Thoughts On Morale in Wargaming Rules 

I sometimes feel like moral has an almost psychological effect on the player as well. When I first started playing Age of Sigmar, I had started with Skaven. After a few games I discovered that I really dislike playing horde armies; not because of the army itself (love the Skaven models) but because taking a dozen Skaven off the table from combat and an additional 6 due to moral losses was actually having a demoralizing effect on me. I hated taking so many models off the table at once, but also found the demoralizing effect to be really profound. I now play Bloodbound/Slaves to darkness and am happy :)

I think Morale is one of the more important things that makes a "wargame" a "game about war".

I have always enjoyed the moral mechanic in war games. I used love getting the enemy to break in total war. Now that I am playing Bolt Action my buddies and I are enjoying the pinning aspect. That said, we are primarily currently or formerly infantry, and some of us have been legit pinned down over seas, so I think we have more sympathy for the guy saying nope as well as a large part of our section level doctrine is to do with pinning the enemy and then pushing the advatage, which we like to simulate on the table. I used to play Operation Flashpoint when it first came out. The game actually kind of worked at pinning you, as if you got hit even once, you were likely dead or limping, so you did not want to lose your progress to a lucky spray and pray from the computer.

Unrelated to your video, but I recently found your stuff and it has inspired me to get back into the hobby.

Bolt Action. Seeing your units pinned can be frustrating, but having to think ahead or adapt to pinning calamities improves the experience. From version 1 to version 2 the makers realised that the pinning and rallying rules needed a tweak. No one wants to spend all battle watching orders being ignored and soldiers are generally trained, proud and brave and when told to pull themselves together and fight, they generally do.

The Total War series of computer games have morale baked into tactical combat. It is a key game-play component. In the right circumstances you can make an entire army route even though they've taken ~5% casualties.

I think the best Pinning/morale rules are used in Bolt Action and Gates of Antares. For those un familiar with the rules; every time your unit takes a hit you gain a pin marker, when its time to activate that unit they must make a morale check rolling equal or below with a negative -1 to your morale value (not the roll) for every pin marker. If the test is passed then they may act normally but if they fail they go down and may do nothing else this turn. If a unit has a number of pin markers equal to the unit size they are removed from play as they run away.

Atom, your videos have made me appreciate the hobby even more than I used to. I might not be a huge fan of 40k anymore, but your videos have brought some of the smaller-scale skirmish games into my line of sight and made me more interested in the hobby than I have been in recent years. I know I'm just one person but genuinely from me, thank you.

I have to agree with earlier comments about Bolt Action/Antares and Saga. Different morale systems, but both are really well done. This discussion reminded me of one of my disappointments with WM MK3. Rather than finding a way to make morale work within the game, now every unit and model is basically fearless.

It's already been mentioned but the Bolt Action morale rules are really awesome. In a lot of games, pinning happens to units as you try to kill them. Sometimes in Bolt Action, you know you aren't going to kill something necessarily, but if you can pin them you can lower their effectiveness. Morale and pinning are at the core of Bolt Action/Konflikt 47 and it makes for really enjoyable games.

i find morale very frustrating in 40k mostly because of how many armies / units ignore it entirely

Just what I needed, been looking to try understand morale rules better for my tabletop game. Thanks 'Big thumbs up'

I'm glad you touched on this Adam as I have come to feel the same way as I'm now in my 40s as well. I find that the orders/morale system in Bolt Action is fantastic. Its a very integrated system to control initiative as well as provide something more detailed than IGOUGO. Specifically what I find most entertaining is that while I may come to the table with an overall strategy, I have quit trying to plot out turn by turn plans of what I want to do. I adopt a general strategy and am then forced to adjust on the fly as my troops either execute or fail to execute my orders. This to me proves to be so much more challenging as a tabletop general. I wish this system could be adapted to more genres. I know Test of Honor (also by Warlord Games) uses a variant of this and it's fun too. Great content as always.

absolutely love the morale concept on table top. adds a degree of realism and Forces commanders to try to preserve the lives of their troops. not to mention it can lead to some fantastic moments. once had a 30 bug gaunt squad come on from reserves, realized they were out of synapse, rolled poorly, they ate a handful of themselves, then failed leadership and the whole squad ran right back off the board they came on.

