So—mass combat. When there’s too many dudes on the field to model normally for the game. I usually avoid making this a (core) part of a system but playtesting this particular game (Drying Time) showed me it could organically come up in the provided campaign, so I need to at least give it a working ruleset.
If you’re familiar with some older rules from games tangentially involving dragons then you know the simple premise of “scale it up, stupid”: take 10 guys, give them 10hp where 1hp=1 guy, and make everything about them (weapon attack, armour, etc) function identically it’s just 10 of them to a square.
My first introduction to the concept was WOLVES OF GOD, a lovely lesser-known Kevin Crawford joint written in-text as a ficticious roleplayingame from post-Roman Britain.
Context:
The only thing I think you need to know about Drying Time to evaluate these rules is that normal Shooting is 3d6, at-or-under a static value grants a Hit per die, each Hit does damage based on the ammo\weapon. Clashes are melee engagements that involve simultaneous die roll (d6 on attack, d4 on defense, you only choose one, damage dealt to both sides instantly).
So! all that said and one: what do you think about this? I’ve been tightening it up to fit on a single spread, there’s two paragraphs about \when\ to do this\zoom back in that cannot fit on this page without scrunching it unacceptably close. I go back and forth on cutting bits of “concision” but it duels with “clarify,” feedback of all sorts welcome.
A lot of the terms used here aren’t legible to me without knowledge of the system you’re using this within. Likewise, I don’t know your design goals, so everything said below may turn out to be irrelevant. I’ll give you my first reaction all the same, since the silence you’ve been greeted with seems discourteous.
IMO designing TTRPG warfare as a tactical combat game is a trap. The word count necessary to make a wargame both interesting and evocative of the underlying fiction would eclipse the word count of ITO-adjacent systems. Your present rules read as evocative but not interesting to me.
If your goal is merely to find out the consequences of two armies slapping against one another, there are far faster methods than minis-on-a-grid combat.
If your goal is to simulate the experience of managing an army, the level of minute control players have over their units is unrealistic. The core fantasy should rest in prep and logistics, not real time control.
If your goal is to force players into making tense life or death split second decisions, these procedures are insufficient. You need guidance on level design as well.
Knave 2e has my favorite warfare rules. Paraphrased:
Compare the strength of the two fighting forces. The stronger force gets a +X bonus on three consecutive DC11 d20 rolls, depending on the size of their advantage. Each success gives the stronger a choice from the list below. Each failure gives the weaker a choice. Picks are made in secret, then revealed simultaneously. Winner of 2 rolls wins the battle.
Capture an NPC
Steal an Item
Slay 10% of the enemy force
Negate the enemy’s Capture
Negate the enemy’s Steal
Negate the enemy’s Slay
Allows for tension, tactics, and surprise.
My mass combat white whale would ideally lean into both logistics and be resolved from the perspective of individual PCs. Something that treats war like a mid-initiative environmental hazard you can influence at absurd expensive, instead of a chess board. Think Battle of the Bastards.
I tried to write up such a system - inspired heavily by Battalions in Fire Emblem: Three Houses - but got lost in a mind mire and scrapped the idea.
Hope this isn’t too critical I want you to keep posting updates lol.
Thank you for the reply! I was struggling to “know where to cut” on describing how Reign of Fire handles combat because it is not like D&D (you don’t have a number to hit, attacks/damage resolve simultaneously between two people in melee, many terms differ and don’t describe precisely the same thing anyway, multiple ways to die, etc). I see I was insufficient in many regards.
Here is the overall objective:
Provide skirmish-scale rules for groupings of ~8-12 people to take up the same gamespace as one person does in normal combat
Otherwise port them all over to the flow of normal combat, simplified, each group proxy’d to their Lowest Common Denominator member
Leave space for PCs and significant NPCs to stand out as attached/detached units who cross the battlefield or group up with units and are able to take consequential action (kill other significant characters, help wear down a group).
To address your own points directly:
The outcome is significant but the personal moment-to-moment experience of the PCs on the battlefield is center stage. This is a story of how they live/die, their small-scale place in history. I can’t just generate an outcome and call it at that.
They’re usually not in command of the army, and these units are run according to same the logic NPCs on either side of a conflict would be.
This is for a Capsule Game, so the level design is incorporated every time such encounters are called for—I may still incorporate a small guidance on same, but will primarily point them to extant ones in the book’s section on fights to use as templates.
I am vaguely familiar with Knave, and that does sound interesting—but it does not tell the story of the glory won in the mud. The PCs here are slobbering at the sight of a bronze sword and shanking each other in the dirt / desperately seeking escape from their conscripted place in the slaughtering line. The press and flow of bodies deeply matters here and could decide who lives, who dies, etc.
I think logistics are key, too; have you ever heard of Cataphract? I’m in a game of it I’m quite enjoying right now, but of course its real time scale gives its luxuries few other games can afford.
Don’t feel sorry about being critical! I strongly believe in critique and other forms of feedback as a means to learn and grow. Likewise I hope I was not too quick in dismissing your contributions.
I don’t have a solid update just yet, just got home from a wedding and 44hrs of collective flight, but let me get a quote from WOLVES OF GOD (by Kevin Crawford) to show you my most direct source of inspiration (it takes up multiple pages but this drive home at the core of what I’m ripping off + uses D&D-based terminology):
