General Exalted Thread

[Segev]

"If you don't have enough soldiers present to require a chain of command to make them usable, you don't have a mass battle" is probably reasonable. This being a thought experiment, it's probably not productive to define things more than is required to discuss the thought experiment.

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Agreed in principle. My concern is whether this line can be sharply enough drawn, because how it's drawn and the sharpness of it may well shape the thought experiment's design.

I'm thinking, bouncing off the terms you used here, that "chain of command" goes straight to unit cohesion. You need an extant chain of command to have a coherent unit; a unit that loses cohesion becomes a collection of individual combatants.

Unless these individuals have the "adapter action" available to them, they cannot participate in mass combat effectively and can be mowed down, captured, or otherwise considered routed and defeated if mass combat units engage them.

This should be true of any individuals confronted with mass combat: they just lose if they cannot use the adapter action.

This does make forcing people into mass combat when they cannot form a chain of command a "win button," though, so care must be taken in allowing such tactics, so "me and my rat" forming a mass combat unit doesn't automatically beat an entire bar full of toughs, even if they have no "leader" and can't cohere into a mass combat unit.

 

[strange_person]

C) Mass combat's context trumps personal combat, and you can enter mass combat with a "military unit" of yourself and your pet rat (insert similarly ridiculously low bar example here of your choice if you don't like the rat), which because of points A and B makes all the other people around you who are built for personal combat rather than mass combat not work, as you can forcibly drag them in, no matter how inappropriate the context.

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Mass combat trumps personal combat in general, but a called shot to initiate a duel puts the larger battle on hold while a personal-scale fight scene is resolved.

So, then, how do we set the criteria for entry "sufficiently high?"

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Magnitude 2. In practical terms, a unit of at least eleven extras, plus the leader. Heroic human-sized characters (including exalts) count as three, and nonheroic named mortals might count as two, so theoretically as little as three heroes and two retainers is sufficient, once they've spent a few days practicing how to march without tripping over those in front or behind, swing without elbowing those beside, communicate efficiently, and so on.

However, if only a single Magnitude 2 unit is present, and has such marginal numbers besides, the mass combat context is extremely fragile, since the slightest hesitation or division could end battle - and scene along with it, including scenelong charms. A group with only bare minimum training and cohesion will have Drill 0, limiting their tactical options and increasing the risk of hesitation further. Harassing fire with missile weapons from extreme range, a lone maniac's hopeless charge, or many other tactics which have, mechanically speaking, no real chance of inflicting appreciable damage on the unit as a whole, could still force a hesitation check and temporary loss of a dot of magnitude, allowing scattered soldiers to then be picked off as individuals in the subsequent personal-scale "battle's aftermath" scene before they can tend their wounds and regroup.

A magnitude 3+ army can endure momentary confusion and rally back to full strength while keeping the pressure on, so really you only need to worry about groups of less than fifty keeping you away from the personal combat rules when they seem exceptionally disciplined, heroic, or simply fearless.

 

[Jon Chung]

Mass combat trumps personal combat in general, but a called shot to initiate a duel puts the larger battle on hold while a personal-scale fight scene is resolved.

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Not if you can't hit, and you can't generally hit something with huge DV bonuses on top of a peer dicepool, which you won't have because your combat ability is now capped by War. This is one of those bits in the game where garbage output is produced if you try to use the mass combat system as-written. You can fix this in various ways, but "do a called shot to get out of mass combat context" isn't a solution without modification. Note the in-game incentive to force every combat into mass combat, preferably in close formation with your pet rat.

Also note the optimal tactic if you allow declaring war and then dissolving your unit to reset the scene and turn off everyone's scenelong charms - it is equally garbage tier.

 

[Phyrexia Unbound]

so theoretically as little as three heroes and two retainers is sufficient,

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So, Monkey, Sandy, Pigsy, Tripitaka and The Horse?

Define retainers out of the four that aren't Sun Wukong as appropriate.

 

[Lioness]

2e had a whole bunch of mechanics that people felt clever for invoking as PCs but got seethingly angry when they were invoked against them.

 

[strange_person]

Not if you can't hit, and you can't generally hit something with huge DV bonuses on top of a peer dicepool. This is one of those bits in the game where garbage output is produced if you try to use the mass combat system as-written. You can fix this in various ways, but "do a called shot to get out of mass combat context" isn't a solution without modification. Note the in-game incentive to force every combat into mass combat, preferably in close formation with your pet rat.

Also note the optimal tactic if you allow declaring war and then dissolving your unit to reset the scene and turn off everyone's scenelong charms - it is equally garbage tier.

