War Games

[Asmotherion]

My group has asked me to play a war game. No, not the kind were the party will take care of a small portion of the opposing army, or one they will have a special mission (or set of missions) to acomplish. They want an actual war game, a strategy game if you wish, where they will control more than one unit. I've suggested the game with the underdark war and read the variant rules on combat, but that doesn't cut it.

I've spoke with them, and what they want is something more similar to Warcraft 3 (not the dota variant), where they will be able to take preciese controll of all their units and have individual fights. This seems a bit too far-fetched to me, and a variation I've thought about is to give 5 heroes each to control, who are some sort of generals. They do have to give orders, but, unless a unit is a spy, their orders will be caried to the letter.

So, here I am, asking from any other DM who has experiance in war games any tips, oppinions etc. Preferably answear only if you have actually monitored as a DM (or at least played) a war game before.

PS: The only experiance I have with War games was a one session game I DMed where there were 3 necromancers, each controlling their individual army of undead. The game went smoothly, mostly because the undead were always obedient to their Necromancer, and we used a non-roll variation (take 10 for attack rolls, average damage)

[Mandragola]

If you're looking for an actual war game, as opposed to trying to make dnd into one, then there are a lot of options out there.

Games Workshop are probably the big guys here, and the one I'm most familiar with. In the last year or so they have switched strategy, and now give away their rules for free for their fantasy game - called Age of Sigmar. The rules for this are really simple and can be downloaded here: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Warhammer-Age-of-Sigmar-Rules.

You've got the 4-page core rules there, plus "warscrolls" for all the different races in warhammer. Luckily (if not entirely coincidentally!) these correspond to the standard fantasy tropes of humans, dwarves, elves, orcs and so on. No beholders, hobgoblins etc though - for these you'll have to either make something up or use the rules for something else. Or just use orks.

They sell really good models, though not for free! And recently they've brought out a book called the general's companion, which gives points values to units. This allows you to pick an army essentially in a similar way to buying stats for your character in dnd, so you can have fair(ish) games.

There was an awful lot of hatred for AoS when it first game out a year or so ago, from fans of the system it replaced. It isn't too bad in and of itself though, and could be what you're looking for.

[Asmotherion]

If you're looking for an actual war game, as opposed to trying to make dnd into one, then there are a lot of options out there.

Games Workshop are probably the big guys here, and the one I'm most familiar with. In the last year or so they have switched strategy, and now give away their rules for free for their fantasy game - called Age of Sigmar. The rules for this are really simple and can be downloaded here: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Warhammer-Age-of-Sigmar-Rules.

You've got the 4-page core rules there, plus "warscrolls" for all the different races in warhammer. Luckily (if not entirely coincidentally!) these correspond to the standard fantasy tropes of humans, dwarves, elves, orcs and so on. No beholders, hobgoblins etc though - for these you'll have to either make something up or use the rules for something else. Or just use orks.

They sell really good models, though not for free! And recently they've brought out a book called the general's companion, which gives points values to units. This allows you to pick an army essentially in a similar way to buying stats for your character in dnd, so you can have fair(ish) games.

There was an awful lot of hatred for AoS when it first game out a year or so ago, from fans of the system it replaced. It isn't too bad in and of itself though, and could be what you're looking for.
Thank you for your feedback, though I'm more interested in a D&D 5e based game.
The basic consept so far is giving a certain Level-Buy to the players, where they will distribute the levels beteen their generals, and then a CR-Buy for the units. Or instead of the level-buy, they could instead have set levels for 5 characters. About the CR-Buy, I am quite fond of it, so if a played chooses to have less units of Higher CR it would be their choice.

[Sianthus]

Like what Mandragola has said, there are proper wargames out there with rules that suit that sort of play. If your players insist for it to be based on 5e, you're gonna need to come up with a modified turn system, as them individually controlling their units would simply take forever, It's long enough with 6 PCs in vanilla 5e. What i can suggest is what my DM has been using for larger battles, whereby instead of splitting into turns, battle is split into rounds. Each player rolls initiative for every one of their characters, and you for your enemy units as per normal. Then the players decide their actions all at once for the round, and again for you as well. Then let the round play out by initiative. It cut shorts on battle time significantly.

