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Friday, October 22, 2010

Clone Project: Command Control

I should be doing galley-specific rules next, but I'm feeling low on energy, so I thought I'd skip to the much easier topic of command control. The big question on command control is: why is this in the naval combat section and not considered a more general part of combat?

The rules are pretty simple: you can give orders to your hirelings or underlings if they are within a range determined by your Charisma, 1" per point, halved if you are in melee yourself, shouting orders between cutlass thrusts. If the hirelings can see you better (standing on a higher deck,) you add +1 per 10' of height above the fray. For land combat, you could allow a similar +1 if you have a battle standard.

If you have lieutenants who are within range, they can relay your orders to those outside your range. Their range is one less than yours. I'd argue that the lieutenants can in turn use sergeants to relay orders even further; this would mainly be of use in mass land battles. On the other hand, maybe sergeants exist primarily as a loophole to avoid the Charisma limit on number of hirelings; each sergeant leads a group of warriors who are personally loyal to their sergeant, but only the sergeant counts as a loyal hireling.

Hirelings within range who do not break morale will follow orders as soon as they hear/notice the orders. Make an Avoid Accident roll each round until they receive the command. For medium to large groups, I'd probably do this in sub-groups of 20%, rolling 5d6; every 5 or 6 rolled means 20% of the hirelings were too involved in melee to notice. Obviously, this doesn't apply if the forces are not involved in melee yet, so a command to charge doesn't require a roll.

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