Heroes of Battle
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JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Heroes of Battle
Written by David Noonan, Will McDermott, Stephen Schubert
Published by Wizards of the Coast
160 full color pages
ISBN: 0-7869-3668-X
$29.95
Heroes of Battle is the first in a new line of ‘Heroes’ books that takes different elements of the traditional D&D game and adds them. For example, Heroes of Horror is on the horizon. Heroes of Battle focuses on the actions that players can take during wartime and how such elements can be added without becoming a war game. It’s also one of the first books to take into effect the new price structure.
Heroes of Battle is 160 full color pages. Now that’s not terrible compared to some other third party books where their black and white books at 160 pages, but compared to their past books like Races of Eberron, it’s a huge price increase as it drops 32 pages. What’s worse is that like some White Wolf books, there are multiple pages of advertisements, making it in effect a 157 page book. Count the traditional cover and credits page and well, the book’s getting smaller all the time. Like most WoTC books, it has no index, but does have a good table of contents.
To be honest, I didn’t get a lot out of this book. I’ve read through it several times, and unlike many other WoTC books, haven’t been inspired by it. It might be because the whole ‘War’ thing has been done in my campaign for years using inspiration from the novels of the Black Company and the manga/anime Berserk where the focus, despite some major combat and warfare, is on the characters.
In terms of systems, the book incorporates several micro-systems to represent different elements of combat. For example, we have group benefits. These require the ‘leader’ to have a higher degree of skill than those following him and the minions to have some of the skills.
We also have victory points. The players gain victory points for completing major goals and the GM compares the total number of VP that the characters earn against the total number possible that they could earn and influences the outcome of the battles based on that. It’s an interesting idea but it’s another subsystem to keep track of.
Same thing with recognition points. You gain these for completing specific goals like defeating notable enemies or capturing the enemy standard. You can spend these for things like decorations, which grant a bonus to NPC interaction and for promotions. Interesting, but really, isn’t there enough book keeping to begin with?
Other bits are useful for time pressed GMs as they present the reader with numerous NPC stats and organizations for different armies. For a book that’s supposed to be about the ‘Heroes’, that’s a lot of pages used to detail NPCs that are generally not going to be of any use to the players, especially as the book’s focus isn’t in fighting wars but in providing opportunities for heroics on the battlefield. Do I need an appendix with sample armies and another one with sample soldiers? Do I need to see that a ‘nature’ army would use things like druids and treants? No. They may be useful for other GMs who are looking for quick and generic army styles but they didn’t do a lot for me.
The mechanics didn’t move me either. Now the Miniatures Handbook has been robbed from numerous times in various books and to be honest, this book would’ve been great to bring forth the Marshal with his commanding auras and the Healer, as core classes. Instead, we get four five level PrCs. Now I’m one of those people that believes that more background information, as seen in recent WoTC products, with the PrCs is good. However, when the PrCs are of a fairly generic nature and are only five levels, do we really need multiple statted out NPCs for them? Do we need paragraphs of detail on how to become that PrC when it’s a combat medic? No.
The PrCs included here are as follows:
Combat Medic: They’re really good at healing and can even grant benefits to those they heal in addition to pure hit point recovery.
Dread Commando: Uh… okay, the ‘dread’ commando is in essence a specialized Scout from the Complete Adventurer.
Legendary Leader: This is a fairly solid class in that it’s almost good for any character class that wants to become a leader of men and would probably stack really well with the Marshal from the Miniature’s Handbook.
War Weaver: An interesting take on things as they can ‘weave’ non-combat spells like bulls strength into group effects so that the whole group is empowered by their spells.
They’re not bad, but certainly not up to part with some of those found in the Miniature’s Handbook. Where’s the Havoc Mage or the Tactical Soldier? Where are the PrCs that would actually make more sense for a combat team? Don’t misunderstand me, the Dread Commando for instance has some great potential for any player who wants to be like Wolverine in that they work best either alone or with other stealthy types.
