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I'm not putting this in 'Proposed Rules' because I don't have a proposal.

So, we all generally crap on battleshock mechanics in current 40k. Chaos knights tend to get crap for having it be their army rule, and the battleshock-focused detachments (looking at you, Night Lords) tend to be pretty lackluster. It just never seems to have a huge impact on the game.

...EXCEPT! I just literally watched the finals of a 6-round tournament come to a screeching halt on Bottom of 3 due to failed battleshock tests. And I mean screeching. I was watching on YouTube, and the affected player, after conceding, immediately killed his mic and the stream had to cut away from the table. This also wasn't a TFG payer, either. In fact, during that very stream, the host store was raffling off a fully-painted army that this guy had painted and donated for charity. And I gather he's a damn good player, too.

So, it feels like battleshock is either a joke mechanic that never really does anything, or 1% of the time just completely destroys someone. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.

Thoughts?

I think it's the best implementation of Morale in 40k that I've ever played with.

Because most factions do not have fear like humans do. Even the human factions are fanatical in ways real armies could only dream of. However, units losing some cohesion? That feels like something that could happen.

Edit: Still plenty of room for improvement, though.

It's work good for IG forces, battle shocked unit can't be ordered. And that game changer.

 BorderCountess wrote:
I'm not putting this in 'Proposed Rules' because I don't have a proposal.

So, we all generally crap on battleshock mechanics in current 40k. Chaos knights tend to get crap for having it be their army rule, and the battleshock-focused detachments (looking at you, Night Lords) tend to be pretty lackluster. It just never seems to have a huge impact on the game.

...EXCEPT! I just literally watched the finals of a 6-round tournament come to a screeching halt on Bottom of 3 due to failed battleshock tests. And I mean screeching. I was watching on YouTube, and the affected player, after conceding, immediately killed his mic and the stream had to cut away from the table. This also wasn't a TFG payer, either. In fact, during that very stream, the host store was raffling off a fully-painted army that this guy had painted and donated for charity. And I gather he's a damn good player, too.

So, it feels like battleshock is either a joke mechanic that never really does anything, or 1% of the time just completely destroys someone. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.

Thoughts?

Battle shock the idea isn't horrible. Battle Shock as implemented has a glaring flaw: You can't play for it. If you DO build for it - say with Dark Angels or Night Lords Det - You're most likely to cause the test in your fight phase with your Battle Shocking units (Reivers, Assault Terminators, and the like). So it wears off in their Command Phase. And it often doesn't even take affect until after your attacks so you still aren't preventing things like Armor of Contempt. You have few opportunities to alter the tests, the tests are usually easy to pass, and even if you fail, you're usually losing much less than a player turn let alone a battle round for failing it. Battle Shock would be much better if it had duration. For example: recycle the Broken/Shaken mechanic SM used to have. At the end of your turn, Shocked Units become Shaken. At the beginning of your turn Shaken Units become Normal. At that point you can start to use Battle Shock as a "weapon".

I kinda miss the days of my enemy running away after I knock down 80% of their number.

Or having enemies pinned.

Perhaps, we can have opponents that once they fail a battleshock test must "rally" by passing a leadership test, otherwise they can only fall back thar turn.

Breton wrote:

 BorderCountess wrote:
I'm not putting this in 'Proposed Rules' because I don't have a proposal.

So, we all generally crap on battleshock mechanics in current 40k. Chaos knights tend to get crap for having it be their army rule, and the battleshock-focused detachments (looking at you, Night Lords) tend to be pretty lackluster. It just never seems to have a huge impact on the game.

...EXCEPT! I just literally watched the finals of a 6-round tournament come to a screeching halt on Bottom of 3 due to failed battleshock tests. And I mean screeching. I was watching on YouTube, and the affected player, after conceding, immediately killed his mic and the stream had to cut away from the table. This also wasn't a TFG payer, either. In fact, during that very stream, the host store was raffling off a fully-painted army that this guy had painted and donated for charity. And I gather he's a damn good player, too.

