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Aecus Decimus wrote:


Um, what? Fog of war considerations are inadmissible because they have nothing to do with resolution mechanics. Fog of war happens earlier in the sequence of events and is very relevant for movement, scouting, etc. But once units have engaged in melee and are making attacks you no longer have to wonder about what the enemy has or where they are, they're right in front of you with a sword/pointy stick/whatever. Realism issues, on the other hand, are very relevant in resolution mechanics because you still have to ask what the realistic outcome of an event would be and/or what decisions could be made by the real units and officers.

What a completely novel and ahistorical take on combat. Who knew that once swords crossed, all was perfectly known! "Real units" are immune from uncertainty or deception, which of course have no place in "combat resolution."

In truth what you are saying is that you want an impersonal, mechanical approach to combat in which the player's choices no longer matter. You see the players as traffic cops, directing units into collisions, whereupon "the system" or "the dice" take over.

I think there can be design space for player decisions within resolution and cards - the ability to stare down an opponent rather than dice them down - adds complexity and flavor to a system.

There is an immense difference between RNG in outcomes (list building a fully deterministic choice of units that have RNG to resolve the success or failure of their actions) and RNG in basic things like "what do I have available this turn" or "what are the possible outcomes for this event". Do you really think that a unit of archers having a 25% hit chance for each of its 10 dice is equivalent to building your melee deck to include more "enemy unit panics and can't attack but does not flee" cards because they interact well with your "a unit that panics takes extra damage" cards and metagame analysis shows that this is more effective than taking direct "the enemy unit takes casualties" cards?

Where are these "enemy automatically panics cards" you speak of? We haven't actually designed anything yet!

What's funny is that these actually exist in GW games. There are plenty of army-wide effects that come from taking a single model (or even a trait or piece of wargear for a single a model) during army selection. You want "enemy unit panics and can't attack" rules? GW has produced many of them over the years and they're always tied to the army list.

In fact GW actually had rules to kill units before the game even started. Guess what? It was entirely dependent on what you put in your army list. But that's just a roster, right?

Again, you hate cards so much that you are incapable of seeing their full potential.

It seems to me that you have very little experience in operational/shared deck games, only built ones (which was clearly very negative).

I, on the other hand, have most of my experience in those systems, and have designed a few of them. One of the most enjoyable aspects is the ability of the players to directly enter in on the combat resolution through the commitment of specific resources - or the threat of doing so.

Upthread you remarked that dice are needed to see if your X-wing pilot can take the shot, but that's only because it's not feasible to put the players in the opposing cockpits. But what if you could do something very much like that, where each impact becomes not merely a throw of the dice, but also a battle of wits. After all, what is closer to a duel than a cut-throat game of cards?

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
What a completely novel and ahistorical take on combat. Who knew that once swords crossed, all was perfectly known! "Real units" are immune from uncertainty or deception, which of course have no place in "combat resolution."

First of all, yes, "all is known" in a fog of war sense. It's absolutely relevant design space to have a fog of war mechanic where you don't know what enemy units are lurking behind a hill until you send a unit forward to investigate, but that has nothing to do with combat resolution mechanics. Once units are engaging in melee combat the fog of war has lifted, you know where the enemy is and what they have because that unit of swordsmen that was lurking behind the hill is currently in your face trying to kill you with their swords.

Second, within the constraints of a tabletop game all must be known by the time you get into resolution mechanics. Once a unit's stats are used you have to reveal those stats. You can't push a mystery unit into combat and say "I make some number of attacks", you have to define what those attacks are so you can use the appropriate resolution rules. This isn't a video game where you can have the software handle resolution even if the player doesn't know what is happening behind the scenes.

Where are these "enemy automatically panics cards" you speak of? We haven't actually designed anything yet!

Cyel's post here: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/807887.page#11476100

What's funny is that these actually exist in GW games.

Ok? I'm not sure that using the raging dumpster fire of incompetent design that is GW games is a great example.

One of the most enjoyable aspects is the ability of the players to directly enter in on the combat resolution through the commitment of specific resources - or the threat of doing so.

But does that commitment of resources make sense as a representation of what is happening on the real battlefield? In a combat resolution sense it makes no sense to commit "resources" of RNG to a particular combat at the expense of spending your resource elsewhere when those two fights are entirely independent events. You as a commander of an army don't have some quota of successful sword wounds that you allocate between the two.

