First and foremost, I've retooled the 2d6 morale roll to a 1d6 roll (roll equal or lower to stay in the fight). The real reason is that all the other mechanics I'm writing use 1d6 too, so it makes the rules prettier overall, but its hard to admit this vain part of me. The reason I tell myself is that it allows me to change the 2-12 range of morale in monsters to one with less granularity and that makes it easier for me to adscribe a rating to a monster based on their description.
morale 11-12 becomes 6 (mindless undead, never flees)
morale 9-10 become 5 (really brave or mad warriors, dire animals, uruk hai or dragons)
morale 8 becomes 4 (monsters with martial training, annoyed predators, etc)
morale 7 becomes 3 (annoyed peoples, common predators when not overhungry, 50% chance to flee)
morale 5-6 becomes 2 (if a monster is sort of coward-ish, herbivore animals, etc)
morale 4 becomes 1 (mostly not combatants, rust monsters, etc)
Then we get to the next part: This rules I'm writing in this rule series have no attribute scores for characters, so I don't have charisma to determine number or loyalty for hirelings.
For the number, I don't yet know what to do. Maybe base the cap on gold alone: if you can pay them, you can buy them. There is something I like about independizing charisma from hirelings, which is that I can treat hirelings as belonging/following to the whole party instead of a single PC individual, which makes more sense to me. This and reaction rolls I feel that could work better if adressed by the group as a whole.
The downside is that being "communal" and independent from charisma, PCs might lose some agency over the behavior of their henchmen. The upside is that when you die and must roll a new character, you can pick any of your common hirelings instead of your personal ones. Is like a common pool for second characeters.
For the loyalty: Whenever you find a tavern/inn/town in which 1dX hirelings are available, you roll for their morales secretly: 3d6 keep lowest. Sum the other 2 dice: that's the price he reclaims per month/adventure/whatever. The idea is that it gives you an idea of his morale without really telling you.
Morale 1 or 2 for torchbearers or sages, 3 and 4 for bandits or men at arms. Morale 5 is for this mysterious strangers smoking on the dark table by the bottom room. Maybe I could make a table of hirelings or something, with one special trait for each, like "+2 morale when tainted with jewels" "will steal from you" "morale drops to 1 in presence of spiders" etc.
When confronted with danger, they roll morale, not loyalty or anything. Their morale increases overtime somehow, with 5 being the maximum.
When you give them an order that is not obviously dangerous they probably accept, mostly if it falls within their expected job.
Loyalty takes two shapes: +1 to any morale roll derived from your orders if they have survived an adventure with you and +1 if you have some relevant special feat that allows you to be more charismatic than common people.
This rules can apply to Searchers of the Unknown or Here is some Fucking D&D, which I tried to scourge for hireling rules being both of them attribute-less. Just to find they hadn't any.
Alternativelly, there is another approach: to ditch all this post entirelly and to have monsters roll for reaction again at 50% hp left.
On the next chapter I'll probably steal something to abstract distances and get rid of counting feet altogether for this game.
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