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Post by name_here »

Schleiermacher does have a point; making up bullshit about how your culture and everything it does is the most awesome thing in the world and everyone else sucks didn't suddenly get invented at the turn of the millennium. Primary source writers will tend to be the best-informed, but they're also often rather biased.
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Post by Mechalich »

The relative quality and superiority of Eastern versus Western historical forces is largely irrelevant from a game design standpoint, most settings won't be built around representing both capabilities.

The important questions in designing an East Asian setting revolve around the capabilities of the various local cultures versus each other such as contemporary Chinese armies versus Japanese, Korean, Turkmen, or Burmese armies.

They also involve a design question related to the generally larger absolute size of said armies compared to the design system utilized for contemporary Western armies, which tended to be smaller. Absolute size matters regardless of army quality especially given that PCs will usually be able control such armies and have the ability to transform a bunch of desperate bamboo spear-wielding peasants into an elite fighting force (in fact, anyone who's seen Seven Samurai at least once probably has some distinct ideas in that direction).

This question is actually similar to the design question of building an RPG to represent ancient Rome - which managed to muster some pretty large forces - as opposed to the comparably smaller forces of medieval Europe. Additionally, stronger, more centralized empires can muster larger military forces than decentralized and often unstable competing feudal states.

The bottom line is that the traditional East Asian states have long had a much higher population density than their western equivalents and this shaped their culture in significant ways - ex. a huge mass of peasantry is pretty much an essential feature of any fantasy Chinese setup. So that's something people are going to want to have built into such a setting.
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Post by tussock »

Primary source writers will tend to be the best-informed, but they're also often rather biased.
All historical documents are biased. What Rome wrote about Rome was deliberate bullshit, but also full of interesting truth that was a normal enough part of their life that they didn't see any reason to change. Where what they wrote about pre-Roman Britain is also deliberate bullshit based on very limited information, and thus much less use for understanding the place.

Outsiders can be good sources when they visit places, because they talk about stuff that's so ordinary no one local thinks to record it, along with a bunch of nonsense. But people who never even visited are useless, it's all just so much fantasy.

Third hand stories and you get flying bulls and wheels within wheels covered in eyes.
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Post by Rasumichin »

Mechalich wrote:The relative quality and superiority of Eastern versus Western historical forces is largely irrelevant from a game design standpoint, most settings won't be built around representing both capabilities.
From a game design standpoint, the key question here is just which effect these capabilities have on the game. And while well-organized armies offer more choices for a wargame, hero-led peasants tie better into an RPG campaign, as the PCs remain center stage during mass battle scenes.

Same obviously goes for the quality of the equipment. Normally, it would be a waste of space if your weapons create the Shadowrun situation where you have tons of weapons, but only one or two relevant options. But if large-scale ressource management and dealing with limited availability are a minigame in your campaign, you may want to have cheap local knockoff handgonnes that you can churn out en masse as well as superior import handgonnes that require a diplomatic mission or intercepting an arms shipment if you want to equip larger forces with them.

And general capabilities would also be determined by game impact - you don't want a situation where one force can just roflstomp the entire setting, you want a situation where leading a horde of steppe riders with bows produces a different game experience than leading peasant masses than leading a samurai coastline raiding party than leading a naga and monkey guerilla rabble, and all of these should be viable options that allow you to have meaningful impact on the setting, just as the sudden apperance of colonialist forces should be a viable threat in the metaplot, but with an outcome that depends entirely on player choices.
Players will want bow-wielding Mongols as well as ranks of arquebuse-wielding conscripts. So you'd want firearms that are not yet an automatic win button, but still a viable choice.

Historical accuracy should be entirely subordinate to such considerations. It's a guideline for coming up with a plausible and internally consistent setting and a source of inspiration, but never the primary concern.
There's enough variables you can fiddle with - if you're making up the entire geography, if you determine the tech level and degree of organization, political stability and economic strength of each culture instead of just taking a real-world map of East Asia and setting the game in 1573, but with tengus, you can justify about any divergence from the historical sources.
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Post by Username17 »

It is deeply surreal that there are people simultaneously making the argument that you can't trust the historical accuracy of the Chinese stories about the size and effectiveness of thei amis and claiming that those stories don't support large armies marching around. If the latter was actually true, the fist agument wouldn't need to b made. If you find ypouself aging both things, you have lost the argument before anyone says anything.

In any case, Asian themed fantasy has big armies marching around and fighting each other. Whether we're talking about Princess Mononoke or Hero, large armies run around fighting heroes and monsters, and sometimes they win. This just is a thing that happens, and any RPG that attempts to handle East Asian themed fantasy needs to address this.

Now the mass combat system probably needs to be fairly abstract. Like alternating "Hero Phase" and "Tactics Phase" until the enemy general is captured or one side routs. What you don't want to do is to have some sort of 1:10 or 1:100 scale, because any sort of transform along those lines only lets your game handle armies of very specific sizes (alongside the very specific sizes of hero vs. monster skirmishes that a D&D inspired game can already handle). East Asian themed fantasy might include battles with twenty guys, or two thousand guys, or twenty thousand guys. The mass combat game needs to scale smoothly.

