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View Full Version : Good systems to run a battle campaign in?



Heliomance
2013-04-29, 03:47 AM
I'm thinking about running a campaign (based off Jim Butcher's Codex Alera, for those who have read it) where the PCs are all officers in an army. I'm really not sure how to go about running it, though. D&D's mass battle rules are quite terrible, it's not designed for it at all. Friends have suggested Legend of the Five Rings or Only War, but those are both very setting-specific, and I want to run it in a D&D-esque fantasy world.

I'd also like it to be a setting where battlefield magic is a thing. D&D magic is very useful and powerful, but except for the very highest level stuff, it's too small scale to make a meaningful difference in a full-scale battlefield, unless you're fielding huge numbers of casters. I'd like a way for magic to give noticeable effects that can substantially affect a full-scale battle - maybe multi-caster rituals or something, but a mechanic that lets you use casters as more than just independent crack troops that go off by themselves and infiltrate enemy HQ or something, which is the usual role of PCs in a battle.

BWR
2013-04-29, 04:22 AM
L5R mass battle is a lousy system. At least the one presented in the core books. You might want to look up "Way of the Daimyo" (out of print, I'm afraid) which has a much better system. Still not great, but pretty good for those who want to build characters who are leaders of large groups of warriors and have specific rules for what you can and cannot do.
It's also dual-stat R&K and d20, so works equally well (or poorly, depending on your taste) for both systems.

If you want to stick to d20, AEG also produced a couple of d20 books on the subject, specifically "War" and "Empire". Empire has mass battle rules which are basically the combat rules you know and love with a few modifications to assume that big groups of creatures basically fight like individuals of said creatures. War has fewer mass battle rules but more on battle magic and tactics and strategies that take D&D magic/creatures into account. Also, several hints on campaigns and adventures for such characters.

Lastly, Mongoose publishing had "Encyclopedia Arcane: Battle Magic" which has an alternate class which is basically the Warmage's granddaddy, and is specifically designed to to max damage to huge amounts of targets at a time.

For those interested in more rolling and less tactics, there's the old Warmachine rules from earlier editions of D&D. It's basically a system to allow you to calculate the relative strengths of the two sides, taking into account numbers, creature types, magic, gear, etc. and rolling to see how well you do based on that.

Heliomance
2013-04-29, 04:30 AM
I'd like to keep a tactical side very involved. At the same time, I don't want the PCs to be too constrained in what they can do - I'd like a system that allows them to be thoroughly imaginative with how they apply the resources they have available, and rewards creative thinking.

Rhynn
2013-04-29, 04:34 AM
If you like d20... the fairly awesome Conan d20, with Mongoose Mass Combat (www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/conanmasscombat.pdf) (PDF link) and maybe the Free Companies supplement (but don't use the abstract battle rules, just use the supplemental material), or fit the d20 Open Mass Combat System (www.scribd.com/doc/7851118/d20-Open-Mass-Combat-System-) (Scribd link) to your game of choice.

Any old (pre 3E) edition of D&D (or the retroclones). Battlesystem (1E, never 2E!) works for any of them, and is simple and pretty great. It will require some kind of counters, though, but nothing more complicated or unusual than regular 3E combat expects (in fact, you can get by with less, IMO - you don't need a grid, for one thing). Also, BECMI/Cyclopedia has mass combat rules, IIRC two different systems you can choose from.

And you can bet your butt basic magic is a big deal in Battlesystem. A single fireball will wipe out multiple counters (sub-units of usually 10 men), and can demolish multiple counters from a unit in close order. More tightly targeted spells can have a huge effect by taking out large monsters. (Even a young adult red dragon can destroy an entire unit in one turn.)

The Riddle of Steel has good, slightly abstract mass combat rules that are concerned with 1. fairly simple battle resolution and 2. what the PCs get up to during the battle. It's actually rather like L5R and GURPS's systems. TROS also has the best personal hand-to-hand combat system there is (for anything before the 19th century, basically, whether medieval knights, Greek hoplites, late 17th century pirates, musketeers, or Japanese samurai whether Sengoku or Edo).

Speaking of GURPS, GURPS 3e had mass combat rules in Compendium 2, and GURPS 4e has a big mass combat supplement (called ... Mass Combat!).

If you like RuneQuest, Mongoose's RuneQuest (the somewhat inferior first edition) had mass combat rules in Legendary Heroes. (I actually think they may have partly been based on Sandy Petersen's Warhamster from one of the Tales of the Reaching Moon zines.) They weren't actually very good, but you could probably make them into something good. Meh.

If you're into (relatively hard) scifi and big mechs, there's MechWarrior (the RPG) and BattleTech (the miniature wargame), which are naturally meant to go together. That's a lot of rules to learn for one campaign, though.

HârnMaster, aside from having one of the best settings ever (and a set of rules far less intimidating than it's reputation - the 3E combat rules, for instance, are some of the shortest and most succinctly functional I know), has a related, easily integrated set of skirmish rules (for units of say 20 on each side, a pretty good skirmish/small battle scale for the setting of Hârn) called BloodLust. I bought mine off the 'net just a year or two ago as a hard copy.

The Lord of the Rings RPG from Decipher has pretty decent battle rules, only a little abstract (and with no need for battlemats or minis; a "battle map" is circles on a piece of paper connected by lines), with good integration of PC abilities.

I'm pretty sure Pendragon has some kind of siege and battle rules, but I really don't remember the specifics...

... my knowledge is wearing pretty thin now... there's a Finnish RPG called Praedor with battle rules (actually very similar to the TROS and GURPS rules), but that's not much use if you don't speak Finnish...


