I hope the above post conveys what a fun and satisfying way this was to deal with the conflict!
Looking forward to trying out the next increment of the rules. . .
Man that sounds cool. Arguments, command decisions. The final outcome.
I want to play the battle that the brief mechanical summary put into my head. Which is exactly what I want.
Have you seen 7th Sea’s mass combat system? It looks kind of like this one, and has a similar feel, players do cool things in order to affect the combat.
Cool, glad you’re intrigued.
No I haven’t, is it good?
It’s less about what the armies are doing - and it’s almost entirely about the swashbuckling the heroes do. It’s a good system - different - but a similar goal I think. It’s been about a year since I read it.
I want to say that this mass combat system seems awesome to me. The focus on individual actions, the little number of rolls required and the stress on fictional world blend together harmoniously. Is there someone who is actually developing the missing parts of this document?
Things got busy, but yes, me. 
Please, go on :rolleyes:
This is really excellent work Fuseboy, can’t wait to test this in game. Two question in mind so far…
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What would you do if players are minor officers and rank-and-file in a battle where the general on the player side is a named npc? Let him take actions alongside the players or restrict him to helping only? Personally I lean toward letting him take actions, but letting the action restriction apply - ie. not let him get more than one action ahead or behind.
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The Faith and Sorcery rules seem a little punishing for players with those abilities. +2Ob and +2s cancel each other out, meaning it doesn’t have more pronounced effect than others and they still have to beat the normal prayer or spell obstacle to avoid unfortunate side effects - miscasts, unwanted summoning and divine punishment. (I would only apply the +2 Ob with regards to beating the opponents roll, not the spell or prayer ob).
Also, there needs to be a guideline for how many actions of spellcasting one can expect to get. This is relevant for spells and songs alike. Maybe 40 under during battle, 60 or 80 in a lull?
I agree there needs to be something to power Faith and Sorcery down a bit, as the many dice they can gather and the open-ended dice are powerful. Maybe +2Ob and +3s? You risk more, but gain more? As it is, you just get +2Ob that are removed afterwards, making especially Faith a weak ability in battle.
Or maybe say it’s +2Ob across the board, but +2s for most spells/prayers, but +3s for spell/prayers that are especially well-suited for battle (eg. Rain of Fire, Lightning Storm, Major Miracles, Strain of Far Sight, Anthem of Courage). -
In Harms Way works kinda funny. I don’t mind this, but the fact that whether you get wounded depends not on the soldier you are facing, but how fast their runner is running or how well their general is strategizing could be irritating for some. Maybe whatever you are likely facing rolls vs you as well and then you compare yours to both rolls? So you can beat their commander while getting injured, or vice versa. I see rich opportunities for players to use instinct or traits against themselves here, in narrating what they face. “Always challenge the biggest one” means you get to roll vs both their action and their most dangerous fighter, comparing your result to both.
Thanks, SK.
- An NPC taking actions seems dodgy to me. Unless the players are actually with him and he’s directly assisting them in their tasks, I wouldn’t even let him help.
Some help is very direct, “I lift the other end of the fallen door,” other help is a bit less direct, “I sweep debris out of the path of the guys carrying the door”, but some help is so indirect as to be merely aligned with the overall goal and essentially having nothing to do with the task whatsoever. A lot of situations occur like this in battle (because the whole side is nominally cooperating to achieve the same goal), and I’m inclined to disallow help of this sort.
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Faith & Sorcery is misdesigned. What I had intended was +2 Ob, +4s - but at this point the numbers are getting so huge it feels like I’m bending the mechanics. +1 Ob, +2s might be sufficient.
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In Harm’s Way needs improvement; Countercheck had some good suggestions that I have to fold in at some point. For combat actions, it works fine. For other actions I’d assumed you were getting hit with a stray arrow, enemy troops get unexpectedly close and some big lug whacks you with his mattock. Rolling Surgery vs. Sword to avoid getting hurt while healing people on the front lines is really weird, I admit. The only thing that pops to mind is whether you act quickly enough to avoid reprisal from enemies that spot you.
What you describe points out some GM guidance that I need to make more explicit. In much the same way that we focus on the players’ actions, I think this system works best when the opposition is as direct as possible, too. At the very least, it needs to be something the PCs can perceive. The actions of the enemy general are, to my mind, pretty much irrelevant most of the time unless the players are receiving reports of enemy troop movements and so on. Healing vs. enemy Strategy should just… not happen.
