[d20] What's mass combat without time limitations like?

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Lokathor
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[d20] What's mass combat without time limitations like?

Post by Lokathor »

So Mass Combat is cool. Resolving a Mass Combat usually isn't. Imagine that there were some computer (eg: maybe an app or webpage on your phone/tablet) that would resolve each turn for you very quickly. Also imagine that we'd want to use DnD 3e/3.5/Tome/PF/whatever as the "base" system that is normally played by the group. So creatures will already have those sorts of stats, and the Mass Combat is more like a special event that will (hopefully) be affected by that kind of stat block somehow.

Now, the computer is rolling the dice for you, so the fact that there's a lot of dice isn't a hang up. That said, turn to turn there needs to be a resolution for how two (or more?) armies battle one another. What can and/or should such a system look like? It seems to me like such a thing shouldn't use the normal skirmish-level rules with tactical positioning rules and all that. How abstracted would you wanna go? What sorts of special battlefield situations would you want rules for that you wouldn't bother with at the tactical level? Catapults and archer squads seem like the sort of thing. Or having swarms of tiny men attack the gate of a castle, that sort of thing.

This feels like the sort of thing that folks here would have pondered before, but usually such discussions try to stay within the limits of what you could roll dice for.
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RadiantPhoenix
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

Let's take a look at some history:
OSRIC wrote:When the party of adventurers comes into contact with enemies, game-time no longer follows a sequence of turns (rep-
resenting 10 minutes), but is measured in rounds (representing
1 minute), subdivided into six-second long “segments.” The
order of events is as follows:
  1. Determine Surprise (d6)
  2. Declare Spells and General Actions
  3. Determine Initiative (d6, highest result is the winner, each
    party acts in the segment indicated by the other party’s die
    roll)
  4. Party with initiative acts first (casting spells, attacking,
    etc.), and results take effect (other than spells, which have
    casting times to complete before they take effect). Note:
    Some actions may allow the other side to “interrupt” with
    an action such as a fl eeing attack or attacking charging
    opponents with spears set against a charge.
  5. Party that lost initiative acts, and results take effect (oth-
    er than spells, which take effect when casting time is
    completed)
  6. The round is complete; declare spells and general actions
    for the next round if the battle has not been resolved.
... and then do something where you have to declare a finite number of "units", and then issue orders to whole units. Like, say, each PC has a "command" stat, and can command that many discrete units, but the size of a "unit" can be very flexible.
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Post by Mechalich »

Mass Combat involves more than one kind of combat that. You have at least two scales to work with: Squad Level and Army Level.

Squad level combat is the kind of thing most table-top wargames model. Each side is a small number of squads fighting each other with probably no more than around 100 combatants on each side.

Army level combat is much more abstract and involves potentially tens of thousands of combatants being involved in some massive battle.

It is possible for a computer-aided system to resolve squad level mass combats fairly quickly using the exact same rules as personal combats. An example is Disgaea 5: which can handle just over 100 characters on screen but normally runs about ten to twenty. In the reverse a game like Bladestorm primarily operates at the squad level (optimally units of twenty goons) but a degraded squad can still be represented down to a single unit using the same system.

Army level combat necessitates a different system entirely. The level of abstraction is such that individual persons generally no longer count (even if they might be rendered on the battlefield like in the Total war games) and the operative agent is some kind of abstracted unit generally at least several dozen persons in size. Generally in such a setup the power of individuals is reduced to some kind of constant bonus and/or special unit abilities that they provide.

Problems rise in systems like D&D in that you have individual persons who can easily - and at fairly low levels - overpower units of hundreds of average soldiers with their basic actions. Integrating high level wizards or dragons into mass combat systems designed to model medieval armies is difficult at best.
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Post by codeGlaze »

Squads of tiny men have an HP pool
Squads act as one creature with many parts
Squads have one attack per member when facing PCs
One attack per squad when resolving squad v squad, damage increases per living member
Y damage will kill off one member

Armies of many squads have an HP pool
Armies use squads as minions/attacks in a round
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Lokathor
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Post by Lokathor »

I was thinking more of a rule set for the Army Level combat, where you'd handle thousands of individuals on a side or more, and you could even track most of that individually during the fighting since the program would be managing it.

Assuming that most troops would have identical equipment and generically derived stat blocks, eg: "3000x Human Warrior 2: Longsword, Chainshirt, Wooden Shield", then it's easy to type that sort of thing in as a line in an army description. A computer would obviously have no trouble at all if it's 3,000 units of 6hp each or 30 squads of 600hp each. Rolling the former is technically 100 times as many rolls as the latter, but it's still essentially in the blink of an eye to a human either way.

Though, with squads you can perhaps have rules for things that squads do as a group that they wouldn't normally be able to do on their own (like a Shield Wall or something).

I'm wondering if most of it could be automatable though, so that you're not picking an action for each squad out of 30 squads (which would be slow), you're just pressing a button and the computer runs a whole round of simulation at once. The players could make decisions on their turns, and then once per round (like at the start/end of every round) you'd click the button on your laptop and get another round of results. Alternately, you could just run a battle without PC involvement at all as a way to determine what happens when they send a group of NPCs off on some mission and aren't there to assist.

It seems like, most rounds a character or squad should have a "default action", and then a possible chance of some other sort of action or effect that would be triggered instead. More "winds of fate" style. And of course, one might imagine that there'd need to be some special rules for engagement width which would limit how many melee combatants could fight each other at once. Perhaps ranged attacks would also be limited in some way. Most ancient world armies had very low portions of ranged attackers, but DnD is just full of them.

As to the fact that a higher level opponent could easily walk through dozens or perhaps hundreds of low level guys... well that's the point of being high level after all.
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Post by Mechalich »

Lokathor wrote:Assuming that most troops would have identical equipment and generically derived stat blocks, eg: "3000x Human Warrior 2: Longsword, Chainshirt, Wooden Shield", then it's easy to type that sort of thing in as a line in an army description.
The thing is, generally one has other variables to describe a unit beyond the stat blocks and equipment of the individual soldiers.

Off the top of my head:
1. Morale
2. Commander Bonus/Penalty
3. Terrain
4. Fatigue
5. Drill/Espirit de Corps

And those variables change from one unit to the next, even in the same army. Two companies of one hundred standing next to each other might fight very differently because the one on the right has a stone wall in front of it.
Lokathor wrote:As to the fact that a higher level opponent could easily walk through dozens or perhaps hundreds of low level guys... well that's the point of being high level after all.
Yes, but your hypothetical system has to represent that. It has to be able to model 500 cavalry charging 1500 pikemen and 1 red dragon fire-breath strafing 1500 pikemen. That's a problem because even though 500 cavalry and 1 red dragon might ultimately have the same attack and defense values depending on how the system was designed, they are not going to behave the same way (or if you pretend that they do, then you're playing MtG and you might as well just do that)
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