Chamomile wrote:Meanwhile once the war is on for real we not only get the occasional couple of paragraphs devoted to planning,
Very occasional, and actual battle following up is even rarer.
Chamomile wrote:but also the occasional complete chapter where Tyrion Lannister does nothing but plan the battle of King's Landing.
I don't thing that ever happened.
Chamomile wrote:The time Tyrion spends in melee at King's Landing is something like three or four pages. He spends that much time stockpiling alchemist's fire alone.
The melee has important consequences for him though (from wounding to increase of paranoia towards Cersei). Battle preparation, when he from time to time distracts himself from plotting against his sister to engage in it, well, doesn't, except insofar as disastrous course of battle forces him into melee - his battle plan ends up an utter failure, the city he expected to hold for a week or two is about to fall in a day, and he's bailed out off-page by a arrival of cavalry due to a common sense political decision and negotiating skill of his messenger. In short, even thoroughly failing as a commander does not produce a gameover for him. But being a little less of a fighter when he attempts to recover shambles of his battle plan in the same battle by personal fighting would have produced it.
But stop talking about only what you think strengthens your argument. I've asked you before, and I'll ask again:
-Can you provide an example on how a mediocre general can be different from a good general, and how two good generals can be different from each other based on any of the books you mentioned, so that we can actually talk about a DnD minigame, where characters have abilities and shit, instead of nailing a boardgame to DnD?
-Can you provide an example of a fiction book or book series, preferably fantasy, where army commanding skill of protagonist is a key plot aspect and which you consider good?
Chamomile wrote:Other examples of source material don't have that specific hangup, but you're still going to have combat of any kind being best depicted as one die roll per party member plus the enemy and then get back to the dialogue if you want anything like a book or movie experience.
I don't think you've even actually watched the movies you've mentioned (somewhat more true for their book inpsirations, but not for many other popular books).
Chamomile wrote:Games have different needs from books, and both mass and tactical combat are going to be a significantly larger focus of your game than of your book. In a book, it doesn't matter where exactly Gandalf got his ten thousand Rohirrim reinforcements, but it also doesn't matter that Boromir, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are all armed with different weapons, all that matters is that they have some kind of weapon capable of killing orcs. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have different damage dice for wielding an axe as opposed to a sword nor that we shouldn't have skirmish combat abstracted out to the point where ranged and melee attacks are identical.
What does matter is that heroes solve plots by going around in small groups on quests, and when plot turns lead them into mass battles, the checkpoints they need to clear to win/survive the encounter are acts of personal heroics, like going on a sally against the enemy battering ram team or stabbing the Witch King. Or they have to first go on a quest and retrieve Heart of Ahriman for their battlefiled feats to not be undone by enemy sorcery. Or, if they leveled up enough on their quest, with their Jotuhn horse and the cursed sword they can hack through half the enemy army personally, take the head of the troll king and single-handedly turn a hopeless last stand into a smashing victory. Sometimes they need to be able to position their troop before a battle, or clear conditions ensuring that gates are open/enemy has uprising in their rear/their reinforcements are coming and enemy's are not to clear a plot checkpoint, but as about actually controlling troops on the battlefield, instead of hacking up guys in the thick of melee, that almost never happens, and I'm still waiting for examples of that actually happening in interesting fashion.
Are you really failing to notice how narratives of questing around in small groups and performing personal heroics are very compatible with a skirmish game, but not with a mass combat game?
Chamomile wrote:Games need rules because players want to interact with the setting on a level more concrete than declaring intentions, rolling a die, and then getting an ultimate result. Players don't want mass combat abstracted away with a single die roll anymore than they want skirmish combat abstracted away with a single die roll.
Players don't want mass combat at all. What makes you believe that the next attempt to force players into a separate minigame where their characters' abilities are suddenly devalued will be received any better than all the previous ones? Players, as far as I can tell from experience, want to be able to hack through an army's worth of guys with their high-level swording without that taking approximately forever to roll.
Chamomile wrote:They don't just want the GM to say "okay, you're a king now, so do you want to do the fire dungeon or the ice dungeon next?" They want to actually do king stuff.
This of course, as already mentioned in the thread, soon runs into the problem that king stuff is sort of smalltime for DnD power scale. If Kyuss or Demogorgon or Tiamat are coming with their hordes to annihilate your entire civilization, what does it matter if your peasants are well-fed?
More importantly, they probably don't actually want to do king stuff, because doing king stuff is 95% people management necessary to see anything done. Those nebulous "they" probably just want to get things done. I'd prefer a system that naturally allows you to progress from managing your party's camp followers to managing your kingdom's dukes, but so far I don't even have a rough sketch for it.
Chamomile wrote:So the system needs to have some kind of mechanics for doing king stuff so that the players can feel all kingly. If being king is just a title and you do not end the campaign immediately upon receiving it (thus leaving the details to player imaginations or a broad-strokes epilogue) then it's basically the same as being elected student president.
And here's the deal: if things you can get done by being a king (let's assume that the minigame in place skips all the boring realities) don't help you fight Kyuss, or Demogorgon, or Tiamat - in some direct or indirect way - then one of the following must be true:
(1)Being king IS "just a title". You're simply wearing a fancier hat, to borrow an image from upthread.
(2)You're now suddenly playing a completely different game only nominally connected to your DnD experience. If people at the table were interested in that, why haven't they played something else to start with?
