Mass Samurai Battles in BECMI

What do you say we lighten things up and talk about the mass slaughter of the flower of youth?

The Rules Cyclopedia is (I think) the only iteration of DnD which makes a stab at a flavourful, quick and comprehensive mass battle system in its core rules. This has always been relevant to my interests, because I was always as much into Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 as much as I was a role player, and I am to this day something of a wargame geek (incidentally, if any of the readers of this blog play Steel Panthers: World at War, I'm always available for a PBEM game).

The War Machine, as it is known, is a noble attempt, and ultimately a success - because, although the rules are simplistic, efficiency is art, and it clearly strikes the right balance between simplicity and flexibility. Let's run ourselves through a battle and find out why. Because almost nobody commented on it and it sank into the murky waters of the blogosphere with nary a trace, I'll randomly generate two samurai armies from my random feudal Japanese army generator to duke it out.

To be fair, we'll keep both armies roughly the same size [Force Size C on my generator, for those following along], but keep composition different. And, through the wonderful mystery of dice rolling, here's what we come up with:

Lord Bakayaro's Army (490 men)

49 light cavalry (0-level keikihei; unit contains 2 1st level warriors)
49 medium cavalry (1-level chukihei; unit contains 2 2nd level warriors)
122 heavy infantry (1-level foot samurai; unit contains 4 2nd level warriors)
74 archers (0-level medium archers; unit contains 2 1st level warriors)
196 light infantry (1-level foot samurai; unit contains 4 2nd level warriors)

Lord Bakayaro is level 5. He is a paladin.

The BFR for this force is 63, assuming 20 weeks of training with their general, and including bonus for having an average AC of 5 or better. This means their Troop Class is 'fair'. Their BR is 77 (63, +7 for having 20% mounted troops, +7 for speed).

Lord Do-Aho-s Army (390 men)

39 light cavalry (1-level keikihei; unit contains 1 2nd level warrior)
39 heavy cavalry (1-level mounted samurai; unit contains 1 2nd level warrior)
39 heavy infantry (1-level foot samurai; unit contains 1 2nd level warrior)
195 light infantry (1-level foot samurai; unit contains 5 2nd level warriors)
39 archers (0-level light archers; unit contains 1 1st level warrior)
39 no-dachi samurai (1-level foot samurai; unit contains 1 2nd level warrior)

Lord Do-Aho is level 9. He is a magic-user.

The BFR for this force is also, interestingly, 63, applying the same bonuses as above - giving a BR of 70 (+7 for speed).

Let's also assume that no other bonuses apply - the troops are meeting on an open field in neutral territory on a bright autumnal evening.

Now, combat results: both armies advance forwards, fanning out across the plain - a standard meeting engagement. Both players roll a d100 and add their BR: Lord Bakayaro gets 68 + 77, resulting in 145. Lord Do-Aho gets 37 + 70, resulting in 107. Lord Bakayaro's force drives Lord Do-Aho's backwards, winning by 38; examining the results table to find out what this means, we discover there is great slaughter on both sides - 20% of Bakayaro's men are casualties, compared to 40% of Do-Aho's, and after the day is done both forces are understandably fatigued (Bakayaro's moderately, Do-Aho's seriously) and retreat from the field.

Casualties are spread equally across all units, with a 50/50 split between dead and wounded, leaving Bakayaro with 402 men able to fight the next day if necessary, and Do-Aho with a mere 234. Bakayaro has 49 wounded men on his hands; Do-Aho, 78 - both sides were able to retreat in good order and save their injured.

I was able to complete the above battle in about half an hour while I was making dinner, including generating both sides. It would be a bit more complicated in other scenarios - if I was taking into account terrain, who was defending and who was attacking, that sort of thing - and magical or special monstrous troops through additional factors into the mix. But still, most battles can be worked out in 45 minutes or less. This makes it a robust and sexy little system for generating battle results.