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Post by Schleiermacher »

It is deeply surreal that there are people simultaneously making the argument that you can't trust the historical accuracy of the Chinese stories about the size and effectiveness of thei amis and claiming that those stories don't support large armies marching around.
Has anyone actually made both arguments? I made the first, but I would never make the second because regardless of whether you're talking fiction or history, it is trivially obvious that it is totally wrong.
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Post by Username17 »

Schleiermacher wrote:
It is deeply surreal that there are people simultaneously making the argument that you can't trust the historical accuracy of the Chinese stories about the size and effectiveness of thei amis and claiming that those stories don't support large armies marching around.
Has anyone actually made both arguments? I made the first, but I would never make the second because regardless of whether you're talking fiction or history, it is trivially obvious that it is totally wrong.
FatR did in fact make both arguments, and it's retarded.

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Post by FatR »

OgreBattle wrote:FatR, you seem like someone who's really proud of the history of your people, and quick to defend it.
You don't even know what my people is. Опрометчиво судишь, как мне кажется.
OgreBattle wrote:You've probably had your feelings hurt in the past by people who disparaged medieval european martial arts as crude and so on,
Of course not. Given that in actual battles European martial arts rocked the eastern world from 16th century to 19th (after which it borrowed the European military tradition) so it was never a question of whether Europeans fight better, but whether they fight better enough to conquer and enforce demands, or just to take over naval trade and kick local competition from outlying islands, and given that no enlightened Chinese martial art sage ever showed up to dominate MMA... how attempts to run away from reality can hurt my feeling? You'll have to excuse me for considering the whole talk about speshul and spiritual Eastern martial arts to be to a very large extent rooted in desperate Eastern attempts to believe in something awesome about themselves. Like the whole folded-ten-thousand-times katana mythos (while saying that it only really took wing around and after encountering European weapons and armor during the Sengoku period might have been an exaggeration on my part; its revival in 20th century - long after the creators of the new Japanese army firmly agreed that katana was much less practical sidearm compared to European-style cavalry saber - certainly was purely the matter of nationalistic delusion).

I do, however, sometimes suffer from the urge to correct people who are wrong on the Internet.
OgreBattle wrote:But that's really no reason to be a westaboo yourself and reflexively malign everything that offends your worldview.
Maybe you should look at yourself before engaging in Internet telepathy.
OgreBattle wrote:Say the Mongols, the Ming dynasty overthrew the Yuan nearly two centuries before the Golden Horde was overthrown in Europe,
The Ming dynasty took over in 1368. The inheritors of Golden Horde, lost power over Russia de-jure in 1480 (de-facto arguably in 1389, but whatever). Still not "two centuries".
OgreBattle wrote:but that feat can be handwaved by an "anti-Asian" side with an excuse like "well, the Mongols only beat the BAD Europeans".
That's not an excuse but a solid fact. Russia, the only part of Europe that the Mongols subjugated for a significant length of time, was very noticeably militarily inferior even to its immediate neighbours, never mind the European heartland. No stone fortifications, arts of siege and withstanding siege almost unknown, crossbows almost unknown, infantry of any sort practically nonexistent.

Besides, once again, the Chinese problem was not being beaten by Mongols of Ghenghis Khan's times, which definitely were an outlier, it was getting their whole civilization nuked by nomads not once but three times (if you count Jurchen and Mongol conquests as one episode) never mind many lesser military humiliations whenever facing people that weren't too strongly influenced by the Chinese system of statecraft. One failure can be an accident, two raise questions, three indicate a recurring problem. Which to be fair was not limited to military matters. But the military part of which was significant.
OgreBattle wrote:The example of the Zhentong emperor being captured by Mongols can be brought up to go "see, these guys are weak because", but the example of the Yongle Emperor's successful campaigns against the Mongols is then conspicuously left out.
See, let's compare again to Russia, which faced constant pressure from the Mongol successor states. While it had its share of miserable failures against the Crimeans (particularly in 1521), no tsar was ever captured, and even burning of Moscow in 1571 was immediately followed by a resounding victory at Molodi in 1572 (speaking of army sizes - the Wikipedia article for that battle inflates them two-to-threefold). And of course there was nothing approaching the Qing conquest there. And inbefore you try to say that the Ming China was weakened by internal strife or climatic changes allowing Qing to roll in, in late 16th to early 17th century Russia suffered an utter catastrophe due to misrule, overpopulation, the Little Ice Age and civil war that reduced its population to one-fourth of what it was, and yet survived even if diminished despite the massive external pressure, so authors that shift the blame for the Ming collapse from its government and military to the forces of nature or pure accidents of internal politics are simply fucking wrong.


OgreBattle wrote:Nevermind that the Mongols on either end of the steppes after Genghis Khan were under different rulers and developed pretty differently through the centuries.
Proof that the Mongol successors in the east were so much stronger is needed.
OgreBattle wrote:With the capture of a leader, if I wanted to be abrasive I could say King John II being captured in the 1350's means the French super sucked throughout the whole 100 years war and bring that up any time somebody talks about the French military.
The thing is, the French indeed sucked thoughout most of the Hundred Years' War - not all of it, else they would not have won - and English enjoyed a marked superiority in troop quality that allowed them to win time and and again against odds and be on offensive against a country several times their population for decades. The French simply adapted to the fact that English could not be defeated in the open field during the first phase of the war, and eventually improved their organization and equipment to the point of being of being able to match them during the second.

