Are there generic wargame rules for free?

[VoxRationis]

I'm interested in the concept of wargaming, but I don't want to get into the expense of the hobby. Are there generic rules available that are free and don't assume the purchase of a bunch of miniatures? (I'd be able/willing to improvise little flags or something for formation-scale units or the like.)

[GloatingSwine]

I'm interested in the concept of wargaming, but I don't want to get into the expense of the hobby. Are there generic rules available that are free and don't assume the purchase of a bunch of miniatures? (I'd be able/willing to improvise little flags or something for formation-scale units or the like.)

Stargrunt 2 is free now (no link, at work), and is designed to be miniatures agnostic so you can proxy everything.

[Pilum]

A google search for "free wargames rules" returns plenty. The relevant questions are period and scale; fantasy, sci-fi, historical? A 'unit' is a model, a 'unit' is a squad of up to a dozen or so, a 'unit' is a regiment or even larger?

Essentially, do you want XCom or a Hollywood-esque Biblical epic?

[LansXero]

WarMachine / Hordes rules are free, stat cards are suposed to come out for free soon (and you can access all of them through a 5$ app, inc. army builder and other utilities), and the measurements are done from the base, so the shape / size of the model is irrelevant, as long as the base is the correct size.

Hardest part of wargames, however, is finding people to play with, so I'd sort that out first and then based on that choose a system.

[Knaight]

There's a website called Wargame Vault with tons and tons of free rules sets. I haven't tried many, but liked Combat Reactions 3 alright (although it does focus on a morale table, and bad morale tends to end in unmitigated and frustrating disaster).

[9mm]

you can use square paper to proxy models for The 9th Age/, of course you could just get Table top simulator on steam and then download asset packs and play lots of games for free.

[Science Officer]

As others have said, it really helps if you know what kind of wargaming you want to do.
Setting? scale?

Malifaux and Infinity both have their rules available for free, but those kind of assume you'll buy their miniatures. You can still use proxies to try stuff out.
You might also checkout Two-Hour Wargames. They have some free rule-sets that are very flexible and setting-agnostic.

[VoxRationis]

Basically, I want to be able to run battles from my D&D campaign settings (even if I'm not actually doing them as part of a campaign). Low-magic preferred, no-magic acceptable, largely pre-modern tech level (I can't get more specific than that because the setting I'm currently working with has technologies that are pretty widely spread). Ultimately, I want to be able to run battles with hundreds to thousands of combatants, but rules that focus on tens of combatants could also be useful.

[Aotrs Commander]

Stargrunt 2 is free now (no link, at work), and is designed to be miniatures agnostic so you can proxy everything.

Huh. I was not expecting the first reply to be the top suggestions! Well said, that chap!



OP: Full Thrust (starships) and Dirtside II (nominally 6mm, though you could use if for 144th (10/12mm) as well are also available from the same place.

I VERY highly recommend these systems. While I don't play them anymore myself, my own (hopefully after 15 years to be published this year) set of starship rules and Maneuvre Group (which my Dad wrote, starting at the same time but made it publication before I did) both draw spiritual ancestry from those games. As starters to the hobby, though, especially for the price, they are excellent and a lot better than a lot of the competition, paid or otherwise even still.

They are also all generic in the sense you make your own armies/fleets and while (for FT at least) some "official" fleet stats exist, they are optional.



Also, depending where you are in the world, local wargames clubs are worth investigating.



Edit: Okay, so none of that is any use.

Hmm.

I haven't played fantasy for years. I would suggest with a bit of googling, you should be able to find Hordes of the Things, which is a good set. It deals with armies as elements, not individual figures, so is exactrly what you want for doing proper battles and has enough tactical complexity it's not just dice-throwing. HotT also can be played on small boards.

(Horde of the Thingd was based on the ancients set, De Bellis Antiquatis. If you are particularly enterprising, you can fit HotT onto De Bellis Multitunidis, which is a more advanced (slightly larger scale) game of DBA. (And if you grovelled nicely, I could even send you my modifications to do just that!)

[VoxRationis]

Thank you all for your aid. I haven't found a free copy of Hordes of the Things just yet, but I found a pdf of De Bellis Antiquitatis, and the rules seem manageable; they pretty streamlined and fast-paced, as far as I can tell. Incidentally, is it that common for wargame rules to dedicate that much time explaining how to put together miniatures? Seems kind of unnecessary to me.