There are two key complaints I suppose could be made:

• Figures for dead and wounded. In most medieval battles, indeed in the entire history of human conflict, the wounded always far, far outweigh the dead. However, by the same token, the injured in pre-20th century battles would frequently die afterwards from their wounds and often from disease, and arguably therefore the 50/50 split makes sense (the "50% killed" figure could refer to the total number of dead during the fighting and after).
• Bonuses are applied to the entire force - either the whole army is defending or attacking, the whole army is on higher ground, the entire army is in the woods, etc. This is a fairer criticism, although it is difficult to imagine how it can be resolved without recourse to counters and maps; and the beauty of the system is that you don't need either of those things.

A great innovation is the optional rule for tactics. Both players choose a tactic for their turn (attack strongly, attack, envelop, trap, hold, withdraw) and conceal a dice, face up with the corresponding number (1 for attack strongly, 2 for attack, 3 for envelop, etc.). Then they reveal their dice at the start of the turn and see what happens (if both sides attack strongly there are lots of casualties; if one side attacks strongly and the other holds, the attacking side suffers more casualties; if one attacks and the other withdraws, the withdrawing side suffers more casualties, etc.). Kind of a glorified version of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but also fun and easy to use.

The great tragedy, of course, is that you don't often get the chance to see the rules in action because high-level play is so rare. Playing once a month is not a recipe for success in this regard. NOISMS NEEDS A WEEKLY GAME.

Ooh, Magic Missile

Faustusnotes has an interesting post today on, essentially, why "fantasy writers don’t take advantage of the cosmology of their worlds to examine how social, political and economic relations would change in a magically-imbued world" - that is, why is it that in a D&D-esque campaign setting where clerics and wizards can cure any illness, and literally change reality, do you still end up with a "filthy, primitive, ignorant feudal world, where life is hard, racism and sexism is rife, and injustice is the order of the day"?

To be fair to fantasy authors, I think in actual fact that D&D-style magic is extremely rare in fantasy fiction. In the "core" texts of modern fantasy - Vance, Howard, Harrison, Moorcock, le Guin, and especially Tolkien - you just don't get magic that can cure diseases, shape stone, and create food and water willy-nilly. Arguably, the fact that magic can't make peoples' lives materially better is kind of the point; and usually it is depicted as a destructive force that probably makes peoples' lives worse - certainly more corrupt.

But it's a nicely done post and true, I think, when it comes to D&D itself. Technology has, over thousands of years, made life many, many orders of magnitude better for us than our ancestors living in neolithic times. Why wouldn't the same be true of D&D magic, except many, many orders of magnitude faster?

The obvious answer is just that "it isn't fantasy that way". And, let's face it, it isn't. The fantasy genre, expecially D&D (which is a genre unto itself) has a set of tropes that make it what it is, and to expect it to be different is to expect romantic fiction without the square-jawed Mr. Darcy-lite, or space opera without the space ships. Complaining that D&D magic doesn't result in the kind of society that Faustusnotes thinks it might do is a bit like complaining that in a Stephen King book we're expected to believe in supernatural entities even if we don't personally believe they exist. Well, yeah, but where's the fun in that? You suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying the work as an example of its genre.

But I also think there's an interesting point to be made in relation to this: D&D magic is really, really banal. Over the editions the "magicalness" of it - the specialness, the rarity, the wonder - was sucked out of it and it became increasingly about utililty due, let's face it, to the demands of the game and the players. Spells like "create water" and "cure light wounds" exist not because they are cool and wondrous but because they solve in-game problems like "my character needs to drink to stay alive" or "my character lost too many hit points".

There's nothing wrong with this, per se - it is a game, after all - but there's no point in pretending it's all very exciting. It isn't very exciting. D&D magic is as bland as anything - just look at the names of the spells. Cure light wounds. Purify food and drink. Sleep. Magic missile. I know, I can hardly stand the sense of awe and wonder either.

It's for these reasons that I'm all in favour of two things: the non-magical campaign (where magic is the preserve of NPCs, thus implying great rarity) and the spell-forge generated spell name campaign, in which mage characters are told they start off with spells called things like Sage Eyes, Earth Mountain, Underground Child or Vicarious Weaver, and they have to negotiate with the DM about what the hell they do.