However, Valois would only have been a proper comparison to Ming had they been actually overrun by barbarians - say, the Swiss - at some point.

And bringing the Hundred Years' War whenever someone talks about the French military would have been apt had events like it repeated themselves several times in the France's history. But they did not.

OgreBattle wrote:If we want to talk about the quality of European troops I can be very selective and pick up on instances of poorly trained, cowardly, poorly managed troops too:
So, was England, which accidentally too had aggressive barbarians right over the north border, overran by those barbarians as the result of having such poor troops and plenty of civil strife during 16th and 17th centuries as well? Was any of the kings captured by foreigners or London stormed and sacked? Had it foreigners from the other hemisphere taking over islands near its shores? I believe not.

The results simply cannot be argued. The Chinese military system failed in the way not unlike that of the Western, and, to an extent, Eastern Roman Empires. Except repeatedly. It was not alone in this tendency - the Islamic world after being created by conquest was swept by two more waves of barbarian conquerors (Seljuks and Osmans), not even counting half of it getting razed by Mongols. Meanwhile, the European civilization was the only one whose core territories remained unconquered by foreigners since Charlemagne (even though several iterations Muslims, Hungarians, and, until christianised, Normans made pretty significant efforts, never mind that various barbaric and warlike peoples within Europe, like Swiss or Scots that might have played a different role in a different circumstances). With the Mongols that may have been luck, but against everything else? Someone clearly had been doing things right. Or at least righter than everyone else. Well, the fact that the European military system swept the world, so absolutely everyone had to adopt it or be crushed by it also might count for something. And no, technological superiority was not the only and possibly not even the biggest factor. Else Qing troops would not be failing so very miserably in everything - including and even particularly in close quarters - against Europeans. And given Qing's illustious story of military successes during the conquest of China and against China's neighbors, it can be fairly safely concluded that their troops, if anything, deviated for the better from the average. It's not the matter whether the Chinese military tradition had failed, but why the fuck it had failed repeatedly despite being backed up by a rich and populous country that was the world leader in many areas of invention until well into second millenium AD.

Let's examine the causes of that using the Ming military as an example, given that the great works of Chinese literature which are so influential to this day are primarily informed by the realities of Ming period when their authors lived.

First, it should be noted that ever since Zhu Di later known as Emperor Yongle decided "fuck the order of succession, I have an experienced army" the Ming rulers, starting with his son and successor and their Confucian scholar advisors, who were removed from power under Yongle's militaristic government, mistrusted the military, tried to reduce its importance and financing, soon cutting its numbers near in half, and argued against a return to Yongle's active external policies. It's no wonder that within mere 25 years from his death the string of successes against the Mongols turned to a disastrous defeat, and Mongol raids became a constant scourge.

Well, you might say, even after reduction of the army it still numbered over a million, so how could it not be sufficient in absence of neighbors of comparable size and strength?

But second, that million was only on paper, and its fighting strength was not proportional to its numbers. A Ming army consisted of a tiny number of military functionaries and a vast number of hereditary soldiers, who were peasants obligated to both work earth and provide one man per family to military service. Not only this obligation soon became loathed in general, as its very nature dictated, military functionaries, like all Ming government functionaries, were thoroughly corrupt habitually robbed and mistreated peasants in their power, including "soldier" peasants. How common people of Ming saw their government you can deduct from the River Margins' status as a classic - while I doubt in the real life they considered cannibalistic bandits to be better than government officials, there is no doubt that the book portraying cannibalistic bandits as better than government officials became massively popular. So when the officers saw their service as an opportunity to enrich themselves by expoiting lowly peasants under them (at the direct expense of military readiness - people who work like slaves for an official cannot well prepare for war) and soldiers saw officers as oppressors and their duty as a burdensome obligation forced upon them by sheer coercion. So morale and motivation usually did not exist, besides the fact, that endemic corruption simply made actual forces much smaller and worse equipped than they were on paper - going a bit forwards, Qing's government misplaced confidence on the eve of the Opium Wars was partially due to the fact that the imperial court was systematically misinformed about the true state of their military assets in the threatened provinces. A comparable same state of affairs existed back under the Ming, from which Qing pretty much copied their administration - garrison comanders rarely sent accurate reports on the actual number of soldiers under their command (particularly as it often was reduced by their own rapacity, including stealing governmental support that soon had to be provided because military settlements proved to be not self-sufficient, and taking bribes for allowing soldiers to leave their garrison and seek work elsewhere).

Now you might say, that European commanders of the same age also weren't on the best terms with common soldiers too. Indeed, even the Grand Duke of Alba, well-known for promoting common soldiers based on merit, maligned his mercenaries as the lowest sort of villains in his private correspondense, and screwing your soldiers over by deliberately hiring more than you could reliably pay in an attempt to gain a military advantage was the rule, rather than an exception throughout 16th century (until the Dutch proved that you can get better results by promising less, but keeping your promises and paying in good time). However, the important difference lies in the fact, that the European system, for all its faults, was based on incentives (soldiers hoped to get paid, for nobility forming the command ranks wars often were profitable, and even when they weren't, a sword granted more prestige than a pen, while in China the situation was the opposite), while the Chinese system was based, again, solely on coercion, and the only major incentive for anyone to actually go to war was the hope to plunder the defeated. Or civilians on their own side, when opportunities arose.

