[Mass Combat] Discipline, Law, Order and Preventing Atrocities

[legine]

Well it comes basicly down to the morale standad. If players apply todays standards it will be dissapointing if you apply an other standard. So I would not to much worry about.

If you check the romean army or the old chinese, they applied high disciplin. There is even one ancient book which is still valid in todays military teachings.

So i think you have to decide what kind of army they lead.
I'd orient myself on the disciplin value you base it.
Something like rome Legion or Sparta I'd give a 16.
a romean standard stroops 14 or 15, auxileries maybe 12, pressed troops 10 and less.
I would assume this values for fresh people. If there are arguments to reduce I would reduce by 1-4 points. depending on severity.

For each failed point I would assume 1% or if thats not working failed point sqared. that would mean miss by 10 and you loose the commnd of that particular unit.
With that there is some chance something happens, and the severity is of course higher if you have less trained troops.

I would also concider my next steps in the campagne. I think it is important not only to simulate but to tell a story. And the story tells you what limits you put in. Maybe more then 10% does not suite in the story, but causes enough trouble to be interesting.

For me it is really the question what do you want next. And that massivly influences the severity of the role.

[Railstar]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Realistically low tech armies rarely have the logistical backstop to make the prevention of looting and the atrocities associated with looting feasible unless the city surrendered without a fight.

This is a good point. The level of control when the fighting officially stops would make a huge difference. With an orderly surrender, there is a clear "end" to the fighting. But if the city is taken by storm, violence against civilians would be easier to lose in the surrounding violence of the battle, and others would be too busy to put a stop to it.

Perhaps use the "Pursuing a Retreating Force" rule after the and treat the city as the logistic force (losing 1dx5%)?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Realistically low tech armies rarely have the logistical backstop to make the prevention of looting and the atrocities associated with looting feasible unless the city surrendered without a fight.

There is a significant attempt here, at least, to do so. It is being done by extremely competent commanders and their staff. They are devoting around 20% of the troops that enter the city to military police duties, as opposed to combat duties, and naturally all the troops were briefed extensively on expected norms of behaviour and consequences of deviating there from.

The city surrendered after the port was seized and artillery and dropped incendiaries broke a counterattack. Actual hand-to-hand fighting never involved more than around thousand men of the invanding army and happened only near the docks. Nevertheless, even twelve hours after landing, there is still chaos, confusion and, every so often, the potential for violence as some hiding members of the former occupying force who have either not heard of the surrender or don't agree with it are encountered. So there is plenty of scope for atrocities, should anyone desire to commit them.

Everyone is extremely busy preparing to defend their new acquisition. The 300 troops devoted to military policing duties started at dawn and it's late afternoon now. The commanders have attempted to have around 1/3 of them rest at a time, but it's unlikely many have gotten much sleep. So as it gets dark again, I imagine that the level of security starts to decline sharply, as the MPs are tired and the south wall is going to be attacked, which ties up much of the rest of the troops.

There are 500 others who will be in a quasi-MP role as well, because of their status as expatriate locals and also because they are not as well equipped as the front-line mercenaries and therefore not as vital to the defence. They are not trained guardsmen, however, but just militia and soldiers who over the past year of living next to refugee camps have often had to contain riots, guard food shipments, oversee potentially subversive civilian labourers and perform other MP-like tasks. How much good they can do during the night, however, is up for debate. Especially if the army outside the walls attacks.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Realistically low tech armies rarely have the logistical backstop to make the prevention of looting and the atrocities associated with looting feasible unless the city surrendered without a fight.

I'm sceptical too. Low-TL armies didn't avoid looting. At best they may have attempted to ensure that the looting took place in an orderly and civilized fashion, so that it was efficient and didn't cause the important civilians or nobles back home to become upset

And I'm not aware of there being anything analogous to military police, in any low-tech armies. Insofar as there was discipline, it'd have been kept by NCOs (Roman-style) or clergy.

But this is Icelander. He tends to think things through, rather than go for D&D Land, so there's probably an underlying ice(lander)berg of thoughts and rationales that we don't know about, that makes such a thing rather more plausible.

[Donny Brook]

Propensity to offend = Incentive - Restraint

Elements of Incentive include:
-actual need/deprivation
-the reward or benefit of the deed
-battlefield resentment or historical dislike of enemy
-extraneous rewards for offending (spiritual benefits, regard from peers)


Elements of Restraint include:
-cultural ethics of the force
-intentions of leadership
-effectiveness of command/control
-ability of the defeated to resist/deter


There is a lot of room to further unpack the elements, and to play with how they interact.

I think that there is probably no generic answer and your question will have to find its reply in your vision of how these people think and act.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by Icelander

. . . I'm trying to find ballpark figures for TL2 to TL4 wars. And historians at that time rarely recorded facts about the incidence of rape or murders contrary to official policy.

This covers a lot of ground. Armies of the Thirty Years War [1618-48] were known to be pretty savage in terms of atrocities -- their foes were of the Wrong Religion so torture, murder and other crimes seemed to make God happy. (In the eyes of the atrocity-committers, I should note.)

