Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards > LW/LW in D&D.

[Username17]

Anyways, if I want to play L&D, what game should I play? Keep in mind, I don't want the kingdom to be my character.

I want to be Steven, the ruler of the Fire Kingdom in the Celestial plans, who can punch people so hard they go back in time. I recently got in a fist fight that destroyed a mountain with Kyle, the ruler of the Water Kingdom, and I want to invade his shitty wet kingdom.

What game lets me play DBZ fistfight then lead an invasion?

Is it possible without effectively making two games?

You're actually talking about what are essentially three games. A kingdom management game, a mass combat game, and a cosmic battles game. And sadly to say, all of those are games that have historically been relatively hard to attach to RPGs. Which is ironic when you consider that RPGs literally grew out of a special case of mass combat games, but less ironic when you consider that that happened because the mass combat games in question were deeply unsatisfying to begin with.

Games have a great difficulty switching scale. The action resolution system isn't going to output one man picking a lock and one hundred men shooting arrows without groaning. The combat system isn't going to output one man using a tree for cover to the entire forest being incinerated by an energy punch without throwing your battle maps away. The movement system isn't going to be able to keep worrying about whether a patch of mud is slow to walk through and still handle a fight between the stars.

Now a caveat I should mention is that abstract games have less difficulty switching scale. If various actions you use are mechanically just playing red and blue cards, your cards can be flavored as intrigue or raising troops or whatever and it's not a problem. If you go to the most abstract game that still qualifies as a game (which is of course Munchhausen), then you can seemlessly switch from cosmic battles to impromptu role playing sessions to kingdom bureaucracy to mass battles without a burp or a pause - but only because everything is abstracted enough that none of the world elements really matter. It's still a game and there are still rules, but you're judged entirely on how much cool story bro you can generate, not on how big your kingdom's army is or whatever.

If you want to do kingdom management and mass battles in addition to personal combat, you really don't have a lot of options. Sadly, I think 3rd edition D&D is probably the best you get there. With the Power of Feyrun, Stronghold Builder's, and DMG2 rules you can indeed leverage management of stuff into a quite hefty income and that in turn can by the basic WBL rules be turned around into very powerful swag that will completely upend the power scale the game is aimed at. Similarly, you can take your massive income and hire and improve some armies and use the Heroes of Battle rules to with only moderate clunkiness conquer vast territories.

Does this have problems? Oh hellz yes it does. First of all, those rules don't actually distinguish between having an income source that is a diamond mine and an income source that is a taxable port. Hell, when running a business it doesn't even make a difference if you're selling magic weapons or erotic cakes. The conversion jumps between the RPG and the mass battles are such that the one doesn't very often give you results that would be expected in the other. It is, in short, not terribly satisfying and obviously needs a ground up redesign. A ground up redesign that two editions and nearly a fucking decade later have never appeared.

As mentioned earlier, GURPS has some pretty intense logistics rules. But combat in GURPS is a minutiae driven nightmare to begin with and expanding that combat in scope or scale makes the nightmares worse. HERO can describe castles, fortresses, armies, and cosmic battles - but it's all static. There's no forward looking logistics in HERO, the castles and armies simply have a points cost and that's that. And in any case neither GURPS nor HERO are really balanced in any way, shape, or form.

ACKS produces some nifty baron-level kingdom management, but you're still playing a deliberately grognardish OD&D hack with stupid armor classes and racial character classes. And it doesn't bother attempting to go past that to the point of shooting volcanoes at people in any case.

Pendragon has a fief management system, but it involves having rules for when female characters get sold off into marriage with foreign lords to create alliances and wants you to roll d20s to save against chivalrous behavior and shit. It is, in short, more than a little bit insane, and also so laughably retro that I am failing to find an appropriate metaphor. It's not really so much of a role playing game as it is a clunky table top version of Crusader Kings with some modest fantasy elements. And even that makes it sound better than it is.

-Username17

[Blicero]

And it [ACKS] doesn't bother attempting to go past that to the point of shooting volcanoes at people in any case.

That's not strictly true. High level characters have access to Ritual spells. These include the Cataclysm divine spell, in which your god drops a meteor/volcano/whatever on a 24-mile hex. This causes massive (quantified) property damage and kills between 10% and 100% of the population. And arcane spellcasters get the Plague spell, which can infect large tracts of land with a plague. ACKS by no means does DBZ, but you can shoot volcanoes at people.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I feel if there's ever going to be a game that flip-flops and smoothly transitions between squad-level and 5000+ belligerent level (and everything between!) in a way that's both fast and sensible, it's almost certainly going to:

1. Be dicepool-based.
2. Have at most a two-step resolution system for attacks.
3. Have fixed hit points.
4. Use math no higher than the mid-teens to resolve everything below the power level of Iron Man.
5. Use At-Will or Drain as the resource management system for the vast majority of combatants.
6. Use abstract zones instead of grids.
7. Have a Time/Scale/Progression chart like in Champions/MnM d20.

