Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk XII

[Brother Oni]

I think a section which gives the GM some tips of military procedure to infiltration and sentry duty would be very helpful for making a stealth system work, for tabletop games.

As I noted earlier, this should only be applicable if the defenders had military training. A random, uncoordinated response would be expected from a barbarian horde or untrained civilians thrown together as a militia.

[Mr. Mask]

Grey: Tabletop games are pretty hit or miss, with stealth, entirely on the GM you have. If there's good visualization of the situation, and the GM is playing things sensibly, they'll give penalties and bonuses appropriate to what kind of stealth plan you enact. Of course, even with a skillful GM, it seems awkward to get proper stealth mechanics out of most systems.

With games, they can do completely terrible jobs and get away with it. The enemies know exactly where you are, or spot you through stone walls, or they're blind as moles, or they go over and stare at a wall so you can sneak up behind them.


Oni: I think most barbarian groups would be pretty good with stealth and thwarting stealth. It's a pretty essential part of warfare, so any warlike group with wood-craft traditions is likely to have excellent scouts and sentries.

The point is of course a good one. You'd want notes for how a group could be confused, fail to communicate or notice dead scouts, and other such details. Even a skilled military operation can encounter confusion; which you'd either want to roll for or leave up to the GM's discretion.

[Matthew]

Many of them started out as knights and won their position as a political favor or even by direct conquest. I'm not sure when exactly they would have stopped being knights, but in the case I quoted upthread, clearly this particular Bishop Walter von Geroldseck never did.

Yeah, sure, and many (or most) came from the same knightly families as their secular fellows. In practice they may never stop being knights, but much like knights who become monks they are no longer knights in theory, just as the mid to late medieval sergeants and squires looked like knights, but were not. Then, of course, there was the "real" conflation with the military orders and Bernard of Clairvaux famously stating that he did not know whether to call them monks or knights. Officially clergy were not supposed to function like knights, and for the most part they knew it, but when it suited them they paid it no mind. There was no point in actually claiming to be a knight, though, which is why it is always "as a knight" or "as though a knight" or "as good as any knight".

[JustSomeGuy]

Reflections on stealth:

Key, absolutely key, is the motivations, morale, discipline and routines of both forces. If you are really keen, you will crawl 500+ yards in pitch black really slowly so as t oavoid arousing suspicion; and your enemy will be actively watching their assigned arcs of fire, sending out routine patrols, be alert and investigate potential enemy sightings - if no one really cares, the attackers will trudge along half-heartedly, making all kinds of noise, until contact with the enemy where they will turn and escape, and the defenders will (if they're even still awake) be groggy, half-dressed (the eaisier to rouse yourself and return to sleep afterwards) resting their heads on whatever is to hand, put everything suspicious down to animals/wind etc. and not make contact wit hother sentry positions/guard commanders etc.

I have little practical skill or experience with uberstealth (i was a blacksmith, welder, metalworker and recovery mechanic during my military service), but i served with some guys who did - including some airborne/commando guys and a posting to a ghurka unit - and often deployed on exercise with them and tagged along (mostly because it was fun), and the right people in the right situation can absolutely 'stealth level' when needed, even when they had people like me tagging along. If you understand what makes you stand out and be spotted/heard, you can take measures to avoid it, such as concealing your outline and shiny surfaces, not having loads of jangly rattling kit swingaing and bashing about etc. The most obvious giveaway at night isn't being seen, but being heard. Rustling leaves, the odd gently snapping twig (not a herd of buffalo trampling through, mind), a gentle (careless!) whisper that can be passed off as the wind+imagination+tiredness etc. can all give you away but only in the oddest of circumstances, you'll mostly get away with them; the big warning signs are unnatural sounds, like watch beeps, zipper noises, metallic clicks (such as loading/cocking weapons) adn the like.

If you take your time to scout your target (almost exclusively you would scout one night and return the next to assault, although that may well be to fit in with the exercise - i for one would have two groups, one doing the recconaisance and another ready to assault as soon as the first team is back and information disseminated and plans made), you will learn an awful lot about your enemy and how to proceed - particular points of note are sentry positions, camp layout, general attentiveness of the enemy, routes and regularity of standing patrols etc.

