Stress test and morale rolls?!?

[Jörgen Andreasson]

There are some strange inconsistencies in how the stress test is performed, perhaps someone can straighten them out for me.

Success and failure are based on rolling more or less TQ dice and compare them against the stress level. What happens if you roll an EQUAL number of dice to the stress level. According to the rules as written you pass of you roll more dice and fail of you roll less. It say nothing about what happen if you roll an equal amount of dice (which can happen of the unit have en even number of members).

Also…. WHY do you add/remove dice for leaders… this make no sense since it have nothing to do with passing the test. The number of dice rolled will not have a huge impact on the chance of success more or less if the leader are good or bad… to some degree it perhaps will since the less dice you have the harder or easier it is to pass or fail the roll, but that depends on the answer to the first question. But having an even or odd number of dice is more important for passing or failing the roll.

 

The third question is also about why you roll a dice for every member of a unit in the first place for morale and stress rolls. It make no real sense from a game mechanic perspective and I don’t see the artefact having any real life proof either. Is it more likely for a small group to fail its moral role than a larger group for example, perhaps it is?!?

But the worst thing is that an even group are far worse of for passing a morale test than an odd group is. I really don’t think this is the case in reality or how morale, stress or confidence actually work. As long as the leader of the group manage to keep its shit together then the group is quite likely to keep functioning so if the leader is one of the even members that pass the test the group should be pretty safe from a realistic perspective.

This is also why I don’t think a larger group is better at passing morale test than a small group. A leader who manage to keep his calm are far more likely to push his men forward and together in a small group than in a large group where his pull is weaker on the individual soldier. This then offset the power of the larger group having one of its members wounded for example.

 

Personally I just roll a single dice, it is quicker and make more sense from a game mechanic perspective and the end result are more or less the same. It also fix the stress problem above.

 

Please correct me or tell me why I should not do this?

[maggico]

If you roll an equal number is a failure. Rule states more than half.

You add or remove only if you are using the rule about positive or negative leader. If you don’t have such leader, there are no modifiers.

For the third I don’t have an answer. In a real life the fact that a leader is a good leader or not it’s difficult to recreate in a game. If you are a small team of three men, it’s likely that if someone is a casualty is more difficult to have nerves to continue. But, too, a group of ten rookie can flee at first occasion, good leader or not.

[Jörgen Andreasson]

Problem is that the rule for stress say that you only fail if you roll less than half successes. So on equal roll you can argue the same for both failure and success but which one is it suppose to be?

 

My main problem with the mechanic is how different the likelyhood of failure or success is depending on an odd or even number of dice you throw. This is also the problem with adding or removing a dice for a leader. A +1 leader can potentially make the roll worse since rolling odd dice is better then rolling an even amount of dice. I rather roll 3 dice than 4 if I need to roll more success than failure.

If you have a small team of two and get one casualty you roll one die for morale… This is far easier to pass than getting one casualty in a team of three models and roll two dice.

That is why I think just rolling a single die make more sense from a game mechanic perspective…. It also is faster and more transparent.

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