Man to Man
...with Multiples
The primary appeal of Chainmail resolution to me is twofold - first, its simplicity and its expeditiousness; and second, its utilization of concurrent hits to casualty larger than life figures. Where the traditional approach of hit points can be used to abstract both grit and skill - the lesser fighter will take a more grievous injury than the superior fighter who knows how to roll with the punches - it doesn't fit well in the context of the game: giving a character multiple attacks, but requiring multiple hits to "connect", better presents the target as defending itself and scaling that defense according to martial prowess: determined by level of experience.
So, with troop combat - there is speed of dice pool successes; and with man to man - there is the granularity of weapon versus armor: how to combine the two?
To take a hint from Fantasy Combat resolution (and reverse an idea from
Majestic Fantasy for Swords & Wizardry
to make it fit!)
Man Equivalence and Attack Pool
Each character should consider its own offensive capability in terms of a pool: this pool is a number of attacks equal to the character’s Man Equivalence and is refreshed each round. During the appropriate phase - Missile or Melee - the attack sequence below is then executed.
Attack Sequence
-
Assign: The character assigns a number of attacks from their pool
to a given target, up to their remaining attack pool.
-
Resolve: Dice are rolled – 2d6 – and the value, after modifiers, is
compared to the target number of the weapon versus the armor (or armor
equivalence) of the target.
If the target number is met or exceeded, the target suffers a number of Hits equal to the number of attacks allocated in Step 1.
-
Remove & Repeat: The number of attacks assigned in Step 1 are
then – regardless of success or failure in Step 2 – deducted from the
attack pool. If the character has additional attacks remaining, the
controlling player may then repeat this process on the same or a new
target.
Once the pool reaches 0, the character may make no further attacks until the following combat round.
Injuries
When a defender has accrued a number of Hits in one round (cumulative between all sources) equal to or greater than its own Man Equivalence, an Injury is suffered (or casualty inflicted, hit points lost, etc. - to taste).
Critical Blows
For an attack which succeeds and on which doubles are rolled on the 2d6 attack roll, a
Critical Blow is struck. When a Critical Blow occurs, the hits inflicted on
the defender are equal to double the attacks assigned to the roll.
Additionally, hits against vulnerable targets - targets unaware they are under attack, targets which are prone on the field of battle, and so on - are likewise doubled.
This is designed to prevent characters of only slightly higher level than an
adversary from being invincible to that adversary in man to man while still
preserving the possibility of great warriors or powerful monsters only a
hero could hope to tackle alone.
The Math: Hits and Crits
A hit on the Man to Man table can be achieved - depending on weapon vs armor - on between a 5 and 12 on 2d6: producing a wide variety of probabilities. To prove I've thought about it - for the purposes of illustration, we'll focus on target numbers of 6, 8, and 10 - an easy, a normal, and a challenging result.
Provided, a matrix of all possible combinations on 2d6 - with their respective
result:
|
In red, a result which will miss all target numbers. In yellow, a
result which would hit only the easiest target number, 6. In blue, a
result which would hit both the easiest 6 and the moderate target
number of 8. In green, a roll which would hit all target numbers. In deeper highlight and italicized, a double: representing on hit a result which would indicate a critical result. |
Observing the provided, there are 36 possible outcomes - with six possibilities for a double. Thus:
| Target Number | Chance for a Hit | Chance for a Double |
|---|---|---|
| 6 |
26-in-36, or around 72%. |
4-in-36, or around 11%. |
| 8 |
15-in-36, or around 42%. |
3-in-36, or around 8%. |
| 10 |
6-in-36, or just shy of 17%. |
2-in-36, or just shy of 6%. |
A character well armed - having a weapon appropriate to the enemy's defenses -
may reasonably expect to hit frequently and hit above their pay-grade on a d20
equivalent of 19: whereas a character armed poorly relative to the enemy's
defenses will have a difficult time hitting - and will hit above their
pay-grade on a d20 equivalent to a natural 20.
Inspiration
The Hero can stand against a squad of normal men, holding his own; the Wizard stares down a fell beast which has laid waste to an army before it! Chainmail accomplishes this via the Fantasy Combat table - a solution to a problem where some units take many hits before going down: making them prime candidates to strategically lock down other units. Concurrent hits - as I describe above - are actually very uncommon: only Lycanthropes, Heroes, Super Heroes, and Wizards (implied) use them: however, this is an even more extreme example - as two Heroes who run into each other on the battlefield, using troop combat - have a statistically insignificant chance (almost 1 in 1,300) to end their conflict in anything other than a draw. Thus, the Fantasy Combat matrix is provided to pit Fantastic creatures and figures against one another - catering to the fiction from which they are drawn: Dragons cannot be killed in normal combat, but can be slain by a Hero with a bow and magic arrows (*cough* *Esgaroth* *cough*) with only a moderate degree of luck; Trolls are fearsome opponents, but are vulnerable to the magical weapons Elves carry (*cough* *The Broken Sword* *cough*). The key take-away here, however, is less the fiction: but from the gamist perspective, the rapidity of resolution.
