Questioning Morale and Reaction Rolls

I'm writing a d20-or-so table of combat events to spice up old-school combat and it's turning into a table of enemy tactics, which I dig.

It's also making me think about Morale rolls, cause those completely disregard tactics: it's a roll to gauge the troop's emotion. Usually we make a monster flee or surrender when they fail a morale, but what about parlay? 

What about giving PCs gold to let the monsters go, or some other kind of exchange? What about tactical escapes, or fake escapes to lead PCs into traps? what about fake-surrendering to then stab PCs in the back? I think it's not a good thing to exclusively rely on Morale to decide if monsters keep fighting. Sometimes an intelligent monster-leader may choose escape as a tactic.

Morale is what it says on the tin: the troop's conviction that they can reach their objective if they keep fighting. And a Morale system works as long as there are concrete possibilities for the monsters to reach their objective, or if the monster is too dumb to realize that this is not the case.

Also, notice how I talked about "objectives". this is making me question Reaction rolls as well. It would be better to really think about what a negative or positive reaction roll means, or disregard them entirely. A monster wouldn't just attack PCs for no reason, and there are a thousand reasons that a monster would want to attack a PC

1. the power divide is so big PCs pose no risk, a squash-an-ant situation

2. Monster is scared that PCs will harm them, harm someone they care about, or rob them

3. PCs objective conflates with monster's objective

4. Monster wants to rob PCs (<---this is a different objective from just wanting to kill PCs)

5. Monster is in a foul mood

6. Monster is a sadist/masochist

7. Monster mistakes PCs for someone else, an enemy

etc.

See also this post about encounter stakes and this modified reaction table by Patrick Stuart

The Reaction Roll doesn't tell you these things, but they're quite important. As you can see, these motives and objectives may change the course of combat quite a bit. 

You could convincce the dumb ginat you are stronger than they are

You could convince the scared monster that you pose no threat.

You could enter an agreement with someone with an opposed objective than yours.

You could drop your gold and leave if someone wants to rob you.

You could try to pacify an angeredd monster and pffer to help.

etc.

So what I will try to do in the future is to not rely completely on Morale and Reaction rolls for monster tactics and reactions, but I would act as a real monster would act (or as a PC would act) and only use Morale rolls to see if the monster has it in them to keep fighting

and I will question the Reaction Roll: what makes the monster react this way?