Previously on this channel, I described the idea of having the random aspect of combat be something that determines which portions of an army actually contribute, and which just stand around watching. This sounds a little silly to someone with only a Hollywood-level exposure to warfare, where battles seem to consist of everyone firing at everyone else in a frantic melee. But in a more realistic environment, the primary challenge of a commander is getting troops to move up to the front lines and actually engage the enemy. A detailed study of the psychology of warfare suggests that convincing human beings to function as cold-blooded killers isn't as easy to accomplish as it might seem. (The majority of combat casualties are inflicted by a handful of psychopaths who finally find themselves in an environment where there's no stigma against their psychopathology!) In fact, humans are mostly like other social mammals, in the sense that we'd really rather defeat an opponent by posturing and creating the appearance of a threat, rather than actually having to deliver on that threat's promise.
In a game system, it's not sensible to model the psychology of the 3 to 20% of individual soldiers who are going to inflict 50% of the casualties. Instead, it's more sensible to create aggregate representations of the behavior of a unit that reflect the probability that the overall psychology of that unit will be swayed by that minority. That is, you just tweak the probabilities of winning the battle (a binary outcome) up or down a sliding scale that gets adjusted by various modifiers to reflect how easy it is to get your bloodlusted barbarians to sweep along the rest of your unit into the fray.
This isn't as much a kludge as you might think. The strangely formal styles of formation warfare that dominated Europe seem odd to us in the modern world, since we have weapons that kill at a distance, and thereby minimize the psychological distress of having to hack apart an enemy with a hunk of sharpened metal. But in the era of broadswords and longbows, the idea of conditioning soldiers to march in an orderly formation was a sort of essential trick to get them to stand in places where they had no choice but to participate in a fight. If the formation broke apart or lost cohesion, its bewildered soldiers all at once stopped fighting and just tried to stay alive.
Let's walk through an example of a large-scale battle. In the second engagement between the conquistadors and the Tlascallans, a relatively tiny force of 400 Spaniards was able to force a vastly larger force of tribal warriors. Bernal Diaz doesn't provide an estimate, but it hardly matters, since even if the entire army of 100,000 Tlascallan warriors arrived on the battlefield, there would be no way for them to simultaneously make contact with a tight formation of Spanish rodeleros. Instead, the Tlascallans would essentially be forced to line up and come at the Spaniard in waves, in a classic display of mook chivalry. If they could break apart the Spanish formation and come at it from multiple sides, then suddenly they could press their numerical advantage and put four of their warriors on each isolated Spaniard; indeed, a cavalier named Pedro de Moron had fallen to them in precisely this way in a battle a few days earlier. So the real question that a dice roll needs to resolve is what happens first: the shattering of the Spanish line, or the retreat of the Tlascallans.
Visualize a set of boxes labeled form 1 to 12, which represent the cohesion and morale of any given unit. The Spanish are probably going to get to place all of their 13 muskeeters, 13 crossbowmen, and 13 horsemen, and some fraction of their infantry (say, the first 100) in a very high box. Let's put them in the [10] box, which means that there's only a 3 in 36 chance that they break. The remainder of the infantry will go in lower boxes, representing the chance that less courageous, diseased, or wounded soldiers might be more likely to break off. We'll put 200 infantry in the [10] box, another 200 infantry in the [9] box, and another 100 in the [8] box. Here we're assuming a total infantry force of around 500, based on Diaz' records.
The Tlascallans will be broken down in the same way. Their placement reflects morale more than discipline, although their lack of military training will probably force them to start in a much lower box and have a reduced chance of passing a participation check. They only have militia-quality infantry (no horses or muskets!) so we'll start them with 200 infantry in the 8 box, then another 200 in the 7 box, and so forth down the row. These reflect the waves of combatants arriving one wave at a time. Note that the guys in later waves are going to have very poor morale, since if they battle isn't over by the time they hit the fray, they've already seen several hundred of their kinsmen mowed down by steel and gunpowder. After the first 500 or so of them have fallen, the remaining legions in reserve just aren't relevant to the battle, since they're likely to lose their enthusiasm for battle under some internal pretext and just head home (as indeed, they historically did due to infighting between their commanders).
To represent the effect of long-range guns (muskets, crossbows, and artillery), we'll let the Spaniards take a few potshots at the front wave (the highest box). They'll knock out some of the 200 enemies in that box, which is particularly useful, since that's the box most likely to be included. The Tlascallans might have a few spear-throwers and slingers, but those projectiles are likely to bounce off of breastplates made from good Toledo steel.
Now we roll a 2d6 check for each side. For the Spanish, the represents their efficiency in staying in formation. For the Tlascallans, this represents the number of waves that will be available strike and fall before they collectively lose heart and call off the assault. Statistically speaking, it's pretty likely that the majority of Spanish will hold the line, while only a few waves of Tlascallans will participate. Let's assume average rolls for each side of 7. Then the Spanish will get all of their infantry fighting at full discipline, and the Tlascallans only convince 400 of their warriors to run screaming at the Spanish line, some of whom have already fallen to matchlocks and falconet grapeshot. So effectively, this fight reduces to the Spanish just having to endure the casualties from fewer than 400 opponents who will fall quickly to their superior steel blades. Much less daunting than having to eliminate all 100,000 in a single afternoon!
Of course, things could have gone much worse here for Cortes. If his line had partially broken (say, a roll of 10 for Spain, that costs him 300 of those infantry), then most of those guys are probably going to be dead weight, and the other half of his force will need to work twice as hard to bring down the Tlascallans. And if the Tlascallans themselves suffer from less internal dissent (say they roll a 4!), then there will be more like 1000 enemy warriors to defeat. This pretty quickly is going to turn into a nightmare outcome for the outnumbered conquistadors. We'll be generous, though, and assume that the troops that fall out of formation somehow manage to flee and regroup a few miles away. (More realistically, they'd probably end up being rounded up to be sacrificed at the summit of some step-pyramid...) That gives the Spanish a chance to continue their exploration of the countryside, albeit in a weakened state, so that the entire game doesn't end on a single roll.
This kind of combat is highly "swingy". In fact, for a less frustrating game, it might be necessary to artificially reduce the randomness in some way. Any easy approach is to provide some check modifiers for quality commanders and other situational effects, to give a nearly 100% chance that at least some portion of the Spanish troops will pass the check. (Maybe Cortes adds a +2 modifier to the top box for his personal charisma and persuasive charm -- "The more Moors, the more gold!" -- or something like that.)
What if one side doesn't get to include any of its boxes? Then the entire opposing side (even the troops that didn't pass their own check) gets to simply pick a single opposing box to crush, to represent the ensuing battlefield rout. (The troops in the other boxes will scatter to the winds and escape with life, if not dignity.)
What if neither side includes any boxes? Then both sides stare at one another as they reload and the commanders rally their troops, and the whole procedure repeats from the top with new ranged and artillery barrages. Probably bad news for the Tlascallans, who can only toss stone javelins!
I still haven't discussed the question of how to calculate casualties. Most of the Tlascallans will end up mortally wounded by superior weapons, while most of the breastplated Spanish will take only superficial injuries to their extremities (and maybe suffer a few casualties to infection over the next week). Calculating the casualties will be something that depends on armor quality and on the morale check roll -- the one consolation of rolling badly on a morale check is that at least the battle ends in a hasty retreat before you've suffered many losses. While both sides care about losses during the initial barrage stages that cut down the high box formations, the final losses after the morale check can really be ignored for the Tlascallans, who essentially have infinite reserves.
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