Had a DM a few years ago (pre-covid plague) run an epic battle for something like 15-20 players as the capstone to a Western Marches style campaign. Using 2-3 players as volunteers to assist in the madness, he broke us into three groups and each of us had different objectives that lead to the final confrontation with a black dragon and her recently resurrected (undead) mate. One group was on an infiltration mission to reduce the power of the enemy. The others swapped time between fighting a couple of different force levels. One was a battalion level force where each player "commanded" a specific unit or two in battle. The other was a more skirmish level fight where it was the players characters and a few troops. Everything was run off of a real time clock and every hour or so, we'd break, figure out the level of success for each battle and that, in turn, would determine the starting conditions of the final confrontation. It was awesome! Everyone had a great time, but it took a stupid amount of planning on the part of the DM.

@SusCalvin

7 ай бұрын

Queen's Gambit, a surprisingly good Star Wars episode 1 boardgame, used very similar ideas. You're fghting the end battle of the movie. A group of royal guards with the two jedi infiltrate the city, where they may duel Darth Maul. A naboo fighter wing is meeting the Trade Fed blockade fleet to target a droid controller ship. A gungan army has massed on the plains, and the droid garrison of the city has rolled out to meet them. Each battlefield can influence the others. If the naboo side wins the space battle, they have destroyed the droid controls and the ground battle becomes a lot easier as droid units act up. The players control everything themselves, and have to divide some resources and actions between each field. The jedi can lose their mission but the gungans soundly defeat the droids.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

That sounds epic!

Thank you for covering this topic. I have just wrapped up my Keep on the Borderlands campaign that I have been running for a group over the past year with a massive wargame using over a thousand miniatures. The campaign led up to this big battle with a barbarian invasion on the Keep. I used home brewed rules I created for mass combat. I also included victory conditions and special objectives to determine the winner of the battle. My group handed the barbarians a massive defeat. The battle was epic! I love your videos; keep the awesome content coming!

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

That sounds amazing!

We just switched from a 3.5 table to AD&D 1e. Taking that system and scaling up 1:10 (1 unit = 10 people) has made it a breeze to run mass combats. It’s the exact same encounter system, just bigger.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Nice!

Only War was the Dark Heresy 40k RPG sub-game that focused on warfare. You play at the lowest level, as mostly ordinary humans of low status in the imperial guard. You are one tank crew or one infantry squad or one platoon command squad in large efforts of at least division-level combat. The people you interact with between missions are going to be camp followers, other soldiers, base and trench life and random artillery. I like that artillery is part of their random encounter table. The supply chain is unreliable, sometimes the plasma bombs you need to blow a bunker turn out to be plasma batteries. Then you solve the job with what you have (or can trade, scavenge, beg for and steal from neighbouring regiments). You are not heroes. You are part of the greater war machine. You get missions and orders but they are rarely cool special missions. A mission might be to take and hold building 442 on the map. You are going to patrol a stretch of the forest. Moving the greater mission forward is a grind room by room where your PCs have a relatively small part. When orders come, you follow them or get shot for insubordination. You have some wiggle room to complete your objectives, but you can't be free-ranging hero types. Only War is maybe one of the best sets of ideas for what a military mission could look like, without having the game move over to special forces and irregulars territory.

@BanditsKeep

6 ай бұрын

Sounds very cool

I found my players who played only d&d were resistant to wanting their characters placed into a large scale game because their charcters were established, and they felt a lack of control. However, I ran a 3.5 campagin, and they joined in defending their village while still low level from orcs, and ot formed their group solid and was something they talked about for years. 3 of the 5 characters lived to be level 20, which took literally 3 years to do.

When PCs were high enough level to be in command positions I've used Chainmail (we were playing it before D&D came out), Swords and Spells (OD&D Supplement intended to replace Chainmail), and Battlesystem (for AD&D) and Battlesystem 2E (for 2E AD&D). I've also abstracted battles around the PCs and just had them fight the parts they were individually involved with. As long as the results of the individual combats the players fight feed into the outcome of the battle it works. One time the PCs did well but their side lost and they had to hold a pass so the army could retreat / regroup. They did it allowing their side time to recover and (eventually) win the war. When I "abstract" a battle I find it helps to have an idea of the flow / outcome of the battel and then figure in the PCs role. On one occasion I played the battle in Chainmail (normally a Napoleonic wargame wargaming bunch) with one group and used the outcome / course with another group n D&D. Either way it can be tremendous fun with the right group of players.

