My Life As A Gamer: You Got Man-To-Man Combat In My Wargame (Part Three)

(Citations from the Player's Handbook (PHB) and Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition (AD&D1e) as needed.)

(Monday's post is here, and yesterday's is here.)

Your man and his party encountered a hostile party, got Surprise on them, and elected to engage. They have neither been wiped out nor broken and ran by the time that Surprise elapsed. It's time to begin the standard combat procedure in earnest.

As I said yesterday, this is a procedure. It it meant to be run down step by step each Round until Combat concludes and the Encounter ends.

This is obvious to those familiar with wargames. Gygax was a wargamer, as were many playing at the time, so this was presumed to be common knowledge. That presumption proved false.

Initiative

This is by side. Each party rolls 1d6, applies any applicable modifiers to the roll, and the high score wins. The winner acts first, running down the check list. Then the loser gets to do the same.

The penalty for losing this roll is obvious: the winners get to attrit the losers and induce them to break and run before they may suffer retaliation in turn.

As Primeval Patterns noted, having Initiative By Side is the cornerstone of a procedure that scales from Man To Man to Mass Combat and easily opens up Naval and Aerial Combat without needing more additional rules than absolutely necessary.

Presuming that Combat occurs (making avoidance, parley, or waiting--A through C--irrelevant), the winners then do Missiles/Spells, Movement (including Charge), Set vs. Charge, Armed Melee and then Unarmed Melee in that order. Surviving losers, if their Morale holds and are not deliberate ordered otherwise, now get to do the same in return.

Initiative By Side also makes coordination within a party easier. Couple that with strict adherance to the aforementioned procedure, and what begins a a small party with some hirelings--more on those in another post--delving into a small monster lair easily moves into that same party leading an army on campaign because the way you conduct operations IS EXACTLY THE SAME.

That checklist approach seems silly to someone used to be Le Protagonist, but the wargamer knows that this approach makes playable action at scale- and due to how certain Classes are able to have NPC subordinates at 1st level (Druids w/ animal friendship, Fighters leading mercenary Hirelings (and letting Rangers and Paladins command them), Magic-Users with Familiars) this is hardly a non-issue.

DMG p. 62 notes the most common wrinkles to Initiative: Combatants with multiple attacks per round and ties.

Ties means that actions and attacks occur simultaneously, so effects are held until all actions are resolved and then are applied step by step. This can result in some serious carnage that ends up with both sides savaged and open to breaking Morale.

Between the massive advantage that Surprise grants to those that get it, and a clear win on the Initiative check therafter, if you really want to know what that looks like at scale then there is one crystal-clear example from history to look at: The Ambush At Teutonberg Forrest.

Everything that the DMG covers about Surprise and Initative is here, showing that the rules of AD&D1e work exactly as-written as a Mass Combat system.

This includes p. 62's notes on contributing factors, which include willful deception of the target party by the ambushers- what Arminius did to Varus and Rome.

Commentary

The misunderstanding of AD&D1e's combat begins here, and the lack of players bringing their own subordinates to the fight is a major contributing factor. Tomorrow I will get into the meat of the procedure--Missiles, Movement, Melee--and then the wisdom of deciding upon Action By Side will go from easily comprehended to brick-to-face obvious.

Instead, later editions--and other RPGs--went to Action By Actor (a.k.a Individual Initiative), leading to increasing dysfunction over time as it became more difficult for a party to coordinate as a group (as they ought to), and forcing Encounters down the path to what we see today in both tabletop and videogames: Movie Ensembles Doing Combat As Spectacle complete with Boss Monsters and mostly-irrelevant "adds"- something often complained about, but without the wargame foundation there is no effective alternative to be had.

As this series continues, this wrong decision and its consequences will become more obvious to the reader- and so will its remedy.