Once you know this, you can absolutely sneak past the sentries straight to the main body of resting troops, most of whom are asleep or trying to be so don't particularly pay attention (after all, that is what the sentries are for/someone else's job who gets paid more can deal with it), and can often be 'bluffed' (one example that springs to mind was when i was playing enemy for a nco course - where they are trying to be their best - and we snuck in and literally stumbled into one guy's shellscrape... he sat up and said something like "what's going on", and the guy with us who was on his leg said "oh, sorry mate wrong hole" and backed out. Guy went back to sleep no bother, assuming someone had got off duty and got lost - he didn't even see the rest of us 5 feet away beacuase all he cared about was the guy who woke him up)

I even have a couple of photos somewhere of a section of ghurkas sat in a woodline all cammed up at night, and you can't see them at all until the next photo with a big security light shining at them and even then you have to look beyond the first glance.

There was another time a main battle tank was driving straight at our sentry position because it didn't see us until we started shining torches at the drivers hatch, when it changed direction, although that may not have been as much stealth as it was someone driving for hours over rolling prairie not paying attention anymore.

[warty goblin]

As I noted earlier, this should only be applicable if the defenders had military training. A random, uncoordinated response would be expected from a barbarian horde or untrained civilians thrown together as a militia.

I'd actually figure that rather a lot of tribal people would be very good both at stealth and defeating stealth. Much tribal warfare after all isn't so much battles as it is ambushing some guy from the other tribe while he's out hunting. Also I'd figure that spending one's life constantly hunting would do a lot for a person's ability to escape detection.

[Galloglaich]

Yeah, sure, and many (or most) came from the same knightly families as their secular fellows. In practice they may never stop being knights, but much like knights who become monks they are no longer knights in theory, just as the mid to late medieval sergeants and squires looked like knights, but were not. Then, of course, there was the "real" conflation with the military orders and Bernard of Clairvaux famously stating that he did not know whether to call them monks or knights. Officially clergy were not supposed to function like knights, and for the most part they knew it, but when it suited them they paid it no mind. There was no point in actually claiming to be a knight, though, which is why it is always "as a knight" or "as though a knight" or "as good as any knight".

I think this is a little off - I know for a fact that in the Teutonic Order members were considered actual knights, it was a specific rank, brother knight, (ritterbruder) they also had brother-squires below that. These guys were actual belted and spurred knights with every right and honor that other knights had, they even participated in the tournament circuit.

They also did follow a monastic rule, fasting on certain days, wearing a type of habit, and so on, but there is no doubt they were knights.

I know this was also the case for the Livonian Order and the Sword Brothers.

I'm not certain but I believe the Templars and Hospitalers were the same as well.

G

[Galloglaich]

I'd actually figure that rather a lot of tribal people would be very good both at stealth and defeating stealth. Much tribal warfare after all isn't so much battles as it is ambushing some guy from the other tribe while he's out hunting. Also I'd figure that spending one's life constantly hunting would do a lot for a person's ability to escape detection.

I'd say the same for militia in many cases.

In the pre-industrial context, there is often a lot of confusion between militia, which is usually trained; and an actual untrained levy. Militia were usually pretty good at remaining vigilant and alert in defending their walls, since their life and freedom typically depended on it.

For militia, think Swiss 'mercenaries' and Genoese 'mercenaries'.

As far as games go, whether it's computer games or rpgs, the whole idea of 'mooks', 'red shirts' etc. is really the issue. Players want to feel like tough-guys, and easy wish-fulfillment is a big part of our entertainment culture, whether you are talking about a 'rom com' or an action flick... it's the sort of pre-chew that most people want to eat.

For those who do chew their own food, I think "justsomeguy" gave us a pretty good description of the actual flaws in human nature that can and are exploited in dealing with real sentries; (really, relying on the same kind of instinct we all have for 'wishful thinking' - to assume that a disturbance or a noise or a man stepping on your foot is just a routine thing and not an actual dangerous anomoly) but once people are focused on you as a problem, they can be awfully creative.

