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Re: Mass Combat Rules Constraints

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 2:05 am
by Zinegata
infected slut princess wrote:What. No one gives a damn about any of this. People want MASS COMBAT. i.e. "a group of guys with pointy sticks that fights battles".
And that's why there are also things called "Wargames" where you can just play mass combat all day long without trying to balance it around stories of individual characters.

My criticism isn't meant to stop people from playing mass combat if they want to. The criticism revolves primarily around trying to unify a gaming system that revolves primarily around story-telling of individual characters (RPGs) with one that revolves around abstracting (or, more harshly _dehumanizing_) individual soldiers and making them into just tiny cogs of a larger formation.

RPGs are fundamentally about individuals. Mass combat is fundamentally about institutions. That's why I pointed out there is a much broader set of interaction points between the two and that battle is in fact an incredibly rare occurrence in an army's overall lifespan in real life. They will spend way more time sitting in a garrison than doing any fighting.
That means "Like Braveheart style hordes charging into each other and hacking each other up with blood and body parts flying all over the place.
Except mass combat games outside of computer games never actually achieve this. Mass combat isn't won by charging each other and having body parts fly over the air. That's not what actually happens on the tabletop. Instead, at best, mass combat games let you throw 72 dice to simulate the "feel" of individual soldiers attacking and then deflate that feeling by having stuff like "toughness" and "armor" saves which reduce those 72 dice down to... 1 or 2 dead enemies?

Smarter systems - such as chits and hexes wargames - dispense with throwing 72 dice together and just come up with tables that simulate the effect of rolling 72 dice by just rolling 2 dice instead. But that also means it's more of a "game" of adding up numbers and getting the exact amount of attack strength to beat the defense strength in a specific area.

Moreover mass combat is in fact pretty deterministic and boring if you play to win; which is really a big reason why a lot of minis games are perpetually unfun and why traditional chit-and-hexes wargames are highly deterministic teaching tools rather than a real struggle. Even computer games that do mass combat - such as Total War - very rarely turn out to be tactically interesting affairs; which is why most of the interesting decisions in Total War games lies with the strategic map and character-building while the battles themselves are merely spectacles to confirm a pre-determined victory.

Which I think is the bigger and broader issue with mass combat in general. People think of it as a grand spectacle like Battle of the Five Armies; when in reality it's more of a lot of busy work and dice rolling. They think of it as an arena where they can make interesting tactical decisions, but in reality the side that brought more men, better men, and bigger guns are just confirming their win.

That's why armies treated as longstanding institutions are far more interesting than armies in battle; and why I simply pointed out that's a much better use for them in a game focusing on individuals. The individual tends to get drowned out when it's just one die roll out of 72.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 2:26 am
by Zinegata
FrankTrollman wrote:However, within the context of fantasy adventure storytelling, big battles of uncertain outcome are a major thing. Whether it's the Battle of the Five Armies in The Hobbit or some Wheel of Time clash or fucking whatever. Armies have big clashes, and the players need to be able to take actions that concretely affect the outcomes of those battles. Which in turn means that having the battle results just be bears that the MC pulls out of their ass is a basic failure of genre emulation.

-Username17
First of all, I did not say there shouldn't be battle. What I questioned is the need to simulate the battles themselves into their own mini-game; and that a game focused on individual player characters should instead _retain_ the focus on those player characters and how they can affect the battle.

That's why the core of my proposal is to convert a battle into an encounter generation system - where the party's success or failure in each encounter contributes to winning or losing the battle.

Moreover, I have to say that battles being won or lost by factors that are pulled out of someone's ass is depressingly far more common in actual history than battles won by tactical brilliance.

For instance Austerlitz is a very famous battle won by Napoleon and is often hailed as a "tactical masterpiece". And yet, in reality, the majority of Napoleon's orders during the battles had been planned _weeks_ in advance - because Austerlitz was in fact a giant pre-planned ambush. To make it even more galling, half of the Austrian and Russian top commanders correctly guessed that they were marching into an ambush and would be crushed as a result!

Instead, Napoleon "won" Austerlitz in the weeks leading up to the battle by basically making a series of bluff checks - wherein he pretended that his army was weak and starving, and that he wanted to give up and sign a negotiated peace. Many of the Allied commanders - such as Kutuzov - saw through this ruse, but the Czar and his entourage basically failed their Sense Motive checks, overruled the more cautious commanders, and sent their army headlong into the ambush where it was destroyed.

