what do you want in a mass combat system?

[jollyninja]

so i'm making a mass combat system in my spare time and i'm really liking how it's turning out. i'm liking it enough that i'm seriously considering shopping it around a bit along with some new feats and prestige classes related to the system as some kind of small book. i'm just trying to figure out wiether my system is the sort of thing that people want or yet another vain exercise that will only please the designer. in this case me.

well, do you want your characters to still be the focus of the battles or would you preffer troop numbers to rule the day? are there other concerns you have had with other systems that you want to voice? how well would you like high level characters to fare as solo entities on the battlefield? should 150 human soldiers be able to take on a young adult dragon and win? how simple vs realistic do you want the system to be?

 

[Crothian]

I want a system that takes into consideration the amazing ability of magic and the unique abilities of non human, and non humaniod races. A system that works for land, sea and air.

 

[Umbran]

well, do you want your characters to still be the focus of the battles or would you preffer troop numbers to rule the day?

If I want to play a wargame with loads of faceless cannon fodder, I'll play a wargame. When I want to play an RPG scene that happens to have lots of troops in it, I still want the focus to be on the PCs. The story is still about the PCs, even when the scene is a battle.

 

[Ds Da Man]

Well, I would want easy conversion of PCs to the mass combat wargame rules, combined with good battle magic rules, topped off by units that could be configured with special feats.

 

[Agback]

G'day

Sometimes PCs in my campaigns go into battle as soldiers, and then sometimes in the front rank of a phalanx, and sometimes as Homeric-ish heroes in the mêlée.

Sometimes my PCs raise troops from among their neighbours and tenants, and go into battle as subordinate unit commanders with or without a duty to fight as heroes. And sometimes they have formed elite units and given them special training, and lead those inot battles as subordinate unit commanders.

Only rarely do my PCs go into battle as commanding generals.

So what I don't want is a tactical wargame. I don't want to have to make tactical decisions that determine the outcome of the battle, and I don't want my players to have to make such. So I want a system in which the tactical ability of the characters, not the tactical ability of the players and myself, influence the outcome.

Player characters aren't always the kind who turn the tide of battle by feats of individual heroism. But often enough they are, so I would like a system that was capable of taking this into account.

The battle system in Bushido was pretty good, in that it depended on the generalship of the character rather than that of the player, and was good at generating dramatic situations in which a charactes might find himself or herself. But it had a few little problems of detail in the execution (eg. behaving cautiously was not in fact safer than behaving boldly, and past a fairly modest odds ratio there was absolutely no chance of the smaller side prevailing, no matter how brilliant their generalship). Also, it lacked a mechanism be which the heroic accomplishments of the PCs could influence the tide of battle.

Regards,


Agback

 

[ForceUser@Home]

I want rules for armies that my PCs can command, and I want those rules to be flexible, scalable, streamlined, and logical.

 

[radferth]

big battles

When a big battle shows up in a game I am running, I play out the portion the PCs are in using normal rules. When I need to decide how the other parts of the battle, I use the charts from the _old_ Chainmail rules. Depending on what type of troop you are and what type you are attacking, you roll a xd6 per guy and take out one enemy for every y or higher rolled. x can be fractional in some cases (light footman attacking any cavalry, for instance). Not the best or most consistant system, but it gets the job done.

I'd love to see a good d20 mass combat system, but it will never be as good as a pure miniatures system, so I would suggest make it simple and useful to DMs integrating large battles to their campaigns.

 

[smetzger]

I want a system that takes into consideration the amazing ability of magic and the unique abilities of non human, and non humaniod races. A system that works for land, sea and air.

Yup, plus I wan't it to be a scaled up D&D.

I don't think it is possible to come up with a system I would be happy with.

However, I hold out alot of hope for a computer program that would be able to handle a mass combat. RPM shows promise, a sequal to NWN may also work. Computer processing power is cheap enough now to make this possible, we just need time for programmer(s) to work on the problem.

 

[Conservative Cow]

Simplicity.

If you can make mass combat rules that are simple and streamlined with D20, I'm happy. I don't want a war simulation with amazeing detail. Something simple that I can understand that can help resolve battles that the PCs are not involved in.

 

[CRG]

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Power to the people.