This has the added advantage of stopping the logical-minded of us worrying that we have priests and magic-users running around everywhere, while society remains mired in leprosy and filth.We get to keep both.

Larry Elmore and Utter Ridiculosity: A Love Story

More art, mainly because there's a bit of Larry Elmore love going round the blogosphere. I'm a fan of Larry Elmore, because it's his art that I cut my teeth on in my early years of D&D playing, and let's face it, there is no more iconic "Silver Age" D&D artist.

The thing I like about Larry Elmore art, now, is that it is all "quite" something, and never "very" anything. It is either quite good, quite cheesy, quite bad, or quite ridiculous. Some examples to illustrate:

Quite Good

Quite Cheesy

Quite Bad

Quite Ridiculous

Devils & Demons by Diterlizzi: A Love Story

Freshwater Octopuses of the Lapis River Valley

The Lapis River is a cold, glacial river network flowing down from the Mountains of the Moon all the way south to the God River in Lamarakh. It is fast running, totally pure, and often frozen in its upstream during winter. So it is a surprising place to find freshwater octopuses, but actually they flourish there, feeding off the many oysters, crayfish and water snails in its depths.

There are hundreds of species, of many colours. Some are edible, some are poisonous. Some have unusual, colour changing abilities. Some are social, others are solitary. The only thing they have in common is that they are all small - no bigger than a man's hand. In an encounter with freshwater octopuses, the DM should randomly generate their species using the following tables:

Table 1: Appearance

Roll a d10 to determine main colour, then a d6 to determine pattern, and then roll another d10 to determine secondary colour (roll again if the result is the same as the main colour).

Colour

1 - Blue
2 - Green
3 - Red
4 - Yellow
5 - Purple
6 - Black
7 - Brown
8 - Grey
9 - Orange
10 - White

Pattern

1 - Striped
2 - Solid
3 - Solid
4 - Solid
5 - Spotted
6 - Leopard-spotted

Table 2: Sociability

Roll a d6 to determine how social the species is, then roll again to determine the number encountered.

1 - Solitary or Pair (d2)
2 - Solitary or Pair (d2)
3 - Family (d4)
4 - Family (d4)
5 - Social (1d10)
6 - Flocking (3d6)

Table 3: Abilities

Roll 1d30 to determine abilities.

1-2 - Chameleon camouflage. Can change the colour of the skin to match surroundings. Opponents always surprised, -4 to hit.
3-4 - Minor toxin. On a successful hit, opponent must Save v. Poison or suffer weakness for d3 days (-2 to all rolls).
5-6 - Moderate toxin. On a successful hit, opponent must Save v. Poison or suffer weakness for d3 days (-2 to all rolls); a successful save reduces this to d3 hours.
7 - Major toxin. On a successful hit, opponent must Save v. Poison or be paralysed for d3 days.
8 - Deadly toxin. On a successful hit, opponent must Save v. Poison or die within d6 turns (can be magically healed during that time). A successful save results in weakness as per result 2.
9-10 - Feeds on magic. A successful hit on a magic-user causes him/her to forget a random spell.
11-12 - Psionic. Can perform a mind-blast which always hits for d6 damage; a Save v. Death defeats it.
13-16 - Electrical. Can electrify the water surrounding it like an electric eel. Anything within two yards takes d6 damage and must Save v. Death or be paralysed for d6 turns; other octopuses are immune.
17-20 - Ink. Can squirt ink 3 times per day. Acts like a Darkness, 15' Radius spell in the river.
21 - Friendly. Unaggressive and benign.
22 - Poisonous if eaten. Same effect as per result 8.
23-25 - Emits stench. This acts as a stinking cloud spell, to which other octopuses are immune.
26-28 - Emits alarm hormones which travel downstream and will be detected within 1 hour by 1) more octopuses of a random species; 2) giant crayfish; 3) river troll; 4) nereid; 5) freshwater sea hag; 6) merrow.
29 - Spits acid at land targets for d6 damage.
30 - Can phase as a phase spider.

