Mass Combat 2: Battlesystem (1st Edition)

 

Let's have a look at the grandpa of all D&D mass combat rules, Douglas Niles' first edition Battlesystem, supporting both the AD&D and D&D lines. The product received a big rollout in 1985 with tie-ins to adventure modules using its system, namely the Bloodstone Pass H series for Forgotten Realms, and Dragons of War for the Dragonlance setting. 

It's easy to see Battlesystem as a cynical move to get people to buy miniatures in the hundreds. In 1985 TSR had just made a deal with Citadel to produce a new line of official figures. No doubt they were eyeing the burgeoning popularity of the parent company's Warhammer game. But Battlesystem also provides cardboard counters if figures are lacking. So it's fair to say that it was designed functionally, with the aim of enabling a kind of action that many campaigns naturally grow into. The boxed set does promote the miniatures hobby, but stays realistic about the ability of most tables to field large 3D forces to order.

Battlesystem distinguishes itself from other miniatures games of the day by advertising its scaleability to D&D individual stats. For most troops each figure represents 10 individuals grouped into units of 4-48 figures. Units have the D&D stats of their constituents: hit dice (the measure of damage), armor class, movement rate, damage die. What's different from D&D are: morale on a 2d10 scale, compromising between D&D's 2d6 and AD&D's percentile system; required unit commanders who affect morale and command; and some effects of formation (formations can be open or closed, and formed units are more effective than skirmishers and mobs). These are all sensible ways to model the emergent properties of units that a pure scaling approach would miss.

The notorious THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0) stat underlies Battlesystem's one unforced break from the RPG rules. Popular pressure at the time was moving design away from the venerable combat matrices and into this simpler and more transparent way to resolve hit rolls. Instead of just using THAC0, though, Battlesystem takes it as the basis to calculate an Attack Rating, factoring in a number of formation and tactical modifiers. Then, Attack Rating minus defending Armor Class plus 2d6 feeds into a table factoring in the attacker's damage die and giving the Hit Dice of expected enemy casualties per attacking figure. While this mechanism is clunkier than some of the other rules sets we'll consider, it does improve on the swingy, all-or-none d20 hit rolls of the RPG, in a nod to the bounded chance criterion. And the table is by no means deterministic. A unit of hobgoblins with 10 figures in the front line can do as much as 40 Hit Dice damage (on a lucky 2) or as little as 2 (on an unlucky 12).

Hidden in this table is a clever resolution of the problem I alluded to last time. To recap: literally applying the D&D combat rules en masse would result in much higher casualties in front-line clashes than historical battles ever knew. Even in the systems of the 80's, where one combat round was a glacial full minute, troops with average training and equipment would hit each other on, let's say, a 13 (40% chance), and deal, on average, killing damage with one weapon blow. After three rounds of this, there's only about a 20% chance that any individual would be missed three times. And so, close to half the fighting troops would be dead: nearly everyone who was hit twice and half those who were hit once.

In Battlesystem, one mass combat round equals three D&D rounds. And in that space of time, each figure, usually representing 10 troops, deals out on average 1 hit die of damage, enough to kill one of the aforementioned average individual troops. Instead of a 50% casualty rate per three minutes, we get the more historically bounded 10%. This pace, by the way, serves the incrementality criterion well -- it might take a few rounds of fighting before morale gets to the break point.

Why is skirmish combat held to be more lethal than mass combat? The answer would deserve its own post, explaining the gap between largely fictional views of heroic combat and the realities of military history and psychology.  For now, it's a sign of canny design instincts that the scaleability of the system is broken in the one place where it makes for both a better simulation and a better game.

Battlesystem is otherwise a typical miniatures rules set in its allowances for casualties, movement, command, morale, terrain, and so forth. But how does it do on the final criterion left, the interface between PCs and the mass battle? Even without the player characters fighting, a fantasy miniatures game has to factor in the doings of heroes, wizards, and outsized monsters -- both how they fare against troops, and how troops fare against them. 

Battlesystem introduces this heroic layer into the second helping of rules, the Intermediate Game. The options are interesting on paper: a PC can embed themselves into a unit, act as a commander or deputy commander of a unit, or range the battlefield freely as a hero.

