D&D Miniatures handbook and how easy is it to integrate?

[Jonny Reload]

I've been looking over "Cry Havoc" and the reviews for Fields of Blood and I'm really pumped to run a "Kingdom Campaign" (Just like Birthright) and these books seem perfect for my ideas but I was also curious of trying to incorperate miniatures. Now D&D is already fine with using it's regular rules to incorperate it into miniature format... For just individual units but when it comes to units or armies thats when things get a little difficult. But when I was browsing through the D&D Miniatures book it just looked like a completely different game. Like there were different classes, rules for fighting, etc... It just seems like it couldn't be incorperated into a regular D&D game (That and trying to excuse the fact that your 3rd level fighter has a beholder fighting along side him when you start tallying up points for a battle force.)

ANYWAY, has anyone had experience (Good or bad) with incorperating the D&D Miniatures book into their campaign setting or any other systems that would handle big scale warfare via miniatures?

 

[MerricB]

The Miniatures Handbook is a book of many parts.

The additional D&D rules aren't actually necessary for running the mass combats. New classes such as the Marshal are there for two reasons:
a) to provide you with new options in a D&D RPG
b) to provide a source for some special abilities in the D&D Miniatures Skirmish game.

The rules for Mass Combat using the D&D Miniatures rules are in three chapters - the actual Mass Combat Rules chapter, the Skirmish Rules chapter (which gives some basic concepts) and the Stat Cards chapter (which has guidelines for converting characters/monsters to the simplified DDM format).

I'm not entirely happy with the mass combat rules because of the scale - they're 1:1. The actual rules are fairly solid and are basically a simplified regular D&D system with a few additional rules covering
* Formations and units
* Commanders
* Magic and Special Abilities in mass combat

Cheers!

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

Can a large scale combat be run using the MHB rules WITHOUT Minis?

 

[MerricB]

Can a large scale combat be run using the MHB rules WITHOUT Minis?

In theory, yes. The miniatures are meant to be placed on trays, after all, and a few glass beads or other token to represent surviving forces would work...

However, it isn't an abstract system by any means.

I'll be interested to see if Battlefield Adventurers has such an abstract system.

Cheers!

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

Abstract is what I'm interested in. I'm not a big user of mini's, and neither is my group. I'm currently going over the mass combat rules from Birthright 3e to see if those suit my tastes.