A Short Game of Cataphracts
Earlier this year Sam Sorensen published a very early draft of a kreigsspiel-like operational wargame and kinda-sorta TTRPG named Cataphracts. This blog is about my experience prepping and running a game of Cataphracts, and ultimately deciding to end the game after about two weeks, for a variety of reasons outlined below.
Cataphracts is a cool game, and I look forward to playing or running it again in the future. At the moment however I found it the rules have too many gaps in them, and did not mesh well with the players and environment I ran it in. To be clear, I don't think this is a problem now! A game benefits greatly from people pushing on it as early as possible. While my overall experience running Cataphracts has been a good time, boy did I step on a lot of rakes.
I'll get some things I thought I did pretty good out of the way first: I wrote some pretty decent battle reports, and I came up with some fun spells for one commander who knew them. Only one got used:
Eclipse - Extinguish the light of the sun in 2d6 miles around you for 1d6 hours. 3 week rest.
and in the global weather channel this is what players who were not nearby saw: The sky suddenly dims, as if a strong wind met a tall fire. You look up and from the sun extends a column of darkness reaching to the ground. This caused no small amount of public and private consternation, which made me very happy.
Anyway, the stuff I got wrong, and all the ways they fed into one another:
Player Expectations
My playgroup is a mix of people who play all sorts of RPGs of varying flavors, and some have lots of experience in wargames and megagames. In short, everyone was left wanting a bit more. The players who like telling a big story loved fleshing out backstories and writing letters, and not so much the day to day aspect of managing an army. The wargamers enjoyed that more, but felt overly confined to the operational aspect of the game and being unable to affect much of the tactical or strategic layers.
Team Composition
One big departure from Sam's method of running the game is I wanted to play just with folks I know in a private server, and everyone joining the game from the beginning. What I went with was for a group of nine people, two teams of five and four. This I think was a straightforward mistake, though the solution has some nuanced caveats. In these big teams, players are essentially playing a big two-player wargame with lots of moving parts, or two multi-organism creatures pushing at each other.
The players began naturally thinking in terms of action economies - if one player could tie up two opposing generals for a time in a siege, this was a victory. When one player from the four person team got captured, this immediately put them on the back foot in battlefield capability. All this is fine in general, but was not the kind of dynamic I was looking for out of the experience. I opted to start with only two larger factions to cut down on prep time and give players lots of reasons to send messengers and letters around to each other; by those criteria it was successful.
But in hindsight, more factions would have been better. If I had to redo it, I would have three factions of two players and one of 3, or even one player alone in a fifth faction. With two big factions, there's little reason to strike deals with the other faction, and very little gray area in the interaction between them. The dynamic is very zero sum, and I wanted players to feel more like they had to get creative diplomatically.
The nuance here is that with fewer allies reduces the amount of player interaction, letter sending, and intra-faction roleplaying that I knew my players wanted. I don't think this tension reaches the level of Cursed Design Problem, but it's something I am anticipating.
Bad Maps Are Hard To Make
It is, unsurprisingly, extremely difficult to make a map of a territory that is bad in narratively and mechanically interesting ways. The map I made featured two key secret irregularities: the scale was off (7 miles for the players was 6 miles in reality) and some roads were missing, fake, or just incorrect in their route. In the end, having roads be totally wrong really constrained the strategic decision space for the players in uninteresting ways, and the scale change basically had no effect at all.
Thinking about this more, I don't exactly know what a good 'bad' map looks like for this situation. Everyone in the modern world is extremely familiar with how maps, compasses, and the sun works. It's hard to destabilize people from that thinking in ways that produce interesting game outcomes. My thinking is it would almost be better to create a map that is almost completely abstract, closer to the Tabula Peutingeriana that has no pretensions of roughly aligning to true geography.
All the Rest
The special units I made were not particularly interesting in actuality (a unit that allowed wagons to ford rivers, a ship that could carry twice as many troops, a unit that got a numerical boost at low army morale). Giving players too many troops, and too many of the extremely powerful boats. I gave each faction the option to request some special info, and while this was potentially interesting did not ultimately make too much a difference in their experience or strategy.
Conclusions
This really drills down to the meat of the questions that Cataphracts asks of players and a referee. What does a player need to know to have a fun time in this game? What can they expect to not know, or even not know what they don't know? These are questions that are hard to answer without having played or referee-d once or twice, and things I would love to see answered in the full version of the game.
All this kinda overflowed into making the decision to call the game early. I will probably run it again eventually, and I'm encouraging some of my players to run it with the lessons learned from my mistakes. I'm looking forward much more to playing. From the game itself, what I think I want is a full sample scenario to pore over, replete with maps, units, factions, and extraneous information. The rules themselves are not complex or unintuitive, but a downside to their openness is a nuance to the small decisions in setup and execution that have large outcomes.