So, it feels like battleshock is either a joke mechanic that never really does anything, or 1% of the time just completely destroys someone. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.

Thoughts?

Battle shock the idea isn't horrible. Battle Shock as implemented has a glaring flaw: You can't play for it. If you DO build for it - say with Dark Angels or Night Lords Det - You're most likely to cause the test in your fight phase with your Battle Shocking units (Reivers, Assault Terminators, and the like). So it wears off in their Command Phase. And it often doesn't even take affect until after your attacks so you still aren't preventing things like Armor of Contempt. You have few opportunities to alter the tests, the tests are usually easy to pass, and even if you fail, you're usually losing much less than a player turn let alone a battle round for failing it. Battle Shock would be much better if it had duration. For example: recycle the Broken/Shaken mechanic SM used to have. At the end of your turn, Shocked Units become Shaken. At the beginning of your turn Shaken Units become Normal. At that point you can start to use Battle Shock as a "weapon".

This sums up my thoughts pretty well. High-concept, I like the idea of battleshocking basically representing your squads being "thrown off their game" enough to disrupt tactics rather than being a cause to run away screaming. As JNA pointed out, the latter just doesn't make sense for most of the factions on the tabletop. So the basic idea of battleshock disrupting your ability to score or hand out buffs feels appropriate.

Buuuut, it also kind of feels like the designers had only thought it halfway through when they started writing the actual rules for battleshock and thinks that interact with it. Most armies/builds can't really do much to try and force battleshock to happen. Those that can usually do so on your own turn, which mostly just makes battleshock a thing that shuts down fight phase stratagems and then goes away before scoring happens in the following command phase. And in those scenarios where you're really worried about a key unit being shocked, there's a stratagem you can use to autopass it just in case.

The Broken/Shaken thing would help make incidental battleshock rules be more useful and matter in the following command phase. I could also see GW introducing a Pinning special rule that either forces battleshocks or imposes a penalty on a battleshock test in the following command phase to give players more ways to play into battleshock rather than it just being a largely random thing that *hopefully* happens at a relevant time.

Lathe Biosas wrote:I kinda miss the days of my enemy running away after I knock down 80% of their number.

Or having enemies pinned.

Perhaps, we can have opponents that once they fail a battleshock test must "rally" by passing a leadership test, otherwise they can only fall back thar turn.

Being forced to fall back (and do a desperate escape) if you fail battleshock could be interesting. I definitely don't miss the running backwards or spend-all-turn-doing-nothing mechanics though. Those were pretty brutal for any army that needed to cross the table to engage the enemy. Plus, the falling backwards one was kind of a pain to resolve.

Battleshock is a decent concept, horribly implemented. It's been obvious from day one that the various "Battleshock in your own turn" abilities are useless because the enemy recovers automatically at the start of their turn, so it's a very niche advantage on an already unreliable effect. Sometimes it can win games on its own, but most of the time it does absolutely nothing.

Personally, I'd make two major changes to Battleshock:

1. You have to roll to recover from it rather than automatically doing it if you're above half strength.

2. Make it turn off more abilities, other than just OC and strats. There's room for adjustment, but I'd like to see it turn off army and detachment abilities for a start, and maybe even datasheet abilities too. Make it actually impactful rather than a minor inconvenience.

While we're at it, I'd make everyone's Ld worse. It was a mistake to star with SM at Ld6. Put them at 7 and adjust everyone else accordingly.

I think Battle Shock would be more fun if it was directly tied to your Warlord.

You can use his Leadership, but if he dies, your entire army must take a Leadership test or be Battleshocked for 1 Game Round.

I think they've got the right idea this edition. Stopping scoring and strats is a good design space. Impacts the right things and matters when it matters quite a bit.

The main issue I see with it is currently it has more bookkeeping than impact. It's very easy to forget to keep track of simply because its a lot of busywork that you don't actually need most of the time. All the timing on it is wrong in a way that makes it unintuitive and regularly played wrong.

