Natural-20 Crit Deals Double-Damage To Your Wallet

Yesterday after our planning meeting for MEK-OP, we got a tour of "the house". For clarification, a tour of a house populated with game nerds involves spending about 30 seconds looking at a pantry full of tea, and about 2 hours looking at a seven-box shipment of plastic crack Warhammer Grey Knights figures. Apparently they were in the budget this year, although from looking at the receipt, I imagine that they're probably pretty much the only thing fitting in that budget this year.

Here's celebrated children's author (and secretive wargame enthusiast) Robert Louis Stevenson reflecting on his compulsion to expend the greater part of his royalties on fighting the Napoleonic wars in miniature, thereby proving that the addiction can be dated back to at least the 19th century.

A MARTIAL ELEGY FOR SOME LEAD SOLDIERS

By Robert Louis Stevenson

For certain soldiers lately dead
Our reverent dirge shall here be said.
Them, when their martial leader called,
No dread preparative appalled;
But leaden-hearted, leaden-heeled,
I marked them steadfast in the field.
Death grimly sided with the foe,
And smote each leaden hero low.
Proudly they perished, one by one;
The dread Pea-cannon's work was done!
O not for them the tears we shed,
Consigned to their congenial lead;
But while unmoved their sleep they take,
We mourn for their dear Captain's sake,
For their dear Captain, who shall smart
Both in his pocket and his heart,
Who saw his heroes shed their gore
And lacked a shilling to buy more!

Classic 80s RPG Flavor Elements

Right now I'm trying to come up with retro-fantasy campaign optional rules for my game design project, with flavor elements that evoke some of the quirky and arbitrary rules of the 80s era (basically, 1e and 2e TSR stuff). The actual combat mechanics would wash out, since I'm not trying to implement things at the level of man-to-man combat, but I'm still trying to think about the system-independent concepts and ideas that stand out as unique to the era. Basically, anything that seemed to exist for no clear reason other than "Gygax said so", but somehow propagated through several generations of rule revisions by virtue of inertia and nostalgia.

Examples that leap to mind:

• Melnibonean ethics by genetic destiny (orcs are born chaotic!)
• Clerics can't use edged weapons (in any conceivable universe)
• Humans get more specialty classes, but demihumans get to multiclass
• Clerics get prayers automatically, mages need to find/research their spells first
• Goofball one-trick-pony monsters based on cheap Asian toys (I <3 rust monsters!)
• Linear warriors, quadratic wizards
• A zillion polearms
• Element-breathing dragons, color-coded for your convenience
• Big, worthless treasures (You won... ten thousand coppers that you can't carry!)
• Bumpy character progression tables
• Vancian magic based on preparation (and baroque spell names)

Long Marches

I was reading a bit about the difficulty of extended military marches, and found this comment by "Lars":

Regulations required a 10-minute break every hour. Marching and fighting at night was rarely done, so the march was generally limited to the time between dawn and dusk. Moving troops would make their breakfast and coffee well before moving out at first light, and they'd make camp while they could still see, and dinner after it was too dark to march.

Ten miles per day was fairly leisurely. Twenty was common, but pushing it. I've heard of thirty, and even forty, but a good fight had left the men after such a march. There are numerous incidents wherein a commander's excuse for not being aggressive enough was "my men had been marching hard all day and were wore out."

This is one of those areas where a game designer is confronted by the challenge of making a game feel "fun" despite the annoyance of having units that represent human beings that get tired and need to rest.

Almost every wargame I've every played just glosses this kind of detail. If a brigade has a movement of 4, it can move 4 hexes every day forever, and never needs to worry about camping over a weekend to wash and darn its socks. When controlling an army of dozens of troops, it would be laborious to commit to the bookkeeping of remembering when each individual brigade was too fatigued to fight well. Presumably the movement of "4" represents an averaging over longer days and R&R days.

Interestingly, you can find early RPGs trying to maintain this level of detail. The "party demands a 10 minute break every hour" was a feature of 1st edition dungeoneering (it's in every edition of Basic D&D up to the Rules Cyclopedia!) that must now seem curious to a modern player. I've noticed some similar drift from the early days of real-time computer RPGs (say, Baldur's Gate) where your party moves at some reasonable semblance of a walking pace, and more modern RPGs, where even the auction district of a capital city is populated by a more diligent set of joggers than the finish line of the Chicago half-marathon!

