It’s Thursday. Or whatever day it is. I don’t f$&%ing know when you’re reading this and I’m not even sure when I’m writing this or when I will actually post it. Any of those could happen on any day. So, I say, “f$&% it.” It’s Thursday.
It’s Thursday. And that means it’s time for me to dip into the electronic mailbag and pull out a bunch of 1s and 0s that represent a question some hapless reader has sent me. Let’s see what we’ve got…
Bastard asks…
Should I do away with morale checks for player characters in my game? By morale checks, I mean a result that determines if the PC will fight, run away from the danger, fight with reduced effectiveness, cower, etc. The game I am running is a system focused on combat where all player characters are at least a bit combat effective. Many enemies are freakish demonic monsters, so one might reasonably argue that it would make sense to have the PCs make a morale check every now and then (depending on the monster) but I think that this will only slow the game down, not to mention that players will hate it when their character has to spend the next few rounds running in circles screaming, doing nothing productive, should they fail. Now, I do enjoy it when the game includes “realistic” elements such as character mental state to a reasonable degree of course, but shouldn’t I leave that to the roleplaying competency (or lack of) of the players?
So, back when there was a thing called flash, there was this website with a bunch of animated cartoons – animated using a particular software tool called Adobe Flash. Well, it was originally Macromedia Flash. Well, it was originally Future Splash Animator.
Anyway, there was this website called Homestarrunner.com. And, yes, I know the website is still there. But it also really isn’t. I’m not going to try to explain what the hell it was or is. Either you know it and love it, you know it and don’t f$&%ing get it, or you don’t know it and you’re not going to get into it at this point. But there was this angry, mean little character who would answer questions submitted by fans. And that angry, mean little character was angry and mean and therefore always saying “crap.” He used the word “crap” a lot. So, fans would occasionally throw the word “crap” into their e-mails. They would use it in the greeting or sign the e-mail “crapfully yours” or whatever. And then, in one episode, the character – whose name for reasons I won’t go into was “Strong Bad” – was reading an e-mail on screen and it was signed “Crapfully Crap, John Smith.” And instead of reading that, Strong Bad gives this big, long-suffering sigh and pointedly reads it as “YOURS TRULY, John Smith.” And then he goes into the e-mail.
I get that joke more now than I ever have in my life. And I did get it when I first saw it years ago before the website started hosting a message saying “this plugin not supported.” But now, NOW I really get it. So, do me a favor. Go back and reread the heading and the question again. Each and everyone one of you. And imagine I’m reading it out loud. And I want you to hear, in your head, me issuing a long-suffering sigh and then saying “JOHN asks…”
DO YOU ALL HEAR WHAT I AM SAYING?
Anyway, John, I have to hand it to you. If I had been drinking a beverage when your e-mail came in, you would have seen the best spit take. I would have been reading like…
“Greetings Angry, you may call me *sigh*… JOHN. The problem I am facing is this: should I do away with morale checks… for PPPPHHHHHWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHH…. PLAYER CHARACTERS?!”
I have so many questions. First, I want to know what system you’re running that has morale checks for player characters baked in that you are considering removing in the first place. Because I’m going to be honest, that would set off so many alarm bells in my head that the neighbors would evacuate the apartment building thinking there was a fire somewhere. And it was only when I read the question a little further that I started to understand what was actually going on.
So, let me take this whole thing apart and make sure all the readers are up to speed on this stuff.
A morale check is a game mechanic whereby a creature in the game has to roll a specific die roll once a set of specific circumstances has arisen in combat. If the check succeeds, nothing changes. But if the check fails, the creature’s morale has broken. They have become demoralized and they won’t fight any longer. What happens varies from system to system, but mainly, the creature will flee or surrender or cower or retreat or otherwise remove themselves from the battle because they’ve decided that they are not likely to survive the battle and whatever they are fighting for just isn’t worth dying for.
Since most of my readers – and most of the gaming public – are exclusively familiar with the system, I’ll mention morale checks used to be a part of Dungeons & Dragons. I am pretty sure morale was removed from D&D during the change from AD&D 2nd Edition to D&D 3rd Edition. And they got into D&D because they were a part of the games that gave rise to D&D: tabletop war games. In those games, as in many real-life wars and battles, you rarely fought until you actually destroyed a military unit or killed all of the combatants. Long before you hit the point where everyone was dead, people tended to lose their will to fight and rout or retreat or surrender. That just makes sense. And I bring that up specifically because you, John, said you like “realism” in your game and I’m going to forgive you the cardinal sin of uttering that word as if it actually means any f$&%ing thing and is remotely desirable in any gaming experience.