Upthread you remarked that dice are needed to see if your X-wing pilot can take the shot, but that's only because it's not feasible to put the players in the opposing cockpits. But what if you could do something very much like that, where each impact becomes not merely a throw of the dice, but also a battle of wits. After all, what is closer to a duel than a cut-throat game of cards?

You have dice in X-Wing because the resolution of the "real" shot involves an element of luck. How accurate is the alignment on the attacker's guns, does the target dodge at precisely the right time, etc. In the real WWII aerial combat that X-Wing borrows heavily from gunnery had a large element of luck in it. You could line up a better or worse shot but whether you hit the target was up to chance and sheer volume of bullets fired, and whether your bullets hit a vital piece on the enemy plane or passed harmlessly through sheet metal was even more luck. So the most realistic way of representing this on the tabletop is to have deterministic maneuvering and gunnery with a RNG element.

I will grant that your proposed battle of wits would be relevant in a 1v1 duel but that isn't really the scope of this thread. "Melee Yahtzee" isn't a problem in a game of 1v1 duels because the rules are inevitably complex and deep enough that you aren't just passively rolling dice to see what happens. You only get the problem OP is talking about in army-scale games where the level of detail involved in modeling the battle of wits between fighters would be an unwieldy mess of spending an week resolving a single fight.

Aecus Decimus wrote:
Ok? I'm not sure that using the raging dumpster fire of incompetent design that is GW games is a great example.

Interesting redirection, but my point stands. An army list is not just a roster, it is a collection of capabilities and carries its own probability matrix, just as cards do. If you have recon units, you will gain abilities you otherwise would not have. They are a useful addition to your "deck." For a while, there was a bunch of military card games out there during the salad days of the 1990s, and like army lists, there were rules about what you could and could not take (i.e. the German army of nothing but Pumas or Napoleonic armies of nothing but Guards).

But does that commitment of resources make sense as a representation of what is happening on the real battlefield? In a combat resolution sense it makes no sense to commit "resources" of RNG to a particular combat at the expense of spending your resource elsewhere when those two fights are entirely independent events. You as a commander of an army don't have some quota of successful sword wounds that you allocate between the two.

Such limited thinking! What about physical exhaustion? Have they been marching back and forth all day or are they fresh and eager? Have they just fought a previous combat and already exerted?

Command ability is also finite. Are they simply holding the line or is "home beyond those hills"?

Some games use points (or dice, or chits) but cards are a very streamlined way of doing things, and they also create more uncertainty. You can say that our purview is only resolution, but I see nothing wrong with using a mechanic that both encompasses command and control as well as combat resolution.

I will grant that your proposed battle of wits would be relevant in a 1v1 duel but that isn't really the scope of this thread. "Melee Yahtzee" isn't a problem in a game of 1v1 duels because the rules are inevitably complex and deep enough that you aren't just passively rolling dice to see what happens. You only get the problem OP is talking about in army-scale games where the level of detail involved in modeling the battle of wits between fighters would be an unwieldy mess of spending an week resolving a single fight.

Again, scale is critical to how detailed the system would become. How many maneuver elements? What size are they?

These are crucial considerations, but do not by themselves rule out using cards. What they do is determine how you would use them.

And this is like anything else. As I pointed out waaay upthread, you can eliminate dice by using tables and a single die roll if you want.

Since it came up elsewhere: did you play Decipher's Star Wars? That was my first true "built deck" game (as noted above, military ones are very restrictive, typically following unit organization). It was just like putting together a Warhammer army list and the attempt to manipulate probability reminded me of the difference in play styles between the various factions.

As you pointed out, it ultimately had issues was the quantity of supplements, which pushed the game engine over the edge. As a result, there was a push to having "fixed decks," which could rein in some of the excesses.

Still, as a self-contained card game that required zero maps or tokens, it was a remarkable design for what it was trying to do.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Interesting redirection, but my point stands. An army list is not just a roster, it is a collection of capabilities and carries its own probability matrix, just as cards do. If you have recon units, you will gain abilities you otherwise would not have. They are a useful addition to your "deck." For a while, there was a bunch of military card games out there during the salad days of the 1990s, and like army lists, there were rules about what you could and could not take (i.e. the German army of nothing but Pumas or Napoleonic armies of nothing but Guards).

