Re: (TFT) Armies

["maou_tsaou1@netzero.net" <maou_tsaou1@netzero.net>]

Hey Mr. G.

Okay, I had a brief look at your experience system and then my internet machine crashed.
Ergo I shan't go into any detailed analysis here.
Rather I'll take this as an opportunity to explain what I've been thinking up to this point.
Then I'll fire her back up and we'll see how well the stuff matches.

I've been messing with war a Loooooong time.
Long enough to have done this six different ways from Sunday.
I've come to the conclusion that it's probably best to offer combat at large scales as a kind of "social organization" 
The "atoms" of the whole thing are Figures.
The principals for joining Figure/atoms into Unit/molecules seem to be based around the "influence" Talent/Spells.
SJ says IQ/2 rnd dn, total Followers acquired.
Jay says 1pt IQ per Follower, representing effort on the Followers behalf by the Leader.
Forgetting a Follower is a reaction roll for the Follower; hostile goes "Fatal Attraction."
This can be highly modified by stuff like "social traditions" and the like, but that's the wider set of Culture.
Let's keep this limited (as much as possible) to the Unit combat, i.e. armies.

In very large armies a General doesn't control troops they control troop commanders.
This works on down the line to the extent of a forces overall communication technology and training.
Training represents Talents that the Unit has studied as a group and are able to perform as a Unit Action or an Order.
Communication represents how a commander relays their Orders to the Units under their command.
Where a players Figure sits in the overall power structure of the "army" is gonna have a LOT to do with how they experience the "war".

In very large groups, the Population "Joe Average" is more and more strongly representative of the groups as a whole the more and more members there are in the group, i.e. the larger a percentage of the total population the group represents.

So after I flooded my "idiot child's" poor 64megs with a cut and paste of your experience system I was stuck at the "end" of your list.
I looked at it for a minuet, then decided to try and explain some of my point of view before the restart.
I'm still not doing a good job, but I'm keeping these kind of things in mind when messing with this stuff.
Just because I'm working by-myself doesn't mean I wanna be a dictator.

Uhhh...

< scrambles for a book >

" Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."
" It often seems as if a man has to deepen his experience by a great suffering, sometimes akin to death, and learn to give up much of what he clings to at any given moment, before he can obtain the release of enlightenment or the blessing of salvation. It also appears to anyone who has been through such an experience that the ultimate result is incommunicable. This suggests to us that a religious secret is often secret not because anything or anyone wishes it so, but because it can not be known in any other way than by living through it. Franz Kafka summarized this when he wrote: "The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon." It cannot be mere chance that so many of the rituals of secret societies, both primitive and advanced, include tests of patience and fortitude, deliberately inflicted sufferings, disciplines of silence and heroism, followed by gradual revelation of mysteries concerned with the presence of dying in all the living, which take away the sting of death and are followed by the candidate's return to the world as a resurrected being, an initiate. It often seems that a secret society undertakes the task of creating for the many such circumstances as may take a few fortunate men through to wisdom in a natural and unforced manner.
...
The initiate's "uniqueness" lies in this withdrawal from relationships with other people, which frees him from many of the constraints that bind the ordinary man in society and to act in a way that is virtually antisocial."


In other words, Jay is a screw-up, and so karma has provided to screw up Jay.

Uhhh. Chuck Jones is going down on Turnner Classic...

Let me sum up.
Why did you correlate experience with number of troops so to speak?




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