[Aotrs Commander]

Thank you all for your aid. I haven't found a free copy of Hordes of the Things just yet, but I found a pdf of De Bellis Antiquitatis, and the rules seem manageable; they pretty streamlined and fast-paced, as far as I can tell. Incidentally, is it that common for wargame rules to dedicate that much time explaining how to put together miniatures? Seems kind of unnecessary to me.

Depends. For ancients in general, yes, because a great deal of games rely on bases and base sizes (i.e. frontage and depth) to model the area in which the unit the figures represent covers. In the spiritual predessors to DBA and DBM (6th and 7th edition wargames research group rules), the number of figures per base also mattered as the number pertained as a factor in casualties. (I.e. you got x casualties per figure). Though my memory is fuzzy; I only played a little 7th and not for probably twenty years. As 15mm was (is?) the primary scale for that sort of game, more or less no-one mounted troops on indiviual bases at that size, so knowing how many to out on what size of base was important.

Larger scale (e.g. 25/28/30/35mm) games tend to do that a little less but even Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy had base-size as a factor (25mm verses 20mm; a larger base meant you had less figures that could hit the enemy across the same frontage. Though again, it has been almsot as logn if not longer since I played Warhammer).

It's much less common outside of ancients or fantasy, however.

[Blackhawk748]

Low Magic Mass Battle System? Kings of War has their Core Rules for free and a fair chunk of their Army Lists. The army lists arent complete, but it has all the basic stuff you need to make a solid list and using common sense will actually build a decent list. Plus Heroes are used as power multipliers not unit deleters, so thats a bonus. On top of all of this, you can proxy the units by using appropriately sized pieces of cardboard.

[VoxRationis]

Low Magic Mass Battle System? Kings of War has their Core Rules for free and a fair chunk of their Army Lists. The army lists arent complete, but it has all the basic stuff you need to make a solid list and using common sense will actually build a decent list. Plus Heroes are used as power multipliers not unit deleters, so thats a bonus. On top of all of this, you can proxy the units by using appropriately sized pieces of cardboard.

That sounds good.
Could you please clarify what "unit deleter" means in this context? I don't quite follow the meaning of that sentence.

[Blackhawk748]

That sounds good.
Could you please clarify what "unit deleter" means in this context? I don't quite follow the meaning of that sentence.

In some games, such as past Warhammer Fantasy Editions, you could make Hero units (so a "unit" that is one person) that could take on an entire unit of normal infantry and whoop their rear ends. As an example:

Vampire Counts could take a bunch of items on their Lord, stick him in the front of any old unit of Skeletons, and he would win the combat for them. This is where the term Hero Hammer came from.

Kings of War on the other hand, Heroes are for boosting the units around them, and possibly causing some damage to help rout an enemy unit. The only Heroes that can solo enemy units would be ones on Dragons or similar large monsters. But then they are less like Heroes and more of a giant dragon so.....

[VoxRationis]

Oh, okay. I'm inclined to agree with your opinion on the matter; I'd rather have leaders not be doing most of the hack-and-slash themselves.

[VoxRationis]

Going over people's suggestions, I notice that the rules for DBA and Kings of War both dedicate a lot of time (by necessity, I realize) to accommodating the rigid nature of unit blocks. It occurs to me that since I'm not planning on getting miniatures anyway, it might be more helpful to find a rule system that doesn't get bogged down on them. Are there any "theater of the mind" style wargames people know about?

[Blackhawk748]

Going over people's suggestions, I notice that the rules for DBA and Kings of War both dedicate a lot of time (by necessity, I realize) to accommodating the rigid nature of unit blocks. It occurs to me that since I'm not planning on getting miniatures anyway, it might be more helpful to find a rule system that doesn't get bogged down on them. Are there any "theater of the mind" style wargames people know about?

Not really, no. Kings of War kinda goes over them a lot, but theres really only a handful of unit sizes, so once you got them made, you can just swap them out. I mean a Troop of Elves is the same footprint as a Troop of Dwarves.

[Knaight]

Going over people's suggestions, I notice that the rules for DBA and Kings of War both dedicate a lot of time (by necessity, I realize) to accommodating the rigid nature of unit blocks. It occurs to me that since I'm not planning on getting miniatures anyway, it might be more helpful to find a rule system that doesn't get bogged down on them. Are there any "theater of the mind" style wargames people know about?