Personally, I think the right answer was to shift it away from the idea of "Battleshock" and more around leadership tests. Half strength units for example might need to pass a leadership test before targetting with a strategem or when determining OC values. Make it something that you only check when it matters and you'll see people use it correctly.

 LunarSol wrote:
I think they've got the right idea this edition. Stopping scoring and strats is a good design space. Impacts the right things and matters when it matters quite a bit.

The main issue I see with it is currently it has more bookkeeping than impact. It's very easy to forget to keep track of simply because its a lot of busywork that you don't actually need most of the time. All the timing on it is wrong in a way that makes it unintuitive and regularly played wrong.

Personally, I think the right answer was to shift it away from the idea of "Battleshock" and more around leadership tests. Half strength units for example might need to pass a leadership test before targetting with a strategem or when determining OC values. Make it something that you only check when it matters and you'll see people use it correctly.

I think you're talking about the old Psychology rules, which would also be nice to see have a comeback similar to Battle Shock. It makes sense that even veteran guardsmen, guardians, firewarriors, etc would be afraid (Fear/Terror) of the giant dinosaur rampaging across the battle field. It also makes sense the somewhat simpleminded Ogryns would also have an Instinctive Behavior (Stupidity).

Breton wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
I think they've got the right idea this edition. Stopping scoring and strats is a good design space. Impacts the right things and matters when it matters quite a bit.

The main issue I see with it is currently it has more bookkeeping than impact. It's very easy to forget to keep track of simply because its a lot of busywork that you don't actually need most of the time. All the timing on it is wrong in a way that makes it unintuitive and regularly played wrong.

Personally, I think the right answer was to shift it away from the idea of "Battleshock" and more around leadership tests. Half strength units for example might need to pass a leadership test before targetting with a strategem or when determining OC values. Make it something that you only check when it matters and you'll see people use it correctly.

I think you're talking about the old Psychology rules, which would also be nice to see have a comeback similar to Battle Shock. It makes sense that even veteran guardsmen, guardians, firewarriors, etc would be afraid (Fear/Terror) of the giant dinosaur rampaging across the battle field. It also makes sense the somewhat simpleminded Ogryns would also have an Instinctive Behavior (Stupidity).

Fear/Terror/Psychology is a maybe for me. I'd need to see the specifics of the pitch. My biggest concern with it is that I think you just named about half the units in the game that should reasonably be impacted by fear. It wouldn't be particularly fluffy for anything space marine, necron, tyranid (within synapse), daemonic, robotic, or arguably even aeldari to be all that bothered by the presence of a "scary" dinosaur or whatever.

I like LunarSol's pitch though. Make Battleshock a thing that matters when you try to actually do the things that it should impact (use strats, score, actions, etc.) It would be slightly book-keepy, but you could maybe hand out Shock Tokens to units as they get targeted by Pinning weapons, hit with Fear-based effects, etc. Have them roll Battle Shock when they try to score, use strats, etc. with a penalty based off the number of Shock Tokens they're carrying around. Then let them get rid of a certain number of Shock Tokens at the end of their own turn.

Things like Chaplains could remove some extra shock tokens in the command phase (rather than the end of the turn) to help their unit get back in fighting shape faster. Psychomancers and neurolictors and such could hand out a whole bucket of shock tokens at once. Weapons meant to be disruptive could now easily pile on to a given target without GW having to come up with three different versions of, "This unit moves a little slower" for each one.

I think I like this.

Not to be negative, but I don't think psychology is ever going to be satisfying.

I mean this goes back a long, long way, but I'm minded to think of WHFB. I remember it being something of a meme that High Elf and Dwarf Armies could witness the heat death of the universe and would still happily be passing leadership tests. Even Goblins could get up to something like Ld 9 or 10 (I think depending on edition Crown of Command either gave LD 10 or +1 LD) with a reroll from BSB. Which means so long as that combo is alive, the odds of failing are extremely low - at 0.7% or something.