So, while certain commanders bucked the tradition and achieved decent level of military readiness exactly because of that (notice how your own examples mention success owed to rather tiny forces?), an average army consisted of soldiers that moved forward in battle mostly to avoid getting killed by their own officers, and officers who, while individually well-trained, were often spread thin through the mass of worthless soldiers. And when they were concentrated in generals' retinues - again, in violation of what an army was supposed to be - well, then we got tiny but relatively successful forces mentioned above. For example, in the Imjin War generals' cavalry retinues were a distinct and better part of the army, and its early parts featured several bold (though that time ultimately unsuccessful) actions by small cavalry forces. You can clearly see where the roots of the "heroes - usually mounted heroes - rule, masses of footmen scum drool" attitude so very observable in historical fiction of the period are.

Then third there was the problem of logistics and financing needed to convert a million soldiers on paper into any significant number of soldiers in the field. Speaking of the Imjin War, the Ming forces never numbered more than 100 thousands at most - in total, and quite possibly on paper, the biggest armies ever gathered in one place were 43 and 36 thousands, and the biggest field battle involved only 8 to 9 thousands of Chinese. Speaking of the War of The Roses, over a century before, campaigs were decided by battles estimated to involve 17-45 or even 55-65 thousands of combatants in one place (on both sides, but well, that's the civil war for you). And these combatants were rather... different average quality. And the war, despite involving only two years of major campaigns which required big Ming armies, was said to be ruinously difficult on Chinese finances already. Unsurprisingly, Ming troops did not fare too well at all against the Japanese. Just one major engagement on land, counting field battles and sieges (most were sieges and related action, just like in Europe) could be considered a Chinese victory - the siege and assault on Pyongyang as the very beginning, and even then the Japanese garrizon managed to slip through the enemy lines and get away. The comparison to the Hundred Years War, if you mentioned it, might be apt here, particularly to its 14th century part - while in both cases the continental side, enjoying a massive resource superiority, eventually repelled the island invaders, at a great cost and after much devastation, outcomes of individual battles give the winners little cause for pride. Had Japanese been led with more strategic direction and massacred the civilian population with less enthusiasm so their own army would not be so hard to provision in the resulting wasteland, they would have rolled into China before the Manchu did, even after all the Japanese disasters in naval battles. By the way, numbers on the Japanese side of the war also are instructive - while totals amounted to near the ming-boggling 160 thousands, closer examinations of survivng muster rolls suggest that 2/3 of those were unarmed laborers and boatmen.

And the fourth problem was largely inadequate equipment. The Imjin War is once again demonstrative here. Whatever the Chinese generals and chroniclers boasted, the artillery on the Chinese sides was no less pathetic than on the Japanese, and in sieges it didn't seem to play any greater role than accidentally killing a few enemy soldiers. To take walls that were defended too strongly to be taken with mere scaling ladders and covering fire, both sides relied on tricks and contraptions that would have made ancient Romans roll their eyes, including dismantling walls by hand under the cover of moving sheds, trying to bring down parapets with hooks and muscle power, and making larger ladders moved on wheels. As about personal weapons, at the age when the shittiest European reiter knew that without at least a pistol you might as well not show up on the battlefield (and non-shitty ones wore three-quarters plate armor - buying such an armor was apparently what allowed Honda Tadakatsu to gain the reputation for invulnerability which lived right to the video games of today), cavalry on both sides seemed to mostly use just swords, and while the Japanese at least had decently organized arquebuse squads, otherwise infantry on both sides seemed to fight with swords and short spears, without much indication of proper formations, though given the absence of what one probably imagines a proper battle as - with masses of troops clashing head-on in the open field - throughout the war, this might be undestandable.

As about my sources, much of them are not in English, but as about books covering overall history of the period, I've read Ming China, 1368-1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire by John Dardess and the appropriate volumes of The Cambridge History of China, and then Samurai Invasion - Japan's Korean War 1592-1598 by Stephen Turnbull and The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China by Samuel Hawley (better to be read together) were a pretty good illustration of what that history led to from the purely military standpoint.
Last edited by FatR on Fri Nov 27, 2015 1:21 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by tussock »

The French simply adapted to the fact that English could not be defeated in the open field during the first phase of the war, and eventually improved their organization and equipment to the point of being of being able to match them during the second.
Or, you know, the French repeatedly tried the same basic tactics with the same organisational structure until they worked. You charge the archers with your heavy cav, and follow up with overwhelming numbers of infantry in close formation. One day they finally caught the archers before they had their stakes up and overran them, damn near killed the lot and England never trained up a decent force of them again.

Same way the Scots beats them, though in that case the archers retreated safely enough.
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Post by Username17 »

FatR wrote:So, was England, which accidentally too had aggressive barbarians right over the north border, overran by those barbarians as the result of having such poor troops and plenty of civil strife during 16th and 17th centuries as well?
This is a weirdly specific demand, but of course the answer is "Yes." The aggressive northern barbarians annexed England in 1603.

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Post by ckafrica »

FrankTrollman wrote:
FatR wrote:So, was England, which accidentally too had aggressive barbarians right over the north border, overran by those barbarians as the result of having such poor troops and plenty of civil strife during 16th and 17th centuries as well?
This is a weirdly specific demand, but of course the answer is "Yes." The aggressive northern barbarians annexed England in 1603.