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I have already - repeatedly, in fact - described my solution for the basic pet rat problem. By my rules, disbanding your own force only ends the scene of battle if there isn't some other Magnitude 2+ unit still on the field, and is only useful, let alone optimal, if the particular enemy you're fighting has more to lose from seeing their scenelongs deactivated than you do. A Wyld Hunt pursuing the Invincible Sword Princess might quite logically adopt a hit-and-run strategy:
First, engage from a position of surprise, hit hard until she warms up Infinite Melee Mastery (or something else expensive), then scatter.
If she pursues, that becomes a new "chase" scene, perhaps leading her toward some trap to which the shikari's anima power provides immunity.
When she stops to meditate and recover motes, regroup (Wind-Carried Words comes in handy here).
Find the target again before her anima dims below 4-7, rinse and repeat.
ISP might then face interesting tactical and strategic decisions about whether to throw full strength into the current skirmish, or hold back for longer-term advantage at the risk of immediate injury.

As for the general incentive to force mass combat... well, yes. Working as intended. You want to win a serious fight? Bring an army if you can afford one, that's exactly what they're for. If you expect your opponent to also have an army, try to make sure yours is bigger, better, and/or run by someone with more dots in War, and have a few clever plans ready just in case it isn't. When a lone hero is faced with a large and/or competent army led by a peer, they are in very deep trouble. That's why sane people mostly try to avoid violent confrontations where they'll be outnumbered fifty to one! Also, that's how international conflicts can escalate until somebody's economy collapses, which is something Bureaucracy rules need to be able to model.

An exalt or other powerful magical being up against an army led by comparative chumps can probably muscle through the duel-initiating called shot with flurries, excellencies, virtue channels, the long tail of double 10s, etc. but even then there's meant to be some uncertainty to that outcome, a chance of the individually inferior troops dragging the Forsaken down by weight of numbers, action economy and so on. It sounds like some of what you're describing as "garbage output" was actually a cornerstone of the success of the Usurpation.

2e had a whole bunch of mechanics that people felt clever for invoking as PCs but got seethingly angry when they were invoked against them.

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Yep. Full mechanical support for unfair fights cuts both ways. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - 2014-12-25 If no countermeasure exists, or some effect is wildly underpriced compared to options that should be competitive with it, sure, I'll call that a problem to be fixed. The mere existence of nigh-insurmountably lopsided matchups, or advantageous tactics, that make sense from an in-setting perspective? Not so much.

 

[Segev]

Thinking about it last night, I may venture to say Exalted as a setting provides a potential N for minimum force size for mass combat. Not directly, but via a setting convention in the importance on the number 5.

If it takes a minimum of 5 warriors to make a Magnitude 1 unit, we can argue that it avoids the problem of the heap by virtue of the number being selected by in-setting metaphysics.

I further propose that minimum magnitude be determined by powers of five.

Magnitude 2 is 5x5=25.
Magnitude 3 is 5x5x5=125.
Magnitude 4 is 5x5x5x5=625.
Magnitude 5 is 5x5x5x5x5=3125.

You can establish a chain of command by saying that a single person can effectively directly command (Charisma)x(War+1) individuals. Commanding men who are commanding others is how you build up massive armies.

Using the concept of cohesion as a sort of unit hit points, a unit's maximum cohesion is the Magnitude plus the number of guys it has over the minimum for its magnitude rating. Lost cohesion is almost 1:1 a man down, out, or broken. It's new cohesion after losing a magnitude is its maximum possible without going up again, minus the overflow.

This can lead to massive numbers of effective unit hit points at high Magnitude. Probably going to wind up with whatever mechanics determine battle damage between units having some high multipliers for large magnitude.

 

[Segev]

Until the modern age, or at least the widespread deployment of massed infantry with firearms, casualties for a battle might look like 10% for the losers and 2-5% for the winners. Real life isn't total war where defeating huge fractions of the enemy army is the norm. Among other things, the enemy if faced with a choice between fighting to the death and death will tend to choose the latter and such fiercely determined foes will inflict sever casualties on your own force.

The battle of Asculum, where the phrase 'pyrrhic victory' comes from, had the winners suffer less than 9% casualties while the losers suffered 15%.

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Point taken, though I was envisioning the "losses" being more akin to people dropping out of the formation.

That said, representing it as magnitude reduction probably isn't a great mechanism, then, especially with a drop in magnitude being "reduction to 20% of previous size."

 

[Phyrexia Unbound]

Using the concept of cohesion as a sort of unit hit points, a unit's maximum cohesion is the Magnitude plus the number of guys it has over the minimum for its magnitude rating. Lost cohesion is almost 1:1 a man down, out, or broken. It's new cohesion after losing a magnitude is its maximum possible without going up again, minus the overflow.

