Detachments, Forts and Large-Scale Battles: Part 2, Integrating Sub-systems

Note: This post is a continuation of this post-mortem.

A post on Gundobad Games about adapting ItO for Domain-play pointed out solutions for scaling Detachments: to steal from Apocalypse World's lovely gang-system, which I've used before and loved.

Detachments and Size

The basic idea is that Detachments now have an additional size, based on the number of people in the unit.
Small (20+)
Medium (40+)
Large (80+)
Huge (160+)

So, two Small Detachments can combine to form a Medium one, two Medium Detachments can combine to form a Large etc etc.

This means I can still use ship stats with specific Crew Scores, as each point represents 20 sailors. So a Sloop with Crew Score 2 can field 2 Small Detachments, or merge everyone into a big angry Medium Detachment of pirates.

For every step of size advantage against a target, a Detachment gains +1 bonus dmg die, and +2 AV. (The base +1 dmg / +1 armour in AW is far too low, because it's based around a system where everything has about 6 HP)

Individuals attacking a Detachment suffer those size penalties, and deal impaired damage (d4) unless they use Area attacks. Detachments can hit multiple individuals at once.

Instead of HD reflecting size, the HD of a detachment is equal to the HD of a single member. Their damage die is based on equipment. Since there are 20 men per Small Detachment, you'd just multiply the cost of, say, a pistol, by 20 to equip them all with pistols.

So a Small Detachment of twenty HD3 Grenadiers wielding sabres would look like this:

Grenadier Detachment, HD3, Small, Sabres (d6)

If they go up against an individual PC, they gain +1 bonus dmg die and +2 AV, or:

Grenadier Detachment, HD3, Small, Sabres (2d6), AV2

Considering that individuals always deal impaired damage to Detachments without Blast weapons, that AV2 means there's a 50% chance that lone PC won't make a dent on the unit. But the reverse is true if the Grenadiers go up against 40 goblins: they'll be rolling 1d6 against AV2. Those are still better odds than that PC had, especially since those goblins are HD1 and have 3HP collectively.

If a Detachment is dropped to zero HP, they drop a size and Test Morale. I'm putting a placeholder 1d6 as the Morale Die for now, since Detachment HD doesn't scale that high. A Small Detachment dropped to zero HP is wiped out. This means that there are now 3 failure-states for Detachment-level warfare:

1) Detachment is destroyed (if it's small)
2) Detachment is reduced but stays in the fight
3) Detachment is reduced and flees / surrenders

Fortress rules

Forts

Forts use similar principles. They're rare enough that I didn't mind assigning arbitrary HD values, but they all have a Size and additional AV based on the type of fortifications. This also makes it easier to make rulings on what happens if a Detachment were to eg, hole up in a tower. I'd give them either +AV2 or +AV3 depending on whether I thought the tower was closer to a palisade or stone walls.

As so:

EXAMPLE	SIZE	AV	STATS	SUPPLIES
Outpost (20-man Garrison)	Small	Sandbags (+AV1)	Level 2, d6	A few days
Wooden Fort (100-man Company)	Medium	Palisade (+AV2)	Level 4, d8	A week
Coastal Fort (400-man Battalion)	Large	Stone Walls (+AV3)	Level 6, d10, Large-Scale	A few months
Star Fort (1000-man Regiment)	Huge	Reinforced Fort (+AV4)	Level 8, d12, Large-Scale	Years

Forts would also benefit from Size advantages. It's suicide for a Small Detachment to attack a Star Fort: it has AV10 AND deals 3d12 damage relative to them.

PCs can attempt missions to lower individual stats: undermining the walls might lower AV, or sabotaging the powder stores might reduce that damage die. Forts should be very hard to take without subterfuge and advance planning, or a huge force-advantage. Or you could siege them.

Forts can create HD2 Detachments of their respective Sizes by reducing their HD by 2.

So a Coastal Fort could create a Large Detachment of HD2 soldiers, in exchange for being depleted to HD4. If an Outpost creates a Small Detachment, well, the whole garrison has up and left.

Ship Rules

Ships:

Ships follow the same Size principles. One exception is that Detachments need Cannon to attack a ship at all. Coastal Forts / Star Forts are assumed to have Cannons.

Ship Sizes are largely equivalent, except for the biggest warships/galleons. It's really there to enable them to interact with Detachments while still keeping manageable damage dice / hull points.

Don't mind all the stats here. The two damage values are the 'stock' and 'maximum' amount of guns. Crew values are probably too low, especially for Warships, but there's a separate sailing sub-system that uses Crew score and this current system leans towards play rather than simulation.