ANYWAY…
Morale systems meant you rarely ended up fighting until everything was dead, but they were also pretty clunky and clumsy. And I wrote an article not too long ago about why they were a great idea and why they really need to come back. If only some brilliant, handsome, long-suffering Internet gaming a$&hole could streamline the whole thing. And eventually, I have to write another article because I’ve been testing that system a lot and I’ve streamlined and cleaned it up a lot. But I digress…
POINT IS…
The one important thing to note about these morale systems is that they applied to monsters only. Players never rolled morale checks to see if their characters stuck around or got demoralized. And, in most other combat-heavy role-playing game systems that use morale, you often see the same thing. Morale checks are for monsters, not for players.
And I bring that up because you’re pondering this whole “players making morale check thing,” John, and you’re saying, “well it’s clumsy and time-consuming and also maybe players might not like it if I force them to skip a turn running around like Daffy Duck,” and I think you’re missing a big point. It’s the point that made me do a hypothetical spit-take.
We need to talk about player agency and the things that RPGs really can’t do. See, I know that lots of people – even actual paid, professional f$&%ing game designers who should know better – say that role-playing games can be everything and that there isn’t a solid definition to them and isn’t that wonderful. But those people are wrong. Because there are certain things so central to a role-playing game that they actually make it a role-playing game and not any other type of game. And I even identified them in this book I wrote on the subject of how to actually play and run role-playing games. And one of them is Player Agency.
In all other types of games – board games, card games, video games – the player is actually very restricted in what they can do. There’s a list of the things you can do on your turn. There’s specific text on the card that tells you exactly what you can do. There’s only so many buttons on the controller and so many dialogue options in the menu. You can only do what the rules say you can do. So, no matter how many options there are and how broad they are, to some extent, you can’t play whatever character you want. You can only play the specific characters that were designed into the system.
Table-top role-playing games, on the other hand, are much more freeform. You can pretty much do anything you can imagine a character doing in the situation they are in. You can’t do ANYTHING. You still have limitations. But those limitations tend to be mostly organic limitations that arise from the setting or the situation or the laws of nature or whatever. But then, that’s pretty much the way it works in real life. You have a specific situation, you are limited by the physical laws of the universe, and you are limited by the limitations of your own physical body, but you can imagine anything and therefore you can attempt to implement any plan you can imagine.
And there’s a really key point to the way I’m phrasing that. Because yes, pedantic nitpickers will point out that there’s no difference between a physical constraint and a mental constraint and that you’re just as limited by your ability to reason and solve problems mentally as you are by the lifting power of your muscles. And that just shows some people are just looking for a fight to win. Because there is a difference. It’s just that no one has ever really articulated the difference. And because once you try to articulate the difference, anyone who is more into arguments on the Internet than they are into just actually enjoying a game about pretend elves will start a major fight about the philosophy of mind, neurophysiology, and physicalism.
So, let’s put all that crap aside and talk about this the way reasonable people with a sense of scale and perspective actually talk about it: you can divide everything that might happen in the game into two groups. Stuff that is external to the character’s mind and stuff that is internal to the character’s mind. That is, the cutoff for player agency is the character’s skull.
Once upon a time, when the industry had some f$&%ing standards, game designers were warned that you never tell players what to think or feel and you never make choices for them or assume choices on their behalf. It was even written into the submission guidelines for publications like Dungeon Magazine back in the day. When you wrote flavor text, you never told the players how the characters felt or what they thought. And you never assumed they would look a certain direction or react a certain way.
The funny thing is that this assumption is still pretty central to RPGs. And that’s because it’s vital to the definition. RPGs are games about people making choices and dealing with the consequences. Role-playing is about imagining a situation, imagining yourself as a particular character in that situation, making a choice about how you would react if you were that character, and then seeing how it works. Everything else comes out of that basic exchange. If you take away the choice from the player, you are essentially playing the game for them.
When you say, “I think my players will get mad if they have to lose a turn to running around like a crazy person,” you’re right. Most of the time. Some players can tolerate agency loss better than others. But they aren’t getting mad because they lost a turn. They are getting mad because you crossed the threshold and went inside the character’s skull and messed around. And they’re right.
If you look carefully, you’ll notice most role-playing games actually respect the PC skull as the cutoff for game effects pretty strongly. There is a reason why you – the GM – are advised never to roll a social skill roll to manipulate a player-character. When you roll a die roll and tell the player “you are moved by the orphan’s plight and agree to help them,” you’re telling the player how their character thinks and feels and what choice they make. Even Bluff and Deception checks walk a really fine line and they DO start arguments when some players are told they have to believe a certain NPC that they – the player – believe to be lying.
“But wait, Angry,” you say, and I just sigh because I know exactly what is coming next because it’s always one of two things. It’s either the knowledge check argument or the charm spell argument.
First, the knowledge check argument. Some people like to point out that no one has any problem with the idea of rolling a die roll to see if a character knows or can recall a certain fact. Isn’t that a game mechanic crossing into the player’s skull? Well, obviously, the fact that it doesn’t upset people already proves that it’s somehow different.