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You can have a unit with both low morale and low cohesion. These are basically disorganized, dispirited men who would rather be anywhere else, don't care about the fight, and will not hold together or do anything more useful than defend themselves.

You can have a unit that is low morale but high cohesion. Such units will not break easily, but getting them to do much more than hold ground or retreat in an orderly fashion is going to be difficult. They will engage in lackluster proactive attacks and actions, but they will likely hold together even when pulling back from unsuccessful ones.

You can have a unit with high morale and low cohesion. Such units are eager to charge into battle, but don't do so as one. They'll do what you ask: they're excited and eager. But they're more hot-headed individuals who happen to be clustered together than an actual unit supporting each other. If they don't overtake the objective, they'll break rather than retreat in an orderly fashion.

You can have a unit that is high morale and high cohesion. This is the ideal for a commander: his forces will not break, and are eager to act together to do whatever is necessary to win this fight. They'll charge as one, they'll fight fiercly, and they won't be dissociated into easier-to-handle chunklets.

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So 5^Magnitude is a Units Size, Cohesion is its Health and Morale is its Willpower?

 

[Sanctaphrax]

One of the many improvements 3e brought to mass combat was making mass combat and personal combat use the same system. So you don't get those join war shenanigans. A battle group is a battle group, whether it's the sorcerer's bodyguard of eight blood apes or an entire military unit.

 

[Segev]

So 5^Magnitude is a Units Size, Cohesion is its Health and Morale is its Willpower?

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That's about what I'm thinking right now, yeah. I hadn't thought of Morale as Willpower, but that might be a good comparison. I'm not 100% sure I like the magnitude thing, but I'm also hashing out the rough shape to try to see what works and what doesn't right now. It's not a trivial problem.

 

[strange_person]

Isn't it supposed to be, feasible if not trivial, for certain Exalts to win against vastly larger groups of foes? Fivefolk Bulkwark Stance, Protection of Celestial Bliss, Shining Razor Wind (eight charms, 7 BP at chargen) a specialty and a daiklave.

DV 8, 9 with PoCB, never takes attack or onslaught penalties
Base accuracy 17 before excellencies or I(A)M
Base damage 5+Str*2/2 L

And I am sure Jon could produce something better by holding a pen over a paper and letting random muscle twitches automatically write something out.

That DV is more than attack pool for elite soldiers and non-heroic mortals (which all the mooks in the army are) don't double tens. Such people have, roughly, a 1/70 without PoCB and 1/233 with chance of beating the Solar's DV and then they have to beat hardness and soak. (It is much worse for regular troops and can get worse than 1/1000 for green troops/levies/conscripts)

That is before the Solar attacks. They stand a decent chance of killing one person per attack (almost guaranteed for extras).



So approaching this figure is, from the perspective of mortals, suicide. Assuming they don't break and run, running out of time in the day to keep killing is a serious concern. You need supernatural combatants to drag them down.

Note: All this is based on 2E which I am more familiar with.



Until the modern age, or at least the widespread deployment of massed infantry with firearms, casualties for a battle might look like 10% for the losers and 2-5% for the winners. Real life isn't total war where defeating huge fractions of the enemy army is the norm. Among other things, the enemy if faced with a choice between fighting to the death and death will tend to choose the former and such fiercely determined foes will inflict sever casualties on your own force.

The battle of Asculum, where the phrase 'pyrrhic victory' comes from, had the winners suffer less than 9% casualties while the losers suffered 15%.

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Fivefold Bulwark Stance only helps with onslaught and own-action penalties, not penalties for coordinated attacks, or elevation, or the inapplicability associated with an unexpected attack.

Suppose for the sake of argument the opposing army is a mass of fearless, tireless zombies. Whichever zombie is directly behind the solar gets a free shot against DV 0 unless the solar has a surprise-negator, and short of something like Eye of the Unconquered Sun or the capstones of Dreaming Pearl Courtesan or Prismatic Arrangement of Creation styles that's going to cost a mote per swing - and there's no reason for that particular zombie not to use a flurry. My houserules make grappling more survivable, but any enemy with Strength 3+ laying a gripping hand on you still tends to be bad news.

Every time one zombie falls, another steps up to replace it... and by "up" I mean the solar is soon surrounded by a ring of bodies, maybe ten per cubic yard. When the corpse pile is knee-high, that's +1 to the encircling army's DVs and -1 to the solar's. Chest high? Twice that. Too high to see over? Three times, bringing the solar down to DV 6. A ghost-blooded sergeant coordinating five close-combat attacks might cut that all the way down to DV 1, before even considering the stench, or impairment to footwork from slowly sinking into a mud-puddle of putrescent gore, or further distraction from ranged weapons - it's not like they'd be worried about friendly fire.