SHIP TYPE	Size	SPEED	MANVR.	HULL	GUNS	CREW (min. / MAX)	CARGO
Raiding Sloop	Medium	12	12	6	d4 / d8	1 / 2	4
Pirate Brig	Medium	11	11	12	d6 / 10	1 / 3	5
Merchant Junk	Medium	10	10	8	d4 / d8	1 / 3	6
Slave-Galley	Medium	8	8	16	d4 / d8	2 / 4	7
Galleon	Large	7	7	16	d8 / d12	1 / 3	9
Patrol Cutter	Medium	13	14	10	d6 / d8	1 / 2	3
Customs Frigate	Medium	11	12	14	d8 / d10	1 / 3	4
Warship	Large	10	11	18	d10 / d12	2 / 4	5

Bring the noise

Cannons / Area / Large-Scale Weapons:

You might have noticed the 'Large-Scale' tag in the Fort stats above. I'm still messing around with the terminology: I started with 'Ordnance', though I wondered whether 'Large-Scale' was more direct.

This directly addresses the troll-attacks-a-Detachment problem in the previous post. In Electric Bastionland, individuals deal d4 damage to Detachments unless they do Blast damage.

It's a sensible rule, which I've kept and renamed to the Area tag. This allows an individual creature to hit multiple opponents in 1-on-1 combat, or to keep their damage die in Detachment combat.

(Note: This tag is now very, very important for monsters that want to go up against large groups of foes. In my mind, it makes sense. If a big scary monster can only make 1 or 2 attacks a turn against individual foes, it's essentially the same as doing d4 damage against a Detachment of 20. Then the question is whether the monster can plink the Detachment to death, before they get through its hit-point sink.)

The next tool is the Large-Scale tag. This gives the benefits of the Area tag and allows attacks to ignore Size AV. It should be reserved for especially destructive weapons, like cannons, machine-guns or giant dinosaurs.

The final step is just to declare the creature so big that it's a Detachment itself, which is ItO's solution. Then you'd just run it using Detachment rules.


Test-Run:

So:

Tyrannosaurus Rex, HD10, Bite (2d10), Rampage (d6, Large-Scale)

Let's put him up against 20 brave (foolish?) dinosaur hunters.

Dinosaur Hunters, HD2, Small Detachment, Muskets (1d8)

The dinosaur hunters are a Small Detachment, so they'd do 2d8 damage, whilst the Rex does d6 but ignores Size AV. Considering HD2 is about 6 HP, the Rex would take around 2 rounds to eat through the hunters, and take 4d8 damage (or 4x4.5dmg), for an average of 18 points of damage. The Rex is wounded, but triumphant.

 If 40 hunters got together, that would increase damage to 3d8. The Rex still takes 2 rounds to eat 20 hunters, but now takes around 6d8 damage (or an average of 27 points of damage). The 40 hunters might get lucky and take down the Rex in 1 round, but are more likely to get reduced by half, and have to Test Morale to see if the remaining 20 men break and run. The solution might be to buy them all armour, or hire better soldiers.

The exact numbers would need to be tweaked, but this seems workable.

I'd probably put Cannons at d10, Large-Scale. This also means that Detachments can take cannons off of ships, use the ship damage die, and just the Large-Scale tag.

Maybe cannons could default to the Size of their base ship if used by PCs in individual-scale combat? So a Sloop's culverin would do 3d4 damage if a PC really insisted on taking it with them, because a Medium Sloop gives +2 damage dice.


POSSIBLE PROBLEMS:
- What if a large army of soldiers armed with spears tries to attack a monster that is functionally a tank? The bonus damage dice would overwhelm natural armour, even though an individual spear wouldn't be able to pierce it. The easy solution is to multiply natural armour by number of damage dice, but at this point I can see my players' eyes glazing over.

- Large-scale tags scale downward, but not up. A Large detachment with cannons does 3d10 damage against a yeti, compared to the 2d10 of a Medium detachment. But both would do 1d10 to a Huge detachment. I'm ok with sacrificing this level of granularity.

- Does this system incentivize throwing together ludicrous numbers of peasants, indifferently arming them, and sending them against foes? ...Actually, is this a problem?

Detachments, Forts and Large-Scale Play: Part 1, Post-Mortem

pew pew

When my players asked to do an age-of-sail piracy campaign, I thought I'd hack up some sailing rules, throw 'em on my GLOG Hack and call it a day.

I ended up adding a liiiiitttle bit more than I intended, and writing a whole new system.