Also I would say having 5 generals is a little much. WC3 had a max of 4, and that was a proper RTS engine. Maybee restrict it to 2-3, or even 1, since that's how Warcraft traditionally was anw, and give them more CR buy for the units, which btw, is a great idea on your part.

In conclusion, try and work out how combat works in this ruleset first. Talk with your players, get them to help instead of just letting them say they want this or that. No doubt, it's gonna be difficult as you're shoehorning a wargame system into a roleplaying one. All the best!

[Assenzio]

Have a look at Cry Havoc manual, from Malhavoc press.

I used it in a Midnight 2E campaign, but I think you can easily adapt to 5e.
It's not all gold and it's difficult to grasp, but it sure is a solid approach to play a large scale war.

Have a look!

[Mandragola]

I don’t think you could straightforwardly use dnd as the basis for a war game using soldiers based on PCs. It’s a different brief for the games designers. Dnd characters and monsters have far more complex rules than those in most wargames, precisely because it’s a pain to keep track of loads of models with complex rules. It also takes a long time to play a game.

Part of the problem would be that crowd control abilities would be far more powerful than they ought to be. It would also be incredibly complex. And to be clear, a proper war game will be better designed and more fun than one based on dnd.

But you could do it using npc soldiers with pre-determined stats, and you could have them fight mosters. If a unit attacks another unit, and everyone has the same +to hit and AC, then it’s not really all that hard to roll 10 D20s, see which ones hit or miss, and go from there.

Recording damage is more complicated and probably needs some work. The simplest option would be to take a guy off every
time the unit took the hp of each guy (so if the soldiers have 11hp each and the unit takes 24hp, take 2 off). You could either note down the remaining hp or just scrub anything that didn’t cause whole numbers of troops to be removed – though that wouldn’t work for big stuff like giants where you had one model with loads of hp. It would mean a giant could potentially remove several soldiers with one swing of its club, but that seems fine really.

Healing might be a bit odd too. If you put 30hp of healing into that unit, what happens? Do you put two guys back? I guess you could say that they were wounded and KOd rather than killed and are now back on their feet.

Initiative shouldn’t really be an issue. Roll initiative for units, not individual soldiers.

Most proper wargames have a system for the morale of soldiers, who will tend to run away sometimes if they see their friends getting splatted by a giant. So I guess you could do something based on a wisdom save, and bolstering this might be one of the things that generals could do.

Hope this helps. Just to reiterate though, there are tons of great wargames out there. Many of them (including AoS) feature heroic characters as well as units, just like warcraft 3. And they do buff the units around them, through inspiring them or casting spells on them. As someone who's been playing wargames for about 25 years now, I'd say you should do that rather than trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

And AoS is free. What do you have to lose by having a read and seeing what you think?

[CaptainSarathai]

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/unearthed-arcana-when-armies-clash

Boom.
This is essentially Warhammer or Kings of War, for 5e. I have run this, and considering that it's UA material, it's incredibly easy to run and gives exactly the feel you're looking for.

It plays pretty quick too, to the extent that my friend and I have had a few "for funsies" games as free-standing battles not tied to a D&D campaign. For the record, that should mean a lot: most of my group are Warhammer Fantasy veterans, and now play Kings of War amid a host of other wargames.

The only major change that we made was that we took it "off-grid," since we're used to free-form games like Warhammer. We just changed 1 square into 1" and it worked perfectly fine. Better, actually, because we could use our Warhammer terrain and 6'x4' tables for truly massive battles.
We have also tried running regular encounters off-grid in a similar method, but found that the tape measuring just slowed things down when you're dealing with so few miniatures.

One thing I will say: you will either need several miniatures, or you will need to print several tokens.