An army of sufficiently clever and disciplined living soldiers might gain similar tactical advantage with far less senseless destruction of their own side by planting shields or bamboo frames in the ground, standing on each others' shoulders, or some other weird trick the personal combat system doesn't neatly model because it only makes sense in formation fighting rather than wide-open duels.

Each swing of the daiklaive kills at most a single soldier. Time in the day isn't exactly the limiting factor so much as attention, short-term memory. Stage magic often exploits such limits. If you're trying to keep track of each and every soldier as an individual, by the time you fully observe the twelfth you will have partly forgotten the first, even in the unlikely event that they all courteously remain stationary in your field of view to be counted. The Adventures of Dr. McNinja » Archive » 5p33 Heroes are equivalent to multiple extras in part because they're harder to predict, and those possibilities occupy more mental space - for foe and friend alike. That's where War as a capping skill comes in, and inability to hit larger units with single-target effects: need to understand the logic of formations and tactics, so a group can be thought of as a single entity.

However, to stab that whole group at once as a single 'primitive action,' rather than mentally breaking it back apart into a functionally uncountable multitude or pushing through to someone specific, your horde-slayer needs something like Peony Blossom Attack, or better yet Grass-Cutting Strike or Arrow Storm Technique. All of those multi-target attack charms cost motes per use. Or you could just remember to bring some weapons that naturally deal splash damage: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja » Archive » 5p36 though they tend to have their own ammo limits. Each ranged attack on a mass combat timescale usually represents three volleys, consuming a corresponding amount of ammo, so that stash of grenades won't last forever - too costly to replicate with Inexhaustible Bolts of Solar Fire, while those that can (Spirit Weapons or even Golden Artillerist Method) cost motes per use.

It's certainly possible to build an exalt for fighting solo against armies, but nontrivial. Even with that investment there's still an important gap between "hold the line" and "butcher them all" in terms of resources required.

 

[Jon Chung]

I have already - repeatedly, in fact - described my solution for the basic pet rat problem

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Your rules aren't relevant to that post, which was directed at someone asking about the base mass combat system. The pet rat problem is a problem in those rules. You having houserules for your game does not change this.

As for the general incentive to force mass combat... well, yes. Working as intended. You want to win a serious fight? Bring an army if you can afford one, that's exactly what they're for. If you expect your opponent to also have an army, try to make sure yours is bigger, better, and/or run by someone with more dots in War, and have a few clever plans ready just in case it isn't. When a lone hero is faced with a large and/or competent army led by a peer, they are in very deep trouble. That's why sane people mostly try to avoid violent confrontations where they'll be outnumbered fifty to one! Also, that's how international conflicts can escalate until somebody's economy collapses, which is something Bureaucracy rules need to be able to model.

An exalt or other powerful magical being up against an army led by comparative chumps can probably muscle through the duel-initiating called shot with flurries, excellencies, virtue channels, the long tail of double 10s, etc. but even then there's meant to be some uncertainty to that outcome, a chance of the individually inferior troops dragging the Forsaken down by weight of numbers, action economy and so on. It sounds like some of what you're describing as "garbage output" was actually a cornerstone of the success of the Usurpation.

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Not if you can form a mass combat unit and Join War with your pet rat, in which case the scenario isn't "Army of mortals against an Anathema", it's "Anathema with a pet rat against another Anathema winning purely because he declared Join War with his rat, mandating that all Anathema have pet rats and 5 in War to compete". We aren't discussing your rules here, we're discussing the base rules, in which you do not need an army - or anything even remotely close to being something a person would reasonably describe with the word "army" - to invoke mass combat and cause the scene to enter Bizarro World. If this is possible, and by the corebook it is certainly possible and in fact very easy, your game will enter an error state once people start using that fact to win fights.

Yep. Full mechanical support for unfair fights cuts both ways. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - 2014-12-25 If no countermeasure exists, or some effect is wildly underpriced compared to options that should be competitive with it, sure, I'll call that a problem to be fixed. The mere existence of nigh-insurmountably lopsided matchups, or advantageous tactics, that make sense from an in-setting perspective? Not so much.

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See above. Your defense is only valid if you actually need an actual army to enter mass combat, which is not at all what the mass combat rules in the book require.

You are free to propose using your rules as an alternative if the guy ends up feeling the base system isn't fit for purpose, but don't conflate the two.

 

[Jon Chung]

Agreed in principle. My concern is whether this line can be sharply enough drawn, because how it's drawn and the sharpness of it may well shape the thought experiment's design.

