A design is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
This simple truth is often forgotten when dealing with RPGs because the infinite expandability is much of the point of the medium. Nevertheless, it still applies. It's not that you shouldn't differentiate the Orcs of Kor from the Orcs of Thar, it's that there are an awful lot of things you could end up writing rules for that aren't going to matter.
Consider all the different ways troops might fail by not doing what they are told. They might be too cowardly to advance. They might be too stupid to follow orders. They might be bad at working together and be out of formation. They might be too eager for battle and run ahead of where they are supposed to be. And so you can see why early Warhammer gave troops a Cool value, a Leadership value, Willpower value, an Intelligence value, and so on and so forth. Obviously if you find yourself writing all those psych values for every kind of troop you need to rethink your life choices. But you can certainly see how you'd get there.
Now personally, I think it would be a good thing to be able to do various psychological stuff to enemy armies. But I don't think that would be good enough to justify giving separate discipline and bravery stats to individual troops. My personal preference would be to have Morale for cohorts and to have all other trickery and failures of discipline be based on the cohort's
commander, who is an RPG character that you could presumably bribe or fool.
maglag wrote:But dwarves have darkvision.
And elves like drow would have even better darkvision.
And devil archers would have infinite range darkvision.
See this is the kind of shit that you
mostly don't have to worry about at all. Dwarves and Droaw see in the dark but they don't see in
magical darkness and in any case the 3e D&D darkvision ranges are so short that they essentially don't matter on a Mass Battlefield at all. Devil archers are so rare that it wouldn't be surprising to just never encounter them at all. There's Erinyes and Marrashi, and that's pretty much it. It's sufficiently obscure that them having a hard counter to
battlefield darkness can just be a weird special rule they have. If someone wants to build up a whole lot of piety in a domain with Gnollish Heretics in order to recruit an entire cohort of Marrashi in order to put out the sun in a major battle and have one sided archery supremacy - they deserve to win that fight. And if it takes some weird calculations and head holding to resolve that situation, I regard that as acceptable.
In any case, I think Infravision is stupid as hell and Darkvision is only a little better. My preference for a new edition would be to remove the assumption that everyone and their dog can see in darkness and just put glowing fungus in big sections of the under realm.
-Username17