Advice/Ideas for Campaign

[jaxmthemirc]

Well to put it bluntly, I am not an experienced DM at all. This would be the first attempt I have made. The group I will be running with are all experienced in both playing and DMing many types of RPG's. I decided to run a campaign after a few of them were wanting to play certain races/classes to which the DM said no he would not be allowing it. So I came up with the idea where I would run a "Sandbox" style campaign. Here are some of the rules for it.
Starting level 20
800,000 GP for armor etc.
Large size and smaller
All Races/Classes can be pulled from any Official D&D 3.5E Book but must be approved first (These guys come up with some ridiculous game-breakers sometimes). No OGL stuff.

The general idea was to have this game as a fall-back for times when 1 or 2 people can't attend the session, so we instead run this more arcade style game.
I will be keeping all the characters that they make as well, and inserting them as random encounters during different scenarios.

So with that in mind, I am wanting to run different themes for it, for example, Humanoids, Giants, Monsters, Evil, Underwater, etc etc. Mainly just to be able to try out alot of the things that we never do in our normal games.

The current theme, which I am looking for advice/ideas on is this -
Mass-Scale battles
Characters are made, and based on their race/class, they will have an army at their command. The "Elite Guards" will be higher level NPC's similar to the character's class, yet significantly weaker of course. Then they will have normal Infantry based on their race, cannon fodder for the most part.
The character will be playing evil type monsters, bent on conquering the world. I will be DMing the good dwarf/elf/human/other races to fight against them, mainly defensive.
For example-
One player is wanting to run as a Troll Rock-Thrower. His Elite Guard will be weaker Troll Rock Throwers. His infantry will consist of Goblins, the Officers for the units will be a lower level Troll.

The problem I am facing, is this campaign is supposed to be a progressive one, building up to the final assault on the very heavily fortified stronghold. The progression will be starting off smaller, say they first attack a series of outposts and gold mines. They then can use these mines to fund upgrading their armies, more training, or simply to recruit mercenaries and other units to add to their army strength.
Since none of them have ever played any mass-scale campaigns, they aren't knowledgeable of all the rules, variations and encounter systems for it.

My main issue was to see if there was a book/site that had pre-built templates for the strongholds, outposts and other scenarios that I can use for this. I really don't want to take the time having to prepare every single outpost they are going to come across, I don't want to just use the same one over and over because that would get a bit boring. But I really wouldn't have the time to sit down and keep making them and keep the game on track as well.

So if anyone has any thoughts, ideas, tips, references or anything that might be useful to this style of campaign, please drop a post and let me know =]

Thanks!

PS- I have read up on Heroes of Battle, Strongholder Builder and Miniature Guide. Just wondering if there were other books that have more types of Siege ammunition/enhancements

 

[jaxmthemirc]

Well, im planning on starting all this on Saturday, not gotten any replies. Is this in the wrong spot, or just simply noone has any ideas? =/

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well to put it bluntly, I am not an experienced DM at all. This would be the first attempt I have made. The group I will be running with are all experienced in both playing and DMing many types of RPG's. I decided to run a campaign after a few of them were wanting to play certain races/classes to which the DM said no he would not be allowing it. So I came up with the idea where I would run a "Sandbox" style campaign. Here are some of the rules for it.
Starting level 20
800,000 GP for armor etc.
Large size and smaller
All Races/Classes can be pulled from any Official D&D 3.5E Book but must be approved first (These guys come up with some ridiculous game-breakers sometimes). No OGL stuff.

The general idea was to have this game as a fall-back for times when 1 or 2 people can't attend the session, so we instead run this more arcade style game.
I will be keeping all the characters that they make as well, and inserting them as random encounters during different scenarios.

So with that in mind, I am wanting to run different themes for it, for example, Humanoids, Giants, Monsters, Evil, Underwater, etc etc. Mainly just to be able to try out alot of the things that we never do in our normal games.