@HelotOnWheels

7 ай бұрын

I think abstracting the battle with the adventurers’ combat encounters influencing the overall outcome is a great way to handle it. As you say, the influence doesn’t have to be straight win/lose; it can also make the difference between an orderly retreat and a rout, capturing the enemy baggage train or siege artillery versus letting it escape, killing or capturing the enemy leader or letting him get away to fight another day, or simply determining whether one or more friends or enemies of the adventurers become casualties.

@RHampton

7 ай бұрын

You are a glutton for punishment if you ran Swords and Spells.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Yes!

Splitting it up into story beats and locations is a great way to keep things from getting too big for the players PCs to impact or feeling like ineffective. The battle of helms deep is good one to look at, 1) the orcs storm the outer wall. 2) the orcs approach the main walls and are shot at. 3) the orcs try to storm the walls and the heroes fight them off. 4) the orcs blow up the wall. 5) The orcs try to ram the grates 6) the heroes counter attack the ram. 7) The heroes fall back to the keep. 8) Théoden and the heroes mount there charge, Gimli blows the Horn of Helm Hammerhand 9 The time limit runs out and Gandalf comes. The heroes fight 3 times, against the orcs from the ladders, the ram crew and the charge, each of them is just a few rounds of combat vs small numbers.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Yes!

I tend to use a Mass Effect 3 style "military readiness" war score before any battle, influenced by contingents, logistics, events, NPCs, and such. It affects the "abstract" battle in the background, as well as how much help the players receive during any special missions they are trying to do during the battle. Also, the players can make tactical decisions or reaallocate resources to the "abstract battle" if it isn't going well. Lastly, they can simply jump into the fray if they feel they are needed there. As they advance, it will always either advance alongside them, or falter and leave them dangerously alone. Joining the melee of two or more mobs of warriors isn't quite like normal combat. I don't use move actions, just a "go to the front of the melee" or "disengage to the rear". But you are essentially fighting one or more respawnable enemies, with excess damage being transferred over to new ones that spawn. This allows you to be as heroic as Aragorn and such, cutting through two or three guys in one go. The melee and archer mobs present can attack each player as if there are individuals of their type attacking them separately in one turn. Spellcaster mobs in the fray can only go once a turn, not one action against each player. Not a hard rule though, depending on war score and such. The allied mob is played like one or two respawnable NPCs as well, and they exchange attacks with each enemy mob. Obviously this can be flavored as allied soldiers moving in and out of the direct fighting of the players. Everyone is always in melee range except for those who have "disengaged" to the rear, who still have missile range. Defeating certain thresholds of enemies will have different effects -- raise in morale, allow skill checks for various reasons, allow a breakthrough to hit enemies at the rear, or cause an enemy captain to spawn in or be spotted so you can defeat him, etc. Mechanics-wise, it's really just respawnable NPCs with multiple attack actions and maybe preset behaviors. The DM has to do the work of making it seem like there are many, many individuals dying, stepping forth, disengaging, clashing, and dying all over again in a quick, chaotic, endless cycle.

Another option, and one you (Daniel) might look at and consider if you haven't already, is Dan Collins' "Book of War" from Original Edition Delta. (Free I believe, or cheap purchase from Lulu.) Dan is a mathematics lecturer and he's concocted a procedurally simple mass combat system that basically statistically replicates ODnD one-on-one combat. Clearly inspired by Chainmail (all d6 rolls with "hits" being kills). I haven't used BoW yet, but when mass combat comes up in my campaign, it will be what I turn to as a first experiment.

@ahabicher

7 ай бұрын

I have used it for battles within campaigns; excellent for D&D type rules as a more fluid replacement of Chainmail.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

I have BoW- really good, I should have mentioned it.