As a unit member you might improve the unit's fighting ability somewhat, but you share the fate of the unit if it is destroyed or routed, rolling on a table to see if you survive albeit unconscious or badly wounded. This is not a very interesting or palatable role, but might be appropriate for lower-level characters who find themselves on the battlefield.

The commander is a defined role in the unit and is important for cohesion and command, and the rules also allow for higher-up commanding roles, right up to general. A deputy is there to step up if the commander is killed or incapacitated by magic or assassination. These rules are  on the whole less interesting than they could be. Commanders are immune to harm from military sources until their whole unit is killed, reducing the risk of battle and the chance for deputies to be promoted. What's more, command is incompatible with spell casting, but opens up a role for deputies to take command while the usual leader is brewing a spell. A unit commander will probably have to go along with orders, while more agency can be found in higher ranks - but how to convince the generals to let you in?

One gets the impression that the hero, shades of Chainmail, is the main way competent PCs are supposed to enter the battlefield. If heroes meet fellow individuals or monsters, they fight it out using normal rules, three rounds to one Battlesystem round. Damage between individual figures and units is easily translated, each figure being 10 individuals and hit dice being convertible 1:4 to hit points. In any round, only the most undermatched attackers can hope to do more than wound a figure, which translates to laying low 5 individual soldiers. Of course, area damage spells have much more potential.

These rules are generally satisfactory, but underplay the ability of individuals to target and eliminate enemy commanders, except through magic or (yuck) assassin abilities. Around the turn of the 18th century, revolutionary armies in America and France fielded sharpshooters or tirailleurs armed with longer-ranged rifles. Their mission was to harass units and pick off their leaders, to the great dismay of armies used to 18th century style - not cricket to target officers of noble blood! But eventually even the British army made use of such tactics. The fantasy equivalent would be, as a hero, charging the orc lieutenant commanding a battalion of 300 and cutting him down in a one-to-one duel. Allowing for such a mission would be more satisfying and consequential for would-be heroes than dealing out abstract figure-level wounds, and more equalizing for the balance between mid-level fighter-types and magic-users.

Overall, although suffering from some of the inelegance that lingers in 1980's game design, Battlesystem is a worthy old Studebaker of a ruleset that hits most of the desirables.

Next up: We turn to some of the new-old-school solutions.

Mass Combat 1: What Makes a Good System for a Roleplaying Game?

In many an adventure roleplaying campaign, there comes a time when the heroes' struggle gets caught up in larger politics and warfare. They may find themselves helping villagers to defend against a marauding army; get embroiled in a street fight between rival gangs; or, at higher levels, use their hard-earned treasure to hire a mercenary army and rid the land of a nasty orc warlord.

Scenarios at this scope and scale would be tedious to fully play out, rolling for the hits and damage output of each single figure. This is where mass combat comes in. 

Photo by Thom Quine, CC BY 2.0

Mass Combat Desirables

The irony of developing a mass combat system for D&D was fully apparent to the authors of the first such rule set, AD&D Battlesystem. In the introduction to the first edition core book (1985), Douglas Niles points out that the D&D game developed from the Chainmail system for fighting medieval battles at scale, so this product represents a return to the roots of the game. 

Chainmail itself contained rules for fantasy creatures as well as castle assaults involving individual figures. Indeed, early games at Gygax's and Arneson's tables used the dicey, insta-kill Chainmail man-to-man combat system, before Dungeons and Dragons adopted the more heroic wearing down of characters' hits derived from naval combat. 

However, Chainmail mass combat in relation to Original D&D skirmish combat lacks one property: the ability to directly transfer statistics from the roleplaying game to the combat procedure. Indeed, if mass combat bears no mechanical resemblance to the roleplaying rules, you may as well use any tabletop wargame system, be it Warhammer, De Bellis Antiquitatis, or whatever. 

What we are looking for is scaleability: the ability to simply and uncontroversially convert stats from characters and monsters to the stats of the units they make up. This goal is compromised when complicated equations and statistics intervene between one layer and the game and the next. Ideally, you want your units to have Armor Class, hit bonuses, hit dice/points, and movement rate on similar scales to the stats for their constituent figures.