I've only recently come to tabletop miniature wargaming (through a short path that goes: Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower -> Age of Sigmar), but I've had a long history of seeing morale rules in other games. I began with Dungeons & Dragons back in the early 80s, where the understandable Morale rules of Basic D&D (rather than the overly fiddly ones of AD&D) were as follows: Monsters had morales typically of 6-9. Roll 2d6 when the first monster of a group is slain, and when half the monsters are slain. The monsters run/surrender if you roll over their morale. So, this idea of morale being a key part of battle was something I got to know very early on. Player characters didn't roll morale - the better to keep the actions of the players paramount (and because we're talking about an individual scale here, not like the small or larger groups of monsters). Henchmen of the players did have loyalty, however - whether they'd follow the orders of the PCs or not! Many years later in the mid-2000s, I became interested in hex'n'counter wargames. Two in particular I played a lot of: Advanced Squad Leader and the Great Battles of History line from GMT Games, in particular, SPQR (Roman Republic battles). With ASL, I basically saw the old 2d6 system of D&D done again - but with far more detail. Squads (of about 8-12 men) were pinned by fire, broken - and thereby routed - or occasionally eliminated. A complex set of rules determined where they'd run to - or if they'd surrender to the opposing forces. Yes, ASL can have your troops having to deal with prisoners on the battlefield. How "realistic" the implemention isn't really the point, but I'm not sure how many miniature games even entertain the idea of having to assign troops to move prisoners about. Meanwhile, SPQR - with single counters representing hundreds of men - implements routing off the battlefield as a significant problem. In SPQR, one unit routing can cause the units bringing up the rear to rout as well; a chain reaction that can doom the entire army. I'm informed that this was a problem in ancient warfare. (A related item of interest: cavalry units will occasionally rout the enemy... and pursue them off the battlefield and be lost to your forces for that battle...) And current D&D has abandoned morale rules, to leave monster actions in the hand of the DM. (There's an optional system that isn't particularly deep). I quite like Age of Sigmar's morale rules, mainly because (a) they're simple and (b) they do show quite well the impact of losing your friends in battle. If my unit is being slaughtered, do I want to stay around to be slaughtered as well? Probably not! (I don't think AoS, by default, handles the loss of units on the morale of an entire army, correct?) For myself, the more combatants that are present on the battlefield, the more I appreciate morale rules. In a game of BattleTech with 4 mechs vs 4 mechs is morale going to add much to the game? Not really. But once you get to hundreds of combatants - or even thousands or tens of thousands (SPQR) - then morale becomes more of a mechanic I appreciate.

Red Orchestra 2 is a good example of a shooter with a great emphasis on morale. You still wouldn'd run away when under fire but you screen turns black and white, your controls start to get wobbly and your character is screaming things in panic. The only option for the player is then to cower in cover or straight up run away and look for a safer place.

The 'Close Combat' video game series comes to mind the way you speak about morale.

Brothers In Arms (a squad-leader tactical FPS) had suppression. You could order either of your two teams to suppress the enemy, while you or the other team flanks them. Your guys could also be suppressed. If your character is under fire, then the screen starts turning red to reflect that until you get your head down. But morale is better shown in strategy games. The Total War series uses morale as a core concept, as do more serious games like Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings and Ultimate General.

I always loved the idea of morale, because it adds the aspect of randomness to an otherwise very linear and predictable game. I know gamers who get frustrated when they see their master strategy just crumbling before their eyes the moment their troops start to run - but I think this is just another aspect of wargaming that we need to keep in mind when figuring out those same strategies. Aside from this, it also gives us a way to identify ourselves with the imaginary armies fighting our battles, and that is a big bonus to me.

Hi! I think the first time I really enjoyed morale in wargaming was when I learnt how to use it to give me a tactical edge. I distinctly remember running orcs and goblins in 7th edition and for ages it was a stupid side thing that I often forgot, but after one game where a big swing was an effective use of a giant I started to take morale a lot more seriously. I think the key thing is if the game makes it easy for you to appreciate or whether it feels like a chore.

My group has recently gotten into konflikt 47/ bolt action. We love the pinning and morale mechanic in that system. Works really well.

