D&D General Large Scale Battles - How do you DM them?

[toucanbuzz]

The 3E adventure Red Hand of Doom handled a city siege well. The PCs know an army is coming, and they have a ticking timeline to disrupt enemy operations, disrupt an alliance, get some allies, etc. They may not have time to do it all. When the battle occurs, there should be "elite" missions that only the best of the best (aka our party) are sent to handle. In that adventure, they did things like shore up a broken barricade line, stop hill giant siege engines, put out fires caused by a dragon, and eventually face off with the enemy general's elite strike at the heart of the leadership. Each one of those missions would be impacted possibly by prior successes (e.g. the enemy might have ghost lions in one battle if the PCs did not sever that alliance), and each of those missions carried a benefit and consequence.

The success of the PCs at each juncture, including leading up to the finale, would give them some form of battle points. Low enough and the city falls, the populace is enslaved. Above that might be city is taken but a large part of the people escape, above that city holds but with heavy casualties (major NPCs or services lost), and the top level is success with minimal losses, enemy in full flight.

Thus, even if the PCs accomplish all their siege missions, if they didn't do anything pre-siege, didn't get any allies and so forth, it won't be enough.

I say all this AFTER having tried 3x to run some form of mass warfare rules in 5E (Pathfinder rules, Battlesystem AD&D rules, Colville's Stronghold and Followers rules). Mass warfare just hasn't translated well.

1. The rules are generally too complex with too many options, and players get overwhelmed with something they won't be using possibly ever again. Eyes glaze over and the DM, who spent days learning the system, is essentially playing a game with his or her self.
2. They often won't involve everyone doing something, especially if #1 isn't good (usually one player is calling the shots, and it's not all that fun to simply be a dice monkey rolling a d20 every once in awhile for them).
3. It doesn't involve the players, who should be the focus of the story.

 

[Li Shenron]

I've been trying to wrap my head around how to run a game where the party is involved on the battlefield with hundreds of Orcs and Humanoids are running around all over the place and how to determine the ebb and flow of the battle. How many soldiers/orcs die each round? How to decide if the party is directly targeted? When is morale for each army decided to see if they retreat/surrender?

It's very difficult...

You're probably going to have to fake a few things because combat rules are not meant for mass battles and the PCs will just die if you force them to fight against too many foes without resting.

On the other hands the BECMI War Machine rules or rules from miniature games are meant for armies and that means they don't care about individuals and don't support PCs well. They are good however if you want your players in control of the armies, rather than their PCs: you could narrate that the PCs are on the ground with their armies but their abilities aren't directly usable (they are implicitly assumed by the army statistics) and if they lose the battle they will suffer some penalty or drawback, possibly including death.

In between however, you could have cut-scenes where one or more PCs have a direct confrontation with an important foe, and play it out normally.

If you want instead your players to control the PCs as usual for the whole battle, you must at least handwave the standard combat structure a bit. You just can't have turns for the PCs and the monsters as usual or it will be tedious and deadly...

(a) If the battle is between lots of allies and lots of foes, you certainly don't want everyone to have turns: have turns only for foes directly confronting PCs, and let everyone else remain part of the scenery (your allies are keeping most foes busy). (b) If it's between the PCs only and a horde of critter, also in this case only grant a turn to foes at the front, and consider the others blocked.

Definitely use much weaker foes than the PCs (even default to 1hp each so you don't need to roll damage), and speed everything up by giving some advantage to the PCs, for example: ditch action economy and let a PC keep taking actions until failed (or some max is reached). This also lets PCs take on a much larger amount of foes than normal, obviously don't grant normal XPs for them.

What still remains to be determined is, in the case (a) above is how much the success of the PCs can influence the total outcome of the mass battle, since they are not supposed to win it by themselves. You need to make something up! Maybe set a goal such as "reach 100 kills in X round to turn the tide of the battle". This also brings back the idea of cut scenes ("one of you must kill the enemy captain") or specific targets within or between fights ("you must breach the castle doors / destroy the catapult / blow their gunpowder reserve").

 

[aco175]

I had a DM back in 2e days just use a few set encounters amid the larger battle. Your 10th level PCs wander along the eastern flank of the battle killing a few bands of goblins and orcs with little resistance. You see a siege tower with 2 trolls at the top being wheeled to the wall and a outpost hill with several warriors from your side being in the process of being cut off from being able to retread. A squad of ogres are bearing down upon them. What do you do?