My first experience with a grand battle being decided by smaller scale encounters was in the Star Frontiers adventure "Starspawn of Volturnus". The module set up 4 encounters for the PCs that each increased the chance of the good guys winning the overall battle by 10%. (There was also another 10% per NPC race that the PCs got to help such that the range of success could be between 10% and 90%). This seemed like an elegant way to handle a war, even if now I'd probably modify it such that the if the players met every victory condition they would be guaranteed to win the war. I've never used this in D&D simply because my campaigns have never involved this kind of thing but this approach seems like a great way to approach wars if they do come up.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Sounds great - I’ll have to see if I have that one, I went on a star frontiers buying spree a few years back

Thanks for the shout-out, Daniel! I can attest to BK's skillz at running Chainmail. I wasn't able to play (running too crazy) but got to watch a bit of his sessions at CleriCon, and it looked awesome! The players were all engaged and played into the wee hours. Next year I'm making a point of being free for his game!

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

That would be great!

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

What is the best time to break out Chainmail? I've always wanted to try it on our local con. The best I can think of is to throw a challenge worth of Chainmail in the wilderness, and then let them try to fight through it to reach a dungeon site to explore in detail. All the dudes they have along to fight on the overworld are not going to join them in the dungeon. They're caravan mercenaries who don't want to step into a weird hellhole.

I’ve found the “special mission” concept to be ideal for players’ role in a mass battle. Besides killing giants or other monsters attacking a wall, I think needing to take a particularly difficult terrain feature can be a good mission. Like the Rangers who had to scale Pointe du Hoc on D-Day, the PCs might need to lead an attack up a steep cliff under enemy missile fire, the monks and rogues using their climbing skills, the wizards and sorcerers using *levitate, fly* or *spider climb*, and the druids wild shaping to reach the top, while the more heavily armored characters may have to wait for their friends to throw them a rope ladder.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Cool

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

There is a lot of games where you play special forces. In Star Wars D6 from WEG, you can play rebel special forces entirely and go on all sorts of infiltration jobs for the rebels. You fight a lot of imperial army people and other rear staff. An alternative is Dark Heresy: Only War where you play an individual squad and get missions and orders but few of them are special. You are going to take and hold a building. It's not critical, just one of many buildings that need to be taken. There might be ork tanks over the hill, your section are going to go up and see if there are. Missions are not lynchpoints, a single battle can be a campaign in the game where small victories one room after another determines it.

I've run a large skirmish in 5e with hobgoblins on an outdoor hex map. Each unit on the map represented 10 hobgoblins with 10x HP. There were foot soldier units, archer units, war-boar cavalry units and a boss/shaman unit. For each increment of average hobgoblin HP the unit lost, one soldier was killed. Scale damage accordingly: A unit with 3 losses would only do 7x damage instead of 10x damage. It's a great way to challenge mid to high level players with low level monsters. My players loved it.

@BanditsKeep

3 ай бұрын

Nice!

Excellent timing. I’ve set a lot of pieces in motion but I’m not sure what my players are going to do. This gives me ideas to run massive battles that the players may not even be present for.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Excellent

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

If absolutely no players are present, I can just roll a single dice. I have used that to determine the outcome of a city election where neither the PCs or any other underground faction paid the slighest interest. The sitting party stayed in power in the end, with a 60% chance. That was also a matter in Birthright, how does the DM determine events where no players are present? I might not want to sit and play a wargame with myself, and not entirely pull stuff out of the blue. Not taking action is also an action, and should have consequences. In Delta Green, I ruled that the PCs could often order local cops and non-DG feds to do things. But those goons are not going to have any mythos skill, which immediately sets a limit for how they deal with a gangster using a spell or a mi-go. They got a d100 roll to measue approximately how well they did, using their mundane expectations. An NPC ambulance crew managed to save a shot truck driver, but had no idea how to describe the thing he puked up that slithered into the sewers. A PC or other DG guy on the scene advising and commanding makes a lot of difference.

