What's your favorite Mass Combat system?

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

Do you want the players in control of parts of the army (wargame style) or in control of only their characters (RP style)? If it's the latter, I've heard a number of people say they enjoy the Heroes of Battle system for big battles. Basically you set the battlefield up as encounters, and each one will go a given way unless the PCs interact with it. If they do, the outcome of their actions influences how subsequent events transpire. It's a simple concept, but pretty nifty!

-blarg

I'm probably going for a mixture of the two, actually; one of my characters has a pretty expansive back story about being a military commander (and has the skillset to prove it) so I want to give him the chance to push the little units around on the battle map . From a personal taste standpoint, however, Heroes of Battle sounds like the kind of system that I would enjoy playing/DMing, so I might try to kludge the two together .

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

I rather liked Bad Axe's Mass Combat system. It was quick and pretty easy, but still accomodated PC interactions and some strategy/tactics without getting too in depth. And it's cheap, too.

 

[diaglo]

Chainmail (1971)

 

[Mark CMG]

You can find some advice about this in an older thread here -

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=71964

Good luck!

 

[Vrecknidj]

I don't know if it'll help, but, there's a Quick and Dirty DM article in Knowledge Arcana issue 6 that's about dealing with mass combat in an abbreviated way (that is, avoiding complex rule sets and the like). See my sig if you're interested.

Dave

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

Chainmail (1971)

Awesome . And diaglo, you didn't even need to clarify the year. There's only one true Chainmail, especially when it's coming from you .

 

[mcrow]

I would say that the system from Epic RPG.

easy to use, interesting, and gets the job done.

 

[Huw]

War Machine from the old D&D Companion Set or the Rules Cyclopedia.

Seconded! It fits on a single page as well, IIRC.

 

[Gargoyle]

Seconded! It fits on a single page as well, IIRC.

Thirded. I like how scalable and simple it is, and how it took into account magic, immunities etc, and yet still had some room for some rock, paper, scisssos style strategies.

 

[Garnfellow]

Anybody have any idea how close this [Representative Battles system] is to the system in Black Company? I've already dismissed the system in BCCS as being pretty clunky, although I did like the idea, if not the implementation, of having multiple "scales" of combat going on simultaneously.

Totally different thing.