Theater of the mind and wargaming doesn't fit together too well. With that said, anything with a grid can often substitute miniatures with writing on paper.

[Pilum]

Certainly for the DBx series, the dirty little secret is the "unit base" is essentially just a counter, except instead of writing "Blades" (or whichever unit type) on it, you glue on some appropriate models. Granted, this is true in all wargames but most especially in "element-based" games like these. The only important thing is that all units have the same frontage so that they line up nicely in combat (DBx can be quite an exercise in geometry). There was a computer version for a while (DBA Online, or DBAOL), it was fairly unofficial and was really aimed at facilitating multiplayer, there was no tutorials or anything like that, but it was playable in offline single player. Don't know if it's still around though.

That said, if you do go DBx, please remember that it's a historical ruleset, though as most fantasy warfare is generally "medieval + a wizard" it's not like you couldn't hack the fantastical in, and without checking I'm fairly sure that people will have put their house rules online. "Hordes of the Things" is the explicitly Fantasy version of the smaller-scale DBA (DBM was basically a way of playing bigger games with some more detail like troop quality, weather and so on) but I don't know what the availability is like nowadays.

Kings of War... I only played it once or twice many years ago, it was ... ok but there were a few things that didn't really 'do it' for me, can't remember what they were now though. A guy at a games club i used to go to swore by them though, so it was purely personal.

"Theatre of the mind"... it could be done with a GM, but it still needs a structure. It's similar to RPG's in that regard, the rules are putting a framework and restrictions to our "Let's Pretend" / "playing with army men" sessions. You'll need someone who had a grasp on how far a unit could move, how it might react in certain circumstances and what it could therefore do, assign a probability to the chances of a unit doing what the commander wanted and return the results of that. And such a thing exists, or at least the concept does, it's called "Kriegspiel" and came from the Prussian staff colleges, but it is still ultimately an umpired game with a structure, if I've understood you correctly.

[Aotrs Commander]

Going over people's suggestions, I notice that the rules for DBA and Kings of War both dedicate a lot of time (by necessity, I realize) to accommodating the rigid nature of unit blocks. It occurs to me that since I'm not planning on getting miniatures anyway, it might be more helpful to find a rule system that doesn't get bogged down on them. Are there any "theater of the mind" style wargames people know about?

Not really, no. The problem that the two just don't mix well. You can't abstract a good wargame, because the placement of the Things and the terrain is the most important part of the battle. The attempts that D&D and Rolemaster, for example, made at mass combat were crap basically because you can't half-arse the job; they were not wargames, just not-very-well organised combat systems¹.

You don't need miniatures, but DO need some sort of representation. Counters, tokens... Something. As Pilum says, you can play DBx with counters, but you do need the counters, because where stuff is important. You could, I suppose, work with sketches and whatnot... The spacial relationships to stuff to other stuff is what MAKES a wargame a wargame and not just a combat system (or worse, a dice throwing exercise).

But what you cannot do is play a wargame without a map and things moving on the map. It... just doesn't work. What you can (arguably, though I personally never have) do in a small-scale RPG combat without a map and some sort of representation of position, you can't do the same for a wargame.



Maybe some sort of DM-driven partly scripted interaction like Pilum suggests would be possible (in, presumably, the context of an RPG?), but I would not really classify it as a wargame per se (though I'm not prepared to get into a pedantic terminology argument about it!) I am fairly sure you would have to create the framework largely or entirely by yourself, since I don't think you will find a set of wargames rules that would facilitate it, since it is basically not what wargaming a hobby aims to do, I'm afriad.



¹Nor could they ever have been up to that much, sicne a good wargame - like any good game - requires months or years or work to make work. I've been working on my own starship rules for fifteen years now and there is a slim chance they might finally get published this year!

[VoxRationis]

The only important thing is that all units have the same frontage so that they line up nicely in combat (DBx can be quite an exercise in geometry).

Kings of War... I only played it once or twice many years ago, it was ... ok but there were a few things that didn't really 'do it' for me, can't remember what they were now though. A guy at a games club i used to go to swore by them though, so it was purely personal.

