Cataphracts Design Diary #3
Cataphracts commanders: there is no actionable intelligence in this post. Read on. Previous design diaries: Entry #1, Entry #2.
Running Cataphracts is sort of like having a large pet that lives on the internet. It’s a joyous, loud, confused, sometimes aggravating, sometimes amazing creature I am both required and privileged to tend to every single day.
Some days, this is a burden, an annoyance, one more thing I have to find time for in my schedule. Most days, though, it’s just part of my routine, a habit that I maintain over the course of my week. Of course, when I don’t tend to my roided-out Tamagotchi machine, when I miss a day and fail to care for the wiggly little apiary, things go bad—never anything that can’t truly be fixed, but enough of a mess that it takes me far longer to dig myself out of the hole than it would have to just attend my players in the first place. On the best days, though, I get to wake up and smile, watching my little ducklings dance in ways I never could have predicted—their plots and schemes and actions never fail to shock and delight.
At time of writing, my game has seen thirty-nine total commanders. A couple of those commanders are now dead, and a couple had players who needed to drop out (we transferred control of their armies over to existing or new commanders), but most of them are still running around, still active in play.
I check the game at least twice per day, usually three times—once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. On easy days, this takes less than thirty minutes, sometimes even less than twenty. Commanders march and forage and rest and write letters, but don’t fight or hold major meetings. When my commanders are warring en masse or holding large complicated political councils that need questions answered, then my days get busier. The most time-consuming days sometimes take up to two hours to keep everything moving—notifications to commanders, messages ferried, battles and operations resolved, updating my notes, and so on.
I organize all of this information in my Orders Log. I have a list of each day in a week (starting from Mondays, since my game began on a Monday), and a checklist under each day, labeled according to time of day, usually “Morning,” “Midday,” and “Evening.” Each entry in the checklist is a message that needs to be sent to one or more commanders, a specific entry for a specific entry. The overwhelming majority of these orders consist of either letters being delivered or scouts noticing something. As I check the game throughout the day, I mark entries off my list as I send messages out, then add new entries as I take orders in, a regular back-and-forth between my notes and the discord channels.
At this point in my game, a slow day has perhaps a six or eight orders on my log, and a busy day might have fifteen or more. Most days hover around ten or twelve orders to check off, but games with fewer commanders will likely have fewer orders. Here’s a fictionalized example:
WEDNESDAY, MAY 14TH
Morning: the Saraian 4th rejoins the Saraian 1st.
Morning: Eirene’s messenger reaches the Ikosene 1st.
Morning: Hafsa and Arslan’s messenger reaches the Khandaker 1st.
Midday: the Khandaker 4th, Valentinians, and Tartessian Rebels spot the Lamba Fortress and the Crimson Company.
Midday: the Crimson Company notices the Khandaker 4th, Valentinians, and Tartessian Rebels.
Midday: the Golden Order notices the Saraian 3rd.
Midday: the Saraian 3rd arrives in Devavanya.
Evening: the Golden Order and Saraian 3rd notice the North Beroean Rebels.
Evening: the Sacral Guard reach Brus.
Evening: Zywia’s messenger reaches the Saraian 3rd.
Evening: the Khandaker 2nd arrives in Karkota.
Evening: the North Beroean Rebels notice Devavanya.
Evening: Tancred’s messenger reaches the Khandaker 4th, Valentinians, and Tartessian Rebels.
Evening: the Ruin Templars finish foraging.
Fourteen entries, a fairly busy day, but not overwhelming. You can see the movements of different armies, often together—this kind of bunching-up has come to be very common in my game. Commanders and armies march and fight together, sometimes at the behest of their faction leads but more often just because they’re nervous about setting off alone. Even my more confident and savvy commanders like to bring multiple commanders along to allow detachment shuffling, too: one commander to stay behind at the siege with the wagons and heavy infantry, another with the cavalry and skirmishers to zip overland for supplies, scouting, or raiding. When they meet back up again, they reshuffle once more.
As armies move, I track them all on one big central map, a living and ever-expanding Photoshop file with all my layers. Each week gets its own layer, and I track armies’ movements in lines. (I use Photoshop because I’m a fancy boy who went to art school, but you can use almost whatever medium suits you best: a detailed paint.net file, layers of graph paper, a Google Drawing, any other means you have to track layered images.)
Here’s a simple example, tracking just six armies across the still-unnamed country from the last design diary over four weeks.
