How to run large scale conflicts.

[frogglesmash]

I want to run a scenario where my players are fighting as part of a large army against another large army. In this scenario I want focus on the players themselves and the carnage all around them, and have the rest of the battle act as a backdrop. Have any of you tried, or thought of trying something like this, and if so, how did you/would you have run it.

[Venger]

Heroes of battle has a lot of good rules for things like this. It gets into a lot of detail about it. chapter 4 in particular is very helpful

[flappeercraft]

I have not done something like this before but what I would do is for the most part have the army vs army fight as background, but add powerful creatures or NPCs to the battle which the PCs have to kill to allow their side to gain an advantage and win. Of course to give it the feel of an army vs army fight I would probably set up a time on how much time they have until the battle is over and they can change things by killing enemies, delaying them, etc that could elongate or shorten the battle. Also I would add some basic soldiers attacking them in medium sized groups as a way to drain their resources and delay them, not necesarily to kill them but they will if they have the chance.

[Mystral]

I want to run a scenario where my players are fighting as part of a large army against another large army. In this scenario I want focus on the players themselves and the carnage all around them, and have the rest of the battle act as a backdrop. Have any of you tried, or thought of trying something like this, and if so, how did you/would you have run it.

Such a thing is generally quite problematic. You don't want to really simulate a battle on the tabletop, or you'll spend 90% of the time playing against yourself, rolling dice to hit for one soldier whacking another with a longsword.

You can have your PCs become special force commandos and do work behind enemy lines or in other places. The book of battle reccomends this, but it does't sound like what you're looking for. If you PCs are of high enough level, you can just use most enemy soldiers as a backdrop and more or less as terrain, and you can say that they don't directly attack the player characters because the obvious gap of power is too big and they're scared. Have the friendly and enemy formations become dangerous terrain instead of real npcs, and only play out those NPCs that can challenge the PCs.

[Eldariel]

You should scroll past the slaughterfest and just guesstimate the results lest you end up with this (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1098) issue. It's more engaging if the PCs don't play rank and file but rather spec ops, blocking breaches, holding near-lost positions, destroying enemy special units (dragons, giants, squad leaders, spellcasters, the like), rallying allied troops, etc. Spellcasters are naturally able to contribute more than warrior types - a single Cloudkill can do more damage than any number of attacks from a warrior not built for annihilating masses (of course, someone with Great Cleave can annihilate enemies pretty fast).

If you wish to actually use the rank-and-file and include PCs just hacking away at the front of the enemy, use some variety of some communal template for the enemy formations and only have the PCs roll - or just average the results since with hundreds of rolls that's what you'll end up with. If PCs fight enemy rank and file outside allied formations, that gets a lot more interesting though as the enemies are free to use Aid Another and combat maneuvers to bring the players down and dogpile them should they reach melee; in general, PCs shine more in desperate defense and some extreme situations than at the front of a unit even though they can certainly do the work of 100 men-at-arms in the front as well.

In general though, you can fastforward most of the frontline fighting (a fight can last hours of game-time; you can't highlight every 6 second instant reasonably) and just record average hits and enemy deaths and see how the fight progresses, focusing more on the morale/formation aspects and leadership than the individual units. There are too many units for rolling non-communally to be practical.


In short:
- Abstract the repetitive rolling away.
- Don't give every 6 second span over a long conflict screentime.
- Focus on unit-level effects (morale, formation, etc.) and special characters, not individual soldier-level considerations.
- Make sure both sides are doing their best to get an advantage and create circumstances - encourage the PCs to participate in those crucial, battle-shaping encounters and on the other, to figure out how to best make their presence felt.

[ksbsnowowl]

Heroes of Battle discusses this somewhat, as does the adventure The Red Hand of Doom, which employs it. The PC's are basically a strike force that put out "fires" that erupt during the battle (engaging enemy special forces sent to assassinate your side's leadership, taking out the big bad dragon that starts burning down the town, and all the low-level warriors on the city walls, that sort of thing).

I also ran an adaptation of RHoD in a Viking-themed game which used a tanarukk army with demon support, rather than a hobgoblin army with dragon support. It worked quite well.

If you look around for the Red Hand of Doom suggestion thread, there is a Crisis Points aspect created by a poster named Glyphstone. I adapted that for my Viking game's take on RHoD, and it worked out fairly well.

I'll try to hunt down a link to that crisis points post.

