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So.... this could be a thread for the rules idea sub-board, but the nature of my question is a little broader and I'd love to get some broader perspective on this.

Right now in 9th, there is a two step process to morale:

STEP 1 - If a unit has taken casualties during the turn, take a MORALE test: Roll a D6+Models Removed. If score is equal to or lower than unit's Ld, it passes, otherwise it looses 1 model and you go to Combat Attrition.

STEP 2 - COMBAT ATTRITION test. Roll a D6 for each model that's left. On a 1 it is removed. Subtract 1 if below half-strength.

So, looking across codex's, there are special rules (stratagems, etc.) that pertain to morale tests in some cases, and combat attrition tests in others.

What I'm curious about is house-ruling back a more oldhammer style morale system where units that fail a morale test instead fall back 2D6" and then have to regroup at the start of their next turn.

The morale test itself could remain the same (D6+models removed <= leadership test is a pass) but the outcome would be different. Now, the unit would fallback 2D6" (or some other distance) and would need to regroup next turn.

When it comes to the combat attrition test, maybe that test gets turned into a "regroup" roll (roll equal to or under leadership on a 2D6) with modifiers for being below 25%, 50%, and 75% strength (-1, -2, -3, etc.). Then abilities that allow ignoring of modifiers would still work (ATSKNF) as normal. If you fail the morale test, you keep falling back, etc. If you regroup successfully, you're back in the action. Some units that auto-pass attrition tests would then likewise automatically regroup.

Thoughts? Is there anything that would completely not work about this approach? What am I missing?

EDIT: People talk about the lethality of 8th + 9th edition, and I can't help but think this is part of it. Morale tests causing units that lost models to lose even more models is a positive feedback loop for removing models off the board. It would also help balance armies that don't have good melee options, because they could shoot units off objectives and force them to fall back instead of just having to wipe them out entirely.

I think before we consider making morale more impact full we should redesign the armies so half of them don't just straight up ignore it most of the time.
Having said that I would like a return to a fallback kind of mechanic, it could be very impact full in this edition too, you don't have to kill the enemy on the objective, just make him run from it also causing him to lose points.

I think they should go back to the way Morale and Leadership used to be pre-8th. I think it was a superior system.

The issue with it was that they made every army basically immune to it, so it became useless.

I've always been a fan of the fall back/test to re-group morale system.

I never really cared for the old "run away" version of morale. Failing morale just caused me to lose at least a turn of gameplay with one of my units because my dice got sassy when I lose 3 guys in a 10 man squad.

It removes interesting decisions from my turn without me having a lot of say in the matter. You're going to take out a quarter of the models in my units here and there. You should be able to. I shouldn't generally be able to stop you from doing so. But then there's not much I can do mid-game to prevent a unit from failing a leadership test save spending 2CP once a game to autopass.

It impacts melee units that have to cross the table to fight more than shooting units that can exert offense relatively easily too. Turn 1, you make a melee unit fall back. It spend turn 1 getting farther away from you. Turn 2, it recovers, and its movement basically just brings it back to where it started. Meanwhile, the squad of fire warriors that fell back is shooting at you on turn 2.

My broken record pitch:
Mark a lot of buffs in the game as "command effects." If a unit fails a morale test, it becomes suppressed until the end of the next player turn. A suppressed unit cannot benefit from command effects.

So instead of making khorne berzerkers run away in fear or forcing termagaunts to take an extra turn to get into range, morale becomes a way of reducing your opponent's ability to buff their army.

Night Lords suddenly become great at keeping captains from handing out rerolls. My phantasm grenades suddenly have a shot at keeping the fire warriors from listening to their ethereal.

The hard part is just coming up with a list of what is and isn't a command effect.

Wyldhunt wrote:
I never really cared for the old "run away" version of morale. Failing morale just caused me to lose at least a turn of gameplay with one of my units because my dice got sassy when I lose 3 guys in a 10 man squad.

As opposed to losing 3 guys, failing a morale test to lose a 4th, then possible losing a couple more. Then next turn you lose a few more, suffer loses for under 50%, and suddenly morale means your unit isn't on the board anymore.

Running away, by comparison, means more of your unit is left alive. Also falling back moves you (presumably) further from the enemy, protecting you somewhat from subsequent attacks or making the unit less of a target. Then you can regroup and re-press the attack. Seems to be that it would preserve your options for the future.

