Awe Question

[LumenPlacidum]

Hi. I recently picked up the game, and I have to say that this is very addictive. I haven't even tried to break into the multiplayer stuff yet, but I'm sure it'll consume my time. I have realized that before I can really figure out some of the effective combinations, I really need to know how some things work. Specifically, I don't understand Awe. Or rather, if I understand it correctly, then it's really not very useful.

With 10 dominion, it's possible to give a Virtue pretender Awe (+8). The manual said (I think) that the enemy must win a DRN+Morale check vs. my Awe+7 score. If a DRN is 2 6-sided dice (approximately, the average is somewhat higher because of its open-ended nature), then its expected value is somewhere above 7. If the typical unit has a morale of 10, then they have a score of 17 on a typical roll, versus my constant score of 15. That doesn't seem very useful. It only really seems POSSIBLE to fail that because I made it Awe (+8). If it were a lesser version of the ability, there'd be almost no chance of its working.

Am I misinterpreting the mechanics somewhere?

Thanks for your help.