I also didn’t find the feats too useful. Some more feats that give you access to useful skills are nice, but as players only have a certain number of feats in the first place, it seems to be trying to fill a hole in the game system as opposed to providing new utility as demonstrated by Black Company’s background rules or Grim Tale’s ability to pick some of your skills and let others be determined by your, yes, background. Why not provide some official background options for players involved in a war campaign as opposed to making them burn up precious feats?
So is there anything that I did like? Yes. The use of flow charts to help the GM control the flow of the characters in a wartime situation is great. Those who’ve followed some of my ravings on the En World message boards know that I thin that too many times in near open ended campaigns that publishers don’t use the flow chart enough. Here we get a few examples that include victory points. The bad thing though is that the authors have assumed that everyone knows what the different symbols mean and didn’t define them. Bad WoTC.
I also like the way they draw battlefield maps and provide a few examples of how the field changes from one day to the next. However, I think that they’re scale is way off. I can understand where they’re coming from, but now you get areas where siege engines are taking up like two hundred by four hundred feet of space. Otherwise it’s pretty good looking and is a good example.
I think that Chapter Three, Battlefield Encounters, also does a good job of providing the reader with numerous examples of how to use different elements of war time combat to add elements to his own game. These include little maps and scenarios with a lot of references to the new statted out creatures in this book for customized creatures, like ogre brutes, as well as the monster manual.
The new spells and magic items didn’t do a lot for me. Perhaps it’s my fondness for an old issue of dragon with an ice ram with a princess in it and rods that were used to destroy walls and towers, but the stuff here seems pale in comparison. Having said that, I do like the blast disc as they represent a logical progression in magical war. They are in essence land minds. We also get some others like Daern’s Instant Tent, not quite the fortress, but good enough for the field.
I think that the book is confused. It’s supposed to be Heroes of Battle, yet most of the book is of use to a GM. That’d be fine if it spent most of that time focusing on how to get the players into position as opposed to stats and obvious armies and if for those sections on player customization, it actually used something outside of over-detailed five level PrCs that thrived on the battlefield like those found in other books by many companies. While some find the lack of a mass combat system annoying, I’d be willing to bet we’ll see one in a future book as it’s own entity or that they’ll continue to rely on the one presented in Miniature’s Handbook.
For the time pressed GM, the sample encounters and customized monster stat blocks, can save you a load of time. For the Gm who likes mini-systems and doesn’t mind keeping track of them, the Victory Point and Recognition systems will add little bits to the game to make it more detailed.
Written by David Noonan, Will McDermott, Stephen Schubert
Published by Wizards of the Coast
160 full color pages
ISBN: 0-7869-3668-X
$29.95
Heroes of Battle is the first in a new line of ‘Heroes’ books that takes different elements of the traditional D&D game and adds them. For example, Heroes of Horror is on the horizon. Heroes of Battle focuses on the actions that players can take during wartime and how such elements can be added without becoming a war game. It’s also one of the first books to take into effect the new price structure.
Heroes of Battle is 160 full color pages. Now that’s not terrible compared to some other third party books where their black and white books at 160 pages, but compared to their past books like Races of Eberron, it’s a huge price increase as it drops 32 pages. What’s worse is that like some White Wolf books, there are multiple pages of advertisements, making it in effect a 157 page book. Count the traditional cover and credits page and well, the book’s getting smaller all the time. Like most WoTC books, it has no index, but does have a good table of contents.
To be honest, I didn’t get a lot out of this book. I’ve read through it several times, and unlike many other WoTC books, haven’t been inspired by it. It might be because the whole ‘War’ thing has been done in my campaign for years using inspiration from the novels of the Black Company and the manga/anime Berserk where the focus, despite some major combat and warfare, is on the characters.
In terms of systems, the book incorporates several micro-systems to represent different elements of combat. For example, we have group benefits. These require the ‘leader’ to have a higher degree of skill than those following him and the minions to have some of the skills.
We also have victory points. The players gain victory points for completing major goals and the GM compares the total number of VP that the characters earn against the total number possible that they could earn and influences the outcome of the battles based on that. It’s an interesting idea but it’s another subsystem to keep track of.