But as everyone knows, there's a big, generally unsatisfying gap between something with even a 1% chance, and 0% chance. I remember this game where I was playing a Chaos player who'd been terrorising the store. Shot his chariot to death turn 1. He proceeded to roll box cars four times, and his brick of Chaos Warriors and Chaos Knights proceeded to run off the board. Very funny for all concerned - but really it just prompted an immediate "gg go next". Effectively we just un-did my movement phase and started the game again. I guess its given me that memory after 25 years - but it was a bit stupid for the game.

And thats sort of where Battleshock is - but its where any ability is which is in theory decisive, but rare.

You can rebuild the game from scratch so "shock tokens" are integral and built up like Bolt Action etc. But you need to get passed this rub of "this is a disaster, but it only happens rarely". You need it to be almost something that is guaranteed, but is only minorly debilitating.

Basically something a bit like the Nightmare Hunt Grotmas detachment seems sensible. You get +1 to wound a battleshocked unit, and a Battleshocked unit gets -1 to hit. The precise details could be tweaked but you get the idea. In this case its a clear modifier to play around - and not its exactly good to be Battleshocked. But its not auto-game losing to fail those tests. Which in turn means you can design the rules so people will regularly fail them.

Tyel wrote:
But you need to get passed this rub of "this is a disaster, but it only happens rarely". You need it to be almost something that is guaranteed, but is only minorly debilitating.

The issue you're describing is just an artifact of old WHFB and 40K making leadership a binary 'you're fine until you're not' check with potentially dire consequences.

The Old World makes psychology critically important to combat without having full-strength units rout off the board on boxcars. It does this by refining the WHFB psychology system to only have units rout if they fail a morale check under half strength. Above half strength, they 'fall back in good order' on a failed leadership test, where they fall back a lesser distance and automatically rally at the end of the move. Then in combat, a unit that loses a combat and fails its modified Ld check only routs or falls back if it exceeds its unmodified Ld. Otherwise the unit 'gives ground', which makes it move back out of combat but without running. So it's the combination of degree of failure with casualties that produces decisive results. It's still random and impactful, but it isn't decisive until a unit has already been attrited.

In Epic: Armageddon, formations accrue blast markers from casualties and fire, and get rid of blast markers by rallying. Each blast marker prevents a stand in the formation from shooting. When the number of blast markers exceeds the number of stands, the formation is broken and becomes combat ineffective until it can rally. It's an extremely impactful mechanic, but there's no randomness, and units gracefully degrade in capability as they accumulate blast markers rather than go straight from everything-is-fine to run-for-your-lives.

Making the range of outcomes depend on the current state of the unit would avoid the 'sudden death' feeling, while also neatly solving the issue illustrated in the OP of buffs allowing one army to incapacitate the other through psychology alone. The second approach of a more deterministic implementation, like the shock tokens Wyldhunt mentioned, makes the current state of a unit directly visible and something the players can both interact with- when a unit with a whole stack of tokens fails a check, there's no surprise there. Either way, psychology does not need to be reduced to yet another milquetoast predictable -1 modifier that adds more bookkeeping than it's worth in order to avoid once-in-a-blue-moon feelsbad moments.

 BorderCountess wrote:


So, it feels like battleshock is either a joke mechanic that never really does anything, or 1% of the time just completely destroys someone. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.

Thoughts?

I've been there. At a GT last year, I went 4-1 and my loss, by only a handful of points, was in no small part to, when facing Chaos Knights, on round 3 I failed every single battleshock test for my entire army. (Both our armies were horribly mauled at that point so it was only like 7 units, but still...)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I kinda miss the days of my enemy running away after I knock down 80% of their number.

Or having enemies pinned.

Perhaps, we can have opponents that once they fail a battleshock test must "rally" by passing a leadership test, otherwise they can only fall back thar turn.

I do quite miss these as well. I still house rule this for narrative events.

I doubt it will ever come back to the game proper though because they are always balancing for competitive play and it adds a not insignificant amount of time to the turn.