I quite like the interaction with a Morale rule in Infinity, which is some units might be Religious. Most units when shot at, if you want them to stay where they are and not fall back or hide need to pass a 'guts' check. You can also choose for them to automatically fail and hide. Religious units, like knights in big honking armour, driven on by faith flip that dynamic; They can always choose to pass but have to actively try to fall back. I like how you can have units that are so stubborn they won't back down from a fight with morale systems, as well as the ones that keep ducking their head and letting the enemy ad vance.

Flames of War handled Morale very well. The most interesting situation I've had in that game was a platoon of Sherman's vs a Tiger tank. The Sherman's couldn't actually blow up the Tiger from the front, but they CAN tie their firepower score with it's armor value. If you do that the target crew is stunned. If you force that twice, they have to pass a morale test, if they fail, they flee. So essentially, you can beat superior units, if you shoot them a ton, and literally scare them off. I thought that was cool.

My intro into Warhammer40K was Advanced Space Crusade, it was like Space Hulk but you were in a Tyranid Ship. AND you didn't even have terminators, you had Scouts! Talk about morale, try convincing scouts to jump into a Tryanid ship, all they get is a combat knife and a bolt pistol!

kings of war has an interesting system where at the beginning of your turn you do a nerve test. this is based on the number of hits on the unit plus the roll of 2xD6. there are 2 figures given and on the lower one the unit wavers and cannot do some of its actions. On the higher figure the unit routs and is gone. This is cumulative so the more hits a unit takes the more likely it is to waver rout. I think the system works well (barring extremely bad dice rolls}.

My favorite battlshock rule for age of sigmar is for the dwarf Hammerer's. They font take a battlshock test if there is a hero within "16. Really helpful rule!

Your first experience with Space Hulk is an interesting one as a system with an absence of morale mechanics: it fits with the game very well and you don't think there is anything missing because either the troops have super-human motivation (Terminators) or are aliens with a completely different psychology and lacking a sense of self (Genestealer) so suspension of disbelief is well maintained. I like morale effects in wargames..... I think anyone who has read any military history will appreciate the importance of simulating the mismatch between a commander's intent and the actual execution of those orders by front line troops. It adds depth to the tactical thinking you need to be an effective tabeltop commander. Thanks for the video :)

I first encountered Moral Rules with the Squad Leader rules back in 1983 or so. The entire game combat system is based upon Moral. Its actually really hard to get a KIA result in that game. Larger game systems use Attrition, Supplies, or Combat Readiness to simulate moral like functions at a higher level. A recent WW1 Grand Strategy game I played, you first had to stockpile supplies to conduct offensive battles. Moral is good for games, but younger adults and new people to the hobby may not have that sort of exposure (yet). But the games are much more fun and dynamic when you include good Moral rules.

Morale is Fog of War. In Historical Wargaming, it is a key ingredient to not only the realism factor, but to the tension and level of excitement in a game. To me nothing beats, the anticipation and focus of a pivotal die roll at a key moment of the game, which may decide the outcome. The quotes always seem to be similar, "My guys love being killed" for a positive result and "I can't believe they broke" for the negative.

Nice video, I like the 'morale' aspects of Lion and Dragon Rampant's rules, as you have to carefully consider which troops you are going to move from turn to turn, as a failed activation can totally screw your plans up. I'd like to see more morale effects in the new 40k but suspect GW will leave that part of the rules alone somehow :(

watching this video helped me reach an interesting idea for how i want to manage, or perspectively mismanage, morale in my minitures game.

I must admit I do like the AoS approach, crippling fear is not something you get over in a few seconds and rally from, and in the same token; it would affect every soldier the same. great video fella! :)

Warmaster's command mechanic is my favourite effective implementation of a morale rule. Having units (or entire forces) not even act sometimes is fantastic. :) It really makes you think outside the square and forces you to change your tactics on the fly.

I can't think of any cool morale rules but I do play Flames of War (Now in its fourth iteration), which I understand you also enjoy, and morale plays a respectable role in that game. From remounting bailed out tanks and rallying pinned troops all the way to multiple considerations regarding unit/formation morale makes morale in FoW an actual way to beat your opponent and I personally think that is very cool.