Part of that system needed to have rules for large-scale combat because ships had big crews. A cursory google threw up a figure of about 75 men for a sloop, which was the smallest practical pirate ship in the system.

Taking a cue from Sid Meier's Pirates! and the domain-play goals of Counter-Colonial Heistcrawl, I also thought I'd throw Forts in there. So I created a couple of sub-systems hacked from Into the Odd / Electric Bastionland, using Detachment rules. 

Very simply, large groups of soldiers are a Detachment. They have a HP value and a damage die like all NPCs, except the damage die is used primarily against other Detachments. Against individuals, Detachments deal d12 damage and only take d4 (unless Blast weapons are used). Some monsters were Colossal and fought as Detachments. Pretty simple!

Thus far my goals were:

1) Simulate large-scale play

2) Allow PCs to build up and equip larger crews

3) Have rules to allow crews to fight individuals or take on forts

4) Minimise rules over-head

I made a generic sailing system and integrated a 'Crew Score', and had the bright idea of tying the HD of a Detachment to Crew Score. Done, and done.

Then my PCs took a gang of 40 trash sailors to a swamp to fight a large troll and it all fell apart. I realised that ItO's detachment rules meant there wasn't any granularity: a gang of 40 goblins with sticks were as effective as 20 trained and armoured soldiers against a troll. Maybe more so, because I'd tied HD to numbers. But in terms of damage, they both dealt d12 and took d4. 

Now, in the moment I bodged together some fortune rolls and it kind of worked out, but as I looked over my rules I saw more problems.

I realised there were all these edge cases that didn't work. I'd made a ship sailing system and kept the numbers low, but this meant all kinds of rulings had to be made once the discrete categories of individual / detachment / fort / ship were breached. What if a particularly dangerous monster attacked a detachment, but it wasn't big enough to justify being Colossal? How were losses tracked? What happens if PCs say 'I take a cannon from the ship and push it on land with the crew'? 

I realise there's a 5th goal I had missed out:

5) Subsystems need a way to interact with each other

More problems. ItO / Electric Bastionland Detachments assumed 50 people, but age of sail ships could have crews ranging from a couple dozen for small ships to around eight hundred people. There wasn't a good way to scale for that, aside from increasing HD, which meant that very large-scale battles would just involved prolonged flailing at big hit-point-sink armies until one side fell over. Because I'd tied the HD of Detachments to size, there wasn't a good way to represent better trained units except by bodging arbitrary +HD bonuses.

(Side-note: in the current Black-Hack inspired rule-set I'm using, HD alone can be a stand-in for skill, because 1) morale rolls are against HD and 2) tests against higher HD opponents incur disadvantage)

I needed to rewrite large-scale rules.

I'll put my new thoughts in a separate blog post.

Combat is an OSR Puzzle

This post is a continuation of this one, which talks about doing away with initiative entirely, while a combat example on Lithyscape crystallised some ideas that had been kicking around my head.

I once attended a pick-up game of D&D at a local community centre. It was terrible: the GM was new and inexperienced, and fully 2 hours of a 4 hour session was spent on a fight with some introductory kobolds. It was like pulling teeth, that combat. Enemies were all hit-point sink, the only complexity was which kobold to attack, and because it was an introductory fight we'd been railroaded there and the only way forward was through.

 A large part of that could be chalked up to GM and player inexperience, but the whole thing soured me on elaborate combats with complex stats. My take-away was combat is tense but should be brief, and short, and we should get it over with as soon as possible.

I can't be the only one who thinks this way. There's lists of OSR challenges or traps which provide all sorts of ingenious set-ups for players to deal with, but I rarely see similar lists of combat situations on OSR blogs. Combat is the lethal thing that parties might die to, it's a semi-fail state for when the plan doesn't work, or a glorious lop-sided affair where the PCs wipe out their foes with poison, ambush, and bomb.

What if combat wasn't that, but a continuation of OSR puzzle-solving?

A lot of fixes I've tried with combat are mechanical (lower HP pools, auto-damage, death and injury tables), but here's a procedural one. (I'm trying to run an initiative-less system, but conceivably this could work for trad initiative-resolution combats too)

PROCEDURE:
1. Every round, the GM establishes a new tactical situation
2. The party discusses their approach
3. The GM resolves the collective approach, calling for rolls as appropriate

This isn't an earth-shaking new mechanic. There's plenty of GMs who do something like this, maybe broken up into initiative order, but I want to try explicitly seeing each round as an OSR puzzle.

The GM draws inspiration from the list below, and mixes them up. If this was a PbtA game they'd be GM Moves, or whatever.