I'm thinking, bouncing off the terms you used here, that "chain of command" goes straight to unit cohesion. You need an extant chain of command to have a coherent unit; a unit that loses cohesion becomes a collection of individual combatants.

Unless these individuals have the "adapter action" available to them, they cannot participate in mass combat effectively and can be mowed down, captured, or otherwise considered routed and defeated if mass combat units engage them.

This should be true of any individuals confronted with mass combat: they just lose if they cannot use the adapter action.

This does make forcing people into mass combat when they cannot form a chain of command a "win button," though, so care must be taken in allowing such tactics, so "me and my rat" forming a mass combat unit doesn't automatically beat an entire bar full of toughs, even if they have no "leader" and can't cohere into a mass combat unit.

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I'd actually flip that around and say that the individual combatant context should trump mass combat - you shouldn't get to impose automatically lethal consequences on the hero unit by engaging them with a mass combat unit, all that should happen in this case is you enter a combat scene with as many individual soldiers as the GM is willing to run at a time. The "adapter action" should probably be for engaging with mass combat entities in mass combat as a mass combat entity.

For really obvious reasons - the very first thing you'd get otherwise is a player revolt where they go "look, these extras have a 0.02% chance of hitting me and I have Hundred Paces Reaper Decapitation Slash which does exactly what it says, why the fuck am I dead?" and the only response the GM can give is "Derp, these are stupid rules".

 

[strange_person]

we're discussing the base rules, in which you do not need an army - or anything even remotely close to being something a person would reasonably describe with the word "army" - to invoke mass combat and cause the scene to enter Bizarro World. If this is possible, and by the corebook it is certainly possible and in fact very easy,

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Do you have an actual citation for that, or are you simply assuming that anything not explicitly and unambiguously forbidden is permitted?

 

[Jon Chung]

Do you have an actual citation for that, or are you simply assuming that anything not explicitly and unambiguously forbidden is permitted?

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If the book tells me I can Join War to enter mass combat context, that mass combat context trumps personal combat context and places no restrictions on me with regard to calling Join War, I am going to Join War whenever it's tactically advantageous for me to do so, yes. Let's flip that around. Give me a citation that forbids me from doing Join War if I don't have a Magnitude 2 or above unit.

The guy deserves to know this, yes? Not knowing it and having a player who figures this out can lead to an error state, we do not want error states in our tabletop games.

 

[Sucal]

Do you have an actual citation for that, or are you simply assuming that anything not explicitly and unambiguously forbidden is permitted?

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It's like MDV Fist

 

[strange_person]

If the book tells me I can Join War to enter mass combat context, that mass combat context trumps personal combat context and places no restrictions on me with regard to calling Join War, I am going to Join War whenever it's tactically advantageous for me to do so, yes. Let's flip that around. Give me a citation that forbids me from doing Join War if I don't have a Magnitude 2 or above unit.

The guy deserves to know this, yes? Not knowing it and having a player who figures this out can lead to an error state, we do not want error states in our tabletop games.

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Although it is theoretically possible to run a combat with dozens or even hundreds of active participants, such battles last interminably and quickly stop being fun. As a result, Exalted uses the following rules to abstract mass combat into the existing system by making battle a clash of units rather than individual characters. Units do not fight in the standard one-tick increments of individual battle. Instead, they track time with long ticks that last approximately one minute each. Storytellers should keep in mind that these rules aren't appropriate to every engagement, particularly if the clash of armies only serves as a dramatic backdrop to smaller-scale personal combat. Once protagonists become involved in the direction of mass combat or the Storyteller wishes to leave a battle's outcome to dice rolls and strategy rather than a plot device, use these rules.

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Emphasis added. As further support, this passage:

It would be more efficient to field much smaller units, but the communication and combat-space imaging resources of the Second Age don't permit effective management of armies that consist of dozens of Magnitude 2 units.

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and the rest of the sidebar it's excerpted from make it clear the sort of scales mass combat is meant to handle, including singling out Magnitude 2, rather than 1, as the point of diminishing returns for splitting up an army into smaller independent units.

Allowing an otherwise simple bar brawl or pokemon-trainer challenge to be treated as mass combat just because someone technically managed to "assemble a Magnitude 1 unit" is the true cause of the errors you describe. Follow that mass combat section intro's explicit instructions by forbidding it, draw the line at Magnitude 2 instead (do I need to quote the storyteller advice about clear and consistent rulings, too?), problem goes away.

 

[Jon Chung]

Allowing an otherwise simple bar brawl or pokemon-trainer challenge to be treated as mass combat just because someone technically managed to "assemble a Magnitude 1 unit" is the true cause of the errors you describe. Follow that mass combat section intro's explicit instructions by forbidding it, draw the line at Magnitude 2 instead (do I need to quote the storyteller advice about clear and consistent rulings, too?), problem goes away.