The pinning mechanic in Epic Armageddon is perhaps the best I know. Taking fire and some other factors add pinning markers to your formations, which in turn prevents stands from firing (one stand/vehicle can't fire for each pinning marker on the formation) and affects formation activation, close combat effectiveness and may lead to the formation breaking and fleeing. Broken formations take extra casualties and are instantly destroyed if engaged in close quarters and lose. It's a pretty elegant system in my mind and one that I absolutely love.

I've been playing war-games since the very late 80's and I always loved morale. In a lot of the older games you could performa a fighting withdrawal, orderly retreat, or if things really go south, your unit routes.

Saga. Even though it is a very light set of rules they still managed to work in morale. The fatigue generated during fighting kind of represents an element of morale, but when a unit is destroyed any friendly units within a short distance are given extra fatigue. In Dark Age vicious hand to hand combat a lot of your courage is based on the confidence that you are in a winnable fight and that you are not being over run. If you witness friends being cut down do you just fight on unaffected? I doubt it.

I recently picked up Runewars and while I have yet to play it, based on what I've seen from videos and reading the rules the way they do morale is pretty interesting. it's kind of setup in a way that you and your opponent can cause morale issues with your characters by making good or bad choices. like if you charge with a unit and miss, they take a morale hit. it is an interesting system and im really looking forward to seeing how it plays.

There's a great game from Osprey called "Horizon Wars" by Robey Jenkins. It's a sci-fi combined arms game (normally played 6mm-15mm). You entire platoon of tanks, troops, mechs and aircraft have "momentum". In a mission, your entire force's momentum gets chipped away at by loses, your opponents success, and general fatigue. You can move fewer units and have to start thinking about where to direct your energy to secure an objective. It's an interesting type of "macro" morale, rather than individual figures. Also, an excellent game that's super fun and SUPER CHEAP to play. Can't recommend enough.

Several historical rules I have played, such as early Wargames Research Group from the '70 or the Lion Rampant rules I am just getting into, also allow for units to decide that they are just plain going to attack no matter how much you want them not to. Great fun; sometimes they even make the right decision.

Best: Epic 40k, Epic Armageddon. Both simple and elegant. Honourable mention: Heavy Gear 2e. Effective without being overbearing, though weighed down by other issues.

in modern x-com there is a panic mechanism a panic soldier will randomly do something sometime helpful(shooting at the enemies) sometime stupid(running out of cover)

My friends and I play a fantasy version of the war game Piquet and it made me evolve as a player for the reasons you cite. There are morale rules, but more importantly, the turn sequence is broken down into cards. For example, one card might be Infantry Move in Open - meaning any infantry units can move if they're in open terrain. Players have decks of cards, and those may not be equal. For example, one army might have more Move in Open cards than the other. You can *only* act on the card you have showing at the moment. And you don't know the order of your deck (they're shuffled each turn). So you *really* have a situation where your figures will not do what you want them to do at the exact time you want. Which actually makes the game a more realistic simulation of actual combat - when you look at how events progress across the entire length of the battle. It's impossible for you, as a general, to command individual soldiers like automatons. You only have a general idea of your strengths and capabilities, and you need to devise a *simple* plan to execute. Otherwise, you will likely fail. We enjoy the rules set tremendously.

Runewars - Give it a go since you got a boxset at adepticon. The morale rules are well thought out with cards card effects more or less impacting your unit as you receive more panic tokens

Hey, really enjoy your videos. Anyway, on the topic of video games with morale check/pinning mechanics, there are a few titles I remember from old original xbox games. Mostly they were squad based titles like Star Wars: Rebulic Commando, which in my opinion implemented it the best, or The Thing and Area 51. Sadly it wasn't a very popular mechanic and seems to have mostly been phased out of fps. But, some more recent horror/survival titles have brought back a terror mechanic that makes your character act erratically like Alien. Anyway keep up the great work.

My favourite ruleset is currently Sharp Practice V2 and it really emphasises the effect of morale on a blackpowder battle rather than soldier attrition. Each unit accrues "shock" that eventually begins to affect their effectiveness, but also significant events lower the overall Force Morale to eventually affect the effectiveness of the officers.