I think there is a famous anecdote from the Panama war a couple of decades ago, where a SEAL team was inserted out of the torpedo tubes of an attack submarine offshore, got into a 'stealth' boat with an electric motor, and were sneaking across an airfield, when some Panamanian defense forces guy who was eating his lunch noticed them, opened fire with an old rusty RPK, and practically wiped the whole squad out (killed 4 SEALs and wounded 11).


G

[Mr. Mask]

Guy: One point you make stands out to me in particular. The really skilled unit could operate while you were taken along, despite the fact you probably weren't as good as them at stealth. That's entirely contrary to systems like DnD, where everyone rolls stealth, and someone who isn't a master rogue easily ruins the operation for all involved.

This makes me feel better about my decision to make large groups have stealth penalties, but they share the best agent's roll.

[Mike_G]

A skilled operator can coach a less skilled person, tell them when to move and when to freeze, and so on.

It's more work, and the worse they are, the harder to cover for them, but good allies will make you better.

For a game you could make everybody roll and give the "aid another" bonus to the low man.

[Mr. Mask]

Yeah, I have a modifier planned to get that effect. If I do this correctly, it will be easy to apply a lot of modifiers without confusion.


Another thing about stealth in certain RPGs, particularly DnD-like ones, is that it usually isn't that powerful. Generally, an extra hit at the start of an encounter, which rarely kills the target.

Realistically, most of the best gunslingers were killed from shots in the back. While DnD doesn't put much emphasis on warriors having good wisdom or spot or listen checks, that is an important part of being a warrior. If you don't know your fighting, you're a sitting duck--cut down in a second just like an untrained serf.

[warty goblin]

Apparently non-strategic night time trench raids occurred in WWI; commanders would gather up a small group of volunteers (consisting of the more aggressive soldiers) and send them out with little more than a bunch of weapons and the promise a decent ration of rum on their return. One of the guys discussed regularly led trench raids and sounded like a stone cold sociopath, he basically loved murdering people up close and personal. Makes you kind of hope he got fatally shot on the last day of the war.

I recall reading a summary of a study of, I think, British soldiers in WWI, that basically concluded anybody not a basket case after a month or two of frontline deployment was a sociopath to begin with. People with a normal capacity for empathy just got ground down.

[Galloglaich]

Realistically, most of the best gunslingers were killed from shots in the back. While DnD doesn't put much emphasis on warriors having good wisdom or spot or listen checks, that is an important part of being a warrior. If you don't know your fighting, you're a sitting duck--cut down in a second just like an untrained serf.

Yah I think this is one of the big problems with their idea of a fighter, the whole CRPG / RPG concept of a 'tank' who can just absorb hits and doesn't actually do much more than absorb damage and dish out a little punishment back, and doesn't rely on situational awareness or stealth at all, let alone timing or tempo.

It would help game designers a lot I think to study how actual tanks worked in real life. Even trying out a relatively simple but realistic computer war game can be a real eye-opener. You can have the worlds best tank (T-34, Pz Kw V, whatever) but if you attack without regard for where the enemy forces are and how they are situated, blundering right into the open so that they definitely know where you are, you are doing to die real quick, no matter how good your armor is, no matter how good your gun is, how big your engine and so forth.

It's the same with air combat too. The most deadly component on a WW II fighter arguably was the radio. If you play a game like Il2 you can see how 3 or 4 guys using their radio's (through VIOP) can rip apart 12 or 15 guys who aren't.

Every kind of actual warfare is a chess game, and without situational awareness (reconnaissance, battlefield intelligence, communications) you are playing without knowing where the other pieces are. To call that a disadvantage is an understatement.

The more I read about the Mongols, the more critical it seems that it was THIS, the C3I as they call it today, which was their real battlefield advantage. People tend to try to make their recurve bow into an uberweapon; and it was a very good weapon, but it was not what made the real difference. It was the C3I which allowed the Mongols and other lightly armed forces in history to defeat much tougher (on a man for man level) opponents routinely. The C3I and the discipline which for example allowed entire Mongol cavalry troops to lay their horses down on their sides and hide ...

