Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
I don't understand; so are you saying you resolved battles with hundreds of combatants using TFT rules, or that you resolved such battles using other rules, and the situation happens to have been related to your TFT campaign? It is really hard to imagine someone playing out a a fight among several hundred combatants using real TFT rules. For starters, how would you manage all the book keeping?
|
Both.
Most big campaign battles were done with wargame rules, almost never involved PCs - they were mostly for fun and interest and to have a real game system's cause & effect and uncertainty determining what happened in the campaign world's wars. I my case I used counters tending to be about 100 men each.
I have also played out a few battles with 100-200 figures in both TFT and GURPS. I mention it not to suggest everyone do it, but to mention it can be done and has been done, even by 14-year-old GMs. ;-) (... who had three+ years of TFT experience and more years of wargame experience.)
I managed the book-keeping by putting squads on pieces of paper, several characters to a sheet, and giving most of them ID numbers that helped me keep track of where they probably were. e.g. Red A1 through A 10 are in A squad of the red army, and I drew their ID numbers on their counters in red ink. Yes, I also made hundreds of counters for these battles, with the aid of photocopiers, rubber cement and scissors.
There are even more efficient ways to do it, especially now with computers. You can pack quite a large number of character stats onto one sheet of paper if you make an organized table grid for them. The first edition GURPS Basic Set had a decent example of this for tracking PCs or NPC groups, called the GM Control Sheet - it lets you keep most stats visible without needing to look at players' sheets. For many TFT characters you could have practically everything on one line.
As for running the action, it helped to look at the situation and realize that except for long-range missile fire, most groups were concerned just with the people near them, so you could resolve action for figures who were near each other, and only some of them would actually be engaged or able to attack each turn due to all the distance, allies in the way, blocked LOS, confusion, etc.
That also means you don't need a massive table of everyone's adjDX, even though it is still very important that actions are interleaved and higher DX goes first versus people they are fighting. The main concession I made to sanity and playability was resolving all distant missile fire in a separate phase, IIRC after all close-range actions. e.g., I'd to the left flank, then the center, then the right flank, etc, and then everyone trying long-range shots. I think I had those being essentially simultaneous unless long-range shooters were being shot at by other long-range shooters, in which cast I'd do those in adjDX order.
Generally I would let players make a lot of the choices for the NPCs on their side of the battle, without showing them the NPC record sheets or letting them deliberate.
I thought it was pretty grand and cool and liked it for its own sake, but it was a lot of work and took quite a while to do, and I had some mixed feelings about doing it for some of them.