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

[mean_liar]

Morale should be a dieroll, but not the actual combat. I know dierolling is awesome in games and maybe that's reason enough, but if you've ever played Bonaparte at Marengo you know you don't need dice for mass combat, and when reading historical reports of battle unexpected slaughters just don't really come up. Unexpected collapses do and unexpected holding out against odds happens (see below for more commentary on this), but not unexpected slaughters.

The ability of men to kill other men is much more predictable in a mass scale. I suppose there's some scale when it does matter, but that scale is a hell of a lot closer to standard DnD-as-skirmish-we-don't-need-mass-battle scale than what anyone would consider a mass combat with hundreds of participants.

I can imagine room for some kind of "then a miracle occurs" dieroll for combat, where one side manages to avoid being completely slaughtered, but that feels best-suited as a "roll at the point of your nominal elimination" rather than "roll every round".

The real unpredictable element in a mass battle is psychology and the ability to command and control the battlefield. The former is a dieroll, the latter hasn't even been discussed. Modern battlefields are messy as fuck already, with difficulty in coordinating attacks in the field once a battle has started, much less in a melee environment rather than modern ranged combat. Check out this map: you basically can't see shit over any marginally uneven terrain, and even if your badass general can fly his officers and lieutenants probably can't, much less expect to communicate effectively with all elements simultaneously and clearly.

There's a reason why Warmaster has command rolls to get units to fight effectively, and rolling for unit actions to simulate the difficulties and confusion of battle is also a good idea.

With morale and command being good ideas for rolling and actual killing dudes not so much, I don't see a strong design case to include it as well. I recognize that puts me in a minority position with respect to pretty much every mass combat game ever (save for outliers like Bonaparte at Marengo) and therefore it's not a position that I would die on, but I figure I had to make the case because I think it's a good one.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The ability of men to kill other men is much more predictable.

No it is not. If you put a bunch of people in a tight formation, one person fucking up can in fact fuck up the functioning of the entire formation. And that can butterfly-effect/for-want-of-a-nail up to basically any level of organization. Crit fails and crit successes really do happen on the scale of units (whether those units are 30 soldiers like in Warhammer or 3000 soldiers like in Field of Glory). Not in the sense that everyone in those units hacks their own head off RuneQuest style, but in the sense that they drastically under or over perform their expectations.

[nockermensch]

mean_liar, so you're advocating for players and DM to use their actual military strategy and tactics knowledge to determine the outcomes of battle without rolling dice? Even if mass combat is predictable and the real variables are tactics, morale and such you still need to abstract all this for a roleplaying game.

[mean_liar]

The ability of men to kill other men is much more predictable.

No it is not. If you put a bunch of people in a tight formation, one person fucking up can in fact fuck up the functioning of the entire formation. And that can butterfly-effect/for-want-of-a-nail up to basically any level of organization. Crit fails and crit successes really do happen on the scale of units (whether those units are 30 soldiers like in Warhammer or 3000 soldiers like in Field of Glory). Not in the sense that everyone in those units hacks their own head off RuneQuest style, but in the sense that they drastically under or over perform their expectations.

It is possible my recollection of historical accounts of battles is faulty, but I don't ever recall reading anything quite like what you're talking about. I get what you're referencing regarding phalanxes, but again I don't recall anything like that happening to a well-trained phalanx, whereas I can imagine that happening to undertrained troops... which should be rolled up into their abstracted defense score.

There's also the issue that fantasy mass combat assumes a level of armament and capability which carries with it the assumption that most infantry are probably unarticulated units and not organized into rank-and-file subject to the example you have up there. I don't see how any fantasy world with available and common area-of-effect attacks would maintain use of articulated units... packing your men just seems like suicide in a world of fireballs. You'd want your soldiers to train being something like 20ft+ from each other in general terms and only closing at melee range, where having an articulated unit would be too chaotically dispersed to effectively fight that way anyhow.

mean_liar, so you're advocating for players and DM to use their actual military strategy and tactics knowledge to determine the outcomes of battle without rolling dice? Even if mass combat is predictable and the real variables are tactics, morale and such you still need to abstract all this for a roleplaying game.

