The concept I can't currently get out of my head is gritty class-based struggle in Arcadia/Under the Hill/Faerie.

I'm seeing this as a human-less game, with the real world not entering into it at all. Instead, our world will be 17 places: 7 "daylight" (Seelie) nations, 7 "night" (Unseelie) nations, 1 dawn nation, 1 dusk nation, and Center, the place that they're all adjacent to (imagine a wheel).

The concept is a highly fantastic world with gritty warfare and a fair amount of political/social commentary and satire. Fanciful images (the headless cavalry, or a row of jack-o-lanterns warding off attack, or nymph irregulars) contrasted with brutal results. I'm particularly fond of the notion of peasant vs. noble conflicts within a given realm.

Question 1: Does that grab you?

I'm kind of torn as to where on the spectrum of roleplaying to wargaming I should put this. On one hand, I'd kind of like to make it a wargame-with-RPG-elements, like Necromunda, if for no other reason than that it'll be a lot more likely that I'll actually be able to play it if it's a wargame. On the other, I want a wide variety of races and things going on, which is brutally hard to balance in the way a wargame demands. Not to mention the many more peripheral systems that you need in a wargame -- it's just mechanically tougher.

Question 2: What do you think? Wargame, RPG, something in the middle?

I'm thinking about systems. I know Warhammer pretty well, and it's useful both as an RPG system and a wargaming system (with variants). D20 could do the job reasonably well, but I find high-lethality stuff a bit of a pain in it. GURPS has a wealth of options, does the gritty thing well, but I kind of shudder at the chargen and the balance issues when its system is opened up to a lot of options. BESM might do the job very well, but I'm a little concerned about the grit factor.

Question 3: Any suggestions?

#1 - Yep, it grabs me. Then again almost everything does, but I like the short description so far. I see lots of politicking. I like that.

#2 - Do both. Make an RPG and a Wargame that are fully conversant with each other.

A real neat trick would be to create a Simmy or even Narrativist RPG system, and at the same time have the entirely gamist battle system playable on its own if pople like. So, make yourself a noble if you like the politics, and hire your best wargammer friend to be your general and fight your battles for you. Or do both if you're into both. Neato.

I think that the trick would be to stage the Premise of the Narr part of the game in a scope of play where the outcomes of the battles would be no more important than die rolls. The wars then become a shifting backdrop for Narrativist play. Make sense?

#3 - Make your own system. I'll help if you're interested. If you must use something extant, I'd suggest tailoring FUDGE to fit. OTOH, that would probably result in Castle Falkenstein. Hmmm...

Mike

#1 - Yep, it grabs me. Then again almost everything does, but I like the short description so far. I see lots of politicking. I like that.

Woot!

#2 - Do both. Make an RPG and a Wargame that are fully conversant with each other.

I hate you, you big enabler, you. This is, of course, the ideal. I'm highly dubious that I'll stick with a project long enough to actually do it. But if people encourage me to try... :razz:

A real neat trick would be to create a Simmy or even Narrativist RPG system, and at the same time have the entirely gamist battle system playable on its own if pople like. So, make yourself a noble if you like the politics, and hire your best wargammer friend to be your general and fight your battles for you. Or do both if you're into both. Neato.

It would be a real neat trick. A real hard one, too.

(I think that D&D and Chainmail, the new versions, work together like this, by the way)

I think that the trick would be to stage the Premise of the Narr part of the game in a scope of play where the outcomes of the battles would be no more important than die rolls. The wars then become a shifting backdrop for Narrativist play. Make sense?

Yeah, it does, though as I've perhaps mentioned in the past, I'm not a big fan of purely Narrativist play.

#3 - Make your own system. I'll help if you're interested. If you must use something extant, I'd suggest tailoring FUDGE to fit. OTOH, that would probably result in Castle Falkenstein. Hmmm...

I want all of you to witness the fact that Mike Holmes is actively trying to get me to lose my job by working too hard on games.