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Post by Username17 »

ckafrica wrote:He hardly Scottified London.
Sure. But the Qing Dynasty didn't de-Hanify China, they claimed the mandate of heaven. The Nubians didn't end the writing of Egyptian, and so on.

Tails don't wag dogs, and when minor powers annex big empires the usual result is that a few deck chairs move around at the top and the empire pretty much goes along as it had before. The fact that China was annexed by a group that was nominally a bunch of Manchu "barbarians" in 1644 isn't terribly interesting. Three out of four of the "Manchu" soldiers were Han Chinese. And the comparison to England of all places was particularly inept, because of course England was annexed by Scotland in 1603.

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Post by Almaz »

And, of course, all this shit doesn't matter to what people want out of an East Asian themed game, because what they care about are the stories, not historical accuracy. As hilarious as watching FatR get repeatedly schooled is, history is just one story, and while it's an alright story, what people want to play is Disney's Mulan, Koei's Dynasty Warriors, and Shi Nai'an's The Water Margin, not "historically accurate" China.

And in those stories armies are important but in a fairly abstract fashion, and in the game based on them then China's aggrandizing stories about itself are perfectly fine references when you don't care about making a period accurate historical wargame. Which you don't, because... yeah. It's Oriental Adventures not Oriental History.
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Post by Username17 »

And in those stories armies are important but in a fairly abstract fashion, and in the game based on them then China's aggrandizing stories about itself are perfectly fine references when you don't care about making a period accurate historical wargame. Which you don't, because... yeah. It's Oriental Adventures not Oriental History.
I broadly agree with that, save that I would say that in many cases the armies are important in a fairly concrete fashion. For every scenario where Mulan cuts off an army from splattering the heroes by creating an avalanche or has to fight the main villain in single combat while the army is locked outside, there's a scenario in which the protagonist is a Mary Tzu who needs "tactical acumen" to defeat an army with a somewhat smaller army. It's totally normal for an East Asian themed ensemble of fantasy protagonists to include a tactician as one of the members, and those characters don't have a lot to do if there isn't a military actions mini-game for them to participate in.

It's important to note that while the standard European themed fantasy occurs when the "big empire" had collapsed, the Asian themed fantasy occurs while the "big empire" is very much a going concern. So all the character archetypes that feature heavily in "big empires" but don't in "little kingdoms" are archetypes that East Asian themed fantasy needs to support. That mostly means that protagonists in your ensemble fantasy cast can include Generals and Bureaucrats. If we were doing fantasy adventures inspired by the Roman Empire or the Aztec Empire or any other Empire those guys would be on the table as well. But when we're specifically doing East Asian themed fantasy we are almost always talking about an imperial period because honestly very few people give a tremendous amount of fucks about Yayoi period Japan or Spring and Autumn China.

Fundamentally this means that your basic party isn't going to be a Wizard, a Warrior, a different flavor of Wizard, and a Thief; but is instead going to be a Wizard, a Warrior, a Ninja, and a Sage. The Sage character might be an engineer, a bureaucrat, or a general, but their powers are based on writing orders and taking measurements. That's a pretty big paradigm shift in allowed classes, but until you do that you are going to feel like you're playing D&D in yellow face. Basically you have to deliver the kinds of playable parties that Star Wars games need to - and for pretty much the same reason.

Another facet of "the empire" being a going concern and not something lost in the mists of tl;dr setting backstory is that status and rank are things that matter. In D&D whoever can kill the local dragon is the defacto ruler of everything in that dragon's former territory. But if there's a functioning empire, your ability to kill a dragon only gives you temporal power if it endears you to ministers in the empire. Many fantasy games from Runequest to Mech Warrior have attempted to create fantasy ranks and status and have that be viable system and they have mostly been terrible. But that's a thing you're going to have to work out if you want the East Asian themed fantasy to be a thing.

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Post by Zaranthan »

Hey, don't be talking trash about Spring and Autumn!

It's a pretty tall order to have tactical, strategic, and political maneuvers in the same game. Yeah, people want to play Mulan and Dynasty Warriors, but at the same time? You're basically making three games and constructing a way to port characters between them. You want to avoid the WoD problem where the spotlight samurai becomes set dressing inside the Forbidden City, but also the 4rry problem of everybody who isn't the sage playing Angry Birds until the talky bits are over.
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Post by Mechalich »

Zaranthan wrote:It's a pretty tall order to have tactical, strategic, and political maneuvers in the same game. Yeah, people want to play Mulan and Dynasty Warriors, but at the same time? You're basically making three games and constructing a way to port characters between them. You want to avoid the WoD problem where the spotlight samurai becomes set dressing inside the Forbidden City, but also the 4rry problem of everybody who isn't the sage playing Angry Birds until the talky bits are over.
It's also particularly difficult to do so using the same rule set that functionally describes a traditional D&D style game, even with new classes, rule modifications, and so forth. While you might not actually do that, it seems to be something a lot of d20 players want - the ability to play a ninja who's basically a rogue with a stylistic gloss in a faux-East Asian fantasy world.

Looking at it like that, I think it might be better to avoid the rankings and mass combat in a hypothetical East Asian setting, or spin them off into some kind of mini-game and focus on aspects of East Asian fantasy that focus more on a traditional party archetype rather than political fantasy. Journey to the West instead of RotK, for example.

