The Ninth Gate: Morale

Nearly done with my pre-emptive look at 9th Ed. Remember, it's all completely correct until the future proves otherwise.

Today, the phase that time forgot - Morale!

The End Phase Times

Most wargames (and many similar board games) have a tidying-up phase at the end of a game turn. It's the moment when you take away all those nasty Stun counters your opponent has slapped on you, or tot up your victory points over a swift swig of IPA and a handful of Wotsits.

Funnily enough, the old style Morale phase wasn't really its own thing in earlier editions of 40K. It was spread out through the entire round. Break Tests, when they were the way battlefield terror was resolved, happened at the end of any phase when a unit had taken 25% casulties. If they failed, you immediately lost control of them and they legged it. This sometimes happened for other reasons too, like being attacked by a sufficiently Terrifying creature, or from being hit with psychic powers.

Rather than rallying at the end of a turn, they would try and recover at the start of a new turn. And if they didn't feel like coming back, they'd keep running until they left. As a veteran of this system, especially in Fantasy Battle, it was the worst thing to have to deal with. Worse even than Wood Elves.

A random dice roll meant you essentially lost the unit, but you'd still have to do busy work, moving and checking morale over and over. So they're out of the game, but they still slow it down! Well, that's just great.

8th Ed got rid of it, along with most psychology. Now, you roll at the end of the round for a unit that's taken casualties, add the dead guys and lose another model for each point that you beat your own Leadership value by.

Simple? Yes. Effective? Well, kind of.

It's so much faster, and avoids all that miserable schlepping of cowards about the board. But it also feels simplistic, an abstraction much more than the other, similarly abstract, rules. It also rarely effects the game very much, especially given that you can mitigate it with a strategem.

Not that it isn't good, really. I like that it's less of a big deal, less of a make-or-break part of the game. And I like that even if it doesn't matter often, it tends to be important when it does! Having the choice of passing or failing, CP allowing, is also a great decision to have to consider in a battle.

But it's an oversimplification. A broken model just vanishes immediately, effectively dead for the rest of the game. It also makes taking large units risky. The more models you have in one, the higher the risk is that your opponent shoots out enough to auto-fail a morale check and instantly deal with the other half. Tyranid bias talking here, perhaps, but it feels like a tax on big squads, so you don't see them so often in the game.

Thing is, I reckon it could go further. There are some changes I'd like to see, although I don't think they're very likely to appear in 9th.

If It's Not Broken, Don't Rally It

First option, and the most obvious one, is to leave it alone. The new rules works fine, it ties in nicely with Strats and Ld debuffs, and most of us don't seem unhappy with it.

Likelihood of Change: 95%, and let's be honest, that's a good thing

Fly You Fools

Second option, and an outside chance, would be to scrap it altogether.

Seriously, would you actually miss it that much? You paid points (and good money) for those models. A game where they stay on the table until something murders them off it is probably going to be more fun. Less realistic, sure, but you don't come to 40K for the gritty accuracy of its simulated war logistics.

Having it gone makes the game faster and simpler. GW are erring towards this side anyway, you could argue it's the next and most obvious step. Equally, if you like this approach, why not play Tyranids and rarely bother with Morale anyway?

Likelihood of Change: 4%. You know most of us pretend our tiny men have souls, so why not psychology?

Minority Retort

Private 24681! Look Down!

Third option, and my favourite, is to change the effect of a failed morale test.

So the system stays the same, a roll against Ld with casualties taken as a modifier. But instead of removing models from the game, consider these alternatives for a failed test:

1. The unit immediately has to Fall Back, and counts as having done so on their next turn too. So no charging, shooting or advancing, but they can still move. To e.g. get to the chopper.
2. The unit is Suppressed, and gets a blanket -1 to hit until their next Morale Phase. 
3. The unit is Suppressed, as above, but it stays until the end of the game. And stacks on repeats. 
4. Your opponent gets to move the unit immediately, once with no advances as though falling back, and they count as having already moved in their next turn

I'm sure you can come up with your own. The point here is not to discourage people from using large squads. They stay in the game, you paid for them after all, but they're going to be less use. It also feels slightly more psychological than the sudden vanishing of people from the game. 

Likelihood of Change: 1%. It's my favourite, therefore it's the least likely. That's how these things work. 

And that's all the phases done! I'm not quite finished rambling yet, there's going to be one last set of predictions to come along with a sort of round-up. Stay, as ever, tuned.