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Leadership shenanigan armies would hate me for this but what if leadership was a morale saving throw that if failed results in such debuffs as negative modifiers to hit, losing a turn phase(s),etc? That’s basically what they did in DAwn of war.

macluvin wrote:
Leadership shenanigan armies would hate me for this but what if leadership was a morale saving throw that if failed results in such debuffs as negative modifiers to hit, losing a turn phase(s),etc? That’s basically what they did in DAwn of war.

And how would the throw work?
That's the issue.

Depending on how you set it up, results would differ vastly.

I mean I would make morale a flat roll against leadership, maybe include USR to allow for re-rolls or additional ld stat buffs, and allow LD debuff armies to apply as well, and them on a failed leadership roll just have a flat debuff. Maybe negative to hit modifiers, lose aura buffs, lose half their movement... or they could only be allowed to shoot OR move. As far as I figure, I see 3 issues with morale.
1) Rules that negate morale make it inconsistent and often I wonder why they make rules for it. And they shall know no rules from 7th edition, to when commissars used to be able to blam away any significant impact from morale in one of the few armies that honestly should be heavily influenced by it, to Abbadon. Most armies seem to have ways of negating morale or making it so insignificant it may as well be.
2) Morale doing too little-a lot of that ties in with problem #1, but if a bad morale roll costs a single infantry model that isn’t a terminator or something, you can almost forget about it. Night lords players feel this one quite a bit I bet.
3) morale doing way too much-losing an entire unit to morale ala 7th edition, and worse, having to watch them run off the board sucks. Losing an entire unit to a crappy morale roll also sucks, as the rework to commissars put them in that area.

I think what I was thinking ultimately was basically turning morale tests into a weakened, but more universally applicable, pinning test as a tactical tool to attempt to either force your opponent to make tactical decisions or as a debuff rather than a killing instrument. To go that route, though, I would want to give armies with leadership shenanigans more ways to force leadership tests, via aura abilities that force them or when being charged, as most Ld rebuffing armies seem to want to bring a knife to the gun fight of the 41st millennium and I don’t want to force a night lords player trying to charge with a squad of raptors or warp talons or any other close combat squad to rely on guns elsewhere to work properly.

So screw mass armies out off principle?

You could denote this something like this.

When a unit takes casualties, at the end of the turn, they roll morale. The roll is a d6+ casualties sustained.

Should the number exceed the leadership of the unit, a token is placed by the unit, and the unit must in the movement phase, move and advance its full move towards the board edge.

In the next turn, that unit counts as having fallen back for the purposes of shooting and charging. Models which cannot be moved back into coherency by the end of this move are destroyed, and models who are surrounded, and cannot fall back are destroyed.

So, failing morale forces units to move. If they can't fall back they die. If you can't move your move to get back into coherency, the models that can't make it die.

If a unit cannot fall back from assault and shoot, it can't fail morale and still shoot.

A few units could then feasibly fail morale, fall back, and still shoot, and a VERY select few could fail, fall back, and attempt a new charge.

Means failing morale moves units from points they might otherwise want to hold.

Considering almost every army can ignore morale in some way shape or form, its more interesting IMO.

 iGuy91 wrote:
You could denote this something like this.

When a unit takes casualties, at the end of the turn, they roll morale. The roll is a d6+ casualties sustained.

Should the number exceed the leadership of the unit, a token is placed by the unit, and the unit must in the movement phase, move and advance its full move towards the board edge.

In the next turn, that unit counts as having fallen back for the purposes of shooting and charging. Models which cannot be moved back into coherency by the end of this move are destroyed, and models who are surrounded, and cannot fall back are destroyed.

So, failing morale forces units to move. If they can't fall back they die. If you can't move your move to get back into coherency, the models that can't make it die.

If a unit cannot fall back from assault and shoot, it can't fail morale and still shoot.

A few units could then feasibly fail morale, fall back, and still shoot, and a VERY select few could fail, fall back, and attempt a new charge.

Means failing morale moves units from points they might otherwise want to hold.

Considering almost every army can ignore morale in some way shape or form, its more interesting IMO.

Wouldn't this just combine a lot of the problems with morale from previous editions with some of the problems from 8th? Specifically:

* It arguably doesn't make sense for the majority of units in 40k to literally run away.
* It punishes melee armies more heavily than shooty armies by forcing them to move away from the enemies they're trying to reach.
* You have to add oldschool rules for figuring out how to move fleeing units around impassible terrain.
* It punishes you for taking more than a minimum-sized unit unless you can mitigate or ignore morale.


Something I pitched in another thread was:
* Mark most buffs in the game as "command abilities."
* Morale tests are taken more or less as now; a d6 + casualties roll taken during the morale phase. If you fail the test, however, you don't take additional casualties. Instead, you get marked as "suppressed" until the end of the next player turn.
* Suppressed units cannot benefit from command abilities.

So rather than being a way of inflicting more casualties, morale becomes a way of denying buffs to key units. The only extra bookkeeping involved is putting a "suppressed" token next to any units that fail their morale tests.

This has been discussed a lot in this thread:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/781957.page

General feeling is that suppression is better than actually fleeing. A guardsman with his morale broken will probably still fire into the enemy, albeit screaming/crying with little regard for the officer shouting at him to shoot faster or move move move.

I agree that a simple tag of command ability: before most auras, orders and a lot of the stratagems etc. would give the game all it needs to allow this level of suppression.

Might be better in certain circumstances than a negative modifier to to hit rolls... suppressed/pinning was basically the idea I was going for. And to be fair about screwing hordes over... I feel like hordes are supposed to be more susceptible to morale issues, and also I thought horde armies at some point shaped the meta due to hordes being really good. I haven’t played much this edition so I don’t know how true my last statement is. I just feel like morale is something they haven’t gotten right since I started playing in 7th. So definitely at least since 6th. And I would love to see morale become a viable strategy to mess with because there are armies that have morale shenanigans as the only thing going for them.

The idea of failing a morale check meaning a unit loses buffs/auras is interesting. I'd be curious to go even further though:

Remove the morale phase completely and use the Leadership stat in the other phases to test if the unit can benefit from an aura or perform specific tasks such as charging.

I haven't thought about this in depth so maybe it wouldn't work at all, but I'd like Leadership/morale to have a real place in the game and be a viable tactic alongside melee, shooting, movement etc.

I think the fact that morale is generally crap this edition, and the fact that most winning tactics involve using auras, stratagems and abilities all at once on specific or massed units in your army, denying this ability through suppression and thus wrecking your opponents carefully looked-up-on-the-internet plan without necessarily having to kill things or snipe characters to achieve it would be a very good addition to the game.

In the other thread I wanted to separate suppression and breaking - and concluded it was best to have suppression tests after the shooting phase and break tests after the fight phase.
If this was done, Suppressive weapons could be added which reduce morale for the suppression check for successful hits, allowing low strength high ROF weapons to have a new role. This would actually add a result in 40k which isn't "the model died", which would mean that killiness could decrease without the efficiency of an army suffering.