Okay, that said, sure, I'll give it a shot. No promises that I'll carry it all the way through.

First thing I need is a core mechanic. I don't see any strong reason to get fancy with it, either. How about a roll-and-add or a zero-centered-bell-curve system, like I hear all the cool kids are doing these days.

Next thing I'll need is a racial creation system, I think. I just don't think that I could create enough races to make myself happy with the diversity of this place. So, something to do with that, and it would ideally give an accurate measure of the racial balance (in case anybody plays a pure wargame version, and needs to create balanced armies) or at least a general sense of racial balance (for the benefit of beleagured GM's and PC's trying to figure out if they're presenting a challenge to their opponents/the outcome is in doubt).

Then I'll need a robust magic system which handles the variety of magic in an extremely fantastic world. This may be easier than I think -- it could just be a couple of well-named skills -- but it bears consideration.

So, anyone want to help me dig in and start?

Smashed Jack O' Lantern heads, spilling their overripe contents beneath the hooves of a headless cavalry...count me in!

The rpg should come first, of course, just so I can play it.

- Moose
(being entirely too selfish)

Moose,

I don't think that there'll be a lot of differences between the two.

If Mike my apparant accomplice-in-crime wants to wade in on the subject of core resolution, I can probably hack together very "lite" basic rules for the RPG, that we can add on in great depth for the wargame, without much trouble.

Sounds good my friend. I look forward to seeing it.

Mikepoch--

You've played loads of Amber. As Ron noted, one of the cool & fascinating things about that game is how well it drifts into gamism, simulationism, or narrativism, depending on how you play it. Sounds like this setting would be good for that as well. So...do something like Amber. Only different.

Okay, like races. I agree, there's no way to have a list of races & have it be satisfying to everyone. As Jared's pointed out, on of the frustrating things about Changeling is the limited races (for a game about creativity). Now, Amber's powers & magic systems are pretty easily messed with & customized. Same with the demons in Sorcerer. I'd say with the races, just have a batch of "qualities"--powers, advantages, disadvantages, & so on. Make it easy to put together your own race, like building with Legos.

Just an idea. I'm not really a game design guy.

Josh,

Ve vill remake you into a designer. Ve haff the teknology!

Yes on the "make a driftable game."

Yes on the "qualities list" for races -- the difficulty is creating the list in the first place (example: suppose that you have an "extra limbs" advantage. And you have a "flight" advantage. Does someone with wings who can fly purchase one? The other? Both?), and costing it appropriately, so that people can play what interests them without getting walked all over by people who play what's "good." (This is more important for the wargame side than the RPG side, and less important on the wargame side than in most wargames, if our default assumption is that what's in an army is determined by the results of roleplaying rather than by the players spending X number of points, but it's still important).

If anyone's interested in this project and doesn't fancy themselves a big systems monkey (ook! ook!), but would like to contribute, my suggestion would be to just describe a vaguely genre race or magical ability, in purely qualitative terms, so that I and any other monkeys who do the mechanics have a target to aim for ("Must be able to adequately model the fruits of Josh Neff's sick, twisted imagination").

Here're some examples from me:

Jack O'Lanterns

I tend to think of properly carved Jack O'Lanterns as wards against harmful magic. They'd probably only work within the Night/Unseelie areas, because, really, a Jack O'Lantern during the day just looks stupid. They probably have an area of effect (makes harmful magic more difficult within radius of X), and possibly a facing (makes harmful magic more difficult if you're facing the lantern's face).

Goblins

These are my take on classic goblins. They're short -- maybe three feet in height, and have long, long spindly arms (they can put their palms flat on the ground without bending at the waist). They have big eyes which catch the moonlight. They're not as strong as most bigger folk, so they often avoid direct conflict. They've got the same range of intelligence as humans -- some are dumb, some are bright, lots are in the middle. They tend to be low on the social pecking order.

[ Editted for spelling. ]

[ This Message was edited by: Epoch on 2001-12-06 18:47 ]

Okay, someone go find Pete Seckler and drag him into this, 'cuz this is so his territory (goblins? pumpkinheads? oh my!).