Not really, no. The problem that the two just don't mix well. You can't abstract a good wargame, because the placement of the Things and the terrain is the most important part of the battle. The attempts that D&D and Rolemaster, for example, made at mass combat were crap basically because you can't half-arse the job; they were not wargames, just not-very-well organised combat systems¹.

You don't need miniatures, but DO need some sort of representation. Counters, tokens... Something. As Pilum says, you can play DBx with counters, but you do need the counters, because where stuff is important. You could, I suppose, work with sketches and whatnot... The spacial relationships to stuff to other stuff is what MAKES a wargame a wargame and not just a combat system (or worse, a dice throwing exercise).

But what you cannot do is play a wargame without a map and things moving on the map. It... just doesn't work. What you can (arguably, though I personally never have) do in a small-scale RPG combat without a map and some sort of representation of position, you can't do the same for a wargame.

Well, okay, not entirely in the mind—I think you're right, it would kill much of the strategy to do away with positional representation—but dispensing with the "exercise in geometry" caused by use of rigid blocks?

[Wookieetank]

So its not really generic (or D&D-esque), but its still pretty neat: Mobile Frame Zero is a giant robot wargame using Lego models and includes instructions on how to build several different types. Haven't ever found anyone to play it with, but I have a spiffy little army made out of Lego pieces I had lying around

[VoxRationis]

So yesterday I tried De Bellis Antiquitatis, playing a couple of games against myself. I improvised some terrain with road pieces from Catan, pieces of junk mail, and a towel, and improvised playing pieces using tiles from a mah jong* set I have, which I thought worked quite nicely. The suits were visually distinguishable enough that the sides were never confused, and DBA doesn't usually have more than 4 of one class of unit in an army, so the obvious limitation of there only being 4 of each suit-number combination wasn't an issue.
My first game was ahistorical: New Kingdom Egypt vs. Late Western Rome. That game started off very poorly for Egypt, since they had several bad command rolls (as well as battle rolls) at the beginning while Rome rolled spectacularly. Almost immediately, Egyptian bows were torn apart by Roman artillery. Regression to the mean helped turn the tide later; the +4 bonus bows had v. mounted opponents allowed the surviving Egyptian archers to break up Rome's cavalry in spite of its nominal superiority, allowing Egyptian chariots to roll up the flank. (The fact that chariotry out-performed cavalry, including in a chaotic melee, is undoubtedly why the game by default does not let you do ahistorical battles.) The game performs well in general at rewarding the tactic of breaking through and rolling up the flank, though there are a few odd quirks (see below).
My second game was Bactrian Greek forces against Late Seleucid ones. In this one the artillery (owned by the Seleucids) was worthless. The restrictions on when artillery can fire make it easy to outmaneuver; in particular the rule that it can't fire if you're engaged in contact with the enemy. The Bactrians won this round, partially because of superior numbers of war elephants. Elephants in DBA seem to be quite good; in particular they help make clashes more decisive because a lot of units that would only fall back on a marginal loss are destroyed instead when attacked by elephants. A unit that can score quick, easy kills on weak units without too much maneuvering or the need for supporting elements is very handy to have in a game where losing 4 units is an auto-defeat.


There are some odd rules in DBA (probably because the game is somewhat more abstract for the purposes of simplicity and quick play). The rule that you only roll for the unit attacking the front of a unit is strange and seems inclined to make it harder to surround and destroy a unit than it should be. According to the rules as I understand them, if you attack a unit of infantry with skirmishers at the front, then come in with elephants at the back, you still roll using the skirmishers' factor (+2) rather than the elephants v. foot (+4), with the enemy only having a -1 penalty for being attacked by elephants in the rear. It's far better, numerically, to have the elephants come in first (forcing the infantry to turn to them) and then hit them in the flank with skirmishers.
Another odd rule is that a unit can't move across the front of another unit within a certain distance without attempting to close to that unit. While this seems better-designed than the other, it leads to things like cavalry being flat-out unable to charge a unit of bows caught out in the open, simply because there's a unit of skirmishers staring hard in a direction perpendicular to the cavalry's path. (Now, obviously, there are reasons why it's not wise to charge across another unit's path, but being unable to, especially when the intervening unit is something like skirmishers, is somewhat restrictive.)

*Did I spell that right? No matter how I write it, it looks wrong.

[Pilum]

Yes, elephants have their moments. Can be hard to work with though; do they still have a "+1 command point of group contains an elephant", or am I thinking of a different version / other game in the family?

