Mass Combat 2 - A Question of Scale

Miniature figures can challenge
even the greatest minds

Scale is something that has to be grappled with, or at least decided on when dealing with mass combat - scale of time as well as distances. D&D and then AD&D used a multi-purpose system based on ignoring the gameworld measurements and instead concentrating on the size of things on the table in front of the players, measured in literal inches as measured with a ruler or tape-measure by the DM. Sounds good, but somehow it all became a little tricky...

One of my most common arguments with other D&Ders is the question of whether one increases the size of area effect spells when using the outdoor ground scale or not. Basically, I say you do and everyone else says you don't. Luckily for me, they're wrong. Which is also lucky for you if you're interested in mass combat with D&D monsters and spells because it eliminates a load of pointless calculations.

The main cause of the arguments is the badly worded section in the PHB on the topic (p39):

Magic and spells ore, most certainly, devices of the game. In order to make them fit the constrictions of the underground labyrinth, a one for three reduction is necessary. It would be folly, after all, to try to have such as effective attack modes if feet were not converted to yards outdoors, where visibility, movement, and conventional weapons attack ranges are based on actual fact. (See MOVEMENT.)

Distance scale and areas of effect for spells (and missiles) are designed to fit the game, The tripling of range outdoors is reasonable, as it allows for recreation of actual ranges for hurled javelins, arrows fired from longbows, or whatever. In order to keep magic spells on a par, their range is also tripled. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT OUTDOOR SCALE BE USED FOR RANGE ONLY, NEVER FOR SPELL AREA OF EFFECT (which is kept at 1” = 10’) UNLESS A FIGURE RATIO OF 1 :10 OR 1 :20 (1 casting equals 10 or 20 actual creatures or things in most cases) IS USED, AND CONSTRUCTIONS SUCH AS BUILDINGS, CASTLES, WALLS, ETC. ARE SCALED TO FIGURES RATHER THAN TO GROUND SCALE. Note that the foregoing assumes that a ground scale of 1” to 10 yards is used.

Of course, sometimes the players
will enjoy using the wrong scale

The text is, in fact, a slightly modified extract from an extended piece on the subject in issue #15 of The Dragon where Gygax ponders the question of scales in June of '78, a couple of years after the publication of the final D&D supplement: Swords & Spells, which was a mass-combat system

He rightly puts his finger on the fact that for mass combat, ground scale is the most important issue as the players will be constrained by physical space and that time scale is affected by ground scale insofar that movement must be noticeable. He does make some assumptions about what the reader already understands, however, and never fully explains the reason behind the use of "inches" and D&D.

He also assumes a rather generous 5'x10' playing surface—much larger than most people have today—and picks a scale that makes that equal to 600 yards by 1200 which he takes as a typical battlefield for mediæval combat. Now, when one inch on the table represents 10 yards in the game world (1:360 scale), then a round must be a minute to give reasonable movement rates, where "reasonable" means easily handled by a typical ruler of 12" length. Since the ruler and the table are taken to be fixed sizes, there is a direct relationship between ground scale and time scale; double one and you must double the other or units will be making tiny movements.

Taking the outdoor ground and time scales to be 1":30' and 1rnd=60 seconds this means that the indoor ground scale of 1"=10 feet (1:120 scale), requires a round of 20s to give reasonable open-air movement rates. The important thing is that a fighter makes an attack every round and everyone can only make a charge movement once in ten rounds and so on, all while a combat can be contained on the table in front of the players.

Now, an underground round is not 20s long, of course, it is in fact still a full minute. There's two reasons for that and one of them is the question of moving about in dark corridors with slippery or rotten floors with the chance of sudden ambush around every bend. The other reason—magic— is more problematical and I'll deal with it below.

A significant presence

Next we enter the rabbit hole as Gygax raises the issue of figure scale. If 1"=10yards, then you can get a lot of people into that. With spears or other thrusting weapons, a 10 yard line might take 16 men standing shoulder to shoulder and each being backed by another 16, for 256 men in that one inch. This is very dense packing of the sort probably only encountered in special formations like Alexandrian pike phalanxes or Roman shield tortoises, but that's okay, really. Most figures have slightly smaller bases than that but then they are normally taken as representing 20 men. Except, this is fantasy and a single person can be a massively significant presence on the field of battle and therefore require their own figure.