Rather than have a list of physical "things" (wings, extra appendages, night vision, etc.), pare it down to the abstract essentials. Boosts to attributes and special effects. If my character can "FLY" it could because he has wings (like a bat) or has a mount that can fly (a pixie on a dragonfly) or does the spooky-floaty thing (a ghost) or whatever. What does the physical body part or whatever DO? THAT'S what the list should be.

You could also go for a Puppetland-y "Things I Can Do / Things I Can't Do" list. But that kidna gets in the way of your two-tiered play structure.

Oh, and the pumpkinheads should be dormant during the day. At night they sprout viny legs and viny arms to go trick-or-treating through the night. Boo!

Jared,

Check out Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter for a really interesting take on this kind of world.

Best,

Blake

Pumpkintown (was that what it was called? The twilight/night place) is certainly an influence. I see this as less cartoony, more like the classic, scary faerie tales, plus a sort of Victorian or slightly pre-Victorian working-class/aristocracy social hierarchy.

Oh, and there isn't, I think, "daytime" and "nighttime" in this world, or maybe there is, but only in Center. Everywhere else is stuck in its appropriate phase -- the Seelie kingdoms are always day, the Unseelie kingdoms are always night, and the two twilight kingdoms are always dawn and dusk, respectively.

[ This Message was edited by: Epoch on 2001-12-06 19:57 ]

1: Neat Idea. I'm intrigued.
2: I agree with some of the others that a combo sort of treatment would be quite interesting.

Comments: Much of the myth about the Fae shows them as being more set to the seasons than the day-night cycle. If you were willing to reduce the numbers to 5 Seelie and 5 Un-seelie, you would get 12 nations. Each could easily get associated with a month of the calender. (I do realize the 12 month calender is more of a Roman Thing, but oh well it fits.) The next nice thing about this is that you could then use the d12 for rolls in both the Wargame and RPG portion as a tie-together trick. Just a thought from a late-night sugar-loaded mind.

My latest little research kick is CCG's. I see them as sort of between Wargames and RPG's, but that is a different topic. One of the things about the card games is they boil the basic stats quite far down, and then add on descriptors of abilities. I don't play wargames much, but the same could be true for them as well.
If you had a set of abilities/special bits, that translated from the Wargame half to the RPG half, translating characters would not be too hard. Like 'Flight' allowed just basic narrative flight in the RPG, would allow some sort of standardized advantage in the wargame. This would mean your characters in the RPG could end up as just sort of a list of descriptors, ala Underworld or Over the Edge. Which may not be that bad depending on the type of game you intended.

Sorta my thoughts.. I would be willing to add help if this goes forward. I'm quite fond of the Fae/Celtic legends and most games involving them.

Torrent


[ This Message was edited by: Torrent on 2001-12-06 23:20 ]

Hmmm. After some thought, I think I like the seasons thing. I'm probably less keen on using d12's for anything, based simply on the fact that they're probably the least common die among the usual polyhedrals for anyone to have.

So then, rather than being stuck in a time of day, each land would be stuck in a seasonal thing -- maybe one Unseelie early spring, three Unseelie winters, and two Unseelie falls, two Seelie springs, three summers, and one fall.

I realize that there's pretty much nowhere in the world in which there are actually three months of each season, but I'm not too stuck on realism here.

The descriptor trait thing might be doable -- the issue is that those systems are often very loosey-goosey in RPG's, and a wargame needs things nailed down.

Okay. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to begin nailing down parts of the game. I am expecting help from those of you who said you would. This is too big a project for me to do on my own right now. :smile: However, perhaps unfairly, I'm going to be despotic about resolving things into a single game as we go along -- I'll try not to be too unreasonably despotic. If I end up being a dick about it, I imagine that everybody will abandon the project and I'll grind to a halt. :smile:

So. If you have any kind of core mechanic ideas, write about them in the next 24 hours. Things I think are important (non-exhaustive list):

• The mechanic should be usable, with perhaps some modification, in the wargame as well -- that means relatively low handling time, and, if at all possible, ability to roll multiple characters at once.
  
