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This does require number tracking but my idea is that each unity has a morale life of 10. At the morale phase, they would roll leadership with a penalty for every wound inflicted. If they fail, they lose morale life equal to the difference, then if they have 0 morale life left, they all retreat from the battlefield, retreating in the process.

Having played most of the editions, I've had mixed feelings with morale.

The retreat of older editions while simulative was annoying to keep track as it often lead to a mess of models pointing different directions.

8th was my favorite but it made losing models too quickly and felt odd when some retreat off while others didn't

10th is my least favorite. It's fun that the unit stays but it seems nonsense that they just can't capture.

I think this would capture all the strengths of the previous editions, with the longevity of 10th, the ease of 8th, and the realism of the older editions.

The problem with morale is you have some units that are immune to morale.

Lobotomized gun servitors and mindless Plague zombies aren't going to run away even if they should.

That's why I think morale should be tied into your Warlord or HQ units as they are your proxy on the tabletop giving orders.

The trick is how to tie them together.

 NivNeos wrote:
This does require number tracking but my idea is that each unity has a morale life of 10. At the morale phase, they would roll leadership with a penalty for every wound inflicted. If they fail, they lose morale life equal to the difference, then if they have 0 morale life left, they all retreat from the battlefield, retreating in the process.

Having played most of the editions, I've had mixed feelings with morale.

The retreat of older editions while simulative was annoying to keep track as it often lead to a mess of models pointing different directions.

8th was my favorite but it made losing models too quickly and felt odd when some retreat off while others didn't

10th is my least favorite. It's fun that the unit stays but it seems nonsense that they just can't capture.

I think this would capture all the strengths of the previous editions, with the longevity of 10th, the ease of 8th, and the realism of the older editions.

Respectfully, I think I'd hate this. It means that taking any number of casualties at all turns your unit into a ticking time bomb that will eventually vanish from the table even if they haven't been shot at since the first turn. It's the "take damage because you took damage" thing that people disliked about 8th, but cranked up to 11 (albeit with the plus side that you at least don't lose any extra performance from your units until they suddenly vanish.)

For most factions in the game, running away at all doesn't really make sense, but this potentially leads to 19-man boyz squads or 9-man marine squads abruptly vanishing en masse halfway through the game because they took a single casualty and then rolled badly on a few leadership tests.

It also doesn't sound like it's particularly interactive. Maybe if you added an abundance of mechanics to restore Morale Life or something... But even then, having to constantly keep an eye on 19 guys because 1 guy got shot still feels off. This also runs into the problem with past morale systems (such as 8th's) where it disproportionately punishes less durable armies or armies designed to lose a lot of bodies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
The problem with morale is you have some units that are immune to morale.

Lobotomized gun servitors and mindless Plague zombies aren't going to run away even if they should.

That's why I think morale should be tied into your Warlord or HQ units as they are your proxy on the tabletop giving orders.

The trick is how to tie them together.

I feel like that risks devolving into creating a "warlord tax" where you take the cheapest, easiest to hide character in your codex in every list and then hide him in a corner to cower all game so that you don't auto-lose the game by having the audacity to try actually using him. And again, this goes double for squishy armies.

Wanted to make a succubus your warlord? Lul. Hope that paper-thin transport keeps her safe. Oh, you wanted to get her into melee so she can be cool and duel opponents like her fluff and rules suggest? Pfft. Okay. Guess you're really eager to have your whole army start running away because she got boltered to death.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 NivNeos wrote:
This does require number tracking but my idea is that each unity has a morale life of 10. At the morale phase, they would roll leadership with a penalty for every wound inflicted. If they fail, they lose morale life equal to the difference, then if they have 0 morale life left, they all retreat from the battlefield, retreating in the process.

Having played most of the editions, I've had mixed feelings with morale.

The retreat of older editions while simulative was annoying to keep track as it often lead to a mess of models pointing different directions.

8th was my favorite but it made losing models too quickly and felt odd when some retreat off while others didn't

10th is my least favorite. It's fun that the unit stays but it seems nonsense that they just can't capture.

I think this would capture all the strengths of the previous editions, with the longevity of 10th, the ease of 8th, and the realism of the older editions.

Respectfully, I think I'd hate this. It means that taking any number of casualties at all turns your unit into a ticking time bomb that will eventually vanish from the table even if they haven't been shot at since the first turn. It's the "take damage because you took damage" thing that people disliked about 8th, but cranked up to 11 (albeit with the plus side that you at least don't lose any extra performance from your units until they suddenly vanish.)

For most factions in the game, running away at all doesn't really make sense, but this potentially leads to 19-man boyz squads or 9-man marine squads abruptly vanishing en masse halfway through the game because they took a single casualty and then rolled badly on a few leadership tests.

It also doesn't sound like it's particularly interactive. Maybe if you added an abundance of mechanics to restore Morale Life or something... But even then, having to constantly keep an eye on 19 guys because 1 guy got shot still feels off. This also runs into the problem with past morale systems (such as 8th's) where it disproportionately punishes less durable armies or armies designed to lose a lot of bodies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
The problem with morale is you have some units that are immune to morale.