The current theme, which I am looking for advice/ideas on is this -
Mass-Scale battles
Characters are made, and based on their race/class, they will have an army at their command. The "Elite Guards" will be higher level NPC's similar to the character's class, yet significantly weaker of course. Then they will have normal Infantry based on their race, cannon fodder for the most part.
The character will be playing evil type monsters, bent on conquering the world. I will be DMing the good dwarf/elf/human/other races to fight against them, mainly defensive.
For example-
One player is wanting to run as a Troll Rock-Thrower. His Elite Guard will be weaker Troll Rock Throwers. His infantry will consist of Goblins, the Officers for the units will be a lower level Troll.

The problem I am facing, is this campaign is supposed to be a progressive one, building up to the final assault on the very heavily fortified stronghold. The progression will be starting off smaller, say they first attack a series of outposts and gold mines. They then can use these mines to fund upgrading their armies, more training, or simply to recruit mercenaries and other units to add to their army strength.
Since none of them have ever played any mass-scale campaigns, they aren't knowledgeable of all the rules, variations and encounter systems for it.

My main issue was to see if there was a book/site that had pre-built templates for the strongholds, outposts and other scenarios that I can use for this. I really don't want to take the time having to prepare every single outpost they are going to come across, I don't want to just use the same one over and over because that would get a bit boring. But I really wouldn't have the time to sit down and keep making them and keep the game on track as well.

So if anyone has any thoughts, ideas, tips, references or anything that might be useful to this style of campaign, please drop a post and let me know =]

Thanks!

PS- I have read up on Heroes of Battle, Strongholder Builder and Miniature Guide. Just wondering if there were other books that have more types of Siege ammunition/enhancements

First of all, welcome to the boards!

Second, as a self-proclaimed "(in)experienced DM" this sounds like a fairly ambitious project to take on. High level games are very different from low-level ones in almost every respect, and can be tricky for even experienced DMs to control.

However, don't let me dissuade you completely.

Were I in your position, instead of running a high-level, mass-combat RPG campaign, I'd treat this as more like a combat minis game like Chainmail/DDM, Confrontation, HeroClix or Warhammer (to name but a few). Make some PCs and some mooks and just run some big nutty combats. Then the next time you play, try different combos.

 

[irdeggman]

Also welcome,

I echo the concerns of a novice GM attempting to run an epic level campaign.

All character advancement would folow the epic level rules - which require a lot of DM work to integrate, not for the light of heart or those with notlimited time to prepare for the game.

There are several books out there for mass combat rules, albeit 3rd party - WotC (Wizards of the Coast) never put out any real good rules on mass combat, although the DMG II had some "mob" rules.

Cry Havoc is a great one.

Fields of Blood is another.

You can also try the mass combat rules from Birthright (see the link on my sig for the web site) as a starting point for a different method.

 

[Haxor295]

First of all, welcome to the boards!

Second, as a self-proclaimed "(in)experienced DM" this sounds like a fairly ambitious project to take on. High level games are very different from low-level ones in almost every respect, and can be tricky for even experienced DMs to control.

However, don't let me dissuade you completely.

Were I in your position, instead of running a high-level, mass-combat RPG campaign, I'd treat this as more like a combat minis game like Chainmail/DDM, Confrontation, HeroClix or Warhammer (to name but a few). Make some PCs and some mooks and just run some big nutty combats. Then the next time you play, try different combos.

what is it with new DM's trying hard stuff first? =D

 

[jaxmthemirc]

Awesome, I will check out those books. I myself am willing to reference third-party books when it comes to stats for armies and things like that, but I don't want the characters making any from them due to some of the ridiculous classes they have in there.

I have not DMed, but am pretty familiar with the system. Frankly I did not think a mass battle was going to be as hard as it is turning out to be! We were going to start my DMing expierence with doing mini quests, like go to this cave and fight this big monster. No XP/Loot to worry about, just a thing to get me familiar with running, and to let them play the things they wanted.
With them being level 20, I have decided to make them non-epic. So if for some reason they managed to get into the stage to take epic feats, they couldn't. It would just be normal level progression.

