Reflections on my Cataphracts game
Recently, I ran and completed a Cataphracts game, inspired by Sam Sorensen's blog posts. The gist is that it's a logistics wargame that occurs in real time over Discord. All credit to Sam, it's a captivating game and just the first two articles on his game was enough to convince myself and my friends to try it. I summarized the events of my game here.
What follows are some thoughts I have on the sucesses and challenges I faced while running this game.
The Map
I used a map 18x36 hexes large, with 6 mile hexes. I had 6 factions crammed into the map along with 41 settlements of various sizes. I was (mostly) following along with the suggested method to construct a map found in Sam's second blog post here. I used a cut-out portion of Golarion for a map, since I couldn't find an interesting topographical map of the real world that wasn't A) too detailed or B) large enough.
Firstly, this map was entirely too small! All the hotbeds of player to player interaction were only really 1 or 2 days apart, with the corners of the map literally never seeing a single army. This was partly due to the number of factions I had (6, double the number suggested for such a small map) and partly due to the actual layout of the map (bisected by a major unfordable river). More factions mean more borders. The giant unfordable river limited cross-map interaction until major fleets were built, leading to an effective split of the map into two smaller maps. The end result is that the majority of armies spent nearly the entire game within 8 or so hexes of the middle of the map. Towns and cities were usually only about 2 days apart, sometimes only a single forced march apart.
If I ran this game again, I'd keep the large number of factions but increase the size of the map by at least 50%. I had opted to lean towards a smaller map as opposed to a larger one to increase the level of action in the game and reduce boredom for the large amount of newer players I knew I would have. The grid I put over the top of the map was just a generated hex-grid, I could have just reduced the size of the hexes to get to something closer to a 30x60 map, or a 25x50.
The massive river in the center of the map did radically impact plans of the various factions, and I love it for that. Its very existence forced me to include more robust rules for state-owned fleets and naval combat than existed in the base game. Fleets and their mobility ended up being extremely important towards the end of the game, especially on so small a map. It's possible to get from Osbeort in Saewine almost to Gormlaith in Daggermen territory in a single day's travel, leading to incredible avenues for surprise reinforcements. The river's size makes it impossible to ford however, and several commanders got stuck on one side or the other while they tried to figure out how to cross it effectively.
Espionage
It could have just been that my players were devious scoundrels, but I had to make a ton of rulings regarding spycraft. The game's heavy focus on information warfare made players want to have spies follow armies in their noncombatant retinues, seek out messengers to capture directly, forge messages, and so on. Part of the fun of a game like this is the discovery aspect of seeing just what it is possible, but the downside is that one faction's minor discovery is another faction's catastrophic discovery. Especially in a game marked by "Rulings, not rules", learning that your opponents have effectively been playing an entirely different game than you can lead to some incredibly bad feelings.
As an example, the Daggermen faction leader intercepted a messenger from Herodoton in Week 1, forging it and sending it to Four Forts as essentially a declaration of war. This minor act would go on to shape politics for the entire rest of the game, leading to 2 dead faction leaders, a major battle involving 5 of the 6 factions, and arguably lead to Mataucia's eventual win (they were the sixth faction). When it finally came to light what had happened weeks later, it was not a happy moment.
These discoveries and moments of deviousness are ultimately the core of the game so I'm loathe to write a new system to fully define espionage and information gathering. Various commanders playing telephone with news and events and relationships was the highlight of the game (and I think always will be). Those same commanders coming up with off-the-wall ideas to control how information was presented to others was similarly a major component of the game, and removing it would make the game feel much more artificial. Writing a simple ruleset to hide/find undercover agents and using a more robust message-writing tool than Discord would probably solve the major problems while still leaving room for novel situations.
Having any rules at all for espionage prompts commanders to always be thinking of information warfare. Using a different system for message-writing (such as ugh, email) would prevent messages from getting as easily lost or received at the wrong time though at the cost of eliminating the possibility of forging messages. If I ran this game again, I'd stand up an email domain with mailboxes for each commander and force all messages to go through a 24 hour quarantine with a BCC to a central GM mailbox. Sure, some messengers would theoretically take longer than 24 hours to reach their target but the restriction prevents real-time messages while ensuring that commanders get their messages in a timely manner.
Infrastructure
It seemed strange to many of my players that there were no explicit rules or scale for building things day to day. Nothing for costs associated with building roads or new strongholds, blockades, bridges etc. I came up with rulings on the fly for these things but consistency and ubiquity was hard to come by.
What I settled on was the ability to hack out a road 1 mile per day per 1000 infantry (for no loot cost). All other building projects were ad-hoc and varied depending on context, but included: ports, lookout towers, bridges, road removal, strongholds and moats.
Wrapping Up
This game was an absolute blast to run and play. The rampant speculation, the constant hunt for supplies and loot, the many many many pages of messages sent to this or that commander, the backstabbing and the backchannels. It was fantastic. Already one of my players is planning the next game.
The only reason I don't wholeheartedly suggest everyone run a game like this is that it's a huge time commitment! I had a co-GM work with me everyday to manage the spreadsheets of the various factions and armies and make sure we recorded what everyone did in a day, and it still took us about an hour all told every day. We did bulk processing of orders once a day and that took about 20 minutes, but the answering of questions, clarifying orders, passing messages back and forth, etc etc all happened continuously throughout the day and would just eat up time like you wouldn't believe. Implementing tools to ease the burden on the GM would help alleviate it, but ultimately the game is happening all the time and the intended number of players is at least 10+. That means 10+ people all possibly having a question or needing a conversation at any given time, and it all has to go through 1 person.
Happy to discuss further if folks have more questions. There's lots of small things I did to smooth out gameplay but I figured it would be too much minutia and not enough context to put here. If you're interested, let me know!