Week One:
Week 1
I notify armies as their scouts detect strongholds and their armies march by: each of those points would get an entry in the Orders Log as the armies get closer and pass through. If the commanders are smart, they’ll also be sending messages back and forth between their armies to coordinate. When a commander sends a message, I count the hexes between the armies (remember that messengers travel about fourty-eight miles per day, or roughly eight hexes), then note down in my Orders Log when the message should arrive.
Week Two:
Week 2
As these hostile armies get closer and their scouts notice each other, they’ll start to slow down, get more cautious, and maybe begin sending letters back and forth. (Because armies of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands are pretty difficult to hide, it’s quite rare for armies to truly surprise each other—“surprise” usually amounts to only having a day or two’s notice rather than one or two weeks.) Once they get close, it’s very common for commanders to send a letter or three back and forth with the enemy, either dictating terms (“Get off our land or we’ll attack!” “Give up the city and we’ll let you live!”) or trying to negotiate. Also note the battle early in the week between Red and Yellow—Yellow lost and routed, retreating some twenty miles north from Red. See, too, that Red’s other army is stuck inside a city, besieged by Purple.
Week Three:
Week 3
Purple finds both its armies holed up in strongholds, besieged by Red and Yellow respectively. While Red and Yellow armies fought further west, this kind of impromptu alliance work isn’t so uncommon—armies and commanders within the same faction often have subtly different relationships with others, even sometimes enemy commanders. This gets amplified further with the addition of the factionless armies: militant holy orders, mercenary companies, and peasant rebellions. In my game, these factionless commanders make up something like one-third of my total commanders (a pretty big slice), but they add further complexity to the politics as factions jockey for new alliances. Because raising a new army takes a full month, converting the recent crop of revolutionary peasants to your cause is among the fastest way a faction can bolster its numbers.
Week Four:
Week 4
With six of the seven armies on the field tied up in or near sieges, only one army—the western Reds—moves much. This is also quite common in my game: very often, armies and commanders will sit around for days or weeks at a time before they march again. Sometimes this is due to being stuck in sieges, sometimes it’s for recuperating or recruiting, and sometimes it’s due to simple inertia and uncertainty. Multiple armies amplify this effect: long columns march slowly, distant armies take a while to return home, and diplomacy requires time. The largest single gathering of commanders in my game (so far) reached ten(!) at its peak, all eleven of us jammed into a huge council thread. After they split apart, it took more than a month before there were fewer than six armies within two days’ travel of each other. The game moves slow.
On top of the Orders Log, the other important out-of-game game construct is the Commander Queue. This is, basically, the sign-up list: if somebody on the server wants to play Cataphracts, they ping me and I add them to the end of the queue. When a new commander is needed—because an existing commander wants a subordinate, or a new army forks off from a morale roll, or the peasants get uppity—I bring in whoever’s at the top of the list. Other than the first five commanders, the faction leads, no Cataphracts player has really had any kind of decision in who they play, and so far that’s worked out just fine. For the really dicey roles, the ones showing up right in the middle of a complicated political snare or a starvation siege (sometimes the same thing, as it turns out), I often message their potential players ahead of time to see if they’re okay with diving into a more complex role. Usually, they say yes. Those who say no instead wait for a role as a subordinate of an existing commander, which tend towards more guided, structured, and organized play—following orders, rather than coming up with your own direction.
In general, I take quite a laissez-faire approach to the game. While it obviously requires a hefty amount of time to run, I have no stake in the proceedings, and so am quite content to let things run their course. Sometimes, this results in commanders getting captured and spending weeks or months as prisoners of another commander; sometimes, this results in a commander wandering around for a month, mostly lost, before returning home for fresh orders; and sometimes, this results in fascinating, complex situations emerging, things that I never could have dreamt up. I let things happen as they happen—I trust my players to make it exciting.
By and large I find this hands-off approach extremely rewarding. It greatly simplifies my job: I’m not responsible for telling a story or guiding the experience or even ensuring bad outcomes don’t happen. I’m just the referee.
(There are one or two exceptions to this, the main one being the Emperor, Alexios. As the only real named NPC, he’s limited to sending snotty letters to his underlings and summoning visiting commanders to speak with him in the palace. No commander is required to obey him—no commander is required to obey anyone, after all—but his complaints add a little tension, a little uncertainty, especially to the otherwise-friendly Orthodoxy. I write Alexios’s letters because I like to cause trouble, but otherwise I try to keep out of the goings-on.)
As you might expect, this all leads to a fairly unpredictable game. The movements of the Novan legions, Sakarziyan priests, Valgar heretics, Zlanic warriors, Kalkhanid cavalry, monastic knights, mercenary companies, and peasant revolutionaries—effectively none of it has gone as I expected it to. The machinations, politicking, battles, and general decisions my players make are rarely the ones I can guess ahead of time.