Oh, and there was one memorable moment, a lowly GI kept the advancing german unit pinned down by firing and making them scatter - now that was memorable 'wargame' moment. :-)

Bolt Action/Antares was mentioned earlier and that's my favorite type of handling the morale as well. First time I saw that mechanic was in Epic Armageddon and I've loved it ever since. Pin or Blast markers not only hinder your units effectiveness but they also make it easier for you to fail morale checks (activation too in bolt/antares) That's simple enough and still has depth in it to create immersion. And with actual markers representing explosions around the unit it's really visual too. What's not to like. :) Going to implement blast markers to shadow war as pin counters once I get my group jump in to the hype. In the game Horizon Wars from osprey morale is handled altogether differently. Actually the game don't have any specific morale rule. Instead once units start to take hits the player on the receiving end of the bullets has to decrease stats from his/hers units. If opponent rolls a critical he gets to choose which stat is decreased. Usually damage points and with the case of infantry which have only one point in their damage stat they are instantly destroyed. In other cases the unit, be it infantry or bigger warmachine, decreases it's stats and thus decreasing it's effectiveness. After a while units are quite useless unless they spend activation in order to 'heal' some of the damage taken. This method kind of simulates morale in a sense that units under fire become less effective and they have to retreat to better cover in order to get back to better fighting condition. Horizon Wars is designed​ to scales 6-15mm so it handles units of infantry as single elements on a base so this kind of more abstract approach for morale isn't breaking the immersion at all. I don't like at all the all or nothing mechanic that current 40k has as the game is filled with LD 10 and occasionally failing the LD check is so rare that it actually could be removed from the game. 3rd edition still had some attempt to represent morale with pinning and crossfire rules. Hopefully 8th edition has proper mechanic for pinning as it is now it's quite useless. Long rant. But the subject is interesting. :)

The morale mechanic that I find interesting us actually in the video game Xcom Enemy Unknown. It's a turn based squad combat in a sci-fi modern human vs alien setting. If one of your characters freaks out they might just crouch down and refuse orders, or they might just shoot at any random character they can see, even killing your own guys.

Video Game wise, while not really Morale, the Battlefield series from 3 onwards, have visual effects (screen shakes, becomes blurry, you see red on the edges) and also audio cues, such as if a grenade or tank shell goes off next to you, you have Tinnitus for a few seconds.. even if near a friendly tank. Battlefield 2 went so far as to include background helicopter rotor noises if a friendly helo pilot was using the commo-rose to spot targets or whatnot.

Let's see; X-wing doesn't really have a morale component, but some maneuvers or actions can cause stress, which will prevent you from doing anything stressful until you perform easy maneuvers to clear the stress. Bit you're still able to move/fire normally Saga is quite interesting in that it uses Fatigue to represent morale and general tirdness of your troops. You'll gain fatigue if you activate a unit more than once per turn, and everyone in a melee will gain fatigue for fighting. But a big part of the game is spending those fatigue markers (for example, i can spend your fatigue to make you easier to hit or to make me harder to hit) with each unit class having an exhaustion threshold where they won't be able to activate until they rest some of their fatigue off.

i like the morale rules in Runewars it has more options than just oh that unit is running away or disappearing into the ether. on that note morale systems that keep your unit on the board until they run off of it are better than units that just dissapear. it feels more real and keeps your hopes up that they might rally.

My intro into Warhammer40K was Advanced Space Crusade, it was like Space Hulk but you were in a Tyranid Ship.

I'm just a newbie in wargaming, playing only x-wing and armada. I think the closest to morale I got was (and if you can consider as morale) the stress system in x-wing. Also, there is a Morale system in Robinson Crusoe (board game) witch I think it works very well. I think morale systems are interesting and add depth to the game.

It isn't exactly pinning/morale as a game mechanic, but some of the older CoD's used to have infinitely respawning enemies until you pushed forward through them. On Veteran (when that difficulty was actually relatively hard) this could occasionally create a 'nope' situation where you just got stuck behind some cover waiting for an opportunity to move on.