Dice would've ostensibly still be involved for morale and command, but I see your point. That's still a fine line, though. A DnD player who knows to use a Reach weapon and Ready an attack against a certain-to-charge/close opponent has an unavoidable advantage against a player who is less tactically savvy. The first solution I come up with to problems like this is unsatisfactory in that it involves an abstract "combat number" for every character and you just dieroll your performance round-by-round rather than actually move minis around, designate targets, or otherwise directly engage in the combat.

That's the same argument against Diplomacy and social skills, and "what if my character is a genius shouldn't he know this even if I don't" sorts of problems.

[nockermensch]

mean_liar, so you're advocating for players and DM to use their actual military strategy and tactics knowledge to determine the outcomes of battle without rolling dice? Even if mass combat is predictable and the real variables are tactics, morale and such you still need to abstract all this for a roleplaying game.

Dice would've ostensibly still be involved for morale and command, but I see your point. That's still a fine line, though. A DnD player who knows to use a Reach weapon and Ready an attack against a certain-to-charge/close opponent has an unavoidable advantage against a player who is less tactically savvy. The first solution I come up with to problems like this is unsatisfactory in that it involves an abstract "combat number" for every character and you just dieroll your performance round-by-round rather than actually move minis around, designate targets, or otherwise directly engage in the combat.

That's the same argument against Diplomacy and social skills, and "what if my character is a genius shouldn't he know this even if I don't" sorts of problems.

Now you're just being dense. And for the record, I believe that if a character is a genius, the player gets to make Int checks when the party is stuck, with the DM giving them insights based on the results.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It is possible my recollection of historical accounts of battles is faulty, but I don't ever recall reading anything quite like what you're talking about. I get what you're referencing regarding phalanxes, but again I don't recall anything like that happening to a well-trained phalanx, whereas I can imagine that happening to undertrained troops... which should be rolled up into their abstracted defense score.

Really? We're supposed to be doing this at the whim of what you have and haven't decided to read/remember? How about no?

I don't see how any fantasy world with available and common area-of-effect attacks would maintain use of articulated units... packing your men just seems like suicide in a world of fireballs.

Well, there would have to be a discussion about how common those sorts of things are in the default setting. But you'll note that artillery didn't obviate tight formations for literally hundreds of years. People just accepted the casualties and moved on.

[Username17]

I could mention a few battles like Agincourt where the total number of dead dudes was quite surprising to the people involved, but I'm pretty sure you're prepared to pick at minutiae about the circumstances and try to claim they played out deterministically. Instead what I'm going to do is talk about a roughly analogous event that has happened hundreds if not thousands of times in our history with considerably different results based entirely on the success or lack thereof of the face stabbing of the people doing it: a wedge charge against a shield wall.

A shield wall has been a popular and effective formation for the majority of recorded history and has been discovered and rediscovered by militaries on most continents. And until the invention of gunpowder, less organized opponents have had only one really effective counter: putting all their enthusiastic but not especially disciplined warriors into a rough triangle and charging the shield wall point-first. And this has played out hundreds of times to a vast array of different results. And while sometimes the results could be blamed on morale or command or externalities like archery effectiveness or hidden moats, if the shield wall held together and the wedge actually made contact with said shield wall, there were still two ways it could go.

Either the wedge manages to kill off enough of the shield bearers to force the wall apart and create two new flanks to chew through, or it doesn't and gets ground down into sausage. The wedge is definitely going to lose a lot of people doing it, but the amount of people lost by the shield wall is either going to be "very few" or "really a lot" and in many cases it won't be known by either side which it's going to be until after contact has been made.

So no. I categorically reject your idea that the amount of killing is deterministic and unworthy of a die roll.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

You've convinced me, I think.

What it seems we really want, then, is mechanics for "formations" and "maneuvers" and such.

[mean_liar]

Proving a negative is hard, Angel. Just find a positive example. It's a discussion. I'm saying I can't recall an example that supports your conclusions. You're saying you do, but lol fuck me for being dense you can't be bothered. Okay.

