Writing a system for the Siege of Troy

[TavishArtair]

Yes, that Troy. The one in the Iliad.

The story of the siege contains in its a pretty standard adventure in-play. You dither around forming the party, making preparations to go to the adventure location, when you start there you go on and have a few random encounters and sidequests, and then eventually everyone goes up and actually knocks on the gates of the main quest, i.e. Troy. There are gods who act in a sort of indirect way to help their interests, but anyone can curry favor with them, and it is unusual for someone who is not a priest to do so.

There are warriors, magic armor, not-so-magic weapons, magical horses, brides to be looted, and so on. Presumably, the actually playable game will also have menfolk to be looted (even if the scheme isn't truly equal-opportunity, there are enough tribes with warrior-women to make it happen) and the occasional magic weapon. But the first focus of the game is taking these elements and making a playable and interesting game... a game wherein the actual combat itself is an engaging part of the system, and features, mostly, the quirks of battle that could be seen in ancient Greece, and any others that make particular sense to employ.

And, of course, you should also be able to use the same system to run 300. If possible the system could be expansible to run the Odyssey or Jason and the Argonauts, but those are secondary concerns.

My initial thoughts are to use some minorly-curved diceroll (2d10 or 3d6) to reinforce that some people have arete and others don't and it is hard to scale up to the ones who do, and this would make a simpler system than scaling dice pools between both merely mortal, demigod, and divine action scales. Likely using "arete" as a form of level. People level up mostly by gaining glory, which has fuck-all to do with experience and treasure, even if those are highly desirable. The "Fate" people seem to confront is probably mostly the game-system... the Mister Cavern fills in the role of Zeus in governing the gods in a general way, and of Fate, and seems to comment occasionally on his ability to alter Fate(!) and fudge the dice rolls. Gods are interactable-with and do not win automatically in all contests against mortals but tend to have a breadth of skill that easily crushes any mortal. Even if you can win a weaving contest against Athena she can flip you off and turn you into a spider. Winning a fight against the gods, in general, while possible, is actually a bad idea, so most people just accept that they are essentially game fiat, a series of tutelary spirits, patrons, and protectors, who people generally don't try to cross.

My main focus in this thread is to analyze what would go into this as a good core, and either run it as-is when I throw out a more full game design flowsheet, or modify my premise, as I have an idea of where I want to start and an idea of where I want to end but the inbetween right now is fuzzy for me. I will probably ramble at myself now and then while I am doing this.

Other thoughts: Armor and shields are important, spears are largely disposable, but more common weapons than swords, which are mostly useful for having a slashing quality that spears mostly lack. Character types seem to be mostly divided based on schticks above and beyond "being a warrior" at this point... some warriors are exceptionally clever or mighty, but almost everyone of note fights.

[Zinegata]

How do you visualize the Troy-era combat though?

A lot of people associate Greek warfare with spears and shields because of the Phalanx system for instance, but Homer's depictions focus heavily on the use of chariots, as Troy was actually fought before Phalanxes got a lot of use.

Are you looking at something more like the movie version (which features massed spearman on spearman combat), or more of the 1 vs 1 duels with two guys who also have chariot support?

[Josh_Kablack]

Well most of the greek myth interpretations I've seen have the heroes backed by one or more gods and also opposed by one or more gods. If you really are doing the Illiad, there's that whole apple of discord deal in Olympus. that causes the gods themselves to intervene and award Paris with Helen, thereby launching the thousand ships.

So it needs to be totally possible, even encouraged for PCs to slay the bastard son of Posiedon, thereby incurring his wrath - but living to adventure through the obstacles that wrath causes for the next decade.

[angelfromanotherpin]

When it comes to the gods, you can go the Clash of the Titans route, where the gods are literally hanging around and showing up; or the Age of Bronze route, where they appear only in visions or as metaphor.

I'm not sure why this game needs a new system. It seems like you could do this just fine with any number of existing games.

[Blicero]

How do you visualize the Troy-era combat though?

A lot of people associate Greek warfare with spears and shields because of the Phalanx system for instance, but Homer's depictions focus heavily on the use of chariots, as Troy was actually fought before Phalanxes got a lot of use.

Are you looking at something more like the movie version (which features massed spearman on spearman combat), or more of the 1 vs 1 duels with two guys who also have chariot support?

The thing to remember, though, is that Homer doesn't actually have his heroes use their chariots to fight in. They're more or less just glorified buses, not combat vehicles.

(This of course comes from how The Iliad was written during the Greek Dark Ages, when people had forgotten how to use chariots to their fullest extent.)