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View Full Version : The PC's as part of a larger conflict.



eulmanis12
2011-12-02, 08:46 AM
A while back my group did a campaign that ended with a final battle between the Army of the BBEG and the Army of the nation that had hired the PC's. In the final session we tried to model the PC's fighting in the middle of a clash between two armies.
What we did was to model a "huge" clash between the PC's and about 20 low level "Good Guy" soldiers (representing the closest platoon of allies) against the BBEG's anti-PCs (4 high level evil opposites) and about 20 low level Evil Soldiers. This clash was conducted in standard D&D format.
Meanwhile, to show the larger battle raging around the PC's We pitted two Armies from Warhammer Fantasy against eachother on a separate table, declaring one area as the PC Area (It moved as the battle progressed, 2 inches in a direction chosen by whichever side dealt the most damage on a given turn), As the battle raged the Good General and Evil General (Represented by two friends who were not part of the D&D group) fought their battle as normal with the exception that any troops sent into the "PC Area" (a 6inch by 6 inch box that moved according to the location of the PC's) would disappear from the table and reappear in the apropriate location on the PC table/map.

It took forever to run, and was very difficult to keep track of. It was fun. The PC's had to fight their oposites, Occasionaly move to fight in a different part of the battle and reinforce their allies, then chase down the BBEG (Whom we gave some Warhammer stats to so that he could participate in the battle when not fighting the PC's).

As fun as it was, we had no idea what we were getting into when we planned this. How would you run a similar scenario in order to make it more playable?

king.com
2011-12-02, 08:55 AM
Personally I've run bigger games based upon command tests. Successful tests rallies members of the allied faction into the fight. For example, the players are fighting the BBEG and his goons and then this turn the BBEG rolls well and a pair of soldiers leap at a player (they do little to threaten them but it stalls him long enough for the BBEG to gain ground and confront the other party members).

This felt, atleast to me and my players like they were a part of a much larger melee going on around them and they needed to cut their way through to the leaders.

Gullintanni
2011-12-02, 08:57 AM
If you're talking 3.5 D&D, large scale war is just difficult to run. The best success I've had in large scale conflicts is to create a two part system. One should just be a system of arbitrary die rolls reflecting army vs. army. For example, if I roll below 50% on my percentile die, the enemy army wins battle 1. Battles you roll for usually involve cities and strategic assets.

This system is then influenced by the PCs, who are given specific "missions". The result of the PCs mission influences the arbitrary die roll. For example, let's say evil army x is trying to take the city of Ravengard. They're laying siege.

The PCs first mission: Disrupt Enemy Supply lines. If they succeed, add 10% to the die roll.

The PCs second mission: Infiltrate the enemy camp and assassinate their officers. If they succeed, add 15% to the die roll.

Once missions are complete, either failed or otherwise, roll your dice. If your PCs were successful in both instances, the chances of your city weathering the siege are 75%. If they failed in the mission, chances may shrink to 40%. In other words, use manageable, objective based play to create statistical advantages for the faction your party favors. This works decently well if you want the potential outcome of the war to be somewhat unpredictable, while ultimately rewarding PC performance.

Alternately, remember that war is a plot device. If your PCs are successful, they win the war.


Personally I've run bigger games based upon command tests. Successful tests rallies members of the allied faction into the fight. For example, the players are fighting the BBEG and his goons and then this turn the BBEG rolls well and a pair of soldiers leap at a player (they do little to threaten them but it stalls him long enough for the BBEG to gain ground and confront the other party members).


If the PCs are actually in the melee, this sounds like a pretty good idea. Present strategic "test" objectives during the melee. Impose positive consequences for your army if your PCs pass the tests, and negative consequences for your army if they don't.