See, factual knowledge and factual recall aren’t the same as telling the player how the character has to feel or what choice they have to make. In point of fact, they are externalities. They come from outside the character’s head. For a fact to be inside their head, it has to have gotten in there. Facts are not feelings. And its feelings – and choices – that are at issue.
Second, the charm spell argument. Some people argue that the whole argument about player agency is null and void because spells exist that make the player character think, feel, or act a certain way. Mind control spells like charm and command and cause fear. Now, any GM who has used those spells more than a couple of times knows that those spells do actually walk a fine line and some players really get upset about even those. But they DO get more leeway than a GM just saying, “you have to like that person because they made a Charisma check against your Will defense.”
The thing is, those spells do often get a pass because they are rare and unusual, they are limited in duration, and because they are, in fact, externalities. At the end of the day, if you tell a player, “you’ve been charmed, you have to treat the vampiress as if she’s a trusted friend and ally,” they can handle that because they know it’s not the character’s mind doing the thinking, it’s the spell. And they know that the character’s mind is still in there too. Once the spell is over, once the magic is gone, they won’t keep believing the vampiress is really their friend. Hell, they don’t believe it now. Their will is being suppressed, but it’s still in there. They still have sovereign control over the character’s mind, feelings, and opinions. They just can’t express that because of magic.
That might sound like a nitpicky different and most players can’t actually explain that, but they do feel it. And game designers know it. Hell, in the last couple of editions of D&D, the designers have toned down what mind control spells actually DO and what thoughts they actually create in the mind of the victim. They have scaled them down to mostly behavioral and mechanical things. “Think what you want,” says the spell, “but this is what you have to do until you can make that Wisdom saving throw.”
And the reason all of this is important even though the average player, GM, and game designer can’t really explain it is that role-playing isn’t about imagining some character you’re telling a story about doing things, it’s about imagining YOU are some character in the story. It’s not about imagining Krognar Groodoon of the Hill People slaying by day and wenching by night, it’s about imagining what it would be like if you were Krognar. People don’t imagine the choices that Krognar would make. They imagine the choices they themselves would make if they were Krognar.
There’s actually some market research and psychological research about how people identify with game avatars to suggest there are actually two different ways people project themselves into character roles and that the two ways actually fall along gender lines, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to talk about that. Because they still amount to the same thing. Most players who engage in role-playing in the games they play are not making the decisions that the characters would make, they are making the decisions they would make if they were their characters. Or the decisions the characters would make if the character were the player.
And so, when you f$&% when the character’s mind – when you tell the player what the character has to think, feel, and believe – you’re actually f$&%ing with the player’s mind. Because there’s no difference. And, for a variety of reasons people absolutely hate to have pointed out, there really can’t be a difference. At the end of the day, you can’t think like anybody but yourself.
And that’s the best way I can explain the player agency issue. And also explain why I did a spit-take when I saw that you were thinking about forcing players to make morale checks to decide if they believe they can win the fight or if they believe the fight is lost and the thing they are fighting for is not worth dying for. Which is what a morale check is about.
But I did also confess there was something you said later that made this all make a lot more sense. And that’s because there IS an exception to all of this crap that is actually commonly accepted by lots of players and lots of GMs. And it might be exactly where your game falls. You might be talking about what is usually called a “sanity check.”
Well, just like morale checks, sanity checks go by a lot of names. But basically, they involve a die roll that a character has to make in very stressful situations, like combat. If the check succeeds, nothing changes, but if the check fails, the character’s mental fortitude and willpower have failed and they are forced to behave in a particular way either temporarily or permanently. And I know you’re thinking, “hey, that sounds a lot like morale checks.” But there’s an important difference. Unlike morale checks, sanity checks are almost exclusively made by players to determine if their player-characters crack under the stress.
Look, the truth is that sanity mechanics and morale mechanics are actually very similar. Mechanically, the biggest difference is that morale effects tend to be very temporary and affect only the immediate situation – like a single combat – whereas sanity mechanics tend to have more impact for longer. But they also vary in severity from “panic and flee” to “go into catatonic shock.” But sanity mechanics are generally much more acceptable than morale mechanics. At least when they happen to players. And isn’t that weird given everything I said about agency? Doesn’t that prove me wrong? Doesn’t that mean YOU win the argument?
No. Everything I said is totally correct. That’s why people ask ME questions and not YOU, hypothetical internet argument person. Now, shut up and let me explain this to John. There’s a reason people are willing to accept the loss of agency to sanity mechanics. Actually, there’s generally two reasons.
The first reason has to do with where sanity mechanics came from. The idea of sanity checks – and the sanity meter, which I’ll get to – came from the Call of Cthulhu table-top role-playing game which was based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and other examples of the cosmic horror genre. The conceit is that the characters would face situations and creatures that were so incomprehensible and so horrific that they were literally beyond the comprehension of the human mind. And that if the human mind was forced to try to comprehend them, it would blow a gasket and grind to a halt. Sanity mechanics actually became something of a synonym for the cosmic horror genre and really came into their own in video games where game designers could actually f$&% with the player’s perceptions by changing what they could see on the screen.