Wish List

I need one of these.

And then I need my wife to crochet something like this, to carry it in.

Women In Early Modern Warfare

In the 15th century, Jean d'Arc lead the French to a formidable sequence of victories over the English occupation, and this seems to have set up a small boom in imitators. Quite a few queens and ladies, including Queen Elizabeth, Catherine of Aragon, and Mary, Queen of Scots, all donned armor and rode in front of their armies to act as a rallying figure. Unlike Joan, they functioned more as glorified mascots rather than exercising actual military command.

In the New World, women were relatively rare during the conquest phase. The Spanish Crown permitted women to travel only with the protection of male relatives. A few conquistadoras were known to have participated in battle, including Maria Estrada, who rode with Cortes' cavalry, and Ines de Suarez, who ruthlessly decapitated seven captives and rode out to battle in chain mail after tossing the severed heads out into the enemy forces. Catalina de Erauso served in Chile disguised as a man, and became the subject of some (probably exaggerated) legends of her exploits, all of which depict her as a skilled cavalrywoman.

Such cases were quite rare, admittedly, and the general pattern seems to be (1) cavalry, (2) in armor, and (3) with special dispensation coming from a relationship to a high-ranking officer (de Erauso is the exception to the last). Naturally, there were also non-military female personnel performing essential functions as guides and translators.

It's a little hard to figure out how to represent this situation in a game. A logical way to represent women as symbolic leaders but not frontline fighters would be to alter their statistics by reducing Endurance (the all-purpose physical stat in FF) and increasing Charisma. This is more or less the same thing done in 1e D&D, which prompted all sorts of outrage based on the recognition that Charisma was an unimportant dump-stat. In a larger-scale wargame, however, the situation is very much reversed, and the value of an officer is based more on leadership and less on personal prowess. It doesn't feel authentic to make women universally better at command then men.

I think the better approach is to design a rule that results in female expedition members being used in a roughly historical manner, deployed in armor on horseback at the front of the line to shame inspire men into following them. My idea is to allow them greater mobility as armored riders, with the justification that most women are rather lighter than the average man. Even if that isn't quite true, it still shifts them into a role that feels reasonable and doesn't represent a complete betrayal of history.

Fantastic Frontiers: Encumbrance Weight Calculations

No one likes encumbrance systems, but games need weight limits to force meaningful choices. This is a fact of life, and it only becomes harder to manage when everything is operating at the level of large scale battles. When you fire a single arrow at a time, you just take the weight of an arrow and multiply it by the number of shots to figure out how much your load has lightened. But what about in a 20 minute skirmish (roughly 1 "round" in a larger battle), where longbowmen can toss off arrows at a rate of 10 per minute?

A few quick estimates:

• Food will need to amount to about 4000 calories a day for an adult male in a physically demanding environment. You can get this many calories from about 2 lbs of hardtack. If a ration is about 1 lb (for convenience) this amounts to saying that two rations a day puts your team on "full rations", and one a day is on "half rations". This is about a factor of two below the modern military standard of a 20 oz MRE providing around 1200 calories, but American soldiers eat pretty well by the standards of medieval armies!
• A longbowman will probably go through somewhere between 20 and 60 arrows per battle round, depending on initial engagement range. If these are war arrows, they weigh around 1200 grains, or about 3 oz. That's roughly 2/10ths of a lb. So each battle will expend somewhere between 4 lbs of ammunition and 12 lbs. That's a lot of arrows! For a slow-firing weapon like a crossbow, you can cut that in half.
• Gunpowder and shot would be spent much more slowly. It would take a talented soldier to reload a matchlock inside of a minute. An arquebus ball would maybe be an ounce, with a roughly equal amount of powder. Even with a very stead rotation of volleys, that's unlikely to use up more than 2 lbs of ammunition over a round. However, unlike arrows and bolts, you can't gather any of your spent powder off the battlefield even if you win!

If we break this down to units, then it makes sense to define a "ration" of food as weighing 1 lb (with 2 rations a day standard), a "battle's-worth" of medieval ammunition as 5 lbs (double that for longbows), and a "battle's-worth" of firearm ammunition as 2 lbs. It's pretty clear that the common denominator of all these values is about 1 lb, which is pretty convenient (if not particularly metric!) So it's worthwhile to measure everything in pounds, instead of something larger like stones, but it's definitely not worth the trouble to break down below 1/10th of a pound.