GW seems to have a strange relationship with morale rules.
They write a rule, then immediately make sure that everyone who stands to lose a lot from it ignores it.

I think the fact that a falling back mechanic is a big issue for melee units but not shooting units can be a problem, at least if simply dropped into the game as is.

Falling back mechanics are an easy fix, and that's to make it a LD test each time you wanna do it.

 Mezmorki wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
I never really cared for the old "run away" version of morale. Failing morale just caused me to lose at least a turn of gameplay with one of my units because my dice got sassy when I lose 3 guys in a 10 man squad.

As opposed to losing 3 guys, failing a morale test to lose a 4th, then possible losing a couple more. Then next turn you lose a few more, suffer loses for under 50%, and suddenly morale means your unit isn't on the board anymore.

Running away, by comparison, means more of your unit is left alive. Also falling back moves you (presumably) further from the enemy, protecting you somewhat from subsequent attacks or making the unit less of a target. Then you can regroup and re-press the attack. Seems to be that it would preserve your options for the future.

I don't love either approach, really.

The 9th edition version is arguably unfluffy for most armies in the game. The fluff behind units indicates they'd be unlikely to run away or care enough about their comrades to drive them to safety or what have you. Also, randomly losing models because you already lost models (and then failed a d6 test) doesn't create a lot of meaningful decisions.

The pre-8th version's leadership test also doesn't create meaningful decisions and generally removes even more meaningful decisions from the game because you lose control of your units until they regroup. If your opponent leaves you alone, you'll still have your models later in the game, but I personally always found moving my units into useless positions to be more annoying than just losing a couple extra guys.

Both are bad results that happen without a lot of input/interaction from the controlling player. If I'm fielding guardsmen, I'm going to roll (and fail) morale tests at some point; that's not really avoidable. I've never found that either mechanic makes the game more interesting. It's a bit of a twist when my units suddenly evaporate or fall back instead of fighting, but my response has never been, "How interesting!" It's usually more like, "Ugh. Okay. Fine."

On paper, I feel like the "command effect" approach would be interesting. It doesn't take away control of your units or randomly remove models, but it might lower the effectiveness of some units or prevent you from using a stratagem on them at a critical moment. Plus, while I don't buy that a space marine could be scared into retreating by a night lord, I totally buy that night lords fight in a way that makes it difficult to coordinate with your squad or pay attention to orders coming in over the vox.

Yeah, the Command idea is my favorite one, that I've seen at least.

In Andy Chambers' Starship Troopers they ditched the notion of morale, reasoning like we are here that it didn't make any sense for either the Mobile Infantry or the Bugs to be scared away from a fight. They did, however, put in a rule by which some models could 'flinch' 2" away from an attacker to avoid taking damage. I also played a card-driven game called Tactical Assault: Combat Cards where you could avoid damage by moving away from attackers - pretty interesting if you need to close with attackers, or even hold position.

I really like the idea of players being able to voluntarily react to preserve their material at the expense of something like position or time (or the command bonuses, which is a neat idea). Particularly where position is actually significant in 9th edition, it seems like allowing players to go to ground or fall back as a response to otherwise being annihilated or massacred would be neat. After all, players already have the option to fall back out of close combat.

Speaking as a person who hated much of the changes in 8E, I can't agree more about the fallback part.

FWIW, I'm looking to a "ProHammer-like" pass on 9th edition and test out some ideas. The morale changes are one of the bigger proposed changes I'm trying to think through, hence asking about it here for feedback.

Sounds like a slightly majority of the responses so far are in favor of the idea.

In the interest of giving players choices, I could also see a few possible ways of creating a choice.

If you take shooting casualties, you can voluntarily have the unit go to ground. Or you could take a morale test, and if you fail that be forced to fallback. It could also be tied to the distance of the attack and whether or not you are in cover. IE, you can't go to ground if standing in the open, the only choice is falling back (but you can stop once the unit is in cover and go to ground). Something like that.

 Mezmorki wrote:

If you take shooting casualties, you can voluntarily have the unit go to ground. Or you could take a morale test, and if you fail that be forced to fallback. It could also be tied to the distance of the attack and whether or not you are in cover. IE, you can't go to ground if standing in the open, the only choice is falling back (but you can stop once the unit is in cover and go to ground). Something like that.