Kol Korran
2011-12-02, 01:00 PM
there's a book called "heroes of battle" that deals exactly with this- large scale wars and the PCs as being part of it, but having it be managable and playable enough in the D&D system.

i have used it only very little and it worked well, but i heard from others who used it more extensively, and it went quite good. they didn't use all the rules (some could easily be determined by common sense instead of rules they said)

i suggest you look it up.

kieza
2011-12-02, 01:11 PM
I've run similar concepts on a couple of occasions. I used some rules loosely based on the WARMACHINE/HORDES system for strategic combat, and switched to D&D for tactical combat.

The adventure where I got this right (I think) was the culmination of a 2-year campaign, with the players supporting an invasion of a sidhe lord's stronghold in the Feywild. It went sort of like this:

-(Tactical) Players teleport in to a concealed teleport circle near the enemy teleport hub (a bunch of teleport circles for troop movement), kill the gatekeepers, and use speaking stones to let friendly troops arrive through the teleport hub.
-(Strategic) Players lead friendly troops to storm the gate of the city before the alarm can be raised. (They have a limited number of turns to get a certain number of their troops to the gate objective.)
-(Strategic) The next wave of friendly troops arrives at the gate; the players get to lead them in one of the assaults towards the inner walls. (There are other assault groups offscreen.) The players got bogged down and lost most of their troops when we played this, so they retreated.
-(Tactical) The players grab some scrolls to establish teleport circles and make a surgical strike through enemy lines. They have two encounters in the tight confines of the city before they find and capture a plaza to establish their own teleport hub.
-(Strategic) A company of marines (powerful, teleport-capable troops) comes through the teleport hub. The players decide to abandon the hub and push forwards, because they can see the villain starting a ritual in the citadel. They break through the poorly-defended inner gates with a lot of troops left, so they have the entire marine company open fire on the villain, who has been possessed by a dark god.
-(Tactical) After being injured by the volley, the villain takes flight to escape. The players teleport to a friendly airship which has been providing coordination for the assault, and they take it into the fight. The villain fights them atop and around the airship until they break the god's hold on him, at which point he loses the ability to fly and falls to earth.

Each of the fights was relatively short, about the length of a normal encounter, rather than a massive single encounter with a lot of stages. I used to do massive encounters like that, but I found that they tend to get boring partway through. The party doesn't get to rest, heal, recover powers, etc., and it becomes a slog as the party deals with yet another squad of soldiers that appears near where they're fighting. Better to mix it up a little.

Warlawk
2011-12-02, 02:00 PM
I believe one of the White Wolf gaming systems (Exalted maybe?) handles large scale battle by using the army as 'armor/weapons' that enhance the stats of your PCs. Then you simply run it as a 1v1 or XvX battle between the pcs and the enemy commanders. You use their base stats and then the quality/type etc of the troops determines what type of bonuses each person gets and the results of the battle are applied to the armies in question.

I've never actually used the system in play, but it struck me as an interesting approach that would be cool to play out.

GungHo
2011-12-02, 02:22 PM
I sometimes do it like Dynasty Warriors. My PCs will go against another squad or successions of squads, and as the PCs start to win, so does the rest of the army. If one of the PCs fall, so goes a large portion of their army, etc.

Usually, though, I'll have them perform tactical objectives while the battle rages around them and use that as a "success factor". Occassionally an "add squad" will come in and attack, but their successes determine the success/outcome of the overall battle, and the more objectives they achieve, the more complete the victory.

I have never really wanted to try to model the stats of one army vs another army beyond the broadest strokes, and I certainly wouldn't want to roll all of the dice to simulate an army to the nearest squad, even if I technically could via a dice program.