A particularly tricky part of scaleability is the mixing of individual characters such as leaders, wizards, and heroes with masses of troops. You want your system to not just handle battles as a spectator sport, but to actively involve PC participation. The role of individuals in a mass wargame is likely to be abstracted, as a commander token with +2 morale and 3 command points, or an embedded hero who gives +1 to the attack roll. Players, however, will want to see their characters embodied, with access to the familiar set of combat moves and tactics. 

This simulational seam can be finessed, somewhat, by playing out the wargame abstractly when PCs remain in a purely command role, but then zooming in to standard D&D rules when the PCs themselves make contact with the enemy. However, using this method, it might not be clear how the PCs' kill count transfers back into the play of the larger battle. How does eliminating eight knights out of a unit of 100 affect the morale and cohesion of that unit? A satisfying mass combat system for D&D will integrate individual and mass levels organically.

There are other traits that you want the mass combat system to share with other wargames. You could adopt a "power grinder" approach where you feed in troop totals, armament, morale and other factors influencing the battle, then make a single roll that tells you which side won and with how many casualties, like the venerable old computer game Civil War. But that would lack the desirable trait of incrementality - the feeling that the battle is evolving in stages, going back and forth, and you can see exactly when a command decision, a heroic charge, or a well-placed fireball turns the tide.

Another desirable trait is bounded chance. War is chaos, and you don't want the results when two forces meet to be completely predictable. At the same time, you don't want 100 scrawny kobolds to have any kind of plausible chance to defeat 300 brawny gnolls in melee. If seen as a collection of individual combat outcomes, the law of large numbers gives rather predictable casualty figures. For example, if 100 orcs meet another 100 identically armed orcs in D&D combat, with a 25% chance for each figure to kill its opponent on the first round, then 95% of the time the casualties on that round will be between 16 and 34 inclusive, per side attacking.

However, it's on the larger scale that chance reasserts itself. In premodern warfare the question is not how many soldiers will die, a low number compared to the carnage that 0-level D&D figures can wreak on each other in the space of 30 game seconds. Rather, the question is when one side will break and run. This is where the higher-level resolution of the morale check comes in, even more applicable to mass combat than to skirmish. Included under this heading, too, are factors like the formation of the group, which has important consequences for casualties taken and received but cannot be easily equated to the traits of individual combatants. As with any wargame on this level, unit games need to model the emergent group-level properties of morale and formation alongside raw casualties.

It might be tempting to simply treat a hundred gnolls like a single gnoll, having them swing, take damage, and have a chance to run when wounded using the D&D rules. Eric Diaz at Methods & Madness broached this technique recently, but while it is eminently scaleable, it trades away bounded chance and needs its own rule for morale. At the other side of the range are overly complex or wargamey systems that don't scale to D&D stats or don't allow for PC-level input.

Next post, I'll talk about some of the systems out there that I've looked at or tried in practice. Post after that will be my own offering, recently tried out in a street battle in my ongoing campaign.

Night's Dark Terror 8: Raid on the Goblin Fort

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror. 

When the adventurers find it, the lair of the Wolfskull goblins is properly atmospheric. It's in the middle of a miles-wide petrified forest -- not the paltry fossilized remains found on Earth, but a whole forest turned to stone, birds, squirrels, leaves, and all. This strange and gloomy place will attract the attention of the adventurers when they discover it, and channel them to one of the paths that runs through it, which all lead to the Wolfskull fort at the center.

Art by ShahabAlizadeh

There's a fight with some giant bats (confusingly, not the same bats that are the hobgoblin Vlack's pets), then a more consequential run-in with a goblin patrol. Although the party see the foes in time to arrange an ambush, letting just one goblin get away can mean trouble - and we can assume the foot-goblins at least are more able to scramble through the petrified underbrush than a typical adventurer.

But if the garrison isn't alerted, there are just two guards in the entrance of this memorable fort, built of and around the stone timber of frozen trees. Two guards lit by torches, who are not even looking out their one door ... OK, hold up a second. Goblins can see in the dark and wolves have a great nose, so all the fires and torches described lighting up this fort's interior are besides the point. Just make it a dark hole with two red eyes staring out that, if you're lucky, you see before they see you. And don't fall in the river moat - if cold-water piranhas are too much for you, they can always be replaced by good old mundane giant leeches.

