(TFT) Wargame 6 --> Those darn PC's

[Rick Smith <rsmith@lightspeed.ca>]

Hi all,
  The purpose of a TFT wargame is (as I see it) to allow
the GM to more easily integrate powerful PC's into his
or her campaign.

  A quick discussion of political power.  Power is the 
ability to get other people to do what you want.  This 
comes in many forms.  A non-exclusive list:

Economic Power - Basically you can hire, bribe or get 
people to do what you want in hopes of future monies.

Persuasive Power - You are sufficiently persuasive,
charismatic or well published to convince people to
do your thing.

Military Force - You can beat down or kill people you
don't like.  In TFT powerful magic items can increase
personal slaying power by orders of magnitude.  You 
can also get hordes of like minded people, load them 
up with armor and weapons and set them off to do their
thing.


  The TFT wargame is specifically aimed to help us 
model the later system in a fun way.  However, there 
is no reason why we couldn't make games to handle 
other means of power expression.


  I tend to end up with politically powerful characters
in my long campaigns and a number of times I have 
wanted to streamline mass military combats and model
their effects on participating PC's in my game.  Some
things I have tried are:

Risk Rolls - The SJ solution, I assign a risk value for
a week's fighting and leave it up to the dice.  This is
quick, but has the disadvantage of allowing for boring 
character deaths.  (PC's should die on occasion, but 
ideally they should die in a heroic, self sacrificing or
in a memorable manner and not because they rolled a 17
risk roll and then high damage.)

Improved Risk Rolls - I built one based on the system in
the old game En Guard!  Basically the player took part in
the fight with a low chance of being hurt and a zero 
chance of being killed.  Then the player chose the risk
modifier to the roll.  The higher the risk, the more 
chance they had of death and the higher the chance of
them gaining glory and being mentioned is dispatches / 
being promoted.  Some systems I created were very, 
complicated (my players encouraged me in this) to take
advantage of the various defensive tricks they came up
with.  The point is if a player takes a huge risk 
modifier they have only themselves to blame if they die.

Board Game Counters - When the counter with the PC's 
in it was destroyed or badly damaged, the PC's took a
load of damage.  Often this system was modified to give
some risk to the armor monsters PC's that could soak up 
an amount of damage that would kill regular people.

Critical Events - Using any of the systems above, when
the GM gets a result that is bad the game is stopped 
and a suitably dire situation is invented.  This is
then gamed out on regular TFT scale.  This is most 
satisfying but has 3 disadvantages.  One, it is a lot
more work.  Two, it requires the board game mass combat
to stop for an extended time.  Three, it is totally
arbitrary with GM whim determining the dangerousness
of the fight.  (To some extent I scoff at such an 
argument.  If you are afraid of GM whim, what are you
doing in my game?  But in practice is can be challenging
for the GM to provide just the right amount of risk in
a created on the spot fight.)

----------------------------------------------------


  The major ways that PC's can be damaged by a fight
consist of:

1) Death.
2) Maiming.
3) Destruction of major magic items.
4) Heal-able major injuries. 
5) Destruction of minor magic items or damage of major 
      magic items.
5) Use of one shot items such as healing potions and 
      exploding gems, etc.
6) Minor injuries.
7) Loss of mundane materials such as food, gunpowder,
      maps, footwear, water, etc.
8) Being forced to maneuver to someplace they don't   
      want to be at.


  (Can anyone think of other penalties for a battle that
goes poorly for PC's?)

  The above list is ranked roughly in order of how much
it bugs my PC's.  If your Players are a happy go lucky 
bunch they may not mind magic item loss as much.  But 
getting powerful magic items is tough in my campaign &
when a lightning bolt shorts out their pet item you
would think I am strangling my player's first born.

  One thing that I do in my campaign is I allow magic
items to get damaged.  In this case an item does not 
die outright but gains an unpleasant GURPS like quirk.
This might be minor (you must pay 1 fST per day for 
the thing to operate) or major (your self powering
Reverse Missiles ring now only reverses the third
arrow fired at you each turn).  


---------------------------------------------------

  Now obviously our wargame should be able to damage 
PC's but if the only result is survival or death then
you are missing a trick.  

  Normally, I am not fond of a lot of tables in my 
wargames.  But for something as important as describing
how exactly how a PC is affected by a combat gone bad,
this is something that that would be worth it.

  
  As a sketch of how things might work, for each PC
unit, a running total is kept of each time it is 
attacked but sustains no visible effect (at the war
game level) each time it is affected by something 
that does not permanently lower its combat value,
(e.g. retreats, disruptions) and all those effects
that do it serious damage (e.g. reduction of its
combat strength or its destruction of a military 
unit).

  When a unit is destroyed the health of the PC's is
immediately checked.  Otherwise a single roll at the
end of the battle will determine the damage done.

  
  These rolls can be modified in a number of ways.
If the PC's have stated that they are going to be
very brave, use up magic to protect themselves, plan
to only use healing potions on themselves (good and
bad, reduce minor results but the death of your 
buddies increase the chance of catastrophic results),
and the like could be added to the system.


  GM's can always play out death results and give
PC's a chance to reverse their fate if they want.  
But in my experience, I am not nearly mean enough
when baking up a battle for survival fight and PC's 
breeze thru.


  Does anyone one have further thoughts on the 
problem of handing PC damage in mass combat?

  Warm regards, Rick.
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