That this isn't well known and people assume that Napoleon was being a tactical genius during the battle is again the result of people and historians having a myopic focus on the battles themselves; rather than the events prior to it.

From an RPG sense, it also shows how a small group of characters with non-combat related skills could end up winning a battle for one side or another outright. You don't need to be able to cast Fireball if you can just bluff check your way into making the enemy commander over-confident to the point he walks his army right into an ambush.

By contrast, having a mass combat mini-game presumes that battles are won and lost primarily on the field of battle itself - which not only limits both the MCs and PCs from a creative standpoint, but also presumes that the MCs and PCs actually understand how to fight tactical battles which in itself can already be a source of a comedy of errors at best or just boring frustration and busywork at worst. Not everyone is a Napoleon, and indeed not many can even be a competent squad or platoon leader.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 2:38 am
by Zinegata
Lokathor wrote:Zinegata, I would add that two armies against each other isn't like back and forth up and down a ladder. In the ladder scenario, one side is at its best when the other side is about to lose. The actual case is that both sides can be beaten down to their worst at the same time.
That's true in terms of absolute casualties. However, when I envisioned it the "ladder" was really meant to represent each side's morale/mindset rather than its strength. This is because while there are many battles that ended in a "draw" in terms of having equal losses, almost all of them end with one side in possession of the battlefield while the other side has withdrawn. And that's because even a larger force that has suffered fewer losses may be conned into fleeing or withdrawing by a smaller force - by a combination of confusion, intimidation, or just a general sense that "it's not worth it to risk dying here". Battles are very much exercises in large-scale group psychology in addition to fighting; something that is almost always completely ignored by many tactical mass combat systems other than the odd morale check.

That said, battles should also reflect relative army strength and long-term casualties. And for this I would suggest simply giving each army a "Strength Value". This value could decrease based on casualties inflicted by the PCs or by general combat as a whole, and it could increase upon the arrival of reinforcements. However, this should still be different from the "morale ladder", so that even an army with weak strength can force a strong army to withdraw; or you can create a Phyrric Victory situation where an army "won" and retained the field but lost far more strength than the "loser".

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 10:24 am
by MGuy
Zinegata, in acknowledging that players and GMs are likely to have little to no tactical understanding of how combats go down how would you suggest any given encounter generation engine would even work? Most people I've run games for are bad at negotiating, making logical decisions in general, and math. If you expect both players and likely the GM to not be able to understand the better approaches to tackling any given mass combat encounter then what could you even do that would work?

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 1:53 pm
by Zinegata
MGuy wrote:Zinegata, in acknowledging that players and GMs are likely to have little to no tactical understanding of how combats go down how would you suggest any given encounter generation engine would even work? Most people I've run games for are bad at negotiating, making logical decisions in general, and math. If you expect both players and likely the GM to not be able to understand the better approaches to tackling any given mass combat encounter then what could you even do that would work?
The answer’s actually rather simple - provide a large number of sample encounter ideas with the mass combat framework. Have a few samples of pre-battle scouting for instance, or add a couple of cases where the party has to seize some key terrain on their own or with minimal outside support.

The thing to realize here is twofold.

First, people are not simply bad at doing something. Instead, people are bad at something because they haven’t learned how to do it properly yet; and the key to learning is to see how someone else does it properly first.

Thats why you can’t expect a _player_ to be good at negotiating right after reading Diplomacy check rules - because they explain how the _system_ works but don’t really show examples of how negotiations actually happen. To see examples you are much better off watching movies or TV series that focus on negotiating and use those as references.

Likewise this is why I am highly skeptical of mass combat mingames resulting in players feeling that they are commanding real armies. Because while you can learn the mass combat system and its math, and it may encourage some real-world tactics by the way the rules favor certain actions (eg flank attacks), learning the system only results in mastery of the _system_ without showing the players that battles are more than just CGI Orcs and Goblins colliding with each other.

Which brings me to the second point - which is that each play group has different frames of reference, and the good DM will try and tailor the campaign based on the group’s known references.

For instance a DM making a negotiation-heavy campaign and expecting it to play like Suits or Game of Thrones is doomed to failure if the rest of the group has never seen either series.

