[Grim Tales Mass Combat] BR Question...

[Old One]

Wulf,

Since I can't help but tinker ...

I was playing around with a scenario last night that included horse archers and it occured to me that basing the horse archers BR on the normal calculation (including mounts) makes them much more powerful when attacking at range than they should be. The mounts (assuming they are horses) don't get an attack and should be excluded from the ranged BR calculation.

Is there anyway to resonably do this? IE, ranged BR (not including horses) and melee BR (including mounts)?

Thoughts?

~ OO

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Wulf,

Since I can't help but tinker ...

I was playing around with a scenario last night that included horse archers and it occured to me that basing the horse archers BR on the normal calculation (including mounts) makes them much more powerful when attacking at range than they should be. The mounts (assuming they are horses) don't get an attack and should be excluded from the ranged BR calculation.

Is there anyway to resonably do this? IE, ranged BR (not including horses) and melee BR (including mounts)?

Thoughts?

~ OO

Yes, very easy. Just stat up the archers as one unit, and the horses as another unit, and make sure they move and fight together.

Archer BR + Horse BR = (Archer + Horse) BR.

The problem with this approach is on defense (ie, return fire from archers-- can they snipe the riders off the mounts? Or vice versa?)

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

The more I think about this, the more uneasy I get about separating the mounts from the riders, because what you are doing is really trying to draw a distinction between BR that is "offense" and BR that is "defense."

You wouldn't do that to a single creature ("How much if this guy's CR is HD and AC, and how much of this guy's CR is BAB and damage?"), and I'm not sure I'd do it to mounted archers.

You can drop a magnifying glass on an EL-based Mass Combat system such as this just about anywhere, and find things that don't seem to fit. What if one unit of archers has shortbows and the other side has longbows? What about masterwork? And on and on and on.

At some point you just have to step back and let EL have its way.


Wulf

 

[JimAde]

I've only read through this system (I like what I see) but it seems to me that if you need a rationale, you can remember that the horses provide extra mobility. This will let the archers get better positions for both attack and defense. Hence increasing their EL.

I'm about to have a big combat with mounted archers in my campaign, so I'm interested.