Getting Back Into the Fight: Combat Design for FOEGYG
I've been trying to get my own shitbrew heartbreaker out there for a while. I've had the idea for at least three or four years, an idea of something the size of ODnD which spans all modes of play, hits every high note the fiction we so much enjoy does, in roughly the page count of the four little brown books. I gave the project the working title FOEGYG.
That page count constraint isn't just aesthetic. You can't have combat systems that take three hours to resolve plus another hour and a half to set up, like you see in proper miniatures wargaming. Everything has to be fast enough to actually use at the RPG table, but comprehensive enough to handle everything from duels to massive battles. That's a tight design space.
For a short while it went well as I hacked away at the easy bits, but when the going got rough, I stopped working on it. The White Whale articles are an example of this tendency. In an attempt to get it going again, I decided to just let them be for now and come back when inspiration struck.
You know how it is with heartbreakers. You get this burst of energy, dive deep into some fascinating subsystem, then hit a wall and the whole thing sits there mocking you from your hard drive. FOEGYG was doing exactly that – taunting me with its half-finished domain rules and my increasingly baroque attempts to make feudal economics interesting. So I did what any reasonable person does when stuck: I pivoted to the part where people hit each other with swords.
My initial idea was straightforward enough: lift most of it from Chainmail. Have a detailed combat system based on man-to-man and a simplified combat system based on mass combat. Makes sense, right? Chainmail already solved the problem of individual duels versus army clashes. Just lift the mechanics, file off the serial numbers, and call it a day. But when I actually tried running this at the table, my players hated it. Not the mechanics themselves, which worked fine. They hated what happened to their characters.
When we ran a mass combat, suddenly the fighter who'd been developing his swordsmanship for six months became just another figure in a block of infantry. The wizard's carefully chosen spells mattered less than whether the unit she was embedded in passed its morale check. Players felt like spectators to their own characters' stories.
This disconnect is fine in pure wargames, where you're playing an off-board force commander making strategic decisions. But in tabletop RPGs, even when commanding armies, you're supposed to be playing that character. Trying to bolt tournament-style wargaming onto RPGs creates this fundamental mismatch between the player's role and the mechanics' assumptions. No wonder it feels wrong.
So I got to thinking. What is player agency at every level? With the detailed combat system, it's direct agency. You swing your sword, you cast your spell, you make your choices and deal with the immediate consequences. That's the bread and butter of RPG combat and it works fine.
But what about larger scales? I was stuck on this until I encountered some work that reframed the whole problem. I owe so much thanks to Stephen, Rod Hampton and a host of other people that I cannot thank them enough. I'm blessed with being accepted into a group of excellent wargamers with tons of historic knowledge. Here too they helped me, without even directly knowing it. The light went on when I read Stephen's Killing Fields and contrasted it with the mess that I'd made.
Most miniatures games abstract individual soldiers into units, then give you direct control over those units. You tell the 43rd Heavy infantry division where to go and what to shoot, and they follow your orders immediately and perfectly. But that's not how actual command works, and that's not how you properly translate the role of commanders if those commanders are to have an actual role on the battlefield. But in tabletop RPGs you can't carry that over directly to war.
The role of PCs in skirmish and full-on war is that of a battlefield commander. Not "I control these units like pieces on a chess board," but "I am a person charge trying to get other people to do what I want them to do in a chaotic, deadly situation." That's a completely different type of agency, and it needs different mechanics to support it.
The insight reading Stephen's (excellent; you should play it and support him) game led me to re-evaluate what I've seen before in other games. In Warmaster, in DBA, but even in Kriegsspiel. They all mention, implicitly or explicitly, fog of war, and how this influences how units respond to commands given to them. I felt like this was the missing link I was searching for.
Three Flavors of Violence
So here's what I landed on: three distinct levels of combat, each with its own type of player agency.
Man-to-man combat gives you direct control. You swing your sword, cast your spell, make your tactical choices moment by moment. This is standard RPG combat and it works fine.
Skirmish combat puts you in a limited command role. You can give orders within your command range, but you can only issue so many per turn. Your orders get followed, but you're managing small units rather than individual actions.
Mass combat introduces command uncertainty. You can give orders, but there's no guarantee your units will receive them clearly or execute them properly. You're dealing with the fog of war and the limits of battlefield communication.
Man-to-man example: The orc chieftain swings his massive axe at your head. You duck, step inside his reach, and drive your dagger up under his ribs. Your choice, your skill roll, your immediate consequence.
Skirmish example: You order your archers to loose at the approaching cavalry while commanding your spearmen to form a hedgehog formation. Both units follow your orders, but you can only give two commands this turn and the enemy is attacking from three directions. You have to choose what gets your attention.
Mass example: You send runners to tell the left flank to advance, but in the chaos and noise, only half the message gets through. The unit advances, but not as far as you wanted, and now they're exposed because the center didn't get your follow-up order at all. Command is about making decisions with incomplete information and imperfect execution.
The key insight is that each level requires different mechanics to support different types of agency. You're always playing your character, but what your character can actually control changes with the scale of the fight. This way I hope to retain the feeling for players they are actually playing their character, instead of some vague abstract commander floating above the battlefield.
But agency isn't the only thing that changes with scale. The second key difference across scales is how you handle maneuvering units.
Man-to-man scale keeps it simple: the unit is the individual. You move your fighter, your wizard, your thief.
Mass combat uses predefined formations: companies, battalions, whatever formal military units your army brought to the field. These are set organizational structures with multiple stands or figures per unit.
Skirmish combat sits in the middle with ad-hoc units that you create and split on the fly. Group those archers for a concentrated volley, split your infantry to flank around that building, combine scattered survivors into a new fighting unit.
This creates an interesting tactical trade-off: you can manage more individual figures for fine-grained control, but that limits how many units you can effectively command. It reflects the reality that small engagements are messier and more fluid than formal battlefield deployments.
Honestly I cannot take too much credit for the systems I'm creating. It's a mish-mash of elements from other systems. Man-to-man is 80% just Chainmail man-to-man, with dashes of the ACS. Skirmish combat is now an unholy blend of DBA command with the Warmaster turn structure, combat more or less lifted directly from Warhammer Fantsy Battles, and a post-melee morale system hacked together from Warmaster and The Old World. Mass combat will most likely be a combination of Warmaster and its descendants and DBA. No element is unique, but together it's finally starting to create something that feels like it belongs to me.
But while all of this sounds great in theory, I haven't actually run a battle with the new system yet. The proof of a system is in running it successfully, and the real test isn't whether the mechanics look elegant on paper, but whether my players feel like they're playing their characters instead of playing a different game entirely. Does the fighter's tactical expertise matter when commanding troops? Can the wizard adapt her magic meaningfully across different scales of violence? Do players feel agency rather than frustration when the fog of war kicks in?
I need to find out, and maybe you can help me. Below is a PDF excerpt of FOEGYG book 2, containing all of the rules for skirmish combat. It's rough, it'll change as I test it, but it's complete enough to actually use. If you're dealing with similar problems in your own games - players feeling disconnected during mass combat, or struggling to make individual characters matter at larger scales - give it a try and let me know what breaks.
For now I'm just glad I found energy and inspiration to resume work on my heartbreaker. Sometimes the best way forward is sideways.