Goatboy’s Oldhammer 40K – Old School Leadership Fail Disasters
Today I want to talk about some of the most terrible Warhammer 40K leadership rule fails I’ve ever seen from past editions!
Leadership checks – or Battleshock tests for those who have only played this edition – were something of a pain in the butt in older editions. You were forced to take these tests, have some modifiers depending on if in combat or not, and then usually something bad happened if you failed them. They could be very devastating or almost never do anything to it based on your army and how the interaction happened.
Warhammer 40k – 4th & 5th Edition
Leadership checks were based on if you lost 25% of your unit to shooting or if you lost combat. You took a -1 to the roll for each model you lost in melee, and if you failed you had to make a fallback move. This was a 2d6 move going directly back to your deployment edge. If you hit your edge with any model in the unit – your unit disappeared.
Run Lysander, Run!
This game had me playing my Orks versus Space Marines. Now Space Marines had a rule they couldn’t be run down. They would break and even if you could catch them they wouldn’t die. Units would die if you broke them and then caught them in your sweeping advance. The biggest issue was always if you had a low Initiative you would rarely catch anyone. Orks had a very low value and so my marine friend – who was playing Lysander in a unit lost combat by a lot. Lysander was the only one left, he broke, and proceeded to run away from my Ork Warboss on a bike. Now if you got close enough to the enemy that broke you could cause them to keep breaking and fallback. I proceeded to “chase” Lysander from the middle of the table all the way back to the table edge by staying nearby and just trolling him all the way. He would fallback very slow as he was a Terminator and I could easily “catch” him with my crazy Warbike of doom. Let me tell you killing a great Hero of the Imperium thru taunting him as he tried to get away was probably one of the best feelings I ever had in this game.
Warhammer 40k – 4th Edition Black Templars
The Black Templars had some peculiar rules back in the day, that if they took some damage early they had to make Leadership test or get spooked. It was very hard as the army was Leadership 10 so rolling an 11 or 12 was what was needed.
Tempermental Templars
This is a story that isn’t about me but a friend of mine that set up a giant horde of Black Templar with a Dreadnought in the middle. My friend shoot his Aeldari tank into the dreadnought, blew it up, and the explosion caused a bunch of units around the Dreadnought to take damage. As this was a heavy MSU time frame for Marines a crap ton of them took 25% casualties which caused them to take Leadership tests. EVERY LAST Templar unit failed, rolling an 11, or 12, and my buddy watched in horror as over half of his army ran off the table as this was turn one. Nick definitely deserved it as that Templar horde was a pain to deal with.
Warhammer 40k – 8th Edition
Back in the day if you failed your leadership test you had to take tests on each model – a roll of a 1 or 2 would watch them disappear.
The Doctor is NOT in…
This was from one of the last events I played at Kansas City and watched as my Creations of Bile Terminators lose over half of their models to a failed leadership test. I was attacking Be’lakor and his old rule of causing an edition +1 to that roll had me fail the initial Leadership test and then roll for all the Terminators left over. I saw over half of the unit disappear before my eyes to the brand new Big Daemon List that came out a few weeks prior. It was a rough loss and when I had to play against his buddy with a similar list the table turned and the dice rolls went my way as a giant unit of Possessed took out Skarbrand on their Fight on Death and everything came up Goatboy that edition.
Warhammer 40k – 4th Edition Space Marine Psychic power – Fear The Darkness
Back in this Edition, there was a Marine psychic power that allowed the Librarian to throw out a bubble of LD tests. You would put this one a Jump Librarian and watch as he jumped within the middle of the table and spammed this power to cause as much havoc to the enemy. It wasn’t always good but sometimes you just got to spook a pile of Tau suits was this insane darkness spread from this Emo Librarian. I remember games where my Space Marine friends would just break whole armies across the tabletop.
What’s the craziest Leadership fail you’ve ever seen?
