Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bryan Vining" data-source="post: 417384" data-attributes="member: 7628">A couple of thoughtsMass combat systems...  well, there's no doubt a need for them in RPGs.  Here's a few things that may help focus you.  First, you will absolutely have to figure out how to include the PCs (otherwise, why are spending time resolving the battle), and that means figuring out how to handle adventurers.  If you are also shooting for 3E compatibility, the obvious way to do this is to take into account that everyone has a level of something (even if its just commoner) in 3E.  The tricky part will be parlaying info like "this unit has 56 1st level commoners" into something that can be handled with one die roll (a d20 die roll, obviously).  Understand that you are basically going to be designing a game-within-a-game, kinda like blitzball in Final Fantasy X.  It's good to have a tie into the core system, but you're going to have to develop some things that D&D just isn't meant to handle and that won't be relevant outside the mass combat arena, since the focus of D&D is on individual characters (and that's how RPGs developed from wargames, after all).  Also, it would be well to heed the words of wisdom regarding complexity here.  My suggestion would be to start simple, and add complexity as options.  Last, if you haven't played any wargames, take the time to do so before you design.  These can help you get a feel for how people who are concentrated on handling wargames do it.  There are tons of things to consider.  For instance, do you use minis or not?  Using minis has obvious disadvantages: it's expensive and space consuming.  OTOH, if you don't use minis, then you will have to decide how to handle regulation of movement and distances between units.  Seems simple, but virtually every wargame that uses counters uses a hex grid for this very reason.  And if you don't use counters, what do you use?  How do you represent the space a unit takes up if you don't use counters or minis?  There are lots of challenges here.  By the way, if you're interested in having some collaborative help, I think I would enjoy working on this.  Drop me a line if you're interested.</blockquote>

Verification