  
• High numbers should probably be better -- people seem to have an issue with roll-under mechanics.
  
  
• Easy modifiability is a must -- wargames are only interesting if there's tactical stuff involved, and that pretty much means that people have to get positive or negative modifiers by doing certain things.
  
  
• Common dice types are preferred. I think that die types go like this in order of commonality: d6, d10, d20, d8, d4, d12, everything else. If we're down in the d8, d4, d12 range, I think we need to think again.
  

Pumpkinheads should surely be bomb-throwing-anarchist-style grenades.

Basic resolution:

I'm going to go with 1d20 + modifiers versus a consistant target number of, I think, 15 (subject to change).

It's simple, it uses a relatively common die type, it should be nice and familiar to people who play D&D3.

For attack and damage, I think that I want to take a two-tiered approach: Roll to hit, roll for damage, using the same mechanic.

Example: The elven cavalry charges the trollish irregulars. There are five units in the cavalry, and three in the trolls. The elf's commander rolls 5d20 to hit, and has a +4 total to hit, so he needs 11's. He gets a 13, a 2, a 5, a 19, and a 10 -- two hits. He follows up with damage rolls. The elves' charge bonus more than makes up for the trolls' resiliance, so they roll at +3. He gets a 12 and a 7 -- one of the trolls goes down and out.

Another nice thing about this approach is that, in the RPG, you could optionally use 2d10 instead of 1d20, for a very slightly higher average and a much more regular curve.

Ahem... funny I should find this now. Theres some half-hearted work going on designing a HeroWars battle system which I've been mulling over, and came up with a loose idea which I cannot yet realise. This is the "design-a-feud game", probably a card-game. You generate, randomly with player exposition, a cassus belli, generate some troops, and thrash it out on the field of honour. The idea here is of a pickup game with little prep-time; setup is in fact part of the game.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that into the mix. I'm not startlingly enthused by the fairytale stuff, bu I have a cut-down HW mechanic for you to borrow if you want.

I'd like to see what you've got, Gareth.

I know you probably think that I've abondoned you Mike, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a battle mechanic that works with what you have, and is not amazingly math intensive. If you're still looking, I might have somethng soon. Or maybe Gareth has something better. We'll see.

Mike

You big abandonner!

Actually, this morning, in the shower (where all good game design goes on, not to mention pretty much all of my job-related creativity), I was thinking about formation.

See, I want to emphasize the difference between "regular" (in an army, disciplined, trained) and "irregular" (guerilla, or untrained) troops. My thought was that regular troops could go into close formation, and irregulars couldn't.

When you're in close formation, you get a hefty melee combat bonus.

However... You either can't "run" (move faster than your base movement) in formation, or you have to make some kind of die roll to remain in formation while running. You can't maintaing close formation in certain kinds of terrain, and you have to roll to perform certain kinds of manuevers without falling out of formation. You can do a single movement-phase charge and retain your bonus to combat during that charge, but after it, you're out of formation.

The idea was that you could have two groups of troops, one regular and one irregular. They've got roughly the same stats. If they meet on the open field, the regulars kick the irregulars asses squarely, because the regulars keep formation and provide a beat-down. If, however, the irregulars can arrange to meet in heavy woods, where it's impossible to keep formation, it's more of a heavy fight. Additionally, since the irregulars can manuever more freely and run without restriction, they're more manueverable than the regulars... If the regulars want to keep formation, at least.

Seems like an interesting dynamic, and, based on the tiny ounce of military knowledge that I know, relatively realistic.

Actually, this morning, in the shower (where all good game design goes on, not to mention pretty much all of my job-related creativity), I was thinking about formation.

Formations, excellent. I think that'll fit tight into what I'm designing. And I think you'll like it as I stole a lot of it from you. Here's what I'm thinking so far.