Other games adopted sanity-like mechanics for different things. The old Vampire and Changeling games had mechanics that reflected how far the character had fallen into their bestial or faerie side and how it affected their actions and perceptions in the game world, for example. I don’t know if the current incarnation of World of Darkness does that crap anymore because I stopped being a fifteen-year-old misunderstood teenager many, MANY years ago and gave up listening to Nine Inch Nails and writing poetry with black eyeliner pencils.
So, the first big difference between sanity mechanics and morale mechanics is that sanity mechanics are central to the game and the genre in question has disempowerment and loss of agency as a central theme. Horror is the most obvious place for sanity mechanics because horror requires the characters to be weak, even powerless, to work. And there is nothing more disempowering than losing your own sense of self. Your own mind. Outside of horror, you usually see sanity-type mechanics in games that are about retaining yourself and ignoring some base urge or supernatural compulsion. The urge to feed or the urge to kill. Or to hold on to your sense of reality while reality itself crumbles around you.
Players who are playing games like that are willing to accept the loss of agency because that’s part of the definition of the game they want to play. Players who want to play a horror game want to feel disempowered and see how long they can hold on. Players who want to be a werewolf want to struggle to hold their humanity while the monster within tries to seize control of them.
But morale isn’t really central to the definition of a fantasy action or adventure game. It’s just a thing that sometimes happens to some people on the battlefield sometimes. If you took the sanity mechanics out of Call of Cthulhu, if you took the chance of being driven insane by the horrors you were facing out of the game, it wouldn’t BE Call of Cthulhu. But a fantasy adventure game like D&D is just as much D&D whether everything fights to the death or not. Hell, there’s an argument to be made that it’s MORE D&D when everything fights to the death.
The second big difference between sanity mechanics and morale mechanics is that sanity mechanics are usually – but not always – choice-driven and interactive. There are things you can do about the sanity mechanic. Ways you can interact with it. Ways beyond just picking an ability that gives you a flat +3 to sanity. In Call of Cthulhu, there’s a sanity meter. And when your sanity is starting to really slip and all your little neuroses are starting to get the better of you, you can check yourself into an asylum. Or you can just run away from the cosmic horrors instead of fighting them. You can avoid reading the spells. Or, hell, I’m pretty sure in some cosmic horror games you can lean into the sanity loss and become some kind of spellcaster that way. The point is, it’s a resource to manage. It drives your decisions. You can push or pull against it. Granted, in horror games, you can’t push or pull that much. It’s horror. But still…
Compare that to morale. Morale is usually more of just a thing that happens. Sometimes your morale fails. Roll a check, oops you failed, now run away. It isn’t something to manage, it’s not something you can do anything about, it’s just a “you have to roll this roll now because your hit points dropped below this threshold and the dice will tell you what to do.” And your morale will recover when a certain amount of time has passed or when you succeed at another die roll. Even though sanity mechanics and morale mechanics seem to take away agency, the truth is that sanity mechanics create more opportunities for players to exercise their agency because they invite interaction and management.
And now we come back to your question, John. Do I think you should do away with morale checks for player characters? Yes. I absolutely do think that you should do away with them. But I also can’t say that your game isn’t one of those games where they are actually okay. Is your game a horror game or a game where maintaining agency, sense of self, or sense of humanity are central themes the game can’t do without? And is the mechanic an interactive mechanic that drives choices rather than just a die roll that dictates actions when certain conditions are met? If you think your game and the mechanic both meet those criteria – and based on what you said, it might hit the first one – then you could get away with keeping them around. But the keyword is BOTH. If there’s really nothing the players can do about the morale check other than do what the dice demand when the dice demand it, then it’s a crap mechanic and you need to nix it.
And for the love of f$&%, John, stop even thinking about realism. It’s a crappy criterion for anything in any role-playing game ever.
I hope all that helped.
-Crapfully Yours,
The Angry GM
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Very insightful, I will try your suggestion of the choice driven morale. Thank you.
Additionally, if you DO want morale to be a part of the game, add interaction with it, ways characters can help prevent morale loss, ways they can turn the tide.
Make failing morale not a loss of player agency, but rather a penalty to continuing. So instead of forcing them to drop their weapons, make continuing to fight more difficult and expensive. Say taking penalties to certain checks, or costing a resource like hit die to stay fighting. So they feel a reason to run or surrender, not a requirement.
Finally, if they have a chance of failing, give them a chance to exceed. Let a strong check not just fight off morale loss, but begin a rally! Give characters that excell at keeping morale high a bonus, allow their allies to push together to turn the fight, not just a chance to lose less.
To be honest I was thinking of just giving them a penalty to their effective chance to hit and taking an extra action to reload guns. You are suggesting good stuff though. Thank you.