Same thing with recognition points. You gain these for completing specific goals like defeating notable enemies or capturing the enemy standard. You can spend these for things like decorations, which grant a bonus to NPC interaction and for promotions. Interesting, but really, isn’t there enough book keeping to begin with?
Other bits are useful for time pressed GMs as they present the reader with numerous NPC stats and organizations for different armies. For a book that’s supposed to be about the ‘Heroes’, that’s a lot of pages used to detail NPCs that are generally not going to be of any use to the players, especially as the book’s focus isn’t in fighting wars but in providing opportunities for heroics on the battlefield. Do I need an appendix with sample armies and another one with sample soldiers? Do I need to see that a ‘nature’ army would use things like druids and treants? No. They may be useful for other GMs who are looking for quick and generic army styles but they didn’t do a lot for me.
The mechanics didn’t move me either. Now the Miniatures Handbook has been robbed from numerous times in various books and to be honest, this book would’ve been great to bring forth the Marshal with his commanding auras and the Healer, as core classes. Instead, we get four five level PrCs. Now I’m one of those people that believes that more background information, as seen in recent WoTC products, with the PrCs is good. However, when the PrCs are of a fairly generic nature and are only five levels, do we really need multiple statted out NPCs for them? Do we need paragraphs of detail on how to become that PrC when it’s a combat medic? No.
The PrCs included here are as follows:
Combat Medic: They’re really good at healing and can even grant benefits to those they heal in addition to pure hit point recovery.
Dread Commando: Uh… okay, the ‘dread’ commando is in essence a specialized Scout from the Complete Adventurer.
Legendary Leader: This is a fairly solid class in that it’s almost good for any character class that wants to become a leader of men and would probably stack really well with the Marshal from the Miniature’s Handbook.
War Weaver: An interesting take on things as they can ‘weave’ non-combat spells like bulls strength into group effects so that the whole group is empowered by their spells.
They’re not bad, but certainly not up to part with some of those found in the Miniature’s Handbook. Where’s the Havoc Mage or the Tactical Soldier? Where are the PrCs that would actually make more sense for a combat team? Don’t misunderstand me, the Dread Commando for instance has some great potential for any player who wants to be like Wolverine in that they work best either alone or with other stealthy types.
I also didn’t find the feats too useful. Some more feats that give you access to useful skills are nice, but as players only have a certain number of feats in the first place, it seems to be trying to fill a hole in the game system as opposed to providing new utility as demonstrated by Black Company’s background rules or Grim Tale’s ability to pick some of your skills and let others be determined by your, yes, background. Why not provide some official background options for players involved in a war campaign as opposed to making them burn up precious feats?
So is there anything that I did like? Yes. The use of flow charts to help the GM control the flow of the characters in a wartime situation is great. Those who’ve followed some of my ravings on the En World message boards know that I thin that too many times in near open ended campaigns that publishers don’t use the flow chart enough. Here we get a few examples that include victory points. The bad thing though is that the authors have assumed that everyone knows what the different symbols mean and didn’t define them. Bad WoTC.
I also like the way they draw battlefield maps and provide a few examples of how the field changes from one day to the next. However, I think that they’re scale is way off. I can understand where they’re coming from, but now you get areas where siege engines are taking up like two hundred by four hundred feet of space. Otherwise it’s pretty good looking and is a good example.
I think that Chapter Three, Battlefield Encounters, also does a good job of providing the reader with numerous examples of how to use different elements of war time combat to add elements to his own game. These include little maps and scenarios with a lot of references to the new statted out creatures in this book for customized creatures, like ogre brutes, as well as the monster manual.
The new spells and magic items didn’t do a lot for me. Perhaps it’s my fondness for an old issue of dragon with an ice ram with a princess in it and rods that were used to destroy walls and towers, but the stuff here seems pale in comparison. Having said that, I do like the blast disc as they represent a logical progression in magical war. They are in essence land minds. We also get some others like Daern’s Instant Tent, not quite the fortress, but good enough for the field.