Life being what it is, the figures used in D&D, Chainmail and other table-top games are all a certain size, and don't come with tiny versions to represent individuals. So, the idea was introduced of using some figures to represent player characters and important NPCs while some other figures the same size represent 10, 20, or 100 people. This was not a good move at all and led directly to the text in the PHB quoted above.

In short, the problem becomes one of spell effects. A spell effect is given in inches as normal for movement and weapon range. So long as the target(s) are/is in the same scale, that's fine. But what happens if the spell, say fireball or flame strike, or even bless land on a group of six figures that represent, not 120 orcs but 6 PCs. Well, Fig-1 shows how this plays out - first the party in marching order (each grid line is 1"), then a fireball is "called" and lands on the Reverend Bill's head.

At first glance, it doesn't look too bad for the party - Villa's safe and Corry and Fred will be saving for half or no damage as they are mostly outside of the fireball's area.

But this is all wrong. That fireball is 4" wide, as required by the PHB, but that's 40 yards wide. On the scale of these figures that... Well, actually it's hard to know what that is. A figure base of 1" is typical of 25-30mm figures, which is roughly 1"=6' (1:72 scale) or 1"=5' (1:60 scale). Taking the latter, as that's currently popular and it's easy to work with, the fireball is now a measly 20' wide in relation to the party. That's not right. The book says that the fireball even in indoor mode should be 40' wide, or twice the size it is here. Villa should be fried with the rest of them.

Well, okay, then, we'll stick with that. But what if the party are near some troops? Now the scale only works part way (fig-2) and we have a problem: if the party's figure/indoor scale is used (i.e., an 8" fireball on the tabletop, the outer circle) then not only the party but all the 120 goblins are turned into leather armour pop-tarts. But a fireball scaled to the goblin's outdoor scale (the inner circle) would have, if centred on the cleric, completely missed them all. And neither circle is even the "official" indoor scale of 1"=10', which would be a third circle bid-way between the other two, again affecting the goblins incorrectly. What a mess.

Transferring the indoor scale to the battlefield leads to the problem which Gygax says in the Dragon article was pointed out by none other than Len Lakofka:

"A huge area can be covered with webs from a lowly magic-user’s second level spell. Of course this is ridiculous, as the 1" = 10 yards scale only applies in cases where all other scales are in proportion."

Which is what we see here with the fireball. This quote sums the problem up but also gives the correct answer at the same time - keep all the scales in proportion. Don't use a separate figure scale in the first place! If you do, you will have headaches; no one wants to have to deal with this crap during a game.

The text in the Players Handbook tries to say this, but fluffs it. It should, for clarity, instead read (my addition in bold): "IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT OUTDOOR SCALE BE USED FOR RANGE ONLY, NEVER FOR SPELL AREA OF EFFECT UNLESS A FIGURE RATIO OF 1 :10 OR 1 :20  IS USED FOR ALL FIGURES".

This means that a single figure or counter is used for a group of PCs, just as it is for a group of orcs, goblins, or knights. This allows us to represent the area of effects consistently as shown as the still unnumbered fig-3 at left where we can clearly see that no goblins were harmed in the production of this diagram.

The crucial factor in all this is that miniature figures are three-dimensional and therefore very hard to overlap. In fact, instead of replacing the party with a single token, we could mostly solve the problem by allowing units to stack.

Stacking also allows us to eliminate the need for different sized tokens for different sized creatures—Swords and Spells uses ⅝" wide stands for humans and 1⅜" wide ones for ogres, trolls, and some horse units. We can instead simply adjust the maximum number of individuals represented by a token or counter. So, if a 1" counter could normally represent 100 men, it can only represent up to 45 horses, say.

Since an individual counter can represent from 1 to 100 or more individuals, it may seem that the DM must have a system for judging the actual placement of those individuals within the area covered by the counter. I personally have never found this necessary and the normal D&D 1" melee-range fuzziness generally covers all rationalizations, at least when the counters are 1" or less in size.

