"You are standing on a beach with a fox, a rabbit, a head of lettuce, and 5,000 Mongolian warriors. Your boat is moored nearby. It is only big enough to carry two of them at a time..."
People are like "Oh if I got hit by truck-kun and got Isekai'd to the middle ages I'd teach them about germs and computers and become the most powerful person!"
Fuck that. Learn trigonometry and engineering. Inform the nearest king that you know how to make siege engines and accurately calculate their range. You've written yourself a golden ticket for life. Even if you get captured by the enemy; No one kills siege engineers. They were one of the most valuable spoils of war and some of them bounced around from court to court for decades as their kings fortune's waxed and waned.
I’d teach them about germs
Screaming about how unseeable microscopic animals are the cause of all diseases as I'm hauled into a dungeon for questioning the Emperor's long-held belief in sickness being caused by bad meridians blocking the flow of Qi.
Being an asshole about supply lines was one ofnthe best DM moves I've ever made. Make your characters need a pack animal or even a wagon. Supplies can get stolen sneakily, you gotta protect an animal and your supplies in a fight, you can't really bring them into dungeons so you gotta figure what to do with them sometimes. I like real medieval history way more than the fantasy genre
I generally play modern to futuristic settings, but GMs are surprised when almost all of my character's supplies are carried on them or on their vehicle. I keep pretty meticulous records when we're away from home about how much food and ammo is around. Doesn't actually come up much though.
I GM'd Call of Cthulhu before doing any DnD stuff and I'm not that fond of DnD tbh. In COC you gotta consider your per diem and if you can afford to take time off work to adventure
I do like games where the player characters have side jobs that they have to navigate around. While we go merc this guy, can we stop here and here? I gotta uber-deliver a pizza and its on our way.
Ask if their armor is on is fun once or twice, but it can be tedious to keep track of if the table isn't in for that kinda game
My players set a watch every single time after the first incident. Just because you can go camping safely in Yellowstone doesn't mean you can apply the same logic to the Wandering Forest.
Yeah, we're all here for fun. I just like being the Swiss army knife character
No one has ever regretted having twenty yards of silk rope in their pack. That said, I just let my players buy, like 100g of "assorted dry goods" and then they can pull whatever common goods out of their pack at a later date and we all understand that it was in their pack all along in a state of quantum superposition.
Retconning equipment purchases is a very important thing for a good game. As you the player aren’t a professional hero, you’re just playing one in a game. So there are things characters would have taken because they aren’t stupid.
I think Blades in the Dark has mechanics for this on magic items. You just spend the gold via retcon.
For magical items, you can do that too, or dice roll for a very specific and unlikely case, such as bringing a potion of under water breathing into the desert. But the same roll would be much easier if your adventure was involving a boat ride.
Bit of rope, some tent pegs, toolkit, some Semtex, some gauze... you can resolve a lot of situations with a practical mind.
I think games often have an adventurers kit or something like that
Fabula Ultima, a silly JRPG inspired system, has this codified in the rules. You've got "inventory points" and then you spend those on potions. Want a health potion? Sure, you spend 3 inventory points. You bought it last time you were in town cause you knew it would come in handy. Next time you're in town you spend some money to replenish your inventory points and now your inventory is back in the quantum superposition of health potions, mana potions, etc.
Other miscellaneous adventuring gear is handled by your character's concept. If your character concept includes that you're a thief you have lockpicks when you need them, end of story. The thief doesn't forget her lockpicks.
Having played a little of both styles, I can't imagine what makes people think extremely crunchy systems are in any way better or more fun than abstract systems. Abstraction is just so much more fun, cooler, and smoother at every single step of the way.
It was pretty much only a hindrance to mounted raiding parties. An army could just go through it, since it was basically undefended, but it made casual opportunistic raids by cavalry significantly less convenient.
Well, really, it's 450,000 horses, men, baggage, fodder, camp followers, siege weapons, accountants, administrators...
Yeah but then they would have had to fight the Chinese army one boatload at a time or in wet pants, that would suck ass
the more important thing is that the wall wasn't meant to stop a full invasion. it was meant to raise the cost of raiding the chinese heartland. when the nomads become politically united and raise an actual army they don't have to go around the wall. if they did they wouldn't be able to conquer china's many walled cities.
