D20 Iron Age: Preliminary

[Manxome]

Historically, battles do not go to the death. If your game system has everyone on one side or another die, then your system is producing results that are every bit as a-historical, and stupid as Runequest's production of people in major battles chopping their own heads off by accident. Actual death tolls in the major battles of history are generally pretty small in terms of actual percentages of total participants. If there has been magical healing of any kind, the casualty levels would have been lower still. The goal of the game design should be to have battles end with relatively few deaths on either side.

A big part of that can be produced by having a system for determining how much land changes hands and other concessions are made at the end of a war. Go all Europa Universalis on this, with wars ending with your nation annexing a major city, gaining the right to collect taxes on river traffic, and forcing them to hand over one of their princesses to marry your chieftain. Once you've gotten that you can institute a rule where dead, fled, and captured enemies all count the same for purposes of enemy casualties and returning prisoners counts as a concession of considerable value and good faith. Bam. Once the players want to capture enemy goblins rather than kill them outright, the rules really don't have to change much to accommodate a historically accurate low-fatality war system.

I don't disagree, but are you trying to suggest a particular direction or concept for battle mechanics that will produce the desired results, or are you just saying that we should do "not like D&D"?

It sounded like you had (or thought you had) the seed of some mechanics with the different victory levels and the quasi-random battle endings, but I don't see how those would work or how they would produce any of the narrative results you say you want (at least, not more clearly than traditional mechanics, where you could easily have people surrender or flee before they die if you fixed the rocket-launcher-tag and the chase-scenes-don't-work problems).

Having rules for concluding a war (other than unconditonal surrender) sounds like a good idea, but that's rather different than having rules for ending a military battle, and is certainly different than having rules for ending the fight where some highwaymen try to kill you and take your stuff or you decide to take on some nonsapient monsters.

[MGuy]

I didn't state one of my questions clearly. When I asked if the idea that there's a morale system I mean something like are you suggesting that "death" or "0 life points" mean that the other side have lost the will to fight along with meaning death. So depending on what you wanted you could have 0 hp end a fight because that participant is dead or has just given up.

Alternatively are you saying there should be a second system that keeps track of morale. And that once a side has lost all of its "M points" it must give up/run/ surrender.

[shadzar]

D&D used to have a Morale that did exactly that. Not sure exactly which D&D concepts are being used for this d20 setting/game, but it did exist in the past and worked to save some players and monsters from complete defeat, and would resolve as a victory for the side that caused the morale to diminish.

Granted you had to have henchmen that would run away to get the PCs to follow, because the players chose what the PCs were going to do, not the system.

I think that works best, in that player's ALWAYS get to choose their actions, unless under some mind altering/controlling thing. The rest of the things CAN have a morale system if wanted, and it CAN work.But they players should have the PCs act under their own decisions, not being forced to run away. It is their choice to live to fight another die, or go out in a blaze of glory.

[Username17]

I'm saying that battles, like futbol matches, should have an end in sight. And that end can seriously be "no decision." Historically, battles like that were pretty common.

-Username17

[violence in the media]

I dunno. If you're going to have a morale system, I think the PCs should be subject to it as well. PCs don't get to elect to not die when the system says they should, I don't see why they should be able to not run either.

Why should PCs get to be innately fearless, at least right off the bat? Also, if player actions cannot be constrained by system results, then you cannot have a social combat system at all.

[Murtak]

I'm saying that battles, like futbol matches, should have an end in sight. And that end can seriously be "no decision." Historically, battles like that were pretty common.

-Username17

"no decision" could also mean that both sides temporarily back off to catch their breath. That gives both sides a little time to surrender, work out a deal or (especially in duels) to taunt the opponent. Then they can both go at it again. If working out a deal is preferable to wiping out the opposition at any cost (or getting wiped out) maybe a timeout is all that is needed. And if it is not, forcing surrender stinks anyways.