big teej
2011-12-02, 03:29 PM
A while back my group did a campaign that ended with a final battle between the Army of the BBEG and the Army of the nation that had hired the PC's. In the final session we tried to model the PC's fighting in the middle of a clash between two armies.
What we did was to model a "huge" clash between the PC's and about 20 low level "Good Guy" soldiers (representing the closest platoon of allies) against the BBEG's anti-PCs (4 high level evil opposites) and about 20 low level Evil Soldiers. This clash was conducted in standard D&D format.
Meanwhile, to show the larger battle raging around the PC's We pitted two Armies from Warhammer Fantasy against eachother on a separate table, declaring one area as the PC Area (It moved as the battle progressed, 2 inches in a direction chosen by whichever side dealt the most damage on a given turn), As the battle raged the Good General and Evil General (Represented by two friends who were not part of the D&D group) fought their battle as normal with the exception that any troops sent into the "PC Area" (a 6inch by 6 inch box that moved according to the location of the PC's) would disappear from the table and reappear in the apropriate location on the PC table/map.

It took forever to run, and was very difficult to keep track of. It was fun. The PC's had to fight their oposites, Occasionaly move to fight in a different part of the battle and reinforce their allies, then chase down the BBEG (Whom we gave some Warhammer stats to so that he could participate in the battle when not fighting the PC's).

As fun as it was, we had no idea what we were getting into when we planned this. How would you run a similar scenario in order to make it more playable?

ARggg
!!!!!
:smallfurious:


I have always wanted to do this!!!

I am so jealous!! :smallfrown:


glad somebody out there has established proof of concept though. :smallbiggrin:

I don't care if it's a pain to run, it is awesome!

eulmanis12
2011-12-02, 05:12 PM
It is awesome to do and overall a great experiance. What I'd like to do is try to refine the system so that it isn't such a pain to run and each round does not take an hour.

In the method we used these things were nescesary:
the 4 PC's
The DM
D&D equipment
5000pts of Empire/Bretonia Warhammer pieces and gear
5000 pts of Vampire Counts
two additional players who are the generals of the above armies.
A 4x6 table complete with warhammer scale scenary
a full weekend
Lots of snacks

Not all of these are difficult to get, but it is often difficult to get all of them together.

We used these rules to govern the interaction between the two games.
The D&D fight is assumed to be taking place in a 6inch by 6inch section of the battlefield.
This section can be moved up to 4 inches in any direction by the PC's during each turn that the "good guys" deal more hitpoints worth of damage to the "Badguys" within the section. If the opposite applies, the DM can move it 4 inches in any direction.
No ranged attacks may fire into or out of the D&D section, however it can be fired accross.
The same applies for magical attacks.
Major NPC's will be statted up for warhammer and thus be able to participate in both the D&D section if the enter it, and the Warhammer section.
Any unit, (other than the PC's) can move into/out of the D&D section of the battle by moving into contact with the edge of the square, it will be placed on the appropriate side of the square on the other table and act as normal starting in the next round/turn.

The scenario itself was very simple in terms of Background. The BBEG's undead army (represented by the Vampire Counts) was marching towards the capital of Polyhedra and the PC's were marching at the head of the Polyhedron army to meet them. (Yes that is a dice joke). The Good army ended up losing but the PC's managed to kill the BBEG, so we declared the campaign over and said that despite being pushed back the Polyhedron forces would be able to regroup and fight again while the undead would wander aimlessly without the guidance of their leader.

I'm hoping that I might get another chance to do something like this again, perhaps in a "Siege of Azure City" type scenario. But first I need to refine the process.

Also I think that putting the rules/method we used out here might make it easier for others to run similar games if they want to.

jackattack
2011-12-03, 10:38 AM
I would run the micro-battle the way you did, but link the outcome of the macro-battle to it rather than running the macro-battle itself.

-----

You can metagame this to mean that the macro-battle generally mirrors the micro-battle.

If the PC fight goes well, the entire battle goes similarly well for their army. If they do poorly but still win, then the battle was a near thing with heavy casualties on both sides. If they lose, then the battle is lost (and they might not survive to care about the details.

You can still roll for random reinforcements, or tie reinforcements to character rolls for tactics or leadership or luck, but you don't have to play the entire battle to see if/whose reinforcements show up in each round.