Rand Corporation wrote a really good article about this a few years back, including how the Mongols used special couriers called 'arrow riders' for battlefield intel here

Even the knightly heavy-cavalry of the European feudal warlords relied on timing and situational awareness to achieve their victories, just on a more tactical than operational level. In a full scale battle, they would ride by, attack, rearm; ride by, attack, rearm; over and over again until the enemy force started to weaken. Then and only then the decisive lance charge came which shattered the enemy formation. Vastly more wars were won by small ambushes, tricks to takeover castles, commando raids to destroy supplies, basic cavalry tactics used to achieve quick local numeric superiority, and so forth, than the actual toe to toe, football game style contests which tend to get all the press.

G

[Galloglaich]

I think whoever wrote this article had a somewhat limited command of English, but it's got some more useful details on the Mongols use of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence networks.

http://www.etudeshistoriques.org/ind...e/viewFile/7/7

G

[warty goblin]

Yah I think this is one of the big problems with their idea of a fighter, the whole CRPG / RPG concept of a 'tank' who can just absorb hits and doesn't actually do much more than absorb damage and dish out a little punishment back, and doesn't rely on situational awareness or stealth at all, let alone timing or tempo.

I've always hated that. Not least because, given the option in any sort of game where it makes any sort of sense, I will pretty much always play a dude with a sword. And soaking up damage like an inert sponge is dull. Even aside from my desire to actually be able to do cool stuff*, it just sells a huge swath of history vastly short. We've reduced Viking warriors to idiot barbarians in loincloths, knights to clumsy fools in tin cans, and the sword to a mild irritation.

*And for the record, being able to set my sword on fire does not count. That's just being a wizard who uses a meat cleaver instead of a staff. I want to be a wizard with my sword in the sense of having great skill, not turning it into a +1 sparkler.

It would help game designers a lot I think to study how actual tanks worked in real life. Even trying out a relatively simple but realistic computer war game can be a real eye-opener. You can have the worlds best tank (T-34, Pz Kw V, whatever) but if you attack without regard for where the enemy forces are and how they are situated, blundering right into the open so that they definitely know where you are, you are doing to die real quick, no matter how good your armor is, no matter how good your gun is, how big your engine and so forth.

It doesn't even have to be a super hardcore simulation. Company of Heroes gets the idea across just fine, and is plenty gamey. An unsupported armor push is going to end in smoking ruin pretty fast against anybody with any notion of how to play, even if it achieves the initial breakthrough. Well, unless I'm the one trying to stop it, in which case you can probably Panzer blitz through my entire defense without any problem.

[Brother Oni]

Oni: I think most barbarian groups would be pretty good with stealth and thwarting stealth. It's a pretty essential part of warfare, so any warlike group with wood-craft traditions is likely to have excellent scouts and sentries.

I was thinking more along the lines of mounting a disciplined co-ordinated response, rather than being sneaky or being able to detect sneaky people.

As others have pointed out, on an individual or small group basis, tribesmen would be excellent at being sneaky as that's how they raid or hunt. Get several thousand of them together in an army and I don't think they'd be able to post sentries and set up rotating watches with the same organisation as a Roman Legion or a modern army.

[Galloglaich]

What about say, Vikings?

Or the Visigoths?

Or the Franks?

G

[Galloglaich]

Speaking of Vikings, they found a really significant pre-Viking grave in the Baltic, on an Island near Estonia. Multiple heavily armed warriors, apparently killed in battle, buried in two ships.

