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Thursday, June 13, 2024

Alexander the Great in GURPS and History

I recently read a pair of posts over on ACOUP about Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great.

In GURPS Who's Who 1, Kenneth Hite wrote Alexander III of Macedon, aka Alexander the Great, and gave him Strategy-22. By the stat/skill level approach we used, this is pretty much "greatest in history." The appendix in WW1 says 20-24 is that range, with 24 being the top end of realistic. With that in mind, you can make a case for 22 being a tad conservative.

For comparison, Julius Caeser (who I wrote up) has Strategy-17, and Julius Caeser pretty much beat everyone he faced hollow, even when in disadvantageous conditions. Oliver Cromwell got an 18. No one else exceeds about a 15, including Tokugawa Ieyasu and Cyrus the Great.

I feel like it was justified. His success rate in battles is stunning - he wins his battles and sieges, large and small, usually as a blowout. That's despite numbers and terrain. You could say he wasn't good, his foes were bad, but it's hard to square "his foes just sucked" and Alexander's ability to apply exactly the right solution to the problems in front of him even as the calculus changed on the fly. The Pedant makes a good, readable case for this here, especially in Part I. If there is a best choice avaiable in a changing situation in battle, Alexander chooses it. That's quite persuasive.

Alexander III of Macedon - Part I

Alexander III of Macedon - Part II

That's the usual argument, by the way - so-and-so wasn't good, just better than these others who sucked. How do you know they sucked? They lost to so-and-so. But if you presume that the baseline of competent is around a 11-12, then it takes a similar score or slightly higher + superior mass combat advantages to win. Start to look at the foes that the folks your chosen character has beaten, look at what their armies should roughly look like in GURPS Mass Combat, and compare away.

Doug and I frequently have discussions about this - I'm not a stat maximizer, or a stat normalizer . . . but I tend to think your successes shouldn't all be chalked up to rolling a 3. Whatever you consistently do well should be reflected in a high chance to do it consistently well. For Alexander the Great, that's sure a can be Strategy-20-24. I can live with a 22.

7 comments:

  1. Yeah, ACOUP makes a solid case for what GURPS calls Strategy being really high for Alexander III, along with his important personal combat skills and Tactics all being at least above average. But any skills involving understanding or handling people, other than maybe Intimidation, he probably had at default. Also, he should probably have Bad Temper—he did kill one of his friends by throwing a spear through him in a fit of rage.

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    1. He wasn't given Bad Temper - just stuff like Megalomania and Fanaticism (Self), which helps explain drunken murder without Bad Temper. He does have Leadership, which he clearly has - he sways his men to do crazy-ass stuff on his behalf without intimidation. Administration, though? Not at all. He clearly understood logistics extremely well, but not "governing." He did precious little of that and didn't do it particularly well.

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  2. Since you brought up Tokugawa Ieyasu, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Nobunaga Oda, and how much of his success was luck, cunning, and good support from Tokugawa and Hideyaki.

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    1. Meant Hideyoshi Toyotomi, not Hideyaki (who?). Don't know what I was thinking.

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    2. I'll have to look at Who's Who 2 - I wrote Oda Nobunaga up for that one. I had him ready for WW1, but it already had Tokugawa-dono so my guy had to wait. I'll do a post about him when I get a moment.

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    3. Oh sweet! I look forward to it!

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    4. It might take a bit - I realize I don't have most of my Japanese history books anymore, having culled the collection a while ago. All I have to go on is the WW2 entry, which is a bit sparse.

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