I just finished running my first battle - the battle of Mearcred Creek, using the BoB rules. I went horribly for the PKs, and I think I must have done something wrong. Fortunately I have this handle battle record so I can recreate the battle here - hopefully someone can point out the mistakes I made.

First charge. As a medium battle, the battle intensity started at 25, modified by -5 for superior troops and +2 for battle events, for a starting intensity of 22. Unit intensity is +5 for zone and -20 for cohesion, so a 7. Uther won the army commander roll, so the PKs got the first charge bonus. They charged a unit of warriors (13 on the Defending Saxon Army list from BoA), and the result was a triumph. They moved forward two zones and the BI dropped to 20.

Round 2. BI starts at 20. The event modifier is 0. UI is +10 for zone, so 30. Sir Amig succeeds on his battle role, but the UI criticals, so the unit must Stand vs. 2. The PKs are attacked by Seething Warriors and Warriors (units 4 and 9). The Seething Warriors succeed at their Hate Britons passion, bumping their skill to 25. This is where things start to fall apart; the PKs must divide their attacks against opponents with 25 and 18 skill. They pretty much all had 15 skill, used a passion, and had the mounted bonus.

Now, I know I screwed up here - I had them add the +5 mounted bonus before splitting their skill - so generally they split it as 15/15. They actually should have added the bonus after splitting, so they could have attacked with 15/20 (or some other combination). I think I made another mistake in not subtracting -5 from the saxons' skill for attacking a mounted foe. This is done in normal combat, but it's no in the condition modifier table on page 43, so I left it out. In retrospect, I think the -5 should have applied.

Anyway, the result of round 2 was that I rolled a bunch of critical hits with the Seething Warriors, and regular hits with the great weapon wielding warriors, and one PK went down (Sir Rathgen), as well as Sir Amig and his bodyguard. (Amig suffered a critical hit for 14d6 after his bodyguard intercepted the first attack) So the PK unit suffers a loss, recoils to zone 5 and is disordered.

Round 3. BI again starts at 20. Events lower it to 16. UI is +10 due to zone and +5 for disordered, so 31. One of the PKs takes over as the unit commander (Sir Aeron) and succeeds on his battle role, but again the UI criticals, so they must stand fast vs. 2 again. The same two units press the attack. This time the PKs correctly applied the +5 mounted modifier after dividing their skill, and the seething warriors no longer had a +10 from their passion, but I neglected to impose the -10 penalty on the PKs for being disordered. Two more PKs went down (Sir Aeron and Sir Cynrain). Sir Rathgen's squire was cut down attempting to bring his body to the rear. The unit suffers another loss, recoils to zone 4, and is still disordered.

Round 4. BI starts at 16, increased to 17 from events. UI is +5 due to zone and +5 for disordered, so 27. Sir Ysgarran takes over as the commander, with his battle skill of 10. He fails, the UI succeeds, and they choose to stand and fight. There are 3 PKs and one NPC (the last of Amig's followers) remaining. They face the Little Guys!(unit 14), and Sir Caletus goes down. They choose to extend the round to try to grab Caletus, and while they're successful getting him onto a horse, Sir Gwern is cut down while he fends off two attackers. Sir Cynrain's squire runs the guantlet and gets his body to the rear.

Round 5. BI starts at 17, drops to 12 from events. UI is +5 for zone and +0 for cohesion, or 17. Sir Ysgarran again loses the battle roll, so they stand and fight again. They face more warriors (unit 17) and this the two knights still remaining take minor wounds but survive the round. I rolled archers this round as well, but chose not to have them fire too in addition to everything else.

Aftermath: So the end result, of 6 PKs, two have taken major wounds and have negative HPs, three have taken major wounds and are below 1/4 HPs, one has several minor wounds that have taken him below 1/4 HPs, and one has several minor wounds but is still conscious. Three of the knights technically never made it off the battlefield, as neither their squires or companions were able to rescue them after they fell, so presumably they would have died of their wounds.

Things I know I did wrong: applying the mounted modifier correctly, as mentioned above. Also, I never imposed a penalty on the PKs for being disordered (which would have made things even worse).

Things I'm not sure about: Is the Unit Intensity calculation correct? It seems like the group was a victim of their initial triumph and got caught in a death spiral. With the UI at 30, UI criticals are very likely, and eliminate all of their options. The best the players can get out of a Stand vs Two maneuver is -2 intensity on a triumph.