If you look at the photo's on page 4 of the article they show an arm bone severed by a blade.

http://archaeology.org/issues/95-130...vendel-oseberg

"Allmae has ample reason to think the men were felled in a fierce battle. Lying on a steel lab table is a humerus, or upper arm bone. Lining it up against her own arm, she demonstrates how the man probably raised his right hand over his head to ward off sword blows—to no avail. Deep chop marks cut clean through the bone. Another warrior’s skull was cut straight through. “Somebody chopped off the top of his head,” Allmae says. “I also suppose it was done with a sword—two strokes.” Only five of the 40 skeletons have clear cut marks on their bones, which she says isn’t unusual for mass graves—there are lots of ways to die in battle, after all. “There were also arrowheads in the body or in the pelvic area that could have been deadly but not touched the bones,” Allmae adds. Bloody flesh wounds that didn’t connect with bone could also have felled the men without leaving a lasting trace"

(snip)

also some more archeological support for the idea that people in the pre-industrial world were not the undernourished wimps some people from the 'nasty brutish and short' school tend to claim:

"Allmae’s analysis shows that this would have been an intimidating crew, especially in eighth-century Europe. The average height was 5’10”, and several of the men might have been well over six feet tall. Some of the bones bear signs of old wounds, suggesting these were veterans of more than one scrap. Based on the style of the swords, arrowheads, and other weapons, in addition to the objects found in the graves and especially the boats themselves, Peets and Konsa are already certain that the men were from Scandinavia."

G

[Knaight]

It doesn't even have to be a super hardcore simulation. Company of Heroes gets the idea across just fine, and is plenty gamey. An unsupported armor push is going to end in smoking ruin pretty fast against anybody with any notion of how to play, even if it achieves the initial breakthrough. Well, unless I'm the one trying to stop it, in which case you can probably Panzer blitz through my entire defense without any problem.

It doesn't have to be much of a simulation at all. Advance Warsgets this across fine, despite being extremely gamey. Just rushing forward like an idiot gets you killed. It routinely gets the AI killed, and the AI routinely starts with pretty big advantages in regards to everything that isn't strategy. I don't know where the idea of "tanking" came from, but it appears to have mostly to have been a CRPG invention - though I will note that there are a handful of old novels and similar that give this impression (Le Morte d'Arthur is pretty bad about this).

[AgentPaper]

It doesn't have to be much of a simulation at all. Advance Warsgets this across fine, despite being extremely gamey. Just rushing forward like an idiot gets you killed. It routinely gets the AI killed, and the AI routinely starts with pretty big advantages in regards to everything that isn't strategy. I don't know where the idea of "tanking" came from, but it appears to have mostly to have been a CRPG invention - though I will note that there are a handful of old novels and similar that give this impression (Le Morte d'Arthur is pretty bad about this).

Well, in that sense, even World of Warcraft, probably the most egregious example of silly tanking mechanics, gets the point across because if you run ahead without support, you'll get stomped flat in a few seconds flat no matter what class/role you are. (well, unless you severely out-gear the content, but that's a whole other issue)

[Galloglaich]

Yeah but it's the very idea of the tank role, it's not the actual way that armor works, not to mention the general lack of good situational awareness and a safe knowledge that you can take whatever mooks you are going to face (at a given level) go lick your wounds for a while, and come back.

It originates, I think, with unlimited hit points plus cure light wounds, then gets accelerated by any number of magical abilities, and finally gels into a sort of comic book hero archetype, which is really boring for combat unless you are really into all the magical effects, and enjoy chewing through endless... endless armies of mooks without a whole lot of tactical thought.

Real fighting isn't so static, or so incremental, or so predictable, or so boring. I think games like WoW helped weld the worst kind of RPG cliché's to the popular culture mindset in a way that is really hard to shake off for those few who want to have some other kind of experience in a game or in entertainment from the popular genre fiction of whatever media (let alone have an interest in any kind of real fighting).

G

[Matthew]

I think this is a little off - I know for a fact that in the Teutonic Order members were considered actual knights, it was a specific rank, brother knight, (ritterbruder) they also had brother-squires below that. These guys were actual belted and spurred knights with every right and honor that other knights had, they even participated in the tournament circuit.

They also did follow a monastic rule, fasting on certain days, wearing a type of habit, and so on, but there is no doubt they were knights.

I know this was also the case for the Livonian Order and the Sword Brothers.

