Mass Combat/ Warfare?
- Thread starter HeapThaumaturgist
- Start date
MarauderX
Explorer
You just missed this thread on the subject of Fields of Blood. It's a release that deals with mass combat, running kingdoms, and having your PCs as rulers. It should be a great product and I have been long anticipating it, but don't have it yet.
HeapThaumaturgist
First Post
Hrm. Fields of Blood LOOKS interesting.
My eventual goal was to have the PCs gain power in or become the local government. That might model it well. Then again having a release date of September that hasn't been updated yet and it's already October is a little distressing.
Cry Havoc is already out as a PDF which means they can't exactly screw up the Oct. 20 release date. The book is already DONE.
With Fields of Blood I could go ahead and start my game, get around to when I'd be needing to integrate the war rules, and ... no book.
Gah.
--fje
My eventual goal was to have the PCs gain power in or become the local government. That might model it well. Then again having a release date of September that hasn't been updated yet and it's already October is a little distressing.
Cry Havoc is already out as a PDF which means they can't exactly screw up the Oct. 20 release date. The book is already DONE.
With Fields of Blood I could go ahead and start my game, get around to when I'd be needing to integrate the war rules, and ... no book.
Gah.
--fje
Vaxalon
First Post
Fields of Blood is vaporware as far as I'm concerned. It has been pushed back and pushed back and pushed back until I'm totally disgusted with it.
I bought "Empire" from Alderac and I'm very satisfied with it so far. The system is scalable (three scales; barony, kingdom, empire) and simple, designed as an adjunct to play rather than a huge focus.
I also have Cry Havoc. It's magnificently detailed without being incomprehensible, but it's not particularly scalable and it doesn't include realm governance rules.
I bought "Empire" from Alderac and I'm very satisfied with it so far. The system is scalable (three scales; barony, kingdom, empire) and simple, designed as an adjunct to play rather than a huge focus.
I also have Cry Havoc. It's magnificently detailed without being incomprehensible, but it's not particularly scalable and it doesn't include realm governance rules.
Henry
Autoexreginated
I'll have to disagree with Vaxalon and suggest that Cry Havoc is EXACTLY what you asked for.
It contains three scales, all interrelated with one another.
1) personal scale, which is the D&D rules you already know
2) unit scale, which lets you pit units of 100 - 200 creatures on a side against each other, using a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio, complete with "hero challenges" (like when 2 enemy commanders meet on the battlefield), and rules for leaderless units
3) finally, it contains Army Rules for engagements of hundreds to thousands of troops. The third level is more number crunch heavy, but contains complete rules for computing the strength of each side, and a heavy amount of cutomiation of the resolution, where the entire war can be decided in a couple of die rolls, or you can even a month-by-month or day-by-day evaluation of the war.
I demoed it at Gencon (by Skip Himself
) , and it's pretty sweet!
...Er, excuse me, "it highly objectifies in my opinion the kind of system you described."
My fanboyishness will now return to normal levels.
It contains three scales, all interrelated with one another.
1) personal scale, which is the D&D rules you already know
2) unit scale, which lets you pit units of 100 - 200 creatures on a side against each other, using a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio, complete with "hero challenges" (like when 2 enemy commanders meet on the battlefield), and rules for leaderless units
3) finally, it contains Army Rules for engagements of hundreds to thousands of troops. The third level is more number crunch heavy, but contains complete rules for computing the strength of each side, and a heavy amount of cutomiation of the resolution, where the entire war can be decided in a couple of die rolls, or you can even a month-by-month or day-by-day evaluation of the war.
I demoed it at Gencon (by Skip Himself
) , and it's pretty sweet!...Er, excuse me, "it highly objectifies in my opinion the kind of system you described."
My fanboyishness will now return to normal levels.
diaglo said:
I second the recommendation for the CS War Machine for abstract combat without minis; it allows for quick resolution of arbitrarily large battles - I've used it for battles with over 200,000 troops on each side. Some of the Basic Force Rating calculations may need redoing for 3e, IMO - the bulk of a BFR in War Machine for most units seems to come from training, and the actual power of the troops is downplayed. Numerical superiority is also perhaps less important than it should be - eg 1.5:1 superiority gives only +15 to the d100 roll, 2:1 gives +30 - it's quite easy for a much larger army to be defeated by a smaller one even when troop quality is similar. According to eg Clausewitz a 2:1 superiority on a level battlefield should pretty much guarantee victory where troops and tactics are similar. Most D&D combat though is between very disparate troop types (unlike Clausewitz's 19th century Europe) so this doesn't come up too often, and the War Machine does give intuitively satisfying results with a single roll - for modelling eg Lucullus vs the Armenians at Tigranocerta (Roman legions beat army 10-20 times bigger) it's probably better than most systems which tend to give priority to weight of numbers.
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