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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 5982594" data-attributes="member: 1465">I've never tried to run a mass battle, but it would certainly be an interesting (occasional) addition to a campaign.From my point of view, I would expect a mass battle ruleset to provide me the ability to cover the following scenarios:A- the PCs participate into large-scale battle: they are soldiers or perhaps elite soldiers depending on their character level and their social status in the campaign; the players are playing their characters more or less in a similar way as in a regular adventure but are now immersed into a long and chaotic battle, they can directly affect the battle around them but not the battle as a whole (although they can provide some indirect effects to that)B- the PCs lead the large-scale battle: they are the commanders of the battle so they can affect the entire battle both by preparing/organizing the troops before it starts and by directing the tactics during the fight; presumably the characters are not only high in social ranks (to be in charge) but also are high level enough so that you can presume they won't easily be killed in action and therefore the players actually do not "run" their characters individually (even if they are present on the battlefield) but instead play a different game of controlling army units and choosing/changing battle-scale tactics during the battle; it might still happen an occasional duel in the middle of the large battle, against a similar elite member of the enemy army, in which case the player(s) resume playing her PC as normal and such mini-battle is handled with normal combat rulesI think new rules are definitely needed for scenario B, but scenario A might just be handled with modified combat rules.What I don't want is rules that reduce a mass battle into one (or a few) dice roll done by the DM. If I ever run a mass battle in D&D, I want the players to be engaged into actually doing something, and it cannot not be just rolling, it has to be making tactical decisions that will affect the outcome... just like a regular combat with rounds, but between units (and obviously longer rounds, or turns, although it should probably better work simultaneously, not with an initiative-like sequence). I want the players to have to decide things such as "let our archers shoot a first volley while the pikers in the front ready against charge" or "move the cavalry to the flank side of the battle" or "twenty knights with my Paladin will now focus on the enemy leader Ogre riding that dire elephant". This is essentially the scenario B.For scenario A, the best would be if how well the players play their "local" combat within the mass battle can have an effect on the whole battle's results, but this is not easy at all to design! First of all, it should be almost certain that the PCs won't all die in the battle (PCs death should probably have the same frequency of occurrence as in a regular adventure after all). This means you cannot just state that if the PCs survive then the war is won, if they get TPK then the was is lost. Other outcomes are possible, maybe one side retreats, maybe the PCs survive but their side is losing and so on. You might just as well let the DM predetermine the outcome and use no rules at all when the PCs are too low level. This is IMHO tricky and requires very good guidelines rather than hard-written rules.[bottom line] Overall, those rules should still be simple, at least in line with the average 5e complexity... roughly and fairly realistic but not simulationists. Since the rules for scenario B would be mostly detatched to the regular combat rules for single characters, a gaming group that wants a simulationist approach to mass battles can just find such rules in other games which already do a great job at that and use them in a D&D campaign with little problems.</blockquote>

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