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.