Logistics and Dragons [No Kaeliks]

[maglag]

I've heard the video game Banner Saga has a particularly degenerate version of this, where there are severe wound penalties and when units die their action gets given to their surviving allies, so you want to get every enemy down to low health before killing any of them.

Banner saga actually has quite a fascinating combat system and I can't resist to fanboy a bit about it:
-Your damage bonus and HP are the exact same stat. So an enemy left at 1 HP is attacking for 1 damage.
-The Initiative count is always ally-enemy-ally-enemy-ally regardless of how much units each team has left. So indeed killing the weak enemies first means the stronger enemies get to act more.
HOWEVER
-Killing an enemy gives you an Horn/Action/Soul point that can then allow one of your dudes to perform an action better like extra moves or stronger attacks. Sometimes you really want to kill enemies right away to rack those points for stuff like quickly closing in with enemy ranged/mage units or punching through the defences of specially tough enemies.
-All units have an Armor Break attack that is independent of your HP, so although the 1 HP dude can't kill you, they can still make you more vulnerable against other enemies. Ditto for some special abilities that have fixed effects regardless of HP, but those are usually more rare. If you see an enemy pseudo-mage, you want him down ASAP.
-If there's only one enemy left in the field, then suddenly they stop getting extra actions and your team can gank them at leisure.


Kinda on-topic, Banner Saga is also a bit of logistic simulator where you are guiding a caravan and have to manage a bunch of stuff. Simplified and abstracized, but there's a bunch of random events that spice up the between-battles. Do you spend your resources into new shiny items for your hero units or in food for your people? Do your take in those refugees to gain some extra bodies while knowing you'll run out of rations faster?

Also your caravan has a morale stat where the happier you keep your people out of battle, the more action/horn/soul points you get at the start of each combat. I guess that last bit could kinda work in Logistics and Dragons. The benevolent ruler gets to channel his people's devotion and happiness for some self-buffs.

[Username17]

The worst system for focus fire fire is nVampire. It's awful. But it's awful because it's deterministic and without meaningful tactical choices, not specifically because focus fire is an option or even that it's the best option. In that system:

• All participants in combat produce a number of dice towards their side that are totally interchangeable. One eight die attack is exactly the same as two four die attacks or four 2 die attacks for that matter.
• The number of dice a character produces does not meaningfully change until they go down.
• Characters can heal themselves over time during combat while still acting normally until they go down and then they stop.
• There is no real positioning system and you can direct your attacks on anyone you want.
• Defense dice are small and often don't apply, and one of the things that can make them not apply is having multiple enemies attack you, meaning that ganging up causes a small increase in total damage output versus spreading attacks.
• People have a lot of hit points compared to the size of an attack die, meaning that most people will take several attacks to drop.

nWoD has what is quite likely the worst combat system in RPG history. It's really bad. And if you wanted characters to sometimes declare attacks on different enemies, you could make pretty much any different design decisions at all. There are a number of ways to incentivize splitting fire, and name_here and DrPraetorious name checked some of them. Things that make there be meaningful decisions about whether to attack the enemy that your ally just attacked include the following:

• Wound penalties for partially wounded enemies. This encourages you to prioritize an unwounded target over a wounded target.
• Zones of control. This encourages you to target available enemies and also encourages you to spread out your zone controlling.
• Penalties for leaving enemies unengaged. Like zones of control, if enemies can do more things to you if you ignore them, it encourages you to prioritize unengaged targets over engaged targets.
• Straight up penalties or risks for attacking an enemy that is engaged by your ally.

Early D&D hacks used all of these to one degree or another. And so back in 1978 you could be playing D&D and have the optimal tactics to be that the fighters made a loose skirmish line and spread their attacks against the enemies in the front to keep the enemy from being able to surround you while the archers and mages fired at enemies behind the line in order to minimize friendly fire.

Ideally, you'd want to balance the incentives such that it would be situational whether you wanted to focus fire or spread attacks so that there would be meaningful tactical choices that players could take. So having a balance of rules that encourage ganging up (eg.: flanking bonuses, critical existence failure, regeneration) and rules that encourage splitting attacks (eg.: spell failure, firing into melee penalties, threatened areas) would be what you wanted. It is of course entirely subjective where you want the default to land, which is why people are still having game design discussions.

-Username17

[Rejakor]

Here is an example of high-granularity low-complexity nation simulator.

That's a mythweavers game archive dump. Read each of the nation threads/the rule threads to understand the basics.

It's one guy's codification and write-up of a set of emergent rules for games of this type run on 4chan's chaotic 'quest threads'. It requires a lot of GM overhead and is nearly entirely call-based - the rules and dice mechanic are lightweight and not explicit - I believe it was a d10 +/-2 (based on workability of plan) with greater modifiers making it either automatic success, or impossible without further resources, and the d10 determined both degree of success/failure and success/failure, as well as amount and degree of 'complications' - the system relies on complications being implicit to nearly any action, and necessitating further action, as well as occurring on their own and needing to be dealt with.

It's leagues ahead of any other rule system or product i've found for running any sort of nation/community/group. The combination of a simple die system, degrees of success/failure, and GM fleshing out results explicitly as well as deciding what is and isn't possible according to a real-world yardstick is effectively a framework for good GM judgement calls.

If you want to have a game of this type, i'd recommend finding or creating something along these lines and bolting it onto a game like dnd or [you are adventurers] game of your choice. There is no printed game that does both at all, and none that really do community management in any meaningful sense.