That's how I win RTS games. Turtle the fuck up and let the AI funnel in to my carefully prepared artillery killzone.
Hello fellow UEF main in Supreme Commander.
More RTS games need to have horribly expensive cross map artillery as a win con.
mongols famously didn't do water stuff well they got owned twice trying to invade japan and it wasn't even because of the japanese navy just got destroyed by lucky weather for the japanese twice
Thank the Lord Almighty for this divine intervention so that we could have One Piece
all asian history has been moving towards the rubber pirate, china gives the first manga to japan (journey to the west with Sun Wukong) and we end here, as god intended
Saying my prayers and being a good lad so I can read the rest of Berserk when I die.
People with sophisticated leftist perspectives of Japanese history be like "ooooohhhh, what about all the harm and fascism???" but the real heads know that Japanese history started with GEA SECANDO!
import mn.navy.invastionfleet.factories.*; import java.util.geolocation.*; public class Main { public static void main(String args[]) { IMongolFleetInvasionFactory factory = new MongolFleetInvasionFactoryImpl(); ( factory.create() ).invade( new LatitudeCoordinate("7.6145", GPSConstants.SOUTH)), new LongitudeCoordinate("110.7122", GPSConstants.EAST) ); } }
Why didn't the Mongols simply load their horses into hot air balloons?
the other end is an dry earthen berm in the desert. if you want to be extremely unimpressed
Weren’t the Mongols terrible boaters? They failed miserably when they attempted to take Japan
While the Mongols weren't known for their naval prowess, my understanding is they got rekt by a hurricane on the way to Japan. So bad luck mostly. The hurricane was called a "divine wind" or "Kami Kaze" by the Japanese for that reason.
British🤝Japanese. 90% of naval combat reputation from being a miserable land of constant thunderstorms.
The Koreans, on the other hand, actually fuck, and had the best naval and land artillery and the best naval gunnery in the world for at least a hundred years at one point.
130–330 japanese warships :wojak-nooo:
vs
13 korean turtle ships :gigachad-hd:
Apparently there are major reasons to doubt that this was the only reason. Alot of modern historians from what I gather think the 'divine wind' thesis is too simple by itself. If you look at the primary sources in particular the mongol communications they had already decided to withdraw before a storm hit.
Japan was far away from mainland China, the Mongols were not seafarers (they had to use Korean and Chinese sailors and troops as the bulk of the force and the latter were not very happy or motivated to be forced to sail cross the sea to invade japan for their mongol overlords), it's several large islands with, by that time, stabilized military feudal military dictatorship under a proficient warrior class. They know the land. You don't. It's the 13th century so sailing is seriously dangerous and difficult. One of Kublai Khan's advisor cautioned him against sending further expeditions because of the record of how difficult it obviously was to actually take mainland Japan. It seems like the Mongols genuinely struggled and gave it up. It's fascinating how they steamrolled across Eurasia but struggled for understandable reasons when they faced naval and jungle warfare.
Bullshit, they were successfully taking over Japan, til a down-trodden samurai with daddy issues fucked them all up and sent them home. I played the game.
Clearly your Jin never made it to the island of Iki.
Makes sense, though it's for that very kind of reasoning I actually did play it. As a rule I never buy any game until it's on sale for under $15
IIRC the going theory is that the Great Wall was more for controlling the movement of peasants than it was for controlling the movements of Mongolian battalion level maneuver elements.
Why would they when the wall didn't actually help all that much against raiding parties because it was never really fully manned.
i mean if you make the mongols have to wander all the way to the sea to even begin to plan to bypass your wall, the wall has done its job exceptionally well. not to mention it's probably easier to get an army over, under, or through the wall than around the wall in boats lol
a lot of people have trouble picturing just how clunky armies are. sure, you could kayak around this, you could probably even swim it. but when you need a thousand of your buddies to come with you, you run into problems.
Yeah, not to mention you have to do all that while also bringing equipment, supplies, horses etc