By contrast, Logistics and Dragons will be a significantly easier minigame to implement mechanics-wise. However, you will almost certainly need two or more people with a background in economics, law, history (preferably pre-Industrial history), and sociology to be spot-checking your system at every step so things don't end up stupid.

There's a Japanese system that's all about Logistics and Dragons called Meikyuu Kingdom. Everyone plays a member of a kingdom's ruling body that also goes on dungeon delves. It's being translated I think.

Do go on.

[Orion]

Actually, I think Vancian could make a lot of sense on a mass combat wargame.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I feel if there's ever going to be a game that flip-flops and smoothly transitions between squad-level and 5000+ belligerent level (and everything between!) in a way that's both fast and sensible, it's almost certainly going to:

1. Be dicepool-based.
2. Have at most a two-step resolution system for attacks.
3. Have fixed hit points.
4. Use math no higher than the mid-teens to resolve everything below the power level of Iron Man.
5. Use At-Will or Drain as the resource management system for the vast majority of combatants.
6. Use abstract zones instead of grids.
7. Have a Time/Scale/Progression chart like in Champions/MnM d20.

1. Strongly Disagree: You want to make sure you can resolve several essentially-identical dudes acting at once, and that means either having several sets of different-looking dice, or rolling one die per dude per action.
2. Agree: WH40k has a three-step system
3. Disagree: I think that, instead, you want the number to be small -- typically =1 for the kind of things you send 5000 of around, but larger numbers for high-level things like dragons.
4. Agree: small numbers is good. This does almost certainly mean smaller dice, though.
5. Half-Agree: At-will yes, drain no, assuming you mean what I think you mean, which is, "use ability -> get debuff". Simple resource management yes.
6. Agree: Something like Risk, perhaps?
7. Agree: I'm not familiar with the ones from those games, but I think I get the gist of what you're saying.

Actually, I think Vancian could make a lot of sense on a mass combat wargame.

Only if the number of Vancian characters is small, or the number of different spells is small enough to balance the tokens on the miniatures such that you can see them all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I support dicepools as the RNG because they're inherently exponential while also not having a readily reachable floor. If you're trying to build an engine that can scale from 30 vs 30 combatants to 5000 vs 5000 your RNG needs to smoothly support this scaling without A.) having probabilitiy discontinuities B.) ridiculous amounts of addition and C.) not being overly swingy. You can waive that last one if you're okay with how 5E D&D does things, where peasant militias can gangbang a level 10 PC party at a small but not minute probability. And trust me that you want exponential scaling (either with dicepools or by assigning the steps of the RNG to an exponential results scale) because you want a system that doesn't implode or overly elide when combining twenty Human Fighter 2s into a gestalt unit and their numbers double or split.

Uniform hit points are an absolute must. I'm surprised that you disagree with that one. If you're doing mass combat at all you're going to want to have some kind of universal health-based attrition mechanic unless you want to be tracking the statuses of hundreds of tiny men. And after how bullshit healing surges and the bloodied condition was in 4E D&D, I can't imagine why you wouldn't want durability to be represented by soak instead of tracking the 1/4 and 1/2th health marks of trolls and orcs and goblin outriders.

As for zones, you might want to read this thread to get the general idea. I know there was another thread that followed up on it but damned if I can find it.

[Orion]

I'm thinking that like an archer units might have 2x Flaming Arrow Volley prepped and then not be able to do that anymore. Your cavalry unit has a 1x cavalry charge and then doesn't get to do that again.

[Chamomile]

Your cavalry unit has a 1x cavalry charge and then doesn't get to do that again.

I hate this kind of thing. The flaming arrows one was fine, because that just makes sense, you have a limited amount of oil to pass around before you're out. But the 4e thing where you have encounter powers when they really should be context dependent (i.e. you can cavalry charge when the zone you're in is empty and an adjacent zone has bad dudes in it or something) is not only bad because of the "why can't we ever seem to do this more than once per combat" question, but also because for mass combat in particular it takes a perfect opportunity to add in the kind of "struggling to position our troops for maximum efficacy" decisions that actual mass combat is about and tosses it for something pointlessly abstract. Commanding an army is pretty much 100% about trying to get your troops in the right place at the right time despite obstacles, if setting up a cavalry charge isn't something you have to actually set up, you've done something wrong.