I'm not certain but I believe the Templars and Hospitalers were the same as well.

Right, that is why I brought them up, because it was the point of "real conflation" where a man could be a monk and a knight at the same time, indeed passing into and out of a military order without ever ceasing to be a knight. It was a highly unusual situation, and as a result Saint Bernard lacked the terminology to succinctly describe their status at the outset. Interestingly, the Templars (and I assume other military orders) had the controversial right to ordain their own priests; I have never yet been able to determine one way or the other whether these were knights

[AgentPaper]

Yeah but it's the very idea of the tank role, it's not the actual way that armor works, not to mention the general lack of good situational awareness and a safe knowledge that you can take whatever mooks you are going to face (at a given level) go lick your wounds for a while, and come back.

It originates, I think, with unlimited hit points plus cure light wounds, then gets accelerated by any number of magical abilities, and finally gels into a sort of comic book hero archetype, which is really boring for combat unless you are really into all the magical effects, and enjoy chewing through endless... endless armies of mooks without a whole lot of tactical thought.

Real fighting isn't so static, or so incremental, or so predictable, or so boring. I think games like WoW helped weld the worst kind of RPG cliché's to the popular culture mindset in a way that is really hard to shake off for those few who want to have some other kind of experience in a game or in entertainment from the popular genre fiction of whatever media (let alone have an interest in any kind of real fighting).

G

Very few fights even in World of Warcraft are actually that static. Any boss encounter worth its salt requires tons of situational awareness. Look at any boss' entry in the wiki and you'll see a whole essay on all the tactics you need to use, abilities to watch out for, and so on.

I'm not trying to say that World of Warcraft is in any shape or form a realistic combat simulator, but that's different from saying that tactics, communication, and situational awareness aren't important.

If anything, it's a great example of a game where those things are important. Every single high-level raiding group uses Vent or some other type of teamspeak to allow everyone to communicate. The tank calls out tank swaps, the raid leader warns people about raid mechanics, and people yell out when something goes wrong so everyone else can adapt to the situation and take care of it. Even in pick-up groups, literally groups of random people picked off the street, vent is a requirement or you don't get in.

[warty goblin]

It doesn't have to be much of a simulation at all. Advance Warsgets this across fine, despite being extremely gamey. Just rushing forward like an idiot gets you killed. It routinely gets the AI killed, and the AI routinely starts with pretty big advantages in regards to everything that isn't strategy. I don't know where the idea of "tanking" came from, but it appears to have mostly to have been a CRPG invention - though I will note that there are a handful of old novels and similar that give this impression (Le Morte d'Arthur is pretty bad about this).

I think it's worth distinguishing between a warrior being saved by armor, and a warrior planning on getting hit repeatedly because the armor is guaranteed to take it. Beowulf for example is repeatedly saved by his mail, but it isn't written as if getting mauled or knifed is a non-issue because he has it. It's written as a lethal situation only made survivable because of the armor, and given the alternative he wouldn't have taken the hit in the first place.

Yeah but it's the very idea of the tank role, it's not the actual way that armor works, not to mention the general lack of good situational awareness and a safe knowledge that you can take whatever mooks you are going to face (at a given level) go lick your wounds for a while, and come back.

Between combat healing is fine. Even if it is realistic, starting later fights at an enormous disadvantage because of wounds taken early in the game is generally bad design. But easily available in-combat healing I think just murders any sort of tension the battle could have. The question is no longer 'can I win?' but 'did I pack enough little red bottles?' It turns every fight into a battle of attrition, instead of motion and timing and skill.

It originates, I think, with unlimited hit points plus cure light wounds, then gets accelerated by any number of magical abilities, and finally gels into a sort of comic book hero archetype, which is really boring for combat unless you are really into all the magical effects, and enjoy chewing through endless... endless armies of mooks without a whole lot of tactical thought.

I'm becoming steadily convinced that the insta-consume health potion is the single worst thing continually perpetuated by the modern RPG. It allows for lazy design, lazy play and once the early game poverty streak is over, means the game is either a cake-walk or forced to resort to excessively lethal attacks in order to give a challenge.

