How to Make Morale and Formations More Relevant in Combat

A few weeks ago I read this tweet by Emmy Allen about how morale and formations are frequently undervalued by RPG theorists, and it got me thinking about how to make both of those things more important.

The solutions I came up with for both of them involve not making them more powerful or numerically impactful, but more so making them come up more often.

Morale

OSR games already have morale rules that work really well.  One thing that could be tweaked is how often morale is checked.

In most games the rule is that NPCs check morale when
a) the first time one of them dies or is incapacitated, or the first time they get hit if it's one big NPC
b) when they lose half their people, or half their HP for one big monster
c) when the leader is taken out, for groups

That's a good start, but it's worth considering what other things could cause morale checks.  Here's what I came up with:

d) the first time they're faced with something particularly scary, like demons or incendiary weapons– maximum once per battle per scary thing.

So now we have morale not only being checked more often, but another potential avenue for players to win battles: psychological warfare.  Maybe you can force a morale check by lighting someone on fire, or throwing a severed head at the enemy?

The other thing you could do with morale is give morale tests more possible results.  They're generally just pass/fail, but maybe you could use a table with four results like so:

Break: the enemies run or surrender
Shaken: The enemy are scared into fighting defensively.  They back off a bit but don't give up the fight.  Morale score lowered by 1 or 2 for the rest of the combat.
Hold: They pass the test, no change.
Rally: Imminent danger only emboldens them– they fight more aggressively and their morale goes up by 1 or 2 for the rest of the combat.

Formations and Flanking

I really like the flanking rule from 5E where if you're flanking someone you get advantage.  It's simple and impactful– advantage makes a big difference.  And yet, the way it works isn't quite how flanking works in real life.  

Take this illustration of the flanking rules from the 5E dungeon master's guide.  

According to the 5E rules, the two flankers need to be in exact opposite squares.  If the guy on the left is in the square he's in, then the guy in the right needs to be in that exact square.  If he was one square north or south– no flanking.

Now realistically, flanking doesn't require two people being on the exact opposite sides of an enemy like that.  Like if someone was right in front of me, and then another person was at my four o'clock, I'd definitely find it very difficult to fend them both off.  So from a realism standpoint, making the flanking rules more permissive in terms of which squares people can be standing in makes sense.

Of course realism for it's own sake isn't generally a very good design goal.  What really matters is what makes the game fun, or promotes the kind of gameplay you want to see.  So let's think about how this change in the flanking rules would change the tactics of the game.

If the ogre suffers penalties for having two enemies more than 90 degrees around him, he needs to keep all enemies in front of him.  He already didn't want anyone getting behind him; the big difference here is that now he also doesn't want people getting to his sides.

Assuming that people actually play smart– and not only the players, but also any reasonably intelligent NPC's should be making an effort to not get flanked– this will result in people guarding their sides more, through some combination of formations or using the terrain.

Now, strict formations isn't really what you want in a game about a small party of adventurers with non-standardized equipment– although it might be what you want if you start having the party commanding whole squads of hirelings.  So what means that if you're going to expand flanking like this, you do want to give people plenty of opportunities to guard their flanks with the terrain– populate locations with boulders, pillars, chokepoints, and random interesting room contents.

One final thing you could do is have shields also provide their bonus to any ally standing immediately to behind or to the left of the holder, at least against attacks coming from in front of the holder.  This would come up a lot less often, but it does provide an interesting positional consideration for shield users.

Also shows just how badass the guy in the front right corner of the phalanx must have been, being in the front rank with nobody covering his right side.  I think I just came up with my next fighter's nickname– Right Corner Roger.