This is a strange little castle, to be sure. It can't be defended with archers, no battlements or window slits. But actually, that suits the armaments of the Wolfskulls, which are throwing spears and axes and the jaws of their mounts. And forget the boxed text that has the goblins "rushing forward with weapons drawn." Instead, the best strategy would allow the goblins' numbers to tell by luring a force of stronger but fewer invaders inside the walls, deep ebough in to be attacked from all sides with no escape possible.

But does the fortress' layout actually support that strategy? Sort of. If the goblins abandon area c quickly, darting in and out of cover to throw spears or (in 5th edition) striking and disangaging with their hand axes, the defenders of areas d, g, and e would do best to hide away out of sight, forcing the invading vanguard to enter that room while the other areas bide their time and attack from the flank.

Then again, perhaps the goblins would absolutely slaughter a third level party, especially playing by Basic rules, if allowed to use optimal tactics. As written, the defenders are quick to attack but slow to be alerted, allowing for a series of manageable battles. Still, you might prefer balance to come from a reduction in numbers rather than from dumbing down the goblins -- perhaps subtracting one or two patrols like the ones encountered outside from the roster, to come back later and put the victors on the defensive.

A smart party will avoid Vlack's rooms across the log bridge, which have no proactive forces in them, until they've recovered from the main fight. The split skull painted on the door (why not a bloody head, the insignia of Vlack's tribe?) should be warning enough. Vlack's not home, but his pet giant weasels are in, and a pair of the most iconic Basic D&D-only monsters: thouls, those misbegotten creatures that happen when a hobgoblin, a ghoul, a troll, and an OD&D typographical error love each other very much.

Thoul, by Steve Zeiser

There's a good mix of obvious and hidden loot in the lair, but the object of your quest - Stefan Sukiskyn - is in another castle. One of the left-behind prisoners, a Slavic granny literally called Babushka, has overheard the word "Xitaqa" as Stefan's destination. We can assume that the people who came to get him were not goblins, but servants of the Iron Ring whose description should match the attackers that start out the adventure -- that gives them a reason to speak Common and for Babushka to overhear. If you feel there should be a few more clues to what's going on, you can have some of the loot give those clues - a rough map of the raid locations in Vlack's room, or an heirloom from one of the raided settlements.

The bridge to the hobgoblins' quarters also gives the goblins a way out if the battle goes against them, assuming they follow their retreat strategy and end up concentrated in room h. But where will they go? It might be a relief that there are no goblin civilians, the traditional "women and children" of D&D moral philosophy. But it's also a puzzle, and my reckoning was that the goblins had a civilian settlement hidden away in the stone forest, not obviously at the conjunction of all the paths like the fort was. In about ten years there will be a new generation of Wolfskulls raising hell.

Some other hacks I applied to make the magic loot here more interesting:

* Whatever the potion of delusion is, it's likely the goblin king Kloss would keep it on his person. In this case it's an emperor's new invisibility potion - you can't see yourself but everyone else can.

* The shield +2 in my campaign is a heirloom of the slaughtered Segenyev family, known as the "White Wall." It is a large, heavy shield that goblins cannot use, white with a red stag, and gives resistance to cold when held but is only +2 after a combat round (turn) spent without moving, as shields with pluses are a little overpowered in 5th edition.

Next: What's a Xitaqa?

Night's Dark Terror 2: Surprise on the Volaga River

Image by leafbreeze7 on DeviantArt

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and fan improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror. 

However long the wait, we are now at the eastern docks of Kelven in the gray dawn of 7 Thaumont (the Thyatian calendar's March), looking for Kalanos and his boat to take us upriver. But hold on a minute! Even if Eastern Karameikos is a temperate climate with little snow, and the rivers seldom freeze over, Thaumont -- "thaw month" -- should be the worst time to travel upriver. The Volaga, whose watershed is fed by mountain runoff, ought to run fast and swollen with melting snow.

