Recommendations. Larger Scale Combat.

[Metahuman1]

So, I'm running a nation building game. And next session the players are going to be having there first real larger scale combat. If your one of my players, stay out.










Anyway, for everyone else. The town they've been working on is several hundred people strong, and is being attacked by a ship showing a black flag with a skull and cross bones. (What they don't know yet but I intend to let them find out is that the ship is not *Actually* pirates, but Privateers form another colony that has a nation from across the sea as a sponsor. The idea being there giving people with enough money incentive to attack other peoples towns and ships so that they can hit them while maintaining plausible deniability and also not investing there own actual military resources into these little raids.)

I mention this for context.

So, the ship has about 80 people on board, 1 mage with a familiar that itself can cast spells (One player is playing a Dragonfire Adept and has a race that has flight, so this is a way to justify a low level areal dogfight while also giving the enemy's a bit of magical support but not an insurmountable amount of it.) And with 1 Troll on the crew as a big wall of muscle to give the enemy's a heavy whom can plausibly breach the gate so that it's a fight and not a siege situation.


With all that said, I pose a question to the playground.

Does anyone have any useful sources or info or advice for running combat when you've actually got numbers in play bigger then Party + small number of followers/cohorts/hirelings/summons, but smaller then truly massive armies capable of taking out entire kingdoms?

And for that matter, rules for scaling TOO truly massive armies capable of taking out entire kingdoms?


It's a nation building game, and I anticipate this will not be the last or the largest confrontation that happens as there nation grows and prospers and needs to expand and needs to also protect it's own boarders.

[Florian]

Check the Pathfinder PRD for the Ultimate Campaign rules. Downtime has rules for handling teams for tasks, while Kingdom and Mass Battle handle the bigger sizes. The rules are pretty much self-contained, so it doesn't really matter whether you use them for PF, 3E or 3.5E.

[Fizban]

How to run it depends on what you want out of it. There are plenty of ways you could condense or waive rolling for large groups of NPCs, up to an including just deciding beforehand how they stack up against each other so you can just tick down the number of troops remaining. On the other hand, sometimes people want mass combats specifically so that the PCs can apply their specific abilities and watch those tip the balance based on the exact changes they can make to their exact troops (buffs, AoEs, killing priority targets, etc), or because they have ideas of things they should be able to do without mechanics ("I wanna train the peasants to fight and make all these cool fortifications!"). In particular, there's just always gonna be a gap between keeping track of individuals, and glomming a bunch of people into an abstract unit which does not behave as a group of individuals.

So what do you want out of it?

(You could also check out the last thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?543863-A-quot-few-vs-many-quot-encounter) on the topic, where I gave some more specific suggestions and Grod linked another).

I've read the Warcraft setting's mass combat but it was missing some critical details- its based on Cry Havoc (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/678/Cry-Havoc?it=1) by Skip Williams, but I haven't got around to picking it up. The big feature I liked was the dual setup of combined units and tracking individuals, and an attack that was neither a flat hit/miss or an automatic swarm damage: a big table of number of hits based on roll vs AC. So each round the unit swings, gets a number of hits, and some number of the enemy drop. The main downsides were ridiculous unit spaces, but that's easy enough to fix or ignore, and a large emphasis on difficulty issuing orders, which is also easy to fix or ignore.

Edit: so yeah, finally taking a look at Pathfinder's mass combat rules. . . I'm not surprised. They're simultaneously incredibly abstract with little or no correlation to the underlying individual mechanics, and also incredibly swingy despite being so abstracted, worst of both worlds in my opinion. While there's some nod towards the law of averages, it's not actually averaged- everything seems to feed into one d20 roll+modifiers -static defense number. It's much more concerned with linking into their kingdom rules and purchasing adjustments to army stats. Even if you like them for kingdom v kingdom, they're not really appropriate for 80 people on a ship at all.

It's actually kindof remarkable how they manage to make me hate every single one of their extended systems, you'd think that at least one would manage to avoid it, but not yet.

[Florian]

L5R 4th also uses a rather elegant solution by adding "Heroic Opportunities" to the more general mass combat system, as a means to handle individual characters alongside a more abstracted rules system.

[Elkad]

For 20-100 identical creatures, I just do their rolls statistically.

So if 20 archers shoot at you, they "roll" every number from 1-20 on their attack roll.
The guy with the nat20 confirms his crit with an actual die.

If they shoot at 20 farmers guarding the wall, it works the same way. If it takes an average of 2 hits to drop a farmer, they only have 3 possible statuses. Healthy, wounded, dying. If the pirates need a 13 to hit, 8 farmers become wounded. Next round 8 farmers get hit again. About 3 should be guys that are already wounded, so I'll roll a d4+1 for number of deaths or something.