter (600xp worth of creatures) with four goblins, then when two goblins fall unconscious the encounter is in some murky way becoming a CR 1 (400xp worth) encounter from that point out, assuming the party hasn't really drained much of their resources to get those two goblins to drop. With a morale system where a check were made and the final two goblins flee, then in a sense (it is more complicated and murky) the encounter was more of a CR 1 encounter to begin with.
If you wanted to make an adjustment with morale in play; then if you upped the APL rating by one, and thus upping the CR by one, then the party would be facing 5 or 6 goblins (depends on how strict you want to be with rounding xp values) which helps bolster reducing the effect of dropping the goblins and could also create adjustments in terms of when the trigger comes into effect, or the morale rating itself.
Another element that might help keep a break on the system is to use the existing conditions as a break mechanism. First failed check causes the shaken condition only to an individual, the second check causes fear in the individual and triggers a shaken check for the rest of the group. A third check causes panic. What is good about this is that it slows down the overall effect, but the downside is a lot of individual checks which can also slow down play via dice rolls and keep track of conditions. For ease of play it would be preferable if there was a more global check for the encounter as a whole, rather than at a individual level.