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This passage simply establishes the rationale for why a mass combat system might be required and gives a recommendation to the GM regarding when he should use it lest he be overwhelmed by the overhead of running a combat involving too many individual entities. This doesn't constitute a prohibition on using it in the case of a player managing to assemble a Mag 1 unit out of himself and his pet rat, or a Mag 2 unit out of himself and his battle buddy and declaring Join War - doing so is a mechanically legal action.

What I was looking for was something along the lines of "You may not invoke the Join War action if the total number of combat participants in the scene does not reach the threshold of Magnitude X. The mass combat context never applies to a combat involving less than this number of participants. It is never valid to use the mass combat rules outside an actual mass battle. Err on the side of 'not' if it ever becomes ambiguous whether a given scene is a mass battle or not, because the purpose of the mass combat system is to reduce GM workload; not enable exploitative combat tactics."

I'll use a similar situation to illustrate: the rules for social combat allow 1-success NMI hits to compel the target to do anything that isn't suicide or contradictory to their Motivation. You may force the target to spend Willpower until they are completely out and can no longer resist or invoke the paranoia combo, so you may then proceed to kill or enslave them without resistance. The GM is certainly able to realise that this is something that shouldn't be happening and should be able to stop it with their common sense, but if the system allows it to happen anyway it remains the system's problem. No amount of GM advice in the ST chapter changes this.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

I'd actually flip that around and say that the individual combatant context should trump mass combat - you shouldn't get to impose automatically lethal consequences on the hero unit by engaging them with a mass combat unit, all that should happen in this case is you enter a combat scene with as many individual soldiers as the GM is willing to run at a time. The "adapter action" should probably be for engaging with mass combat entities in mass combat as a mass combat entity.

For really obvious reasons - the very first thing you'd get otherwise is a player revolt where they go "look, these extras have a 0.02% chance of hitting me and I have Hundred Paces Reaper Decapitation Slash which does exactly what it says, why the fuck am I dead?" and the only response the GM can give is "Derp, these are stupid rules".

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I mean the sort of simple way to deal with 'mass combat' is to make having a superior army give you better environmental conditions rather than act as the primary form of resolution (and make sure that Charms which negate these advantages are expensive as hell and difficult to get, so that even negating the existence of an enemy army is going to mean that you're doing a thing which can backfire on you and get exploited). If you have a pile of mans, and they have a pile of mans, you inherit combat-related bonuses from the pile of mans you're dealing with. It might give you reflexive attacks, let you throw a bunch of mooks into the path of an attack to protect yourself, whatever.

It honestly would have worked better as a 'cinematic' sort of mass combat thing where the large army is just there to show that the big bad means business, which is kind of fitting for the scale Exalted are sort of implied to work at? Armies are helpful but you don't send them unsupported against Exalts. Yes, it means that all good generals should also be good duelists, but...

...that's basically 100% in-theme for Exalted's inspirations.

 

[Jon Chung]

I mean the sort of simple way to deal with 'mass combat' is to make having a superior army give you better environmental conditions rather than act as the primary form of resolution (and make sure that Charms which negate these advantages are expensive as hell and difficult to get, so that even negating the existence of an enemy army is going to mean that you're doing a thing which can backfire on you and get exploited). If you have a pile of mans, and they have a pile of mans, you inherit combat-related bonuses from the pile of mans you're dealing with. It might give you reflexive attacks, let you throw a bunch of mooks into the path of an attack to protect yourself, whatever.

It honestly would have worked better as a 'cinematic' sort of mass combat thing where the large army is just there to show that the big bad means business, which is kind of fitting for the scale Exalted are sort of implied to work at? Armies are helpful but you don't send them unsupported against Exalts. Yes, it means that all good generals should also be good duelists, but...

...that's basically 100% in-theme for Exalted's inspirations.

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That would work. I wouldn't have a problem playing with that. You do lose the "your golden god-king can be shanked to death by a rusty shiv if you screwed up" bit, but I've actually started to think trying to keep that in leads to more mechanical problems than it's worth in cool thematics.

 

[strange_person]

You know perfectly well almost nothing in 2e is written with anywhere near the level of rigor you're demanding. That's exactly why I'm going through clarifying things - first you wish me good luck, then you scornfully dismiss that project as irrelevant? By the book, use of the mass combat system is not appropriate even when real armies are present, if (ultimately at the ST's sole discretion) they're just a backdrop to the primary conflict. I am providing thoroughly researched advice to guide that ST discretion, a metric system to define "kilogram" in place of "heap," clearing out or at least flagging that minefield you've complained about for... what, more than a decade now? Please don't follow me around reinstalling mines out of spiteful nostalgia.

