Godstein Part 5: Mass Combat

This is the fifth post in a series about my home campaign where each of the players act as gods in addition to their player characters. Previous entries:
Part 1: Concept, God Creation, and Game Setup
Part 2: Map and World Generation
Part 3: Resources and Mana
Part 4: The Divine Council

Braunstein-styled games often encounter a resolution system problem. Since I wanted my game to ultimately provide a setting for a D&D campaign, I needed a way to adjudicate mass combat quickly. This was one of the largest hurdles for me in running this campaign, and I’m not certain of the best method.

War games like Chainmail are the classic choice for this and are supported in the original D&D rules. However, in a Braunstein, where situations are abstract and fast-moving, Chainmail makes little sense as we need a resolution system that runs quickly and is better than “just roll a dice” and ideally somewhat representative of combat. This would make more sense in an OD&D game, and I considered using Chainmail or a derivative for the campaign portion of the game instead of sticking to quick mass combat detailed later in this post. I’m not entirely sure I made the correct decision to stick with a quick, easily resolved system, and I may use something else in Godstein 2, but converting to Chainmail once the initial Braunstein had concluded would certainly be a good way to run this, though it isn’t what I chose to do.

The Battle of San Jacinto by Henry Arthur McArdle (1895)

This isn’t to say that just rolling dice is a terrible resolution mechanism- Braunstein games are more about the social dynamic than anything and so a system of “roll a d20 and just add bonuses for relevant factors” isn’t game-ruining at all and keeps the game flowing, and having an idea of the bonuses ahead of time would at least allow the players to make calculated risks. I wasn’t satisfied with it for my game, though, and I wanted to add a bit more to it.

The solution I devised for this is a system that is somewhat derived from my favorite board game, Cosmic Encounter, using a combination of mana (explained in part 3) and dice rolls to adjudicate combat quickly. I wanted to set up a quick prisoner’s dilemma that would consist of a brief negotiation followed by each player committing any amount of mana (the total they could have was 10), and then rolling 2d10, adding their committed mana to the number on their dice. The higher number would win the engagement. Committing 0 mana would be seen as a surrender and a loss no matter what the totals were because a god’s chosen people would not fight for the god if they were not inspired to. However, if both committed 0 mana, they would negotiate instead and if they were able to reach a deal this way, they would each generate 1 mana.

For the campaign piece of this, after the initial Godstein ended, I imposed a 3 month cooldown on attacking a city, that was changed to a 1 month cooldown for gods with the war domain. I don’t actually know if this restriction is at all necessary, but I imposed it to be safe. It wasn’t really needed because we have had no problems with this happening too frequently.

The system was a simple prisoner’s dilemma, but it was decent enough for what we needed. Because mana is freely tradable among players, other players could contribute mana to either god involved of the combat as well, who could choose to then commit it to the engagement. This allowed for a simple but dramatic resolution that allowed players a few betrayal opportunities, but I admit it is not as robust as I would like. It’s an okay and simple system for this purpose, but imperfect.

This quick system was used for a few things in-game, not only the mass combat. I used it when players wanted to spy on each other and really when there was any sort of conflict that needed a resolution mechanic.

I’ve seen a few other conflict resolution systems used in Braunstein variant games with varying results. Moonstein, the Braunstein I participated in, used the classic Traveler system for combat, which works exceptionally well for this purpose because its extreme lethality means that it takes only a round or two to resolve under normal circumstances so it didn’t seem to burdensome on the referee.

I’ve been looking at the Amber Diceless system recently as another potentially useful option, which

Crom

used in his Braunstein, and I’m playing around with mechanics right now. That is a system that could scale to the number of players I needed (Godstein 2 will have 15 players from the start when it happens) and with a bidding system for stats, but combat resolution that takes seconds and can easily happen without players at the table. I may write another post about how I intend to modify the Amber Diceless system to work with Godstein 2.