Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana - The 5E "Battlesystem" Mass Combat Rules Are Here!

The mass combat rules have been posted in the latest Unearthed Arcana. "The D&D combat rules in the Player’s Handbook are designed to model conflict between small groups—an adventuring party of perhaps three to six characters against monster groups that rarely exceed a dozen creatures. Combat on this scale keeps the focus squarely on the adventurers. In some D&D campaigns, though, the story might hinge on battles involving dozens or hundreds of monsters and warriors. In this second installment of Unearthed Arcana, we build on the standard combat rules to model conflict on a much larger scale, allowing players and DMs to control whole armies. At the same time, these rules for mass combat allow individual adventurers to lead an army’s charge against an enemy regiment, rally dispirited soldiers to rejoin the fray, or defeat powerful enemy monsters or leaders."

Find it here! It's a 9-page PDF by Mike Mearls.

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[Reynard]

Interesting stuff but I prefer more abstract mass combat systems. The War machine rules from BECMI (and reprinted in the Rules Cyclopedia) is still the pinnacle of clean, fun mass combat design for D&D IMO.

 

[Mistwell]

I gave it a brief read, and it looks pretty good. Seems like it would run relatively quickly, while still involving a lot of the more interesting tactics of a wargame type scenario.

 

[Blackwarder]

I'm ambivalent, my main gripe is with the use of grid an minis, I understand that each square equale 20 FR and that it allows you to use the minis you already have but something feels off... I need to gork it more.

Warder

 

[I'm A Banana]

While minis combat isn't usually really my bag, I do like the idea of objectives and victory points even outside of minis fighting. I'll leave those more invested in it to tell me if the minis side works, but I do like objectives and VP....and they have me thinking about campaign pacing....

 

[Keldryn]

Interesting stuff but I prefer more abstract mass combat systems. The War machine rules from BECMI (and reprinted in the Rules Cyclopedia) is still the pinnacle of clean, fun mass combat design for D&D IMO.

Agreed. Like BattleSystem in 1e and 2e, these rules would be good for conducting a castle siege or an asault on a town. When you've got nations at war with one another, War Machine was hard to beat.

X10 Red Arrow, Black Shield demonstrated that there is a place for both types of mass combat systems.

 

[TwoSix]

Overall, pretty interesting. If this is the general quality and depth we're going to get with Unearthed Arcana articles, I'm pretty happy.

I did notice some wonky stuff with stands compared to solos. Just as an example, it says a stand (10 units) of a creature should use the same statistics of the base creature for HPs, attacks and damage, etc. Seems strange that a single character would be just as effective as a group of 10, since there's no rules for scaling damage and HP up and down between solos and stands.

 

[TerraDave]

Overall, pretty interesting. If this is the general quality and depth we're going to get with Unearthed Arcana articles, I'm pretty happy.

I did notice some wonky stuff with stands compared to solos. Just as an example, it says a stand (10 units) of a creature should use the same statistics of the base creature for HPs, attacks and damage, etc. Seems strange that a single character would be just as effective as a group of 10, since there's no rules for scaling damage and HP up and down between solos and stands.

The rules feel like a good start, but not really complete. For example, how do solos fight exactly? We have rules for solos casting spells, and there actually are some differences between them and units. We have some juicy rules for them as commanders. But otherwise?

Some of it also seems a little fidly. Elevation rules seem a bit overdone for example.

But this is only a play-test version.

 

[Prism]

I'm ambivalent, my main gripe is with the use of grid an minis, I understand that each square equale 20 FR and that it allows you to use the minis you already have but something feels off... I need to gork it more.

Warder

Just having had a quick read it looks like you could easily remove the grid and do it with measurements much like Warhammer. A few spell template and I reckon it would play pretty well

 

[TerraDave]

Agreed. Like BattleSystem in 1e and 2e, these rules would be good for conducting a castle siege or an asault on a town. When you've got nations at war with one another, War Machine was hard to beat.

X10 Red Arrow, Black Shield demonstrated that there is a place for both types of mass combat systems.

To each his own...

I see why people like the war-machine, but most of the time I would prefer to handle war as part of the campaign narrative, which would include the PCs military, diplomatic, covert, and operational activities.

For these UA rules, I think the point is take a traditional approach--one going back to chainmail and battle system--on how the PCs can be involved in battles involving hundreds of troops. Except for some special cases, I would prefer to play those battles out, not just roll a few times on a chart. I mean if you can play out a battle with 10 orcs, wouldn't you want to play out one with a 1000?