The exact same thing applies to battles. If the group’s idea of battle is the Hollywood version where heroes just need to make a big pre-battle speech and then charge towards the enemy boss then they would just get lost trying to learn a more realistic battle system where speeches mean little and maneuver is important.

In short, a looser framework is better precisely because of the factors you mentioned. A system that can adjust to a group that only knows battle from the Hollywood version but still also be useful to a group that values real tactics is much more likely to be used than one where you have to learn an all-new math puzzle that might not conform to the group’s idea of what battle should be. The system should be able to adjust for the players, and not demand the players adjust to the system.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 3:00 pm
by deaddmwalking
Zinegata, you're being ridiculous.

Sure, there are some groups that won't want mass combat rules and would rather have things handled on the scale of heroic individuals, but there are absolutely reasons that you'd want to think about balance and resolve the conflict in a non-deterministic way.

There may be a situation involving an invading army that must be stopped. The PCs may need to defeat a dragon/recruit a dragon for their side while the armies go out and march to war. It may become important whether their army stands a chance or not. Especially if they've taken effort to recruit/train/equip the army they'll want to know how that combat resolves even if they don't directly participate.

Sure, having 'objectives' that help their army do better is good design. Determining 'how much better' should include elements of chance (ie die rolls). There has to be an underlying system for those die rolls to mean anything.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 3:58 pm
by hogarth
My #1 constraint for a mass combat system:

A unit of X NPCs should not be much stronger (or much weaker) than X-1 individual NPCs.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 4:19 pm
by mlangsdorf
Zinegata wrote: From an RPG sense, it also shows how a small group of characters with non-combat related skills could end up winning a battle for one side or another outright. You don't need to be able to cast Fireball if you can just bluff check your way into making the enemy commander over-confident to the point he walks his army right into an ambush.

By contrast, having a mass combat mini-game presumes that battles are won and lost primarily on the field of battle itself - which not only limits both the MCs and PCs from a creative standpoint, but also presumes that the MCs and PCs actually understand how to fight tactical battles which in itself can already be a source of a comedy of errors at best or just boring frustration and busywork at worst. Not everyone is a Napoleon, and indeed not many can even be a competent squad or platoon leader.
I am certain you can have an abstract mass combat min-game that lets the PC commanders make broad tactical choices while still having battles that are won or lost on the battlefield and battles that are won or lost well before the battle starts. It isn't even that hard.

The reason I am certain that you can have that is because I have been running a Fantasy Mass Combat game for the past year using an abstract mass combat mini-game with tactical choices, and the PCs do win a lot of their battles in the preparation and they win and lose some of their battles on the field, due to luck of the dice. The mass combat minigame has given us a rich field for storytelling, from deciding where and how to station their troops, to heroic actions on the field of battle, to individual trickery and sabotage to counter an enemy force.

I agree a Warhammer style wargame is not helpful. An abstract mini-game, where you have a total number of combat strength (possibly in multiple categories, like Cavalry, Artillery, and Magic or whatever) and pick general strategies like All-Out Charge, Defense, or Fighting Withdrawal, and the combination of the general's skill and modifiers for strategy and combat strength determines who wins and how well, works just fine.

My concern with an encounter based system is that while it's fine for a battle or two, like the climatic battle of Red Hand of Doom or the defense of the Isle of Dread in Savage Tides, it's a heck of a lot of work for the GM if you intend to have regular battles. In 40 sessions, my current campaign had 15-17 really significant battles that could have changed the course of the campaign and another 50+ minor battles. I would really rather use a mass combat mini-game than come up with RHoD-style encounter battles every other week.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 4:29 pm
by Dimmy
As so often happens on this forum, I'm not even sure I understand the question. It sounds like folks are asking "how can we make wargaming and roleplay the same thing"? And then rejecting every solution the industry has come up with -- D&D's "Heroes of Battle", Deathwatch's "horde system" -- because they're too clunky.

But of course they're going to be clunky! Tactics on an individual scale, tactics on a mass-combat scale, and strategy on a mass-combat scale, are all very different things. (That's why it's possible to "win every battle but lose the war".) So you're trying to fit square pegs into round holes. You might as well be asking "how do I use D&D to simulate the physics inside a nuclear reactor?" Um...you don't. That's not what the game is for. We're talking about systems that are specialized for one thing: "my dude sneaks up to the dragon and hits it with his magic sword". They can barely manage "my dude cobbles shoes for a living", much less "my dude is King Agamemnon commanding the Trojan War".

