Are any of these games you mention in print anywhere? I wouldn’t mind looking at them, but don’t want to pay some huge price on eBay. *** My goal was if the players have a mercenary company (or join one), there is some way to measure both the combat ST (in several categories), and ways of judging the command and training quality of the company. I wanted to discuss officers and NCO’s separately. Morale is important. Thru some not too complex process, turn this into a counter for the war-game. Play the game, and make sure that the damage to the counter can be reflected back to the characters that make it up. I want the counters to be much more complex than TLoU, so that more of these details can be captured. I’m thinking oversized counters and hexes, say hexes 3 cm across, with counters 1.5 by 2.5 cm. Have the letters and numbers large enough that home made counters with pen and pencil crayon are practical. The game can stay fairly simple, lots of numbers on the counter do not need to have super complex rules to run them. Terrain in the game would be fairly complex, lots of varieties. Different fantasy races get bonuses in different terrain, etc. During game play, having 1 or 2 status counters per company is OK. (We have a small number of companies so a couple counters each to show their status can work.). Maybe one counter to show it deployment & offensive status, and one counter showing damage / negative effects. *** The size of the campaigns would be small. Companies are 30 to 50 people. 5 to 10 companies per size. (A LOT of ancient battles were under 500 people, huge armies of thousands or tens of thousands of people were very rare. Also I want the adventurers to feel like they are not meaningless in these conflicts.) Debating command and control. Easiest thing to do is say wizards have solved the problem. Likely something more realistic would be better. Card driven like the Command and Colors style games? Maybe you give your orders, and cards say how quickly / confused the orders are carried out? Perfectly willing to use dice. Different type of dice. Lots of dice if needed. Outright destruction of units is very rare. Usually cohesion is lost, morale collapses, and the unit runs. That said, individuals in the unit do die. Depending on command and control, beat up units stop responding to orders well. Logistics… very simple or mostly ignored completely. The units are so small, that big logicist trains are not needed. *** I would like to make this game work with a wide variety of RPG’s, but this makes how to handle magic really difficult. In high fantasy type games (e.g. D&D), a high level wizard can destroy 500 typical soldiers. In lower mana areas wizards might be pretty insignificant. How to handle magic is the thing I’m least sure about. Thoughts on the subject would be welcome! I’m tempted to just use TFT (since this is the RPG I play), but that would make the market for this game tiny, and if I’m going to go to all this work, I would like it to be useful to lots of people. *** I got a book, “How to Make War: A comprehensive guide to modern warfare” by James F. Dunnigan, which has a lot of statistics on conflict and discussions of how various elements tie into making an effective fighting force. Reading this book, made me think about how cool it would be to have a several companies under your command (each with all stats written on a 3 by 5 inch index card), and play out battles with them. After the battle, you look at the results, and modify the card for your company. (These troops are blooded and more confident. But you lost a key NCO, so training will be harder in future.) Note, not all companies need index cards (just YOUR companies). NPC companies are just counters. *** Anyway the key things I’m thinking about are: — Small scale battles, 200 to 500 people on a side. Several companies each. — Full color maps on 8.5 by 11” paper, or 11 by 17” paper. This make it easy for people to create and print out new maps. For larger maps put a couple of small sheets beside each other. — Fairly detailed notes on each company. Different companies are quite different from each other. Info on company fits on index card, from index card counter in game is created. — The ability of events at the RPG level of play to effect the companies and vice versa. — Adventuring parties can be directly used as tiny companies. Or maybe as commanders / bodyguards / command staff. *** Anyone think this sort of game would be cool? Anyone know of a game with this sort of scale? Warm regards, Rick. |