Hello,

I've been designing a comedy/satire RPG based on the characters being "cannon-fodder". The general feel of the game is meant to be of insignificance: think of one of the Star Wars pre-trilogy Battle Droids and how they individually aren't worth anything in combat.

The basic mechanic of the game is that every task has odds of success. Based on this odds of success you draw a card out of a pile with x success cards and y failure cards, for odds of success x/(x+y). Since this is a comedy/satire RPG, the mechanics are meant to be simple and not bogged down with arithmetic computations.

I believe all the mechanics are working except for one. Large-scale combat still remains a problem. All the mechanics for large-scale combat I can think of would almost require the GM pulling out a calculator, especially for battles with 1000+ combatants. In a perfect world, I'd be looking for a feeling that in these large scale battles, the players would have an effect on the result of battle, but an incredibly small one. The one thing I do not want is that the players in a large scale battle would have an enormous impact on the result of it. The mechanics dealing with large-scale battles would ideally be the same as those dealing with smaller scale skirmishes.

Would anyone be able to give me some suggestions as to how to make large-scale battles not require loads of calculations?

Thanks!

Divide the battlefield into cells, where only the active cells that players are a part of are determined via small-scale resolution mechanics.  The rest of the battle is either played out by GM narration or large-scale mechanics, in which a group of combatants are considered as a single acting unit.

Another option is to pre do the calculations into an appropriate table. I recall in War Lore there was a table for showing how much dice rolls average out over a large number of rolls. As your system uses cards this would would need to be modified and to do that I'd need more information on how the system works.

BTW If you're interested, have you seen the graphic novel Crecy by Warren Ellis? Quite appropriate for the setting. Here's a link:
http://www.avatarpress.com/titles/warren-ellis-crecy/

Ar wrote:
Divide the battlefield into cells, where only the active cells that players are a part of are determined via small-scale resolution mechanics.  The rest of the battle is either played out by GM narration or large-scale mechanics, in which a group of combatants are considered as a single acting unit.

flossy wrote:
Another option is to pre do the calculations into an appropriate table. I recall in War Lore there was a table for showing how much dice rolls average out over a large number of rolls. As your system uses cards this would would need to be modified and to do that I'd need more information on how the system works.

Is it a natural progression that if you run smaller battles by mechanics, you must run larger ones by mechanics as well? To me it doesn't seem to be.

To me, the larger battle essentially seems either background fluff or irrelevant to the activity the players are engaging in?

That's personal opinion, Callan. A lot of people want their battles simulated in some way. The entire hobby of RPGs stems from people wanting to do just that . . .

As for how to handle larger battles, the question becomes: do you need to have anything more happen than the drawing of cards, treating each army as an individual?

The example table is table T-1 Luck Table in War Law.

Here's a link:

http://www.themutepoint.com/Table_T1.jpg

The number of attacks is the number of rolls.

Mathew wrote:
That's personal opinion, Callan. A lot of people want their battles simulated in some way. The entire hobby of RPGs stems from people wanting to do just that . . .

I would agree the presumption that battles should be gamed out seems reflexive and doesn't bear close inspection.  Callan is quite right about this.

There are some good reasons that you might want to do it, but as always, for any particular game design, you should think about precisely what you want to do and precisely why you want to do it.  I would expect that for most character-centric RPG designs, gaming out a large scale battle is likely to be unproductive abnd unnecessary, and may be actively damaging.  This arises from the fact that iot may move play out of the imaginary space, and out of the characters sensorium, and into the pure mechanical abstraction of the wargame.

So the question for Rush is this: what would be gained, in your design, by gaming out the battles?  If the answer is nothing, which it may well be, then a big battle can be treated as a somewhat abstract set of encounters.  Instead of being organised, as in the dungeon, by geography, they are instead organised by events in the larger scheme.  If there IS something to be gained, then homing in on precisely what that is will be informative as to how you should handle them.

At first glance, I would have thought that a game centred on the concept of cannon fodder would benefit more from leaving the battle out of the resolution and having them instead as something that imposes itself on the hapless and helpless characters.  But I defer to whatever Rush may have to say on this question.

If it needs discussing, Legend of the Five Rings has what is IMO the best system I've come across for handling large scale battles, and integrating character actions into them.  But even this requires some degree of abstraction.  I can explain how that works if you need it; but first let's get some clarity on whether your concept would actually benefit from gaming them out at all.

If I can just add to Gareth's/Contra's post something that occured to me just now, in alot of books they may describe a huge battle, then some protagonists part in it. But in the end, in the book, perhaps the bigger battle doesn't really matter to the protagonists battle. The thing is, in the moment of reading it you don't know that the big battle wont affect the smaller, so it feels part of it. While here if don't run the larger battle, everyone, at the moment of play, definately knows it's not connected as such. This is probably a problem inherent, though, to being both creator and audience at the same time. Readers of books obviously don't straddle the author/audience divide, with a foot in either, so they don't get that problem. But I'd concede this as a point regardless.

Hmm, I'll agree that's true for some fiction, but if you look at most, for example, WW2 stories, the audience can be confidently assumed to know how, say, the Normandy landings are going to work out.  This doesn't IMO prevent the close in experience depicted on the screen from being effective.

Secondly, a battle could be effectively indeterminate from the characters and players point of view because they don't know the outcome, even if the outcome is in fact fixed by the GM beforehand.

At any rate, if the larger battle were not gamed out, I don't think that would be significant, to me at least.  I agree it signposts something, in the certainty that I am not directly having an impact; but I don't think I would expect to anyway.

Lastly, a battle even if not gamed out could be affected in a choose-your-own-adventure sort of way, and this could be either explicit or behind the curtain.  If the characters succesfully take the redoubt and spike the cannons, outcome A happens, and if they fail outcome B happens.  This approach would still have player impact but it would not require wargame-style resolution of the larger action.

Callan wrote:
Side point: Pretty sure simulation was a secondary concern in most wargaming, with gamist player Vs player coming first (ie, they didn't bother simulating stuff that had nothing to dow with which player would win over the other).

Personally, I'd only play out the large-scale battle if the PCs were actually commanding units, i.e. they had a substantial quantitative effect upon the result.

Wouldnt the aim of cannon fodder, on the eve of the big battle, be to get themselves an assignment which is as safe as possible, and/or as rewarding as possible (in loot/glory) ? 

In a game where you play cannon fodder, I think it may be useful to be reacting to events which are outside your control. Representing this by having large scale battle mechanics sounds entirely reasonable to me.

By the way, both the Flashman or the Ciaphas Cain novels would be good inspiration for such a campaign.

To all who posted here: thanks for all your insights on this system! I think I now have a clear idea of how to proceed, thanks to all of your help here.

Rush