Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Who is More Fightey? D&D Monsters or AD&D Monsters

Continuing my thinking about morale in the two different systems...

Figure 1: A creature with a morale score of '7' has an almost 60% chance of failing a morale check compared to AD&D's base morale of 50%. 

Since D&D Morale rules mandate the use of 2d6 instead of d% as in AD&D, comparing the two systems requires looking at the distribution of outcomes.  If a relatively cowardly monster in D&D has a morale score of 7 then I would argue that the weakest D&D monsters are slightly less aggressive than in AD&D where their base morale score is 50%.  That's assuming the morale rules are applied under similar circumstances and left unmodified.  The modifiers are where things get complicated, though.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for these series. I'm adapting D&D Morale to the Earthdawn Step System (which features exploding dice) and they were helpful. I'm going with Step 8 /2d6, which has a slightly different curve because of the exploding dice mechanic, but will feel good for players and GMs to roll for Morale checks.

    Have you seen AnyDice? http://anydice.com/

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