FrankTrollman wrote:But that's exactly it. The players need to be able to progress and change the world. That is why the correct flow chart is this:
- MC makes up starting inputs (example: "there is an Ogre").
- The Players declare their actions and responses (example: "I attack the Ogre with my crossbow")
- Abilities, rules, and die rolls determine how those actions affect the starting input (example: "The Ogre takes 12 damage and has 14 hit points remaining.")
That is a game. It's a game where technically the MC has unlimited power and could crush you at any time by declaring that there were five, seventy-five, or five thousand Ogres as needed, but it's still a game. The players still have meaningful impact and the numbers on their character sheets matter. They can make intelligent and reasonable decisions. They can guess that given normal die rolls their party can probably beat 3 Ogres and probably can't beat 13 Ogres.
The following is Apocalypse Fucking World:
- MC makes up starting inputs (example: "there is an Ogre").
- The Players declare their actions and responses (example: "I attack the Ogre with my crossbow")
- MC makes up affects, continue from step one. (example: "The crossbow bolt sticks into the Ogre, and it bellows in rage!")
That's not a fucking game. The Ogre dies when the MC is bored of it, and the numbers on your character sheet mean nothing. The players can't make intelligent or reasonable choices because nothing fucking matters. Their chances against 3 Ogres or 33 Ogres are exactly the same, since it's just up to the MC's whim whether they win or lose either way.
I think you need to realize I am not proposing Apocalypse World.
The proposal doesn't have the MC making up effects
within the encounter. Again the proposal is for an
encounter-generation system, and within those encounters the normal pre-agreed rules of individual combat
still apply.
If you want more rules to ensure DM fairness during encounter-generation then sure that'd perfectly fine - but quite frankly I assumed most systems already have guidelines on this to begin with. If the DM is throwing Level 20 encounters at a Level 5 party just because "they're in a battle", then the DM needs a refresher course on this whole "encounter design and limits" thing to begin with.
Moreover, the effects of these individual encounters still have an effect on the overall battle. I never denied that there needed be ways for the PC to affect the battle. Neither was there any denial of the need for a rules resolution system for those encounters that affect the overall battle.
The question had always been centered on whether you zoom out to a bird's eye view of the battle for a wargame minigame or you just use the battle as context for a series of encounters; which is not all that different from a
dungeon. If you're saying that the latter is Apocalypse World then every dungeon ever made was also Apocalypse World.
You still have to have a system to determine the results of the battle or your "encounter" can't affect those results. If the battle results are "whatever the MC goddam feels like" then winning or losing your mini-encounter is meaningless. The results of the battle are "whatever the MCgoddam feels like +/- 1." But you know what? That doesn't change C! Adding or subtracting a fixed number from an arbitrary constant just leaves you with an arbitrary constant.
Hence the "ladder" and how the encounters push the battle towards one side or another
in addition to the army strength. Your PCs succeeded at a level 5 scouting encounter prior to the battle? Good job you reduced enemy army morale by X on the ladder (reflecting how the enemy is now unsure of what they are facing against) and that will help in the roll-off between the armies.
You can certainly criticize the system for being
abstracted, but it's definitely not the abdication of all rules. Indeed, I have to say that the "ladder" system I proposed was actually largely cribbed off an
actual wargame - Chains of Command - so it's not as though wargames themselves are opposed to these kinds of abstractions.
More specifically, the reason why Chains of Command used this highly abstracted system was because the designer wanted to keep the focus on the platoon-level battle; as the game was designed to reflect historical platoon-level engagements in World War 2. That was his design intent.
He could have made a very complicated campaign system that fully simulated the rest of the company or battalion, but he didn't because he knew most people played only platoon-level engagements as that was the game size most tables could actually support (alongside other games like Bolt Action), in addition to being actually fun for most of the play period and not just a whole lot of pointless die-rolling like say 40K Apocalypse.
[Interestingly, Chains of Commands also supports very large games involving multiple platoons, but his "solution" to the tedium problem is to make these games strictly multi-commander affairs, meaning that both sides have multiple players acting as individual platoon leaders commanding only a portion of the overall company or battalion. Because again the rules were primarily based and balanced around platoon level combat, and that the focus of the rules resolutions should be done at that level]
And not to belabor the point, but my critique is really centered around how this "zoom out" problem is magnified in an RPG focused on individuals. There are certainly people who are attracted to the
idea of a zoomed out wargame mini-game, just as there are those who are attracted to the idea of managing an entire kingdom.
But by my experience this has always tended to be the minority of any playgroup, because sending units out to die like expandable pawns is not why most people play roleplaying games. Whenever I try to add army management into the game the focus invariably turns towards specific
individuals within that army - "NPC Captain Dan's a nice guy who cares for his men" - rather than telling Captain Dan to take a hill even if it will likely result in 90% losses just to get a minor +1 bonus on some other attack roll.
And the reason for this really goes back to the fundamentally cooperative rather than adversarial nature of functioning roleplaying groups. RPG players are building a world together, and fleshing out the details of an army's
people and personality is what keeps players coming back - because they now have a sense of shared ownership with the world.
By contrast the desire to "win" battles - which is the central objective of wargames - tends to be diluted in RPGs because
everyone at the table instinctively knows that the DM must always lose or the campaign ends. The stakes for each individual encounter thus tend to be more personal rather than the simple desire to win - "I want to make sure Captain Dan and all his men survive this battle!" than "I want to win this battle!" - and it's this fundamental dichotomy that makes me skeptical about meshing the two genres together.
Anyway, I leave the floor to you. I don't think there's much else for me to add as I'm basically repeating what I said in my first post at this point:
"In short, rather than burying the party in another mini-game where they would potentially spend more time being accountants figuring out its current strength or logistics level, the "mass combat" mini-game should instead be a highly abstracted system that directly adds to the overall campaign story by generating interesting and context-relevant encounters; as encounters are the core dramatic element of RPGs in the first place. To do otherwise is to dangerously balance the game between two very divergent elements with the risk of not satisfying either one."