You're again ignoring the difference between deterministic mechanics and RNG pools. In a conventional list building mechanic if I want a recon unit I put a recon unit into my list, put the appropriate unit on the table, and order it to go do recon things. In a deck building game I have to put a recon card into my RNG pool and hope that I randomly draw that card at the right time. Commanding your on-table forces becomes less important than properly manipulating your RNG pool and knowing that, say, you need 3+ copies of that recon card to get at least an 80% chance of having a recon ability to stack with your artillery strike card.

Such limited thinking! What about physical exhaustion? Have they been marching back and forth all day or are they fresh and eager? Have they just fought a previous combat and already exerted?

First of all, that's not fog of war. Fog of war is about not knowing things outside your army. Whether or not an enemy unit is deployed behind a hill is a fog of war question. There's a single answer to it but you as a commander do not have access to the answer until you send someone to go look over there. Whether or not your army has marched a lot of miles today is not fog of war, it's a fact that the commander knows before the battle begins.

Second, that's still beyond the scope of melee resolution mechanics. A unit doesn't charge into melee with Schrödinger's fatigue state where whether or not the unit fought a battle the previous day is unknown until you RNG for it at the start of melee combat. That is determined before the current battle begins. A unit doesn't RNG to see how far it had to move before reaching melee range once melee attacks begin, you track the number of inches it moves in the movement step and apply the appropriate modifiers (without making further choices) once melee begins.

Finally, these things are not decision points in melee resolution. It would be utterly absurd to, say, have a hand of cards consisting of one each of "normal fatigue", "tired", and "well rested" and allocate them to your three units as melee begins. A commander doesn't get to decide at the last second that the melee fight on the left flank is most important and therefore those troops will have the lowest fatigue level! To the extent that choosing to allocate units based on fatigue from the previous day is possible at all it would be something that has to be done when units are placed on the table at the start of the game. You might know that the left flank is vital and needs your best troops but you have to decide that when you choose where to put your most-rested unit at the start of the game, not retroactively declare that "those guys were the ones who didn't have to march yesterday" as-needed.

Again, scale is critical to how detailed the system would become. How many maneuver elements? What size are they?

How many soldiers, not how many maneuver elements. Even if you only have one maneuver element per side in a melee combat if those elements each represent a block of 500 soldiers it's completely inappropriate to model the difference between a sword swing to the left vs. a stab to the right. Those details average out over an entire unit of 500 soldiers and are not relevant at that scale.

Since it came up elsewhere: did you play Decipher's Star Wars?

Yes. It's an incredibly badly designed game that should be considered a cautionary tale, not an example to follow.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

You're again ignoring the difference between deterministic mechanics and RNG pools. In a conventional list building mechanic if I want a recon unit I put a recon unit into my list, put the appropriate unit on the table, and order it to go do recon things. In a deck building game I have to put a recon card into my RNG pool and hope that I randomly draw that card at the right time. Commanding your on-table forces becomes less important than properly manipulating your RNG pool and knowing that, say, you need 3+ copies of that recon card to get at least an 80% chance of having a recon ability to stack with your artillery strike card.

Once again, you're assuming facts not in evidence. There can be unit decks and action decks. Get out a little more.

Such limited thinking! What about physical exhaustion? Have they been marching back and forth all day or are they fresh and eager? Have they just fought a previous combat and already exerted?

First of all, that's not fog of war. Fog of war is about not knowing things outside your army.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Good grief, I'm talking about a holistic system and you're picking nits.

OP asked for discussion on resolution mechanics, not a "holistic system" where you design an entire game from scratch and go off topic on a million things unrelated to melee resolution.

This is exactly what I mean about you having tunnel vision on trying to justify putting cards into the game. You're going way off topic and then complaining about "picking nits" when I point out that the stuff you're talking about has nothing to do with what OP asked for. All that matters to you is that card-sized pieces of paper are somehow involved and you'll go off on a tangent on any random part of a game as long as you can bring cards into it.

Doesn't matter what scale, the principal is the same.

It absolutely matters what the scale is. Ever hear the phrase "just because you can doesn't mean you should"? It might be possible to include detailed choices for attacking with a swing to the left vs. a stab to the right in a game with only a couple of maneuver units, each representing a block of 50 soldiers, without having a system that is too unwieldy to ever play in a real game. But you shouldn't do it because that level of detail is completely inappropriate for the scale the game is working at. That's the scenario where you accept that you don't have to cram in every possible mechanic up to maximum cognitive load and resolution time and use a simpler system that is appropriate for the scale.