Edit: Found it (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=13217996&postcount=70)


Narrative break this time, to explain the next section. As written in the module, the party is expected to run a gauntlet of multiple encounters - venturing out to kill giants besieging the wall with rocks, then stopping Abiothrax's rampage over the town's flammable buildings, then the Streets of Blood gauntlet. But that's boring, so I modified it heavily to make this part pass a bit more quickly and also give the party a sense of accomplishment for their work over the game so far that was more tangible than Victory points.

There would be four 'crisis points', as designated in my notes, during the narration of the Horde's initial attack - key attempts to breach the city or cause havoc amongst the defenders. At each point, the party could assign one of the four groups of allies they'd collected to deal with the problem, if they didn't want to go by themselves. Every ally was effective against two of the problems, and ineffective against two - if they picked the wrong matchup, Streets of Blood would be a little bit harder.

The Hellknights would be effective against ground-based targets, and useless against airborne enemies.
The Giants would be best-used against big targets, since they had a limited supply of tree-trunk javelins.
The Elves would be most useful against large numbers of smaller enemies, coordination and formation making up for the smaller damage of their projectiles.
The Silver Dragon would be best-used where his airborne mobility would have the most effect.

His table seems to have gotten jacked up in a boards coding change, so here it is, reproduced as it was originally intended:




Hellknights
Twisttusk Giants
Tiri Kitor Elves
Silver Dragon
Loss Results


Skeletons
Win
Loss
Win
Loss
Pre-Wave Cannon Fodder


Hill Giants
Win
Win
Loss
Loss
Random boulders falling on defenders


Vultures
Loss
Loss
Win
Win
Fewer friendly mooks


Abiothrax
Loss
Win
Loss
Win
No barricade




When I ran it, the PC's did generally go out and do the module-intended fights for the PC's, but many of those things were the PC's just going to deal with ONE group of boulder-throwing giants, while other forces dealt with other giant units, etc. I incorporated the "crisis points" aspect so the PC's had some hand in influencing the outcomes of the other skirmishes. And the results (win vs loss) did influence a "hold the breach" type encounter (which is basically what Streets of Blood is in the RHoD module) where the PC's are fighting beside NPC allies as waves of bad guys come at them.

[rel]

modify the base rules using your tabletop wargame rules of choice.

replace the grid with tape measures.

Group similar combatants into units and give them all the same generic stat block

use group movement, combined hit points, generic attacks and morale.

Ignore any fiddly rules or modifiers and keep things as simple as possible.

[Mendicant]

I second taking a look at Heroes of Battle, it's built on precisely this premise and it works pretty well.

Depending on your PC's level and how much you want them to interact with the soldiers swarming around them, something like this (https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Mob_(3.5e_Template)) or if you want to get a bit more involved this (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=143.0) will let you field a couple squads of mooks without needing to manage a bajillion attacks. At high enough levels even mobs don't really let the rank-and-file present a threat, and if you still want them to interact with your players I'd just abstract them act as difficult terrain or piles of temporary hitpoints for the real opposition.

[Vogie]

Stealing an idea from 4e & 5e, you could set up skill challenges in between actual combat. I was introduced to these by listening to the Drunks & Dragons podcast.

If you're unfamiliar, you set a goal (for example, 10 successes before 5 failures) and a DC, and then the players have to beat that without replicating their skill checks. This abstracts the underlying battle with Roleplay by the PCs on a pass/fail basis.

You treat the scene almost like it's a puzzle prior to a boss fight, from a video game. Running a scene with Alice, Bob, & Charlie in a large scale battle may look like this:

Everyone rolls initiative.
A: Rolls Perception to see if there are any weaknesses in the enemy line (Pass!)
B: Rolls Strength to smash the standard-bearer and rip up the enemy standard (Pass!)
C: Rolls Heal to help out the people on the front line (Fail)
DM: You see there is some sort of siege weapon on the other side that is turning the tide against you
A: Rolls an Arcana to destroy the siege weapon with a fireball, collapsing on the enemy soldiers around it (Pass!)
B: Rolls Intimidate to make the enemy conscripts back down (Fail)
C: Rolls Knowledge (History) to identify which of the opposing houses is most likely to change sides if they feel the battle isn't going their way (Pass!)
DM: You've identified that House Weston is a large part of the opposing army, but they have little to lose land-wise if this battle would turn against them.
... and so on and so forth. If you have an action-point or similar system in place, you can have the PCs use them as rerolls as well.

That way the players can feel like they're having an impact on the battle without worrying about the statting out of a bunch of soldiers and doing a bunch of repetitive rolling against yourself, or having them worrying about which abilities they have available. When they get to a group of statted-out mooks you actually do want them to fight, then fight them.