ELEMENTS OF A COMBAT PUZZLE:

1. Enemies just deal damage 
Eg. The goblin warriors rush forward, hacking at your shields and trying to slash you. 
NOTE: I'm using Into the Odd's automatic damage. Enemies in this situation just do damage at the round's end.

2. A wind-up threat -> Something that threatens greater consequences if not dealt with
Eg. The poison bombardier stands at the back, mixing up vials into a grenade bottle.
The wizard waves his hands, and arcane sigils float in the air.

3. Limit their freedom of action
Eg. The room is filled with waist-deep water.
Assassin vines grasp at your feet.
The floor is slippery and covered with grease.

4. Separate them
Eg. Doeg the fighter stands on top of the cross-piece. Far below, Lucius duels the pirate captain.

5. Factor in terrain
Eg. The air is filled with soporific fumes.
Thick choking smog fills the room.
The volcano around you rumbles, spewing lava.

6. Threaten something they care about
Eg. One of the goblins peels off and runs towards your cowering hireling.
An orc carrying a torch runs off towards the wall. He's going to blow the bomb!

7. Offer a prize out of reach, with or without time pressure -> Read broadly, this can be a valuable treasure or some sort of opportunity.
Eg. Behind the spearwall, the priest is legging it with the jewels!
As you fend off the blows of the shadow creature, you think you hear someone muttering and chanting behind the wall. Is it the caster?

There's probably others I haven't thought of, and anyway, they overlap. Reading broadly, a GM might cobble together a simple scene. Here's one from Sacré Bleu, which my players are currently running through.

It combines elements of dealing damage, having a wind-up threat, using terrain and limiting their movement.

The goblin riflemen rain fire down on you from the safe position on the hill-top. Behind them, a trio of goblins are manhandling a cumbersome weapon into place. The rock you're crouched behind gives some cover, but stepping out from behind it means braving a fusillade of shots. 

There's all kinds of things going on behind the scenes here. By default, the goblins are dealing reduced damage, but are hard to reach. Stepping out from the rocks would probably require some kind of Dex Test to not take additional damage. If the PCs don't get past the line of riflemen to take out the goblin weapon-crew, the machine gun opens fire and blows through their cover.

The advantage of this is that the GM is free to slow down combat and make it an interesting puzzle that PCs can discuss, or just speed it up and say Ok there's four ant-men and they all run at you angrily trying to bite you.

Every round, the GM creates a new tactical scene based on the resolution of the last.

Random Over-world Event Tables, Colonial Pirate-Crawl

The pirate wavecrawl campaign is going swimmingly. I've stolen liberally from loads of places, and finally (finally!) have an excuse to break out my library of weird modules and seed them around the over-map as rumours.

One of the goals for my design documents was to create a player-facing sandbox system that (sorta kinda) ran itself. As part of that, I ended up looking at the yearly and monthly event tables of 1985's Oriental Adventures. The TLDR was that, besides the text not aging well at all, I found the tables very big on verisimilitude, but with lacking easy ways for players to engage with what was happening.

My philosophy is that modern gaming happens in such brief chunks. Having, say, 2 hours a week is an incredible luxury, so I want those 2 hours to be full of actionable things that players can directly engage with. All rolls should be viewed through the lens of why they might matter to a group of pirate PCs. Wars and politics matter only insofar as they would matter to a pirate.

MAJOR POWER CONFLICT:

Once a Major Power Conflict has begun, determine the participants. Periodically roll to determine the theatre the Major Powers are sparring in (probably every time you roll for Overworld Events). Victory is 50-50 to either side and can be resolved with a d6, though the GM can give Advantage / Disadvantage to any one side. If the players interfere, adjust results accordingly. Keep a running tally of Victory Points, and assign a winner when the Conflict is resolved. It shouldn’t really matter to the PCs who wins, since it’s really the fallout of the conflict that affects them. 

VPs	RESOLVING
-	Stalemate
1	Minor victory
2	Major victory, some concessions
3	Humiliating victory, large concessions

EXAMPLES OF FALL-OUT / CONSEQUENCES THAT MIGHT IMPACT PCs: Diplomatic/Intelligence During: More port scrutiny, bounty-hunters, encounter spies After: Strange law passed, defection, mutiny/unrest, betrayal Sabotage/Economic During: More navy patrols, prices plummet, damaged merchant ships After: Damaged patrols, Trade-good monopoly Military During: More demand for arms, increased troop movements After: Town/fort changes hands, troop/ship presence, named general