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I dunno, if the pcs are fighting under a named npc general, I think he at least should matter somehow. Definitely not by helping a eg. a fightig action with his strategy by making a good plan, that becomes too nebolous.
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That might work as well. I think there should be an extra reward of some kind for having those big spells and abilities that rarely have much use outside of battles and team range and cover. Such as Rain of Fire.
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Letting the opposed roll be fully determined by player actions is slightly problematic. We also want the gm to able to play the system a bit and outplay the players. If I can make sure I roll my Sword G7 on my action vs a grunt because I only describe my character hacking down grunts… we have a bit of an issue.
Number 1) is not grasped from thin air. My players are part of an exiled army led by a prince/general. I will want to use this system for a battle or two, but I want the prince to matter as he is becoming a major, named NPC. Perhaps just letting the npc do the officer’s roll is enough though.
The general intention is to try to push as many non-player factors into the disposition, so that the rolls focus on the players’ actions as much as possible. If the general is especially important, perhaps he could roll the army disposition using his strategy? Or, you could use his great skill as narrative justification for giving the player’s side some disposition bonuses - winning the engagement roll, being better rested and better supplied than the enemy, and higher ground.
What Fuseboy said. If you have a brilliant NPC general, they could lobby for a disposition bonus.
As for the G7 sword thing, all the PCs have to take an action before they can take a second action, which means that each PC only gets a few rolls, so the G7 sword won’t come up that often. That being said, there are some changes that may make it into the second draft that make using Sword… a bit less attractive =)
And with the big spells, if you can find some way to deploy them before the battle, that might provide a nice dispo bonus. But yeah, giant spells are a bit problematic at present.
Well, one of the things that’s fun about BW is that the GM gets to be a players as well and that there is an element of tactics in playing the various subsystems. If I can take, for example, my Sword G7 up against a mook and have that opposed test count for disposition damage… then it becomes a matter of leveraging that skills and the other players become liabilities.
That might also be an issue with the Patrol Method, ie. each player can never get more than 1 action ahead of the others. It faces the same problem as skill challenges in D&D 4th - suddenly some of the other players participating become a liability… which is problematic to say the least. The player who isn’t good at any of the skills needed for mass combat should not make his side’s chances of winning smaller, he just should not contribute as much.
Putting the patrol method and GM agency aside for a moment, I think I have an idea for the sorcery thing.
This is about intent, task and Testing your ability, right?
So why not disregard the normal rules for casting Carefully and Patiently, which really are the root of the problem. Now that Sorcery is no longer tested together with Will, you can actually use Sorcery for bloody versus. However, letting the Sorcerer almost double his skill in Bloody Versus would be insane.
If you do that, I don’t think there’s any need for the +1Ob, +2s rule. Sorcery is a potent open-ended skill, but it also requires investment. You must still Test for Tax, but there are no penalties for failing the roll or going below the spell obstacle - after all, you can normally add extra dice to compensate for just that.
Under these rules, I would give spells that are very well suited for mass battle +1D advantage, such as Rain of Fire, Storm of Lightning and Billous Smoke… those are battle spells after all. There more opponents, the more effective they are.
Faith might merit similar treatment. However, instead of looking at specific prayer obstacles, looks at whether the roll succeeds or fails. After all, when Faith works, it works perfect. When Faith fails, there are sometimes extra consequences. If you win the opposed roll, you damage the opposition, secure your side an advantage or… whatever. If your roll fails, the prayer does nothing and there may be divine censure.
They will still be potent, but nowhere near as insane as casting… say White Fire with +4D from casting it Carefully. That would win any opposed test, hands down.
One thing that tempts me is to consider the players’ actions as potentially happening in parallel, not necessarily one after the other. (That’s okay if the players are busily at work in the seething masses, less so if their actions are dependent on one another or highly visible, like slaying Balrogs, or attacking through breaches opened up by another players.)
But yes, that’s a problem with the patrol method; it’s particularly apparent in MG when you’re going up against a snake with Nature 7, and the four-mouse patrol has a couple of green recruits with really low exponents. “Aw man, can’t Nettles sit this one out, he’s going to get us killed.” This isn’t true in the same way if all four mice are acting in parallel. Nettles gives the snake an extra attack, in effect.