[virgil]

A large majority of the games I've run ended up with fights where even if the opposition surrendered, the players would use that as an opportunity to torture and kill later at the best of times, stabbing them as they kneel in defeat at the worst. They just don't like the concept of an enemy ever possibly going against them a second time.

And yeah, I've yet to see a social system that works all that well. Part of it is the fact that players don't like their personalities to be controlled, but without it, they are fearless and unswerving.

[Murtak]

Some of my players can be like that. Of course we have been playing DnD and Shadowrun, which are both systems where anyone you turn your back on has a decent chance of killing you in one hit so maybe that is the reason.

[Username17]

It can be frustrating in games like Final Fantasy VII or Pokemon when the enemies just vanish from the battlefield. But honestly, that´s a more realistic outcome than the DnD model where people fight to the death. Getting away is actually pretty easy most of the time.

But there are also things the game system can do that can make parlay seem more reasonable. Consider how in Go you come to a point where there is no longer any purpose served in continuing to play stones. You pass because there are no longer any attacks you can make that won´t weaken your position more than strengthening it.

Part of that can be established by having battles be goal driven rather than murder driven. If the goal ïs to get the saurians to stop raiding the cattle, then continuing to fight after you´ve achieved that is a waste of time. People don´t normally run around in Shadowrun picking irrelevant locks. And another part of that can be achieved with some sort of healing surge / reserve points system. That is to say: if there is an amount of fighting that you can do that won´t have long-term negative consequences for you, and more fighting will have long term negative consequences - then bugging out of fights before they become too serious is going to become standard practice.

But probably the most major point is that you need to get rid of "Evil." As long as every orc you leave behind is going to eventually come back and try to murder your children, you´re going to go full genocide. And that is fucked up.

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

Eh. You can have unambiguous Evil. You just can't have unambiguously Evil cultures. Having a setting that has Crawling Darkness type undead in it but ambiguously aligned orcs is perfectly workable, perhaps moreso since now anyone and everyone can potentially be found to have necromancers in their bunch who make questionable moral decisions. Or demons and demonologists, whatever.

[MGuy]

I never liked the tag of "always" this or "always" that anyway. I am keeping the tags of law evil good and chaos as cosmic alignment tagged energies in my own project for nostalgia's sake but I would not miss them if they were nothing but fluff here. I think that the whole goal driven thing is what we should aim for so that people who want to do something other than kill everything can gain as much experience as those who want to slaughter every male, female, and off spring of a given race. The only problem I can see with that (if you'd call it a problem) is that DMs have to do more work on setting goals and to judge what goals are reasonable (should earn XP) and which aren't.

[Prak]

Alignments aren't especially popular, and Iron Age stuff tends to be very morally grey in any event. If this game's going to include any morality stuff, I think it should be based on actual philosophies; and Detect Evil becomes Detect Dishonor, or similar, where you get a line on what people may have actually done.

I'd argue that we should just toss moral alignment outright and at most have "you are this tribe; it's pretty much just a tag which says where you're a foreigner and where you aren't" and leave the detection spells to "detect monsters" and "detect fire magic" and "detect pissedoffness" sorts of things.

I actually rather like the idea of a detectable foreigness tag, as it provides the image of a person waking up, not knowing where the hell he is, and casting that, when he pings and no one around him does, he knows he is no where near home.

I imagine tribes would be things like:
Spartan, Athenean, Roman (which would ping fewer and fewer places as time went on), Celtic, Pictish, Gallic, and so on.

I could see a racial or cultural powers list that wasn't ass and racial or cultural prestige classes with their special templates and what not, so it could impact advancement.

This has me thinking about things like a "Spartan Warrior" or "Athenean Hoplite" PrC, I'm tempted to combine them into a single "Grecian Badass" PrC except that they're completely different.

What do these sources mean? Akhilles is the son of a nymph (a minor god) and gets his invulnerability by being dipped in the river of the dead. How is that Arcane as opposed to Divine? How is Orpheus, who is the son of a Muse and given a magic lyre by Apollo Shadow instead of Divine?