I’ve adapted a hybridized version of Matt Coleville’s method for my game. It is about halfway between the abstract and wargame methods with players doing player things and periodically issuing commands to abstracted “cards” of troops who battle in the background.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Nice

The way I’ve done it is turn large groups of enemies into minions with a large boss monster they’re attacking with or defending. I took it from Matt Colville’s minion rules, so excess damage goes onto other minions in their little squads allowing players to cut a swath through the warzone. Running them in general groups for initiative (goblins go at this, elves at that, etc) is a good approach for keeping flow and letting minions duke it out for each other is as simple as one roll per squad fighting on the initiative turn and seeing if anything hit. I run a Gundam homebrew and the players cutting through a dozen mobile suits to attack a Big Tray land battleship was a lot of fun.

@BanditsKeep

6 ай бұрын

Awesome!

Man, I gotta say, I really appreciate your channel. You have this really casual but professional way of speaking to the audience. You get the ideas out there in a fun and interesting way and I find myself engaged in every single video because I just want to hear what you have to say next. Your cadence reminds me of Matt Colville, but if he listened to Sabbath and Maiden and only played old school games lol Thanks for the excellent content man!

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Thanks! That’s very nice of you to say. I appreciate the support.

Thanks for the video! Nice variety of solutions.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Thank You!

“Epilogue” might be useful here, because some players’ reluctance to try anything new might be based in their fear that any “learning curve” they face with a new system might jeopardize their ability to keep their characters alive. Why not have the players run entirely different characters, perhaps even from enemy factions? This is a great way to broaden player knowledge about your setting by showing them persons and scenarios that are not normally accessible in the standard campaign storyline. Players won’t be so afraid to lose characters they’ll only play for a one-shot. Besides, it can be a lot of fun to take a break from playing Sir Percy the Perfect Paladin to go walk a mile in the shoes of Hobart the Heinous, scum-of-the-earth mercenary captain.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Could be an option. Though, I often have less issues getting my players to try other things than playing other characters

The system in Dark Dungeons X is a simplified version of War Machine that looks like it would be really easy to incorporate. I haven’t used it yet but I plan to. Since reading Muster I’ve become enamoured with the idea of DnD being played as a war game. I definitely want to start running my games with more mass battles involved and players doing heroic things on the battlefield. Thanks for this breakdown.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Cool

Was just researching this topic! Thank you for this awesome video!

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Good timing!

I asked for it one week ago, I'm honored ! Feels like a christmas gift 😄

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

😊

I run a Dungeon Crawl Classics game, and we held a battle for control of a temple by giving each player a sheet of 0-level characters to use in addition to their actual PCs. Zeroes are a core part of DCC and they were incorporated into the fight with almost no friction despite the players and I having to work with over 40 characters.

@BanditsKeep

5 ай бұрын

That’s a great idea!

we were 3rd ed warhammer fantasy battle players as well, so we had no problem using battlesystem back in the day for the important battles.

@BanditsKeep

4 ай бұрын

Nice!

Adventurer conquarer king is the only system built from the ground up for combat ranging from a few individuals on each side to mass combat of tens of thousands. I highly recommend any GM who wants to make mass combat a part of his campaign to take a look at it.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

That’s a bold statement 😂 OD&D is 100% built for that as is BECMI, Hyperboria and a dozen other games.

Adter learning chainmail from your videos. My gameplay has sped up a lot. Im able to keep the pace up and transition from large scale to small scale seamlessly. Thank you for your videos.

@BanditsKeep

28 күн бұрын

Awesome!

some great ideas. thanks!

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Thanks!

In some editions, Warhammer went in the opposite way and became "herohammer" where nothing but beefed-up special characters with special rules on top of special rules mattered. If the players learn that what wins wars is heroes fighting other heroes, the rational thing to do is to make sure your side's heroes are kitted out with good magic gear and try to recruit more heroes. Battles are decided by the clash between the opposing command squads, other units either have a support role like flanking and scouting or points-scoring objective holders. Exalted would lean towards this in their large scale combat rules. An army is mechanically a set of equipment the two generals wear. Every battle is a wushu duel between generals with the troops supporting them.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Sounds cool

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

@@BanditsKeep Exalted is not my sort of game. It is an extreme end of high-powered heroism though. Heroes in Exalted only measure against other heroes, demons and gods. Any attempt we've made made the world around mostly irrelevant. I like the zoomed out approach where a level 9 bloke is at most going to be a +1 damage modifier to a unit and a morale bonus if attached. A level 9 wizard can hide in a unit and pop some spells, but only spells that will affect 50 people matter. Bless is a really powerful spell in Birthright because a lot of low-level clerics will know it and it can affect a unit. A +1 to hit is not much but a bloke on the battlefield who can pop it on a unit of archers matter. But that wizard is not going to win by duelling with Mirror Image and a staff.