Stats

Frequency: Rare
AC: 5
Hit Dice: 1/2*
Move: 150' (50') Sw
Attacks : 1 bite
Damage: 1d4
No. App: See above
Save As: F1
Morale: 6
Treasure: M (scattered around territory)
Intelligence: 2
XP: 6

On Steered Imagination and the Random Generator

As we know, restriction of options is usually a spur to creativity rather than a hindrance. The narrower the scope in which your imagination is allowed to run riot, perversely, the more productive it usually becomes (within reason). An illustration: Give a man a pen and paper and he might spend 6 hours just thinking of something to write about. Give him a pen and paper and say "Write me a story about a murder" and he'll have a finished piece in half the time it took for him to even think of an idea in the first scenario.

Random generators are such a great aid to creativity, I think, because they embody this fundamental truth. They steer imagination and make it more productive. The simplest illustration of this is the random encounter in D&D (much maligned by people who don't actually really think about their gaming). Without random encounters, traditional games become stale and stressful for the DM, who has to spend unproductive and boring hours trying to think up interesting scenarios from the aether to entertain his players and keep the game going. With random encounters, his creativity becomes focused: why are these goblins here, and where have they come from? Bang: Focus. Interest. Post hoc narrative. Story. If he knows his game world reasonably well, he has it made.

This is also why generating random results on a table is enjoyable in its own right, even taken outside of the context of a game. I can't be the only person who feels this way - a peculiar glee in having a big set of d30 tables and just generating results to find out what happens. What is this treasure hoard, what is its history, and who put it here? What is this group of giants doing in this area, what are their names, and what do they own? What spells does this spellbook contain, and who is its original owner? Your imagination is steered, and consequently becomes productive, and the endorphines begin to flow.

Of course, without the ultimate random generators - players - even generating random results becomes boring after a while. Random generators need a game, just as games need random generators. It's a yin-yang thing, or something.

Ah, The Big Purple

I don't like to partake in rpg.net bashing too much, but I just had to link to this thread, which is just priceless, as it contains everything that is bad about that forum in one go: the snooty, unfunny, hackneyed old joke contained in the OP, the weird in-joke acronyms that nobody understands, the horrible spectacle of geeks being smug about having a "sense of humour", and then - the icing on the cake - a moderator stepping in with red text to ban somebody for a week for a trivial "personal attack" which nobody understands, as if everybody involved is 5 years old (which they sort of are). God, I love that website.

Risus Sorcerers

Apropos of nothing at all, I was thinking about Risus this morning on the way to work and how you could use it to make magic systems in just about any game. Or, you could use it to create a game in which the characters are all uber-powerful archmage demigods who can bend reality to their very will. Sort of like Exalted or Nobilis, except good.

For those who don't know anything about Risus, a brief precis: characters are created with four attributes, ranked 4, 3, 2, and 1. These numbers represent the size of the dice pool (in d6) for the relevant attribute. Attributes can be anything, though usually a noun-phrase is preferred: e.g. "Tough guy", "Poet", "Womanizer", "Slimy courtesan", etc. The beauty of the system is that it models physical and social combat very simply and effectively, before the Burning Wheel or Dogs in the Vineyard guys were twinkles in their respective fathers' eyes. Basically, it boils down to rolling the dice pool for a chosen attribute, with whoever scores highest whittling away the dice pool of their opponent until they have none left, whereupon the winner decides the fate of the loser. (It could be "I blast his face off with a fireball" if it's magical combat, or it could be "I win the argument and convince the King to let me marry his daughter" in a social combat.)

I have two ideas for a Risus-based magic system:

1. Characters begin with 4 "schools of magic" attributes, a la Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, Elements, etc. They can make up their own or choose from a big "I'm the DM and these are the magic schools in my game world" list. So you might start off with Fire 4, Earth 3, Water 2 and Air 1 (say). This is in addition to the standard 4 attributes that a Risus character gets. The DM might set restrictions on what kind of stuff a player can do with that given magical school (green magic is for healing, blue magic is protective, yellow magic is to do with time, that sort of thing) or they might limit it only to player creativity.
2. Characters just have one "magic" attribute from among their four, allowing them to do literally anything they choose with their innate magical ability.