I can certainly see how one could get non-Divine power sources into the space. In particular, the witches and druids of the time seem to work on an Arcane sort of source, I'd just like some more clarification.

Honestly I think you could make anything that sprang (or otherwise got power) from Titan, Fomori, Giant or whatever "Anti-God" tribe you care to mention should be either Arcane or Shadow.

Edit for Afterthought: If we're starting from the ground up what numbers are we looking at and how do they advance? Are we changing attributes around (since there's been some debate over them lately). What do we and don't we have now? Are we still using the feat/ability/skill set up or are we changing things like that around?

I am in favor of going to four base stats: Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, Intelligence. Constitution doesn't do anything except push basic level thresholds off the RNG. Removing it improves the game. Charisma does not do anything that makes sense. Why should Nymphs be better at seducing Ogres than Ogresses are? By the time you include enough caveats and special cases to cover all that kind of crap, you're left with the Charisma stat not really doing anything. Seriously, if a Dryad isn't more intimidating than a minotaur then Charisma shouldn't be a stat. And if she is, then your game is retarded.

Actually, I think this is a great time to split Charisma into Charisma, Appearance, and Manipulation.
In addition to his high Int, Odysseus has a decent to high Manipulation.
Nymphs have high Appearance.
Perseus would likely have ungodly Charisma and Manipulation, if we decided to go with the 300 portrayal (shut up, I like the movie, to hell with accuracy)
and yes, I'm having trouble thinking of an Iron Age character who has high charisma... tricksters, usually, come to think of it...

Localized classes would work best. If not in the far east, then don't include things FROM the far east. That will cut clutter cruft and crap out. You don't need barbarians and ninjas for example. Pick a location and keep with that location.

I agree, to a point. But if the game is Vikings, then I could easily see a justification for playing someone from the Middle East: 13th Warrior/Eaters of the Dead.
In which case you need to cover heavy swords that bash as much as much as slash, and thin, light swords that are fast and twirl around.
It's a good idea, but ultimately, I think we should just cover the basic sword archetypes (for example). Lie back and think of England, as it were.

demons and angels are interchangeable anyway.

Especially when you're talking Iron Age Greece.

"intelligent" makes me think of a bunch of divergent archetypes (trickster, scholar, leader, etc.)

Those aren't that divergent. Trickster Gods were usually also Gods of Writing and Knowledge. Leader Gods tended to have just a touch of Trickster, usually enough to know when to unleash the actual Trickster of the Pantheon.

According to Wikipedia's entry, mythological dwarves are a lot more like "magical subterranean craftsmen-goths who are short". The alcoholism and beardedness is a Tolkein-distillation artifact. With enough flavor and pictures, we could totally bludgeon away that notion from the game while keeping them "dwarves".

hell, Most people of the iron age qualify as short, violent and alcoholic, and a lot of them had beards.

If they run, you might actually say "Fuck this, we're chasing them and dragging this out until they die!"

shit, I think that'd be kinda the standard outlook of Iron Age Heroes, unless they're seriously hurting...

"no decision" could also mean that both sides temporarily back off to catch their breath. That gives both sides a little time to surrender, work out a deal or (especially in duels) to taunt the opponent. Then they can both go at it again. If working out a deal is preferable to wiping out the opposition at any cost (or getting wiped out) maybe a timeout is all that is needed. And if it is not, forcing surrender stinks anyways.

I like this. It's very flavourful, and seems to help represent things like the Iliad, where, IIRC, battle went to about dusk, and then the opposing armies went back to their tents and winnings and rested, letting the night allow for discussion and taunting, as well as plotting.

RE: Ambiguous evil

Having a demonologist character in Runequest right now, I can speak to being fond of a system where Detect Evil isn't handed out like candy and I'm really just "That dark guy who talks to a flying monkey. That lives in his ring. And he summons spider. Great. Big. Fucking. Spiders."

[Kaelik]

WTF Prak. Why do you have to attempt to destroy everything I love?

4 fucking charisma like stats? Fuck you in the ass.

