Horses and knights in plate mail, in real life!

This last weekend there was a cultural festival in these parts. All kinds of films, literature and ethic food and dance all over downtown. When darkness fell, fires lit up and you could watch a show with real horses and knights clad in armour thundering forth. Guess where I was standing?

It was quite amazing to see a 600 kg horse come galloping down a field of gravel, the ground thundering and loudspeakers playing Ramstein. The fact that the horse had a lad or lass on its back wearing plate armour and swinging a sword or lance didn't make it less impressive! With people breathing fire for the audience and the jousting knights sometimes having swords lit with flame it was quite a show!

Now, imagine that beast and warrior coming charging against you with intent on your life.

I would run.

I'm suddenly feeling that having a PC make a morale check to stand his ground when facing a dangerous monster makes a lot of sense.

Morale rules for T&T

In his post on Grognardia yesterday, James wrote about the morale rules he uses in Dwimmermount. I made me remember fondly the simple and effective rules that grace the Basic/Expert D&D. Just like I said in my comment on Grognardia, I consider morale rules to be a very sensible rule that makes us remember that we don't need to resort to murder and mayhem. Playing scoundrels out for gold and glory it actually makes very little sense. I have a soft spot for the design whch can be called "rules for effect".

My beloved T&T, in its 7th ed., actually don't have any moral rules. Many times lately I've found thinks lacking in this edition which was in the 5th ed. If there are any morale rules in 5th ed., I can't confirm it, since my copy is in storage. So I was thinking that maybe they wouldn't be so hard to make up.

Now things became more complex. I think it would be neat to only use d6, and base it on a SR like almost everything else in T&T. If it makes sense to consider morale when the own force have been reduced to half, the leader killed or maybe excessive amount of hits, we have a set of numbers that decrease. Also, when fighting a monster's MR will decrease. All these numbers decrease. It feels like they have to be considered, somehow.

The morale rating, what would that be? I'd like to base it upon something existing, so the system can be used with everything that's been published before. MR, level and Combat Adds are the components we have to use, apart from the stats of course. Level is usually not a very interesting number in T&T. Compared to D&D, it means little. MR and CA are both involved in combat, so maybe that would be something to base morale rules upon.

My first idea was to use the same mechanic you use for calculate dice of attack from MR, 1 + MR/10. Take that many dice and if any of them is a 6, you make your morale check and keep fighting. That mechanic has the problem that it's hard to figure out a way to account for lax troops and crack troops with bad and good morale, respectively.

My second idea was to roll a SR of some kind. Then we hit upon the trouble of determining the level of difficulty. Base it on level? Base on MR? Both have the nonsensical effect of making bigger monsters fail more often. I'd rather not bring in a subtraction, even though 10 - level might be a suggestion. That would of course have the problem that you'd have to scale 10 to the capabilities of the monster.

If you have any ideas how to sort this out, feel free to suggest them.