Has this been done before?

[Biophysicist]

I'm looking into developing a homebrew system which is designed not for small parties raiding dungeons or so on, but for massive battles where each player controls 20+ soldiers. More accurately, I'm trying to make the rules easily extendable, so that just about anything can be added and still be balanced, unless the GM intentionally tries to make it imbalanced. But I'm pretty sure this has been done before - has it?

[Silverscale]

I'm looking into developing a homebrew system which is designed not for small parties raiding dungeons or so on, but for massive battles where each player controls 20+ soldiers. More accurately, I'm trying to make the rules easily extendable, so that just about anything can be added and still be balanced, unless the GM intentionally tries to make it imbalanced. But I'm pretty sure this has been done before - has it?

Three words War Hammer 4000

[Mulletmanalive]

Yeah, what you just described is a Wargame.

Just type that into google, probably with "skirmish" and "free" tagged onto it and you'll be presented with hundreds of them.

[Calmar]

Actually, this is most likely how all the geekery and nerddom began in the first place (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Wars)... :smallsmile:

[Biophysicist]

Thanks, though I wish the responses had been different... Doacks.

Alright, I have a confession. My motivation for creating this system was not so much that I wanted a "wargame" system, but because I wanted to create a system, as I can rarely understand other people's systems (I'm literally insane, making understanding /anything/ hard), and thought that this was something new, which would give me an excuse to create it. (Run-on sentence and comma abuse ftw.) Anyway, guess I'll need to find some other twist on game system design that hasn't been used before... This will be difficult.

[Calmar]

Your idea isn't necessarily bad, when it has been done before, just as a radically new idea doesn't need to be good. :smallwink:

[DracoDei]

20+ would be more like Chainmail (the modern version) than Warhammer 40K...

[Hazkali]

There are a number of skirmish wargames out there- Games Workshop produces the most well known, but I have heard good things about the A Song of... series by Ganesha Games. A Google search will probably be the most help here, although http://www.freewargamesrules.co.uk/ might be a good place to start if you're looking for inspiration.

Most wargames will be light on RPG rules elements, though- diplomacy and anything applicable outside of battle generally isn't covered because that's not the focus of a wargame.