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Imagine this - You are an imperial guards trooper. You and your squad are engaged in a gun battle and holding your line, but the enemy keeps closing. Swarms of bugs, or demons, or chaos marines. Towering aliens of inhumane strength, demons with super human strength and toughness, an AVATAR of molten iron, all kinds of crazy stuff that would drain the strength out of your body just to witness it.

It makes sense to me that INFANTRY should take an immediate leadership test when they are charged. Infantry specifically because if you are inside a tank, or vehicle, or terminator armor, or something heavy duty like that, you dont feel as vulnerable psychologically. Space marines would have the "shall no know fear" type of rule. But guardsmen, and other light infantry, should have to take a morale check. By the number they fail it, thats how many guys break and run on the spot, and the rest are forced to fight on without them.

EX - 10 guard troops with LD 7 are assault by a monstrous creature, so they roll a LD test and score a 4. So 3 troops run before combat is even rolled. So 7 troops remain to fight in hand to hand. Then after they take losses, they must take a 2nd leadership test.

I have not exactly figured out how you could make the rule for when to take the test - since you would not bother rolling leadership for units of exactly the same type charging one another. Since they are evenly matched. But basic infantry being charged by assault terminators, or elite units, or monsters, or dreads, etc, would all take a leadership test because they can see with their own eyes they are obviously outmatched.

This would make it more dynamic when dealing with hand to hand situations, and leadership values of troops, and putting veteran sgts and other leadership boosting models into units to keep them from breaking and running. Lets be honest, if you had a 10 foot tall monster just about to leap onto you, would you try to stand there and fight it with your combat knife? HELL NO. But if your commissar had a pistol to the back of your head, youd probably give it a shot.

This type of thing would add a psychological element to combat that is not there right now. And should be.

Well the easiest way to do this would be any time infantry are charged by non infantry with a successful charge roll after the models are moved and make contact. I.e. you cannot kill off models from the front to make the charge not work.

Terminators would not cause the trigger since they are infantry. But vehicles (including dreads) would.

That being said, it makes assault oriented monsters much more powerful in general.

Dude... I think for an average sized infantry unit like a guardsman or an eldar guardian, if you had a 9 foot tall terminator with lightning claws, or thunder hammers and shields coming, you run. You at least crap your pants. You know your average person is gonna panic when a larger human sized threat is charging at them, let alone a walking tank. I think there should be a distinction between light infantry and powered armored or great type heavy infantry.

Like unaugmented infantry, and augmented or monstrous/demonic infantry. No sane man is gonna go toe to toe with a man wearing a full body power suit or a huge beast. Its like asking someone to wrestle with a damn grizzly bear.

warpedpig wrote:

EX - 10 guard troops with LD 7 are assault by a monstrous creature, so they roll a LD test and score a 4. So 3 troops run before combat is even rolled. So 7 troops remain to fight in hand to hand. Then after they take losses, they must take a 2nd leadership test.

If LD is 7, and you roll a 4, you passed the check.

yeah Im thinking backwards, but you get the idea.

warpedpig wrote:
Dude... I think for an average sized infantry unit like a guardsman or an eldar guardian, if you had a 9 foot tall terminator with lightning claws, or thunder hammers and shields coming, you run. You at least crap your pants. You know your average person is gonna panic when a larger human sized threat is charging at them, let alone a walking tank. I think there should be a distinction between light infantry and powered armored or great type heavy infantry.

Like unaugmented infantry, and augmented or monstrous/demonic infantry. No sane man is gonna go toe to toe with a man wearing a full body power suit or a huge beast. Its like asking someone to wrestle with a damn grizzly bear.

So to be clear, your proposal is not just to add this mexhanic but change/add new keywords to specific units you think should be classified as something other than infantry because they are scarier?

Why dont you make a list of every unit you think should trigger this mexhanic.

I think this would require some sort of "fear"/"terror" rule where specific units impose a modifier on the morale check. So a Carnifex might cause terror: "+4 to opposing morale checks for units within 1" or something of that sort.

Then have a rule that states all units must take a morale test if successfully charged, units comprised of a single model ignore this test.

I'm not sure this is a great mechanic in general (see terror from old fantasy)

A simple way it could work is to require a unit suffer a leadership modifier according to how many more times the enemy has wounds over their own wounds. So a creature with two wounds would get -1 when charged by a unit with 4 wounds. If charged by double that again. So 8 wounds. Then it suffers -2. Double again would be 16 wounds and -3

So the more massive the threat compared to the unit it is charging. It adjusts the leadership penalty. So the larger the unit being charged is. The less it gives a damn

Leadership tests do not exist anymore. Further, leadership values, as they now are interacted with differently than previous editions, have been altered significantly since leadership tests previously existed.

My point is they should exist under these circumstances. Unless everyone is insanely brave in the 40k universe

Maybe they are...

Its not like regular grunts are that much of a threat in CC. The last thing the Guard needs is to suck more in CC (and its rather convenient that SM get to ignore a rule that affect everyone, again)

Space marines are total fanatics. I suppose even they could break for the sake of argument and game mechanics. But it's very difficult to craft a rule that's very realistic and very easy to implement. For example. A guardsman has 1 wound just like a space marine. But a space marine is tougher and has very good powered armor. One space marine could easily crush a mans skull. So a guardsman would feel the urge to run away. Then again both of them are pathetically weak compared to a carnifex or avatar. So finding s way to construct a rule that easily scales up is not the easiest thing to think up

I'm not a huge fan of this rule purely because, among the armies that you can play in 40k, units that can fluffily soil their garments and run away in the face of an enemy charge are relatively rare.

Spess Muhreens, chaos or otherwise, are zealous, brainwashed murder machines. Breaking formation every time the enemy gets close would look silly on them.

Necrons are soulless robots.

'Nids are like... fingernails. The hive mind doesn't care about losing a few billion if it means it gets its noms.

Orkz love a good foight!

Lots of dark eldar only left the house so that they *could* get involved in close-quarters violence.

Aspect warriors are blood-thirsty psychopaths that have dedicated this chunk of their lives to violence.

For most armies, it just isn't in-character to display that level of undisciplined fear. Perhaps you could make a list of units that would be more in-character running away?

On the topic of spooky enemies, I like the idea of some units that really play up the "fear" thing essentially having an aura leadership debuff. So your models won't run away before the fight starts, but more of them might run away after they've had an up-close encounter with some mandrakes.

This could be interesting as an ability some units have, instead of a generic rule applied to all infantry. If I wanted to introduce something like that, that's how I would do it. Something like "Scary: This unit is scary, so people often try to run away from it".

EDIT: It could work as a sort of early Morale test.