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[Techhead]

There are three problems that I see with trying to model a realistic chain of command in a tabletop setting.

The first, as touched upon above, is the degree of automation a unit takes when not given orders. Do they continue acting on previous orders or do they improvise? Improvisation on a tabletop would leave your unit's fate in the hands or either a simple instruction set (If 1, then do A, if 2, then B, else C), or the random number god. Anything more complicated would likely mean you're spending upwards of 20-30 minutes per turn when a sniper hits your leadership.

The second deals with intelligence and the fog of war, and how they interact with the chain of command. As commands travel down, intel travels up. If your foward scouts are cut off, not only are the scouts leaderless, but you stop receiving reports, depriving you of the principal benefits of having scouts.

The third deals with the speed of information. Classical and medieval era must rely almost entirely on runners, although messages to a stationary command post can use carrier pigeons. Semaphore (19th century) can be used to relay messages via line-of-sight. Radio was used from the late 19th century onwards, with increasing bandwidth and availability. WWII-era, one man in a squad had a radio. Modern militaries often have one radio per person.

[Telgin]

Yeah, so far the discussion has led me to realize that modeling anything approaching a realistic command structure is impractical, so I think I've settled on a solution heavily inspired by Starver's idea.

That is, as long as a unit is in contact with its commander (in this case I'll only consider mid level commanders), the unit can act normally.  Being in contact is a setting dependent thing, that would affect the value of a unit.  In some settings it may require a short distance or line of sight, in others as long as the commander is alive they're in contact (radios, or whatnot).

If a unit is not in contact with its commander, it can only select a small number of reactive actions, such as moving back toward the friendly table edge or shooting back at a unit that shot them.

Then perhaps if they go an entire turn without being attacked they may act normally, and continue to do so until they get back in contact with a commander or are attacked again.  Something like that.

Squad leaders would probably just boost morale checks or give a chance to act normally even if you're out of contact.  Higher level commanders would probably give army wide bonuses or something like that.  Abstract, but maybe playable at least.

Fog of war and scouts are definitely important concepts in a real battle, and I'd like to try to incorporate something like that.  I'm kind of at a loss on how to do so in a playable manner.


Anyway, if anyone else has any ideas I'm still open to hear them.  I'm actually kind of trying to work out some other mechanics now, such as a means of resolving hits and damage that isn't a copy of 40K, and which is hopefully more flexible.

[Techhead]

One thing that came to mind is that field units could act as spotters for artillery units. Artillery units would either be unable to fire at un-spotted targets, or suffer some sort of penalty for doing so.

On the subject of restricted actions, I would allow for out-of-contact units to attack any enemy in sight. A bowman lost in the woods is not going to wait until a knight on horseback catches up with him before shooting him. Same with a pillbox and a flamethrower. Or a modern infantryman and a cave-fighter with a machete. I would also allow them to retreat towards the nearest stationary position. (eg. a bunker or FOB.)

You might want to consider the ability to give orders that take more than one turn to execute. That way, an out-of-contact unit can execute it's current orders before losing direction.

[Telgin]

That's a good suggestion and one I considered.  I was likely going to give a small radius in which units could still attack enemies, may 12" or so, depending on the exact scales used.  I think that movement might should be restricted to movement toward a friendly table edge, or toward cover like you said.  Moving toward the enemy might not be allowed, but that could depend on if I have any sort of holdovers from previous orders maybe.  I'll have to test that and see how it works.

[Techhead]

Out of curiosity, what basic mechanics do you plan on using? I'm guessing you're going gridless, but I'm not too familiar with the WH/WH40K systems. My miniature wargaming experience is mostly in MechWarrior.

[Telgin]

Wow, I thought I was the last to reply to this thread, but it just got pushed to the third page of my new replies list.  Don't I feel silly.

To answer your question... well, that could involve a lot of explaining but the basic rules I'd considered so far were quite similar to Warhammer / Warhammer 40K.  Yes, the game is currently gridless although having a grid isn't out of the question.

Warhammer

A basic run down of those rules would be that each player turn is divided into a number of phases.  There is a movement phase, a shooting phase, then a close combat phase.  Warhammer adds a magic phase, where 40K just has psychic powers work during other phases as appropriate.

Movement involves picking each unit and moving them in any direction (in general) up to the unit's move distance (always 6" in 40K for most infantry).

Shooting involves picking a target, and rolling a die for each shot fired, then looking the result up on a simple table of ballistic skill (BS) to see if it hit.  If it did, then the weapon's strength (S) is compared against the target's toughness (T) in another table, and another die is rolled here to see if the target is wounded.  If a wound is scored, the enemy must make an armor save by rolling under their armor value, which may be modified by the weapon.  If the save is failed, a wound is removed.  If a model loses all of its wounds, it's a casualty.