Real fighting isn't so static, or so incremental, or so predictable, or so boring. I think games like WoW helped weld the worst kind of RPG cliché's to the popular culture mindset in a way that is really hard to shake off for those few who want to have some other kind of experience in a game or in entertainment from the popular genre fiction of whatever media (let alone have an interest in any kind of real fighting).

Games can get away from this sort of rote predictability, they just need to simulate a bit more, and abuse percentage increases a bit less. For instance I was playing Mount & Blade last night, and trying to take on four Sea Raiders on my lonesome at the beginning of the game. I was riding around them, taking potshots with my light crossbow from horseback, and everything was going great. Right up until one of them lodged an arrow in my cranium. Ended the fight right there.

[Galloglaich]

Very few fights even in World of Warcraft are actually that static. Any boss encounter worth its salt requires tons of situational awareness. Look at any boss' entry in the wiki and you'll see a whole essay on all the tactics you need to use, abilities to watch out for, and so on.

I'm not trying to say that World of Warcraft is in any shape or form a realistic combat simulator, but that's different from saying that tactics, communication, and situational awareness aren't important.

If anything, it's a great example of a game where those things are important. Every single high-level raiding group uses Vent or some other type of teamspeak to allow everyone to communicate. The tank calls out tank swaps, the raid leader warns people about raid mechanics, and people yell out when something goes wrong so everyone else can adapt to the situation and take care of it. Even in pick-up groups, literally groups of random people picked off the street, vent is a requirement or you don't get in.

That's true, good point... even in WoW at some level the coms and so forth do come into play, if to a limited extent (since you are really only talking about inconvenience as the worst result - the delay of victory - rather than the possibility of defeat)

G

[AgentPaper]

That's true, good point... even in WoW at some level the coms and so forth do come into play, if to a limited extent (since you are really only talking about inconvenience as the worst result - the delay of victory - rather than the possibility of defeat)

G

Well, delay of victory if you mean that as in the whole raid group of 10/25 people dying and then needing to come back and re-start the whole thing over, I guess. And yes, that is what happens when you don't have good communication.

Sure, there's groups that are skilled and coordinated enough and have fought certain bosses enough that they could probably kill them without needing to use any kind of communications, but that only happens after you've fought and beaten that specific boss many times and have gotten the patterns down so well you know what to look out for without anyone telling you.

Which goes to show just how powerful communication, situational awareness, and good tactics are, when they're so strong even in a game as abstract as World of Warcraft.

[Galloglaich]

What I mean is, you can't actually "die" you can only be reset back to start over from some other point (and lose a few hours of time at the very most), right?


So it's just a very very one dimensional imitation of the sort of adaptations you have to make for some kind of fight in which you can actually lose, let alone survive a situation where you could die. It's really not that much different from a super mario brothers game in one sense, it's just a pattern of "spells" and commands jinks this way and that way and so on, and you keep starting over until you get through it. But it's also true that even to solve this limited degree of a problem people make the most of tools like ventrillo and whatnot as a "force multiplier" which through group cooperation enables a smaller group to solve the puzzle quicker.

But the analogy is still a little bit simpler than actual use of recon and so forth, the mooks don't do much that's truly unpredictable do they? And the boss is usually in proscribed area with a certain limited range of abilities and actions (however formidable). I think you can get something closer to a real tactical kind of situation in PvP MMO's such as Planetside or whatever (not sure what is current these days) or one of the war MMO's like WW2 Online where you really have to use real tactics (because your human controlled opponents can actually be genuinely cunning and unpredictable) and one side or another can actually lose... but even there, you just respawn whenever you get 'killed'.

Then again they have PvP versions of WoW too don't they? Or do they?

G

[AgentPaper]

What I mean is, you can't actually "die" you can only be reset back to start over from some other point (and lose a few hours of time at the very most), right?

