Using Troop Rules for Large-Scale Battles?

[Palanan]

Has anyone tried using a set of troops to fight a battlefield encounter? If so, how did that play out?

I’m aware that Ultimate Campaign has rules for armies, but their approach treats each army as a single blob, which won’t work for my purposes. It’s also well-known that TTRPGs are designed first and foremost for individual PCs, and there’s no need to restate that here.

What I’m interested in is using the troop rules to give each player a finer-grained control over different tactical units in a battlefield engagement. If there are other systems that do a better job of this, I wouldn’t mind hearing about them, but I’m already familiar with the Pathfinder troop rules and would like to see if they’re suitable for what I have in mind. Has anyone tried this before?

[arkangel111]

Warhammer... No seriously I'd check out those rules and adapt them to D20. In fact somebody has probably already done it. I've always wanted to move away from the battlemat and just play on a Warhammer terrain, they look so cool. Switch to a 6 inch movement instead of squares (maybe 12 if the terrain is big enough) treat the PC's as hero units and figure out exactly how you want the rolling to work. part of Warhammer's easy to use interface for troop combat is that it's just a truckload of D6.

[lylsyly]

War Machine rules from the BECMI Companion Boxed set are probably the best my group as ever used.

[ngilop]

Adamant publishing released mass combat rules for pathfinder.. I think its called Warpath?


Honestly in all the RPGs i Have ever played... only Battletech and Mechwarrior seemed to be able to run massive wars and indivual characters smoothly and without the game coming to a halt at swap points.

But, it is your game, brother. I hope you have a lot of fun.

[Palanan]

Thanks for the suggestions, some good ideas there.

Has anyone ever looked at Cry Havoc from Sword & Sorcery D20? It had some solid reviews back in the day, though that was quite a while ago now.

[ngilop]

Thanks for the suggestions, some good ideas there.

Has anyone ever looked at Cry Havoc from Sword & Sorcery D20? It had some solid reviews back in the day, though that was quite a while ago now.

Oh man.. I totally forgot about Cry Havoc.

I have never personally played with it. But, I know peeps who have and they loved it. Youd need to change some things up to get it to work in pathfinder, but I would wager not much more than the typical 3.5 to pf conversion amount.

[King of Nowhere]

i did use swarm rules (which are basically the same as troops) for armies, and it worked.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by ngilop
I have never personally played with it. But, I know peeps who have and they loved it. Youd need to change some things up to get it to work in pathfinder, but I would wager not much more than the typical 3.5 to pf conversion amount.

That sounds promising, thanks. I read a couple detailed reviews and it sounded like the book is very well thought out.


Originally Posted by King of Nowhere
i did use swarm rules (which are basically the same as troops) for armies, and it worked.

Can you give more details? Did you treat each army as one swarm, or break each army into several swarms? And what was it like in terms of gameplay and pacing?