While I agree with you that we're unlikely to see such rules return, Tawnis, I disagree with you reason as to why - the Studio have listened for far too long to those who maintain that it is only with perfect of control of their forces that "player agency" can be maintained, and therefore any rule which might deny that has been phased out.

See also: force construction rules being nixed (aside from the Rule of Three - which, last I checked, doesn't scale these days).

Battle shock needs two things: 1. It should turn off either your detachment or army rules or both. i.e. can't use oath of moment re-rolls if battle shocked. Some armies already kinda have this like orders or TS powers, but it should be universal. It also fits with the narrative of battle shock, as how would a unit that is battle shocked still use advanced tactics like Oath etc. This would make it a real penalty more of the time then just the 1% of times it stops a very important stratagem or costs points due to being unable to score.

Second, the basic battle shock rules should be test for battle shock at less than half strength, or if you start the command phase battle shocked. This way units don't auto pass at the start of the command phase, which makes the vast majority of battle shock rules totally irrelevant. If you could battle shock in say the fight phase, and they failed, then had to test again to essentially un-battle shock, that would be a much more meaningful rule than currently, and then causing out of turn battle shock tests might actually be worth while.

Just my thoughts.

 Dysartes wrote:

See also: force construction rules being nixed (aside from the Rule of Three - which, last I checked, doesn't scale these days).

It kind of does, being Rule of Two in 1000 point games.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

See also: force construction rules being nixed (aside from the Rule of Three - which, last I checked, doesn't scale these days).

It kind of does, being Rule of Two in 1000 point games.

But it's not Rule of Four in 3,000-point games.

 catbarf wrote:

Tyel wrote:
But you need to get passed this rub of "this is a disaster, but it only happens rarely". You need it to be almost something that is guaranteed, but is only minorly debilitating.

The issue you're describing is just an artifact of old WHFB and 40K making leadership a binary 'you're fine until you're not' check with potentially dire consequences.

The Old World makes psychology critically important to combat without having full-strength units rout off the board on boxcars. It does this by refining the WHFB psychology system to only have units rout if they fail a morale check under half strength. Above half strength, they 'fall back in good order' on a failed leadership test, where they fall back a lesser distance and automatically rally at the end of the move. Then in combat, a unit that loses a combat and fails its modified Ld check only routs or falls back if it exceeds its unmodified Ld. Otherwise the unit 'gives ground', which makes it move back out of combat but without running. So it's the combination of degree of failure with casualties that produces decisive results. It's still random and impactful, but it isn't decisive until a unit has already been attrited.

In Epic: Armageddon, formations accrue blast markers from casualties and fire, and get rid of blast markers by rallying. Each blast marker prevents a stand in the formation from shooting. When the number of blast markers exceeds the number of stands, the formation is broken and becomes combat ineffective until it can rally. It's an extremely impactful mechanic, but there's no randomness, and units gracefully degrade in capability as they accumulate blast markers rather than go straight from everything-is-fine to run-for-your-lives.

Making the range of outcomes depend on the current state of the unit would avoid the 'sudden death' feeling, while also neatly solving the issue illustrated in the OP of buffs allowing one army to incapacitate the other through psychology alone. The second approach of a more deterministic implementation, like the shock tokens Wyldhunt mentioned, makes the current state of a unit directly visible and something the players can both interact with- when a unit with a whole stack of tokens fails a check, there's no surprise there. Either way, psychology does not need to be reduced to yet another milquetoast predictable -1 modifier that adds more bookkeeping than it's worth in order to avoid once-in-a-blue-moon feelsbad moments.

I have virtually nothing bad to say about epic Armageddon. The rules implementation was just outstanding across all aspects of play. The blast marker system especially.


Imo for battleshock to work it should be a sticky effect. Place a token on the unit and when it next activates it receives the battleshock effect and recovers at the end of the activation. The definition of activation being whenever it is used to do something which could be melee in the opponent's phase.

What the effect is can be determined later. But for me the direct effect on activation makes it clean and puts it in the centre of game play.