As for Frank's point, I love that being conversant in the subject (aka, "finding minutiae") is now a negative. Agincourt was basically fought in an alley of two+ foot ofdeep mud between two hills wherein the French marched their heavy infantry toward longbowmen in said muck in columns so deep and tightly packed they couldn't have retreated even if they were able to flee or run or even walk. That's not archers rolling twenties. That's a disastrous lack of tactical understanding playing to abysmal terrain, and that's exactly the lesson of Agincourt, not "trust in the crit".

If you find dierolling more narratively compelling for its unpredictable nature, say so. Or some up with an example. I suppose fictional examples work too. But Agincourt isn't it. And a handwavy appel to shieldwalls isn't it. And appeals to artillery before explosives isn't it.

[mean_liar]

I should also point out that a shield wall is a squad-level method of movement. They got cut down by being outmaneuvered... at least in a Roman testudo, which is different from the overlapping shields of a phalanx. You don't hit a shield wall with a triangle, you move to its sides or rear while delaying it. You'll note that's a tactical solution dependent on position rather than rolling, say, a 20. At best you force a shoving match of melee, which reverts to the mean. The shield wall isn't this amazing impregnable thing only broken by a make-or-break single throw of the (proverbial) dice, it's a tactic that lowers speed and offensive capabilities in exchange for defensive capabilities, which necessarily devolves into cut-and-thrust and a typical melee engagement once you reach the enemy.

It's a different kind of pike square. It's a formation, not a solution that makes the battle fall to fate who can say what will happen OH NO THE TRIANGLE SHALL WE WIN OR FALL.

Ultimately, it's a defensive measure designed to close ground. It doesn't kill people. It isn't only countered by a triangle, which would really only be viable for heavy cavalry seriously you're fucking talking about a thousand cavalry in a triangle? What the fuck, Frank. Basically I don't think you know what you're talking about.

[angelfromanotherpin]

And appeals to artillery before explosives isn't it.

So appeals to fireball count and appeals to artillery don't because... you say so? How about go fuck yourself?

[mean_liar]

Dude. Explosives aren't cannon. The ability to fire a solid projectile of mass into a wall at a great distance isn't equivalent to an explosion of man-killing fire with a 30ft radius, or shrapnel. Creating an explosive shell that can fired from a cannon but blow up later without blowing up in the cannon on ignition is a nontrivial engineering problem that isn't solved until well after the typical tech level of the medieval period of fantasy games. Until then cannonballs are solid masses of metal, basically a deadly sling, not explosives that kill men in explosions.

Grapeshot is about the closest that occurs prior to explosive shells, and was a deadly problem that happened about once a minute at a close range rather than once every six seconds at 100m+. There are a few battles where some coordinated blasts of grapeshot were devastating... but that was coordinated blasts that you can count on one hand per battle. 1st round attack power = max. Not a dieroll.

I've been being kind, but if you think "artillery" and "explosive shells" are the same thing you're arguing from ignorance. But sure, if you're insulting enough you can win so please continue.

Under what model do you think a hundred men fighting a hundred men does not regress to the mean?

[DSMatticus]

For the record, mean_liar has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. People have been hitting defensive lines with concentrated force since the Greeks, and they didn't really stop until implements of shooting replaced implements of stabbing. Even then, you wouldn't be wrong to point out similarities between the German blitzkrieg and a traditional wedge v shield wall battle. Historically, people faced with a defensive line frequently put their best and most heavily armored units in the front and then pile chaff behind them for momentum and tried to punch through. Because sometimes it works, even if it is a fucking meatgrinder.

Sometimes the concentrated force at the center has proper "wings" and is actually triangular, because this offers protection against flanking. Sometimes the concentrated force doesn't have wings and is to a varying extent more rectangular or blobby, because not all ideas are winners. It's usually called a wedge either way, because it does the exact same thing in the exact same way and quibbling over how far ahead the center has to be and how many different-width rows you have to have is pretty pointless.

