IanPrice/MailAndSteel

The Exalted system of mass combat doesn't work very well at all. The skill of the commander with a sword and the armor he's wearing really have no direct effect on his troops. Focusing on the individual Solars is good, but the brutality of mass combat could be better represented. I refer to Murphy's Laws of Combat: "It's not the one with your name on it you have to worry about. It's the one addressed, "to whom it may concern.""

Therefore, I intend to put here a system based on the Legend of the Five Rings battle table, as modified for Exalted. The basic idea of this is that a commander's main objective is to outmaneuver the other commander. Any PC who is fighting in the battle can only hope to stay alive until the chance to do something useful comes up. Of course, people with some kind of huge advantage in offense could do something useful all the time. By this I mean siege weapons like Warstriders, or powerful Sorcery or Sidereal Martial Arts attacks. Thus, the structure of mass combat will look something like this in my proposed rules:

1. Commanders roll initiative. This will include factors such as command skill and efficiency of communication structure within the army.
2. Commanders issue commands to their armies, which are carried out in the initiative order of the respective commanders. The commanders make rolls for their armies at this time, with stunting based on how effectively their tactics are described, and build up successes in a "tactical advantage" pool. When a side's tactical advantage pool exceeds the other army's pool by a certain amount, that side will gain bonuses as the other side starts losing ground.
3. PCs and NPC heroes in the ranks will have the chance to make their own individual rolls for "advantage." These don't add up a pool, though, they simply determine how well positioned each hero happens to be that turn of the battle.
   1. Primarily, "individual advantage" will determine how much pain comes the way of each character. If they roll better, less random damage will come their way.
      1. Random damage will be soaked as normal, with no parrying or dodging rolls allowed.
      2. Persistent and perfect defenses will be the only defensive charms that matter over the course of an entire battle turn.
         1. Persistent defenses will add an amount to soak equal to the defensive dice pool they grant for one battle turn, since a battle turn lasts about as long as most scenes (20-30 minutes).
         2. Perfect defenses will convert all soak against random damage into Hardness for the battle turn, negating minimum damage as usual. This represents not a single activation of the perfect defense, but more of an abstract application of the perfection of it. The Exalt still only pays for the perfect defense once.
         3. Soak-adding charms only matter if they add it for at least a scene.
   2. Secondarily, "individual advantage" will determine when characters have "heroic opportunities."
      1. "Heroic Opportunities" break the flow of the mass combat turns with individual combat turns, as with the normal rules from the core book.
      2. Depending on stunting by the character and the will of the GM, characters will have different possibilities of what they could do. (Example: Karn the Invincible, Dawn Caste badass, charges ahead of the lesser mortals to engage the enemy forces himself. Entering Fivefold Bulwark Stance, he carves and smashes his way through the foes, heading straight for the enemy's archers. The ST gives him a 1-die stunt and he beats the assigned difficulty on his advantage roll, so he reaches the archers.)
      3. Characters who roll low have the opportunity to try something from a bad position, but nothing useful is usually possible without charms and/or very good stunts.
      4. The results of these heroic stunts add bonuses or penalties to the appropriate armies' commanders, and may directly add or subtract successes from one army or another's Tactical Advantage pool.
4. At the end of each battle turn, each army loses a certain number of troops, based on the difference in Tactical Advantage between competing forces.

As you can see, this is a much more abstract system, which focuses on the unique feats of individual characters, while still making huge masses of people appropriately dangerous. Basically, even with persistent defenses, the law of averages determines that after enough attacks, at least something will make it through. Of course, Heroic Opportunities represent the way a Sidereal Martial Artist might use Uber Godlike Mass Destruction Charm Of Doom to destroy most of an army all at once. I'll be putting actual numbers to this later, when I have time to figure out what would be deadly enough but not too deadly.

Comments

Work in progress... I may or may not continue working on this, depending on whether I can push the idea through to actually revise the Mail and Steel rules this way in ExaltedSecond. - IanPrice