You may force the target to spend Willpower until they are completely out

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This is blatantly false. In 2.0 natural mental influence cannot cost more than two willpower per scene. With the 2.5 "errata," spending willpower to resist NMI just once (though it might cost up to five, with enough threshold successes) makes you immune to further social attacks from the same source for the rest of the scene, improves defenses against others, and combos don't automatically require willpower anymore regardless.

I mean the sort of simple way to deal with 'mass combat' is to make having a superior army give you better environmental conditions rather than act as the primary form of resolution (and make sure that Charms which negate these advantages are expensive as hell and difficult to get, so that even negating the existence of an enemy army is going to mean that you're doing a thing which can backfire on you and get exploited). If you have a pile of mans, and they have a pile of mans, you inherit combat-related bonuses from the pile of mans you're dealing with. It might give you reflexive attacks, let you throw a bunch of mooks into the path of an attack to protect yourself, whatever.

It honestly would have worked better as a 'cinematic' sort of mass combat thing where the large army is just there to show that the big bad means business, which is kind of fitting for the scale Exalted are sort of implied to work at? Armies are helpful but you don't send them unsupported against Exalts. Yes, it means that all good generals should also be good duelists, but...

...that's basically 100% in-theme for Exalted's inspirations.

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How about bonuses to attack and damage based on the average combat stats and magical powers of the "pile of mans" you're leading, bonus soak based on their armor, extra health levels to represent them jumping in the way of attacks, and an attack/defense modifier based on relative numbers that works sorta like the rules for high ground? If that sounds good to you, congratulations, you've reinvented the wheel! Existing system already has all that. Even reflexive attacks, more or less, just by filling special character slots with heroes and/or sorcerers.

 

[Jon Chung]

You know perfectly well almost nothing in 2e is written with anywhere near the level of rigor you're demanding. That's exactly why I'm going through clarifying things - first you wish me good luck, then you scornfully dismiss that project as irrelevant?

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I'm wishing you good luck with having to go through and change all the Charms. This is, to me, crazy, because it does not allow me to get something of suitable quality in play in a reasonable amount of time. If you don't think that's crazy, that's your call and I'm not going to tell you to stop. Maybe you have a different conception of "suitable quality" or "reasonable amount of time", or you're doing it for fun for its own sake rather than to have a playable table ruleset you can use within the next few weeks, again, that's your call.

I have no reason to hope you will fail, so I genuinely wish you good luck, but I equally genuinely don't think you'll succeed (going off my personal metrics for 'succeeds' as stated above, which I set myself when I tried to rewrite Exalted 2). I'm bringing up the thought experiment about decoupling because IMO that approach is more likely to succeed.

By the book, use of the mass combat system is not appropriate even when real armies are present, if (ultimately at the ST's sole discretion) they're just a backdrop to the primary conflict. I am providing thoroughly researched advice to guide that ST discretion, a metric system to define "kilogram" in place of "heap," clearing out or at least flagging that minefield you've complained about for... what, more than a decade now? Please don't follow me around reinstalling mines out of spiteful nostalgia.

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You are quoting GM advice. GM advice is not hard rules, no matter how strongly worded. Anything I had to do to fix a systemic problem with the use of GM authority still leaves me with a systemic problem. Like, if you go "I think you're pulling my fucking leg trying to declare Join War with your pet rat, so I forbid you to do that" that is the absolutely correct call for you to make as the GM running that game to prevent said game from going off the rails, but it's still got nothing to do with the fact that the Join War action has no meaningful mechanical restrictions.

To use the minefield analogy, the fact that the book itself contains a warning such that the metaphorical mine is not concealed but illuminated with flashing danger lights doesn't particularly matter, it's still a mine which shouldn't be there. Less dangerous than a hidden one, but still a live explosive device.

This is blatantly false. In 2.0 natural mental influence cannot cost more than two willpower per scene. With the 2.5 "errata," spending willpower to resist NMI just once (though it might cost up to five, with enough threshold successes) makes you immune to further social attacks from the same source for the rest of the scene, improves defenses against others, and combos don't automatically require willpower anymore regardless.

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Wrong, you can stunt to change the subject to bypass immunity, it's not blanket immunity but subject-specific. Start by compelling them to do something they absolutely will not do (based on what you've learned about them through other means) twice, force them to spend two Willpower, stunt to change the subject to something equally abhorrent but not related to the prior subject, repeat until target is zeroed. The only legal defense against this outside Charms is to call Join Battle and try to kill them the moment you realise they can beat your MDDV. The existence of this trick is why the 2.5 errata contains that new section about being immune to a source.