[Blicero]

The other two threads about abstract locations that I remember are here:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=39406
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51 ... sc&start=0

[RadiantPhoenix]

I support dicepools as the RNG because they're inherently exponential while also not having a readily reachable floor. If you're trying to build an engine that can scale from 30 vs 30 combatants to 5000 vs 5000 your RNG needs to smoothly support this scaling without A.) having probabilitiy discontinuities B.) ridiculous amounts of addition and C.) not being overly swingy. You can waive that last one if you're okay with how 5E D&D does things, where peasant militias can gangbang a level 10 PC party at a small but not minute probability. And trust me that you want exponential scaling (either with dicepools or by assigning the steps of the RNG to an exponential results scale) because you want a system that doesn't implode or overly elide when combining twenty Human Fighter 2s into a gestalt unit and their numbers double or split.

Oh, you're combining units into "stacks".

That... actually seems like a good idea, and in that case, I suppose dicepools wouldn't be so problematic, because you're making one roll for the entire group.

Uniform hit points are an absolute must. I'm surprised that you disagree with that one. If you're doing mass combat at all you're going to want to have some kind of universal health-based attrition mechanic unless you want to be tracking the statuses of hundreds of tiny men. And after how bullshit healing surges and the bloodied condition was in 4E D&D, I can't imagine why you wouldn't want durability to be represented by soak instead of tracking the 1/4 and 1/2th health marks of trolls and orcs and goblin outriders.

I want to both:

• Have the vast majority of combatants not use hitpoints at all
• be able to have "the dragon is wounded"

As for zones, you might want to read this thread to get the general idea. I know there was another thread that followed up on it but damned if I can find it.

I have read some of these threads.

I'm also pretty sure that when you're moving armies around on the strategic map, you want the zones to be the various territories you're trying to control, so your map will look somewhat like Risk.

[Username17]

Exponential models create weird breakpoints. Obviously there is some number of spearmen you can have where one more tiny man puts you in the next category and causes a huge jump in effectiveness. And that creates optimal unit sizes that are perhaps strange. But the alternative of using raw addition is wholly unworkable when there are dozens of dudes on a team and completely ludicrously impossible to contemplate when there are thousands. You need an exponential converter. That doesn't mean you have to use dicepools, but dicepools are certainly a convenient manner to make your RNG output reasonable numbers.

As for fixed Hit Points, that's just a fucking given. There is no other way to satisfactorily scale combats up to casts of thousands and down to casts of five. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay scales up "wounds" totals considerably for random dudes vs. what the wargame uses, and it's still a heap of hot garbage in actual play.

-Username17

[Ed]

Being condescended to by Frank is only one small step on your journey to becoming a man. You still need to be sent to the burn ward by Kaelik and become locked in an argument so obtuse that you're frankly amazed these people even exist. And no, this thread doesn't qualifies for that last one yet. On a scale of 1-to-Shadzar you need at least a Silva.

I got mine through a contact obtuse. It wasn't any better.

[TarkisFlux]

7. Have a Time/Scale/Progression chart like in Champions/MnM d20.

Can someone familiar with these systems explain please?

I want to both:

• Have the vast majority of combatants not use hitpoints at all
• be able to have "the dragon is wounded"

If you have stacks, then you have fixed HP for your stack and not for individuals unless you need them to act individually for some reason (in which case they are not a stack). So you get pretty much what you're asking for. Dragons get wounded, and when they get sufficiently wounded they fall over unconscious / dead. Stacks get wounded instead of tracking individuals, and when the stack gets sufficiently wounded it just routs with some percentage of its members dead, some wounded, and some untouched but running away anyway. Better morale in such a setup might just mean "takes more damage before routing" and "has more dead units when it does rout".

[OgreBattle]

warhammer has 3 attack steps 'cause they use a d6, so rollin' 3 times adds more granularity. Games like Infinity use a d20 so they have a lot of increments with just one roll.

Thinking about scaling from "oh no its muddy" to "angry god destroys dimension", Magic: the Gathering pulls that off with quadradically scaling mana costs of effects. But it's obviously not an RPG

[RadiantPhoenix]

7. Have a Time/Scale/Progression chart like in Champions/MnM d20.

Can someone familiar with these systems explain please?