PCs would be able to cast spells as and when the situation requires, narrating what they do - for example, "I cast an earth spell and open up a chasm beneath the feet of the orcs!" or "I cast an air spell and summon a breeze to blow our ship safely to port!", or "I use my magic to blast the blacksmith's sanity and turn him into a gibbering moron!" The fun comes in coming up with interesting descriptions for how you use your magic ("I cast a fireball" is okay, "I summon a demon from the plane of fire to burn out the eyes of my enemies" is better.) Spells would go off without a hitch unless it came down to magical combat, in which case dice pools would come into play. Or, for the slightly less uber-powered game, the DM might assign target numbers depending on how ambitious the player is being: casting a fireball might have a difficulty of 5, but summoning an Efreet from the plane of fire to lay waste to an entire army might have a difficulty of 22.

The style of campaign it would support is, of course, one in which the characters are already extremely powerful at the beginning - able to smite mere mortals with impunity. The only genuine limit on what they can do is what the players can think of. As with Amber Diceless, the assumption from the start is that PCs can beat an ordinary human, and can only be challenged by mightily powerful opponents. Or each other. Usually, I prefer my campaigns to be more low-level and "gritty". Still, could be a lot of fun for a Very High Fantasy game of adventuring archmages.

The Relationship Hexmap

Following on from yesterday's post, and drawing from ckutalik's interesting sequence on Top Secret and network linkages from earlier this year, I did some thinking last night on how to come up with a conceptual hexmap for non-geographical sandbox play. This post is just a summary of my preliminary thoughts - it's basically some rough ideas.

What I want, and what I envisage, is a hexmap revolving around interpersonal space rather than physical space. Instead of the players exploring a geographical area hex by hex, with encounters and events taking place as they go, in the Relationship Hexmap they explore a network of interpersonal relationships instead.

The key to this, as I see it, is that it has to retain the elements of what makes a hexmap work when you're using it for a D&D-esque sandbox. It has to be loose, it has to allow for random events, and (crucially) the GM shouldn't have any preconceptions about what will happen.

This last point is probably the most important. What I like about a fantasy sandbox is that, although the DM has set up the basic framework and scattered the thing with interesting locales, it's as much a voyage of discovery for him as it is for the players. This means that, although there needs to be some pre-existing information on the contents of each hex, it should be as vague and nebulous as possible until the players discover it.

Maybe it's best to give a physical example of what I'm talking about. Here is a small relationship hexmap that I came up with this morning when I should have been working. (Something about drawing it using paint's "crayon" feature appeals to the inner child in me.)

 

First off, an explanation of what all the pretty colours mean:

• Blue blobs are actual sentient entities that have agency in the game world. Each could represent an individual, a gang, a corporation, a cartel...really anything that could forge communicative or personal links with another blue blob. For the sake of this hexmap, I'll call them "people", but remember this could refer to one person or many people in one unit.
• Red lines represent a strong, positive link between two people - basically, where an alliance, agreement, or mutually benefecial relationship exists. It could be love, it could be a military alliance, it could be a free trade agreement - anything you can think of.
• Orange lines represent contact. Simply, two people linked by an orange line have had some sort of communication with one another, whether regular or not. It could be they've just had one interaction in the distant past, or it could be that they're in regular email contact but the relationship is not positive enough or close enough to be "red".
• Yellow lines simply represent awareness. The two people are aware that the counterparty exists.
• Arrows are used to indicate whether contact, or awareness, is one way. Yellow and orange lines usually work in both directions, but in some relationships one party is always contacted by the other and not the other way around (a spy who recieves communiques via encrypted SMS messages, for example), and sometimes a person can know about another person without the same being true in reverse. Arrows indicate this.
• Black lines represent hostility. They are the opposite of red lines. Here, an antagonistic relationship (open or covert) exists.