Not to blame B10. It's just choosing not to apply part of the Expert D&D travel rules, which give a fixed rate for river travel, but state the movement up- or downstream may be reduced or increased, respectively, by 7-12 miles a day. River boat = 60' = 12 miles a day (close to 5th edition's 10 miles for a rowed keelboat), so strong currents can completely prevent movement upstream (and see 5th edition's rule, "These vehicles can’t be rowed against any significant current").

What's the problem with this slow pace, or even the no-current pace of 12 miles a day? For one, the timetable of the module's action requires the boat to get to Misha's Ferry, 27 miles from Kelven, by "late afternoon" on the very same day. That, plainly, is not happening. It's odd that in a module so dedicated to promoting naturalism -- "Everyday matters such as travelling long distances, finding food and shelter, and so on, need to be taken care of" -- this detail goes by the wayside.

Let's say with the current, the boat progresses 6 miles a day - we are talking late afternoon on the fifth day (11 Thaumont), or on the third if the current's disregarded. To keep up with the planned events, a better DM's choice might be to push the initial departure back to 3 or 5 Thaumont.

But before then, we have our first encounter, which should take place "a few miles upriver" of Kelven where the river narrows, and woods crowd the southern bank. It will happen in the morning if you're going at the module's motorboat speed, or midday at the more realistic pace.

It's an ambush by mysterious black-clad goons! They're hiding in "the woods on the south bank" - well, the map shows no such woods but we can assume it's a small local thicket. In a clearer failure of editing, though, their numbers are ambiguous. The text lists one figure and the stat-blocks list another. As this is only the first encounter I suggest using the less challenging numbers in the text if playing old-school rules, and the larger numbers if playing 5th edition.

First. the boat hits a chain pulled across the river, blocking the way. It's not clear how in broad daylight the boat's pilot misses seeing that chain. We can assume it is just below the waterline, enough to stop the boat's keel, with the ends secured and hidden under brush and sand on the bank. You can further set this up by remarking on the murky and turbulent water.

Then, archers in the trees open up, 80 feet away on the bank -- implying that the boat cruises up the middle of the river, the deepest spot, which is natural for a keeled boat. Also, swimmers with daggers approach to try a boarding. When they do - surprise! - one of the rowers on the boat reveals himself as an enemy agent and joins the attack.

This is a terrific setup, with many moving parts that individually look easy to handle but join into a tough tactical dilemma. The archers may pick off one or more boatmen or wound a party member (if you want to play them extra smart and cruel, have all of them target an unarmored spellcaster!) But once hidden behind the walls of the boat, the defenders are safe, unless they want to return shots. If it were just the boarders, they would be easily decimated by shooting as they approach the boat. They swim at half their movement rate by the Expert rules, so it will take four combat rounds for them to get there, or (swimming at half move but using Dash) three combat turns in 5e. The survivors, once there, lose another round in boarding. However, the suppressive archery from the bank makes both kinds of defense dangerous. The temptation is to hunker down and minimize risk until the boarders are at the boat, but then the odds shift as the agent aboard reveals himself.

Some details that are not obvious from the writing:

* The ambush is led by a higher-level goon who, as a card-carrying member of the Iron Ring bad villains club, should stay hidden and flee if failure is impending. He has a role to play in waking any archers who are felled by any sleep spells heading their way, if he is not felled himself by a lucky sleep roll, which is quite possible in Basic, less so in 5th. It is also in-character for him (but none of the minions) to have a horse ready to make a getaway.

* A DM who wants to play the minions to the fullest might consider having some of the swimmers proceed underwater and out of sight. It is completely in keeping with the ethos of their organization to have four expendable splashing guys head for the front of the boat as a distraction, while five others slip into the water behind a bush and proceed underwater to the stern. We've already established they can't see very well underwater, so they might pop up at random places within 20' of the boat.

* While the rowers are hiding and not rowing, the boat naturally drifts downstream. Working backwards from the amount it slows upriver travel, the river current is "stealing" 6 miles of travel from a 8-hour travel day (with frequent rests) in our generous interpretation, so it's running 3/4 a mile per hour, about .4 meters per second. So, drift is 8 feet per 5th edition turn (6 sec) and 12 feet per Basic D&D combat round (10 sec). This, again, makes a case for the distraction swimmers to approach from the prow (losing a round as the boat slips away) and underwater swimmers to approach the stern.

