mlangsdorf wrote:My experience says your premise is wrong.
Lol.
Look, if it works for you, then more power to you. I just find the Internet's general need to posture "I'm right you're wrong!" to be pretty amusing nowadays given what it really reflects
.
What I don't think you realize however is that your "abstracted" system is actually pretty close to my proposal; mine is only even
more abstracted and with a ladder to facilitate "zoomed in" encounters rather than resolving a lot of battle with just high-level rolls.
Indeed, I'd note your only objection early in the thread was that you didn't think there should be "zoomed in" encounters - you thought it would bog the game down - and only a lot of direct battle vs battle rolls was needed.
I actually agree with that assessment, but with the caveat that it works for a very particular type of campaign - namely one where you will almost never have any individual encounters and all the "encounters"
are battles or high-level diplomacy.
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Your campaign in particular is unusual because you have
two characters per player - with one character being specialized as a battle piece and the other as an individual diplomat, and that the "battle" party and the "diplomat" party tend to work separately.
That's clever design mind you - it's the kind of "two separate genres melded into one" that's been implemented in some games.
War of the Ring for instance is the most well-known boardgame version of this, as it combines a Risk-style war with the adventures of the "Fellowship of the Ring" (composed of individual heroes) on the same map. Notably, heroes in the Fellowship can stay with the group to help Frodo dump The Ring into Mount Doom, or they can peel off and join armies to fight in the big war.
But I am not sure that is the kind of game most RPG players would be willing to play. In fact, I would wager that it's the kind of campaign that would interest
wargamers more, particularly as there's a specific genre of "campaign wargames" (see Titan and Federation Commander) which take 60-100 hours to complete but have "zoomed in" individual battles. Indeed, just reading your campaign description makes me think it would make for a terrific basis for a campaign wargame design.