There might be something there. Depending on what 'going to ground" means. In the past, the term sort of meant gaining +1 to your save, which is now just light cover. If GtG becomes some sort of defensive benefit, you're potentially looking at adding a mechanic to the game that buffs the defense of units in a way you didn't intend. My fire warriors have the option of gaining an extra +1 to their save while in cover as they stand on an objective? Sure, I'll give up a few basic rifle shots to give my cheap obsec unit a 2+ armor save.

Potentially taking away actions/force bad actions on units still seems likely to cause problems though. As previously mentioned, melee footsloggers are going to be hurt by this a lot more than ranged units. Compare the impact on a squad of, let's say, drukhari beasts compared to a squad of fire warriors. Also, this is potentially really rough on large units. Say I take a blog of infantry of some sort. Guardsmen or even csm (because I'm trying to get the most out of the new Bile rules or something). Failing a leadership test on a big, expensive unit means that I'm functionally not using that many points worth of unit that turn. So in an edition where blasts and engagement range already kind of discourage blobs, you'd be adding the risk of randomly immobilizing a blob or even forcing it to move in the wrong direction.

Personally, I don't see myself enjoying a return to such rules, and therefor any added-on complexity is unlikely to be worth it to me. But maybe it's just not my cup of tea. More power to those of you that would enjoy something like this.

Ultimately, I'm hoping to fuse my work with ProHammer with 9th edition, creating a ProHammer version of 9th. I've played a decent number of games with ProHammer and like where the gameplay is landing, so feel a bit more confident in porting over some key aspects of that into 9th.

While the morale stuff we're discussing here might make lifer tougher for foot-slogging melee, I'm hoping with that OTHER changes I'm considering the balance on the whole would tip things slightly in favor for footsloggers (which, let's face it, have always struggled in 40K).

So, I'd like to revisit LoS and cover save rules, again making those work more like a throwback and provide more benefit to advancing units. Heck, maybe units that advanced in a turn (or fell back) have a -1 to being hit?

I'd like to reign in the power of shooting by, for example, removing freedom of fire (i.e. individual models shooting at whatever targets they want) and make split fire a proper thing.

I'll likely adjust how overwatch (and possibly reaction fire and other assault defenses) work to impose some penalties on subsequent fighting performance (instead of fighting normally and getting to make bonus shooting attacks).

And so on...

With moral - why not force the unit to fall back in one of two ways (owning player's choice).
- directly away from the nearest enemy unit
- directly towards the nearest cover, provided they end up further away from any enemy units than they started the fallback.

Running to cover feels more realistic to me than running towards your own board edge, which often feels a little arbitrary and many deployment types don't even have a single defined board edge.

I think that's a great idea. Falling back towards your table edge was always a little odd - especially for units that enter from a different table edge.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
With moral - why not force the unit to fall back in one of two ways (owning player's choice).
- directly away from the nearest enemy unit
- directly towards the nearest cover, provided they end up further away from any enemy units than they started the fallback.

Running to cover feels more realistic to me than running towards your own board edge, which often feels a little arbitrary and many deployment types don't even have a single defined board edge.

How does that work if you have enemies both ahead of and behind you by roughly the same distance? If I'm falling back towards cover and there's an acolyte hybrid blob about 12" behind me and a neophyte hybrid squad or two about 12" in front of me and all the cover near me would put me closer to one or the other?

Or if I opt to run directly away from the nearest enemy and the acolyte hybrid squad is only 11" away, does that mean I can basically ignore the fallback and move straight towards the neophyte squad?

Wyldhunt wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
With moral - why not force the unit to fall back in one of two ways (owning player's choice).
- directly away from the nearest enemy unit
- directly towards the nearest cover, provided they end up further away from any enemy units than they started the fallback.

Running to cover feels more realistic to me than running towards your own board edge, which often feels a little arbitrary and many deployment types don't even have a single defined board edge.

How does that work if you have enemies both ahead of and behind you by roughly the same distance? If I'm falling back towards cover and there's an acolyte hybrid blob about 12" behind me and a neophyte hybrid squad or two about 12" in front of me and all the cover near me would put me closer to one or the other?