A New Type of Encumbrance (goody).

If the DM keeps an idea of a "stacking limit" in their head, things start to work quite smoothly. Taking 100 men as the normal limit in a 1" square, we can count a centaur as 2 men and say that a counter of 25 men and one of 37 centaurs can stack together and still move normally (other issues, such as facing and formation will have to wait for a future post); if we allow over-stacking to, say, 250 men in a square then we can penalize them for movement as they are perforce moving in a tight formation. The DM can regulate this as s/he sees fit, but it means that it's allowable to have working units of mixed fire giants and hell-hounds, for example.

"This is all jolly interesting, isn't it, Frodo?"
"Strictly's on soon; can we go?"

Magic Problems
I said that magic is one of the things that undermines the idea of completely abstract ground scale adjustments. The reason is that such ground scale adjustments logically require time scale adjustments, as mentioned above. But the players are told in the PHB that a casting time of one round represents a minute and a segment 6 seconds and this runs counter to the intent of the system.

That intent is that a game can be played in a balanced way regardless of how much space the players have to work with. A fireball's width is always a third of an unencumbered human's move rate; walls of force and thorns always represent the same level of obstacle, and charging units are always exposed to ranged fire for the same number of turns. Realism is completely ignored for the same of playability at scales other than 1:360.

Of course, you can scale a fireball up too far

This even works for fighters because we know that to-hit rolls are not made for every single blow; with a different time scale we just gloss over the fact that by the clock the combatants are getting more rolls, the important thing is that they get the same number of rolls per round.

Same for spell-like powers...can you see the problem? If spellcasters are taking a set time to cast spells, then the abstraction breaks and spell-like powers become disproportionately strong compared to real spells. This can, obviously, be fixed by simply ignoring the casting-time to real-time linkage, and that can be fun, but many players will find this hard to swallow, I have found.

There is a further problem, and that is missile (and spell) ranges which have to be "topped out" so that at large scales thieves are not throwing daggers half a mile, but that's much easier to accept than fiddling with time for various reasons.

Counters
In the next post I'll put up some software for making double-sided counters (one side is full strength, the other half strength).

Beauty is in the Die of the Beholder

If your looks are holding you back,
Get some armour and a small
European country and you'll soon
be beating them off with a stick.
Or a death ray, as the case may be.

D&D had charisma as an "ability" from the start and from that start, the lack of appearance was noted by players, DMs, and adventure writers alike. The idea that charisma subsumed appearance never worked for a moment with anyone I knew and it's still a pretty laughable idea; just talk to a good-looking 18-year-old sometime and test it out.

So, when it was added in UA it should have been good news, surely? All those succubi could be stated out sensibly without giving them huge loyalty bonuses; and handsome rangers could set hearts aflutter across the boarder lands while good-looking rogues could wile their way into the confidences of women without being automatically regarded well by everyone around them.

Yeah, well. You know; didn't work out that way. I think like many others I rejected some aspects out of hand but a recent discussion on DF made me wonder if it was worth surveying it again with a more detached view compared to the exciting days of holding a new AD&D hardback in my hands.

Firstly, there was the name. "Comeliness" is not a neutral word, nor is it an elegant one for the concept. "Appearance" is much better and has the virtue of not abbreviating to something that starts with "Co". Just a plain stupid choice, which I suspect was driven by pride - Gygax simply couldn't admit that so many rival games which had used "Appearance" for years had been right.

Second problem, and the main thing I want to post about: comeliness grants a special power of fascination for the higher scores. Which sounds oookayish, except that "high" starts at 14 in a game which suggested that all player characters should have two scores of 15 or more. So, 14 isn't that impressive sounding to the players.

Heroes are just different.
(click to enlarge and read 2nd paragraph)

But player characters are special. For the bulk of the population, 15 is the highest score they can have and that's only as common as 18 is when rolling 3d6. Combined with a 15 charisma, for a +1 bonus, the best a normal person can hope for is a comeliness of 16. At the other end of the scale, the lowest score possible is 5 - "simply ugly".