And no, wedge v shield wall was not exclusive to cavalry. Actually, I'd even go so far as to say trying to break a shield wall with cavalry is a fucking waste of cavalry. You might do it, because you're dumb. You might do it, because it's the best option out of a shitty bunch. But if you have cavalry, you do not want to throw them into a situation where their momentum might stall and they'll be dragged into an extended melee. Because they're fucking cavalry, and their primary advantage is that they are more mobile than everyone else. You use cavalry reactively to hit flanks as they become exposed and to "run through" areas you identify as weak. Cavalry would supplement a wedge far better than they would lead it. Exceptions abound for sufficiently heavy cavalry versus sufficiently weak infantry positions, but heavy cavalry are rarely the norm.

mean_liar's "everything is deterministic, only tactical decisions ever matter, whether or not a handful of men in the front line do exceptionally well or exceptionally poorly could never change the course of battle" is fucking stupid. Presumably because most of the things he thinks he knows about historical tactics are stupid.

[Username17]

Dude. Explosives aren't cannon. The ability to fire a solid projectile of mass into a wall at a great distance isn't equivalent to an explosion of man-killing fire with a 30ft radius, or shrapnel.

Explosives predate cannons. Pretty much by definition. The first artillery pieces are of course ballistae and catapults, but the first gunpowder based artillery are explosive rockets, not cannons. Catapults hurling casks of greek fire are of course older still.

Basically, mean liar is serving up weird mixtures of Dunning-Kruger mixed with appeals to ignorance into a soup of nonsense claims that I honestly don't have the energy to deal with. It's essentially a Gish gallop and I'm done with it.

Mean liar has not made his case for removing die rolls from mass combat melees and he has convinced me that he isn't going to. I don't see a reason to continue discussing that particular tangent at all.

-Username17

[name_here]

Also, a quick check of Wikipedia informs me that in fact the first recorded use of exploding shells fired from cannons* dates to 1376. Now, that is still somewhat later than typical DnD tech levels, but importantly it is over half a millennium before people stopped using formations in warfare, and very nearly as long before formations in warfare stopped necessarily being a good idea.

*Well, probably not standard cannons; it was a while before they could figure out how to fire shells horizontally without somehow fucking it up. But they had various gunpowder weapons that fire them in parabolic trajectories fairly well for a long time before that.

[Chamomile]

but importantly it is over half a millennium before people stopped using formations in warfare, and very nearly as long before formations in warfare stopped necessarily being a good idea.

Your general point holds, but I will nitpick that formations were probably obsolete by about 1650, and they just didn't become so obsolete as to demand a reaction until much later. Casualty counts in wars since the musket became the primary weapon of even very large armies crept steadily upward and nobody really made any changes to how they fought until they started seeing absolutely catastrophic casualty levels several centuries after it would have been advisable to convert to more fluid tactics.

[RadiantPhoenix]

My assumption would be that formations would remain useful until units became capable of communicating effectively without having to physically carry messages to or see each other.

[name_here]

but importantly it is over half a millennium before people stopped using formations in warfare, and very nearly as long before formations in warfare stopped necessarily being a good idea.

Your general point holds, but I will nitpick that formations were probably obsolete by about 1650, and they just didn't become so obsolete as to demand a reaction until much later. Casualty counts in wars since the musket became the primary weapon of even very large armies crept steadily upward and nobody really made any changes to how they fought until they started seeing absolutely catastrophic casualty levels several centuries after it would have been advisable to convert to more fluid tactics.

That's somewhat debatable; casualties were high when both sides sent musket formations at each other, but that doesn't mean that a musket formation would lose to a more fluid tactic. Among other things, musket formations could do volley fire to compensate for the incredibly slow reloading times. Plus even up to the American Revolution bayonet charges were still pretty tactically relevant, and formations definitely win those. Now, come the Civil War, breachloading rifles had been invented and changed both those factors, so it's quite reasonable to believe that formations should have been dropped then, rather than waiting another half-century for WWI.

[mean_liar]

You guys are welcome to believe what you want.