The


Automatically Appended Next Post:
For the rule of 3, that's a pretty simple mechanic to describe.

You may take 1 of each unit, +1 per full 1000pts your army is composed of.

3000pts = 4 of each unit
1000pts = 2 of each unit

5000pts = 6 of each unit
Etc

 BorderCountess wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

See also: force construction rules being nixed (aside from the Rule of Three - which, last I checked, doesn't scale these days).

It kind of does, being Rule of Two in 1000 point games.

But it's not Rule of Four in 3,000-point games.

I'm not sure anyone actually enforces rules in 3000 point games.

 Dysartes wrote:
While I agree with you that we're unlikely to see such rules return, Tawnis, I disagree with you reason as to why - the Studio have listened for far too long to those who maintain that it is only with perfect of control of their forces that "player agency" can be maintained, and therefore any rule which might deny that has been phased out.

See also: force construction rules being nixed (aside from the Rule of Three - which, last I checked, doesn't scale these days).

I don't disagree, but one does not preclude the other. Decisions can be made for a combination of reasons.

When did it stop scaling? All the places I play at have rules of 2/3/4 for the 1000/2000/3000 point brackets, so it didn't seem like a house rule.

 LunarSol wrote:

 BorderCountess wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:

See also: force construction rules being nixed (aside from the Rule of Three - which, last I checked, doesn't scale these days).

It kind of does, being Rule of Two in 1000 point games.

But it's not Rule of Four in 3,000-point games.

I'm not sure anyone actually enforces rules in 3000 point games.

I would.

But once you get beyond that, it's totally more about blowing stuff up at that point, so who cares?

Tyel wrote:
Not to be negative, but I don't think psychology is ever going to be satisfying.

I mean this goes back a long, long way, but I'm minded to think of WHFB. I remember it being something of a meme that High Elf and Dwarf Armies could witness the heat death of the universe and would still happily be passing leadership tests. Even Goblins could get up to something like Ld 9 or 10 (I think depending on edition Crown of Command either gave LD 10 or +1 LD) with a reroll from BSB. Which means so long as that combo is alive, the odds of failing are extremely low - at 0.7% or something.

That was one of the benefits of Fear. Losing to a Fear-causer was some sort of auto fail break test.. So all that layered Morale boosting was for naught. It caught me once when I had a Stubborn Grail Reliquae (anvil) lose to Black Knights I was about to flank charge with grail knights.

Breton wrote:

Tyel wrote:
Not to be negative, but I don't think psychology is ever going to be satisfying.

I mean this goes back a long, long way, but I'm minded to think of WHFB. I remember it being something of a meme that High Elf and Dwarf Armies could witness the heat death of the universe and would still happily be passing leadership tests. Even Goblins could get up to something like Ld 9 or 10 (I think depending on edition Crown of Command either gave LD 10 or +1 LD) with a reroll from BSB. Which means so long as that combo is alive, the odds of failing are extremely low - at 0.7% or something.

That was one of the benefits of Fear. Losing to a Fear-causer was some sort of auto fail break test.. So all that layered Morale boosting was for naught. It caught me once when I had a Stubborn Grail Reliquae (anvil) lose to Black Knights I was about to flank charge with grail knights.

WHFB 5th edition. If you lost combat and were outnumbered by fear causing units you automatically broke.

The big perk of the crown of command in that edition was it made you Ld checks unmodified. I may have run a vampire lord with it in almost all my games, with the BSB next to him for the re-roll. Heading up a unit of mounted wights. Good times.

Undead paid a lot of points to mostly hypocritically ignore most of the psychology rules while slapping other people around with them

So what do you want the concept to deliver in game play? A second option to straight killing models, a penalty to unit's actions, a means of controlling their movement (ie running away) or something else?

There's sort of two components to it - the simulation of battlefield behaviour, and the game features that make it interesting to use.

The advantage that E:A had was that it wasn't an all or nothing mechanic, or a niggly annoyance. They managed to get a scalable system that was an effective tool in battlefield control.