What I believe it means is something like this:

Magnitude	Time	Scale
1	Round	Single-target
2	Minute	tactical zone
3	Hour	Room
4	Day	Dungeon/terrain feature (e.g., a ravine)
5	Week	Macro terrain feature (e.g., a mountain)

[Lago PARANOIA]

@TarkisFlux
Check out this website. It explains everything about Time and Scale and etc. I'm sure Champions has one as well but they don't have an SRD.

warhammer has 3 attack steps 'cause they use a d6, so rollin' 3 times adds more granularity. Games like Infinity use a d20 so they have a lot of increments with just one roll.

And if you're going to have a mass combat minigame you can't do more than 2 steps. Seriously, a low-complexity tactical setup could have all of the sides fielding a total of 12 discrete legions in a single battle. It can easily be a lot more than that if you're doing something like a siege or naval warfare. That's a lot of fucking extra rolls. Ideally you'd only have one resolution step but if you also wanted to do D&D-style squad combat with individual heroes using the same engine that might not have enough granularity.

[Aryxbez]

So, is getting insulted by Frank the way you guys baptize people here?

Not really, the actual "baptizing" I would say, is when people get over themselves and leave their ego at the door. When you learn to not take cursing, or the criticizing of Your ideas personally, and as an affront in which they're being a jerk.

Reading his response, you can clearly see that he's insulting your idea, not you personally. While does note should feel bad for your idea, not necessarily saying you yourself are bad. His explanation looks like it could've been more clear, and not completely obvious necessarily, though I can say that your position does seem off.

When you start your response with an insult, even a funny insult, it just really makes me tune out.

That's quite unfortunate, if you're unwilling to read information which criticizes something you said, then why should anyone else give you the similar respect of reading what you said? The fact that swear words get used is simply what adults do, whether its for emphasis or provocative use to call out to something. I don't like to curse myself, but I'm not going to "tune-out" the moment someone wants to use swear words.

Unfortunate to see that he won't have read this, albeit prior posters did a fair job of pointing out it was regarding his ideas, not him personally.

[Orion]

Commanding an army is pretty much 100% about trying to get your troops in the right place at the right time despite obstacles, if setting up a cavalry charge isn't something you have to actually set up, you've done something wrong.

Sure, and feel free to make people jump through however many hoops the tactical minigame allows you to to set up that flanking charge. The question is, once you've called i the cavalry, are you capable of giving them to order to extract, and are they capable of turning their animals around, escaping the melee, and regrouping, and if so do they still have sufficient numbers and do their beasts have sufficient energy left to get the full effect of the charge, and is the enemy either better able to defend because they're expecting you now, or conversely have the lines of battle collapsed and intermixed to the point where there isn't really a formation for your horses to break?

I see no reason you can't give people one shot to attack for massive damage and let them focus on making sure not to waste it.

EDIT: To generalize: I think that if you visualize things on the level of an individual soldier or unit of soldiers it feels like they should be able to do what they do as many times as the situation arises. I'm thinking of it as a commander, where each unit is basically a trap card. You get to script one fancy maneuver for each block of troops, that their sergeants have drilled them on, and call it in when the moment is right. After that, the men in that unit don't evaporate, but they are committed to the fight, out of your reach, and out of pre-programmed gambits. They pretty much just become part of the general melee and no longer go in your hand of special moves.

[RadiantPhoenix]

EDIT: To generalize: I think that if you visualize things on the level of an individual soldier or unit of soldiers it feels like they should be able to do what they do as many times as the situation arises. I'm thinking of it as a commander, where each unit is basically a trap card. You get to script one fancy maneuver for each block of troops, that their sergeants have drilled them on, and call it in when the moment is right. After that, the men in that unit don't evaporate, but they are committed to the fight, out of your reach, and out of pre-programmed gambits. They pretty much just become part of the general melee and no longer go in your hand of special moves.

So, you're picturing this:

[Lago PARANOIA]

One other thing -- if a mass combat engine for a D&D-like game is going to be of any worth, D&D demographics need a radical rethinking. Not just in that we actually need rules more complicated than 'this percentage of people are level 6 wizards' but we need to re-examine the very population mechanics of the D&D-verse.