Roman/Athenian/Spartan? Double Fuck you!

It's d20 Iron, not Real World Iron.

Fully 1/5th of all people are actually sentient Bugs. Your real world cultures can fuck right off.

[Prak]

WTF Prak. Why do you have to attempt to destroy everything I love?

4 fucking charisma like stats? Fuck you in the ass.

Three, actually, but fuck you, whatever...

Roman/Athenian/Spartan? Double Fuck you!

It's d20 Iron, not Real World Iron.

Fully 1/5th of all people are actually sentient Bugs. Your real world cultures can fuck right off.

Yeah, I'm kinda getting that by having read the last three pages... due to computer glitchyness and class, there was a bit of a gap between writing up a response to the first couple pages, and the last couple.

[Mask_De_H]

On the morale front, why not have a separate mental damage track/will gauge? The gauge takes damage like health and once it's filled up, the character begs off/runs/loses the will to fight. It takes damage from their comrades dying, them getting hurt, the general slog of combat, etc.

We could also tie in bonuses to the gauge when it surpasses a certain point in the opposite direction, to show the burst of adrenaline/heroic resolve of a character. Defeating (not necessarily killing) enemies, being awesome, and overcoming odds would replenish and possibly overcharge the meter.

[Manxome]

On the morale front, why not have a separate mental damage track/will gauge? The gauge takes damage like health and once it's filled up, the character begs off/runs/loses the will to fight.

That's still critical existence failure from the perspective of the combat mechanics (there's a magic number that instantly removes you from the battle when it reaches an arbitrary threshold), which was one of the things Frank said we shouldn't do. Though I'm still a bit vague on the details of his position and reasoning.

Now first off all, I do not believe that the goal of tactical engagements should be to inflict critical existence failure on all enemies. The goal should be to have combat end with a minor victory, a victory, or a decisive victory. Combat ending should be something that happens on a quasi-random and influencable basis. Taking actions to prolong a battle when you're winning to try to push it up to a bigger victory should be a viable and available tactical option.

[violence in the media]

On the morale front, why not have a separate mental damage track/will gauge? The gauge takes damage like health and once it's filled up, the character begs off/runs/loses the will to fight.

That's still critical existence failure from the perspective of the combat mechanics (there's a magic number that instantly removes you from the battle when it reaches an arbitrary threshold), which was one of the things Frank said we shouldn't do. Though I'm still a bit vague on the details of his position and reasoning.

Now first off all, I do not believe that the goal of tactical engagements should be to inflict critical existence failure on all enemies. The goal should be to have combat end with a minor victory, a victory, or a decisive victory. Combat ending should be something that happens on a quasi-random and influencable basis. Taking actions to prolong a battle when you're winning to try to push it up to a bigger victory should be a viable and available tactical option.

I thought the argument against critical existence failure was that there was no process of weakening as you progressed towards it. 100 hp or 1 hp made no difference. One moment you were fully functional, then you crossed some threshold and you were fully incapacitated.

There will be a point somewhere that renders you "out" of the fight, but the trick is making that more of a gradient than a binary state.

[Grek]

Three damage types:
Incapacitation. This damage makes you unable to move if you get more than a certain threshhold. Once you are incapacitated, you are out of the fight. Whoever wins the fight captures any of the incapacitated combatants. Incapacitation damage will not ever kill you itself, but getting captured might if you get captured by the wrong people.

Lethal. When you get too much lethal damage, you receive a mortal wound and die sortly after the fight is over. Lethal damage is not incapacitating, and incapacitating damage is not lethal. If you want someone dead, then you must inflict enough lethal damage to kill them AND enough incapacitation to end the fight.

Fear. Almost all offensive abilities have a minimum morale requirement. If your fear exceeds this requirement, you cannot use the attack. If you get enough fear that you cannot attack anything, you are left with the option to surrender or to run away. It is much easier to inflict fear than it is to incapacitate someone or to kill them. It's also much easier to heal, for major characters at least. That's because of Honor.

