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01-15-2022, 04:48 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
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[DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque worlds
Been thinking about how the assumptions of a Dungeon Fantasy world would "bubble up" to the level of mass combat, and struggling with how to translate DF stats into mass combat. Ideally, I'd like something like the old "Heroes on a Mass Scale" article from Pyramid #3/84, except that article seems badly flawed, even if you don't care about consistency with the tables of element types in Mass Combat. For example, I tried writing up a basic foot-soldier in mostly leather armor and running the guy through the "heroes on a mass scale" system, and got that the guy would have about 25 TS on "realistic" assumptions. But upgrading his armor to heavy plate would only add about +7 TS, which seems far too low.
I can think of a couple alternatives here. One is to think about how various levels of mundane troop and equipment quality translate into individual-scale GURPS stats, and then use that as a source of benchmarks to determine what individual-scale boosts are required for +50%, +100%, +200%, etc. improvement in TS. For example, if a "super-soldier" racial template seems to be about twice as useful as upgrading from basic to fine equipment, maybe that's +200% to TS. Another approach is to notice that Extra Attack is 25 points, while Extra Attack (Multi-Strike) is 30 points, and say that each 25-30 points in traits directly relevant to an elements primary job in combat is worth +100% TS. I need to specify "directly relevant" because GURPS massively rewards specialization, and probably most 250-plus-point characters aren't narrowly optimized for being the best possible heavy infantry or whatever. So this is a rough guideline more than cut-and-dried rule, but it's a start. What other ideas do people have?
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01-15-2022, 05:43 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
That article is meant to write up hero units, not everyday soldiers and warriors - which it warns against. It literally says this in the first paragraph.
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01-15-2022, 09:04 PM | #3 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
I'm not sure how this helps. For example, the fact that a massive gear upgrade can result in only a modest improvement in TS will be exacerbated, not lessened, for characters with better stats than my basic foot-soldier. In fact, the basic approach seems unworkable, because everything is additive and nothing is multiplicative. A +6 to primary combat skill should pretty much always be a massive upgrade, but under the article's system it gives a flat +6 to TS (multiplied by the "austerity multiplier"), which might not be very meaningful if the hero's TS is already very high.
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Handle is a character from the Star*Drive setting (a.k.a. d20 Future), not my real name. |
01-15-2022, 09:28 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
You could try to be consistent with CER (itself a dubious formula, but..); I get something like a combined CER of 160 for a unit of light infantry (TS 2), so saying 1 TS is 80 CER isn't out of hand.
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01-16-2022, 08:39 AM | #5 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
My issue isn't the scaling, as I said in my OP I'm happy to throw out the tables in Mass Combat and and have say 25 or 50 or 100 TS mean something totally different than it does in RAW Mass Combat. My issue is with things that should be major force multipliers instead offering a relatively modest flat bonus.
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Handle is a character from the Star*Drive setting (a.k.a. d20 Future), not my real name. |
01-16-2022, 07:14 PM | #6 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
A Mass Combat Element is roughly 10 guys. An individual soldier who replaces 10 guys doesn't just need to have a 50% chance of beating those 10 guys in a a fair fight, he needs to do all the other things those 10 guys do: patrol 10 guys' worth of fortifications, extend the battle formation like 10 guys, cover 10 guys' worth of sight lines while marching, and so on. Just having Altered Time Sense or Extra Attack doesn't really cut it.
For my own DF-inspired Fantasy Mass Combat game, I was mostly generous with the requirements for promoting a PC to Hero status, but it was just Hero status. A single DF Scout might arguably be a Hero Bowman unit, but he's still an Average/Average Hero Bowman with TS 2 F. Depending on the quality of his Soldier skills and equipment, he might qualify to be a Good/Very Fine Hero Bowman with TS 6 F, Night. But TS 23 is way out of line, in my opinion - no 250 point DF Scout is worth 110 basic bowmen, and a hour or two of having a 250 point DF scout fight against 110 archers will prove that.
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01-16-2022, 07:49 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
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01-17-2022, 06:16 AM | #8 | |
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
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01-17-2022, 09:20 AM | #9 | |||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
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I think this is sometimes done with special classes, but excellent equipment can be a force multiplier even if that suit of plate armor doesn't give a knight the Armor special class.
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01-17-2022, 11:04 AM | #10 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [DF][Mass Combat] Handling heroic, superhuman, etc. fighters, esp. in DF-esque wo
Let me preface this by noting I don't have GURPS Mass Combat and have only perused its contents briefly; I also don't have the article in question. So take what I say here with an appropriate volume of salt.
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*Soldier is really important for functioning as a military unit; troops who lack it should have markedly reduced TS, such that a unit of soldiers with Soldier-12 and weapon skills at 12 should probably be equally matched with - perhaps even superior to - an equal number of warriors with Soldier at default and weapon skills at 15 or so.
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