Commander Combat

A Supplement

Currently combat is either in 10 seconds, or weeks with that one supplement that adds in military campaigns. With these tools we can simulate skirmishes between individuals or "we attack this city, roll dice, it goes well, roll dice for how well. So soldier and theater level combat. What about everything in between?

I'm about to list a bunch of ranks (billets) and what they'd do. When playing in groups it's best to keep all PCs at the same billet plus or minus one and within the same general command. A campaign following this would start with a PC TL leading a team of PCs but as they promoted the leader of the table would grow in rank to SL while the other PCs became TLs. At roughly the platoon level promotion slows enough that each PC could be a platoon commander.

No matter the team size there will be some level of planning. This is done before the battle in as safe an environment as possible. Any place where lines could be drawn, erased and things move around would work. these plans are always being made as fast as they can be but the larger the unit the more time it generally takes. A TL may be able to find a blown out room and draw in the dust and debris a new plan to take out an MG next while a General may be back in a peaceful area using holo projections of macro terrain to move carefully drawn icons around that stand in for entire divisions. The bigger things get, the longer they take. The TL may finish the plan, then immediately issue the "follow plan" order and a soldier runs out while another creates cover fire, or the General may tell a division to move and may need to wait a few days to even get an "order acknowledged". The point of this system is that the General doesn't care about the specifics about how the division gets there, only that they do providing that the unit is loyal enough and the order isn't too dangerous. In this example the GM would look at the order, determine that it's a routine activity, done in enemy territory in rough terrain, the unit is loyal, veteran, but recently suffered a loss of 10% of it's NCOs (A negative trait on a mission complete table) and determines the DC to be a 6+1 for territory, +1 for terrain for a DC 8. The unit modifier is +1 due to veteran but has a -1 until they've been sent to the back line due to the NCO loss.

I know I said I'd mention ranks earlier but I've realized that I'd be building a typical US military rank structure and not allowing room for variety of different organizational structures. Even if I left the labels off and just used team leader, squad leader, platoon commander, etc this still insinuates that teams are important that NCOs are given the liberty of discretion that the US Marines gives their NCOs. Corporals in the Marines are very different from Corporals in the army and other E-4s in other branches. A 4 man team in the Army may be given orders directly by the SL and the TL is tasked with enforcing the order. Or like the Russians anything smaller than company commander is given no discretion in tactics which is why we see wave attacks so often, anything more finely tuned requires to give up the micromanaging the company commander is forced to do and yet battalion or division commander still wish they could micromanage more since they rarely trust their Company officers to carry out the mission and the results of failure are lethal from their generals. Gangs could conduct warfare of this scale that will be covered in this book and they may operate in more independent teams, their loyalty would be lower but that could give advantages in other ways. You don't really need a salary if what they take becomes their territory and they somewhat listen to you in regards to what they can do with it. In short, the goals, motivations, and cultural uniqueness of militaries was previously unaccounted for and I'd like to make an "army building tool" that lets you build an army like a character, because they ultimately are.