Shaken and Stirred. Abstract Morale (updated)

The tricky thing about Morale is that it isn't. Its like the wind, you can feel its presence and see its effect, even measure its effect but you can't touch it or see it or capture it and put it away to study it later.

One of the things that hits and stand removal in Hearts of Tin (like figure removal in MacDuff) represents is the slowly degrading cohesion of a unit in combat. Troops get tired, they get scared, nco's and officers get hit, discipline and courage start to falter. One traditional way of handling this has been to have a separate chart to roll on to see if units run. Another way is to just remove units in combat and who cares how many were shot and how many ran away? (apart from in a campaign but there are ways around that).

In the morale test world, the one I grew up in, there were often intermediate steps between AOK and Run Away!, and these usually had combat and morale penalties. In the removal world, generally you are there or not and the penalty is at a higher level, that is, as stands are lost, holes open up in your line.

In the middle of trying to finish off the game last night using HofT instead of MacDuff, (often tricky changing rules 1/2 way through)   I found myself pondering the inequity of rules where having an even or odd number of stands makes a difference to how well your unit fights and wondering about solutions. I also pondered for the nth time whether to accumulate hits (quicker casualties, premature holes in the line, no reduction in fighting power for the stands that are left meaning 2 battered units are as good as 1 whole one and no sudden collapse)  or spread them out (more markers, a chance to rally, sudden collapse built in, weakened units still hold a big chunk of the line making it bad if they go and you haven't prepared for it). Spreading them out was how I originally did it but it was the piles of bingo markers that got to me. To compensate for faster removal, I had to pay more attention to defining and penalizing a unit that should be near collapse etc. It occurred to me part way through now that I have a choice of funny hats  for hits or little green dice, it was easier to use my preferred method then I didn't need a 2nd system, the rallying works etc.

It can be annoying how often removing a rule helps.

Also found that the smoothbore double shot cannister modifier was missing and decided that 1 form of modifiers was better than 2 so adjust that as well.  Pre -test draft loaded at left.

***FLASH**
HOT D*MN!
All of a sudden I realized I din;t have to mark which stands are carrying hits, I just establish the saturation or break point for a unit and track that. Once hit, every subsequent hit removes a stand. I can translate the shaken morale in melee rules into the same terms and suddenly have a single cohesive, integral but implicit morale system. OK update draft and again, then clear table.