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 4:41 pm
by Dimmy
PS: I love that the justification given for this hopeless exercise is "I want to simulate the Battle of Five Armies". So far as the protagonists/PCs were concerned, the Battle of Five Armies was either a series of individual heroic duels -- like Thorin's and Beorn's against the goblin general What's-His-Name -- or it was an opportunity to get knocked out by goblin cross-fire while trying to run away and hide. Either of those scenarios is already well within the capabilities of D&D; you don't need to make a fuss about fancy new rules.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 5:12 pm
by Thaluikhain
Yeah, getting a system to work on different scales like that seems extremely difficult, if not impossible, for anything more complicated than a FF book (which could just about manage it sometimes, but not in their RPGs).

Zinegata's idea of having armies, but avoiding the massed combat which most gamers would probably want them for...yeah, there's an obvious problem there, but it dodges the issue of the rules probably not working.

OTOH, I'd hardly describe myself as a hardcore gamer, so while I've never seen this done very well, that's not to say it couldn't be. I'd be very interested to see a system that did this.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 5:29 pm
by deaddmwalking
Helms Deep also has been mentioned several times.

Ultimately, there are broad references to pitched battles in source material. I'm fond of Bernard Russell novels (Saxon Tales, for instance) where mass battles are an important part. Even if you know your character is bad-ass, it can be important to know if your army can hold against another army.

I don't think that it is a hopeless exercise. mlangsdorf has a mass-combat system he uses and it works. My group has a mass-combat system that we use with our heartbreaker (and I provided an example of how it works out with a 100 versus 100 battle). We played in a campaign that involved a lot of political machinations and several battles. Much of the campaign included the cloak and dagger bits about trying to get one or another noble to declare allegiance to our pick for king or betray their current team. Not only did it matter whether a battle was won, we needed to know how much of the army survived to fight the next battle.

For a historical example, think of the Battle of Stamford Bridge (9/25/1066) followed by the Battle of Hastings (10/14/1066). With less than 3 weeks to redeploy and recruit, the losses from the first battle played a role in the second battle. A 'scenario' based system may help you determine the winner versus the loser and there are times and places that is the only thing you care about, but usually you're going to care about the status of the armies at the end. If you 'win' but your opponent has significant forces that are retreating and regrouping you're going to have a different campaign situation than if they are effectively wiped out.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 5:32 pm
by virgil
You know what? Sure, skip over the specific rules of actually running a war game, but you still need to answer the issues brought up in the OP. If you can control the weather or perform other actions that plainly interact/surpass the maneuvers of an army, and you whip it out at Helm's Deep, then getting a 404 error is not acceptable. You have two options: take flame monsoons off the list, or obsolete standing armies as the means for a nation to leverage its power.

If there's a military campaign in the setting, and the players wish to participate, then they deserve better than "idk, go kill some orcs until the DM says you won." Saying groups of tiny men can't be an all-purpose answer isn't saying that being a fantasy shadowrunner isn't valid, it's saying that you need an in-game reason why your party isn't just forking over enough money for a pile of henchmen when they go on their quest.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 9:34 pm
by Tannhäuser
Games need good rules for anything that is likely to happen routinely of any significance. Crafting, sneaking, diplomacy, mass combat, kingdom management, travel, survival in the wild, investigation, those things all happen commonly in games I've played or run, and rarely have they been addressed satisfactorily. There's no reason they shouldn't have as much or more rules attention as small-scale combat.

Why do so many people stand up for shitty design in pen-and-paper RPGs? I get that, through collective imagination and the inherent enjoyment of socialising, even a totally freeform RPG can be enjoyable, and RPGs are one of the cheapest hobbies around, but there's no reason to defend poor design just because you can ignore or gloss over it.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 10:09 pm
by Emerald
mlangsdorf wrote:The reason I am certain that you can have that is because I have been running a Fantasy Mass Combat game for the past year using an abstract mass combat mini-game with tactical choices, and the PCs do win a lot of their battles in the preparation and they win and lose some of their battles on the field, due to luck of the dice. The mass combat minigame has given us a rich field for storytelling, from deciding where and how to station their troops, to heroic actions on the field of battle, to individual trickery and sabotage to counter an enemy force.
Would you mind giving an overview of how this system works (or pointing us to it if it's online somewhere) and walking through a basic example, like deaddmwalking did with his?

