Huge Scale Battles.

[Yeril]

Does anyone know a good mechanic for dealing with large scale battles, Varying from a hundred aside to leigons in the 10,000's, accomidating for Mundane squads of commoners with leather and spears to Elite leigons of 300'eqe fighters and their impact on eachother.

Im sure 30 warriors vs 30 warriors, or the like is kinda simple, but what do you do when you bring in say... 30 warriors lead by a 6th level marshall, as a squad of archers lay a volly on the enemy, Ferocius orcs mounted on Dire wolves rip into our flank, luckily A small leigon of our Warmagi are unleashing their array of Magic missiles into the fray, not mentioning the Gnome seige weapons that have just been deployed ready to launch..

Any one?

[Afraidofsharpie]

Looked at Heroes of Battle?

Some of my suggestions,

1) Use morale effects along with damage dealt over an area. The archers and siege should be treated as area effect spells, with a reflex save on both cases and if the soldiers have shields then a general attack against their AC. The Magic Missiles would have to be a targeted bunch as, iirc, they can't be fired with no target.

2) Commoners are militia at best ill prepared skirmishers at worst, they're there to kill other commoners and be cannon fodder.

3) If you are using 10,000's of troops 30 is too small a number, if the combat is based off of Middle ages style warfare then the troops would travel in larger blocks.

4) If you wish to speed up the fight roll a single attack for an entire block of troops to speed up the process.

[bosssmiley]

Does anyone know a good mechanic for dealing with large scale battles?

DM fiat is a favourite here. Nothing like handwaving the unimportant (ie: non-PC-related) stuff to make a battle go more quickly.

Failing that check books like "Power of Faerun" and that FR war sourcebook (the name escapes me atm).
For a homebrew take on it try the mass battle system from Keith & Frank Trollman's "Book of War" (on the WOTC forums).

Failing that just say that each square in a D&D Minis skirmish now represents 100' (reduce spell and missile ranges accordingly) and that each figure/group in play represents a *unit* of such creatures.

[Raolin_Fenix]

Option One: average it out. Figure out how much damage your average kobold would deal on an average hit, multiply by the average fraction of times the kobold will hit a footman (one time in four? mutliply by one-fourth, or divide by four), multiply by the number of kobolds attacking. Then divide that by the average HP of the defending footmen, and kill off that many guards by DM fiat. It seems complicated, but it saves a lot of time just to be able to knock out a given number of people per round without bothering with rolls.

Option two: scale it up. Treat each square as fifty feet instead of just five, and play entire companies as if they were single characters, using the same rules. What used to be a five-foot step is now a fifty-foot regrouping. A withdraw-action is now a full retreat. A charge is still a charge. Grappling is surrounding the enemy, preventing them from retreating, and engaging them in hand-to-hand. Bull-rushing is a sudden, heavy assault, forcing the enemy to retreat where you want them to. Disarming is maybe killing their commander, while picking up their weapon is a new commander stepping up from the ranks. All of them are archers, or all of them are meleeists, and all of them swap weapons as one. "This company is now obliterated, but the company that killed them off are reduced to a fraction of their HP." That kind of thing. This is my favorite.

[Hannes]

One word. Warhammer.

Srsly, go play Warhammer for large-scale battles :smallbiggrin:

[Closet_Skeleton]

I just play warhammer.

[Lord Zentei]

One word. Warhammer.

Srsly, go play Warhammer for large-scale battles :smallbiggrin:

Or better yet, Warmaster, since it covers the even-larger scale battles better, and is simpler rules-wise and more strategy-oriented (as opposed to powerful hero oriented).

That way, the Warmaster game can cover the minions fighting each other and you can handwave the effects of PC action as determined by d20, to be used in conjunction...


Caveat: it's rather abstract, as is necessary for such a large scale.

[Zim]

Usually, this falls outside of the scope of a typical D&D game. A few opposed rolls, modified by circumstances and command ability should be sufficient is most cases. If you're looking to run this battle as part of a campaign story, then I suggest you make it a draw and the actions of the PC's turn the tide. If you want to play it out like as a table top wargame, there are systems better suited for it than D20.

[Penguinizer]

Possibly doing a system similar to Heroes of Might and Magic. Where a single batallion/group of a single type of unit is treated as one. It's hp being equal to the number of units currently in there. Attacks, range, and damage would have to be decided similarly.

[Fhaolan]

D&D has had rules for large-scale battles before (1st and 2nd had Battlesystem. I think 3.x's rules are in Heroes of Battle, but I don't have that book so I can't say for sure.) However, none of those rulesets scale up nicely to the size of battles you're talking about.

Warmaster is about the only thing that exists at that scale for fantasy-style battles. I'm not aware of any other systems that can handle it except for historical wargaming, which will require some conversion and homebrewing for the fantasy elements.

[drawingfreak]

For me, I just prepare what the players are going to face and then make sure they understand that there are others battling around them outside of their combat zone. In essence, it's all fluff.

[PnP Fan]

AEG's Empire has mass combat rules for exactly that sort of thing. It scales quite well for any size of combat that uses more than 20 combatants on a side.

[Yeril]

Okay I think we can just Scale it up.

Eg. a group of 50 First level warriors (all with 6HP, ergo 300hp total) head off against a group of 20 Commoners, (60hp) They go down hardly even scratching the warriors, however a cabal of 5 3rd level sorcerers hop out unleashing Magic Missiles. Each fires 2 missiles so 2d4+2 x 5 = 10d4+10 damage to the "group" of warriors, leaving a nice dent in them.

However the main problem with this is a Batalion of 500, scrape away with a victory, however still have all the fighting power as if they were all okay, even though they only have 20 hitpoints out of a total 2000 meaning only 5 or 6 would still be alive.

I suppose saying theres 500, all on 1 hitpoint.

How would healing work? I suppose a squad of healers begins healing 10d8+10 damage as they heal up..

It all looks good, Moral would be important here.

[Yeril]

AEG's Empire has mass combat rules for exactly that sort of thing. It scales quite well for any size of combat that uses more than 20 combatants on a side.

This looks good, do you have a link or somthing I could check out, Google has its limits of usefulness..