Re: (TFT) LOU/DOU hey, would ya look at that

["Jay Carlisle" <selfinflicted_wounds@boardermail.com>]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John J Hyland" 

> 
> And for Jay - - "How does it scale?"
> 
> 
> 
> How's that? You've got me back-filling the logic to make the 
> canon scales work.
> 

I'm with it, and like it.
 I'm still catching up on this weeks Posts so I'll leave off comments about LOU till I've gotten there, but I wanna put this out while it's sparked.

I have no problem in reverse engenering a game to make it fit TFT.
I consider this a valad method of Mass Combat.
It's not the only method, and there need not be one single method to resolve all Combat.

As I've droned on about, I got my start in Wargames.
I was also in the Military.
As a result, it took me a very LONG time to get shook of a lot of notions that I considered axiomatic.

Consider;
>From the standpoint of a Figure in TFT, there is ONLY Melee, Mass Combat from a single Figures PoV is just a LONG Melee.
Even a General figure can only be considered to have some display of the overall Strategic situation acsessable from the Generals current location.
A Leader is a Figure who has a "Chain of Command (CoC)" that executes the Leaders Orders.
For very large groups, Leaders at a smaller Scale can have Meta-Leaders at a larger Scale, or Leaders of Leaders.
A Leader chooses a group Action called an Order, and attempts to comunicate it to their Followers.
A group of Followers, acting together, is a Unit.
An Order is an Action that a Unit is trained to preform in unision.
A Party of adventurers is equlivant to a sports Team which is the same as a Unit.
A Play is an Order.

I make 'New Follower' a requirement for 'Leadership', and modify New Follower as follows;
"A Figure must expend 1pt IQ per follower maintained."

Scale is very much a question of "at what level does my Figure become subsumed by the Scale?".
Is John Carter worth a squad, platoon, company, as a ratio, or is he more like a Special Ops Figure, able to dissrupt or otherwise cause special effects on the battle?
In TFT this largely becomes settled via the Battle Map.

Three types of Talents/Spells/abilities via Mass Combat.
1 Personal. Focus on the Figure and the Battle Map centered around that Figure.
2 Ranged. Focus on some point seperated from the Figure and its Personal effects.
At high DX and proper conditions, a missle attack can hit from many Battle Maps away.
Movement also falls here, and high speeds can allow a Figure to traverse many Battle Maps in a Turn.
3 Downtime. These only affect Mass Combat in the manner of a Downtime Action like 'Build' being at an unfinished stage of construction when the invasion hits, etc.

Most of this stuff I consider nesecsary to a good Mass Combat system.

The trick to it all is to offer something that isn't MY view of Mass Combat, Armys, command structrue, and all, but to offer a set of tools that allows GM's to model what's in THEIR minds as to how an Army should be set up, or how a group of Wizards in THEIR gameworld is structured.
Hell, half the fun in Phil Barker minis was going through the Army Lists and drawing up Orders of Battle for difrent armys at difrent point totals.
Making up your Units in an RPG should be just as much fun, and not limited to the GM IMO.
Put three Players in a Hotel room on the Moon, with a secure chanel to a wicked-smart...., anyway the Players get the choice of how to structure in that one, not the GM.

I'll try to put some of this more clearly in a post on Story this evening.

Jay

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