for chainmail: if they don't want to learn a new system tell them to avoid war for your giant example: tanks on a modern battlefield need infantry screening, a tank on its own is a dead tank. Those giants need infantry screening (the goblins), the PC's job is to kill the giants but the PCs also need infantry screening or they will be killed by the goblins, and thats what differentiates the war from an encounter

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

The screening would be done by the DM in the first setup

@flikersprigs5641

7 ай бұрын

@@BanditsKeep yeah. How I'd probably do it would be "here's 20 units of 20 soldiers, each of you gets 5 and they can move one square per round. And here's 20 units of 20 goblins, if you are adjacent to a goblin unit that has no adjacent soldiers unit, you die.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

@@flikersprigs5641 you die 😂 no thanks, in my games 20 goblins could not insta kill the party - maybe if they were level 1 or 2, but I would not have that level group be specialists.

@flikersprigs5641

7 ай бұрын

@@BanditsKeep "you die" might be a little harsh but I'd want to emphasize the importance of the supporting infantry.

@Xplora213

7 ай бұрын

My perhaps whacky swarm rules for adnd 2e has had my 4th/5th level players routing 60 orcs in 2 rounds (they tend to chicken out if a Lance charge of three horses takes out 30 of them in two passes)… if the PCs is alone, it’s goodbye and hello new character sheet but OSR against goblins…. It’s a meat grinder

My new favorite channel. Keep up the good work, Daniel! Love it.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Thank You!

Great video! So many ideas percolating in my mind. Thanks!

@BanditsKeep

3 ай бұрын

Thank You! Let me know if you give any of them a try

A great example of a backdrop of war is Record of Lodoss War

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

True

As the battle rages, the players are charged with attacking the Giants, or attacking the Siege weapons, or attacking the baggage train. The Players must hold the pass for X turns while their army falls back A super simple method is the bad guys (Orcs, Goblins, etc) roll a D6, the Good Guys (Humans, Dwarves, Elves) roll a D8, simple high dice wins. You can move through a mass combat quickly - at some point, the players can meet up with the leaders of the bad guys and play that out with normal combat. Keep track of the time and the Players may win, but if their troops on either side of them loose, or fall back, the players can be surrounded and make a last stand on the hill top with the battle flag. Chance for epic win or loss.

@Xplora213

7 ай бұрын

Very similar to Professor DMs recommendation. He went with d20s, and used multiple dice to reflect the odds. Two divisions v three divisions? Roll a pair of 20s for one side and three for the other. I really like this but kinda feel like it needed a bit more crunch (maybe roll once per hour to see how things are going).

@Marcus-ki1en

7 ай бұрын

@@Xplora213 Another model you can use is Risk. Attacker rolls three dice, Defender rolls 2. You can rip through company sized engagements quickly.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Yes!

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

The first mission in Cyberpunk 2020 has a small skirmish battle. I saw the kids had made a new computer game in that world and looked it up again when someone asked about it. Johnny Silverhand has gotten his girlfriend kidnapped and has scrounged up the PCs and some others to help. His plan is to rile up a crowd and storm them. There are 100 fans turned rioters just from Johnny's effort. More if the PCs think of someting to help I guess. 30 guards are able to face them then and there. Once the fight starts, the crowd drops d6 guards and the guards drop d10 rioters. The PCs and their allies add further guard casualties. At four remaining guards, the security force breaks and they can enter the place until reinforcements arrive. I think it's stacked in the PCs favor as an intro scenario, it's full of things where NPCs can pull their weight.

Merry Christmas, season greetings, happy new year

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

🎄

A good video! It's much food for thought on the idea of mass combat. Dungeon Minister is a great channel and Father Aaron seems like a really nice guy! I hope your new year is filled with much fortune and great adventure! ✝️📿🧙⚔️

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Thank You!