They did say they wanted to do the whole attacking smaller outposts and working their way up to the big stronghold that I have been designing. Only problem is, they are going to be starting off with some pretty strong armies as well which could just roll right over all these outposts. The main point for that is to at least get a taste of how to run it, and maybe give them a chance to increase their army strength.

As for running the battles, I was thinking of simply representing each of their armies with several minitaures. Breaking it down to the Platoon level and making a cumulative statistics for them all. Each time an attack that does enough damage to kill one of them, I will roll a percentile to see if it was one of their officers, which they would then take a morale hit if it was. And the Platoon itself will lose X amount of troops each time it takes X amount of damage.
These are just the ideas I have come up with in my head as to how to efficiently manage it all. But I shall go read those books now to get more info!

I will be posting the stats for the stronghold when it is finished. Maybe you guys could review it and tell me what I can do to improve it and smooth out the weaknesses. This last stronghold is going to be like the End-game for it, so I want it to be a really hard challenge!

So yea, thanks for the welcoming, thanks for the tips, and hope to see more ideas flowing!

 

[irdeggman]

I have not DMed, but am pretty familiar with the system. Frankly I did not think a mass battle was going to be as hard as it is turning out to be! We were going to start my DMing expierence with doing mini quests, like go to this cave and fight this big monster. No XP/Loot to worry about, just a thing to get me familiar with running, and to let them play the things they wanted.
With them being level 20, I have decided to make them non-epic. So if for some reason they managed to get into the stage to take epic feats, they couldn't. It would just be normal level progression.

Do you have the xp progression formula?

The PHB tables stop at level 20.

Also there is no advancement for base classes beyound level 20 either.

Many issues with starting at level 20.

They did say they wanted to do the whole attacking smaller outposts and working their way up to the big stronghold that I have been designing. Only problem is, they are going to be starting off with some pretty strong armies as well which could just roll right over all these outposts. The main point for that is to at least get a taste of how to run it, and maybe give them a chance to increase their army strength.

As for running the battles, I was thinking of simply representing each of their armies with several minitaures. Breaking it down to the Platoon level and making a cumulative statistics for them all. Each time an attack that does enough damage to kill one of them, I will roll a percentile to see if it was one of their officers, which they would then take a morale hit if it was. And the Platoon itself will lose X amount of troops each time it takes X amount of damage.
These are just the ideas I have come up with in my head as to how to efficiently manage it all. But I shall go read those books now to get more info!

I will be posting the stats for the stronghold when it is finished. Maybe you guys could review it and tell me what I can do to improve it and smooth out the weaknesses. This last stronghold is going to be like the End-game for it, so I want it to be a really hard challenge!

So yea, thanks for the welcoming, thanks for the tips, and hope to see more ideas flowing!

Most of the sources I referenced have "units" for troops, which would be represented by a single counter.

The Birthright info (free by the way and considered "official" since it was produced by an "official" fansite for the Birthright Campaign Setting) has troops with units of 200 members.

If I recall correctly Cry Havoc uses a size of about 20 and Fields of Blood has about 100.

Each unit has a stat block of their own.

 

[Anaesthesia]

A couple of sessions ago, one of the players in my game came across a "Control Undead" scroll..then came across a legion of undead.

What I did was use the Company scale from the Black Company Campaign setting (located here). Each PC was attached to a squad of men and the sorcerer who found the scroll attached himself to the entire platoon. Since I didn't have the exact rules with me at the time, initiative went like this: Sorcerer went first (and could direct the rest of the party to attack where) then rest of the party went as usual.

Black Company also has statistics for Army Scale. I don't remember what exactly about it is different from the Company scale, but could possibly effect initiative and how many orders the captain can give.

One thing about the Company scale is hierarchy (and especially if you are using the Command Skills/Advantage from BCCS) and who is command. One is to have a "default" commander. Another is to rotate the position, for instance, PC 1 is great on open fields and as a [whatever class] can use the open terrain to their advantage, but PC 2 is great for commanding battles against large fortresses, and ranged techniques etc.