When I saw the question, I right away thought: “Warhammer 40K RPG”. Maybe that was not what was meant, but the description is pretty accurate.
And to link it with what was set in article – WH40K morale is somewhere between morale and sanity. And there is also corruption. It is part of the game as WH40K universe is between horror and fantasy – Playing as Space marine is much more fantasy, as some investigator from backward planet is much more horror.
When we played it as captain of freelancing ship and his elite crew there were this check when fighting with demons. And there were ways to prevent it or mitigate it and it is linked to mythos of that setting. So for us it was fine. And it was making reason why player characters were needed – their crew was plaything for the demon and no matter that there were thousands of crew members, they were slaughtered. Then player commando arrived to scene, some failed morale checks and their missionary had a lot to do to get them back working.
You nailed it, indeed it is a homebrew variant of WH40k rpg, though it is modified for a different setting.
I’m not sure how it works in your different setting, but I’ve found the 40K RPG to be a bit hit and miss with sanity and such like.
On the one hand, the concepts of corruption and insanity and the perils of the warp have all been an integral part of 40K since it was created… even going back to Warhammer Fantasy, from which 40K arose. Humanity is doomed, and Chaos is going to get you, whether by killing you or corrupting you. You can struggle, but you can’t win.
On the other hand, that theme isn’t always as much to the fore in 40K as with something like Cthulhu and players don’t always want that to be what their game is about (they don’t always consciously even recognise the theme, especially if they play something like Eldar or Tau in the tabletop game). The game setting says that you’re doomed and can’t win, but many of the stories feature heroic victories anyway.
So that’s what players expect to be able to do. Which makes it a tricky thing to employ as part of the game mechanics.
I think you can do a lot in the setting honestly. Because you are right about both the heroic moments overcoming the darkness as it were, but also the complete hopelessness of the setting.
So you kinda have to mix both. You need to empower the players to overcome and win in a small situation, but make the narrative reinforce the hopelessness of the whole world. Yes, you did beat back the orcs, hold the line, save the city. But also, the powers that be decided the planet wasn’t worth keeping in the first place, so it’s all getting blown up anyway.
Part of 40k is reveling in the absurdity of the setting.
I was going to guess fifth edition L5R, in a campaign focused on the Crab Clan (because demonic monsters).
Strife or whatever they ended up calling it after the alpha playtest in L5R is like sanity in that there are things you can do to reduce how much of it you have. But I &#$#@#! hated the mechanic because *gaining* it is randomized; any time you roll, no matter what the roll is for, there’s a chance you’ll wind up being stressed out and closer to or tipping over the edge of a breakdown. The only way to avoid that when it happens is to decide you’d rather fail the roll than gain Strife. And the sheer amount of constant fiddly bookkeeping required in tracking your Strife or making decisions about how to reduce it drove me up the wall.
Cool article, Angry! 🙂 Makes me think about house rules where PC’s can gain the Demoralized condition (like Bloodied in 4e) under certain circumstances. This condition would be a combination of good and bad effects, the tricky part would be making sure that they are balanced.. Maybe the PC gets the Afraid condition against each enemy, but also when another PC uses Inspiration within line of sight, the Demoralised PC gets to apply the effects as well and loses the Demoralised condition. That way we don’t have to tie it in to lots of spell effects and it encourages the use of the Inspiration, which PCs often forget about..
Demoralized would probably look a lot like frightened, just looking slightly different
For your reference: Frightened gives disadvantage on attacks and ability checks while within line of sight of the source of your fear, and you can’t willingly move closer to the source of your fear.
So demoralized would probably look something like:
disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks while in combat.
if you use your action to dash you may move 10 extra feet as long as you are headed away from combat.
You mentioning Deception checks against PCs reminded me why, if a player asks if they can tell if an NPC is lying or not, I generally have them roll an Insight check (or equivalent): if they succeed, they know for certain whether or not the NPC is being deceitful or hiding something, but if they fail, I tell them “You can’t tell for certain one way or the other.”
I do something very similar. Whenever a player wants to use insight, I have them make a contested insight vs deception check (whether or not the NPC is actually deceiving them). If the NPC is trying to deceive them and the players win, I mention that the player notices some nervous behavior or tell that indicates the NPC is hiding something. If the players lose or the NPC was never deceiving them, I tell them that nothing indicates that the NPC is being dishonest.
I don’t ever give positive affirmation of the NPCs truthfulness (unless the player rolls really, really well and I just feel like telling them. No specific DC for that; I just go by feel. Maybe that’s not fair, I don’t know. If I had to pick a number I’d go with 22 or 23 perhaps).
I never tell the player they believe what the NPC is saying either. At the end of the day, they still get to decide.
This may go without saying, but I also keep the deception roll hidden. It’s better if the player doesn’t know if they’ve succeeded or failed when they get a non-conclusive result because it leaves a greater degree of uncertainty.
I affirm the appearance of truthfullness as long as SOMEONE wins by 10 or more.