Lobotomized gun servitors and mindless Plague zombies aren't going to run away even if they should.

That's why I think morale should be tied into your Warlord or HQ units as they are your proxy on the tabletop giving orders.

The trick is how to tie them together.

I feel like that risks devolving into creating a "warlord tax" where you take the cheapest, easiest to hide character in your codex in every list and then hide him in a corner to cower all game so that you don't auto-lose the game by having the audacity to try actually using him. And again, this goes double for squishy armies.

Wanted to make a succubus your warlord? Lul. Hope that paper-thin transport keeps her safe. Oh, you wanted to get her into melee so she can be cool and duel opponents like her fluff and rules suggest? Pfft. Okay. Guess you're really eager to have your whole army start running away because she got boltered to death.

I meant you can use their Leadership until they die, and the. You are forced to use individual unit's Leadership which should be much lower.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 NivNeos wrote:
This does require number tracking but my idea is that each unity has a morale life of 10. At the morale phase, they would roll leadership with a penalty for every wound inflicted. If they fail, they lose morale life equal to the difference, then if they have 0 morale life left, they all retreat from the battlefield, retreating in the process.

Having played most of the editions, I've had mixed feelings with morale.

The retreat of older editions while simulative was annoying to keep track as it often lead to a mess of models pointing different directions.

8th was my favorite but it made losing models too quickly and felt odd when some retreat off while others didn't

10th is my least favorite. It's fun that the unit stays but it seems nonsense that they just can't capture.

I think this would capture all the strengths of the previous editions, with the longevity of 10th, the ease of 8th, and the realism of the older editions.

Respectfully, I think I'd hate this. It means that taking any number of casualties at all turns your unit into a ticking time bomb that will eventually vanish from the table even if they haven't been shot at since the first turn. It's the "take damage because you took damage" thing that people disliked about 8th, but cranked up to 11 (albeit with the plus side that you at least don't lose any extra performance from your units until they suddenly vanish.)

For most factions in the game, running away at all doesn't really make sense, but this potentially leads to 19-man boyz squads or 9-man marine squads abruptly vanishing en masse halfway through the game because they took a single casualty and then rolled badly on a few leadership tests.

It also doesn't sound like it's particularly interactive. Maybe if you added an abundance of mechanics to restore Morale Life or something... But even then, having to constantly keep an eye on 19 guys because 1 guy got shot still feels off. This also runs into the problem with past morale systems (such as 8th's) where it disproportionately punishes less durable armies or armies designed to lose a lot of bodies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
The problem with morale is you have some units that are immune to morale.

Lobotomized gun servitors and mindless Plague zombies aren't going to run away even if they should.

That's why I think morale should be tied into your Warlord or HQ units as they are your proxy on the tabletop giving orders.

The trick is how to tie them together.

I feel like that risks devolving into creating a "warlord tax" where you take the cheapest, easiest to hide character in your codex in every list and then hide him in a corner to cower all game so that you don't auto-lose the game by having the audacity to try actually using him. And again, this goes double for squishy armies.

Wanted to make a succubus your warlord? Lul. Hope that paper-thin transport keeps her safe. Oh, you wanted to get her into melee so she can be cool and duel opponents like her fluff and rules suggest? Pfft. Okay. Guess you're really eager to have your whole army start running away because she got boltered to death.

I meant you can use their Leadership until they die, and the. You are forced to use individual unit's Leadership which should be much lower.

I was thinking of using Leadership as life but with difference, low Ld would die much faster. As for those immune to morale, they simply have no morale life, they can't run away.

Also it might be a little misleading to call it life. It's mechanical like a HP bar or Wounds, but it more so for willpower.

The issue can be reframed so that units are affected even if 'fearless'.

The real function of morale is unit control and action modifiers as an alternative to pure model removal. So you have multiple means of affecting target performance.

The only problem with morale is the term used and it's inferred action.

Change it to disruption and any unit can be affected by the chaos of war, no matter how fearless or skilled.

Every unit can be disrupted but the way it works will depend on the faction. A necron may not be scared but it will be disoriented by explosions and fire coming from multiple directions. A Guardsman might be terrified instead.

The point is to have more than just kill as tactic and you only need to reframe the concept to allow something to work

On that note, and at the risk of hijacking the thread, I rather liked this concept from one of the other threads:

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.

I imagine you could create a table balanced against each faction for their 'battleshock/disruption' token count that causes different effects.

ie

1 token = -1 OC per model
2 tokens = 1/2 movement
3 tokens = no strategems

etc

And cumulative.

It follows the same mechanical style as a lot of the grudge/drugs style tables of the past.

and clearly unique for each faction, so necrons might be:

1 token = -1 OC per model
2 tokens = no strategems
3 tokens = no resurrection rolls

or something like that

I'd be open to that, but it's also a lot more work and probably a lot harder to balance than something simple like just imposing a penalty on Ld tests when the unit tries to score/use strats/perform actions.

