Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I think I'd prefer to see something like blast markers, one for each wound (not unsaved wounds), with the option for an action based on leadership that lets a unit shed blast markers. Each blast marker on a unit means one of its weapons cannot be used to attack.

Nurglitch wrote:
I think I'd prefer to see something like blast markers, one for each wound (not unsaved wounds), with the option for an action based on leadership that lets a unit shed blast markers. Each blast marker on a unit means one of its weapons cannot be used to attack.

Seems pretty brutal. Assuming this works on vehicles, you'd only have to wound a T7 eldar tank 2 or 3 (falcons) times to leave it completely unable to fire. You'd only need 6 bolter hits to average the 2 wounds (blast markers) needed to keep a fire prism or night spinner from shooting. Units like terminators whose job is largely to get wounded a lot and then save those wounds would never be able to attack. Feels like maybe I'm misunderstanding you?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
IMO morale should cause a unit to fail their check to have maluses to them.

Things like -1 to hit, cannot overwatch, half movement, forces movement towards their deployment, reduced range on their guns, etc.
I'd make it so when you fail a morale check, you add one of these random modifiers from a table instead of losing models.
And morale would always count every model lost in a unit, not just the ones you lost during the current turn.

This would make it so morale isnt jsut a way to get a few extra lucky kills but rather to make some units les effective.

Sure it doesnt make sense for some units to fail morale at all but these units should simply have a higher leadership stat to represent that.

To fix the "hordes are at a disadvantage" problem, just base morale checks on the % of the unit that died. 25% -> Roll 1x on the table, 50% -> roll 2x on the table, 75% -> roll 3 times on the table. Still, i think thats kind of the point of MSU units, you witness less carnage when 2-3 models die in your unit vs when 10 die.

ATSKNF could become "roll one less dice when rolling".
Night lords could become "roll an additionnal dice".

I'm obviously spitballing so the balance isnt there, i'm just throwing ideas out there

Seems like a lot of steps and bookkeeping. You listed 6 possible penalties there, so I'm assuming we'd be talking about a d6 table to determine what your morale effects are. So most turns, you'd be rolling your morale tests per now, plus rolling several times on the morale effect table. Then you'd have to track which of 6 different results each unit is currently afflicted by.

Plus, if you're basing morale tests on all casualties the unit has suffered so far, horde units would start automatically failing the test every turn really fast. A 30 man blob of Ld 7 bodies would automatically fail every turn once they'd lost 7 (less than 25%) of their squad.

And while I get that they're just spitballs, the morale effects you've suggested would be dramatically more or less powerful against different units. If you reduce the movement of a melee squad trying to cross the table, they're probably never going to reach melee, but a stationary shooting unit won't really care. Overwatch only matters if you're one of the handful of units that does overwatch well (or tau). Falling back towards the board edge was always kind of a time sink that also scrwed over melee units more than shooting units.

In a video game or a game with fewer units (like Battlefleet Gothic), something with that much extra rolling and status tracking would make sense, but it seems kind of unwieldy for 40k.

Wyldhunt wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
I think I'd prefer to see something like blast markers, one for each wound (not unsaved wounds), with the option for an action based on leadership that lets a unit shed blast markers. Each blast marker on a unit means one of its weapons cannot be used to attack.

Seems pretty brutal. Assuming this works on vehicles, you'd only have to wound a T7 eldar tank 2 or 3 (falcons) times to leave it completely unable to fire. You'd only need 6 bolter hits to average the 2 wounds (blast markers) needed to keep a fire prism or night spinner from shooting. Units like terminators whose job is largely to get wounded a lot and then save those wounds would never be able to attack. Feels like maybe I'm misunderstanding you?

You're understanding me perfectly, it seems. The lack of suppression effects in 40k is a bugbear of mine, and it annoys me that the only way to reduce the firepower tearing your own army apart is to kill the other guy first. I've adapted this from Epic Armageddon, a game where this is considerably less of a problem, for pretty much the same reason. Having units both affected by incoming fire and able to survive it means that a third state has to lie between the wound roll and the saving throw roll, and that not only means that single-model-units can be affected by morale (finally!), but that tanks actually behave like tanks, which is shoot with impunity until something rattles their crew. It helps to balance squishy infantry squads that have more weapons against hard tank units that have fewer. Those Fire Prisms and Night Spinners will need to be supported, like have other units suppress the enemies that can attack them, in order to be optimally utilized.

I still feel like I must be misunderstanding something. Wouldn't that just reduce the game to stun-locking? And in a way that probably favors whomever gets first turn? If a single scout squad can reliably turn off a tank's shooting on their own, that's a pretty massive change to the game. Even infantry units with lots of bodies would see their shooting hugely reduced by something like my swooping hawk units.

I'm struggling to picture what a game would even look like. I guess shooting would become so unreliable that you'd just switch to using only melee outside of things like mortars that could hide out of LoS to shut down the enemy's shooting?

As an alternative, maybe just have a unit get stunned once per game when t hey hit half strength/half wounds?

It doesn't appear to be the case in Epic Armageddon that the game is reduced to stun-locking. It certainly encourages a game of clever manouvres and tactics though, and helps to equalize hordes vs MSU vs giant robots.

Honestly, I'd rather each army had its own rules for Morale. The Morale phase simply saying: "Check your Codex, and follow the rules for Morale for your army" or something to that effect.

It seems odd that casualties have essentially the same effect on a 'pressed into service yesterday' conscript, as they do on a 'been in combat for 200 years, genetically enhanced super soldier' space marine.

Conscripts, guardsmen, grots and the like I can see running away, sure that makes sense for them. A Space Marine I would expect to be more, hunker down and hold position, sort of thing.

@Kcalehc

That's a great idea, and kinda obvious in retrospect.

While morale rules seem dull, large squads have been already hit pretty hard in this edition. Any suggestion shouldn't go into the path of making units like boyz or gretchins more vulnerable to morale.

I kinda like the current morale system; although it doesn't have any particular depth it's simple and it doesn't punish hardly all those units that could realistically suffer for it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kcalehc wrote:

Conscripts, guardsmen, grots and the like I can see running away, sure that makes sense for them. A Space Marine I would expect to be more, hunker down and hold position, sort of thing.

Or maybe that SM that fails the test is committing suicide because he's ashamed of his failure as he's supposed to me some sort of mini-superhero

 Blackie wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kcalehc wrote:

Conscripts, guardsmen, grots and the like I can see running away, sure that makes sense for them. A Space Marine I would expect to be more, hunker down and hold position, sort of thing.

Or maybe that SM that fails the test is committing suicide because he's ashamed of his failure as he's supposed to me some sort of mini-superhero

Lol, well yes, maybe that can be a chapter specific rule for someone!

Still, every army reacting in the same way just seems off - Necrons are more or less mindless automatons, why would they react the same as an Eldar, or an Ork? If each Codex had its own set of rules for a faction, it'd add some depth at least to a phase that's mostly glossed over for a lot of armies, and just about everyone has abilities that allow them to largely ignore it anyway.

And here I was, expecting that this was going to be about improving ethics in 40k.