Dynasty Warrior style campaign

[CroBob]

I've recently been playing a game of Dynasty Warriors 7 with one of my friends, and I realized it has quite a few elements of a successful D&D campaign, and I instantly began intuiting ways to duplicate the feel of the game in D&D.

Now, mind you, I'm not going to model a campaign directly off of the DW content or characters. There are so many more options available to a D&D campaign. Anyway, my ideas so far are;

1) Have expansive battle-field maps. A battle grid may not be able to contain most of it, but so long as I have a hand drawn map which includes where important items, personnel, and troop formations are, that shouldn't be a problem.

2) Minions. I don't think I'd include quite the quantity as in DW, but formations of minions would easily duplicate the general feel of mook combat. The minions will probably be a level or two below the party level on average.

3) Officers would probably be elites, perhaps with a retinue of a few regular monsters in there since the heroes are a group of more than one dude. Each officer would be unique in some way, having their own, fairly unique, weapon and powers. The leaders of entire armies, generals or kings or whatever, would likely be solos. Each officer has a history that a History check would reveal, and could include notorious vices or some other form of weakness, or even information pertaining a favored battle strategy.

4) There could be a realm map, including sections of land and noting who owns them and what sort of troop movement has been noted therein. It could be a game of conquest, or perhaps peaceful uniting of the realms, since I wouldn't rule out diplomacy.

Those are the ideas I got from the game. Something about the mooks of the game, however, is their notable bravery/stupidity. Making this a D&D game could have mooks operate the same way when facing undead or goblinoid armies, but many of the kingdoms would be humans or a common humanoid species from a PHB. Those mooks, obviously, would tend to retreat after half their platoon gets decimated by a handful of impressively armed dudes.

Anyway, that's a quick rundown of the idea, so I was wondering if anyone had any ideas they'd like to give or take on it.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I've recently been playing a game of Dynasty Warriors 7 with one of my friends, and I realized it has quite a few elements of a successful D&D campaign, and I instantly began intuiting ways to duplicate the feel of the game in D&D.

Now, mind you, I'm not going to model a campaign directly off of the DW content or characters.

I actually did that in d20 Modern. It worked well, but not for long, as the campaign went toward mass battlefield combat, and I had no rules for that

There are so many more options available to a D&D campaign. Anyway, my ideas so far are;

1) Have expansive battle-field maps. A battle grid may not be able to contain most of it, but so long as I have a hand drawn map which includes where important items, personnel, and troop formations are, that shouldn't be a problem.

Yes. There's a 3.x product, Heroes of Battle or something like that, that has a great idea of what the "centerpieces" of a battlefield encounter set could be and how winning (or losing) each encounter modifies the battle.

2) Minions. I don't think I'd include quite the quantity as in DW, but formations of minions would easily duplicate the general feel of mook combat. The minions will probably be a level or two below the party level on average.

Alternatively, you could use "mobs". Just create a swarm, and if it's 5th-level or higher give it an encounter ability (stampede/trample, for instance).

3) Officers would probably be elites, perhaps with a retinue of a few regular monsters in there since the heroes are a group of more than one dude. Each officer would be unique in some way, having their own, fairly unique, weapon and powers. The leaders of entire armies, generals or kings or whatever, would likely be solos. Each officer has a history that a History check would reveal, and could include notorious vices or some other form of weakness, or even information pertaining a favored battle strategy.

Unlike previous editions, 4e does the "warlord" right. Note that they don't necessarily need to be Strength-based warlords.

The noble in MM II makes a great controller (leader), and makes a good "baseline" for characters like Cao Cao or Zhuge Liang. Such a character might have an aura and grant attacks (with bonus damage, depending on level) and/or give free movement.

4) There could be a realm map, including sections of land and noting who owns them and what sort of troop movement has been noted therein. It could be a game of conquest, or perhaps peaceful uniting of the realms, since I wouldn't rule out diplomacy.

Make sure your players like that idea first.

 

[CroBob]

I already ran it by one player who thought it sounded awesome, and I'm almost certain another 2 or 3 would find it very enjoyable. A few others may or may not play, but those are the ones who don't reliable show up anyhow. Thank you for all of your input. I'll definitely look into the Mob thing, but I think my players would like minions a bit more. To move combat along, I may come up with a mechanic that let's me make a single roll for all of them (taking my roll and making it the mean to hit number, with a variance of 0.5 per minion, for example, though that could result in a 20 meaning they all hit, so I'll have to think more about that )for whatever they do, though, since too many rolls bogs down combat.