Encouraging group actions in combat?

[LizardLips]

I need to brainstorm a little... I'm trying to build sci-fi RPG that can handle individual character actions as well as large mass battles (possibly using miniaures. I like miniatures).

I'm using a simple 1d10 + skill level vs target number for personal character actions, but I don't want to be rolling 1d10 for every grunt when the players decide to take a platoon of 30 or 40 men into battle. I want to keep each combat interaction down to two sets of rolls. For personal character attacks that's simple - one roll to hit, one roll for damage. For groups of characters its a little more troublesome because I need three pieces of data (did the attack hit? how many targets were hit? did the hit deal damage?). I anticipate each player having a squad of ten men, and I'd be happy with a rolling up to three dice for a squad's attack, and up to 10 dice to determine the final outcome of any hits.

I like the simplicity of the WWII miniature game Crossfire (if you're familiar with it), and I've looked at Stargrunt II but found it too clumsy.

My current idea is that every four members of a squad would roll a firepower die rather than a d10, and each point the firepower roll beats the TN counts as a hit. Right now I'm struggling with calculating the probabilities for an average firepower die of a d6 vs. each character firing individually with a standard 1d10 where success garners a single hit no matter how high they roll. I want the players to want to group their soldiers into squads to use the simpler die rolling methods than rolling attacks for each character. I think it'll blow their suspension of disbelief if their troops are more effective acting alone than in a team.

[Jasper]

I think it'll blow their suspension of disbelief if their troops are more effective acting alone than in a team.

More to the point, it will fail to encourage them to act together.  But at any rate, the mechanics....

The d6 for a squad vs. d10 for an individual is a bit wonky for several reasons.  As far as raw probabilities go, the d10 rolls on average 2 points higher (5.5 instead of 3.5).  If you had three men and they each fired individually with a difficulty of 3, you'd get 2.1 hits on average.  On the other hand, if they fired together as a squad, using just the d6, you'll get 0.5 hits on average....kind of strange.  The other main problem is that if you use different die types, individual soldiers will be able to hit targets that a squad could never hit at all (target number 7 say).

You say that the squad mechanics involves more questions:

did the attack hit? how many targets were hit? did the hit deal damage?

But it seems to me that you're making it seem a bit more complicated than it is.  You shouldn't need to be asking anything about damage at this point should you?  At least not any more than with individual soldiers -- there's no reason a squad should hit enemy soldiers and yet do no damage is there?  If you're thinking of armor, why not just apply it as a penalty to the roll?  That may seem simplistic but....

In my experience, the common mechanics of RPGs, that is the uses of dice and mental arithmetic which people are happy doing during for an RPG, are pretty limited.  There are really only so many things you can do. And since these things are pretty simple, there's only so muhh detail you can get in there: there's simply no clever way to condense a complicated series of interactions into just one die roll.  You can do a bit of course...but there are definite limits.  That's a mini-standard-rant I guess.   My point is simply that you shouldn't smack your head against the wall trying to figure out some elegant uber-mechanic that gives you the detail of Advanced Squad Leader with one d6 anda small table...just do the best with what requirements you set for yourself.


As for specific suggestions...it usually takes me a while to work out a good mechanic, so I may have to get back to you.  At the least, I'd consider reversign it so the squad got the larger die...but I think I'd ditch the idea of rolling different dice anyway, as long as you use a target number.  Why not always use the same roll, but a squadron is allowed to get more than one hit, while one soldier isn't?

[The Benj]

At the least, I'd consider reversign it so the squad got the larger die...but I think I'd ditch the idea of rolling different dice anyway, as long as you use a target number.  Why not always use the same roll, but a squadron is allowed to get more than one hit, while one soldier isn't?

That would have been my suggestion, too.

Then again, you could also work with a linear damage system rather than rolling for damage (cf Agone), so if you beat defense by five, your base damage is five. This speeds things up by removing a die roll (which is usually good) and means you could eschew the single roll for squads thing, just rolling 4d10, each one that beats defense hits.
Having a single roll on a single die for each action really helps to speed things up, I find.

Man, I'm looking forward to the next session of my Agone game. Mmm.

Anyway...
I like the idea of encouraging group actions.

[M. J. Young]

To borrow a lesson from the Basic D&D Battlesystem, think about getting rid of the dice when you're working with units. Work instead from the probabilities to the consequences.

Let's say you've got a squad of ten men, each with a skill of 3 and a target number of 7. That means anyone who rolls 4 or better is going to hit, right? Now, since we have ten men and we're rolling d10, the odds are that three of them will roll less than four, the other seven rolling the target or better. So instead of rolling the dice, merely determine that seven of the ten men hit.

Damage? Well, if standard damage is a d6, then instead of rolling 7d6 for your seven successful attackers, assume that the rolls average out--each doing 3.5 points of damage, or 7 for each two attackers, which means twenty-four and a half points total. If you want to make unit combat more effective, give them four points each, which makes it 28 points, marginally more effective than the average that would be achieved if each was taken individually but not so much so that a good run of dice luck couldn't beat it.

The problem that leaves you is figuring out how to code it so that the average gamer can quickly and easily determine how much damage each unit does to the other, and what that means round for round.

--M. J. Young

[Andrew Martin]

The problem that leaves you is figuring out how to code it so that the average gamer can quickly and easily determine how much damage each unit does to the other, and what that means round for round.

Also make sure that the game system doesn't lead to strange effects. Consider two PCs facing an army of, say, archers; do the results you get from the system match the results you want to get for this situation? In other words, either the PCs all die, or the PCs heroically defeat all the archers? Note that in one system that I used some time ago with exactly the same situation, 5% of the archers died each round and 5% were permantly disabled, just through their own shooting! :-/ (The PCs survived.)

[Jasper]

I messed with a lot of this stuff soem years ago when I was writing tactical wargames, and some of my thuoghts are coming back to me now.  It seems to me that unless you roll a die for every soldier who's shooting in a squad, then the most you can get from a mechanic that talks about hits is the percentage of soldiers that hit.

For instance, you roll a d20 and compare the result to a difficulty.  If they match, 10% of your soldiers hit; for every point higher, another 10% hit.  If you want more of a bell curve, use something like 2d10.  If you want some extreme heroics, use an exploding roll.

This is a little awkward since players must convert percentages into actual numbers.  You could avoid this if you kept the number of men in a squad constant at all times, and adjust things accordingly (if you had 10 men in a squad, in the above example, each margin of success is a hit).

Note in my initial paragraph that I said this was the best you could probably do for any system that spoke only about hits...if you incorporate damage and other things into the roll, then maybe you cna get more.  Here's a funky mechanic to consider, if just to get the juices flowing:


For every squad, you calculate a combined "Danger" rating, that has to do with the number of men and how they're armed.  Have a little table, since presumably there won't be too many options.  Say six men with carbines is a Danger of 4.  Certain things like dense jungle cover could cut down on this danger right out the door: say our squad of men is fighting in thick grass for -1 danger, for 3 total.  You roll as many dice as you have remaining Danger.  There's also a Difficulty for the shot though, which has to do with range, visibility, and enemy armor.  This difficulty is on a fixed scale, and never exceeds the die size (lets say we're using d10s).  After you've rolled your dice, you toss out any dice with a face value under the difficulty.

So say our squad is shooting up some gorillas at 100 ft. with some grass in the way...difficulty 7.  We roll the three dice for the Danger and get: 1, 5, 9.  The 1 and 5 are lower than the difficulty of 7, so we throw them away.  We keep the 9: that's our total damage.  The enemy squad suffers it, and probably gets a reduced Danger rating as a result.

Eh, eh? :)