Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
And some of the troops on the side of the PCs amount to gansters, murderers, street fighters and even pirates. All in all, about 500 of their men are 'disciplined' pirates under a powerful pirate 'admiral' who can impose fairly good order (for pirates), 200 of them are the chosen elite of a pirate admiral not interested in good order or avoiding atrocities and 200 of them are criminals and street fighters motivated to volunteer for a Forlorn Hope of sort by either patriotism or hatred of the Mulhorandi.****
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The 200 chosen elite of the pirate admiral - I would say policy with these guys is that they will commit atrocities. Rather than try to figure out the chance of them committing those atrocities, make it an encounter/event that the players have to intervene in.
On Fanatics, I would say to assume there are atrocities committed against the slavers but not the slaves. In this case don't roll either, just make it an encounter for the PCs to intervene in (or not, the PCs might not particularly care). We could treat PC intervention as a Parley attempt and use the chance for rebellion from there.
Overall, I would use a Reaction Roll for the starting point - each individual unit makes their own Reaction Roll towards the city inhabitants (I don't have City Stats so I don't know if that should modify things).
Successful skill rolls by the PCs give +2 bonus to these reaction rolls. I am not entirely sure which skill uses they should be, although Leadership & Propaganda are the most obviously useful ones. Either way, my policy would be to let each PC use 2 skills - 1 to represent keeping control of the troops during the fighting and 1 to represent the groundwork done in advance (assuming they prepared their troops for this).
The part I'm not sure of is how many troops a PC can "manage."
Apply reaction modifiers for any traits like "Intolerance" that group of troops has, and adjust for other traits like Code of Honour that might influence things. For numbers to apply, I would say +1/-1 for Quirk-level, and an extra +1/-1 for every 5 points of Advantage/Disadvantage that apply to members of the group. So Code of Honour (Soldiers) gives +3, Fanaticism gives +4 (at least towards those the Fanatics cause is to help).
These are only "average" traits for members of the group. Not every member of a unit will have Code of Honour, but the +3 represents the espirit de corps or peer pressure of those with Code of Honour on those without it.
If that seems too easy a roll for the players, apply Special Modifiers for Potential Combat Situation (because "do we commit atrocities on you" counts as Potential Combat Situation to me...). The civilians might get up to -5 for appearing weaker than the invading army, if they seem truly defenceless.
Also, any Special Modifiers for Loyalty rolls.
General frame of reference for the reaction rolls:
Bad or worse = Deliberate murder and atrocities.
Poor = People beaten or driven from the city, vandalism or excessive/malicious property damage.
Neutral = Looting but no rape or murder. Maybe someone who resists the looting might get hurt, but the unit doesn't actively seek to hurt people.
Good reaction = no harm done.
Very Good or better = actively protects the civilians from other troops.
There's some holes in my plan:
-how many troops can a player influence at once? (maybe a really good roll will influence a larger portion of their forces?)
-what about casualties? If a group is wiped out or nearly so it might affect the damage they do.
Anyway, I hope that helps.