This is rules-legal but will almost certainly be shut down by a decent GM with GM authority for being blatantly exploitative. What I keep pointing out here is that the GM's ability to use their authority to shut down an abusive usage of the rules does not absolve the system for allowing it to happen in the first place. If I talk about rules problems, I am explicitly excluding GM actions, because the reason I point out rules problems is that every rules problem that the GM solves with GM authority is using up a limited resource (GM attention) that should be allocated to doing things that only the GM can do as opposed to patching mechanical holes.

If it helps to frame this, think of everything I point out as happening under adverse QA test conditions, rather than the happy path where the user does everything right. If you, the user, are going to do everything right because you know about all the mines beforehand, you don't need to listen to me.

Oh, since you brought this up earlier, my spite meter gains spite whenever I, the GM, had to use my limited time/attention resource to patch mechanical holes rather than think up cool NPCs or geek out over what I think the geopolitical equilibrium of the Scavenger Lands will look like after my players' Solar Circle knocks over Denandsor. It gained a lot of charge, so I'm afraid it leaks a bit.

 

[strange_person]

So your last resort here is that instructions on when to use the mass combat system, from the chapter covering all the game mechanics, can't possibly be considered part of the game mechanics, nor provide consistent, meaningful insight into when the mass combat system should or should not be used.

In your opinion, if the magnitude-based cutoff I'm proposing were an official rule, would it actually solve the problem, or are there important edge cases still uncovered?

Rewriting the entire back catalog isn't strictly necessary for the game to be playable. So far, approval, denial, or revision is proceeding as players express interest in particular charms.

The only legal defense against this outside Charms is to call Join Battle and try to kill them the moment you realise they can beat your MDDV.

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Odysseus had his crew stop up their ears with wax. In mechanical terms that would be a Poison-keyword effect (foreign object, rather than Crippling for damage to the body) causing deafness, making auditory influence impossible. Probably doable as a miscellaneous action, if you've already got earplugs or suitable gummy stuff on hand. Dashing away beyond shouting distance is pointed out as an option in the actual mechanics.

 

[Jon Chung]

So your last resort here is that instructions on when to use the mass combat system, from the chapter covering all the game mechanics, can't possibly be considered part of the game mechanics, nor provide consistent, meaningful insight into when the mass combat system should or should not be used.

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Such advice is helpful but doesn't actually solve the problem, yes. Take one of the Scroll of the Monk infinite mote effects, for example - there's probably something in a GM chapter somewhere exhorting the GM to not drop invincible fuckers on your PCs because they'll die and your game will explode, but that has nothing to do with the problem of those effects existing.

I don't want "Storytellers should keep in mind that these rules aren't appropriate to every engagement", it isn't exploit-proof and offloads work onto the GM. As the GM, I resent having to do extra work. I do want "You may not declare Join War unless you are leading an army of Magnitude X", because that is clear, unambiguous and does not generate work.

In your opinion, if the magnitude-based cutoff I'm proposing were an official rule, would it actually solve the problem, or are there important edge cases still uncovered?

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More or less, yes. I would say that Mag 2 is too low a cutoff and would push for higher, and/or that the Mag calculation be changed to rely purely on unit count and not health levels, in order to prevent exploitative use of the mass combat system by small numbers of people who are not engaging in an actual mass combat. How I would write such a rule is already posted a couple exchanges up on this page.

My reasoning is that the case we are trying to avoid here with this rule is exploitative behaviour where the player may give themselves a nonsensical combat advantage by forcing what should normally be a personal combat encounter into mass combat, therefore the cutoff should be set high enough that a reasonable player should in all cases agree that a mass combat is actually a mass combat when Join War is declared. Mag 2 is too low for this, as with health levels counting for Mag you can do this with two people with enough Ox Body. Even the book thinks the appropriate point should be at least dozens, not two people.

Rewriting the entire back catalog isn't strictly necessary for the game to be playable. So far, approval, denial, or revision is proceeding as players express interest in particular charms.

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You probably want to solve the conceptual AoE/morale problem sooner rather than later, even doing things this way. Has any of your players tried to buy Death of Obsidian Butterflies yet?

Odysseus had his crew stop up their ears with wax. In mechanical terms that would be a Poison-keyword effect (foreign object, rather than Crippling for damage to the body) causing deafness, making auditory influence impossible. Probably doable as a miscellaneous action, if you've already got earplugs or suitable gummy stuff on hand. Dashing away beyond shouting distance is pointed out as an option in the actual mechanics.

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Well, if you identify that someone is trying this trick on you, it's a perfectly reasonable, rational decision to kill them, right? After all, they're hitting you with something that is doing concrete lifebar damage, heh.