how to do mass/army battle quick?

[BlackMoria]

Play out the battle concerning her location and any foes and allies in the immediate area.

Handwave the rest of the battle with descriptions of how the battle is unfolding. Make it up with a eye to making the battle dramatic and cinematic. Her fate becomes her small forces fate. If she does well, describe how her forces is doing well and pushing back the enemy. If she struggles during her little piece of the battle, describe how the battle around her is uncertain and brutal. Obviously, if she is losing, describe how her small army is being pushed back, casualties are heavy and it looks like her army is about to rout off the field of battle.

Win or lose, you can give the number of casualties at the end of the battle. Just make it up the number of dead and wounded based on how you want the story to unfold (ie. if you want her to continue using her forces, make the overall casualties light. If you don't want her tromping around the country with a small army, make the casualties heavy, which should give her pause as to what to do with her depleted army.

You don't have to play out large battles like a war game. Just make it up and have the battle unfold how you want for your overall story and the right amount of dramatic tension to make it exciting.

 

[tx7321]

We did large battles the same as small, just devided by 10 or what have you. So say you had 20 henchmen, 6 PCs and 200 orc, 10 ogers, 20 bandits and 1 evil MU. We'd have each PC go, then most likely devide by 10, so role twice for 0 level henchmen, then twice for the bandits, and probably devide 20 into the 200 orcs for 10 roles, and probably 5 into the ogers for 2 rolls. And then the MU (so a total of 6+2=8 for the good guys, and 2+10+2+1=15 roles for the bad guys for a total of 23 roles min. a round. Yikes. That doesn't sound very helpful. But if you role it out like that its alot of fun (esp. if you get your change out and actually place them on the table, pennies for orcs etc.).

 

[rossik]

So a unit of 20 0-level men-at-arms with long swords (dmg 1d8 (avg. 4.5) x 20 = 90) QUOTE]


okokok...im geting..but why 4,5 is the avarege for 1d8?
wasnt supose to be half? like, 4,0?

 

[Machiavelli]

You can't roll a 0.

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 = 36

36 / 8 = 4.5

Or, if you don't like doing lots of addition:

1+8 = 2+7 = 3+6 = 4+5 = 9

9*4 = 36

36 / 8 = 4.5

Or, graphically:

Lowest                       Mid                       Highest  
  1       2       3       4  4.5  5       6       7       8

 

[rossik]

You can't roll a 0.

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 = 36

36 / 8 = 4.5

math is devil work!!!

...ok. now i got it..

 

[Shades of Green]

I recall that the 2E Castle Guide had something along these lines... I've downloaded it from WotC when it was available for free (IIRC it still is), so I'll look through it again.

Also, Classic Traveller has a very simple mass-combat system (in its Book 4: Mercenary), though you'd have to fudge it a little to add D20 class levels and/or CLs.

 

[Li Shenron]

I ran super-simple mass combat as such...

150 armed peasants (+0 to hit) vs. 75 goblin warriors (+2 to hit)

PCs take actions normally. At end of round roll for the mass combat.

D20+0 for peasants (say you get a 13 on your roll, for a total of 13)
D20_2 for the goblins (say you get a 13 on your roll, for a total of 15)
15-13=2 dead peasants.
Repeat each round until the battle is over (Usually due to actions of the PCs)

DS

I like this approach a lot!

I don't think it's worth running mass battles unless the PC have a chance to affect them. But in that case I'd like to keep rolls at a very minimum, so your idea seems good enough for me. Players can participate by either killing many small opponents as fast as possible (thus reducing the number of the enemy army quickly) or by focusing on the elite units, in which case it could become simply a regular PC vs NPC combat, just in the middle of a battlefield instead of a dungeon.

 

[greywulf]

I wrote something about Mass Combat Made Easy a while back.

Basically, if the opponents have roughly the same numbers just treat it as combat between one of each troop type. In other words, treat a battle between 100 commoners and 100 goblins as a battle between 1 commoner and 1 goblin.

If there's an imbalance, then there's a combat scale to set the ratio of the damage. 80 commoners against 100 goblins would take roughly a third again more damage, and likely not survive.

It worked well for us, at least.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

There's also the Battlesystem(TM), but I'd hesitate to recommend it.

 

[tx7321]

Greywulf: "Basically, if the opponents have roughly the same numbers just treat it as combat between one of each troop type. In other words, treat a battle between 100 commoners and 100 goblins as a battle between 1 commoner and 1 goblin.

If there's an imbalance, then there's a combat scale to set the ratio of the damage. 80 commoners against 100 goblins would take roughly a third again more damage, and likely not survive. "


We tried something like this long ago. The problem with this system is that if both sides are low HD with similar ACs (say 1 HD vs 1 HD) the first monster class to hit could easily wipe out the otherside with one good damage role. This seems highly improbable with those numbers (100vs100). Thats why we broke it into units (so instead of 1 role per side we'd use 5 (representing groups of 20). This is still quick and results in heavy casualties on both sides usually.