Advice/Help A Single Battle Roleplay?

[OrenjiGatsu]

So I’ve been thinking of a roleplay based around a single, instead of a full war. I’ve been wondering how I’d would do this. For context, I'm thinking a Napoleonic battle. The focus is strategy, but not really fighting though. Most of the characters won't be in one-one-one fights.

My most likely idea is to somewhat have them act as if they are playing a Total War game. All the characters will be leading an army as officers. They would each control a certain unit or units on the field (such as foot or lancers) as an officer. I don't want them to play a single soldier, as I want this to be more about strategy than fighting. The units will act on their command, but do have the chance to disregard their commands and route if things seem bad enough. They will have to command these units to victory. If the win or lose, the roleplay ends.

I think that this is a good way of doing things, though I do want to see what you would think.

 

[Shuusuke]

I haven't seen much of the Total War series, but I'm familiar with Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I believe I understand the "gameplay" you're going after. I don't know much about Napoleonic stuff, so I'll be using feudal Japan as reference, which might not be 100% accurate with your context but hopefully it's enough to get my point across.

I think a good idea is to have the GM(s) RP as the actual leaders of the armies, and each of the players would play as retainers of one of those leaders. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Japanese history, but a few examples would be a GM playing as Oda Nobunaga, and players being Shibata Katsuie, Akechi Mitsuhide and Toyotomi Hideyoshi; and another GM being Tokugawa Ieyasu, with players being Sakai Tadatsugu, Honda Tadakatsu, Hattori Hanzo and Ii Naomasa; and so on. The players' main orders would be given by the GMs, but the players would have some freedom to decide how to carry out those orders. The leader says "we're going to take out the Doe clan! Retainer1, take castle1! Retainer2, take castle2! Retainer3, take castle3!", retainer1 moves their whole army towards castle1 attempting to overrun the defenders, retainer2 splits their army into 4 to surround castle2 and attempt to make the defenders surrender with a battle of attrition, player3 attempts to collude with one of the enemy retainers to try and assassinate the lord of castle3, that sort of thing. Another potentially fun thing is for the leaders to hold councils, where their retainers act just as themselves and not as units.

But from what I understand, you'll probably want some sort of algorithm to decide who's going to win each battle, especially if players will be taking opposing sides, and you'll need to emphasize that players should be prepared to lose a battle. I say you'll need an algorithm to justify to a player why they lost that battle. I don't know where you're going to do such an RP, but you most likely don't want the players to have all the information about the enemy if they didn't work on spying, scouting and things like that (aka Fog of War), so limiting their view and making them unable to see the enemy's posts until after the battle (as proof of why the battle turned out like that) might be something you want to do as well. I don't think you can do private threads here, so you could carry it out through various PMs, and then reporting the results of each move in an actual thread. Alternatively, Discord has those viewing/posting permission settings, so you could make players only able to see what their allies are doing (if even that, misinformation is a thing as well).

If you also want the GMs to compete like the other players, that would take some extra planning. Since GMs technically can see everything, there's no FoW so the chances of metagaming are higher. One way to handle this is to make the GMs directly involved in the conflict being unable to see (parts of) the posts of the other side, while the uninvolved GMs decide the outcome. Alternatively, you could just have all GMs, including the involved ones, decide on the outcome, by means of voting possibly.

 

[Shuusuke]

I see, the morale mechanic is also in some of the earlier games of the series I mentioned. The higher the morale, the more damage they deal and the less damage they take, plus they are able to use more skills, and if their morale gets too low, the units automatically start retreating and can't be ordered until they reach one of their own bases, or just simply get destroyed. Their morale increases when they take an enemy fortress, and decreases when an allied unit is destroyed, when they take damage, greatly decreases when an ally loses a duel (and decreases even more if that ally was killed in single combat), feels like we're talking about the same thing here. It's also one way to take a castle, if you surround them with enough troops for long enough, they'll eventually surrender as the "castle" 's morale decreases.

And what I meant by different battles is more like different engagements in the same battle, so in other words multiple fronts, which is what you seem to be after. Considering there will be multiple players on one side, I assume their units will have some freedom to do their own thing instead of being all bunched up together. No that there's anything wrong with that, but it's what I understood you were after.