I'm a fan of morale, I'd say the most interesting morale rules right now are for Mantic's The Walking Dead: All Out War. Essentially there is a Threat meter that measures how dangerous the situation is becoming: how many zombies there are, how active the zombies are, how aggressive the human teams are at each other, etc. Each character has a corresponding nerve value - if the threat level is lower than a character's nerve, they can act as normal - if it is equal, the character has a 50% chance of panic - if its higher, they panic. Panic does not mean do nothing, though i could. Roll the panic die and you might run away, you might be paralyzed with fear, you might get actions but must use them on quiet, sneak actions, or you might lose your wits and get your full action but whatever you do will cause noise (presumably as your character cries the name of Crom while charging) Obviously fear and morale are big parts of that game, but what I like about the rules is that a) fear is the assumed state of combat, experience and training only delay onset; and b) running away is 1 of several responses, and I think terrified people should be unpredictable

Great video on a subject which hasn't been thought of too much. I love 40k, but I would *love* to see better morale in it. Suppressing fire, missed orders, wrongly understood / heard orders, etc. I think we need more morale in 40k.

Epic Armageddon's 'blast markers' were a great system. Rolls supression, disorder, panic and withdrawal into one simple system and the tactical and stretegic use of blast markers in play was good to engage with.

I feel that morale rules also act as a very usefull bridge between fully functional units and dead ones. The player doing the pinning/breaking is happy that he stalled the enemy, but his opponent might still use that unit later down the line. Computer games can make effective use of health bars trickling down, but that kind of bookkeeping would be insane for the tabletop. Morale rules allows units to be 'down but not out yet'.

I love Morale rules I think it makes so much sense and gives your guys some personification. I love playing total war or Wargame and having your guys tail it is a problem. It makes the battles more organic like if in total war a mass route spells the end for you! I really enjoy the realism. Any one that has issues with Necrons taking a leadership test think of it as life preservation protocol. They looked at the situation statistically and found odds for survival to be rather low. To me that makes sense.

It's not quite morale, but my all-time favourite 'behaviour rules' were the Rogue Trader Ork Madboyz: 82 possible actions, with 10 different triggers. Great fun - no wonder the codex was an inch thick!

7th 40k needs more situations where you can pin units, but i also worry that will tilt the balance even further into the shooting meta.

As many others have already said here, the Bolt Action morale and pinning rules are probably the best I have come across, in over 30 years of tabletop gaming. I have had veteran troops hide behind a wall, just because of the suppressing fire being put on them. None of them died, but they were effectively taken out of the game. This adds another cool tactical layer, to a good game.

The appeal to me of miniature games over board games is the Psychology of them. In a game like risk each individual soldier is not represented in that cinematic way. Very strategic game but lacking in the Psychology factor. Great post as always Atom. Love listening to your rants.

Great thoughts :)

One of the things I love about Age of Sigmar is how elegant the morale system is. It's not the most realistic system, but it's impressive how it handles morale in such an intuitive way.

It's not a first person shooter, but XCOM and XCOM 2 have mechanics where your pieces' moral can be shaken and send them into panic mode where they run away, take cover, fire, then hide there until that enemy is taken out. They can be panicked by either taking dmg or seeing a squad mate die. Also, I enjoy your wargaming videos, If I had more money I would get into it. For now I'll stick to my Blood Bowl. : )

i like the morale in tabletop a lot because of different reasons. First of all it gives more fluff to the different troops. it's so funny when a huge army of goblins is just running of the table in one round becouse they are affraid 😍 Second it forces the player to treat each army different. and third i like this character of simulating a war. history shows, that warriors do not always do what they should so i like it a lot.

To me, it seems like Warhammer has strayed away from being a simulation and is more focused on being a game, first. (which I greatly appreciate) - your observation about being pinned from suppressing fire in a video game is astute. In the Battlefield series, it does blur your vision when shots land near you, and in multiplayer if you kill a character that is debuffed from suppressing fire, you get a bonus score for it. This gives players a real behavior changing incentive to avoid being suppressed, even though they don't feel the shock and horror represented by a person in a real situation like that. So, this is an example of a game mechanic representing a simulated event, but the motivations and how it's handled by the player is entirely synthesized in game. Good games do this kind of thing all the time, we often overlook it as gamers. Miniature games in particular are an abstraction for what's going on, so I'm super ok with it not trying to be a simulation. If it were, I would only buy miniatures that were crouching, kneeling or sitting in some air conditioned command center, piloting a drone :)

I think one of the reasons why pinning is cool to gamers like us, as you get older the narrative gets more cool, more important(from what I've seen) we hear about what heavy bolters and autocannons do, we've seen what they do in video games, but they do a far deal less in the miniatures world. So it's cool when they can at least do SOMETHING. Maybe not kill, but pin at a minimum.