An Aside On Battle Magic
Battle magic is all about spell choices and application. R. E. Howard's awesome Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon, gives some of the best examples: you use magic to win battles by casting a single spell at the right time. Use earthquake to collapse a narrow pass on your enemies. Send a demon to disable the enemy commander. Use control weather or whatever to flood a river to trap the enemy army. And so on. Many basic D&D spells have great applications in war when you think about them, often not directly. I'd never waste my spellcasters as "crack troops" - I'd use them for battlefield control (literally!) and for wiping out swathes of troops with area effect spells.

Kiero
2013-04-29, 05:50 AM
Adventurer, Conqueror, King (a "second generation retroclone" of Expert D&D) has it's own mass combat system called Domains at War. It can be used standalone (though reading it persuaded me to use ACKS in its entirety for my historical game) and a simple version is available free. Being D&D-based, its easy to plug into D20 systems, and already accounts for magic.

Rhynn
2013-04-29, 06:26 AM
Is Domains at War actually out yet, or is it in playtest currently? Just downloaded the free Starter Edition for myself...

Kiero
2013-04-29, 06:58 AM
Is Domains at War actually out yet, or is it in playtest currently? Just downloaded the free Starter Edition for myself...

Still in playtest; but if you donate to the Kickstarter, you get to see the current full draft of the rules.

Tavis
2013-04-29, 12:18 PM
Domains at War has been thoroughly playtested - drafts have been in the hands of Adventurer Conqueror King backers since 2011, and after using it to do everything from epic-scale historical battles to small engagements between adventurers & mercenaries vs. beastman outposts, the rules are pretty solid. The feedback we're getting from backers at the Autarch forums (http://shop.gamesalute.com/collections/autarch/) is helping make sure the system is clearly presented, but I think all the system-level revisions are behind us now.

Heliomance, the things you're talking about were definitely design goals for D@W. Here's how we approached 'em:

- a campaign (based off Jim Butcher's Codex Alera, for those who have read it) where the PCs are all officers in an army.

D@W has two books, Campaigns and Battles. Campaigns focuses on getting players involved with the grand scale of military action, like raising an army (negotiating with mercenary companies to hire troops, dealing with the unrest of peasants whose men have been conscripted into the militia, trading political favors to get vassals and lieges to issue a call to arms), manuevering it into battle (using spells, stealth, and interrogation to gain information on the enemy's position and avoid them doing the same so they can be lured into an ambush), and dealing with the consequences (do you leave a garrison to capture conquered territory or raze it to pay your mercenaries and boost your troops' morale with loot?). Campaigns uses an abstract resolution system that's very quick to dice out, and is great for battles and sieges that happen off-screen or are not significant enough to focus on (perhaps because the PCs have already infiltrated enemy HQ and wiped out the leaders, so the actual engagement is just a mopping-up action).

Battles lets player characters command units of troops in a tactical wargame that's fast-playing and fun in its own right. There's a lot of emphasis on the role of individual leaders, so that each player in the group is engaged and have to work together to coordinate their troops and achieve the overall objectives. One of the key decisions is when it makes sense to keep your PC attached to their units so that they give these leadership bonuses vs. when you need to form up as a party to take out a powerful enemy in head-to-head combat on the roleplaying scale. In the last game I played with the designer, our side lost because we focused too much on commanding our troops and let his dragon-riding wizard pick us off one by one.

Both the Campaigns and Battles systems use basic concepts like hit points and armor class, so that they're useful for any D&D-legacy game, and pay close attention to extrapolating the math so that you can be confident that the outcome of playing out a battle at the Domains at War scale resembles what you'd get if you did it at roleplaying scale with a bucket of d20. The default is units of 120 foot, 60 cavalry, or 30 giants, but it's easy to scale that up or down for epic battles or skirmishes.

a setting where battlefield magic is a thing. D&D magic is very useful and powerful... I'd like a way for magic to give noticeable effects that can substantially affect a full-scale battle

Spells and magic items are a big deal in Domains at War. In the Campaigns system they're handled through heroic forays, where the characters (or enemy casters) choose to enter the fray directly, which sets up a roleplaying-scale combat. The number of foes they face depends on how many points of battle rating they stake on the foray. 0.5 is "leading from the front", 2 is "cutting a swath of glory", 3 is "seeking glorious death!" In the game I ran at Gen Con last year the players' troops had been rolling so badly that the PCs decided this last option was their only hope; some found the death they were seeking, others managed to flee the battlefield invisibly, and the switch to individual scale as a last ditch effort made the whole thing more memorable.

In Battles, in addition to heroes engaging the foe or enemy heroes, there are rules for magic affecting units directly. Even first-level spells like burning hands or bless can provide a big advantage; we did a lot of calculations to figure out what percentage of a unit's troops could be caught in the area of effect of various spells and how that would affect its overall fighting capability. The spells covered are drawn from the Adventurer Conqueror King System, which is based on TSR-era D&D where mid-level spells like control weather or stinking cloud can have long-lasting effects that really reshape the battlefield.

If you're playing D@W with a system that's further from those roots, it'd be easy to treat these more potent versions as rituals or magic items. That'd actually create some really cool interactions with the Campaigns system. The casting time of rituals might mean you could use them only in an engagement you were prepared for, so there'd be a big benefit in catching a sorcerous army by surprise, and if there was a substantial material component cost to these rituals or magic items it'd make maintaining lines of supply vital for the casters as well as the troops.

Here's the Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/domains-at-war); to download the manuscripts of Battles and Campaigns, look for the first backer-only update for links.