I think it would help the conversation to have more examples of the kinds of systems that have worked out in actual play so we can talk about what sorts of mechanics generally work, what are common weaknesses of such systems, and so forth.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 11:18 pm
by Username17
Dimmy wrote:As so often happens on this forum, I'm not even sure I understand the question. It sounds like folks are asking "how can we make wargaming and roleplay the same thing"? And then rejecting every solution the industry has come up with -- D&D's "Heroes of Battle", Deathwatch's "horde system" -- because they're too clunky.
Heroes of Battle isn't being rejected because it's clunky, it's being rejected because it doesn't meet any design objectives.

The "system" of doing regular D&D adventures and fight set pieces with the MC describing a battle going on in the background with victory or defeat determined by the MC whim after they have run out of prepared setpiece encounters is not really a system. That's just Apocalypse World.

-Username17

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 11:43 pm
by Chamomile
Dimmy wrote:As so often happens on this forum, I'm not even sure I understand the question.
You do not. The question is "what impact does it have that players have secured the allegiance of the fire giants," and the answer of "a fire giant unit shows up in a game of Warhammer Fantasy" has been considered and rejected. The idea of using anything similar to a wargame to run the mass battles is unworkable, because the units simply do not scale. I have personally followed that path as far as it will go, and as far as it will go is in battles limited strictly to a certain scale and which can only cover PC actions that were thought up in advance, leaving GMs pretty much unassisted for anything I didn't make specific rules for ahead of time. I stand by those rules insofar as they're better than nothing, but it's a pretty damn far cry from a general purpose solution to the problem of mass combat and it cannot be used as the basis for a general purpose solution to that problem, because if nothing else its limitations on scale are baked into the structure of the sub-system itself.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 1:08 am
by SlyJohnny
I am going to write up armies as if they were a kind of D&Dish swarm monster, with weirder rules.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 1:22 am
by Voss
FrankTrollman wrote:
Dimmy wrote:As so often happens on this forum, I'm not even sure I understand the question. It sounds like folks are asking "how can we make wargaming and roleplay the same thing"? And then rejecting every solution the industry has come up with -- D&D's "Heroes of Battle", Deathwatch's "horde system" -- because they're too clunky.
Heroes of Battle isn't being rejected because it's clunky, it's being rejected because it doesn't meet any design objectives.

The "system" of doing regular D&D adventures and fight set pieces with the MC describing a battle going on in the background with victory or defeat determined by the MC whim after they have run out of prepared setpiece encounters is not really a system. That's just Apocalypse World.

-Username17
Be fair. That's still objectively superior to Bear World.
The players still get to fight comprehensible battles with outputs related to their actions, and the results are likely to be at least semi-coherent.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 2:46 am
by Judging__Eagle
I think that Frank's original assessment "Each unit simply adds some "Army Values"; and the resulting values are arbitrated in some sort of wargame between factions at the battlefield, might be the best way to calculate "any amount" of military forces. Factions tend to coalesce into two sides, because that way they'll be on the side that has enough "army points" to win.

The TSR CYoA book "Gnomes 100 - Dragons 0" (~p 84) is actually a summary of what is an acceptable value for the final score of the books final "wargame". The actual "wargame" occurs around "page" 85; and correct "win" text is at 92k, not 118I (a fairly astounding oversight, I know).

The following review is from Amazon:
ByBrian D. Pendellon November 3, 2009
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
For those who enjoy solo game books, this is an outstanding entry into the field. Where most solo modules run around 400 paragraphs, this book is more than 1200. It's an excellent game, and if you're willing to devote the time can take as much as four hours to play through. Mount Nevermind is marvellously detailed and fun to explore.

It's also a very forgiving game; there are numerous artifacts and pieces of equipment which protect from bad die rolls, from mistakes, and from other horrible things.

Kudos must also be given for the artwork; Each room is lovingly and exhaustively detailed, and each illustration applies directly to the text. All in all, excellent work and good value for the money.

However, the work does have a couple of notable flaws which detract from the enjoyment:

A) Missing references and bad references. Most egregious is that the 'you win' section in the final battle points to the wrong paragraph. The correct paragraph is actually 92K; it took me quite a bit of searching to find it. There are also references that lead nowhere. One example requires the user to turn to paragraph 120, when there is no paragraph 120. Paragraphs go from approx. 119L to 120A-E, none of which have anything to do with the succeeding paragraph.