So lying NPC gets 10 more than PC insight check? affirmation of truth. PC gets 10 more than truthing NPC’s passive negative diplomacy (that’s 10 – diplomacy bonus btw, so a diplo bonus of +2 has a passive negative of 8, so an 18 is your target) you get an affirmation of truth.
What I do with deception is remind players that rolls give them what they see, but what they think is their prerogative, and there are many ways to identify lies.
When I see Tom Hardy say that he’s crashing this plane with no survivors, I know it’s not the truth. Even though he radiates an aura of confidence and menace, and he seems to be truthful, and I can see the plane crashing before my eyes, I intellectually know that it’s not the truth. In this case, while Tom Hardy would’ve rolled an amazing deception check, I still don’t believe it.
Someone with a low deception check is someone who stammers, pauses, looks away, etc.
High deception check, good acting. But if stuff doesn’t add up, or even I just don’t trust this guy, I am not obligated to believe them.
With the ladder of fear statuses I think there are a lot of things you can do to reflect “morale failure” besides taking away character agency. Disadvantage can encourage a character to retreat without forcing them. Let the system inform the player what there character is feeling, but let the player decide how that will influence there actions. Then if they fight thru despite the disadvantage all the more heroic, or they can take a more defensive position to counter-act there probably reasonable fear.
I agree you should be very careful with a standard morale check in a heroic RPG, but even the D&D monster manual is full of creatures with fear auras. The light application of fear makes the whole feel of the setting more flavorful. And sometimes giving a character disadvantage against an opponent is the right way to do it.
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One interesting thing is the way GURPS does fright checks, which is to say, generally it only calls for them in specific circumstances, and especially dependent on the campaign. A low power mundane campaign may look at imposing fright checks for simply being in a gun fight. A mid power campaign may call then when you’re fighting particularly scary monsters. A high power campaign may only call for them for entities of such cosmic terror that even the bravest may falter. Finally it gives you ways to build a character that is less affected by things like fright, increasing your will score or taking advantages that give you bonus to fright checks.
Morale is more a thing higher ranking officers need to maintain for their lower ranking soldiers/workers to maintain the chain of command over them. If you have followers, those can lose morale and flee, or hide, or whatever combination. But a party consists of people who actively chose to be there, and should have a deep bond with one another, so it doesn’t feel nearly as appropriate.
D&D does have fear. And to me fear is interesting because it skirts the boundary between internal and external. Characters dealing with the fear in their body, be it a shaking hand, an unwillingness of the body to follow your command to move, that is more external than internal. Certain characters can’t be feared, or even radiate aura’s of courage to others.
Fear can be a connective tissue between the mind of the player and the body of the character as much as it can be a blockade. Requiring some actions sometimes to steel yourself or attack with disadvantage can help take your head away from the numbers game and into taking the threat more seriously. If players meet a werewolf for the first time, and realize that nonmagical attacks are not registering, that is a moment for fear to take hold. But then also make it an opportunity for the party to overcome that fear. To rally after a rousing speech from the bard, cleric or Paladin, or a daring manouver from the fighter or Barbarian, who decides to try and pin it until the mages whittle it down. But if the players are all 6th level and their magic weapons render the immunity pointless to the point where they can slaughter a gang of werewolves without any trouble, fear would just get in the way of players feeling like they overcame a previous hurdle.
In my 5e game, a loss of morale happens when you hit 0HP and are wounded. Characters can still act but with disadvantage on everything (except death saves). They still roll death saves and they still die if they miss 3. PCs don’t have to retreat but it’s a good time to do so.
I’m interested about the “never tell your players how they feel” rule. I say things like: “the sight of spiders crawling out of the poor man’s mouth fills you with revulsion” or “the unemotional smile of the animated scarecrow leaves you with a sense of uneasiness”
Have I been doing something wrong?
Technically…
Look, it’s a small thing and everything has to be judged by degrees. We’re all guilty of injecting emotions into our narration if we’re really trying. No big deal. But it’s a good habit to break. After all, if you just say “the corpse’s lips part and a mass of brisling, hairy spiders come swarming out of his shriveled, purified mouth…” most people will be properly repulsed.
The thing is, if one of the PCs is a drow and the player is going through their goth phase, the idea of a human corpse providing a warm home and food for a bunch of nursing baby spiders would not actually cause revulsion. That’s just one example. But that’s why it’s important to be descriptive and let the players decide how to feel.
I find this commentary especially usefull, because…
There is this system I’m thinking of experimenting with (as soon as I get a better gist of the rules and I can convince my players of trying) that is more focused on horror (The ORPHEUS Protocol, if you feel like looking it up). And at one point the rules essentially say “the GM should feel free to describe how the player feels, but not how they react to their feelings”. What to me seems quite right for an horror game, and I’m fully aware that this may not be adequate for high fantasy and other genres, but the point is, telling the players how they feel doesn’t outright denies their agency as long as you don’t dictate how they will react. And I actually think it could work for D&D, as long as some boundaries were established before.
