Major battle Options

[Anavel Gato]

I am looking for some options on how to carry out a full-scale invasion of my PC's homeland. I have the armies, the stats, divisions and plan on having PC's as members and generals of these divisions.

I am however at a lose on how to run this. I was wondering if any of you have some advice or perhaps have done such a thing.
I have AEG's book WAR, but it really didn't give a great explaniation of how to go about it. It gave some interesting ideas like +2 bonus for armies with so many PC's etc.

Let me know what you guys think.

thanks

 

[Tom Cashel]

We used to use TSR's Battlesystem. It's actually quite good, and would probably work pretty well with 3E.

You'd have to find it on E-bay or at some other out-of-print RPG seller, though.

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Here is how I handle it...

I have a table based loosely on the "War Machine" from the oD&D "Champions" blue box. I use the CR rating for all the creatures instead of hit dice and whatnot. I then factor in the PC's leadership score (they all have one for war purposes) in the CHA/WIS/INT/LEVEL calculation for the leaders. The test made is Knowlege(War) which I let fighters, paladins, and barbarians get as a class skill.

Now, the leaders of both sides can "call out" the other one for one-on-one combat. The winner gets a +5 to his base score and the loser doesn't get to use the leadership score. If one person doesn't accept the "call out" then the other person wins by default and gets +3 and the loser gets a -3 penalty.

I've only used it once and it doesn't cover a plethora of situations. Frankly, I think my players would have rather played Warhammer instead. =/

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

the best battle system I've seen was in the old Roll and Keep version of Legend of the Five Rings.

It lacked something for determining the actual battle, but was brilliant at giving you a narrative from the PCs perspective.

You could probably translate it into DnD terms really easily since it mostly dealt with pretty general story events.

It worked sort of like a random encounter/flow-chart/storyboard.

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Oh, and then there's this:

http://www.montecook.com/mpress_Havoc.html

The PDF is apparently going to come out in a month or so.

 

[Angcuru]

Whatever you do, you absolutely MUST use an actual battle system. A little ways back in my current game, my party was leading any army comprised mostly of dwarves to go and do battle with Demon Elves in the underdark. There were about 700 soldiers on either side. But the DM had NO idea what he was doing. Lo and Behold, the battle was over in LITERALLY 30 seconds. No rolling, he just decides that our army gets whooped no matter what we do, and decides that 1400 combatants(approx, not including important NPCs or PCs) fighting in an area about 100 ft. wide.........finish the fight in 6 rounds. This is just WRONG.

Especially taking into account that our army was taken down that fast even though we had a lot of dwarven runecannons(mortars, cannons, gatling guns, etc.), lotsa fire-ball tossing mages, one out of every 7 soldiers was Elite, among other things. The drow rip-offs had swords and a mage or two, with a few elites. And we still loose horribly. I don't know what the DM was thinking when he thought that deciding the outcome of the battle off the top of his head without taking anything into account was a good idea. If we ever get into a large-scale battle again, and he does something similar, I'm leaving the game.

After this fiasco, I was tempted to add Favored Enemy: DM to my Ranger's list.

For the sake of your players, man, USE A BATTLE SYSTEM!!!

 

[Anavel Gato]

thanks all. I will look at these and I have a birthright box set, perhaps I can use also (though it might be to simplistic--calvary, infantry, archers---what about special units)...