Mediums and Messages

GLoGtober 24: Background Fleet Combat

William Clarkson Stanfield. The Battle of Trafalgar. 1836. Oil on canvas.

GLoGtober '24 Challenge #1: Anime-inspired content.

Lately, I've been watching 1984's Legends of the Galactic Heroes. If you aren't familiar, it's a scifi series with the scope of a historical epic. The Galactic Empire (an anciens regime style monarchy) wages war against a rebel faction, the Free Planets Alliance (much more reminiscent of the allies in World War II). Most of the show, however, is preoccupied by very elegant looking young men sitting in thrones, drinking brandy, or looking sadly out the window. Every action is accompanied by a ripple of responses, where different characters and factions sound off on what's occurring in the nominal A-plot.

As I was thinking about what to adapt from the show for this prompt, I started to think about how naval combat appears on screen. Many episodes feature a spectacular space battle with thousands of ships firing laser beams at one another, but the actual concern of the show is usually with the personalities giving the orders not the quality of their tactics. I think if I were to try to run a major fleet engagement in one of my games, I'd want to mimic some of this quality.

So how do we run fleet-scale combat at the table while keeping it in the backdrop?

Fleet Combat as Rock-Paper-Scissors

Fundamentally, a fleet can perform one of three maneuvers while engaging in a battle:

  1. Form a line - trying to present as many guns towards the opposing force as possible while maintaining a distance, blowing them away before they can close and present their own weapons.
  2. Form a spearhead - trying to close with the enemy and break out into a general melee as quickly as possible while presenting as slim a target as possible.
  3. Attempt an envelopment - trying to maneuver their forces around the flanks of the enemy to disrupt the concentration of their forces and defeat them in detail.

In practice barring intervention by the players, the spearhead beats the line, the envelope beats the spearhead, and the line beats the envelope. The players should be aware of this system as should characters in the fiction who are familiar with naval doctrine.

Remember, this is a system for reproducing an image of fleet combat, not fleet combat itself. If you want to talk about actual naval maneuvers, run it in Man-o'War or something. Instead, you want to communicate the sense of impending doom, the die being already cast. Both fleets will know the other fleets strategy as soon as the engagement commences, but coordinating a mid-engagement change in strategy is difficult. Let the player's take actions to interfere if they will.

Admiral Personalities as Campaign Objectives

We can make this system a little more gameable by connecting specific strategies to specific commanders. Whether its a matter of theory, temperament, or habit, let each admiral have two maneuvers at their disposal. For example, a particularly hotheaded admiral might only attempt spearheads and envelopments, preferring a proactive strategy to a more defensive one. An admiral defending their home port might prefer a line or a spearhead, not wanted to leave a clear vector to their ward.

Historically, we know that admirals in the so-called Age of Sail often decided on their engagement plans long in advance. Horatio Nelson showed friends a plan for the Battle of Trafalgar in August 1805, two months before the battle itself. His opposite number in the French fleet, Pierre Villeneuve, knew Nelson's reputation well enough to anticipate that he would try some kind unorthodox plan, just not exactly what his plan would be. Even for spur of the moment changes in plan, it could take hours to communicate complex ideas between ships. Getting the right ships to the right location at the right time could take months (or even fail to occur at all!).

This suggests a few possible campaign hooks that a group of enterprising scoundrels might be employed for:

If the PCs are in charge of a fleet, let them decide from the full list of maneuvers (though you could perhaps have stick-in the mud captains under their command who need to be persuaded into actually following the plan).

This also proposes a superpower of sorts for a particularly devious admiral - starting an engagement off in one maneuver, then switching to another. As a GM, I'd reserve this for a few naval engagements in - once the formula starts to get stale. Then the question becomes what does the PC do about this new adversary that's disrupting the comprehensible game that they've been winning?

Running the Battle

Now ideally, the battles outcome would be resolved deterministically. Just like the proverbial 1 HP thief meticulously narrating how they disarm a trap without rolling a die, your players can intervene to swing a battle by following through on one or multiple of the quest hooks above. But what if the players don't intervene, they are too late, or they encounter an engagement half resolved as they conduct other business?

A very rudimentary system to resolve a naval battle would go as follows:

  1. Set a die size for the number of ships in each fleet - d4 for a small exploratory squadron and d12 for a major force. (A single "ship" could represent a larger unit of vessels if you want to handle a larger battle.)
  2. At the beginning of the battle, each fleet rolls their Ships Die, sinking or crippling ships equal to the result. If one fleet is winning the strategic rock-paper-scissors, they roll twice, summing the result.
  3. The side with fewer ships after the initial engagement scatters.

Naturally, these dice could be embellished with any number of modifiers to reflect superiors vessel construction, crew training, or any number of other factors.

For a broader, campaign level view, I'll point you to Skerple's Medieval Stalemate Simulator. Move the overall war state around that hex grid and then whenever a battle occurs on camera use these procedures.

#GLoGtober #practice