Numerous complex narratives have emerged over the course of play. I have seen battles and sieges, of course, but also a trial by ordeal between a peasant rebel and a holy knight (overseen by a lead commander), the conversion of a captured commander to a foreign religion and subsequent switching of factions, a deal struck with a demon, a midnight ride with a captured commander to escape murder, duels between commanders to avoid battles between their forces, manhunts for missing commanders, encoded messages written in scripture and ciphers, uneasy allies forced to work together against a larger foe—not to mention the standard suite of night raids, last stands, catastrophic blunders, petty rivalries, political ascents and descents, and, in more than one case, possibly some hints of romance.
While this is all very cool on its own, obviously, and I am tremendously proud of my players, what’s more striking about all of this is how little I really am aware of it all until afterwards. As the referee, I am the only one who sees every single commander, but even still, most of these narrative beats don’t really crystallize until they’ve happened. Partially, this is due to the fact that I try to keep a quick clip with my refereeing, moving at a fast pace to get through it all—for example, I spend a lot of time copy-pasting messages between commanders back and forth, and since many of my commanders are quite verbose, rarely do I read the entirety of those messages. But also, this kind of post-hoc storytelling clarity is due to time. A major event in the game takes days or weeks to play out, and in the moment, it’s hard to see the overarching narrative threads, to see the various forces—political, social, military, and of course real-world—that led to the big moments.
My other major observation, one that I might write a little more about elsewhere, is the emergence and prominence of in-universe rules, rules that the players aren’t required to follow but they choose to follow as their characters regardless. Most obviously, this appears in the chain of command: no commander needs to follow orders from anyone, but nearly all of them do anyways. Faction leads try to achieve the little pre-written goals I gave them in the spring, subordinates follow their superiors, and even mercenaries and press-ganged peasant leaders usually respect those above them in the military rankings. No player must follow these rules of battle and war, yet more or less all of them do—and when they don’t, it becomes a moment of huge consternation. The few times I’ve seen commanders deliberately not follow orders, it causes them no small amount of anguish.
As my players keep playing, these little in-universe rules keep cropping up: methods for dealing with prisoners, the validity of a superior’s ruling on an issue, how much trust is placed in mystical dreams, how much it matters whether a ruler sits from the throne or not. These are questions that the rules do not and cannot answer, but grow in importance as factions rise and fall. No rules exist for legitimacy, and so each player must individually decide whether to honor the perceived rules by which they act. If there were rules, if I’d written codified stats for Honor or Trust or whatever, these problems could be optimized and solved for, folded into a larger strategy, a kind of “commander build.” But because they aren’t—because the social interactions between players are so open-ended—it means that my players are largely left to themselves to define those questions and their answers.
At the same time, I don’t think this richness, this depth, could emerge without the stringent logistics underlying it all. If my players weren’t required to rigorously track troops, morale, and supplies, and if I weren’t keeping careful measurement of time and space, the stakes would be lessened. With nearly forty players running around in the same space, there’s a crushing sense of reality to the game, a feeling that what you do really might actually matter and make a difference. The unrelenting grind of logistics underpinning the imaginary world demands action, but the near-total lack of other rules puts players in a position of radical uncertainty. As Rutskarn writes in the now-legendary blogpost, “Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice”:
There was another benefit to not having any social mechanics at all in the game, counter-intuitive thought it might seem for a game about managing adversarial relationships without combat. While combat in Boot Hill is decided immediately and obviously, and is thus very well suited to open dice rolls, the game’s social conflicts created tension by being uncertain. One never knew whether to trust an NPC, whether an NPC trusted them, whether a bluff had succeeded, or whether a threat had landed. They had no reason to expect success because a number was high or failure because a number was low.
Increasingly, I’ve started describing Cataphracts mostly in terms of its social interaction. Someone online described the rules as “rules-light Campaign for North Africa,“ (a comparison I’ve gotten more than once, to my surprise), and it turns that when you demand a remarkably complex and detailed world with extremely pared-down but deadly rules, what you’re left with is mostly a social game. And indeed, most of what my commanders do is not fight, but talk.
Thanks for reading. Next time, I think we’re going to delve into game studies and discuss the many overlapping parts of Cataphract(s) we call “the game.”
Also, if you’re reading this as it goes live in mid-July, I’ve just updated the Cataphract Ruleset to v1.1, with tweaks and adjustments to various rules—you can see the changelog at the end of the document.