Morale

I'm just about done with patching the gaps in the original rules for Dungeons & Dragons.  It's been a long slow process, partly because I am a world champion procrastinator, and partly because original D&D is a framework system that needs a fair amount of patching.  From the perspective of someone who's been running and playing the game for 37 years, I'm aware that there are a lot of areas I haven't covered yet.  But I feel like there's only one more major thing that I need to take care of before the rules are ready to go: morale.

To be honest, I've never really played an RPG with proper morale rules in effect.  When I was really young the monsters would always just fight to the death, and once I got older I used my own judgment as to if and when they would flee or retreat.  That's probably because of the D&D editions I cut my teeth on.  Mentzer's D&D Basic Set has simple morale rules, but they're not really foregrounded.  I can't remember if Advanced D&D 2nd edition had any such rules, but if it did they were in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and nobody ever used that book for anything except the magic items.  By the time D&D 3rd edition rolled around, morale rules weren't a consideration.  Which is a little odd considering that game's heavy combat focus, but I digress.  I've used morale once or twice in some of my more recent games, but not with any regularity or consistency.  Given D&D's roots in war-gaming, and original D&D's roots in Chainmail specifically, I'd like to change that.

The aforementioned Chainmail, being a medieval miniature war-game, does have rules for morale.  In fact, it has multiple systems for morale.  One of those is rolled after melee, and is based on relative casualties taken by each side.  The other is a much simpler system, and is rolled whenever a unit has taken a certain percentage of casualties.  Because I want a game that I can run with a minimal amount of reference to the books, I'm going with the simpler system, and I'm simplifying it just a little bit more to suit my own taste.

As written in Chainmail, every type of troop has a morale score.  Peasants, for example, have a morale score of 8, and mounted knight have a morale of 4.  Troop types also have certain casualty percentages that will trigger a morale check: for peasants that's 25%; and for mounted knights, it's 50%.  Whenever that threshold is passed, the unit rolls 2d6 and must score equal to or over their morale score to remain in battle.  So elite units will make the roll more easily, and also roll less often.

It's a simple system, but different troop types having different casualty thresholds is a bit too fiddly for my tastes.  Chainmail's "man-to-man" rules suggest using a threshold of 33-1/3% for everyone, so I'm going with that: a side will check morale when it loses a third of its force, and again at two-thirds.  If they pass both, they'll fight to the death.

The morale ratings for different troop types are readily adaptable to D&D: untrained troops will generally have a morale of 8, soldiers will have a score of 7, and elite troops will have a score of 5 or 4.  Finding ratings for the various monster types is a little trickier.  Chainmail gives morale scores for its fantasy monsters, but those are for use with the post-melee system that I'm not using.  Luckily, a lot of them work for the system I'm using just by deleting the score given from 12 - so that dwarves, for example, having a given score of 5, would end up with a 7 morale in my system.  Elves end up with 6.  There are certain monsters that have ratings of 20 or more, and those I've given a morale score of 2, meaning they won't ever have to check unless penalties are applied to the roll.  And then there are certain monsters, such as dragons, which are completely fearless.

For the monsters that are in D&D but not in Chainmail, I went with my gut.  Generally I would come up with a morale score by deleting the monster's number of Hit Dice from 8, but for some monsters I modified that result up or down based on their description (if they were described as cowardly, shy, aggressive, etc.).

I also had to come up with scores for the various NPC types.  From Chainmail we know that Heroes (4th level fighters) are fearless.  This also goes for Wizards (11th level magic-users).  I wasn't altogether happy with the above figure, as it seems a little too high level for this ability to be kicking in - I'd prefer my NPC magic-users to have a little more gumption.  The Chainmail rules include Warlocks as a less powerful form of Wizard, and as that's the level title for 8th-level magic-users, I've made them fearless from 8th level.  For clerics, I'm simply splitting the difference and making them fearless at 6th.  From there, I simply assigned scores between 8 and 4 for the lower levels of each class, as shown below.

Here's a list of the morale ratings I came up with below.  Certain historical types are included for comparative purposes.

• Morale 9
•  Dryads, Nixies, Pixies
• Morale 8
• Bandits, Buccaneers, Cavemen, Light Horse, Levies, Light Foot, 1st level Magic-Users, Nomads, Peasants, Pirates
• Morale 7
• Brigands, 1st level Clerics, Dwarves, Gnomes, Goblins, Heavy Foot, Hobbits, Heavy Horse, Medium Horse, Kobolds, 2nd level Magic-Users, Orcs, Pegasi, Unicorns
• Morale 6
• Armored Foot, 2nd and 3rd level Clerics, Elves, Level 1 Fighters, Gnolls, Elite Heavy Foot, Hobgoblins, Norman Knights, 3rd and 4th level Magic-Users, Mongols, 
• Morale 5 
• 4th level Clerics, 2nd level Fighters, 5th and 6th level Magic-Users, Hippogriffs, Swiss Pikemen, Unicorns
• Morale 4
• Centaurs, 5th level Clerics, 3rd level Fighters, Gargoyles, Mounted Knights, 7th level Magic-Users, Medusae, Ogres
• Morale 3
• Chimerae, Gorgons, Manticoras, Wyverns
• Morale 2
• Balrogs, Ents, Ghouls, Hydras, Lycanthropes, Mummies, Spectres, Vampires, Wights, Wraiths
• Fearless
• Basilisks, Berserkers, Black Pudding, Cockatrices, Dervishes, Dragons, Elementals, Giants, Gray Ooze, Griffons, Invisible Stalkers, Mermen, Minotaurs, Ochre Jelly, Purple Worms, Rocs, Skeletons, Trolls, Zombies

The above list only includes those monsters with entries in original D&D.  I didn't include the various animals and dinosaurs on the random encounter tables,or the sea creatures, as the list is big enough as it is.  I came up with those figures mostly based on Hit Dice and description, as above.

There are certain monsters and character types that cause enemies to check morale when they approach within charging distance, notably Superheroes (8th level fighters), Wizards (11th level magic-users), and Dragons.  I also included 8th level Clerics and Anti-Clerics on this list, as it feels wrong to leave them out.  My main concern here was whether this should apply to everyone, or just to "normal men" (creatures of 1 Hit Die or less).  It's not specified, so for now I'm going to have it apply to all creatures that are subject to morale checks.  Whether playtesting changes my mind on that remains to be seen.

Chainmail also specifies that certain types of troops must check morale when subjected to a cavalry charge.  I think I'll leave that as a mass combat rule.  It might make sense to test the morale of any "normal man" who is charged down by someone on horseback, but then it would also make sense to do so if they were charged by a gorgon, or a manticore. There are no rules for that, so I'm leaving out the cavalry charge morale rules as well.

So with that done, I have the rules I need figured out to my satisfaction.  At least, I have them figured out well enough to start playing: I have no doubt I'll be making tweaks and alterations as the campaign progresses.  Now I have no excuse to put off dungeon and wilderness design.  I probably won't put a lot of that material up on the blog, as I wouldn't want my players finding it.  So I'm not entirely sure what sort of content I'll be posting on Save or Die in the near future.  The blog's been pretty focused on filling the gaps in original D&D lately, so I'll need to find some new topics (although I'm sure the design work will give me some things to write about).