There's plenty of bandit hunting, conspiracy smiting, demon hunting, martial arts tournaments, spell sealing, and so forth for a East Asian party to get up to without interfering directly with the military and political systems of whatever fantasy empire they happen to be in. Many wuxia tales and historical setting anime do this sort of thing.

I suspect that it boils down to being unable to run East Asian High Fantasy without mass combat and court function rules, but you can still run Sword & Sorcery, Low Fantasy, or Dark Fantasy. Considering that Western high fantasy breakdown in D&D fairly rapidly after level 10 anyway - becoming something more like low-tech superheroes or just straight up mythology, that's not really unexpected.
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Post by Username17 »

Mechalich wrote:I suspect that it boils down to being unable to run East Asian High Fantasy without mass combat and court function rules, but you can still run Sword & Sorcery, Low Fantasy, or Dark Fantasy.
I honestly have no idea what you think those words mean.

Remember that when approaching things from a literary standpoint, the dividing line between high and low fantasy is whether it uses a made up world or not. So when talking about novels, Das Schwarze Auge is high fantasy, while Shadowrun is low fantasy. In an RPG context, the meaning is very different and has to do with how ubiquitous the fantasy elements are. That is, if magic is frequent enough to have consistent rules and be available to the player characters in a dependable way you have high fantasy while if magic is rare and unknowable and shit, that's low fantasy. Which still doesn't stop people from referring to things like DSA and WFRP as "low fantasy" on the grounds that the players are expected to be low level in the world in the sense that they are shit covered rat catchers and shit.

Regardless of the definition, "low fantasy" pretty much screams for the inclusion of sword wielding tiny men marching around. Whether you're using it in its literary sense that things set in fantasy China as opposed to China inspired fantasy are going to have soldiers marching around (see: Dynasty Warriors); or its RPG meaning in the sense that when the players cannot reliably get their hands on fire magic they are nevertheless going to aspire to get a bunch of spears pointed at their enemies; or its semi-confused "power level" meaning where characters are intended to be low enough on the totem pole of life that extras with axes are a massive benefit against the enemies they could possibly be expected to face. In all of those cases, players would want and could reasonably expect to acquire units of spearmen and bowmen and shit.

In any case, I think it's important to note that actually Western Fantasy RPGs would really benefit from having kingdom management and mass battle minigames that players could interact with. It is a rare fantasy series that doesn't have a cavalry charge in it somewhere, and one of the biggest design stumbling blocks of fantasy RPGs in general is finding things for high level non-casters to do. Both from a genre emulation and game balance standpoint, it is desirable to have the party Ranger announce that they are the rightful king of Malkier or Callahorn or Gondor or whatever and start marching troops around right around the point we stop being impressed by the ability to "kill a dude." It's just so much more important to do this for East Asian themed fantasy because so many of the basic character archetypes want to start dealing with land management and warfare right away. It's OK for the Ranger to wait until everyone gets a Paragon Class to turn into a "King Restored" before they start caring about troop levies and supply limits, but in East Asian themed Fantasy your Samurai, General, and Merchant characters all would kind of like that option at level 1.

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Post by Rasumichin »

FrankTrollman wrote: Remember that when approaching things from a literary standpoint, the dividing line between high and low fantasy is whether it uses a made up world or not. So when talking about novels, Das Schwarze Auge is high fantasy, while Shadowrun is low fantasy. In an RPG context, the meaning is very different and has to do with how ubiquitous the fantasy elements are. That is, if magic is frequent enough to have consistent rules and be available to the player characters in a dependable way you have high fantasy while if magic is rare and unknowable and shit, that's low fantasy. Which still doesn't stop people from referring to things like DSA and WFRP as "low fantasy" on the grounds that the players are expected to be low level in the world in the sense that they are shit covered rat catchers and shit.
It gets even weirder than that.
PCs in DSA aren't expected to be rat catchers. Yes, you can play as a rat catcher, but you can totally play as a nobleman or merchant prince or somebody who has moderate influence in a church or wizard guild (or all of the above, while also catching rats). The game doesn't give you anything to do with that because DSA's entire social status subsystem is tacked-on and an incoherent mess that combines two totally different subsystems for no fucking reason. But it always tried to let you play everything from runaway slave to high society. And the campaigns frequently center around world-changing events as well and regularly have you run into royalty, guild leaders etc. Meeting up with the empress or the high council of the wizard guilds or the sun pope to discuss the oncoming almost-apocalypse is something DSA PCs do all the fucking time.
And people who play campaigns where that happens and where a demon horde flattens a city here and there while their PCs reliably order around elementals and throw fireballs fiddle around with heating spells to simulate thermobaric explosions are firmly convinced that they play a low fantasy game because D&D characters have a +2 weapon instead of their super gritty DSA masterwork magic alloy weapons that give +2 to hit and damage and are sanctified to bypass immunity to normal weapons.

But that doesn't count because "these are high-level campaigns". Never mind that they're also historically the campaigns that sell like hotcakes.