It's a lot less to remember as well.

Well you don't really have to remember it, any more than you have to remember the Votann grudges or the eldar fleet options.

You just see the number of tokens the unit has and look at the list that tells you what 2 of them does.


My objective with something like this is to make it a useful tactic rather than a minor side effect.

Minor inconveniences seem there just to pay lipservice to modelling the concept of disruption in warfare, rather than providing a meaningful tactical option in your actions.


Otherwise you run into the issue that morale had in the past, where it is just ultimately better to kill the models than try to inflict special morale conditions on them.


It needs to sit as an alternative to just killing things so it becomes an attack option. Otherwise it's just an annoyance being keeping around for nostalgia.

I feel like preventing key enemy units from benefitting from stratagems or scoring for a turn could be game winning if you're able to stack shock tokens on them to make it likely they'll fail their shock tests.

With some refinement, this is what I've come up with,

Firstly, there would be no more Morale phase.

Instead, in an attack, whatever shooting or fighting, for every successful hit, the unit suffers shock, then wounds rolls would only apply to wounds. After armor saves and removing models from wounds, you would then roll 3d6 and need to roll equal or higher than your Ld increased by the amount of shock. If you fail, the amount of shock that is the difference of failure becomes pressure. A unit can only have up to 10 combination of shock and pressure and once a unit has 10 pressure, they retreat off the board.

At the start of a round, if a unit didn't receive shock on the last round, they loses all their shock.

I am going to play this on TTS and tell how it goes.

I forgot to mention that another reason I think this is a good idea is that it justifies Hit rolls and Wound rolls as two separate rolls, and adds interesting depth were going for wound rolls would help with immediate damages, and hit for long term, total defeat.

An Intercessor squad can put out 40+ shots mostly hitting on a 2+.
That’s reliably 35 hits or so.

I did some playtesting and generally really liked it. It definitely made me aware of my habits and it felt liberating that squads can just go after being hit, and not remembering the morale phase was a refresher, but I needed to do little changes;

I really didn't like the continuous shock and pressure tracking, and its hard to recover from it so stacking can be easily done. Pressuring someone out should be an commitment. So I'm going to change it where there's just pressure and the shock is just the penalty.

Cover saves should help ward off hits so instead of an armor save, its a BS reducer, so a 4+ cover save would reduce a 3+ BS to 6+ BS.

I'd be curious to hear you address JNA's last comment. As they pointed out, some units have a very high rate of fire. If all I need to do to remove a terminator brick or land raider from the table is to point my 40+ swooping hawk shots at it, then that's going to make high toughness/wounds/good saves massively less useful for keeping units alive.

EDIT: The average result on 3d6 is 10.5. Without any rerolls or modifiers, the average number of hits from 40 swooping hawk shots is about 26.67. So even with an Ld10 unit, you're going to average just 20.5 on your morale test. To *not* run away vs the 26.67, you'd need to roll a 17 on 3d6.

Cover saves should help ward off hits so instead of an armor save, its a BS reducer, so a 4+ cover save would reduce a 3+ BS to 6+ BS.

I feel like this is an entirely separate proposal from Morale changes. Might want to put it in a different thread to avoid confusing the discussion.

You always succeed on a 12+ and you can't get more penalized than that, so there is a cap on high ROF where it becomes redundant.

On average, you will get a 7 and therefore 5 pressure.

 NivNeos wrote:
You always succeed on a 12+ and you can't get more penalized than that, so there is a cap on high ROF where it becomes redundant.

On average, you will get a 7 and therefore 5 pressure.

You said you roll 3d6. Did you mean 2d6?

Because looking at the post that seemed to explain it...

 NivNeos wrote:
With some refinement, this is what I've come up with,

Firstly, there would be no more Morale phase.

Instead, in an attack, whatever shooting or fighting, for every successful hit, the unit suffers shock, then wounds rolls would only apply to wounds. After armor saves and removing models from wounds, you would then roll 3d6 and need to roll equal or higher than your Ld increased by the amount of shock. If you fail, the amount of shock that is the difference of failure becomes pressure. A unit can only have up to 10 combination of shock and pressure and once a unit has 10 pressure, they retreat off the board.

At the start of a round, if a unit didn't receive shock on the last round, they loses all their shock.

I am going to play this on TTS and tell how it goes.

I forgot to mention that another reason I think this is a good idea is that it justifies Hit rolls and Wound rolls as two separate rolls, and adds interesting depth were going for wound rolls would help with immediate damages, and hit for long term, total defeat.

Once you hit 10+ Shock and/or Pressure, you die.
You get one Shock per hit. So 10 hits would kill any unit in the entire game.

I don't THINK that's how you're playing it, but that's how it reads. Can you clarify what you actually mean?

Edit: Follow up point!

If your morale has two stages-that being totally fine and dead-I don't think it's a good system.
Morale should be a way to impact opposing units without outright deleting them. If it's just a second health bar, that feels like a poor implementation.