Any thoughts?
Maybe one way to distinguish this (or at least come up with a reason to distinguish between them) is to use the triune brain model: the lizard “fight or flight” amydgala, the mammalian emotional brain, and the white matter “angel” that is our higher reasoning.
As we know, there is a distinction between physiological response, emotion, and thought/reaction: you can be sweating, but it might be fear or it might be excitement.
Magic that induces fear manipulates the amydgala direct, i.e. it induces a fight/flight response which the body has to respond to, but you’re not actually affecting the person’s conscious reaction to what’s happening, you’re just inducing a biological effect.
Magic like an enchantment or compulsion is more complex manipulates both the amydgala and parts of the mammalian brain. It doesn’t affect the higher functions, but it overwhelms the lower levels such that the conscious brain can’t reinstate control. Thus you can have the person having that feeling of watching themselves doing something but not being able to control it: that’s because the magic has temporarily taken over the lower and mid functions of the brain, leaving the higher brain as an unwilling passenger along for the ride.
Saving throws represent the person at that moment being able to override the hijack of their lower brain functions. Separating out the biology from the player’s conscious thoughts might help the players realise the GM isn’t dictating their reactions for them, he is just taking over small bits of their body under certain circumstances.
So, to elucidate: you describe the player as having biological reactions: start sweating, churning in their guts, heart thumping, all that. Maybe you go so far as to say everything they’re feeling is consistent with fear. But they still get to choose how to react to those biological sensations.
I tend to disagree with this, well to a degree. I feel that social skills should work on PCs as they do on NPCs. Though I feel that social skills in general should always stay narratively consistent on both sides. Different people react differently, just like you probably wouldn’t have your great NPC king cower in fear if a low level PC made an intimidate check, similarly you shouldn’t expect your PCs to drastically go out of character. Always represent the roll within the bounds of their character concept.
If a PC normally roleplays his character as a fearless knight and he gets intimidated, he won’t run in terror or tremble with fear. But it might be reasonable if this guy is the fearless protector that he wants to engage that enemy himself to help protect his allies, since he judges that enemy to be the greatest threat. The intimidate check still succeeded, but the actual fear it generated manifested in a different way. Instead of being afraid for himself, he’s afraid for his allies safety and represents that in a way that stays consistent with the fearless knight that his player wants him to be. On the other hand, for the cowardly wizard who is always afraid to enter rooms first and is taking a bunch of hide actions, you have more leeway. Having his fear paralyze him momentarily or otherwise force him to be overly cautious is entirely consistent with the character in question. He probably won’t outright flee, but he could have to use his first spell to do something defensive for instance, or give the enemy advantage on saves against his spells because the wizard himself doesn’t believe his magic will do any good.
I find overall people are generally more satisfied when it’s handled this way. The main problem really arises from when DMs use social skills as a character-destructive tool that makes people act totally contrary to their nature. Really it’s a symptom of overall stupidity in handing social rolls in general where many DMs just let them work total miracles that outright changes someone’s personality.
You may as well take away players’ sheets and dice to make sure they act “in character”.
You don’t get to decide what is in character for the PCs. They are not your characters, and you have no power over them. If the wizard’s player decides that the frail man steels himself and throws fireballs in the face of impending doom, let him.
So the cowardly wizard gets disadvantage on all his spells, but the fearless paladin just gets a description of how he is afraid, but not in a way that affects him mechanically. This would be a huge red flag to me as a player. If my cowardly wizard was penalized this harshly, he would promptly declare that he was just not cut out for adventuring and retire. Then I’d show up next session with a character who is roleplayed as brave, confident, smart, wise, tough, etc, etc in the hopes that it would allow me to use all the features on my character sheet.
Playing a flawed character is fun, but not if it means you are objectively less effective than the person beside you who decided to play Grognar the Brave. If you have a table that is cool with that more power to you, but know that it wouldn’t fly for most people.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a constant penalty that the cowardly wizard suffers each battle for no reason. It’s the monster using it’s action to intimidate him. Monster makes a skill check and produces some mechanical effect.
As far as the braver character being better, I’d say not really. Getting a monster intimidating you isn’t an everyday occurrence, but the brave guy is the one that’s constantly leading the group from the front, opening doors, and otherwise rushing headlong into danger. He’s putting himself in danger all the time while the cowardly character stays close to the rear where it’s safe. So the cowardly guy is reaping benefits in a lot of situations. But yeah, the cowardly guy is more vulnerable to intimidation checks, as any logical person would expect. That’s literally what cowardice is all about: people that are impaired more when they’re afraid.
It baffles me that as a player you’d want to roleplay a coward but also want to be immune to being intimidated by something scary? Does that make any sense to you? And then whinging about retiring your character because the GM ran a battle where a monster scared your cowardly character? Seriously, what the hell man…
Maybe the issue is being forced to play the coward on account of the mechanics, not on player input. I mean, the point scatterbrained made about the character willingly retiring if the mechanics force him to cower does make sense, if the penalties are so debilitating.