So much interesting tips and anlysis in your videos. At one point you should write down a book :) Keep up the good work and merry Xmas Bandit's Keep !

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Thank You!

Thanks Daniel

@BanditsKeep

19 күн бұрын

Thanks for watching

lol love the cut at 12:02

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

😊

The Warhammer specialist game Warmaster has some fun ideas about the role of heroes. Heroes are not going around fighting entire regiments of their own. Wizards can get tricky and use spells on a unit scale, but a wizard is never going to replace a regiment. A hero can pop into a combat and add a few attacks, especially if they're riding a big heckin' monster, but a non-monstrous character will never hold back a unit. Heroes, generals and wizards have the ability to command. A huge amount of the game is focused on manouver, to roll how well different heroes can organize units, point them the right way and make them go. Failed units only move small steps forward, unthinking units like skeletons might not move at all unless their vampire lord tells them. Each hero and wizard is a zone of control bubble for the player, with the general having the best and largest.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Cool

Yes! This is just what i need

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Excellent

Qelong is a small campaign setting where the PCs are not taking part of a war, but they try to traverse the nasty side effects of one. You go upriver in a patrol boat in fantasy Cambodia as the fantasy Vietnam War rages between two impossible wizards over the mountains. Lots of starvation, soldiers from across the mountain press-ganging people, weird monsters awakening, throngs of desperate refugees, angry elephants. mercenaries taking what road toll they feel like, disease and nasty buggery all around. You are about level 6, you can probably outfit a small expedition but not change the course of the war itself. You deal with the usual business of wilderness hexcrawling, but among the encounters are refugees and mad mercenaries and my favourite, armour-stealers.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Ah yes, great setting/adventure

Battlesystems for AD&D was great imo.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

I’ll have to check it out - was that 2e?

@Xplora213

7 ай бұрын

@@BanditsKeepyep

Dragon Rampant is another simple fantasy wargame. It was first recommended to be by Colin Green.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

I feel like I’ve heard of that, I’ll take a look.

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

What do you get to do with it?

I am play testing my mass combat rules soon. Probably this weekend. If it works it will be glorious. If not, I will have spent hours for nothing. I will report back. Looking forward to this video (well all of them really)

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Awesome, let me know how it goes

@Xplora213

7 ай бұрын

@@BanditsKeep The short version is “let’s just use the leaders THAC0, and a bonus for the size of the unit, with fixed HP”. Move, attack or organise/reorder… so units fully “heal” if they are not in immediate combat, and merge with other units to get bigger and get bigger bonuses. Provides a serious bias towards great leaders and stronger weapons and armour and is fully compatible with normal ad&d modifiers etc. I don’t want a brand new system. My players are kids. This should be enough for a siege to finish the campaign. I hope 🤞

@Xplora213

17 күн бұрын

@@BanditsKeepDaniel, finally got that siege battle done. My rules ended up being virtually Rules Lite, and massively favoured trickery over full blown battle. Players were inside their castle. Once you account for the extra range of vertical tower height, it is Impossible to get hurt. You kinda have to starve them out but if they have Call Lightning, then you invite absolute power into the mix. I really can’t undersell the asymmetry in the wounds /HD approach and I see that D&D is no longer a wargame because the slow methodical approach of moving miniatures around just doesn’t work once you create the magic spell environments. It’s been literally months trying to finish this seige but we’re done. I don’t think I would do this again. Five room dungeon is the way forward. if you can’t wrap up the seige in five set pieces then you aren’t thinking it through enough. In the end, that’s what I did. RP the diplomatic meeting to start, combat, stealth mission, false retreat then surprise attack with extra reinforcements. These don’t require wargame rules. I’m inclined to go with War z machine to give some granular results to the battles AROUND the players. But that’s a DMs mini game. A fascinating journey. And we have finished our campaign. ❤

My attempt at this, i just stole the massive battle scenes from the LotR video game on PS2. It worked well enough for me.

@BanditsKeep

Ай бұрын

Nice!

