D&D 4E Mass Cinematic Combat in 4e - Would this work for you?

[Rhenny]

Hi all,

Once in a while during campaigns I've DMd in the past, I'd have the PCs get involved with a larger scale war or skirmish. Instead of using regular combat rules I always described the battle and attacked each PC a few times and allowed the PCs to attack or use their spells a few times. I think with 4e, I'm going to use the Skill Challenges idea to make the battle scene more than what I did for previous editions.

Basically, I'll run the battle like a skill challenge, but for every failure, a PC will take battle damage. If the PCs succeed in the skill challenge, then they will begin to push the enemy back or keep them at bay (if the PCs side is defending). If the PCs fail 3 times, their army must drop back and regroup. As DM, I'll decide how long the battle will ensue.

See the attached for details and let me know what you think, or if anyone else has another system he or she uses feel free to post. Thanks.

 

[Alex319]

The idea of using a "skill challenge" type mechanic to simulate mass combat is an interesting one, although it seems to fall prey to many of the same problems that plagued the core 4e skill challenge system.

For one thing, the mechanic where you lose by accumulating failures makes it so a character with a less-than-optimal bonus actually hurts their chances of winning, since the only way to lose is to roll failures. This would encourage such a character to stall for time - finding ways to avoid making checks (such as healing another player instead of making a check) so he won't get a failure - rather than actually trying to help the team.

Each "mass combat round" presumably represents a lot more than six seconds of battle time, so it might not be a good idea to make using a single standard action (or even a minor action!) replace an entire skill check. One possibility is to say that in each mass combat round characters can spend, say, one round worth of actions to do non-combat things (like heal people) in addition to making the skill check.

You should probably do something with action points and healing surges - like say that an action point can be used to reroll a check or that a player can burn a healing surge to get +2 to a roll. This would put mass combat encounters on a more even footing with normal combat encounters where players can spend resources to improve their chances, and would reduce situations where players feel they have no chance to win.

One more thing to taken into account while running this is that players will likely try to spam their best skills, because unlike in regular combat encounters, there are no differing amounts of damage or different status effects that might otherwise lead players to choose different options depending on the tactical situation. Of course, this problem can be mitigated by good DMing - if you describe the scenario adequately and only let players use skills if they can describe how they are using them.

It might be a good idea to take a look at Stalker0's Obsidian Skill Challenge System (it's just a couple pages down on this forum) and see how he dealt with the problems inherent in skill challenges, if you're designing your own skill challenge system.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

I've been pondering this idea for a few days, I plan to drop the PCs into a proper battlefield, currently I'm probably going to do it the way I've always done:- run encounters for the PCs and work out the result based on their success. However I'm tempted to adapt the old BECMI D&D's Warmachine system. I'm thinking of trimming down the stages and reducing everything down by a factor of five so I can use d20 for the rolls. The major addition I'll do is a way for allowing PC actions to add additional modifiers, possibly after the roll, so that they can see the result and then come up with ideas to help.

 

[Phoenix8008]

Wow, a very interesting idea! I gotta go read the whole writeup now and see the details, but the general idea is very appealing. The skill challenge system seems very versatile that way with lots of things it can cover with a little tweaking.