So it's just a very very one dimensional imitation of the sort of adaptations you have to make for some kind of fight in which you can actually lose, let alone survive a situation where you could die.It's really not that much different from a super mario brothers game in one sense, it's just a pattern of "spells" and commands jinks this way and that way and so on, and you keep starting over until you get through it. But it's also true that even to solve this limited degree of a problem people make the most of tools like ventrillo and whatnot as a "force multiplier" which through group cooperation enables a smaller group to solve the puzzle quicker.

This might be true in theory, but in practice there's a lot of complex stuff going on and things can go wrong very quickly.

For example, one mechanic that a fair number of bosses use is one where they grab a member of the group at random, and start squeezing them. This both does damage to that character and also prevents them from taking any actions for a few seconds. If this happens to, say, a random Hunter who's only job is to shoot the boss, then you're OK, but if instead he grabs the Priest who's in charge of keeping the main tank alive, suddenly your tank is without any healer, and if you don't have someone switch from group-healing duties to focus on healing the tank until the priest is released, then you're going to die.

There's always some element of randomness to any boss, and if you don't have good communications to alert people to what's going on, and a good leader to give out orders mid-fight, you're not going to progress very far in the game.

But the analogy is still a little bit simpler than actual use of recon and so forth, the mooks don't do much that's truly unpredictable do they? And the boss is usually in proscribed area with a certain limited range of abilities and actions (however formidable). I think you can get something closer to a real tactical kind of situation in PvP MMO's such as Planetside or whatever (not sure what is current these days) or one of the war MMO's like WW2 Online where you really have to use real tactics (because your human controlled opponents can actually be genuinely cunning and unpredictable) and one side or another can actually lose... but even there, you just respawn whenever you get 'killed'.

Then again they have PvP versions of WoW too don't they? Or do they?

G

There are PvP versions of WoW, including both arenas where coordinated teams of 3-5 players fight in ranked battles, as well as large battlefields with as many as 40 players on each side.

The real area where Videogames and real life differentiate is in the long-term organizational stuff. There's nothing like an organized guard duty with rotating sentries and patrols and so on in any game ever, simply because there's no reason to. The closest to that kind of thing I can think of in video games would probably be EvE Online, and I don't think even they get anywhere near the level of real-world organization.

[warty goblin]

The real area where Videogames and real life differentiate is in the long-term organizational stuff. There's nothing like an organized guard duty with rotating sentries and patrols and so on in any game ever, simply because there's no reason to. The closest to that kind of thing I can think of in video games would probably be EvE Online, and I don't think even they get anywhere near the level of real-world organization.

Which is an entirely good thing. The moment you start drawing up duty rosters for a videogame is the moment you seriously need to reevaluate the thought process that led you to this point in particular, and quite probably your life in general.

[rrgg]

How big of an issue was bullet drop when dealing with muskets? I seem to remember cruching the numbers at some point for one of the slower types and getting something rather bad, around 5 feet of drop after 100 yards.

[xeo]

I recall reading a summary of a study of, I think, British soldiers in WWI, that basically concluded anybody not a basket case after a month or two of frontline deployment was a sociopath to begin with. People with a normal capacity for empathy just got ground down.

That seems pretty unlikely. If it was the case then all of the armies should have collapsed pretty quickly as their troops rapidly became basket cases. Either that or Europe had a surprisingly large amount of sociopaths. My great-grandfather did about two years on the Western Front and the only negative effect it had was that he smoked 40 a day, despite having lost a lung to poison gas.

The horrors of the Great War tend to be overblown -- the British rotated their troops out of the trenches every three weeks, which is more than you can say for many British soldiers in the Second World War. Tony Ashworth's "Trench Warfare 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System" is an excellent introduction to ordinary trench life.

He points out that trench raiding wasn't simply an outlet for aggression but also a good way of preparing the battlefield (by knocking out important enemy positions like machine guns), of gathering intelligence (by taking prisoners -- this was vital) and of keeping the enemy and your own men on their toes.

Incidentally, there's a pretty good war movie about sociopathic trench raiders -- set in the Korean War! It's called "War Hunt" and stars a very young Robert Redford as well as John Saxon of "Enter the Dragon" fame.