Point costs of characters for using 3.5 rules as-is in a wargame?

[gomipile]

If I wanted to do some small-mid scale wargaming using the 3.5 rules more or less as-is, how would you recommend assigning a point cost to each character so that equal point cost armies are more or less fairly matched?

I suppose the old "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" joke might be a good place to start, but if fighters cost 1 point per level and wizards cost level^2 points, what should tier 3 classes like bards and Tome of Battle classes cost?

What about NPC creatures that have a CR associated with them?

Is this even feasible? I assume it's been tried before, but I don't know if it was with any success.

[nedz]

You could check out the Miniatures Handbook — it's designed for exactly this.

If you are running at lowish level then tiers are less important. Tiers are only rated between levels 5-15. The break with casters generally comes with 4th level spells — so levels 1-6 and you should be fine. Build is more important than class anyway.

[Gemini476]

What I recommend is for you to build pre-gen characters and otherwise limit the available options. Not just because something like Clone is rather useless in battle, but also because novaing is a very real possibility. Why do you need to care about how many dozens of spell slots you will only use maybe a dozen of them to begin with?

Also you need to limit or remove most of the more ambiguous up-to-the-DM spells like Shape Stone or Silent Image.

For NPCs I'd probably price them by CR to begin with, at least. And limit the available options, of course. Did you know that most of the Elder Evils are hanging around CR 20?

But yeah, the big thing is to not have infinite options. Don't give players the ability to build characters with Class X and Race Y and Feat Z from every single book in existence - get some standard "heroes" for each class as well as some more mookish examples. That way you don't need to worry as much about it being Ubercharger vs. Mailman and can instead make it Fireball Wizard vs. TWF Ranger.

It's a really big project, though.

[gomipile]

You could check out the Miniatures Handbook — it's designed for exactly this.



I read the "Deriving costs" section of the Miniatures Handbook, and it sidesteps the question I asked rather than answering it head on(at least with regards to PCs.)

I'd prefer to see some concrete suggestions on point costs. I'd especially like to see suggestions that people have tried out in actual tabletop skirmishes, with commentary on what worked well, what didn't, etc.