58 versus 122, The rules for mass combat

[evangaline]

Greetings,

As a beginning Dm i gave my players the freedom to do whatever they wanted, wich turned out to be a lot of fun. However they had gotten into something i don't know how to deal with right now.

After 5 sessions the players had hit level three. In the world they were playing some farming villages were raided by a horde of goblins. The players were 'not supposed' to go and squash the goblin horde yet, but after one of the players read the available services (Sevices are cheap for pc's) the lovely pc's chose to hire an army.

Prices:
-level one fighters cost 2 silver per day-
-level two fighters cost 6 silver per day-
The party hired 50 lv1 fighters and 5 level 2 fighters for twelve days.

My question:
How does dnd (it does not matter wich version, 3.5 is preferred though) handle Mass combat? The DM's guide does not handle it in the war section wich makes me wonder.

Any book or a homebrew system is allowed

[Zytil]

Heroes of Battle is pretty much "War: The Book." for D&D so you could pick that up and read through it.

[Zombimode]

Heroes of Battle is pretty much "War: The Book." for D&D so you could pick that up and read through it.

Sure, but it won't answer his question. There are no rules for mass combat in Heroes of Battle (or anywhere else for 3.5 for that matter).

Which is a shame, really.

[Aharon]

This homebrew based on the DMGII mob rules may be useful: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?129179-3-5-Making-large-groops-of-mooks-threatening-gt-improving-the-mob-template!

[VoxRationis]

Yeah, Heroes of Battle is really an extension of the "Stuff to do if you're in a war campaign" section in the back of Complete Warrior—it focuses on small-scale things the players are doing, rather than ways to make the whole battle runnable by the DM.
Therefore, you'll have to do some adjudication by yourself if you're to run a large battle.
First, assume that the only things that matter for your average humanoid soldiers are AC, hit points, attack bonus, and damage. Fortunately, you already know what the combatants on each side are, so you don't have to come up with good, easy-to-apply general rules so much as ideas of what happens for each side.
Determine how many hits an average combatant on one side needs to kill or incapacitate their average opponent, assuming average rolls for damage. (For added simplicity, you could assume that each soldier is killed or decides to flee after taking one hit, but that's probably too much.) Then determine the chance of a single attack hitting, based on attack bonus and AC. Dividing that percentage by the number of hits per kill gets you the average number of kills per attack for a given kind of soldier, which should be some small fraction, probably around .1 or so. Then, based on the tactical situation at any point, you can determine, based on how many individuals are in a position to attack, the number of kills they will get in one round. If people have ways to alter their stats, like through Combat Expertise or alternate weapons, you should calculate that separately.
You may have noticed this is a lot of math. Well, that's a problem, but there's not much I can do about that, except to tell you that if you don't want in-depth calculation, you'll just have to fudge it based on the perceived quality of the soldiers on each side.

[nyjastul69]

IIRC, mass combat was excluded from the DMG because the Chainmail game was going to cover that. Unfortunately Chainmail ended up being a skirmish game so D&D was left without a mass combat system. The official rules for mass combat in 3.5 can be found in the Miniatures Handbook (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatures_Handbook).

Mal havoc Press, Monte Cook's d20 imprint, released Cry Havoc (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1588460231?pc_redir=1397727414&robot_redir=1) by Skip Williams that also has mass combat rules.

[Kamin_Majere]

Yeah large combats suck dealing with usually.

I tend to treat "units" as individuals

So in your situation you could have 10 units of 5 or 5 units of 10 (according to how you make the goblins attack)
Then just add the units stats together and treat them as creatures.

So say a unit of 10 fighters attacks a unit of 10 goblins:
The unit of fighters has 100HP (adjust for CON score) 10 attacks, has a +1 to hit (adjust for STR and any generic feat you want to give them) and deals 1d8 damage per attack (again adjust for STR and feats)

That way you can have big blobs of fighters hitting the blobs of goblins and then use the level 2 guys as a commando unit and still have the players run around doing their own things to sway the tide of battle but you arent making 180 different actions and taking the better part of a week doing this one combat. It still takes a while but it makes the players feel more involved than the more abstract ways. And you can set up situations where the players choices can influence the battle... Does the team melee guy keep killing gobos making himself feel powerful or does he run over and help the blob of fighters that are being overrun by goblins to let them help out later in the battle

[Zweisteine]

Soem combination of rules from outside sources and Heroes of Battle might do well.

The real problem here is that D&D was not built to handle large-scale battles. It is a descendant of the bigger war games, made to focus on smaller groups of characters rather than entire armies. The best I would recommend is simply running it as it makes sense, or however best serves the plot.

Note: The DM should control the armies' actions, with exactly one exception: if the player is directly mind-controlling the entire army. Otherwise, the most the PCs can do is give orders and hope it works out well. They can work out plans with the armies ahead of time, and special commands, etc, but they can not control the armies' exact movements, ever. This also makes it easier for the DM to keep track of.

If you're just having the PC's move through a large battle, and they are above level 5, you might try this:
Have each soldier take up a square, and drop them rather densely throughout the battlefield. They remain stationary, and do not die (actually, they do, but a new soldier fill the space quickly enough that it's not noticeable). If the PCs want to clear a space, they have to hit a set AC (see table below for examples), and damage, at which point the soldier will step aside from the scary opponent. To kill them, deal a set amount of damage to one soldier. Moving any distance provokes a single attack of opportunity at an attack bonus of +1 per 5 feet moved, which deals 1d6 damage, +1 damage for each five feet moved.


Soldier type
AC
HP


Generic (easy to deal with)
10
1


Peasant conscript
13
3


City guards
14
6


Generic Soldiers/militia
15
9


Career soldiers/mercenaries
16
12


Knights
17
15


Guard in shield wall
18*
6

This is a hidden message. To whoever finds it: You're pretty cool.

*Actually AC 14, and cover from the tower shield
Those stats are actually these (with some adjustments):
Conscript: Commoner 1 with padded leather and a heavy wooden shield
Guard: Warrior 1 with a chain shirt and 12 constitution
Militia: Warrior 2 with studded leather and a heavy shield
Mercenary: Warrior 2 with a chain shirt and a heavy shield (or chainmail and a light shield) and 12 consitution
Knight: Warrior 3 with breastplate and a heavy shield and 12 consitution
Shield wall: Warrior 1 with a chain shirt and a tower shield and 12 consitution

Keep in mind that that is only an example, and I have never tested it, having thought it up only just now. This is especially true of those soldier stats in the table.


Alternatively, stat up a battlefield as a swarm. Moving through it does damage (blocked by either a save or AC), and it's hard to kill. One book (Cityscape, I think) provides stats for an armed mob. Adjust that, and you might get what you need.