Two generations later such atrocities were frowned upon in intra-European wars. (They did happen but were against orders and punishable.) In the eighteenth century most wars were for limited objectives -- the gaining of a province or so (see Silesia in the War of the Austrian Succession.) Mass atrocity would not only anger the people you were trying to add to your state but would also cut down on your income. (Killing lots of workers and driving others off does tend to cut down on the GDP.)

That said there were always exceptions. If the defenders of a town refused to surrender under certain conditions (after the creation of a "practicable breach", for example) the common soldiers saw said refusal as justifying the worst possible behavior. See Badajoz, 1812. Even Wellington, known as a pretty fierce disciplinarian, could not restrain his troops from the sack of a friendly (Spanish) town after the French garrison had inflicted incredible casualties on the British assault.

So preventing atrocity depends on several factors, including, but not limited to:

1.) How severe is the punishment for atrocity;

2.) How likely this punishment is (how efficient is the provost marshal & his men {MPs for later ages;})

3.) How much justification the soldiers themselves can find for atrocity (heavy losses, death of a popular commander, lack of pay and food, possibly general anger);

4.) How alike, or different, are the potential victims of atrocity (just like you, or God-cursed blasphemers!)

5.) How important is the maintenance of discipline to the soldiers themselves (if they pride themselves on self-order and discipline vs. various armed mobs -- tell them that mass atrocity is what thugs in uniform do, not the Brigade of Steel).

No one approach is going to guarantee or eliminate atrocity, but an intelligent commander can shift the odds.

Very few people truly enjoy war.

There are exceptions. See Patton and Ernst Junger.

[Flyndaran]

I thought looting was not just expected or tolerated, but a known reward for victorious armies.

Taking stuff that's "just lying there" is so enticing that we have entrapment laws to stop police from employing it to "create criminals".

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

...
There are exceptions. See Patton and Ernst Junger.

I would have to qualify the statement to which you replied as, "Few people actively IN war, enjoy it." If few people outside of war enjoyed it, we wouldn't have so damn many.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by legine

you could make a discplin role for one unit. And modify it by some factors like stress, Combat success, relation role modifiers to the PC and so forth.

If you look at current wars, the most civilized people do warcrimes in war for various reason. When Germany Lost WW2 some american soldiers (not many I think 20 000 People died of this todays historican say) took their gun and shootet their captives, just because they could.
Vietnam was even worse.

The series of Band of Brothers I think explores this when civilized people leave their standards. Maybe, I can not remeber, even Saveing Private Ryan.
But yu can take also Anti war movies like Acokalypse now! as inspireing.

While were on the end of WWII you can add keeping up basic constabulary protections among the populace. At the end of World War II one of the chief problems of the Allied occupiers was preventing feuding between DPs and conquered Germans.

Breakdown of normal law is a normal circumstance in war and it has military and political as well as humanitarian ramifications. There is not really much different in effect between partisans and ordinary outlaws as both are hurting your supplies and your native relations.

[dukofdeth]

I've heard previous arguments wherein modern moralists have more or less lambasted the long dead for the way things were back then. We've learned a better way - or believe we have - and those people then did not, or could not, given the conditions they were living amidst then. I never once questioned my grandfather about how he treated Jews prior to WWII. It was enough for me, I suppose, that he did serve, and that for all the time I knew him, he never once spoke ill of anyone. And I know from my father that my grandfather did have a few biases, though in my opinion his reasons were more personal than anything else. My point is that it is very difficult to judge the past, since we were not a part of it. All the more so when the past is removed by centuries.

I was recently surprised to learn that it took mathematicians some thirty years to fully flesh out the proof that 1+1=2. I would imagine that coming up with some sort of mathematical model to generate a statistical model of typical post-battle atrocities in a historical setting would take just as long. It happens for so many stupid reasons, and psychologically it just seemed to come down to greed, wrath, and power, much as it still does. The difference then was that it was expected to happen. It was almost a perk of a conquering force - to do with the conquered as they wished. Some conquerors let their men run rampant, some reigned them in, and some made mountains out of the skulls of their victims.

Take your commander's wishes and translate that into what will, for the most part, happen. I wouldn't dwell on the numbers - there will always be those who refuse to toe the line. You can make it a quest of sorts for the PC's to investigate an incident, or a series of them, and to bring those they believe to be involved before justice. Your characters will not catch them all, so I wouldn't fret over such fine details. Either such incidents are critical to the overall story you are weaving, or they are just so much noise in the background. Those who suffered such deprivations were not likely to come forward, as in those days no one spoke of such things. Before people like Oprah stepped up and came out about the sort of things they had suffered through, most victims of such violence did not really speak of it. They held it in, and tried to cope. Some managed, some did not. Some imploded, and some exploded.

Figure out what you need - story-wise - of such events, and either work it in, or just have it as a casual mention. Such-and-such occurred - make up a number - and so-and-so have been put in chains, and await judgement. If it isn't driving your story, I'd keep it at arms length. Have your commander do what he must, mourn if he must, but move on.