I'm new to war gaming and I think morale checks/etc, bring that aspect into it that makes it even more fun and realistic in my opinion

The character in shooter games doesn't run away. The player does. Nothing quite like trying to coral a bunch of pubs in ARMA or Red Orchestra to make an assault only for everybody to split the second things start going sideways.

A general should be able to use a decimation rule, depending on the army of course. Basically, you would kill 1 in 10 models of a unit to cause them not to take a shock test, Skaven armies would benefit from this. obviously, the unit would need to be 10+ models for it to be effective....

I always loved the Morale, like in Johnny Reb III, where you could try and (more effectively) disrupt battle lines, compared to for example Flames of war where the quality doesn`t come to much into account. Most historical games can get that many modifiers piled on your poor green infantry regiment (cannon fire, enfillade, etc) that you need to throw like 17 on a d6 to have them not getting head down

My first interaction iwith morale was when I got sucked into Combat Missions: Beyond Overlord, a PC turn-based Strategy.. Its a PC recreation of a WWII historical war-game. (now, apparently on GOG at www.gog.com/game/combat_mission_beyond_overlord). I hated it when I started but learned to love it. In it, turns take effect in real time so you have an orders phase, and an effect phase where everything got done at the same time, and AI basically determined if they continued in their efforts depending on level of morale, veteran status, and - the most interesting - distance from an officer, and that officer's rank. Which makes sense...if you are 2/3 the way down the field, with only a lowly Lieutenant safe a half mile from you: the order to rush a Machine gun turret suddenly has way less importance when Billy has been shot.

sword and spear have the best moral rules I've seen. each turn you take 7 dice from a bag, any number of them may be yours or the enemys. you then roll the dice that were yours (the highest number of dice going first) and allocate them to units (they have to exceed the units moral). The dice not only acts as an activation order and initiative mechanic but also a moral test

BattleTech has a concept called forced retreat. if your mech has taken a certain amount of damage, then you must retreat to the nearest Home Edge. you can fire on your way out, but every single turn must be spent retreating.

I've always liked the moral mechanic. It really helps distinguish veteran, fanatic and elite units from the rest. Bolt action and FoW do this well. A battle hardened SS unit or US Army Ranger unit are more likely to brace heavy fire to win the day than some Green unit fresh from the states.

In Arma you hear a fairly loud crack when a bullet flies by. That combined with how lethal the game is, it can kinda pin people despite morale not being a part of the game.

I think Morale needs to be there to add some realism. There is an old Sci Fi Game called Stargrunt 2 by GZG which includes aspects like if a unit takes morale penalties if it leaves wounded comrades behind. There is also a chance that a wounded figure can be patched up and put back to work, thus giving a reason to have medics and medical evacuation units. All of the units have quality levels so the chances of not acting or leggining it vary on the troop quality - (Green to Elite). The game also includes a mechanic for comms which I know slows the game but I think it is brilliant, i.e. there is a command unit and it takes time for orders to reach other units - this is expressed in the way of passing actions from command to units in battle. It means if you want a unit to do something heroic or "extra" you are going to have to plan for it. (Very simplified) - I am not associated with the company or the game in any way but I do suggest checking it out if you havent seen it before. shop.groundzerogames.co.uk/15mm-stargrunt.html

I came to miniatures games by way of hex & counter wargames where morale is either baked into the command and control rules (as in Band of Bothers), or as consequences of being fired upon (as in Combat Commander). When I've run into games that don't have morale rules (like Boots on the Ground) I've found they take me out of the immersion entirely.

My first contact with serious wargaming was Squad Leader. Therefore, I love elaborate morale rules and the fact that you can win without clearing the table. SL and its big brother ASL are however not for the casual gamer. Therefore I always recommend Five Core to people that want to start modern/Sci-Fi skirmish games. It has a simple yet elegant moral system. I love to see that such system are slowly making their way into the mainstream games like SW:A.