So how does all this work in actual play? The answer is that I'm not sure yet, but my basic thoughts on how it might break down are as follows:

• First, the GM draws up the hexmap in a random(ish) way, as I did this morning. I haven't decided on who any of the blue blobs represent yet, or why their relationships are the way they are. I just had fun with crayons.
• Second, the GM picks a number of the blue blobs and gives them a personality, history, and description. It doesn't have to be all of them, and in fact, it shouldn't be. Around half will do. This is the equivalent to the way in which a D&D DM draws up a hexmap but only details what's in some of the hexes - the rest will come as and when it is necessary.
• Third, a handful of the blue blobs/people are selected as the locus points at which the PCs could "start" the campaign. As with a fantasy sandbox, there needs to be a beginning point, but it would be too restrictive to select one blue blob/person and say "You know this guy and he tells you [x]" (although the Mr. Johnson routine is fine if you're into that sort of thing). I imagine that most Cyberpunk sandbox campaigns begin with the fixer-types using their streetdeal skills to find contacts and rustle up jobs. This could give them a number of different "leads" (each being a separate blue blob). 
• Fourth, the immediate relationships (orange, red, yellow, black) around those locus points are fleshed out in a bit more detail. 
• Fifth, the GM puts in some "other interesting information" relating to each hex. I imagine this introducing some sort of temporal element to the process. For instance, you might write that on Day 5 of the campaign, Person 0402 will attempt to assassinate the head of Company 0503. Or, on Day 8 of the campaign, Person 0307 will be contacted by Person 0402 in relation to Gang 0607.
• Sixth (and this is hazy) there need to be random tables changing the nature of the relationships on the map. At various points in time, the GM needs to be rolling dice to find out what is going on on the map irrespective of what the players are up to. I'm picturing a table of stuff like "relationship deteriorates because of X" or "communication breaks down because of Y".
• Seventh, profit.

I imagine it working especially well for investigative play - for instance, if the player characters are police, engaged in corporate espionage, that sort of thing. This is fitting, since I cribbed a lot of the ideas from ckutalik, who in turn cribbed ideas from Top Secret.

Anyway, more on this to follow as I ruminate some more.

The Cyberpunk Sandbox

Trollsmyth has been doing a series of hexmap-related blog entries lately, and what can I say? I have a case of sandboxitis going on.

There are a million and one blog entries about making sandboxes "out there" in the blogosphere. (I recommend these three in particular: by Rob Conley, Chgowiz, and of course ars ludi). It's as you would expect - the OSR has sandbox play as its totem, its modus operandi, its raison d'etre, and a whole lot of other words in Latin and French.

But these sandbox articles are all to do with fantasy, and D&D in particular, which has from the beginning been designed for sandbox play - in particular, for the kind of hex-based, hexcrawl adventure which the OSR recommends. All well and good, but for those of us who have swallowed the Kool-Aid and accepted the One True Way of Sandboxism but who want to apply it in other genres of games which we enjoy, there are some problems with the assumption of a hexcrawl and its associated mores. (The exception to this is, perhaps, Traveller and maybe post-apocalyptic Gamma World or pleasingly bastardised versions of Rifts.)

After fantasy, my go-to genre has always been Cyberpunk. Actually, in my gaming career, I've probably had more 'face time' with Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun (the latter to my slight shame) than with D&D. So naturally my thoughts turn from time to time to the notion of Cyberpunk 2020 in the sandbox.

The crucial thing about a CP:2020 campaign is that it is a) usually urban and based in one city; and b) it is set in the future. You don't hexcrawl in that sort of environment - a taxi, subway train or gyrocopter can take you anywhere you want to go, and all the information about everywhere is available online (except the top-secret stuff, and probably not even then). So the hexmap has to be conceptual rather than physical; the surprises have to come from interpersonal relationships and behind-the-scenes shenanigans as well as vast amounts of tables of random events, because there is nothing geographically interesting about the actual physical space of the setting. So where rumour, conflict and player-motivated change are important in the D&D hexcrawl, in the CP:2020 hexcrawl they are everything.

Because I like a good project, I'm going to do a trollsmyth-esque series of posts on developing a CP:2020 sandbox setting over the next couple of weeks, interspersed with my usual ranting and miscellaneous musings. And so it was written, and so it shall be done.