I think that the book is confused. It’s supposed to be Heroes of Battle, yet most of the book is of use to a GM. That’d be fine if it spent most of that time focusing on how to get the players into position as opposed to stats and obvious armies and if for those sections on player customization, it actually used something outside of over-detailed five level PrCs that thrived on the battlefield like those found in other books by many companies. While some find the lack of a mass combat system annoying, I’d be willing to bet we’ll see one in a future book as it’s own entity or that they’ll continue to rely on the one presented in Miniature’s Handbook.
For the time pressed GM, the sample encounters and customized monster stat blocks, can save you a load of time. For the Gm who likes mini-systems and doesn’t mind keeping track of them, the Victory Point and Recognition systems will add little bits to the game to make it more detailed.
Personally, I liked this book a lot. It's definitely a GM's book, so the title might be a bit misleading. I think the point of the book is to A, give GMs strategies for running "war as a dungeon" games and B, give DMs a quick lookup for military info. I think it accomplishes A very well, though more examples woulda been handy. I think it did OKAY at B, but missed a chance to really illuminate the way a military life could affect characters and such.
pdmiller
Explorer
Mass combat rules
Try Fields of Blood by Eden Studios, Archade. It's full of extra stuff you might not want to use, such as realm and resource management, but the combat mechanism is sound enough. It's messy converting critters to FoB format, but there are heaps of samples provided.
Try Fields of Blood by Eden Studios, Archade. It's full of extra stuff you might not want to use, such as realm and resource management, but the combat mechanism is sound enough. It's messy converting critters to FoB format, but there are heaps of samples provided.
As a point - I run a much lower magic setting than most.
I really, really like this book.
This is not a typical book filled with quasi exciting (and many times nearly corny) Prestige Classes and rouge type feats - it is a tool that, in my opinion, is written with the PHB and DM's guide in mind. It has a plethora of actual game play information for players and DM's (Especially for DM's). Among other things:
Even the magic items are "down to earth" and realistic (well as realistic as the game can be given the environment).
I really found almost eveything useful here.
I really, really like this book.
This is not a typical book filled with quasi exciting (and many times nearly corny) Prestige Classes and rouge type feats - it is a tool that, in my opinion, is written with the PHB and DM's guide in mind. It has a plethora of actual game play information for players and DM's (Especially for DM's). Among other things:
- The foundation of how to run a D&D Campaign within a war or adventure within a large or small scale battle (whether long or short term)
- How to fit your players into such an environment (or lure them in)
- The building blocks for creating NPC units and armies (both friend and foe) that are easy to use
- It provides you with a process and system for rewarding PC's within a military/war/battle environment
- Provides a multitude of information and alternative rules revolving around leadership (actual leadership on the battlefield and the leadership feat; separately and together)
- And most importantly (to me anyway): It provides systems by which to measure the success (or failure) of PC's within a larger battle or war; whether they are high level officers running the whole thing or 1st level privates. How to have a traditional adventure and easily manage the dozens or hundreds or thousands of units/NPC's that are doing things elsewhere in the war or battle. This allows me to randomly have kingdoms rise or fall and have a way to tell how much the PC's took part in that.
Even the magic items are "down to earth" and realistic (well as realistic as the game can be given the environment).
I really found almost eveything useful here.
JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Sounds like some people need to do some reviews of this book!
I always encourage readers to submit their own reviews so that others interested in the book can get as many opinions as possible.
I always encourage readers to submit their own reviews so that others interested in the book can get as many opinions as possible.
I was sort of expecting a 3.5 ed update to the old 1st/2nd ed Battlesystem rules. However, right in the introduction the book states that mass combat is not a role-playing gaming, it's war gaming. Hmmm. I guess I have to agree there.
I'm still reading it, but so far the book suggests designing something like 6 battlefield encounters per day, with 4-8 creatures per encounter. Their rationalle is that this allows PCs to really get involved (rather than just describe how they are moving their unit), and that after that many encounters hit points are probably low and spells are used up. I don't really see how this allows PCs to control units of 100+ creatures, but from what I've read so far, it doesn't. The DM has to decide in advance how unit-to-unit encounters are resolved, adjusting the result based upon the smaller-scale encounters of the PCs. Battlesystem was nice in that it gave DMs a die mechanic for handling encounters of 100+ creatures without having to just decide willy-nilly how things would turn out.
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