To get rid of this problem, the simplest way would be to get rid of the rock-paper-scissors minigame, sadly. Reformulate the actions so that they’re more about making adjustments to disposition, but they’re essentially independent of what the enemy is doing.
Or… perhaps allow a player to not have to script and just provide help where the fiction/framing allows him to? My court advisor could be a the Commander’s side, helping with his Nobles-Wise by saying “Let Aldus lead the assault my lord, he won three tournaments last year and will crush this Orc”.
Don’t cut out the weaker or less-experienced characters. 1) it’s a game, so everyone should get a turn 2) forcing a weaker character into the spotlight has huge potential pay off in BW.
To wit: the inexperienced character can gain advancements in necessary skills, but also the more experienced characters can help and gain advancements for themselves.
And, these odd characters can break up predictable behavior. In a recent game, Thor thought he had our number. He thought he knew what our action would be for a character that typically favors defend, because he is very weak on the attack. Well, we forced that character to attack and thus beat Thor’s feint—and subsequently won the conflict.
Here is a situation and it’s not really hypothetical, I’ve seen it in a few games.
A player does not have any of the skills for the conflict, so the only interest for him in being primary for a test is a test or perhaps a bit of artha (Always in the Way, eh? eh?). Now, having none of the skills and the Patrol Method being in place, that player feels that he is sabotaging the other’s or the “plot” in order to gain tests or a bit of Artha.
If he could join in as a helper on appropriate actions, he would be cool with that. However, having to take a full action to participate, he decides to bow out of the conflict altogether.
Is this really desirable? I’ve seen it happen in Mouse Guard. If participation is ALL or NOTHING then players will bow out of conflicts where they would otherwise make sense as helpers/assistants. While the rest of the table may be fine with them doing lowering their chances of success a bit, the players will self-censure themselves out of the conflict.
Alexander,
Let’s start another thread and talk about this.
Great stuff, Fuseboy! I’d like to use your Mass Combat rules for an upcoming battle, but I’d like your input on how to interpret a couple things.
I don’t know what Night Terrors are, but they sound like they’re not really intelligent creatures. Did you roll Stealth for their disposition in the Airship fight you posted on page 2?
The players in my game are accompanying a force of fifty riflemen heading up into the mountains, and they’ll be passing through a long mountain pass and probably encamping there. At night, a big pack of undead soldiers and gunslingers (the very men this group was sent to relieve) will descend from mineshafts in the mountains around the pass and fall on the infantry. This will be the first time any of them have encountered the undead.
I’m planning on using the Walking Dead stats from the Magic Burner. They have basically no skills and attack like ghouls, with hands and teeth. One major advantage the dead will have in this fight is that they can see perfectly in the dark, whereas the humans won’t be able to see much at all beyond the light of their kerosene lanterns. How would you represent this? I thought of giving a hefty bonus to Disposition, like +3s. They’ll certainly need it, since they don’t have any Stealth skill.
There’s also the fact that the dead are effing terrifying, causing Steel tests to anyone who sees them for the first time, and they can take a bullet like a champ. Another hefty Dispo bonus?
There is an inexperienced NPC captain in command of the riflemen. The PCs aren’t really soldiers - they’re just accompanied by the soldiers. They don’t have any soldiering skills. You recommend that the PCs should be the ones who roll the check. Should they roll Soldiering, or should the NPC captain roll Tactics? Soldiering is the skill of stowing, marching, preparing fighting positions, etc. Why would the rifleman company suffer because the PCs don’t know how to march or stow their gear?
So right now my plan is:
PCs test Soldiering, untrained. They get +1s (outnumbering enemy), +1s (training advantage), +1s (dozens), +3s (broad enemy exposure) =6s.
The dead test Stealth, untrained. They get +2s (winning engagement), +1s (better rested), +2s (very heavy troops), +3s (night eyes), +1s (dozens) =9s.
Also, I’m a little vague on what a feint is in this context. Is it any sort of dangerous gambit, like dividing your forces, a fake retreat, etc? Or is it specifically making a drive at one portion of the enemy lines to draw his reserves there? Since I’m playing flesh-hungry ghouls am I stuck with Attack and Maneuver? If the PCs figure that out they’ll just turtle up and Defend until I exhaust myself.
Sorry for the long, rambling post. Lay your wisdom on me!