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Morale in 5e
🕑 Added 2025-01-07 14:00:10 +0000 UTCI've been thinking about a way to incorporate morale into 5e. The B/X system works well enough, but I wanted something with a few more knobs. Two of my current campaigns are set in cities, and it would be nice to give the players a clear game plan they can use to drive off rather than massacre their opponents.
These morale rules are designed to capture a few things.
Strength in Numbers
I wanted the rules to make it easier to run fights against large numbers of opponents in 5e. When you use morale, it makes the most sense to apply it to large groups rather than a single monster or a duo.
D&D 5e fights can become slogs if there are too many creatures involved. With a morale system, I wanted to throw a dozen or more opponents at the party, knowing that the morale rules would end the fight before the characters had to hack every last opponent to death.
Flexibility
I made morale a rating that you can assign to any monster, giving you the chance to reflect a creature's motivations, stake in the battle, and so on. I didn't want a system that would require me to create a canonical morale rating for each monster.
I also wanted a system where the same monsters might have a different morale rating, depending on the situation.
Tactical Variation
Killing the other side as quickly as possible is the obvious, default strategy in D&D. I wanted a system that could encourage different approaches, whether neutralizing opponents rather than killing them or spreading out damage to injure a bunch of foes and encourage them to run.
In the case of my urban campaigns, I wanted a rule that allowed to me assign low morale to street gangs or other combatants who were clearly not interested in dying. The idea of a system that would trigger a fight to end when the party's opposition are all injured (at half or fewer hit points) served as the jumping off point for this design.
The rules are attached to this post as a PDF. You can theoretically use them with any edition of D&D, as long as you can use your version's replacement for Charisma (Intimidation) and Charisma (Persuasion) checks. That should be easy for 3e and later editions and D&D adjacent games like Shadowdark.
Comments
Mike Mearls
That's a good point, and I literally ran your approach in a game last week and it worked out pretty well. Need to think more about it.
Lojaan
I can see a lot of work has gone into this. Here is a 2 step alternative: Step 1: The GM decides what it would take for the enemies to break and flee (eg, a third of enemies defeated, or half defeated & boss counts as 3 instead of 1, or wizard is killed, someone wears a duck as a hat etc...) Step 2: if the condition is met then the bad guys break and flee. Easy! I think this is all you need for a RPG. They may be useful in TT wargames, but crunchy moral rules can only hinder GM agency & adaptability. If you want solid maths for if the PCs would win or not - that is what hit points are for.
Tim
And a follow up, goblins have a morale of 9 and the leader gnoll has an 11. As a group, they use the 11. If the gnoll gets taken out, use the 9 for the remaining goblins and with disadvantage since the leader was taken out type thing.
Tim
The 2e morale check system but not all those modifiers reminds me of what we would use for morale of monsters, groups of differing monster or even townies that are getting routed by the attacking monsters. I like the idea of morale but ‘feels’ like the old AD&D days of having rules for things to just have rules, optional or not. Something simple as a group of monsters have a morale of 11, then if they lose 50% of their number, role against the morale of 11, fail, they break and run, pass, fight on but then if are down to 1/4 number of monsters, its morale is down like -4 or use disadvantage for that same 11 target, pass, fight on, fail, break and run. Not some many fiddler bits to keep up with.