For the record, early rocketry were incendiary devices, not KAboom FUCK YOU things unless you count static, non-launched weaponry. The use of explosive BLOW UP massed infantry artillery is way late. Fucking around on Wikipedia pretending you know what you're talking about isn't going to change that. Go look up explisve shell. There isn't a reliable method of blasting from a cannon until the 19th century.

I do think and concede that DSMatticus's example of Greek phalanxes of roughly equal skill smashing into each other is a great example of how a dieroll should be used, because they were go big/go home battles by design between ostensible equals... but they were also I would think bizarrely uninteresting battles between identical cultures with smaller scales of participants, where they'd meet in the center of a flat field and beat the shit out of each other... noncoincidentally in a culture where individual battlefield prowess is a big deal. Most phalanxes in any Alexander- or later combined arms conflict combat fall to maneuvers on their flanks where they lack shields, not a tussle of equals in a featureless plain.

The wedge was Frank's idea, not mine. The idea that you want to lap around a shield wall/phalanx - the DSM version of Frank's goofy wedge - is a tactical consideration, not a method of man-to-man straight up head-on combat between equals only a die roll could resolve. You didn't realize it because you're an asshole, but you do hold the point nicely so thanks.

[name_here]

You're an idiot. You don't need perfectly precise timing on your explosions to kill people with them. The 19th century inventions were notable for their utility in naval battles and making it easy to fire them horizontally.

[mean_liar]

Find me a historical example of reliable, deployed explosive artillery at a time when articulated infantry are the Big Thing. And articulated infantry continue to be used despite that fact.

Just one, maybe two. Because haha, I'm an idiot.

You people love sucking each other off too much.

[ACOS]

Okay, so you need to assign your units a variety of combat values:
* size
* modes of movement
* maneuverability - not just how fast and agile, but also time it takes to enact movement commands
* attack values:
-* types and frequency of each type
-* effectiveness (perhaps -vs- various defense values)
* defense values:
-* damage soak
-* -vs- various attack modes
* conditional modifiers:
-* morale
-* training - this may involve individual soldier level, organizational level, and individual commander level
-* resupply capabilities - this is where your kingdom management system really comes in to play

If you want to roll a d20, I think that conditional modifiers is the appropriate place to do that. I think that all the actual combat is opposed rolls using manageable-sized dice pools of non-d20s.

I think that there needs to be some hard break points in terms of scale and when to switch magnification lenses - my guess is that 1 order of magnitude = 1 lens change. Figure out how units of equivalent size interact with each other, and how units interact with units that are +/- 1-or-2 scale-levels different; bigger size differences are essentially meaningless unless you're talking about "super units". I also think that once sufficient "damage" has been done, you essentially reduce the enemy one size (or scatter them in to multiple units of a smaller size, or whatever).

Basically, you have to figure out how to manage the Battle of Stirling Bridge (either the real -or- movie version) before you can even contemplate the Blood War.

[mean_liar]

I'm referencing the difference between cannon firing iron balls and cannon firing explosive shells. Not cannon and canon.

You guys have gone full retard based on your echo chamber curiously devoid of historical examples. DSM's point about phalanxes is a good one, but the rest of you are so full of shit you don't even realize it.

But sure. A hundred men fighting another hundred men is more dependent on luck than, say, being attacked from the side or rear.

Note that those heavily armored so awesome phalanxes typically fell to lightly armored goon squads who just happened to be outside their shield coverage. So if you want to make combat die roll dependent, you still need to make position more important than skill or equipment such that noblemen with expensive cutting edge gear fall to guttersnipes with stilettos dank near every time those guttersnipes get behind them.

[ACOS]

I'm referencing the difference between cannon firing iron balls and cannon firing explosive shells. Not cannon and canon.

Well, I guess that's egg on my face then.
In the context of you-vs-trolling, that sentence seemed to me to suggest otherwise.
Oh well, I'm already over it.

[name_here]

Here's a weapon that can fire explosive shells dating to the 18th century that was mass-produced and employed in field engagements. You're going to insist that's too late, because you have opted to shift goalposts from formations to tech levels, even though the first is more directly relevant to how magic would impact tactics.