In the context of the rules, the 1-in-46656 village heart-breaker is only able to use the fascination power on people with a wisdom score of 8 or less, which sounds fine, really, and probably more of a nuisance than a boon.

But PCs are not normal people and they can have the full range of comeliness from -2 to 21 (-5 to 23 with inter-racial modifiers) and the effects of the fascination are greater as the numbers climb, and not just in proportion.

A character with comeliness of 17 can still only fascinate creatures with wisdom of 8 and under, but with a score of 18 that jumps to 12 for the opposite sex (and starts to work on the same sex, albeit at a lower strength).

The next step up is at a score of 22, which is just about reachable for elves dealing with humans although it would be so incredibly rare as to be insignificant if scores were being generated randomly. While the wisdom score affected remains at ⅔ of comeliness (14 or under at this level), a new power has appeared which means that if such an attractive being actively attempts to seduce a character then they must have a wisdom of 18+ to resist being fascinated.

Fools in love

Strictly speaking, the maximum score is 25 like any other ability, available to a CHA-19+ with a base 18 comeliness and a couple of points inter-racial bonus. The rules however give details for scores up to 30 presumably in the expectation of them being used for an updated Deities and Demigods or something similar. I'm going to ignore this category for now.

In parallel with the fascination power, the new rules say that reaction rolls are modified. Firstly, it seems that ugly characters (scores under 10) simply get a negative reaction. Does this mean no roll is made? Who knows?

For mildly attractive characters in the 14-17 range, the reaction roll is still made and increased by the comeliness score; at 18-21 this is increased to 1½ times the score and at 22 and up the modification is a whopping 2x the score. So that's at least +44%! To put that into context, that on its own is enough to leave just a 1% chance of a reaction below "neutral" and an 88% chance of a positive reaction.

"On its own". Well, is it? Because such a character almost certainly has a high charisma too, which also has a reaction bonus. Combining them simply breaks the system.

On top of that, there's the question of when do the comeliness effects actually apply? Plainly, not while in full plate armour with the visor down. What about when wearing a veil or mask? This is where comeliness gets tricky, because it's in actual play when players want to use or manipulate their comeliness that questions like this come up.

"And where do you keep
your spellbooks, Merlin?"
"Oh, come on! That's got to
be worth +4 at least!"

Leaving that aside for a moment, there is some interesting material in the explanation of the fascinate power. The first one being the saving throw against being manipulated - roll 3d6 and try to exceed the comeliness score in question. Bonuses are given for being asked to do things against one's nature (with +3 or +4 suggested for alignment-changing requests).

Any successful save against the fascination power breaks it permanently. I think this is something that's often overlooked when judging the effect of this power in the game. Until scores get really high, it is reasonably possible to break free quite quickly.

There's also a note about how shape-changing magic works and in particular a mention of polymorphing only allowing a modification of 2 from the figure's original score due to "subtle social clues", which offers a possible solution to the question of hidden faces.

Finally, the whole shebang is modified when dealing across races - and in the special case of drow, across sexes too. Essentially, all the demi-humans and humans are divided into classes and given a modifier for when dealing with others. There are some groupings within these classes whereby two races see each other without modifiers. For example, all races see the grey elves and high elves as having +2 to their comeliness but they do not get the bonus when dealing with each other.

There's an odd note about humans and halflings being paired this way, but since both have a zero modifier it makes no difference anyway.

Drow females get +1 to comeliness from other races, including drow males; drow females view drow males as having a -1 penalty. Which is quirky and quite good, or at least as close to good as anything about the done-to-death clichéd tedium that the drow represent ever gets.

Complicating this further is a note in UA for comeliness of 7-9 which implies that the modifier due to charisma is not received when dealing with other races. Perhaps this is another of those cases where subtle social clues leave the viewer none the wiser about what makes a particular dwarf or elf more beautiful or, as I believe, it's just a mistake in the text. I suspect the idea was to point out that dwarves have a maximum charisma of 16 to non-dwarves and do not get a bonus for higher charisma in those cases.