Finally, there are also paragraphs which say 'now go back to the page you turned from' -- hope you kept a bookmark! Otherwise it may take awhile to hunt your place again.

B) More playtesting was required. There are a number of easily exploitable flaws in the rules which break the game. For example, if you combine a device which says 'roll the die and experience a good effect from the Beneficial table if even; if odd, from the Malevolent table. You may do this as often as you like.') with another artifact which says 'suffer no ill effects in the NEXT CHAMBER ONLY. Just continue as if it didn't happen' -- you combine these two effects, and you can literally run the entire Beneficial table as often as you like in an infinite loop until your character has infinite HP, never misses, auto-kills all enemies, cannot possibly suffer an ill effect from a die roll, etc. Pun-pun himself would be hard put to beat this character if you keep it up long enough.

Combined with this is the fact that the rules are sometimes confusing; They even give me (at 38) pause from time to time, and was endlessly frustrating at 16.

C) A somewhat minor point is that the game sometimes seems only tangentially related to the Dragonlance setting it is ostensibly set in; For example, it is possible to find an use an Egyptian artifact, but Dragonlance takes place on the planet Krynn; there is no 'Egypt' in its history. There is certainly no way a common baker's apprentice could recognize an Egyptian artifact. Likewise, a dragon's hoard is of gold, which the game makes out to be valuable. However, in the Dragonlance setting, gold does not have the value it has in the real world -- the currency metal is steel. There are also ray guns and submarines and bazookas and a host of other artifacts which don't typically exist in a fantasy world. If
you can overlook these factors and enjoy the boyish fun of the module, you can have an enjoyable experience. But if fidelity to the campaign setting is a priority, you may find
that these elements grate.

All in all, a creditable effort with much to recommend it. There are some flaws, as above, but they are not enough to spoil the game's enjoyment, at least not for me.
One option to make simply calculating two forces numbers until one fails might be to borrow Dragon Dice's "abstract" fields for troops to be placed (i.e. reserves/home; field; flank). AFAIR Troops "Enter" a battle in Reserves. Then have to enter the Field to engage enemy units also placed in the Field; units in the Field can be positioned into the enemy Reserves/home (I can't recall at all how the fields interact, it's been forever since I did play, and I barely played the game when I had any dragon dice).

The most recent DD rulebook I could find. From the company which now owns the DD licesnse

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 2:13 pm
by mlangsdorf
Emerald wrote:
mlangsdorf wrote:The reason I am certain that you can have that is because I have been running a Fantasy Mass Combat game for the past year using an abstract mass combat mini-game with tactical choices, and the PCs do win a lot of their battles in the preparation and they win and lose some of their battles on the field, due to luck of the dice.
Would you mind giving an overview of how this system works (or pointing us to it if it's online somewhere) and walking through a basic example, like deaddmwalking did with his?
Sure. It's GURPS Mass Combat (http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-mass-combat-1) with some minor house rules.

Forces (armies) are composed of elements that represent roughly 10 men or one vehicle. Each element has a troop type (heavy infantry, light cavalry, spellcaster, miner, heavy artillery, etc) that determines their basic troop strength, mobility type (foot, mounted, wheeled, etc), and any special classes they have. Special classes are Air, Armor, Artillery, Cavalry, C3I (communication and command troops), Engineering, Fire (archery), Insubstantial (spirits and elementals), Reconnaissance (scouts), and Spellcasters, and you get bonuses in the strategy contest if you have a significant edge in relative troop strength in a special class. Some troops can also neutralize a special class, such as Pikemen are anti-Cavalry, so they prevent your opponent from getting the bonus but don't let you get the bonus. And troops can have other special abilities, like Terrain Adaptation doubles troop strength in the appropriate terrain or Night means they don't suffer penalties for fighting in darkness.

I'll take a fairly simple battle from a recent session. General Aisling is in command of a light cavalry force that is being sent behind enemy lines to cut their line of supply when she runs into a group of enemy centaurs with a similar mission.