Allow areas and time to pull back and heal or rest before another assault and let the players describe how they go through the smaller bad guys looking for the moments that may change the whole battle.

 

[cbwjm]

I did a battle not too long ago. I essentially created an attack bonus for the party's side and an AC for the opponents side with the check determining how things were going in the overall battle. I created these from things like defensive emplacements, outnumbering the opponent, etc., which provided a bonus.

Then I had targets of opportunity that the party could attack like siege weapons, ogres, giants, fire priests. After each encounter a player would roll for the army against the enemy AC to determine the change in the overall battle. If they won their encounter within 3 rounds they had advantage on the roll.

I had some random things happen as well using a list which included things like a random spell hitting the area, more troops, or an ogre charging through the encounter and trampling anyone in its path.

The final battle against the general was also altered depending on which targets of opportunity had been wiped out. At least it was meant to, I had a lot to think about when running and may have forgotten this bit. Once the general was down, a final war roll determined how badly defeated the enemy were, I think when I tallied up the casualties, the enemy army was more or less scattered to the wind.

I also added in another type of rest, the breather. This let everyone spend a single hit die after the encounter since they were in the think of things bouncing between encounters and had no time for short or long rests.

 

[overgeeked]

If you want to have there be dice and randomness in your war, you can easily use any edition of D&D as written to handle large-scale battles. You simply have to reverse one of the basic premises of the game. That one mini (or stat block) represents one character. Instead of one mini is one character, make it one mini is 10, 25, 50, 100, or 1000 characters. Keep all the numbers the same. Hit points don't go up. Keep the math, bonuses, rolls, etc all the same. To keep things balanced against each other. Just scale everything up the same. If you're going for 1:100 scale (1 mini/stat block = 100 characters) be sure that everything is on the same scale. Use the rules as written. Movement. Attacks. Hits. Damage. Saves. It's all there. You simply narrate the difference in scale. Instead of the orc attacks the goblin, it's the battalion of orcs attacks the battalion of goblins.

 

[reelo]

I usually set the "default" result of a battle(...)

What, you don't leave the overall outcome up to the dice? Madness!

 

[Werehamster]

I also added in another type of rest, the breather. This let everyone spend a single hit die after the encounter since they were in the think of things bouncing between encounters and had no time for short or long rests.

I love this idea, and may even use it for dungeon crawling as well. Thanks!

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I've never known players who join in to play D&D so that they can play mass-combat battles of armies-versus-armies instead of the personal exploits of their PC and immediate companions. D&D isn't well-suited to playing out large-scale warfare and when it DOES veer into that, it works best when it VERY carefully remains nonetheless focused on the actions of the PC's, NOT ARMIES that are clashing around them. When PC's are involved in massed battles it's the PC's personal exploits that matter for playing out at the game table. Results of armies tearing each other apart beyond the view of the PC's is something only needing to be described to players.

At best, when PC's of their own volition become commanders of armies and give up devoting game time to their characters and instead want to play their armies, then the game has come full circle back to its ORIGINS. It's not just up to the DM at that point, but everyone at the table needs to help decide how you are all going to handle it as a group, because honestly you ARE all now playing a different game than what D&D is built to be. Just my personal experience and opinion.

 

[aco175]

You can have a side night where you hand out some NPCs involved in the defense of the wall and have them come under assault like in the Two Towers. Give them a few minor victories and then have the BBEG come and kill them with some cool power. The players will not want to kill him and learn about a cool power he has. Maybe the NPCs are in the basement and the bad guys teleport or tunnel in. The next week opens with the PCs hearing rumors about a breach in the basement.

 

[cbwjm]

I love this idea, and may even use it for dungeon crawling as well. Thanks!

Glad you like it. My friend's really enjoyed it and one even used the general system in the game he runs for his kids. I was a little worried about it as I knew I had this upcoming battle and I spent weeks trying to figure out how I'd run it. I'd thought of using so many different systems from the old battle system in the BECMI rules cyclopedia, to kingdoms & warfare, I even looked through various 3e and pathfinder books (not sure they had anything, but I was looking everywhere I could).

In the end, I took inspiration from BECMI and then added in the targets of opportunity to make the focus more on my players as their party, at the head of the army, fought their way through to the enemy general.