Anybody who tells you that DSA is low fantasy just has a pathological amount of prejudice towards D&D and a frightening ability to withstand cognitive dissonance. Which DSA players are in bitter need off, because they play a system that constantly nerfs things and tells people that powergaming is bad while it also suffers from constant power creep in other places.
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Post by Almaz »

FrankTrollman wrote:I broadly agree with that, save that I would say that in many cases the armies are important in a fairly concrete fashion. For every scenario where Mulan cuts off an army from splattering the heroes by creating an avalanche or has to fight the main villain in single combat while the army is locked outside, there's a scenario in which the protagonist is a Mary Tzu who needs "tactical acumen" to defeat an army with a somewhat smaller army. It's totally normal for an East Asian themed ensemble of fantasy protagonists to include a tactician as one of the members, and those characters don't have a lot to do if there isn't a military actions mini-game for them to participate in.
True, but I was partially thinking of... say, Shogi or Go levels of abstraction. Or more/less, and not necessarily moving around actual pawns, but, something like that. "It's still a strategy game, but you notice how much of an actual war we _aren't_ playing out, and yet it still feels somewhat like a war?" In other words, that the exhaustive arguing about tiny details of military _stuff_ that was going on probably is not about anything that is going to resolve in whatever military abstraction you implement, unless you go full on Dominions and have a computer handle your wargaming.

Anyways, I think it's actually not enormously hard to pull out a military wargame that grafts well to your fantasy RPG. The RPG community has been working at it a lot and most of the results have been shit but most of everything is shit, there's been some solutions of varying levels of acceptability and people can bat and tweak those around and hit one that works for them and their tastes. One I've not really seen, however, is a system which convincingly makes social status matter aside from just "you have more stuff." If you have an idea for one, I'm all ears.
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Post by Grek »

To get away from the armies discussion, I'd like to point out a key aspect where Eastern Fantasy and Western Fantasy differ: Weapons.

In Western Fantasy, you have Martial Weapons, which are anything a knight might use but which the Wizard couldn't; Simple Weapons, which are anything that a wizard or a barmaid might use; and Ranged, which only the dedicated archer might use and which said archer will use to the exclusion of any other weapon.

In Eastern Fantasy, you have basically four kinds of weapons: Peasant Weapons, which are legally farming implements and therefore available to ordinary citizens; Samurai Weapons, which are only legal for nobles to own and which can be used in legally binding duels; Bows, which are also only legal for nobles to own, but which are mostly a military weapon; and Ninja Weapons, which are illegal for everyone to own but which can be hidden easily for assassinations.

It actually makes sense in an Eastern Fantasy game for characters to have separate Jiujutsu, Kenjutsu, Kyujutsu and Ninjutsu skills, because each is used in a different context and is meaningfully valuable even if you know one or more of the others.
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Post by Prak »

There also tends to be some overlap of categories, however, at least between Peasant and Ninja weapons. Of course, this probably has a good bit to do with the origin of ninja and the fact that they often hid among the peasants (though on the former, I may be misremembering).
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Post by OgreBattle »

Grek wrote: In Eastern Fantasy, you have basically four kinds of weapons: Peasant Weapons, which are legally farming implements and therefore available to ordinary citizens; Samurai Weapons, which are only legal for nobles to own and which can be used in legally binding duels; Bows, which are also only legal for nobles to own, but which are mostly a military weapon; and Ninja Weapons, which are illegal for everyone to own but which can be hidden easily for assassinations.
That varies quite a lot with what kind of story you're telling. In a lot of wuxia genre stories the heroes (and villains) run around with pretty much any kind of weapon imaginable be they mountain hermits, imperial inquisitors, inheritors of a dojo and so on.

With Japan historically it's around the 1500's with Nobunaga and Hideyoshi that a restriction on sword (and other weapons) ownership is really enforced. Part of it being various uprisings backed by peasants, merchants, and regional nobility against daimyo authority, so after the rebellion is crushed the local powers are disarmed by the central power.

So I'd say the restrictions/expectations on weapons is mostly a matter of how oppressive you want your government authorities to be against the common man.
Anyways, I think it's actually not enormously hard to pull out a military wargame that grafts well to your fantasy RPG.
I figure it can scale up in this manner:

-Dueling (1 on 1 samurai showdown): at this scale the PC's individual fighting ability decides the outcome. Someone like Lu Bu and Musashi excels here. The outcome of a duel is just part of a...

-Skirmish (dozen(s) of dudes, usual D&D scale , mordheim): At this scale the PC's collective fighting ability decides the outcome, usual D&D scale. The outcome of a skirmish is just part of a...

Battle (28mm warhammer fantasy scale to 15mm warmaster scale): At this scale the PC's may split up and lead their own squads, or form one super-unit. Though they may perform well against any targets in front of them, they may still lose as the allied tiny men flee while the badguy tiny men now overwhelm the PC's. This is where PC's like Zhang Fei can demoralize the opponent's tiny men so your tiny men break them, or if needed a PC can make a last stand like Benkei to stop 300 dudes. The outcome of a battle is just part of a...

War/kingdom management (break out the hexgrids!): You could say many battles together are a war. At this scale the PC's are likely not going to be personally involved in every facet of war, there will be many battles/skirmishes that they aren't involved in. But you could have a sneaky PC go to 'dueling scale' (or a team of ninjas at skirmish scale) and assassinate an enemy commander, giving you the edge at a coming 'battle scale' encounter.

So you can do something like an individual PC engaged in a war is fighting a particular battle, leading his dudes (skirmish scale) and attacking a particular dude (dueling scale). At the dueling scale he kills the enemy standard bearer, or cuts down enough dudes, at the skirmish scale the enemy squad's morale drops and the allied tiny men surge forward to break them, at the battle scale the enemy has lost one of its squads but there are still other squads engaged in combat. The outcome of this battle will affect territory/resource controls at the war scale.