Aisling's force is ~1000 horse archers with basic gear and inferior training, 30 light infantry dragoons with the best possible gear and special forces training, 60 mediun infantry dragoons with fine gear and veteran training. She is a PC, and by herself counts as 10 light infantry dragoons with special forces training plus some special communication abilities and is accompanied by another PC, who is super strong warrior mounted on a dinosaur and basically counts as an armored car. Aisling's force has troop strength 350, 15 Armor, 315 Cavalry, 10 C3I, 300 Fire (Archers), 310 Reconnaissance. Aisling is a skilled general with Strategy-17, Intelligence Analysis-15, and Leadership-21.

The enemy force is around 400 3rd line centaur militia. Overall, they have decent equipment and average to poor training, but centaurs are effectively horse archers and get extra bonuses in the forest they're fighting in. They have a base troop strength 350, 350 cavalry, 350 fire, 350 reconnaissance, all of which is doubled for centaurs fighting in the woods. Commander Fiona is pretty good with Strategy-14, Leadership-14, and Intelligence Analysis-10.

The battle begins with a Reconnaissance contest, which is a contest of Intelligence Analysis. Aisling doesn't have a 2:1 edge in Recon troops, and gets no bonuses. The centaurs are all Recon troops which is a +2 bonus, they're twice as fast in the woods as Aisling's troops for another +1, they have a 2:1 advantage in Reconnaissance troops for another +1, and they're centaurs in the woods for another +4. Aisling rolls decently and the centaur commander blows her roll, so what should have been an easy ambush for the centaurs turns into pitched battle on Aisling's terms. An ambush would have forced Aisling to use the Rally Strategy and suffer a strategy penalty on the first round as well as negating some of Aisling's C3I advantage; a pitched battle lets either side choose the best strategy for them.

The first round, Aisling chooses to Raid, which is "hit the enemy hard without trying to hold ground." Aisling gets a +2 bonus when performing Raids, and would get some more bonuses if she had a 2:1 advantage in Cav or Recon, but she doesn't. Fiona chooses to Attack, a straightforward general advance which doesn't give any bonuses, but increases her bonuses for next round if she wins this round. She also gets +1 each for a 2:1 advantage in Cavalry and Fire troops (but not Recon, that only counts in the Reconnaissance contest). Aisling gets another +3 bonus for unopposed C3I and +3 for unopposed Armor. Neither side has enough troop strength advantage to get a bonus. Both commanders roll Strategy + bonuses and get average results, so Aisling rolls 15 points under her modified skill and Fiona rolls 6 points under her modified skill. Aisling gets a decisive victory for the round and takes 5% casualties while the centaurs take 25% casualties. If Aisling had used an attack strategy, she would have gotten a +2 position bonus (PB) on subsequent rounds to represent gaining ground, but you can't get PB from a raid.

On the second round, the centaurs are in bad shape. Fiona chooses a Mobile Defense, falling back to reduce her casualties. This gives her a +1 bonus to Strategy, +1 more for her Cavalry superiority. Aisling attempts a flanking maneuver, which is an Indirect Attack that gives her a -2 penalty on her strategy roll. Each side is at another -1 per 5% casualties, so Aisling is at a net +3 and Fiona is at a net -1. Again, average rolls, so Aisling rolls 10 under and Fiona rolls 2 under. Indirect attacks double the margin of victory, so Aisling wins a crushing victory: 0% casualties for her side, 30% casualties for the centaurs (the Mobile Defense reduces casualties by 5%), +4 PB for Aisling (the Mobile Defense gives up more ground).

On the third round, the centaurs will go into a Full Retreat, hoping to escape before dying. Aisling chooses to Parley instead, hoping to get the centaurs to switch sides. If Fiona chooses to accept the Parley, the battle stops while the two sides talk; if Fiona keeps running, then Aisling's Parley becomes a Defense strategy and there isn't a battle because defense strategies can't fight against retreat strategies. Fiona chooses not to talk and the battle is over.

Aisling won and can apply magical healing and reorganize her troops to halve her casualties. She also has the option of holding the field to reduce her casualties by another 5%, or pursuing and inflicting another 5% (plus bonuses if she had Air or Cavalry advantage) casualties on the enemy. She chooses to pursue. By the time the centaurs finally break contact, they've suffered 60% casualties (including prisoners and unrecovered wounded), leaving 160 battered centaurs fleeing into the woods. Aisling resumes her march north, confident that her own militia forces can handle the remaining centaurs when they trying to cross a river on the plains warded by fortress. The entire experience took 8 hours (2 hours per round plus 2 hours of pursuit).