-----

Alternatively, you can set up the area that the PCs fight in to reflect the larger battlefield, and the PCs and/or NPCs can directly represent units in their armies.

For example, if the battlefield is an open plain with a canyon and a river and a castle, then the area the PCs are fighting in would be a field with a gully and a wide stream and a stone house.

If the hero army has twenty units and the enemy army has twenty-five units, then the PCs have twenty NPCs on their side and their enemy has twenty-five NPCs on theirs. Class and level represent type of unit and skill/numbers.

The PCs might represent elite units, or they might just represent themselves as epic heroes who are personally equivalent to an entire unit of ordinary men. The enemy's "name" PCs / anti-PCs / bosses would be the same, elite units or epic individuals.

Crafty Cultist
2011-12-04, 02:05 PM
For PC's fighting as part of a major battle, I would reccomend making an outline for how the battle will advance without their interference - who will attack where, how many troops they will lose in doing so, how many troops they need for the assault to be successful, ect.

When the PC's take action, only use the dice for the troops around them. The battle should be reduced to a manageable size, and you can tell what effects they will have on the battle as a whole.

you should also plan for a few possible disruptions the PCs could cause, but not too many. just a few backup plans and a few ideas about what the enemy will do if their plans go to hell.

Trekkin
2011-12-04, 02:29 PM
For PC's fighting as part of a major battle, I would reccomend making an outline for how the battle will advance without their interference - who will attack where, how many troops they will lose in doing so, how many troops they need for the assault to be successful, ect.

When the PC's take action, only use the dice for the troops around them. The battle should be reduced to a manageable size, and you can tell what effects they will have on the battle as a whole.

you should also plan for a few possible disruptions the PCs could cause, but not too many. just a few backup plans and a few ideas about what the enemy will do if their plans go to hell.

This. From a dramatic standpoint, the PCs actions should probably be the deciding factor in an engagement important enough to play through. You could justify it by pointing to all the tactical theorists throughout history who have claimed battles are won and lost in the prep stages, but really, a world that reacts to your PCs is just fun, and treating their little section of the war as a duel or such makes it run a lot more immersively. I treat enemy troops as dangerous terrain. :smallcool:

That said, in all the major battles I've run, who won was predetermined, because the PCs were usually in battles too big for 3-4 people on the ground to influence one way or the other. Their actions before the war helped influence that determination, but unless they pulled something amazingly game-changing during the battle, the war was abstracted to a victory for the side I figured was tactically stronger.

What the PCs could influence was the magnitude of that victory, as well as anything important to them as characters. For example, in one instance several characters really liked a few of the NPCs in the army, so I decided that they'd end up coming out promoted, wounded, or dead depending on how the PCs did. The same principle applied to them fighting to defend their hometown at one point; they had a favorite inn, and I saved one wall from missile fire for every major antagonist they defeated in the battle. Beyond that, my post-battle description was usually different if they did well, as was the magnitude of adulation from the crowd. They didn't know that was how it worked, of course, but the relation remained, and they ended up really caring about these battles because, well, it sucked when they lost!

Perhaps it's cheesy of me, but I always thought that a system based on things the PCs and players personally valued, and their perception of the battle, was more dramatic than one where I roll bucketloads of dice and figure out which bunch of armed guys lost least that day, and less cheesy than making whatever the PCs were doing the reason an army won or lost regardless of relative strength--unless, of course, they find some brilliant scheme to change the course of the whole battle.

Unseenmal
2011-12-05, 09:13 AM
I have used this to great effect in 2 campaigns so far. It's a simple battle system that allows the war to rage on but the PCs to act in ways to sway the battle in their favor by completing missions

ENWorld Warfare for Beginners (http://www.enworld.org/forum/local_links.php?catid=2&linkid=1)

I would post the info for all to see but it's really frigging huge. Besides the link has the download, it's a 5 page Word Doc. It gives good ideas for various mision types the PCs could be doing. Various other effects that can change the battle outcome (weather, illness, reinforcements, etc)

It is based on a Victory Point system. Where you determine the total points needed to win the battle. It has a sample 2-day battle to give an idea of how it works.