Chainmail is a wargame. The intent of Chainmail is not to imitate epic
show-downs, but instead to allow armies to clash and to vie against one
another for land, treasure, or honor. For that reason, it has to be quick - to
bog the game down would result in the inability to utilize the rule in a
tournament setting: and might inspire players to ban the Fantasy Supplement
altogether - favoring the tight rules for more real-world military
engagements.
And it accomplishes this smoothness by pairing Fantastic adversaries against
one another on a chart - requiring one roll only to decide the fray.
But how to accomplish the same result without ever and infinitely expanding a literature-based table?
An Equivalence Solution
I referenced Majestic Fantasy for Swords & Wizardry above. In reality, I should have referenced a blog post - Multiple Fighter attacks revisited for Swords & Wizardry: written by Rob Conley, proprietor of Bat in the Attic Games the author of the aforementioned Majestic Fantasy and a perennial figure in the OSR ecosystem. You're shilling him awfully hard this post, CWR - what's up with that? I want to highlight Rob and his product line because - while, admittedly, I like some of it more than others - by and large he's a sharp cookie who has good insights into the experience of an OSR sandbox game. If you play Swords & Wizardry, or if you play OSE or any other TSR-friendly OSR system - I would encourage you to consider looking into his blog, checking out some of his work, and seeing if it's right for you.
But - for the time being, we'll focus on what I saw that changed how I wanted to approach combat in Chainmail and Weapons, Wits, & Wizardry: namely, multiple attacks. In AD&D 1e, a Fighter gets multiple attacks - one per level - against enemies of 1 HD or less. This is an import from the Chainmail roots of the game, promoting the Name-Level-Fighter-As-A-Wrecking-Ball of mass combat. Encountering 40-400 Kobolds? No problem. You're taking out 10 at a time - plus, by that point, you're assumed to have retainers behind you: but that's another story. This didn't sit well with me - as I commented on Rob's post when I first read it - because a Fighter is a whirlwind of destruction against 1 HD enemies - skeletons, normal men, goblins - but then becomes no better than his own normal men troops immediately facing anything else - zombies, Elves, a freaking badger, etc. How Rob handles this - I recommend his blog post for a better explanation - but he counts down: the Fighter "spends" attacks according to the HD of the enemy - attacking, dealing damage, and so on as normal with each. It's a considerable boost - but one which is much needed for the character archetype that, though allegedly Gary's favorite, falls behind fellow classes in effectiveness as the levels accrue. Approaching it from a Chainmail perspective - I had the opposite problem: too many attacks and how to pare them down!
In the Spirit of Fantasy Combat
The resolution strategy of Fantasy Combat is solid - the problem comes with
extensibility. In Chainmail, Fantasy Combat is a chart - depending on which
figure engages which other figure, cross-referenced on the matrix. Knowing
this, each new Fantastic monster would need to have a new entry on the list -
and values determined for each potential opponent.
To stick to literary inspiration - this would also pose a problem as some new
monsters have no precedent to appear next to one another in the fiction:
naturally providing a narrative limitation on the addition in addition to the
margin limitation: that is, how big can the table get before it no longer fits
in a book?
The Man to Man approach with a multiple-hits caveat solves this problem.
By treating the attack and defense of a Fantastic creature according to an equivalence on the Man to Man table - which can be extended indefinitely in rows, if the need arises - it provides a natural answer to "how would this monster affect this other monster?" and "how would a human heroic character overcome this monster?" Thus, say we create a Grue. The Grue - according to our own table - has 4 hit dice: a fighting man of normal bearing has no chance to hurt it. However - a Hero - armed accordingly - has a chance. A single success will strike the creature down - as would a Fantasy Combat entry - and also it allows the Hero to outfit himself for the occasion. We know that Grue attack by eating their foes: perhaps bulkier armor (Plate), preventing easy swallowing, will affect its ability to inflict that attack. Weapon and armor choice continues to matter - giving the Fighting Man more tools in the toolbox. But that's another story.
What about Monsters?
Ostensibly, monsters should receive multiple attacks. A cave troll crashing into the packed ranks of pikemen, rending left and right, throwing men asunder before coming face to face with a champion in its way - this is accomplished in Chainmail by troop combats followed by Fantasy Combat when the pair square off. In the same sense - combining the two under the Man to Man approach described above, the troll would - having a high Man Equivalence - be entitled to multiple attacks (the aforementioned left and right) and then few - perhaps one or two - against the hero, who likewise has an elevated Man Equivalence.
If it gets to the point where it's tedious? Say, rolling 2d6 three or four times in a row?
In that case - I may recommend defaulting to troop combat. Roll dice, on 6s - count a hit: appropriate to the light/heavy/armored spectrum - just in the name of speed. However: for the time being, the rule stands - and unless play-test proves a problem? We'll see how it goes!
Thanks for reading!
Public domain artwork retrieved from
OldBookIllustrations.com
and
the National Gallery of Art
and adapted for use. Attribution in alt text.
Great article!
ReplyDeleteThank you! Looking forward to spending more time with it at the table!
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