Driving a 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee

On our trip to the East Coast over Thanksgiving we drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee as our rental car. It's not what we chose; it's just what we got, a nominal upgrade over the Toyota Camry I reserved. It was interesting to drive it for 8 days and about 500 miles as the Grand Cherokee is a vehicle I considered buying a long time ago. Though the one I would've bought was several generations earlier, it's interesting to see how it stacks up now.



Our rentals was not the latest Grand Cherokee, though. It was a 2021 model. Why does that matter? Well, the vehicle was redesigned for 2022. And the 2021 model we drove is based on a design launched all the way back in 2011. Yeah, it's pretty old design at this point. But Jeep has kept it decently updated, with modern features like Apple CarPlay.

Along with being an older model of the Grand Cherokee, this vehicle also had 63,000 miles on the odometer. That is a lot for a rental car. That's an example of how rental companies have changed their business practices since before the Coronavirus pandemic. Instead of trading away cars after 1 year/15,000 miles and replacing them with new vehicles, they held on to their older vehicles because it was cheap at a time when business was down. Then as the pandemic lifted newer cars got crazy expensive, so rental companies kept hanging on to the older vehicles they had. Now it seems like Business As Usual to get a rental with 35k or more miles. This is probably the most-used rental I've ever had, at 63k.

Here are another Five Things above the Grand Cherokee:

Still Tight. The age of this particular vehicle made it interesting. One things Jeep has always had trouble with, through its ownership by various parent companies from American Motors to Chrysler to Daimler to Fiat to Stellantis, is things coming loose and rattling, squeaking, grinding, etc. after a few tens of thousands of miles. Or sometimes way sooner. This particular vehicle was surprising in that, at 63k miles, it only had one rattle that I could hear— and that one could have been a rear seatbelt that just needed to be threaded back through the tether correctly.

Performance. The performance of this Grand Cherokee was... adequate. With the base 3.6L V6 engine it's not setting any speed records. The rated 0-60mph time is 8.0s. It didn't feel slow, though. It's fine for tooling around town and it holds speed well on highway hills. Steering and braking are fine, too. Nothing about the performance is surprising— either good or bad.

Comfort. We found it a comfortable vehicle for 8 days of travel. The front seats are room, they have decent adjustment, and the seat heaters in our vehicle worked well. (These heaters are an option in the base Laredo trim and standard in the Limited and above.) The vehicle was also easy to get in and out of. That's largely due to the Grand Cherokee's unibody design. Unlike the body-on-frame structure of the Wrangler, the GC's body sits lower to the ground. One surprising comfort feature was the heated steering wheel. Until now I've always thought of this is a frivolous luxury... for people outside of arctic weather, anyway. But this trip both Hawk and I tried it in moderately cool Fall weather and we were both like, "OMG, this feels so good, have my hands always been this cold?!?!' 🤣

Technology. It was satisfying that this car has Apple CarPlay standard. Connecting our phones was easy. And the system was reliable— unlike some other CarPlay equipped cars we've rented recently, where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and there's no rhyme or reason why. One bothersome issue with car designers moving controls into the touch screen that's part of CarPlay, though, is that too many controls no long have easy, direct access. Like, when I wanted to change how the vents were blowing, I had to navigate through an on-screen menu. When we wanted to turn the seat heaters on— and they had to be turned back on every time the car started again— that was a menu navigation, too. Yes, designers can get carried away with putting too many buttons and knobs on the dashboard. But having too few is a problem, too.

Fuel economy. I was surprised by how well this vehicle did with gas. It hit 24 mpg on long highway stretches and seemed like it was still getting about 21 mpg around town. That's noticeably better than our 2011 Nissan Xterra. Of course, our Xterra is taller and has 4wd and chunky all-terrain tires. All those factors sap fuel economy. I wonder what mileage an offroad-ready Grand Cherokee gets nowadays.

Morale Checks in D&D

Recently I've been thinking about how I use Morale Checks in D&D— despite how they were actually dropped from the rules years ago. I started thinking about it when I read a Gnome Stew article that kind of dragged morale checks a few months ago. And of course the topic has gained recent relevance as I've been running a D&D adventure the past several weeks. That makes it a good time to write about it.

A morale check is basically an answer to the question, "Does this monster stay and fight or does it run away?"

"Does it really matter?" you might ask. Yes, it does! In my 4 recent game sessions I've had decide in several situations if/when/how creatures would rather flee than fight. It was a mule running away from killer undead sheep in Session 3 that set up basically the whole tragi-comedy of Session 4 with the mule falling in a pit, a PC chasing after that mule losing his horse in the same pit, then a herculean effort to rescue at least one of the animals while monsters attacked from above and below ground.

Okay, so how does/did one determine morale?

Like I said, it's not even a thing... well, not a rule... in D&D editions of the past 20-some years. But before that, back in the old days of D&D (1980s and 90s) morale was a numerical stat creatures had and there was a mechanic for it, a numerical system, to calculate what happens.

Back in AD&D, dating to 1983, the morale system was both hideously detailed and ridiculously generic. Yes, that seems self-contradictory, but AD&D was able to square that circle in numerous places. 😅 With morale it was more than a half page of tables and modifiers— half a page in very small print, I should note— that a GM had to add up for every monster in every situation, starting with a base chance 50% of running away for all monsters (that's the part that was ridiculously generic). In addition to being too onerous it was also way too tilted in favor of monsters running away after a round or two of combat. While it might be realistic that opponents flee combat half the time it's not heroic. And this is supposed to be heroic storytelling.

D&D Second Edition in the early 1990s cleaned up the complexity by reducing morale to a single stat and specifying it for each monster in the manual. In the creatures' stat block it was like, "Morale: Steady (11-12)". The rules were that after certain trigger conditions occurred, like the creature taking damage from an opponent or seeing a companion killed, the GM would roll a d20 to determine if the creatures run away. While this was simpler that the previous version (no reading a densely typeset page full of text and tables) and less generic, most GMs in my experience continued to ignore it. When they did decide monsters run away it was almost always in service to a plot railroad. Like, "I need you to chase this monster to the next planned scene," or, "I need this monster to steal an item from you and escape with it because I screwed up and let you have something too powerful." 🙄

So, is the solution to these problems to junk morale checks entirely? Enh, not really. I do like the aspect of verisimilitude that opponents are not constantly fearless, that they will run away to save themselves if they perceive the risk of staying as too grave. While there isn't a set of written rules to guide me in doing this I consider the following factors:

• How bold is this monster, generally speaking? Trolls, for example, are really bold because they regenerate. On the other hand, sometimes the "monster" is a neutral-hungry creature that fights only when cornered. Elite soldiers will hold formation longer despite losses than raw recruits, who may break formation and run as soon as the first bad thing happens.


• What's this monster's motivation? A neutral-hungry monster attacked by the party is more likely to run away than an evil monster that attacked the PCs. Though an evil monster may play the move of "Run away and live to fight another day." And even a creature that normally avoids conflict may fight ferociously if defending a lair with young.


• How intelligent/clever is the monster? Smarter monsters will recognize sooner when a fight isn't going their way and will disengage to save themselves. Smarter monsters, or those that practice pack/group tactics, will also use moves like fighting retreats and regrouping, whereas less intelligent monsters may just turn and run.

All things considered, this would be a lot easier to figure out if there were a stat next to each monster, like in Second Edition. Such a rule doesn't have to be used slavishly— in fact it's best if it's not— but it'd be great as a guide. It'd be a help vs. having to make it all up on my own.