Aecus Decimus wrote:


OP asked for discussion on resolution mechanics, not a "holistic system" where you design an entire game from scratch and go off topic on a million things unrelated to melee resolution.

This is exactly what I mean about you having tunnel vision on trying to justify putting cards into the game. You're going way off topic and then complaining about "picking nits" when I point out that the stuff you're talking about has nothing to do with what OP asked for. All that matters to you is that card-sized pieces of paper are somehow involved and you'll go off on a tangent on any random part of a game as long as you can bring cards into it.

Talk about tunnel vision, you think the resolution mechanics aren't related to the gaming system???

The resolution is the culmination of that system, the moment when rules for movement, action, command, morale, etc. come to the point of decision.

It absolutely matters what the scale is.

No, it doesn't. If there are only six pieces to move, I can have a lot more detail on how they interact than if there are 60. The scale is irrelevant to the level of detail - what you're talking about is the level of detail appropriate to a given scale, which is entirely different.

A game with sixty infantry divisions on a side will necessarily have a different feel from a game with sixty men, but the amount of decision points should be about the same. In Panzerblitz, I can worry about whether to bring up individual platoons and have rules for LOS and reaction fire. With Afrika Korps, I'm more worried about supply lines, divisional frontages and replacement rates.

This discussion has jogged my memory. Some years ago I bought a game called Star Wars Duels. It is a card-based game of...wait for it...duels. I know, shocking.

Each character combo has its own cards, so the decks are fixed. It's pretty easy to figure out who can do what, and what is in the deck, so the strategy consists of watching what is done and seeking position to optimize weapon options (reflected in cards).

The maneuver elements vary. Generally it is either two evenly-matched characters (Han and Chewbacca) or one very strong one and some minions (Darth Vader and some stormtroopers). Cards are drawn and can be held, just as a combatant might reserve ammunition for the best shots or time their flurry for an opponent's vulnerability.

I don't know if you've done any martial arts, but lulls in the action while the combatants size each other up/catch their breath are "a thing." So a turn where both players draw and try to figure out what to do is quite realistic. There are attacks and also counters. You can say that's card-counting or some such, but from my experience, people actually do come up with what they think is an effective counter and wait for an opponent to make an attack to use it. Or they think of a brutal attack and wait for the moment when the opponent is distracted before closing in.

I have to say that I find your commentary on "fog of war" lifting at the point of contact quite amusing. While reenactments have severe limitations in terms of applicability to real combat, I found that the moment of impact was when things became more confusing, not less.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Talk about tunnel vision, you think the resolution mechanics aren't related to the gaming system???

The resolution is the culmination of that system, the moment when rules for movement, action, command, morale, etc. come to the point of decision.

Once again: OP has specifically asked for discussion of resolution mechanics and explicitly rejected suggestions that "Melee Yahtzee" can be solved by making other aspects of the game leading up to the melee resolution more interesting. It is not tunnel vision to ask you to at least try to stick to the topic of the thread and not go wildly off topic into stuff that has nothing to do with "Melee Yahtzee" or how to avoid it.

A game with sixty infantry divisions on a side will necessarily have a different feel from a game with sixty men, but the amount of decision points should be about the same.

This is absolutely not true. The maximum number of decision points before you have a hopelessly unwieldy mess may remain relatively constant regardless of scale but there is no minimum quota. If a given action or encounter has few or no scale-appropriate decision points then you do not arbitrarily add more rules just to meet your minimum quota, you accept that the scale leads to a very simple resolution mechanic. Having fewer units on the table means that you can add more decision points per unit, it does not in any way mean that you should.

You can say that's card-counting or some such, but from my experience, people actually do come up with what they think is an effective counter and wait for an opponent to make an attack to use it. Or they think of a brutal attack and wait for the moment when the opponent is distracted before closing in.

No, that's not what card counting is. Card counting is not knowing what your opponent may have chosen to bring, it's predicting future card draws based on which cards have already been drawn. Knowing that a deck of cards in blackjack consists of four copies each of A-K is knowing the basic rules of the game, card counting is when you track which cards are drawn and revealed so you know whether the remaining cards in the deck favor the house or the players and bet appropriately. Knowing that an opponent's Vader deck probably has Force Choke is knowing the metagame and predicting likely choices, card counting is knowing that your opponent has already drawn and played both copies of Force Choke so that attack is no longer a threat.