First we want to keep handling time down, so as few rolls as possible. And I'm thinking of how to keep things scaled so that you can do 300 vs 500 as easily as 3 vs 5. So...

On entering melee each unit (formation) rolls an attack roll and a defense roll. D20 plus unit bonuses. These bonuses would be equal to the bonus for the average member of the unit. So if elves have a +4 racial stat bonus for speed, the unit gets that bonus for defense. Trolls are +3 axe skill on average, so that bonus adds to their attack roll. Attack in this case is more like skill, and Defense is more like dodge than armor. Anyhow, the difference between each sides' attack and the opposing side's defense is the number of "hits" achieved.

Opposing rolls achieve a (almost) bell curve.

These hits are then each rolled, attacker strength and weapons vs. defender toughness and armor, etc. Each failure to defend means ten percent of the affected unit goes down. Roll for actual casualties against toughness again after the battle.

Simpler would be to just make the outcome of the first roll a bonus to a single damage roll, or just to add all the modifiers up. There's a lot of fine tuning to be done here. Need rules for unit mass. +1 per 50% extra? Something like that.

Anyhow, this would work well opposite a regular system that is much like Mithras' Zenobia. Formation bonuses would just remain as a bonus in mass combat to the combat roll when collision occurs. This way you can rate an entire unit by its formation skill, high meaning more regular, and low meaning more irregular.

And here's the kicker - a single leader can make a difference by making a leadership roll and adding successes to the formation or maneuver die rolls made by the unit. Very large units could have rolls for subcommanders as well. Also, PCs in a unit can make a difference by adding their successes as though they were fighting a single member of the opposing unit (reduced by scale?).

Go FitM so that the players can describe the effects of their rolls. Neato.

Ok, that's a lot in a fast confused bundle. Can you see where I'm going?

On races, the way I see it, just charage every character as though they were human. Keeps things balanced. Giants can just more reasonably buy a whole lot more strength. If anything, racial writeups will just have suggested high and low ends for stats. Want to buy a unit? Just write up an "average" soldier in the unit and multiply by the number of individuals. Balances whole units against players. So you can pit dragons against piles of Dwarves.

Howzat sound?

Mike

I like the combat rolls. I'm not sure I like the 10% damage thing, because it sounds to me like it involves lots of special cases. Need to meditate more on that.

A nice feature of the system you propose is that you don't have to use it, of course. If you want to, you can roll each guy individually (which might be appropriate, for small skirmishes).

I think I'd prefer to have a static bonus for being in formation. It sounds to me like having a bonus equal to the troops discipline would be an increasing returns feature -- the better you are at staying in formation, the more you get out of it. Or did you mean two different ratings, one for the advantage that you had for being in formation, the other for rolling to stay in it?

I'm thinking a big bonus: +5, maybe, for being in formation when your opponent isn't.

Definitely, leaders would be important, and would give bonuses for various kinds of manuever rolls.

I rolled some of these ideas around a friend at work today, and articulated something that's clichéd but important: the goal here should be to have simple rules which give rise to complex behaviour.

On 2001-12-13 17:33, Epoch wrote:
the goal here should be to have simple rules which give rise to complex behaviour.

OK, heres HW Lite for you to consider. The intent here was to capture the essential structure of the HW AP trading mechanism in a form that requires less accounting.

Each combatant has a number of DICE; I was working on d20's for consistency but this is not strictly necessary. As per HW, each side nominates an action and rolls a number of dice from their pool (their bid).

Once rolled, the dice are arranged from highest to lowest, starting at the highest for each side. In cases where one side has more dice than another, there will be a "tail" of low-value dice hanging off the matched pairs.

A unit in combat has a number of properties other than how many dice appear in their pool; they also have a Resistance value [note: this is intended to represent the function of Edge and was originally called that; but I have collapsed two edge functions into one so it does not work in a precisely analgous manner]. ANY die rolled against a target which comes up lower than their resistance value is forfeited BEFORE die comparison occurs.