* Advancing or retreating to get off the boat might be rational. The archers will be hard to reach and their 20 arrows (or 12, if you're merciful) can last a long time. We can assume they're smart and don't shoot at hiding defenders they cannot hit. The problem with landing is that, to row or maneuver the boat to the bank, the rowers need to expose themselves, and they're paper-thin. 

* Even if the boarders and false oarsman are defeated, the encounter might end up in a stalemate as the boat drifts down the river. If the archers' cover is only a small thicket, they will want to keep to it. Eventually, the party will drift to the bank and can proceed to engage the archers.

* Terrified of their boss, the archers are likely to stand their ground in the final act of the encounter, serving as a screen even if they're out of arrows, as the leader makes his getaway. Even if one is captured, they know little of the mission, which was evidently called up when an armed group of adventurers was seen consorting with Stefan and taking passage upriver. The Iron Ring wants no interference with their plans!

* Remember, the river water is icy cold. This should reinforce that the swimmers are toughened and past caring, as they emerge from the river with gray and clammy flesh. The cold water might also test characters who happen to fall in without preparing, maybe with a few HP damage if they fail a Poison/CON save.

The aftermath of the combat is not spelled out in the writing. It's likely that several boatmen will lie dead from the combat. Worse, and especially if they're 2nd level, the less sturdy party members are at risk from the surprise archery and backstabbing thief attack. Don't sell the Iron Ring short - the agent on the boat will be out to kill. Party members may have to pull an oar to make speed if more than one rower is dead. Replacement characters can always join up, looking to cross from the north side of the river at the next encounter - Misha's Ferry.

Hex Crawl 23 #223: Am-bushy Hills

Ten hexes northwest of Alakran.

 

"Am-bush" is not just a terrible pun, but solid etymology. Ultimately it comes from the Latin in boscus, referring to an attack conducted from concealment "in a wood," and "bush" likewise derives from boscus. While the travellers of the Road of Flowers speak a different language, the many shrubs and low trees that cling to the highlands to the west give rise to thoughts of danger as they pass this section. There is even a tale about it -- in which bypassers may find themselves a character, if you'll allow it.

A merchant with two armed guards, passing by this spot, was hailed and threatened by two bandits. His men, though, convinced the attackers that a fight would be to their mutual detriment. They then agreed to join the ambush, doubling their numbers, and the greedy merchant assented. The next passer-by was a tough veteran, clinking in bronze. He might have taken on three, if not four assailants, but was instead persuaded likewise to join the gang lying in wait.

The tale goes on for three or four repetitions, each time swelling the numbers of the ambush band with more and more colorfully described personnel, including five members of the Obliterating Fists on furlough. Finally, along comes a stooped, white-bearded, pulling a hand cart laden with goods. The forty or so ambushers leap from their bushes with a terrible yell, and the poor old man drops dead on the spot. But the battle they had all sought to avoid breaks out at last among the would-be bandits, for they cannot agree on a division of the spoils, which turn out to be just bundles of alfalfa. The few survivors limp away in shame, having unleashed such a bloodbath over a month's donkey fodder.

Some Odd Experiences

Although my current RPG campaign is on hiatus I got two chances recently to introduce novices to roleplaying using Chris McDowall's Into the Odd. This is not a review so much as a breakdown of what works and what doesn't work for me.

WHAT WORKS

Character generation is simple and yields perfect shabby-Victorian protagonists for this weird industrial setting, more punk than steam. Starting equipment is derived super quickly, balancing out poor stat rolls with better stuff. All magic resides in things (arcana) and nobody is extra at anything. You are only as good as your starting rolls, your stuff, and later your levels which let you survive better.

The Oddpendium is a fabulous gaggle of percentile tables that let you quickly generate info about characters, places, and things. It conveys and embroiders the setting.

New players love the quirky characters and the quick dive into action. There are real Every-beings without super-powers or fancy tricks. The system forces low cunning and inventiveness to get by.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

Behind the screen (well, the uptilted book) I was sweating a little. The system outright omits some features I am used to in judging adventurous events.

