To the Courts! Not just a Basketball Reference

I’ve been working on figuring out research trees for the SKM Development now for the better part of a few weeks. It’s tougher than I expected because I have to like, balance out the changes against future stuff and make it worth it, and blah blah blah.

It is however something my players have universally requested.

My guilt over not getting that finished though has made me reticent to make other posts on my blog, and that also makes me feel guilty. Guilt seems to be flowing forward and back, and that, that’s ironically the topic for today.

There’s a lot of adventures that come up, dungeon crawls, sieges, hunts, and even the occasional murder mystery, but a surprisingly complicated thing for PCs to deal with, and one that typically requires the full diversity of their talents is ironically, one of the least utilized.

The Court Case.

The idea of pursuing legal proceedings has a tie in of both a mystery and a normal adventure. Like developing a mystery, it requires pretty spectacular work on the side of the DM, however, it has numerous advantages over the standard mystery.

The standard mystery story in a fantasy RPG often runs up against the fact that the players have access to supernatural means of determining guilt or innocence. This means that ‘which one of us is a doppleganger’ can be solved (or derailed depending on the opinion) by a spell of true seeing, a spellcraft roll, or a paladin being able to detect evil.

The issue that makes a court case differ from that, is that in a court case, you aren’t just trying to find out what happened, you have to find proof of what happened. And in that regard, most divination spells have a lovely, let us say, personal range of effect, which means that the witness is basically saying that magical faeries or the gods have made a declaration, which, well, isn’t always accepted.

This means our players might know who did something, but without proof, the innocent accused might end up still getting the chop.

Court cases also typically involve an aspect of intrigue that most intrigue based plots don’t grab onto, since there’s an element of force, manipulation, and legalese involved, just being able to bullshit effectively won’t always solve the problem. The case typically isn’t just solved by hanging around a room with fancy people. Investigation is necessary, which can lead to conflict, exploration, and the like. Forget not that Dr. Watson carried a pistol, and he used it pretty damn frequently.

There are some things that the DM has to address though before he starts bringing in Legal Intrigue plots.

I’ll try unpacking them in some other posts.

SKM Development: The Butcher Bill

Casualty assignment is actually what held me up for a bit.

Alright, last time we had our engagement between Red’s archers and Blue’s Cavalry.

RED

10 Archers (0.5/4)

AR: 5, DR: 40, Automatic Casualties: 10

BLUE

10 Cavalry (4/1)

AR: 40, DR: 10 Automatic Casualties: 2.5

Red vs Blue’s BR was -5.

Blue vs Red’s BR was 0.

Therefore, Red has suffered 2.5 casualties and Blue has suffered 5.

Now, the way that casualties are typically applied is by being bought off by the opposing force’s DR. This is bad for Red. Their cavalry only has one DR each. I made a decision that casualties are applied to whole units, meaning that 1 casualty has to be applied to a unit even if that casualty can’t ‘afford’ the unit’s DR. Meanwhile, So on our casualty ‘pass’ we end up putting a casualty on 5 individual cavalry units from Red, and the 2.5 casualties incurred on blue end up on a single archer.

Pretty simple, no? We’ll also decide that 50% of casualties are non-fatal, with injuries rounded up on uneven ties.. Meaning if we’re splitting 11 Light Infantry, we end up with 5 dead and 6 injured.  

 Also units to whom casualties are applied incompletely are injured not killed. So if a knight has to eat .8 BR, he's just straight up injured, but not dead.

Where this gets tricky is well, let’s complicate our scenario.

SKM Development: Hurly Burly

Whoo boy.

This one is pretty much hard math and mechanics incarnate.

Once again, ACKs does it better. ACKs however does it better for one player group. Not for five. They detail fun stuff like incredibly good morale issues, payment, injury tracking, healing, and so on.

I kind of wish I could imbed some of my test excel docs in this post (I might do that if I figure out how to do it in post).

Alright. Let’s start.

We have two Forces, Red and Blue. Each has their own AR and DR, as we’ve previously established. We get these numbers as a total of all of their respective forces. Then we compare Red’s AR against Blue’s DR and Blue’s AR against Red’s AR. This gets us two numbers. These are our Battle Resolution numbers. BRs translate directly into casualties (as I’ll explain below).

Now Spook, you ask, what happens if the BR is Negative? Like, what if my DR is so awesome that the enemy can’t hurt me. Do I get people back? That’d be silly wouldn’t it? Also, if I focused entirely on DR to the point that I can’t hurt my opponent and my BR against him is 0, do we just bounce off inconclusively?

That’s a good question, fictional questioner.  This was the first problem I had with developing this combat system. See, 10 Cavalry vs 10 Archers resulted in this sort of push. Cavalry couldn’t overcome the archer’s DR, and archers couldn’t overcome the cav’s DR. We, by which I mean me, decided a long time ago that this system is ‘defender’ focused though.

Therefore the idea of Automatic Casualties was created by Spook. Automatic Casualties are inflicted to the tune of 25% of the DR of the belligerent (our decimals only go to the ten's place btw). This means that in our above situation, where the archers have a DR of 4 each, they have 40 DR total, and therefore automatically inflict 10 BR of damage as automatic casualties, the Cavalry on the other hand would inflict 2.5 automatic casualties (their individual DR is 1, so ten of them is 10 DR, and a quarter of that is 2.5).

Automatic casualties  demonstrate that every combat engagement is a dangerous one, resulting in the possibility of deaths and wounds. And this, is also where that AR vs DR disparity comes in.

An Archer has .5 AR and 4 DR, so ten of them (as in our engagement above) have a total AR of 5. Meanwhile, Cavalry has a DR of 1, meaning 10 Cavalry have a DR of 10. This means that our archer friends inflict -5 BR on the Cavalry. Well, like I said above, the BR doesn’t bring people back to life, but it does help to negate damage.   

Having an AR that goes into the negatives indicates that you are so ineffectual at damaging your opponent’s forces that it helps to mitigate the Automatic Casualties he’d otherwise incur from engaging with you. So, to return to our archer example above. We determined the archers inflicted 10 BR of damage as automatic casualties but they’re so bad at actually hurting the cavalry their BR was -5, so they only end up inflicting 5 BR of casualties as a result. The Cavalry on the other hand had a BR of 0, and still managed to inflict 2.5 automatic casualties on the archers without a modifier since their BR wasn’t negative.

That’s step one. We figured out how to hurt each other. Next, we need to unpack how we apply that damage.