This was a battle that could possibly have gone the other way: if Fiona hadn't flubbed the reconnaissance contest, she could have ambushed Aisling and gotten bonuses for terrain while negating some of Aisling's C3I bonus. A tactical victory for the centaurs on the first round would have given them 10% casualties to 15% for Aisling's force and let them grind away at Aisling's force over several rounds. It wouldn't have been an overwhelming victory at any point, but the centaurs didn't have to lose.

Anyway. We've done fights from a half dozen PCs fighting 100 orcs to 4,000+ infantry and cavalry being besieged by 5,000+ infantry, cavalry, and flying demons to 5,000+ infantry fighting 8,000 zombies and wraiths backed by 2,000 orc infantry and powerful wizards. The system isn't perfect and we've tweaked it here and there, but the basic concept of total troop strength plus category advantages turns into bonuses on a strategy contest influenced by the broad type of tactic you're employing has worked pretty well.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 2:48 pm
by hogarth
mlangsdorf wrote:We've done fights from a half dozen PCs fighting 100 orcs [..]
How does it work on this scale? I.e., if time were not a factor, would the PCs generally be better off or worse off using the usual combat rules?

The thing that annoys me about most mass-combat systems is that they assume a modestly-sized group of harmless enemies is equal to a deadly enemy.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 3:25 pm
by mlangsdorf
The current crop of PCs each count as 10 high quality, well-equipped troops in their own right, so 6 of them is like 60 special forces troops against 100 garrison troopers. The mass combat engine says that the high quality troops should win those fights, maybe with minor injuries.

We're currently playing out, at the PC scale, a raid of 6 PCs against roughly an orc company with heavy magic support. So far, the PCs have blown through the infantry and bowmen lines without any injuries, which is about what I would expect. They're about to hit the enemy elite infantry backed by the spellcasters, and things are going to get messy.

Earlier in the campaign, the PC dragon got into his head that he was invulnerable and overflew a castle guarded by (among other things) 300 orc crossbowmen. The dragon probably could have defended himself against 10-20 crossbows, but 300 meant a couple got through and started penetrating. He had to evacuate in a hurry.

Most of the melee PCs are whirling engines of death and destruction, but very few of them can instantly kill 10+ enemies. I've never played it out, but I'd expect 30:1 odds or worse, the orcs will start grappling and dogpile the PCs. That started to happen last session, but the orcs only had a 5:1 advantage in local numbers against the melee PCs, and the PC spellcasters and archers were basically unopposed at that point and starting shooting grapplers off the PCs, and the attempt failed.

Overall, I suspect that Mass Combat slightly underestimates the strength of the individual PCs and slightly overinflates the value of large numbers of mooks. But the effect skew is pretty small: the PCs might be able to defeat 500 orcs in tactical combat, but not 1000. Mass Combat has them topping out at 300 or so, though that depends on the quality of the opposing commanders - the best PC general is a lot better than the average orc battalion commander, but only a little better than their best, and the quality of the general makes up for a lot of other conditions in Mass Combat.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 4:15 pm
by K
I was talking to Frank and I floated the idea that army battles are really just terrain in a heroic fantasy RPG. They are literally some shit that happens while the heroes do samurai battles with the enemy heroes.

I'd probably just give armies a single number each and do some math to figure out how many guys on each side die. Some armies would have terrain environmental effects for heroes wading through them.

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 8:58 pm
by Username17
In pretty much any acceptable Mass Combat system for D&D you're going to spend somewhere between much and almost all of your time doing Dynasty Warriors stuff where you fight setpiece battles on the personal combat scale that have big army battles going on in the background. However, while that accounts for a majority of the table time, it does not answer a majority of the questions.
  • What do you fight when you try to attack the enemy commander?
  • What happens to the battle when you beat the challenge earlier or later or win harder or lose?
  • What happens to the battle if you decide to run off and do missions to get the elves on your side?
As long as the answer to all of those questions is "The DM makes something up" you're in the "Bears" situation and the novel the DM read last week makes as much or more difference to what happens as the player's choices or die rolls.

These questions need a solid battle outcome simulator to answer. It doesn't have to take a lot of time at the table and indeed it should not. But you still need something.

-Username17