Are the glory numbers right? PKs in this fight were earning only 5-15 glory per round depending on the enemy unit faced, while the GPC says 30/round for this fight. Sir Ysgarran, the only PK to stay conscious through the whole fight, finished with ~100 glory, and that's after giving him the unit commander bonus for 2 rounds. It seems like battles should be worth more glory.

What happens when a unit commander is killed? I let the PKs nominate one of their own to take over the spot, but it seems like there should be some loss of cohesion when a leader falls.

I'm ok with the results of this battle, but I'm hoping for my players' sake they aren't all going to turn out this way. Granted, some of this was luck - I rolled a lot of enemies that had high combat skills, and tended to roll pretty high on damage rolls when they hit. Had I properly applied the -5 modifier to the saxons for fighting against mounted troops, some of the successes would have been failures, and some of the critical successes would have been normal successes; I'm not sure how much this would have turned the tide of the battle. If I'd also applied the disordered penalty they may have done considerably worse. Also, the plethora of two-handed weapons in a saxon army means that the PKs lose their shields pretty quickly, which increases the lethality of later hits.

That's a really good and detailed account of the battle.

I won't comment on the rules at this point, as It's bedtime and I'm tired :) but it looks to me like the players weren't a victiim of their triumph, but the events of Round 2. You are right - the saxons should have been at -5 for being on foot. it was the hits they took that round, taking some knights down and weakening others, that really messed them up.

On the plus side, having had a disastrous battle, they'll be prepared for the worst next time and if they do well, they'll be overjoyed :)

Glory: GPC glory is based on the old battle system. The awards in the new battle book are accurate, but remember, there are multipliers for battle size and other factors.

Loss of cohesion: knights are grouped together who have trained together. See the description of army composition early in the book. Plus, they live their lives keeping track of prestige and precedence. So when their leader goes down, they know who is next in line, and usually have trained together so their shouldn't be much loss of cohesion - a battle round is 30 minutes or an hour, which gives time to assess the situation and cleave to their new leader.

Perhaps the most devastating thing for the player knights was to not Withdraw on round 2. One of the player knights in our group now commands the eschille and he learned well from his mentor, Marshal Hemel Hempstead. The knight's greatest weapon is the charge. So whenever possible the eschille does a charge/withdraw/charge/withdraw sequence. Had the player knights withdrawn in round 2 they would have had an additional +10 to their weapon skill, which might have saved them.

That said, good rolls by the enemy can pretty much ruin any knight's day.

My understanding is that withdrawing was not an option for the PK unit. Since the UI rolled a critical success, they were forced to fight vs two attackers. And since a UI of 30 seems to be a pretty average rating for a unit post charge, they'll end up stuck in that situation roughly half the time unless the unit leader can boost his battle score to similar levels through the use of passions. That's why I'm worried about similar outcomes in future battles.

I realized I made a few more mistakes, but in the players' favor. I let them apply their inspired bonus to multiple skills in one battle round. I also forgot about the fact that damage greater than or equal to 2x SIZ is an automatic knockdown - that would have knocked most of them out of the saddle during Round 2.

Another contributing factor is that a couple of the knights are pretty frail. Aeron and Caletus have a CON of 9 and 10 respectively, and just 22 HPs. It doesn't take much to drop them.

My understanding is that withdrawing was not an option for the PK unit. Since the UI rolled a critical success, they were forced to fight vs two attackers.


That's not my reading of the situation at all. The eschille must face two opponents, yes; but, they can still withdraw. Any maneuver in bold on pg 22 for the requisite section (in this case, partial success vs. a critical UI) is possible.

Here's another post I made on the same topic a while back:


http://www.gspendragon.com/roundtable/index.php?topic=603.msg5101#msg5101

Ok, at Camlann at Continuum on Saturday night we had exactly this problem - good charge first round, then we had several rounds of enemy Battle critical success vs our normal success (Battle Intensity got to about 55 at one point!), until we could critical our own Battle roll and withdraw. The tables we used definitely said that a Critical meant attacked by 2 units as the only option, but they were extracted from the BoB, so I'd have to check back in that to see exactly what it says. We just took the view that we were completely surrounded and attacked for some time. Even so we managed to do well and withdraw eventually with few losses.

Mark

I was part of the second unit of knights (separate from Mark's) at Camlann on Saturday and while our initial efforts were less effective I do believe we survived longer. My initial impression - obviously skewed somewhat by the Huge battle size - was that trying to push into the Killing Zone is exactly what you don't want to do.

My group spent one round there, fighting against a Battle Intensity of 40, meaning the enemy roll was always going to Crit, then was on the receiving end for the entirety of the battle. In the first six rounds I don't believe we achieved a single battle success, thereby limiting our choices to either Withdraw or Stand vs Two. After one bloody round of Stand vs Two we opted to Withdraw every time as this gave us the best chance of success (except when facing archers which we did several times).