Once the dice are arranged, highest vs. highest, possibly with a tail, they are resolved, wheich esentially means returning them to the player pools. The highest value die in an opposed pair is said to CAPTURE the other die. A captured die is retruned to the VICTORS pool. Any dice in a tail are returned to the pool of their owner.

Dice which come up as the same value as their opposite number are FORFEITED. This is the same as occurs with dice which role lower than their opponents resistance, and these dice are removed from play permanenently. This means that over time, with losses due to equal roles and forfeits, the total number of dice in play in any given confrontation should decline, and can never rise.

Anyway, there ya go. As it happens, I also have another idea for a card-based movement and deployment systm, more closely based on the HW rules. It came about as a result of my efforts to resolve the anomalies of ranged combat in the HW mechanic - or potential anomalies I should say. I can post that as well, but it would be simpler to mail an attachment, if anyone wants to see it.

I see a big red warning light that says, "Handling time!" I'd need to mess with the thing in practice, but it sounds to me like it'd be really slow.

Is this mechanic modifiable? If so, how?

Well, that's actually part of the HW design. Yes it takes a while to do an extended conflict. But as you describe what is happening, step-by-step, it makes it worthwhile. In theory.

Gareth, if I disengage my unit from combat, the dice lost represent casualties, then?

Mike

I question that theory as it applies to wargames. Which, I recognize, is not what the mechanic was designed for.

Yes, I think that we would be treading new ground here with the "Narrativist Wargame". That being said, I think that the Narrativist methods used here would not annoy the Sims too much. But if that does not sound interesting, just say so and it's back to d20 Simulationism. Yer call.

Mike

I post the following in hopes it will spark thought, rather than any suggestion it be used as is.
This is a paraphrase from a sorta GM'd wargame called Charlie Company published in 1986 or 1997, I think Im not good at reading those publishment pages, by RAFM. It is set in the Vietnam era. Each player had a Figure that was their Character. One player each game would play all of the VietCong(sp?), with the others playing smaller squads of American troops led by their guy. The "goal" was to have your character survive a Tour of 12 battles. There is a

It was written for d6's, but d10's could be tweaked into it. One a side note, I want to raise a point about d20. If you are going to use a system that could resultin rolling more than maybe 3-5 d20s at a time, I would claim that could be a problem. Even with the proliferation of 'd20' stuff, most gamers dont have large piles of them like they tend to of d6 and d10. Something to ponder. d20's also roll farther. We have had several nights of 'find the d20'.

The mechanics (paraphrased) from Charlie Co.
1) Each Unit has a dice value in d6. Poorly armed guys are 1/4, while normal armed ones are 1d6 and a Howtizer is like 15. To start an attack, you count up all the dice for the unit that is attacking.
2) Apply modifier to this number for Formation, Target Cover, movement, etc. These are either +Xd6 or X times the total.
3) Roll your total pool and count the number of d6 to come up 5 or 6. Tally these "hits".
4) This is where the game gets different for the VietCong and the Americans. For the VietCong, there is a single defense roll(d6) + modifiers. For the Americans each unit gets one d10 + modifiers. These defense values are compared to the number of scored Hits. There is one table for each side, with the American side being judges less harshly.

The Things I like abou this:
* Seek time and Handling time seem very low. Seek Time could be helped with Unit Cards. Handlign times improved with Math instead of Tables.
* Several places for possible modifiers. Allowing the Regulars/Irregulars possibility of above.
* The idea that certain figures are more important and dramatically treated differently. Since you are doing the Wargame/RPG crossover, the ability to allow the dramatically important characters to exist in the Wargame without as much danger of bad dice rolls killing them off in bad times.

The problems:
It does use alot of dice.
I have yet to find anyone to play a full battle with it. Just a few test skirmishes. So there could be problems I don't see.

Just my thought in this...

[ This Message was edited by: Torrent on 2001-12-15 13:57 ]

Gareth, if I disengage my unit from combat, the dice lost represent casualties, then?