Overall, I think it's a great and simple system for running large scale battles.

Rorrik
2011-12-05, 05:13 PM
Long Quote

I've run similar concepts on a couple of occasions. I used some rules loosely based on the WARMACHINE/HORDES system for strategic combat, and switched to D&D for tactical combat.

The adventure where I got this right (I think) was the culmination of a 2-year campaign, with the players supporting an invasion of a sidhe lord's stronghold in the Feywild. It went sort of like this:

-(Tactical) Players teleport in to a concealed teleport circle near the enemy teleport hub (a bunch of teleport circles for troop movement), kill the gatekeepers, and use speaking stones to let friendly troops arrive through the teleport hub.
-(Strategic) Players lead friendly troops to storm the gate of the city before the alarm can be raised. (They have a limited number of turns to get a certain number of their troops to the gate objective.)
-(Strategic) The next wave of friendly troops arrives at the gate; the players get to lead them in one of the assaults towards the inner walls. (There are other assault groups offscreen.) The players got bogged down and lost most of their troops when we played this, so they retreated.
-(Tactical) The players grab some scrolls to establish teleport circles and make a surgical strike through enemy lines. They have two encounters in the tight confines of the city before they find and capture a plaza to establish their own teleport hub.
-(Strategic) A company of marines (powerful, teleport-capable troops) comes through the teleport hub. The players decide to abandon the hub and push forwards, because they can see the villain starting a ritual in the citadel. They break through the poorly-defended inner gates with a lot of troops left, so they have the entire marine company open fire on the villain, who has been possessed by a dark god.
-(Tactical) After being injured by the volley, the villain takes flight to escape. The players teleport to a friendly airship which has been providing coordination for the assault, and they take it into the fight. The villain fights them atop and around the airship until they break the god's hold on him, at which point he loses the ability to fly and falls to earth.

Each of the fights was relatively short, about the length of a normal encounter, rather than a massive single encounter with a lot of stages. I used to do massive encounters like that, but I found that they tend to get boring partway through. The party doesn't get to rest, heal, recover powers, etc., and it becomes a slog as the party deals with yet another squad of soldiers that appears near where they're fighting. Better to mix it up a little.

I think this a brilliant way to handle many situations, though perhaps not all. The completion of the objectives has a definite bearing on the battle, but it may not account for all activities of the armies. There have been a lot of good ideas that topped my only experience with this, in which the DM put us each at the head of a division and we could uses spells and such to get bonuses on the rolls we made for the whole division. On the plus side, it went quite quickly, but it didn't have the grandeur we expect from a climax like that.

Bovine Colonel
2011-12-06, 12:01 PM
Has anyone thought of running it as a chess game, players vs DM?

Here's my idea. Essentially the PCs are the white queen; the BBEG/commander is the black king. Each chess square represents, say, a 100' square on the D&D grid. For the most part normal chess rules are followed. If the PCs try to take a piece an encounter ensues; difficulty and general composition corresponds to the piece. If a piece tries to take the PCs a similar encounter ensues, but of greater difficulty. If the PCs flee from an encounter or otherwise leave the square they're in, their turn ends immediately (whether it was their turn or not) and they must move the queen one square in the general direction the PCs left in. If this brings them to the same square as an enemy piece another encounter ensues. If at any point they run into an allied piece, they must roll 1d8 to determine a direction and move one square that way. Each chess turn is assumed to be, say, a minute in real time. If the PCs decide to spend a turn doing things that would normally be done on the DnD grid, such as buffing and casting ranged spells, disabling 75% of the creatures making up an encounter for at least one minute is equivalent to taking that piece; otherwise the piece is not affected. During such a turn none of the PCs' pieces move, and any other square they attempt to affect may respond in kind.