Major Characters get Honor, which is a positive thing. At character generation, you specify some actions that the character considers honorable and some that they consider dishonorable. If the character does stuff on the honorable list, they gain Honor and they loose it for doing things on the dishonorable list. Honor can be spend to heal the character's fear damage, heal fear damage in minions and to use some powers.

[Manxome]

I thought the argument against critical existence failure was that there was no process of weakening as you progressed towards it. 100 hp or 1 hp made no difference. One moment you were fully functional, then you crossed some threshold and you were fully incapacitated.

There will be a point somewhere that renders you "out" of the fight, but the trick is making that more of a gradient than a binary state.

Yes and no. That is the defining characteristic of critical existence failure, and some people might object to that, but objecting to that in a tabletop game is actually highly suspect. Gradients require you to have a bunch more rules and keep checking them during the game, which eats up your complexity budget and slows the game down, and they're kind of dubious both from a tacitcal gameplay perspective (it promotes snowballing, and eternal padded sumo in close fights) and from a thematic perspective (heroes in the literature do all sorts of awesome stuff when they're on their last legs, and many people seem to want limit breaks and stuff that actually make people more powerful when they're close to existence failure).

But Frank didn't say we shouldn't have critical existence failure, he said that inflicting critical existence failure shouldn't be the goal. That the fight should end on some condition other than "when you've disabled all your foes one by one."

He hasn't given any indication (that I've noticed) as to what exactly that would be, but some obvious possibilities are:

• A time limit
• An energy/ammo limit that forces people to take a break from attacking
• Some form of "group hp" (or morale) that causes the entire enemy team to rout as a single entity
• A system of mechanics that makes it practical and desirable for one side or the other to surrender or flee as a tactical decision (rather than because it is mechanically their only option)

It's also conceivable that I've completely misunderstood Frank. I asked for more detail twice already and didn't get any reply that I felt significantly increased my understanding.

Three damage types:
Incapacitation. This damage makes you unable to move if you get more than a certain threshhold. Once you are incapacitated, you are out of the fight. Whoever wins the fight captures any of the incapacitated combatants. Incapacitation damage will not ever kill you itself, but getting captured might if you get captured by the wrong people.

Lethal. When you get too much lethal damage, you receive a mortal wound and die sortly after the fight is over. Lethal damage is not incapacitating, and incapacitating damage is not lethal. If you want someone dead, then you must inflict enough lethal damage to kill them AND enough incapacitation to end the fight.

Fear. Almost all offensive abilities have a minimum morale requirement. If your fear exceeds this requirement, you cannot use the attack. If you get enough fear that you cannot attack anything, you are left with the option to surrender or to run away. It is much easier to inflict fear than it is to incapacitate someone or to kill them. It's also much easier to heal, for major characters at least. That's because of Honor.

Major Characters get Honor, which is a positive thing. At character generation, you specify some actions that the character considers honorable and some that they consider dishonorable. If the character does stuff on the honorable list, they gain Honor and they loose it for doing things on the dishonorable list. Honor can be spend to heal the character's fear damage, heal fear damage in minions and to use some powers.

Multiplying damage types has a number of problems, the most noticable one being that attacks which target different damage types are not cumulative, so the team really has to agree on one damage type they're going to use and have everyone focus on just that one type.

In your particular scheme, Lethal looks like it's only bad for the game. If you want to win the fight, you don't use lethal damage at all, because it doesn't help you end the fight, and you can always kill people after the fight is over if you care. On the other hand, lethal damage can be used to assassinate someone when you don't care about winning, by inflicting a mortal wound and then running away, which promotes guerilla tactics and encourages strategies based specifically around killing your opponents, rather than incapacitating them. Since I'm pretty sure that the general consensus has been that we want to reduce the amount of actual death, making a mechanic that specifically encourages it seems like a dubious move.

The idea that someone who is partially afraid is allowed to be as reckless as he wants, but isn't allowed to actually use his best attacks, is also rather curious. That might accomplish the goal of getting people to make tactical retreats by getting them into a situation where they no longer have the offensive potential to win, but it also encourages padded sumo, and it seems hard to swallow.

