What's your favorite Mass Combat system?

[MarauderX]

Fields O' Blood by Eden Games. They leave nothing out, and also let you decide to leave everything out and still make it work. Now go paint those fields red!

 

[Lucias]

I've written this a dozen times it seems, whever someone brings up mass combat! While it might be hard to find, AEG's Swashbuckling Adventures hardcover has about 7 pages that are the greatest blend of DM fiat and crunch I've even encountered involving mass combat. I've used it countless times to resolve huge battles of armies quickly and easily and it lets the players get involved in troop movements and tactics. You can easily resolve an entire basic land battle in about 20-30 minutes.

-DM Jeff

Any chance you could gie a little more detail here? You have me intrigued, but even the pdf of Swashbuckling Adventures is around $18 at DTRPG.

Every review I've read mentios the prescence of such rules but nothing on how it is run.

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

Any chance you could gie a little more detail here? You have me intrigued, but even the pdf of Swashbuckling Adventures is around $18 at DTRPG.

Every review I've read mentios the prescence of such rules but nothing on how it is run.

Yeah more detail would be awesome. And thanks for pointing out that it's on DTRPG, my FLGS was fresh out.

 

[Kaodi]

Me?

For Mass Combat, I would probably prefer any of the Total War games...

Wait, you mean this is RPG thread? Oops...

 

[RFisher]

My two favorites:

• Strike Force One (Which is just a good introduction to the basic ideas. Tweak & expand to taste.)
• DM fiat

I like the idea behind the classic D&D War Machine, but I've never been particularly happen with the results I get from it. I've also thought something simple based on comparing total HD of units would be nice, but handling spells & special abilities might be hard to do well. (Seems like someone on DF came up with something along those lines.)

 

[Storyteller01]

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 .

Try MGP's mass combat system. Units are converted to stat blocks similar to characters, using the total HD as the units hit points. You can let the characters fight separately or roll them into a unit to strengthen it.

It's less than perfect, and some fudging will be needed, but it does give some nice and simple guidelines.

 

[DerHauptman]

I had great luck using Farland's Mass Combat program for a recent campaign that involved to feuding lords. The players were stuck in the middle, being childhood friends of one lord but currently working for the other lord. I used the Farland program to keep track of the skirmish while the PC's tried to negotiate a truce between them. I have also used it in a human/orc war in another campaign. It's a great program with a lot of options, and it's free!

http://www.farlandworld.com/program.html

Link does not take me there I am afraid?

Love to see it though...

DH-

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

Link does not take me there I am afraid?

Love to see it though...

DH-

I don't think it's actually a link, it just highlights when you move over it. Copying and pasting the link into the location bar did the trick for me (or click here ).

 

[Aus_Snow]

I'll second Fields of Blood (by Eden Studios).


edit --- on second thoughts (after reading the OP properly), maybe not. It's more a big book than half a page, really. Er.

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

I'll second Fields of Blood (by Eden Studios).


edit --- on second thoughts (after reading the OP properly), maybe not. It's more a big book than half a page, really. Er.

Hah, you're right about that one . I downloaded it last night from DTRPG and I'm still reading through the parts that I'm interested in. What I do like about it is that, although there are a lot of options, I think the core rules for running a combat can be distilled into a pretty short summary. Luckily, my players don't need to know anything about building an army since they (literally) found theirs in a hole in the ground.

I'm probably going to download War Machine tonight to see what it's like.