Image
just the heroes in the front fighting would be duel scale, one block of dudes is skirmish scale, but all together they're battle scale.

A warrior (or battle wizard) can scale in a manner where...
-They'll beat the average soldier 1 on 1 without risk, like Musashi
-They'll beat a dozen soldiers without risk
-They'll beat 100's of soldiers without risk, like Lu Bu
-They'll overthrow a city/state without risk, like Son Goku

A mystic magic user can scale in a manner where...
-They'll lock eyes with a dude and paralyze him 1 on 1
-They'll throw a bolt of lightning that pins a dozen dudes
-They'll conjure a tornado that scatters an army of hundreds
-They'll unleash an earthquake that shatters a city

A tactician/strategist character can scale in a manner where...
-They'll advise an average soldier how to defeat a skilled warrior 1 on 1
-They'll lead a dozen tiny men to victory in a skirmish with minimal casualties
-They'll lead dozens of tiny men to victory in a battle with minimal casualties
-They'll lead hundreds of tiny men to victory in a big battle with minimal casualties
-They'll lead a city/state to victory in a war with minimal casualties
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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:To get away from the armies discussion, I'd like to point out a key aspect where Eastern Fantasy and Western Fantasy differ: Weapons.

In Western Fantasy, you have Martial Weapons, which are anything a knight might use but which the Wizard couldn't; Simple Weapons, which are anything that a wizard or a barmaid might use; and Ranged, which only the dedicated archer might use and which said archer will use to the exclusion of any other weapon.
I'm gonna cut you off there, because that's stupid and insane. Robin Hood is the classic fantasy archer. He has an iconic staff fight with Little John and he has an iconic sword fight with the Sheriff. Conan the Barbarian is the classic fantasy big sword fighter. He nevertheless busts out a bow to fight flying enemies because he's not a fucking retard.

In Western Fantasy, warrior types use bows against targets that are far away and swords against targets that are close up. Only in video games (or their table top homages like 4th edition D&D) do we see characters that literally only use one weapon. Legolas is very much an iconic fantasy archer. Nevertheless:

Image

Hercules is very much an iconic fantasy melee fighter, and yet:

Image
In Eastern Fantasy, you have basically four kinds of weapons: Peasant Weapons, which are legally farming implements and therefore available to ordinary citizens; Samurai Weapons, which are only legal for nobles to own and which can be used in legally binding duels; Bows, which are also only legal for nobles to own, but which are mostly a military weapon; and Ninja Weapons, which are illegal for everyone to own but which can be hidden easily for assassinations.
This seems to similarly be nonsense. You can tell a lot about what station in life a character has by what weapons they use, but there's also a lot of overlap. Priests/Monks use swords and bows but don't wear Samurai armor. Guns are big shoulder mounted things that are used by peasant soldiers on the battlefield.

But Priestesses and Ashigaru and Samurai all fight with Yaris and Naginata.

Image Image
Naginata: horse and armor sold separately.

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Post by Almaz »

I am working on a D&D-ish RPG off and on, like most people are, and one of the first things I decided to do was give all the "fighting" characters full access to at least one mode of 1) unarmed combat, 2) ranged combat, and 3) melee combat. The reason being is that if you can't wrestle a bear, shoot a griffon, and hack the undead, you're not really worth much as a combatant in terms of fantasy heroism, and in fact you might be outdone by most warrior classes in actual history. Well, setting aside the fact that most people have faced neither griffons nor undead and the best way to fight a bear is to not.

It just makes players feel like chumps if they can't answer a threat they would reasonably expect to face. They want to be able to reasonably produce an answer. For characters whose powersets mostly revolve around "I am fite gud" this means that they need to be skilled in multiple weapons, no swordmasters allowed. That or they have to be able to jump really far and always have their sword in hand. And unless you make every single warrior character a noble by default, this also means either giving bows and swords to peasants or making slings and clubs as lethal as arrows and stabs.

Also saying "only legal for nobles to own" about bows is hilarious when non-noble hunters existed, and most of the army was not really "nobility" in any real sense, but still had bows.

For non-warrior characters I frankly don't care if they can use a naginata or not because they probably can explode you with kitsune bi or something. If stabbing is still a good action for them to engage in, however, they probably should also have some access to premium stabs, even if that does horn in a little on warriors.
Last edited by Almaz on Sat Dec 05, 2015 11:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Was just thinking about how Ghost in the Shell's set up like a ninja manga

Every Japan government Ministry is like a Samurai Clan, the Public Security Section that's loyal to them is their ninja's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_ ... ty_bureaus

Section 1: Ministry of Home Affairs, like LAW & ORDER stuff

Section 2: Ministry of Health, Labor, & Welfare, medicine and biological threats

Section 3: Enforcing drug policies, including infiltrating smuggler gangs

Section 4: Ministry of Defense, military rangers

Section 6: Foreign Affairs, intelligence on international crimes and so on

Section 9: Reports to Ministry of Home Affairs too, specializes in cyber-crimes


GitS stories involving sections fighting each other, sections teaming up, sections getting into conflict over jurisdiction, which is good for an RPG setting.
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