Close combat is a train wreck of exceptional circumstances and complex hit allocation rules, but basically follows as above.

If enough models are lost in a unit, it must roll under its leadership value or flee.  If enough models remain, the unit may rally in subsequent turns.

What I considered:

There's just a single phase, and each unit must choose what to do: move, attack, use an ability, or possible other stuff (bunker down in their position, for example).

Due to a lack of creativity on my part, I was going to follow the same sort of idea as 40K, except that I'd be using d10s instead of d6s, have an open ended stat progression (in 40K stats don't go above 10 ever), have roll under mechanics instead of table lookups, have a simpler / more uniform method of classifying attacks and weapons, and having a unified method of presenting living units and vehicles / buildings (at least in older versions of 40K vehicles had an entirely different wounding system).

So, models would have a ballistic skill / ranged skill that they would have to roll under to hit, possibly modified by things such as range and cover.  I dispensed with the idea of a S to T roll and instead weapons just had a damage stat and armor penetration stat, where units had an HP stat and armor cover / value stat.  So you still get an armor save, and if you made the save your armor reduced the incoming hit by its armor value.  In low tech settings most things would be 1 Damage and no AP, with armor being of Armor Value 1 and variable coverage (roll under 2 for armor consisting of just a steel cap, all the way to roll under 9 for a full suit of articulated plate).  Higher tech settings like modern settings would probably give rifles 2 Damage or 1 Damage and 1 AP with most things being unarmored or wearing enough armor to give 2 Armor Value (and thus still stop rifle rounds).

It sort of works, but it's a bit clunky and doesn't seem to have the nuance I was hoping for.  In particular, without the S to T roll and a minimum damage value of 1, it's hard to represent things smaller and weaker than humans.

I actually considered using abstract unit-to-unit combats using dice pools where you rolled a number of dice to see if you hit and how much damage was done, but could never come up with a satisfactory way to do infantry-to-vehicle encounters without letting guys with rifles destroy tanks or letting a single anti-armor missile wipe half of a unit out.  Any fixes felt like a huge band-aid.

So, at this point I'm kind of back to square one.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

How about leaders absorb morale failures, up to a number based on the level of the leader?
In a similar way, a shield generator emplacement could absorb hits against friendly units. Place a tiny die next to the leader. One leader might be a d4, another a d6, a great one could be a d8. At the start of every new combat turn the leaders all regain their maximum leadership (tick the dice over to maximum). As the turn progresses, if a friendly unit in range fails morale, you can choose to downgrade the leader's die by one. This represents the leader using his rank and persuasion to force the men to remain in the fight. The system should give plenty of chances to check morale, so a unit attacked heavily might fail 2-3 times in a turn. The leader might serve several units, or you might have several leaders supporting one important unit. The relationship that matters is: when I fail morale, is there a leader nearby who can absorb it?

You might not want your leader to absorb morale. This is because at the end of the turn, you roll a die equal to his leadership stat and if it comes up higher than his current leadership remaining the men lose all confidence in him and he loses his leadership DIE and has only his normal stats.

So a leader who was on d6 and used 2 morales has his d6 showing a 4. End of turn comes, and his player rolls a d6 (not that leader's specific d6 neccessarily) and if it's 5 or 6 the leader loses his die.

A leader can regain his die by performing a heroic feat, which re-establishes his credibility in the eyes of the men and brings him to a d4. This could include forcing an enemy unit to retreat because of one of his fighting rolls, or personally achieving a map objective, or whatever else makes sense in your rule system.

In fact, a leader can gain extra leadership (graduating to the next higher die) by achieving these things. A normal unit should gain leadership (becoming a mythic squad or at least momentarily worshipped on the field) on a roll of 1 in 6 when performing any of these achievements, but units that aren't typical leader-types can possess only a d4 leadership; no more.

A unit with leadership can absorb ITS OWN morale failures as normal (remember, the check is "is there a leader within X radius of me").

When measuring, ignore leaders that are out of communication. This could mean out of line-of-sight if it's an Ancients game, or if the radioman died in WW2, or if you're in a radio-blocked zone in a futuristic game.

[Telgin]

That's not a bad way to handle it, and I'll consider something like it if / when I get back to working on this. 

Leadership has sort of taken a back seat for the moment until I finalize how I want the other core rules to work.  Attempting to find a general set of rules that isn't overly derivative, which suits a large variation in power (this would ideally be able to model anything from a gnome to a gundam), and which is playable on an acceptable scale has proven challenging as one might expect.

My attempts to abstract combat significantly through dice pools have proven pretty fruitless, so I'm scrapping that and heading back to a more simulationist approach employed by games like Warhammer and pen and paper RPGs.  Of course, that sort of thing gets out of hand quickly if you're not careful.