D@W Campaigns: Possible House Rules

To summarize the previous post about why the Campaigns rules in Chapter 3 were difficult for me to use:

First, too many low-success recon checks slow down game play, and so the game over-invests in maintenance activities that don't involve players. Second, the modifiers that are present skew the dice roll results strongly toward one end of the spectrum, making them too predictable.

Looking at the table of recon modifiers, they fall into three general categories:

• Symmetric modifiers that affect both armies equally (distance, size, terrain)
• Asymmetric modifiers that affect just one side (magic, air, spies)
• Anti-symmetric modifiers that affect both sides equally but inversely (leadership, screening, familiarity)

For my own reference tables, I'll probably rearrange the modifiers in this order.

In principle, size and terrain could be asymmetric, but often they are not because both sides will seek to use them in similar ways. If there's forest around, both sides will hide in it. In a balanced game sides have similar sizes, and if there's an advantage to breaking down into sub-armies, then both sides will break down. In particular, they tend to both result in negative modifiers that make the majority of rolls almost useless (nothing but a 10+, or 11+, or even 12+ will find).

My first proposal is to turn the size modifiers into range modifiers, instead of dice roll modifiers. I would also make them explicitly symmetric, so that both the searching army and the opposing army would get the modifier of the smaller of the two. Then negative modifiers in these categories would simply suppress any long-range dice rolls involving small forces! The base range would be 3 24-mile super-hexes (that is, 12 6-mile hexes), and would range between 1 super-hex (for a -2 modifier with the smaller side under 600 troops) up to 6 super-hexes (for a +3 modifier with both sides over 72,000 troops).

To me, it makes sense for this modifier to be symmetrical and to affect range. Not only is a small force harder to find until it gets close, but it also can't spare as many soldiers to function as deep penetration scouts, and so the ones it can spare will cover a proportionally smaller area.

Also, one of the stranger effects of the current approach is that it is much easier to get a count of the number/type/strength of units in an army when that army is large, instead of when it is small. That seems backward, in that a small army should be easier to scout once it is discovered. That is, if you only see a couple hundred troops, it's easy to conclude "They're all orcs!", but if you see a hundred-thousand troops, all you can say is "The battalion closest to me looked like orcs, and beyond that, they were just an endless field of countless helmets and banners". Locating and evaluating an opposing army are distinct functions, and making size into a range modifier emphasizes their independence.

My second proposal is to remove the distance-between-armies modifiers from the roll itself, and allow it to only affect the recon result indirectly through the Degree of Success results. In effect, this modifier is currently being applied in two ways, since it both reduces success chance (on the roll) and then also changes what it means to have a "success" (on the results table). This is creating unnecessary overhead. If you want range to have strong penalties, it would make more sense to just confine it to one of these two places but intensify the consequences. That is, you could either double the roll penalty, but collapse "Proximity of Armies" to a single row, or else remove the roll penalty but make the variation with proximity more severe.

I think I like the latter option better, although I think distance effects might be too strong already, so the best option might be to just drop distance modifiers to the roll entirely. The advantage of keeping it on the Results table (instead of the roll) is that it doesn't create the too-frequent skew toward "Catastrophe" results.

The benefit of both proposals is that they eliminate effects that tend to push the 2d6 roll out of the balanced range 2-12, and skew it strongly toward one end. This increases the uncertainty of results, since players will have fewer expectations about whether they should be routinely falling on one end or the other. Instead of one or two reasonable outcomes, the full spectrum of five outcomes (from Catastrophe to Major Success) will seem plausible in most cases. If they are skewed, it will mostly be on account of hidden variables, like which side has more cavalry or better leadership.

This makes the Catastrophe result meaningful again! Instead of showing up over 50% of the time due to stacked negative size/distance modifiers, it will again become something rare and exciting, as players will really be unsure whether they have a Major Success or a Catastrophe.