Or, to give a more direct example of card counting in a resolution system: card counting is knowing that the damage deck in an air combat game contains three copies of "wounded pilot" and all three of them have already been drawn. It's stupid because in the real battle having pilot hits previously in the dogfight does not make future pilot hits any more or less likely, each burst of fire is a completely independent event. But if you count cards you know that, for example, your unique character plane with limited direct combat power but a strong buff effect no longer has to worry about a lucky "wounded pilot" card shutting off the buff ability and effectively destroying the plane in a single hit, which means you can now play more aggressively with that plane. Instead of putting yourself in the cockpit and asking "what would the real pilot do" you're trying to game the system and exploit the limitations of playing with a physical deck of cards as a game component.

I have to say that I find your commentary on "fog of war" lifting at the point of contact quite amusing. While reenactments have severe limitations in terms of applicability to real combat, I found that the moment of impact was when things became more confusing, not less.

Aside from the question of whether those things are really "fog of war" or not, I will once again remind you that once units are engaging in melee combat it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a resolution system with hidden information. If fatigue in melee makes a unit easier to hit you can hide that fatigue level before units engage in combat but once you have to resolve attacks you have to reveal the fatigue level to know which target number to use in the resolution. This is not a PC game where you can hide all the mechanics from the players, you have to publicly say "this unit has excessive fatigue and has Defense 7 instead of Defense 9". Same thing for pretty much any other mechanic. Once you start resolving consequences all of the information that goes into the resolution system must be revealed to be used.

Aecus Decimus wrote:


This is absolutely not true. The maximum number of decision points before you have a hopelessly unwieldy mess may remain relatively constant regardless of scale but there is no minimum quota. If a given action or encounter has few or no scale-appropriate decision points then you do not arbitrarily add more rules just to meet your minimum quota, you accept that the scale leads to a very simple resolution mechanic. Having fewer units on the table means that you can add more decision points per unit, it does not in any way mean that you should.

For a while this was an interesting discussion (at least for me) because like all good discussions, it generated new ideas and reminded me of things I'd forgotten over the years.

But this paragraph more than anything else shows that it has run its course. In order to disagree with me (which is all you apparently want to do at this point), you have to argue against things I haven't written and don't believe.

And since you keep whining about the OP, let's look at that.

All this time and no one has given an actual scenario for what they want. So I will do it myself. Ten Assault Marines charge 10 orks. The specific equipment is not needed for our purposes.

As it stands, buckets of dice will be rolled. This is bad. So let's consider alternatives.

Option 1 - Non-random combat. Simply aggregate offensive factors and compare them to defensive values. Eliminate models as indicated. (How that's done is another discussion.)

Option 2 - Semi-random combat. Same as above, but add a die roll to the total for each side. Secondary options would include varying size of die added or adding modifiers based on equipment, characters, etc.

Option 3 - Combat Results Table. Total all factors on each side and plug them into a matrix. Attacker rolls a die, hoping to avoid the dreaded "A Elim" result. (Avalon Hill players check your email.) Equipment/characters could modify the roll.

Option 4 - Multiple CRTs. Each side totals their factors, rolls on a table, and inflicts that on the other side, which then consults a defensive table and rolls on that. Depending on how far this is taken, the Yahtzee effect may resurface.

Option 5 - Introduce cards. The discussion to this point has mostly been an argument for or against them in principle, but an honest observer should at this point agree that even "serious" simulations can and do use them successfully.

However, combining cards and dice can cause massive swings and (as GW has shown) introduce a subgame that ends up overwhelming the core rules. A card-based resolution system would, however, also eliminate Yahtzee, thus meeting the objective.

Every one of these has room for the trademark GW rules bloat, including dozens of die roll modifiers or rules about how to use different dice for different rolls, but the goal of having as few rolls as possible is preserved.

I remember during the 80s there was a supposed issue with players being able to read a CRT and therefore gauge the odds of success in combat, so some designers started having players roll 2d6 reading the result as a two-digit number from 11 to 66, thus creating 36 possible outcomes. This was then combined with a points system and column shifts and modifiers to make the process as opaque and painful as possible. It did not catch on.