Fate and Mass Battles

So, yesterday was the first real playtest of the Warfare mini-game in Wrath of the Autarch.  It went about how all the other mini-games went when I first played them: a mixed bag.  In this mission, the players mustered their (pretty crappy) troops to withstand an attack from a limited strength Autarch force.

I went for a more Diaspora-like model of platoon combat as my basis, rather than something like the abstract model that Legends of Anglerre has.  My desire was to fight out units moving around zones, rather than having whole armies roll against each other.  There are many ways to do it, but that level of detail fits better with the rest of the missions already in place.

The narrative phase went well - but no rules have changed there for quite some time.  There were some cool scenes involving leaders from Bavin's Hollow (the Stronghold the players have created) pleading with some local farmers to get out of the path of the oncoming Imperial army.  I compelled one of the players to play to her character's nature and contradict what the other heroes were trying to do.

The Warfare mini-game, though, was a little slow and involved.  I think the mustering the troops went fine (that was pretty easy), and I had drawn out the zone map ahead of time.  But, there were a few issues that I've thought about this evening, and hopefully can resolve before the next playtest of this mini-game.

• The map was too big.  I had too many zones on the map, it was about 8 X 6 (in zones).  Of course, zones aren't grids, but that's still roughly how it was shaped.  That was too many zones.  The units moved too slow, and there was too much down time before it really clashed.  You need more zones than Skirmish (which only has four or five or so), but that was too many.
• A few of the players felt like their heroes didn't have enough options.  In particular, they wanted their bad-ass fighter heroes to be able to do bad-ass fighty stuff.  As it stood now - leaders (commanders of units), could Create an Advantage (makes aspects), Overcome Obstacles (remove them - or get around various static obstacles), or redeploy units under their command.
• Looking back, we weren't creative enough in the creation of aspects.  For instance, it's feasible a warrior could create an aspect which would demoralize an opposing unit simply by wading in and attacking.
• The players were interested in having the ability to attack a leader of the opposing force.  I'm not against this - so I'll probably put it in the rules.
• Too much Create an Advantage can slow things down.  This is sort of a byproduct of the previous issue.  The other mini-games have more options for the characters.  Most of them have a choice of Attack/Create an Advantage/Overcome Obstacle.  Because attack was gone (at least as it pertains to leaders) - that made it drag.
• I'm not sold on rolling for movement.  In Diaspora, each platoon rolls for movement.  In Fate as well, during Conflicts.  For this mini-game, though, it didn't seem to matter much.  It seems like a roll means you can spend Fate points.  But it felt like a lot of rolling for not that much benefit.  I'm thinking of just saying a leader and commanded units can move some base amount - depending on the slowest unit they command.

Those were the main issues.  That battle of itself, which I thought was going to be *very* lopsided, was closer than I anticipated.  The heroes, although they just had poorly trained militia on their side, also had some pretty serious spell power (it's one of their main focuses), and that helped tremendously.

So, it was interesting to see in action, but I have some work to do to make it come together a little better.