Or if I opt to run directly away from the nearest enemy and the acolyte hybrid squad is only 11" away, does that mean I can basically ignore the fallback and move straight towards the neophyte squad?

I considered the case of two units on either side of you - in their panic they forget about the second unit and run towards it instead. So I figured it'd work alright anyway.
Perhaps instead say "move such that they end their move as far away from any enemy units as possible" for the first case?

Just make failing a Moral Pins you, remove all Immune other than Nids (as they have IB/Synapse), no one should be immune, but only better at passing.

Wyldhunt wrote:
I never really cared for the old "run away" version of morale.
My broken record pitch:
Mark a lot of buffs in the game as "command effects." If a unit fails a morale test, it becomes suppressed until the end of the next player turn. A suppressed unit cannot benefit from command effects.

Now this feels good. It's not running away (which many units supposedly don't do) but still feels like a loss of morale. Maybe not as impactful as straight up losing models but is still denying the opponent their points in abilities.

Shas'O'Ceris wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
I never really cared for the old "run away" version of morale.
My broken record pitch:
Mark a lot of buffs in the game as "command effects." If a unit fails a morale test, it becomes suppressed until the end of the next player turn. A suppressed unit cannot benefit from command effects.

Now this feels good. It's not running away (which many units supposedly don't do) but still feels like a loss of morale. Maybe not as impactful as straight up losing models but is still denying the opponent their points in abilities.

I too feel that some kind of suppression/pinning effect might work well. Perhaps when enough units have it, a simple temporary inactivation or removal of the new CORE keyword might do the job.

I wonder if the results for failing morale should depend on the situation you are in. For example:

Fail morale vs shooting attack when in cover: unit may become pinned/suppressed and lose certain command abilities. Fail morale when engaged in close combat, fall back 2D6". Fail morale vs shooting when in the open, retreat towards the nearest cover, etc.

 Mezmorki wrote:
I wonder if the results for failing morale should depend on the situation you are in. For example:

Fail morale vs shooting attack when in cover: unit may become pinned/suppressed and lose certain command abilities. Fail morale when engaged in close combat, fall back 2D6". Fail morale vs shooting when in the open, retreat towards the nearest cover, etc.

Why would Daemons ever run for cover? It does nothing for them.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
I wonder if the results for failing morale should depend on the situation you are in. For example:

Fail morale vs shooting attack when in cover: unit may become pinned/suppressed and lose certain command abilities. Fail morale when engaged in close combat, fall back 2D6". Fail morale vs shooting when in the open, retreat towards the nearest cover, etc.

Why would Daemons ever run for cover? It does nothing for them.

Maybe not in terms of a save, but that doesn't mean other mechanics can't come into play

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:
I wonder if the results for failing morale should depend on the situation you are in. For example:

Fail morale vs shooting attack when in cover: unit may become pinned/suppressed and lose certain command abilities. Fail morale when engaged in close combat, fall back 2D6". Fail morale vs shooting when in the open, retreat towards the nearest cover, etc.

Why would Daemons ever run for cover? It does nothing for them.

Maybe not in terms of a save, but that doesn't mean other mechanics can't come into play

But unless we're talking about something like -1 to hit terrain (dense? obscuring? I still confuse those two), then it's probably weird that they're falling back into it right? I'm picturing daemonettes freaking out over getting shot at and deciding as a group to hunker down in a crater that won't protect them or running into a defensible terrain piece in case something opts to charge them. Then again, daemons freaking out about casualties in the first place is a little out of character for them.

Most units in 40k are described as being immune to panicking and running away. Even if the rule is meant to show the unit being forced into a more defensible position, the player is probably more likely to know what the best defensive tactic is than a forced movement rule would be. So as a daemon player, I might realize that running for cover doesn't make sense for my daemonettes. If I want to keep them alive, I'd probably be better off pressing the attack or trying to get out of line of sight. If I, as a player, know the best way for my marines to stop getting shot by an enemy mortar team is to charge at them, then my marines probably know it too, so having the marines turn around and dive into some ruins when they could have just shot and charged the mortar team isn't terribly fluffy.

But saying that the mortar rounds caused enough of a distraction to briefly throw off the marines' rhythm or make them fail to hear the captain's command (his reroll aura or possibly a stratagem) makes sense to me.