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I still think the HH 3rd Ed is an excellent jumping off point.

Sure, one can’t simply port it right over. Balancing something for what is essentially a Three Faction Game is different to balancing the glorious hodgepodge of 40K.

But the underlying concept, whereby you can strategically erode an enemy unit’s combat effectiveness, giving you an easier time? That does work. It can discourage Deathstar units, as it only takes a single Tactical Status being inflicted to severely hamper them, and render them much easier pickings.

And it means per-sykology and headology does more than just make the enemy run away some times.

It also makes for great theatre of the mind. If I Stun or Supress your unit with an artillery bombardment, then send in a unit for some up close stabby stabby? The impact of Stunned or Suppressed really plays well in the mind’s eye.

And yes, it can encourage real combined arms strikes to eliminate enemy units and positions.

I too think that morale effects should vary for each faction. Some more psychologically resilient factions would merely get disorganized/debuffed, while other factions could go as far as fleeing from the table altogether, like an Ork Waaaaagh losing its warboss, then losing its momentum, and collapsing into a panicked mess as mass casualties keep piling up.

Also, special "terror tactics" units should come with special rules that let tem psychologically alter the base game rules. Currently, none of the terror units in the game are particularly "scary" in-game, lest we count combat effectiveness as a deterrent for the players "orchestrating" the actual miniatures..

I feel like this would make the game much more interesting, although much harder to "balance" once again.. therefore, I dont have much hope of GW ever being able to pull anything off what's better than the current battleshock implementation.

To the poll, the most fun I had with morale was in 2e when there was a variety of different effects and outcomes. I was sad to see things like Fear and Terror go away in the change to 3e.

From 3e onwards though I felt waaay too many things were immune to morale.

That's a choice, to make the setting that way. It doesn't have to be like that. The excuse that they're fanatical zealots is silly - we have fanatical zealots in the real world and they still break and run when they are getting shelled to bits.

Making marines handle it better than others is fine by me but making any faction functionally immune to morale is a big mistake and misses out a lot of what I think makes wargames fun - the friction between what you want your troops to do and what THEY want to do.

In real life infantry very rarely advances under fire and even with power armour you're still going to be hesitant to run out in the open against a starcannon or something.

Making morale irrelevant removes suppression as a mechanic and that makes firefights feel very weird and purely damage focused, which flattens the game down. I agree that I don't want to play counter-hammer but simple and good looking "blast marker" style suppression markers as were used in Epic or BFG I think are something which can add to a game visually and serve a straightforward purpose. I don't like too many markers but a few nice looking pew pew markers to represent levels of suppression is okay I think.

So I think they really just got the background or their interpretation of it wrong. Every faction should interact meaningfully with morale and suppression should be a thing. Some can be better than others and there's space for creative interpretations for stuff like tyranids and necrons, maybe requiring different tactics.

Battleshock seems like a fairly bland but ultimately effective way to handle it. Better than 3-7e where morale honestly hardly ever mattered unless you were playing guard or tau.

Arbiter_Shade wrote:
As someone who loves leadership/morale shenanigans in other games, I would love to see 40k introduce/re-introduce some mechanics that play into the mind games.

If we can't agree on a one size fits all solution, why not think of a solution for each codex? Why can't every army interact with LD differently? Is it a pain for you, the opponent, to remember how LD effects the opposing army? Maybe, but keep the rules simple and standardized.

To me, the issue wouldn't so much be memorizing each faction's morale rules. The issue would be that I'm not sure GW would do a very good job of coming up with a bespoke set of rules for every faction that are balanced reasonably well against eachother. Also, having bespoke rules for each faction makes it more challenging to write rules that interact with enemy morale. If you want a Night Lords style detachment that manipulates the enemy's morale, you can't say something like, "The enemy unit moves an additional 2" slower while pinned," if you don't know whether or not "being pinned" is a part of a given army's morale rules.

A halfway point that could maybe work would be to have like, 2 or 3 standardized morale charts in the core rules, and then assign one of those charts on a faciton-by-faction or unit-by-unit basis. I.e. chaos marines might use the brave-and-elite chart while their cultists might use the scaredy-cat-wimps chart. And you could relatively easily write rules to interact with those limited core assumptions. So night lords might cause a shocked unit to use the next worse status on their chart or might downgrade brave-elites to scaredy-cats. Tyranids might prevent units from falling below a certain level while within synapse. Etc.

All that said, I still feel like a one-size-fits-all solution with occassional modifications for special cases (synapse) is probably the better way to go. Less complicated. Probably works reasonably well if you have the results of battleshock not be crippling to certain units. Like, if we took something similar to 10th's approach and just made it so battleshock couldn't be removed for at least one turn, and leaned into rules that made it possible to shock enemies more reliably, I think we'd have a useful debuff mechanic that made sense for most armies including marines.

Have Orks lose bonus attacks when their morale starts to falter and at a catastrophic enough event, fall apart and retreat. No in-fighting, never again...

See, you say that, but I think in-fighting is exactly the kind of thing you're going to see GW come up with if you ask them to make bespoke behaviors for dozens of factions.

I mean, I am really just spit balling ideas off the top of my head but I personally have so little interest in 10th edition because it removed so much of the complexity of the game on the altar of "balance" that I yearn for something more dynamic. LD is a great way to reintroduce some of that complexity that isn't just layering special rules to make each army more and more powerful.

I do sympathize with the yearning for a return to flavorful rules and gameplay. Morale could be a good place for that, although I'd also argue that it might be even better to first inject more flavor into the other parts of the game first rather than just making morale too complicated and forcing it to do all the heavy lifting, you know?

You could expand race specific rules into other things.

To stick with Orks for the moment? We know the Warboss maintains his surprisingly tenuous position by clobbering anyone that gets in his way - friend or foe. The bigger and fightier the foe? The more cemented his position becomes, at least in the short term.

Hence, provided a given Warboss can lead the Boyz to decent fights, and publicly demonstrate his ‘ardness? His position is maintained until he gets perished.

So…reflect that in their rules. Bonus points for the Warboss being the one the beat up the enemy general, or for duffing up big scary things (Greater Daemons, Tyranid Monsters etc).

Not a huge amount of bonus points. But an extra one here and there to encourage and directly reward “fluffy” play.

The problem with bonus points of course being that 5 VP isn't much in a game where the max score is 100 points, but it's game breaking if you're playing a mission where the max score is like, 10. So you'd have to standardize there being a set maximum number of points (and expected number of points) for all missions.

If they were to bring back faction-specific secondaries, having your boss personally clobber impressive enemies would be a pretty intuitive one.