Have you ever read the 3E DMG2 for the city tour of Saltmarsh? It's... sad. The assassin's guild no shit has like 10 people in it, which is to be expected when your city barely reaches into the thousands. And it's not like Saltmarsh is supposed to be some kind of backwater; it's no-shit only two categories away from the top end of D&D population centers. Even the handful of Planar Metropolises in the ELH only posit around 250K-500K people. If we're using those rules as our baseline assumption for the D&D campaign setting, it raises the question as to why people even put that much work into mass combat. You simply can't field armies of dragons or wizards or trolls if major cities barely have a tenth of the population of modern-day Wyoming. D&D seriously needs to admit that European medieval warfare was small-potatoes and lame and rethink its bucolic bullshit.

[RadiantPhoenix]

At least those demographics aren't as puny as Skyrim?

Whiterun has under 80 named characters, and maybe a couple dozen guards.

[Dean]

A mass combat minigame definitely doesn't need to be able to handle armies of hundreds of thousands. That is totally unnecessary. If the mass combat minigame could handle armies of a few hundred it would be completely useable. D&D is already a world whos identity is molded around its mechanics, and in a world where groups of 5 people regularly save the world I dont think it is a WSOD breaking assumption that armies rarely hit 4 figures.

We want the mass combat game so we can feel like we control many tiny men. If my Sylvan druid controlled a dozen Eagle archers, 50 Elk riders, a squad of Treants, and 200 Elven swordsmen I am definitely getting the leader-of-men high. Lets walk before we run and see if we can find a way to work 100 men into a combat system before we call anything a failure that can't model a hundred times or a thousand times that.

D&Ds battles are already accepted as being fought by impossibly small numbers of people in impossibly small amounts of time. Usually seconds, not minutes, for major skirmishes to resolve. If my characters could direct 50 people without breaking the game I'd be happy. Lets shoot for that.

[ACOS]

A mass combat minigame definitely doesn't need to be able to handle armies of hundreds of thousands. That is totally unnecessary. If the mass combat minigame could handle armies of a few hundred it would be completely useable. D&D is already a world whos identity is molded around its mechanics, and in a world where groups of 5 people regularly save the world I dont think it is a WSOD breaking assumption that armies rarely hit 4 figures.

We want the mass combat game so we can feel like we control many tiny men. If my Sylvan druid controlled a dozen Eagle archers, 50 Elk riders, a squad of Treants, and 200 Elven swordsmen I am definitely getting the leader-of-men high. Lets walk before we run and see if we can find a way to work 100 men into a combat system before we call anything a failure that can't model a hundred times or a thousand times that.

D&Ds battles are already accepted as being fought by impossibly small numbers of people in impossibly small amounts of time. Usually seconds, not minutes, for major skirmishes to resolve. If my characters could direct 50 people without breaking the game I'd be happy. Lets shoot for that.

I'm completely on board with you on this. So the question I have is this: once this is accomplished, would we not then have a template for modular expansion?

[Lago PARANOIA]

A mass combat minigame definitely doesn't need to be able to handle armies of hundreds of thousands. That is totally unnecessary. If the mass combat minigame could handle armies of a few hundred it would be completely useable.

The fuck do you mean, unnecessary? Romance of the Three Kingdoms operated at the hundreds of thousands scale. Hell, even if we're just during fantasy Dark Ages Europe a few hundred isn't cutting it. If your mass combat minigame can't handle armies of thousands clashing together then you can't use it for L&D. And if your L&D engine can't use the results of mass combat to influence its economics and demographic engine then you might as well just scrap the entire project and MTP the whole thing.

So the question I have is this: once this is accomplished, would we not then have a template for modular expansion?

Not necessarily; hell, I'd go as far as to say probably not. Just because your RNG can acceptable handle units in the dozens scale doesn't mean it can handle it in the hundreds scale. I mean, look at 3E D&D. It handles matches of 20 belligerents well enough; are you surprised that it can't handle 200? Similarly, if a battle engine can handle 200 participants, what makes you think that it can handle 2000?

[Username17]

The Battle of the Five Armies had over a thousand Elves, over two thousand Humans, and over five hundred Dwarves and these armies were collectively severely outnumbered by the Goblins. At Helm's Deep, there were over ten thousand Orcs and various human contingents brought a thousand or more troops to one side or the other. At Pelennor Fields, the Roharim brought 6,000 heavy cavalry and the Southrons of Harad brought 18,000 men and oliphaunts.

If your Dungeons & Dragons world can't handle actual Tolkien events because it is too small, then your Dungeons & Dragons is too small. Lord of the Rings is D&D's floor. You're allowed to go bigger than that, but you're not allowed to say that your game can't handle characters as powerful as Gandalf. And Gandalf led an army of a thousand human footmen and a contingent of walking trees to reinforce the Hornburg.

-Username17