But there is player input. He acted cowardly earlier of his own accord. You base this on earlier player behavior. If he’s the guy that’s constantly taking hide actions, staying close to the rear and generally playing his character in a way that is evasive and trying to minimize personal harm, then yeah, I’m going to have him act like a coward when something scares him. Because that’s how he’s been acting up until now. You’re not assigning him the role of coward, he’s taken up that mantle himself through every action he made to get him to where he is now.
If that ruling is agreed upon by the player before the game, it’s fine.
If you a stickler for alignment conformity, you might say that you feel as a DM that a character is deviating from his alignment. Or back it up with a dream from his god.
But you get to play NPCs and your players get to run their PCs.
If you want Social Skills to affect PCs, make sure the players know that up front – you are decidedly in a minority of GMs. You might also want to set the stakes of a check beforehand, so everyone knows what the effect of the roll can be, rather than an open-ended doom hanging over the PC.
Well I have to agree with you there. I probably am in the minority.
Most modern players do seem to hate open-ended mechanics in general, preferring to treat D&D more like a miniatures game than an RPG. All too often I run into D&D players that don’t want the DM to do anything that isn’t directly written in stone in the rules. When the DM has the hobgoblin try to kick dirt in their face to blind them, they immediately start rebelling and demanding page numbers for how this undefined action could be remotely possible. It’s definitely a different age now where rule-zero and DM adjudication is highly frowned upon.
It’s why I mostly run more narrative-focused systems nowadays like Dungeon World and City of Mist. I really only do D&D at all simply because it’s popular and easier to get a group for.
For a recent example of a mechanic like this that works well, take a look at the Alien RPG. When you do certain things, you can acquire Stress. Each point of Stress makes you more likely to succeed at your dice checks, but also gives you a higher chance to Panic. You can only Panic if you have at least 1 Stress, and you can decide to try to manage your Stress. It’s a push-your-luck system in the control of the players.
You also want to avoid the ridiculous situation where the Paladin fails their check and flees in terror, while the Rogue passes and then also decides to flee in terror because the Paladin just ran away. Players should decide for themselves when their characters would keep fighting and when they would bail.
You should have an independent web page explaining how to Ask Angry.
A different example is the Pendragon game, where players have Traits (Valorous and Cowardly being two examples, along with others such as Lustful, Spiritual etc). Sometimes players have to roll against their trait to take a particular course of action, the basic idea being that it is difficult to act against your nature. If you have a cowardly knight who normally acts in a self-preserving manner, it is difficult for the knight (character) to suddenly become super brave simply because the player feels like it. Certainly players seem to have no problem with the concept.
Another example would be the fear and horror checks from Ravenloft (although not quite the same thing as a morale check, the RL fear check comes close).
Looking forward to seeing your refinements on the morale system from that earlier article. I remember reading and playing around with my dad’s old AD&D 2e books, and I vaguely remember the morale rules! I only ever made level 1 characters and had them run death matches with an orc over and over until they died back then so morale wasn’t really a thing I thought about, but I’ve recently been invited to write adventures for my group and it’s something I will be including!
Happy to have you back every week, Angry!
One option I like is rewarding players with hero points / inspiration / bennies when they take costly actions that reflect personality at the expense of pursuing their objectives (provided it makes the game more fun and immersive rather than being disruptive).
This includes successful NPC interaction checks, in which case I sometimes even explicitly bribe them.
The original Twilight: 2000 had a “Coolness Under Fire” mechanic that sort of worked like morale, but in a way that didn’t limit player choice. Basically, your character had to take a certain number of “hesitations” during any given turn of combat (combat turns were 30 seconds, divided into six 5-second rounds) during which they couldn’t take any meaningful action, though they could continue some actions they had already started, like crawling down a ditch, driving a vehicle, or even providing covering fire for another character.
The key that preserved player choice was that you the player decided when you took your required hesitations during a combat turn. So a character with a lot of hesitations could fire at an enemy, duck behind cover, and then take his required hesitations for a few rounds before standing up to fight again. In all cases the player still made the decision of when a fight was hopeless and it was time to surrender or get out of Dodge.
The game also had a “panic” condition where you rolled against your Coolness Under Fire when a character was attacked by surprise or knocked down, but if you did panic this was also basically just a number of rounds that the character had to hesitate while he recovered. It didn’t dictate the player’s actions other than saying “you can’t act until you’ve overcome your surprise at being blown off your feet by that attack.”
I am curious what you referenced by “two different ways people project themselves into character roles”. Can you share a reference? My google fu is only turning up acting articles.
I was wondering the same thing. Found some stuff about how people’s gameplay styles shift depending on whether their avatar is male or female, but nothing that seems to be what was alluded to here.