[Grek]

The battle doesn't actually end untill all of the members of one of the sides is incapacitated or has fled. In a pitched battle with equal opposition on both sides, the side that is focusing on killing people to the exclusion of incapacitating people is going to loose. The mortally wounded people don't stop fighting untill after the battle. Trying to kill as many people as you can without actually trying to route or incapacitate people is basically suicidal. It's a good idea if you are a zealot or a skeleton, but otherwise no.

I would not object to having a rule that says mortally wounded people are immune to fear effects because they know they are already about to die.

[Manxome]

That was half of my point--lethal damage isn't tactical, so if you're trying to win the battle, there's no reason to use it at all. It doesn't help you win, and it's extraneous if you do win.

But you seem to be missing the other half, which is that lethal damage is strategic. My group attacks yours, and inflicts lethal damage on one or two of your people. You make a bunch of my guys run away due to fear damage. Heck, you can even incapacitate some of them, as long as I can teleport them out or carry them away on stretchers or something. You've taken half my guys out of the battle, and all of yours are still fighting.

The rest of my guys make a tactical retreat, voluntarily leave, run away, hide, recouperate. Tomorrow, we come back at full strength, but one or two of your guys are still dead, so I now have a numerical advantage, which will make it all the easier to kill another couple of your guys. Rinse and repeat.

This doesn't work if I'm trying to defend a static asset, like a city. But if I'm a criminal group, or fighting a guerilla war, or an anonymous attacker, I can totally whittle down your numbers and run away, day after day. Sure, I "lose" every battle, but why should I care? You're permanently losing guys, and I'm back to full strength every day. I'll win eventually.

Which is possibly realistic, but is that really what you want to encourage the PCs to do?

[Draco_Argentum]

I think the problem with critical existence failure is the existence failure part, rather than the critical part. It encourages slaughtering every opponent. Morale rules would help by allowing fights to end without so much death. Even if they amounted to critical will to fight failure.

[Username17]

While I could seriously entertain the concept of having multiple social attributes and link them to a series of social mini-games, I seriously can´t consider the inclusion of an appearance attribute with anything other than derision. Aside from historical racism questions like Cleopatra dying her entire body brown for the sake of beauty against Elizabeth painting her skin white for austensibly the same reason - there´s the basic fact that female cows look pretty sexy to cows. Appearance doesn´t mean anything except that you fulfill the ideal of the group you happen to want to attract. My appearance is, I guess, very low because I am considered very attractive by gay men that I happen to have no interest in. If instead I was considered sexually appealing to professional women in their late twenties and early thirties I would have a very high appearance stat? Maybe? Who the fuck knows?

But honestly, the biggest determinant of being taken seriously in discussions of intimidation, leadership, and sexual congress is apparent health. Which is basically Strength. Or at least, it should be.

-Username17

[Koumei]

I'm happy with 0 HP == "Defeated. You are at the mercy of the winner."

This means sometimes when a group hit 0 HP they run away. Other times, they surrender/are captured. But if a bear reduces you to 0 HP, it kills and eats you.

Now, there could easily be morale rules as well, for when you take one guy out with one hit (and it's agreed that he's knocked out cold) and everyone else needs to make a morale check or they take a penalty or also give up (effectively dropping to 0 HP) or whatever.

This makes victory good all the time: you don't have to worry that the only way you can stop the running guy (that you want to capture alive) is to kill him.

Also, I remember playing with one guy who said to always try to take prisoners and even let them go. Because "We get XP for defeating them. So if they come back and try to get us again, we get the XP again. Heck, I could Charm them all to win the fight, then cast Dispel and we can fight them again for even more XP!"

[Username17]

With a default of actual surrenders and retreats built into the system, you could generate genuine fear with dragons (who will continue to attack after you want to surrender) and zombies (who will keep fighting until dead). By making those rare and special powers you can make them be scary.

-Username17