Evil is as Evil Seems
Did I say "finally"?  I lied. Most of the above is about high comeliness and there is a quirk of low comeliness which reflects some mediaeval views on the subject of beauty (which were themselves rather muddled). Ugly evil creatures are, apparently, seen as beautiful by evil characters so that a negative score in such circumstances is treated as positive.

"You can't book me for 'being funny looking'!"

This effect is mentioned only in relation to scores below -8, so it's not entirely clear whether these scores are the only ones to which it applies. Nor is it clear if anything is meant to be inferred about evil characters and positive scores. And on top of that, harsh rejection by a high comeliness character results in their score being treated as negative by the spurned would-be lover. What if both are evil? Does that mean there's no effect? I doubt it but it's another sloppy bit of thinking in a section of rules that has similar issues, I think.
Since this range of scores is impossible to generate, the questions it raises are only in relation to specifically placed encounters so I guess it's up to the DM, and the same is true of the ultra-high scores. I suppose that it makes some sort of sense in a fantasy world to have evil characters view, for example, both  Juiblex and a succubus as equally attractive.
Interestingly, comeliness is defined in the rules as being something that effects creatures of a human sort, not something only they posses, so the DM is free to apply it to anything that takes his/her fancy as being horrific or beautiful, even if not actually humanoid.
There's a subtext here that evil acts perhaps should reduce comeliness, but that perhaps would not go down well with players. Still, it's an interesting "Dorian Grey" notion that might be worth playing with.

"Okay, that's 700sqft of rug
and one Egyptian queen.
Cheque okay?"

Conclusions
That's the rules as written, pretty well. The problem for me is not actually the power of fascination in itself. Stories are full of examples of great characters (usually men, it has to be said) led astray by beauty and the rule reflects that but is, in my opinion slightly too hard to snap out of at higher scores (technically impossible at scores of 24+).

No, for me the problem is the blanket applicability of of the power. Beauty is not quite subjective in the sense that any particular person is as likely to be classed as ugly as they are to be judged good-looking by each other person. The standards for beauty vary over time, but there are standards and certain people clearly float more boats than others. But who floats every boat? Even Helen only managed 1000.

If I were writing a computer game, I would effectively roll 3d6 and add the charisma modifier each time characters met and record the resulting score for future reference, effectively recording how attractive character A is to character B separately from how attractive they are to character C etc. That's not possible in a pen and paper game, clearly.

What I normally do now is to record the PC's comeliness scores (with charisma mods) and keep them secret from the players. I then pick key figures that they come into contact and check only them for the fascinate effect. Players are free to think of their characters looking god or average or whatever and I'm free to track when it matters whether the rest of the world agrees or not.

I also give the targets of fascination a bonus equal to their own level and a save the first time the power is exerted, whether in  a way which is harmful or unnatural to the character in question or not.

Beyond that, I just use it as a loose guideline. But, having looked over it all again for this post I think I might go back to a more BtB system and see how it works out.

Here's my suggestions for using comeliness:

• Comeliness trumps charisma for reaction rolls where the character's face and/or body shape is visible. Ugly characters get initial negative responses no matter what their charisma score.
• If only the face is hidden (by a mask or similar) then inter-racial modifiers are based on expectation or are ignored if there is no expectation.
• Also, if the face is hidden then comeliness is modified by 2 points towards 11 (so 6 becomes 8; 18 becomes 16).
• Modifications for dubious requests should be cumulative - so if Mistertique asks the Snow Queen for two unreasonable (or just plain annoying) requests at +2 each, she will get +6 on her save for a third such abuse.
• Age-related changes in wisdom are matched by equal and opposite changes in comeliness.
• No effect on the opposite sex, in the general case.
• Only inflict the fascination power on PCs if the situation is trivial and funny or serious and key to an interesting plot line. Don't bother with every damn shop keeper.
• Only inflict PCs' fascination power on NPCs if the player specifically tries to use it, if it would be trivial and funny, or it is serious and key to an interesting plot line.
• Call it "appearance" and abbreviate it to "A".