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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5812839" data-attributes="member: 4937">Much as I love that traditional deep tactical wargaming, I'm pretty firmly convinced at this point that any rules/numbers heavy system like that is best faithly ported to the computer to let the computer do the heavy lifting for you.  I don't think I'd ever get deep into one of those games with pen and paper again.I think 'easy' is a relative term here.  Doing a system like that well would be a major accomplishment.To me, for the purposes of most things that come up in a roleplaying game, there are two major considerations.   First, it has to narrate well.  As the GM, the system has to lend itself to translating back and forth between the story elements so that whatever the mechanics say you can describe to the PC's in a logical manner.   Conversely, whatever you want to narrate has to translate to the system in a straight forward manner.   So, if I find myself in game in a situation where with light fog and moderate wind from the southwest, two ships sight each other after coming around a point of land at a distance of 2 miles where one is a barque and its beating to windward, while the other is a ship with a crew of 90 that holds the weather gage, is running free, and is currently due south of the barque, then what I want is for that to easily translate in its essential elements into the game system.  Likewise, if the PC's are on the barque, then I want whatever course of action the PC's state - "We turn into the wind and try to run", "We tack east towards land as close to the wind as possible", ect. - to translate readily into the game system.Secondly, and perhaps related to that last desire, from the standpoint of being a PC the system has to offer regular and meaningful choices to me so that I feel like I have some control over the outcome of the situation and I'm not on the one hand simply following a script, or on the other hand simply allowing dice to determine a wholly random outcome in which I took no part.  This requirement is actually somewhat in tension with the first, because regular actions require frequent narrations.  And the more often you have actions, the more frequently the DM is required to invent narrations.  The real problem that you run into in most abstract game systems is that you more quickly run short of interesting narration than you run out of choices.  This is why most combat in D&D ends up being narrated solely in the metagame language of, "I roll to hit.  I got a 17.  You hit. etc.", and why an abstact combat system risks the same monotony compared to well - something like Saganami Island Tactical Simulation where the players can see the results of choices directly.  There is only so often you can narrate, "You get a little bit closer.", or "You get a little bit farther away." in an interesting fashion.  That the system is an abstraction of combat that usually occurs in a space that lacks any sort of terrain only makes things more difficult.Which is why I think that if you are going to pay attention to anything, it better be the wind.  You might also want to think about relative facing as something worth tracking and the ways in which it might transition, though that one might get to be a problem when having more than two engaged combatants.  Which speaking of, I didn't bring it up, but during that long running naval campaign we were in, eventually the ship counts started reaching the fleet scale.  There is only so long one ship versus one other ship combat remains 'epic'.</blockquote>

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