I'd love to see 1st person shooters getting some element of morale tests. imagine the challenge of dealing with your avatar slowly freaking out if things get stressful. I think that could add much realism if done well

I think you will find the Infinity rules refreshing in this regard. There are certain troops that are basically "kamikaze" type troops. Also, after each shoot/response mechanic, there is a "guts" roll to see if your troop stays where they are, or moves a little to get into cover in certain situations. There is also a "Lieutenant" in each fielded army which, if killed, causes the individual troops to fend for themselves for one round. Lastly, there is a retreat mechanic once enough troops are killed. It is very intuitive and is very combat simulation friendly. Of course, there are special situations where some of thse things don't apply and that makes it even more interesting. These are the reasons I chose to actually start playing, versus just painting. The game is FUN.

The moral system for This Is Not A Test is very good.

Wyrds upcoming game, The Other Side, kind of flips morale around a bit. Models go to "Glory" when they do something really epic. Their "Glory" stats are better and their abilities usually change for the better also. Enemy units can force yours off of glory, back to your normal stats, and that kind of represents being demoralized in a lot of ways.

In the Total War series morale is a big part of each battle, it's quite similar to 40k in that regard.

Maybe not morale exactly, but Hordes has a neat mechanic of frenzy-ing. If you push your beasts too far and make them gain too much fury, they can go nuts and attack what ever the nearest target is. That means friendly faction models as well. Yep, he'll turn on you! But I have used it against an enemy, rile them up and just let that ticking time bomb bite off an enemy head. It's no precision strike, but it's fun to play around with. Makes the beasts themselves also feel more real too. I mean seriously, how many times can a puny elf poke a dragon before it goes bonkers and eats somethings head?

soon there will be the release of the new edition of 40k. i hope to see a video of yours about it.

I'm painting my ironjawz army as I watched this video and all I could think of was animosity. It's been removed from aos but boy was that a signature orc thing. And yes it is a kind of morale. They don't run away but they didnt do what you wanted them to. I kinda miss it even though it always were a love/hate relationship.

In a lots of rts'es there are morale systems and your men will run away. For example Battle Brothers but I can't think of any FPS games.

There is one video game with an effective moral mechanic in Xcom Enemy Unknown. Your soldiers can panic leading them to either hunker down and refuse orders or to shoot wildly, possibly hitting more of your guys. The only thing I didnt like about it was the aliens you were fighting against NEVER panicked so it definitely felt unbalanced.

Only video ive seen Morale changes from units is Total War: Warhammerl. After losing an amount of units or facing a specific creatures some units start routing.

"If you will not serve in combat, then you will serve on the firing line!"...**click**...**BANG!**

I really like your talks. Just miss some battle reports ;) - Would it be interesting for you to make a video about rules interpretation? Since in AoS, it is a big issue sometimes depending on "that guy" - Examples: Shall the trees be removed in sylvaneth wyldwood or not, Must all models be inside the terrain or shall the new experimental rules be used etc.. - I think it is a big thing to discuss and can't imagine other games does not have similar "problems". 8th edition certainly had.

The rebooted Xcom video game series has a lot of morale mechanics that you may appreciate Uncle Atom. Soldiers can get panicked, can take surrpressing fire, can be pinned down, and can (see WILL) ignore your orders or not even listen to your orders to begin with. Xcom is actually a lot like a skirmish scale wargame, just on the big screen which I think is why there are a lot of comprable mechanics.

Honestly, as a mechanic, it really adds a whole extra layer of rich strategy. I now have to plan about this morale, pinned, running, etc. Without morale, the game loses that extra risk and layer of planning.

Interesting ... so, how would you play morale in something like, oh say, General Custer's Last Stand? Surrounded, most wargame rules would have the soldiers runaway - so my question is, do morale rules get in the way of heroic moments like this? Can memorable moments ever appear on the gaming table?

A newer wargame that does moral differently is The Other Side by Wyrd, makers of Malifaux. Instead of getting worse every unit has a trigger that allows them to "go to glory". A unit in glory may receive boosted stats and usually has additional abilities. There are a variety of ways for a unit to come out of glory making it possible for a unit to go back and forth several times in a single game.

Sadly my favorite morale rules remain in the videogame Close Combat series, but each solider gets his own psych profile in it and pinning/suppression/cover/experience etc matter a ton. Be really difficult to attempt to model that for a tabletop game though.