# RPG Scale at Scale: Mass Combat tags: #thoughts  You realize that can only be the case when you engage with the mechanics via pure abstraction, right? In order for that to be true you can't be engaging, even in an illusory manner, in any degree of simulationism unless you intend to simulate story. Congratulations, you've become a narrativist. It's easy to run combat using the same descriptive mechanics if the mechanics only reflect fiction-first. I can run a high-stakes duel in [[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]] using the exact same mechanics and moves as a fleet combat in deep space. But it doesn't pretend to be a simulation. I will take up an example that will be familiar to you from your recent experience. We are playing [[BattleTech]]. It's lance on lance; you have four mechs, I have four mechs. We probably have a range of tonnage, with a Light or Medium taking the recon role in the rest somewhat heavier to bring the thunder. Now we are playing company on company. One mech on the map represents 20. That is 5 lances. Which one is the Locust? Is that Locust actually a Locust or is it a recon lance consisting of 2 Locusts and a couple of Mediums? Can you differentiate a recon lance from a lance of Locusts? What is the armor allocation for an upscaled lance? If you blow the head off of one, does that mean the entire lance is dead? How about an arm if half the lance doesn't have arms? Mass combat in BattleTech doesn't make sense to use the same mechanics even descriptively to make sense of what's going on. One could argue, and I would, it would be completely at odds with what BattleTech does. That's because BattleTech, at heart, is a simulationist model which is directed at simulating realistic physical interactions, provides a basic physics, as it were. That can never scale directly and linearly mechanically because – that's not how reality works. That's not how the physics of the simulated universe work. Simulation of that kind of physics is not fractal. There are discrete differentiations which diverge as you have to adopt new abstractions to make the process actually doable. We see the same situation in computer simulations of real physics. In micro-environments, you can simulate using some very specific techniques which allow something like direct computation. As the scale increases the abstraction changes and various kinds of interactions don't occur the same way because they are computationally infeasible. TTRPG mechanics often have the same kind of discrete abstraction layers as scale increases – because they have to. Compare to simulation of fiction which is often referred to as narrativism. Story elements don't have discontinuous computational domains. "A man" and "a legion" can be resolved equivalently simply by listing their traits. Personally, that's my preference in mechanics in general – but I recognize they are a separate class of resolution mechanic and I don't confuse the scalability of one for the others. That's a huge thing to keep in mind.