Cataphracts Design Diary #1
Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on.
About two months ago, I reread several series on military historian Bret Devereaux’s blog, ACOUP: analyses of Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith, breakdowns of pre-modern command and pre-modern logistics, and, of course, a post simply titled “How Fast Do Armies Move?”. I’m a fan of Devereaux’s—he writes in that delicious space of really knowing his history yet also with the understanding he’s writing for a bunch of D&D dorks who care about the fiddly minutiae of, say, the efficacy of maille vs. plate armor against English longbows. The fun, gritty little details.
In military history, as Devereaux explains, there are basically three levels of decision-making: strategy (why you fight, the goals of the war), operations (how you get your soldiers to battle, how armies move), and tactics (how you win battles). It struck me, as Devereaux often alludes to, that there are a lot of games about strategy (Civilization, Diplomacy, the world map of Total War) and innumerable games about tactics (any given medieval strategy title or tabletop wargame), but very few about operations. Almost no games, as far as I’m aware, are interested in, say, the logistics of feeding an army, or communication structures between commanders in the field. Games usually simplify or skim over all those fine details of running a war, or just skip them entirely.
So, I said to myself, why not try to make an operations wargame? Embrace the logistics, the gritty details, the fuzziness of the fog of war?
Thus was born Cataphract, the written ruleset, and Cataphracts, the game I’m currently running. They have the same name because I made both of them, but—as I’ll discuss—if you run your own campaign, it’ll probably be different. (Really, this one should be called something like “the Voreia Campaign” or “the End of Emperor Michael’s Peace.”)
Almost immediately, things started happening that I have never seen before in any game, anywhere.
The pitch is pretty simple: it’s an asynchronous play-by-post real-time wargame, set in a pseudo-Black Sea region circa 1300. That means no sessions—instead, my players write what they want to do in a discord channel, and I keep track of their orders on my map. We track things in real time, so that means if an army takes two weeks to march from one place to the next, well, I’ll see you in two weeks. Messengers are just “a guy on a series of horses,” so they, too, are tracked in real time—a letter sent from one stronghold to another 150 miles away takes, at minimum, about three days to arrive. While I allow a little bit of “rubber-banding” to keep things moving (especially with players in multiple timezones), we generally stick to this real time element quite strictly. No teleporting armies, no instantaneous messages.
The actual written rules are straightforward: 6-mile hexes, a basic 2d6+mods roll for battles, pretty simple rules for special units, and a few other odds and ends. You can read these rules quickly, and they’ll feel familiar if you’ve played a more simulation-y tabletop RPG before (or, you know, Mount & Blade).
The other twist I added is command structures: each of the five factions (more on them in a minute) starts with a single commander leading one huge army. Whenever a commander wants, they can bring in a new commander (and thus a new player), hand them a chunk of their army, and send them off. Once that happens, those commanders are broken into their own text channels, and cannot communicate except through messengers. (The one exception is when two commanders are in the same place—then, they get a channel together where they can talk freely.) Those commanders can then appoint their own subordinate commanders, and so on. I started Cataphracts with five commanders—at time of writing, I have twenty-three.
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