I belong to a wargames club who also dabble in RPGs. over the years we have played wargames battles as part of RPG campaigns. They are a lot of fun. But.... one mistake i made was ruling that instant death befell a 6th level Barbarian PC because of a single bad dice roll by the unit he was commanding....dont make my mistake. This was over 30 years ago and is still a sticking point at my club.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Good advice

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

That's another aspect I try to figure out, what is the personal risk? If sir Bob and Elfvis are commanding a unit and being big damn heroes to give it a morale bonus, +1 from sir Bob and his magical sword and the use of Elfvis Mass Invisibility spell, do they share any of the risk? If the game is one where napoleonic commanders sit on a hill and get notes, the risk is different. In A Mighty Fortress, the AD&D 2e game of early modern period Europe, you can of course participate in battles and they give you a simple combat resolution system. Any character present in the battle rolls a save, on a failiure they take a bunch of damage that might very well kill them. They don't fight individually, a battle is more like very hostile terrain where a random musket or cannon can appear at any time. In Warhammer, heroes can push to the back of a regiment but then they're unable to influence things. Elfvis can't pop spells from the back of 200 dudes, sir Bob can't use their magic sword from there. They can even leave a unit and leg it, which might be an instant morale test for the 200 dudes seeing mighty sir Bob run. You could rule that even the worst scrimmage ends with some survivors staggering off, and it's very likely a PC is part of them. In Necromunda's gang skirmishes they don't fight wars of extermination. You roll to see what permanent injuries a model gets, but in most cases a model will stagger back home. Casualties becoming deaths is relatively rare. Any PC that loses a battle rolls an outcome table to ride away, get captured, take damage etc.

I ran a "massive" battlefield between an army of demon controlled warforged and the forces of Neverwinter. I had the leaders of the both armies meet in the center, and of course, the players joined. Combat broke out and the leaders and the players had a good 3-4 rounds of combat before the armies caught up to what was happening. Of course Orcus escaped, and the players got the feeling of slaying robots or healing their allied armies while defeating the generals of the armies a variety of high CR monsters. And our warlock turned into a giant powerful stat block to lead the fight. This scenario of two armies facing off, but a big combat with a few important leaders from both sides and the PC's is a great setup any GM can use for any system. It let's the players focus on the "main battle" and in the background/ for flavor the armies are fighting. I had the armies roll off D20's to determine "generally" which way the battle was going at the top of the round, and that was sufficient for our purposes. Once they PC's defeated the leaders the army retreated/ was defeated by their side.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Sounds fun!

If you are doing a war background I would say look into the Faction rules from Stars Without Numbers from Kevin Crawford. Even though it's scifi, you can easily use the rules for fantasy. The rules are in the free version

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Cool, I’ll take a look

Recommend MCDM's Strongholds and Followers, in which the warfare rules come as part of the territory (ahem) around what you said at the beginning: higher level players want to do something else, like "get their own castle," so the book is all about how that works. They have different types of strongholds centered around different classes: the ranger's lodge and the cleric's temple; the barbarian warlord's moving camp or pirate ship; the wizard's tower and the fighter's (bandit's?) keep. With these come followers, artisans, builders, squires, and in some cases, soldiers in your army. The wargame mechanics are informed by the rest of the book but can be used independent. Used this system for epic battles in multiple campaigns--not often but definitely at least once. Very easy to get the hang of, very easy to customize and homebrew units, etc. Also: great art.

@Xplora213

7 ай бұрын

S&F does an enormous amount of heavy lifting for the 5e focused DM who didn’t grow up with the notion of castle building and domain play… while still being reasonably linked to the original game. kingdoms and warfare is a mini game unto itself and is not the same game anymore. Which works for some but not me.

@BanditsKeep

7 ай бұрын

Nice! I’ve heard good things about this but have not read it myself yet

@SusCalvin

6 ай бұрын

@@Xplora213 Sometimes it's the prospect of book-keeping that people worry about, that the game will turn into one about accounts and ledgers. People I've talked with who would love to be king Conan balk at being property registration man Conan. One of the failiures of Birthright was the tax system. That and how much work it put on the DM, people I've talked with in that scene says DM burnout ends most campaigns. It was a system where lots of little moving parts would start depending on eachother. TSR themselves thought people would simply abstract it and never roll for anything that happened off-map. The enemy baron has as many spear orcs as you say she has, because you said so! She does not play the economy game the PCs do.