Post originally by Scottenkainen at 2004-04-20 14:46:28
Converted from Phorums BB System

The OD&D rules fostered role-playing by way of what the rules didn't cover. As Old Geezer delights in telling me, all wargames have morale rules that affect your units, randomizing the success of any command decisions one makes. D&D, having grown out of wargames, could have had that too. One of the genius strokes of D&D was in NOT making morale apply to Player Characters. Indeed, there were no rules that controlled any feelings or thoughts of the PCs, leaving the player free to "play" that "role." People may take this aspect of the game for granted these days. Indeed, it was such a paradigm shift in gaming that few role-playing games since have including game mechanics that overrule a player's command decisions (though Chaosium's sanity rules for Call of Cthulu and personality traits for Pendragon do come to mind).