No skills, just saves vs. ability scores. I guess this makes a statement about the replaceability of characters and importance of possessions in an industrial world. I found it more fun and characterizing to roll a random former profession and give an extra roll, or "advantage" in 5e terms, on saves related to it. And "saves" can be proactive, covering any player action that is unsure to work. New players really need all the hooks for character they can grab.

Combat is simple and safe-till-it's-deadly; being in combat means you score a die roll's amount of damage which is taken first from hit points, which high level characters and monsters have more of, and then from Strength. Each wound to Strength requires a Strength save or you are incapacitated, and dead if not tended to. Advantage and disadvantage in combat means using a bigger or smaller die. Armor can only reduce 1 point of damage, or more for certain monsters.

I like the limited armor - that's in-setting - and randomly deadly wounds. But -- I find there's something you miss by not having a hit roll or the possibility of defense in melee. There's firearms, so taking a long shot seems particularly poor to model and not well covered by the disadvantage idea. You can try to flee when your hit points are zero, but they'll always be able to "hit" you as you run.

At a minimum I suggest: To get a shot in at long range with a ranged weapon, save Dex at disadvantage. Medium range, just save Dex. Automatic damage at close or point blank range.

In close melee, damage with fists (d4) or short bladed weapon (d6) or claws/teeth is automatic. With surprise, damage is also automatic. At swords' length, each attacker saves vs. Dex to hit, and each defender gets one Dex save against one attacker to parry or evade. To speed up a fight you can take Disadvantage on the attack to force the defender to do the same on the defense. If a successful hit is met with a successful parry, both sides roll damage and the difference is applied to the loser.

It's
Odd!

Failed Monster Designs

Although I have written about bad monsters in RPGs, you can identify another type I have sometimes written about: the failed monster, whose basic idea is OK but whose mechanics are off. Either it's too weak or too strong relative to expectations, or just not a good join-up between concept and implementation.

Some examples, from AD&D first edition, with my writings about the first three:

• Ghosts are super-powered, with “zap” effects like aging and possession, but aren’t really true to the variety of their source material. It's a similar failure to golems. There should be lower-level hostile living statues (as in Basic D&D) and lower-level hostile hauntings.
• The gelatinous cube as a 4 HD bag of hit points just doesn’t, er, gel.
• Piercers can be much improved. 
• The carrion crawler with eight attacks is an overpowered paralysation machine. It hits plate and shield on a 14. Good luck!
• The slithering tracker is an undescribed, underdeveloped monster – really, more of an effect -- of consummate unfairness.It tracks you invisibly, paralyzes you in your sleep, and kills in six turns. There is no way to set watch for it unless you're willing to prod sleeping comrades every hour for a reaction.
• AD&D dragons are borderline failed. Certainly their implementation in 70’s-80’s D&D, with fixed HP and breath weapon damage, substitutes “special” for “scary,” and has been repudiated by every edition since and even some retro-clones.
• Harpies are mixed-up with sirens. There should be just normal shitbird harpies. Charm-harpies should be more powerful than they’re given credit for, with squads of charmed minions.
• The oddly specific horror story of the night hag is hard to use in actual adventuring. Like the Fiend Folio’s penanggalan and revenant, the hag’s description is focused on her threat to a lone civilian. It's assumed the party is supposed to barge in upon and rectify the haunting and draining by the hag, even though the victim by definition has to be exceedingly evil.

A common theme in these and other failures: indecision about combat encounters. There's a desire to make monsters about more than a line of stats, to make fighting them a matter of strategy and decisions as well as lining up and whaling on them. But these work better as rules than as haphazard monster effects. That way the strategy can generalize, and be inverted, working for both sides. Just some examples, some of which I've written on:

• Monsters can be scarier, and true to life, by coming into close combat where your weapons are less effective.
• Little monsters can, and must, climb you. You can also, and must also, climb big monsters.
• Flying monsters should be annoying as hell.
• Immunity/resistance to weapon effects. No flesh, can't slash. Nothing hard, can't bash. No vital points, can't pierce.
• Monsters with that one weakness. Puzzle monsters, in a word; murderous locks with murdering keys.