This meant we were virtually fighting at Base Camp the whole time and were happy with it. Any thought of pushing forward seemed madness as the BI, which was already high, would be pushed through the roof and we would be left with virtually no chance of success, stuck with the Sv2 or Withdraw option again.

After reading the posts about Camlann at Continuum, for the benefits of those that weren't there, I ought to clarify things. The Battle Size is of course HUGE and so the starting Battle Intensity is stacked against the players. We ignored the rule about when it reaches 40 for two rounds its a decisive defeat for the players - the game would have been over before it began - Camlann is an exceptional battle and no one is going to give in whilst even one of the opposition is still standing. I also played mean with the players - the idea was to keep the battle running until there was only one player standing. We soon discovered that with the great armour they were wearing, this could take some time - more hours than we actually had - and so we made things harder and harder; limiting the enemies to the strongest, increasing melee skills, mucking around with the terrain and in the end we ruled that if anyone hits, their opponent (player or enemy) was dead.

In a usual battle, to win it the best policy is to try and charge, withdraw, charge, withdraw. You're right, you don't want to stick around in the killing zone for long, but if you can push through fast and get into the enemy camp, not only does the intensity (Battle and Unit) begin to drop, but also you have all sorts of loot you can grab etc.

Firstly on the BI modifiers for huge battles, note that there is an erratum for this issue arising out of Eothar's Battle Intensity (http://www.gspendragon.com/roundtable/index.php?topic=748.0) thread (see Greg's post at #25 in the thread - you apply the battle size mods to First Charge/Unit Intensity rather than the BI).

Secondly, I'll reiterate the stuff upthread about the charge/withdraw/charge. Basically there's a bunch of 'good tactics' that emerge from the battle rules once you start playing them for real but which aren't very obvious on a read through.

Thirdly, there are some exceptions, special cases and non-obvious rules which can catch you unawares - you've already spotted the 'when does the Disordered state go away' question (answer: as soon as you get a combat result without a disordered tag, but I don't think this is explicitly mentioned anywhere in the rules) but there are others. Here's a couple more that I've run across (there are almost certainly more as I haven't done much playtesting to date):

i) First charge opponents are rolled using 1d6+14 rather than 1d20
ii) If you have the "Charge" action picked then you don't flip to "Run Them Down!" if your opponents are sprinters
iii) I also managed to overlook the modifier for being Disengaged the first time I ran a battle (but that's more my fault than the rules as it's there in black and white in several places)

In summary then, there's a real learning curve to the BoB rules and it has a definite propensity to veer into lethality if you or your players make a bad call - I would definitely recommend that people do some practise battles before they unleash the rules for real onto their campaigns.

Regards
Luke

summary then, there's a real learning curve to the BoB rules and it has a definite propensity to veer into lethality if you or your players make a bad call - I would definitely recommend that people do some practise battles before they unleash the rules for real onto their campaigns.


Luke, I'll second that. I did about 8 practice battles myself before going through the 485 battle with the group. It really paid off in terms of smooth running of the battle, which in turn led to a much more descriptive sequence of events.

The eschille must face two opponents, yes; but, they can still withdraw. Any maneuver in bold on pg 22 for the requisite section (in this case, partial success vs. a critical UI) is possible.

Here's another post I made on the same topic a while back:

http://www.gspendragon.com/roundtable/index.php?topic=603.msg5101#msg5101


Oh, that makes a big difference. But not at all clear from the rules. Yeah, if we'd known withdrawing was an option, the battle would have gone differently.

It seems to me Stand vs. Two should not be a separate maneuver. Instead, it would be more clear to say that when a Unit Intensity Critical Success is rolled, the faces an additional enemy selected by the gamemaster. Or am I missing something?




Firstly on the BI modifiers for huge battles, note that there is an erratum for this issue arising out of Eothar's Battle Intensity (http://www.gspendragon.com/roundtable/index.php?topic=748.0) thread (see Greg's post at #25 in the thread - you apply the battle size mods to First Charge/Unit Intensity rather than the BI).

Hmm... It's not explicitly stated, but I take it that the UI modifier should actually be (Battle Size - 20). It wouldn't have made a difference in this case, but that's good to know for future reference.

My regular group and I have gone through confusion, frustration and love with the BoB rules. Here is a link to our experience with the Battle of Lindsey:

http://sacha3791.livejournal.com/31197.html

Cheers,

Sacha