The "only attack once" is, as you said, purely for speed, and probably to get you to think about what order to do things in. I suppose that occasionally you'd be best taking the smaller number (if, say, there was something that could quick-kill the elephants but not the other unit). Don't forget that a unit that either can't recoil or still has enemy on the flanks after it does is destroyed though so it's still worth it.

As for the unit blocking - that was why I said about geometry! It does give light troops a reason to exist given their low combat factors though - area denial! And while yes, I concede that it does get a bit "oh come on..!" at times, i suppose that noone likes being blindsided, and there are equally times where it stops someone simply bypassing a more logical target (which, let's not forget, would NOT just be standing there waiting for their turn IRL!) in favour of a much easier target further down the battle line.

[Aotrs Commander]

Yes, elephants have their moments. Can be hard to work with though; do they still have a "+1 command point of group contains an elephant", or am I thinking of a different version / other game in the family?

The "only attack once" is, as you said, purely for speed, and probably to get you to think about what order to do things in. I suppose that occasionally you'd be best taking the smaller number (if, say, there was something that could quick-kill the elephants but not the other unit). Don't forget that a unit that either can't recoil or still has enemy on the flanks after it does is destroyed though so it's still worth it.

As for the unit blocking - that was why I said about geometry! It does give light troops a reason to exist given their low combat factors though - area denial! And while yes, I concede that it does get a bit "oh come on..!" at times, i suppose that noone likes being blindsided, and there are equally times where it stops someone simply bypassing a more logical target (which, let's not forget, would NOT just be standing there waiting for their turn IRL!) in favour of a much easier target further down the battle line.

Conversely, it also stops other abuse; DBA (and DBM following) was designed with wargames competitions in mind. (And those often leverage the letter of the law over the spirit.)

With that in mind, actually, it's worth observing, especially for fantasy, not cleaving too closely to any of the army lists¹; nor, for that matter, if you play DBM, should you aim for the upper end of the points range. Competition players basically demanded the upper end of the 300-500 point army, because at the upper end, you can have wall-to-wall elements across the board. Which means, of course, it removes a lot of the maneouvre of the game².

I played DBM with about 350-400 points, with my fantasy modifications, because said modifications pushed the PV up a bit (by the time you'd added expansive stuff like heroes and magicians and such; and, obviously playing the titular Aotrs on the field, kinda needed both!)



You should, by-the-by, TOTALLY ignore any terrain generation rules, if DBA had them (and definitely for DBM). Those solely exist so that the competition players can leverage small bits of terrain. Yet in the experience of our crowd, terrain is probably the most defining feature of a battle, yet is typically give merely lip-service. The more realistic³ you can make your board terrain, the better the game will be, because it will promote better tactics. (If you are not actually playing on a wargames board with figures where you have to make decent terrain, but sketching something out, you have a little bit more luxary of being more creative; or even, if playing with tokens or something, as I assume this is a bit ancillary to roleplaying, you can just use whatever you have lying around for a representation and not care too much about how it looks.) If in doubt, just go find a map of a bit of the world historical or otherwise) and use that as a basis.



Edit: Sent you (i.e. VoxRationis) a PM vis a vis DBM.


¹The army lists for DBM tended to be changed annually anyway, since for competition games would often be won the night before by army composition and so the lists would change to favour someone else this time. (DBM had several editions, actually, fairly close to each other, with very minimal practical differences. I officially stopped caring after they reversed the grading bonuses such that they had even less effect (so why bother?) for the sake of jiggling things for the army lists. If you find a copy, aim for before version 3.0, I think).

²Actually, that is a point worth mentioning for ANY wargame. You should never have so many figures/units/elements on the board that you can have the whole frontage covered, else it becomes nothjing but a dice-rollign exerise. If your starting deployment resembles a chess board, your playign aea is not big enough. The interesting bit of wargaming is the movement and tactics, and you need the space to be able to do that.

³By which I mean, "reasonably dense with terrain features," not "The One Hill, plus three of four bits of other isolated terrain and maybe a village of three houses" that is a little too prevalent for its own good, especially in competition games. I'd have shown you what I consider a good example, but sadly, the days when I last played fantasy (and my Dad played English Civil War with my mate's dad, before he died) date back from before we took pictures (the earliest I can find is 2000), so all I have are pictures of moderns or scifi boards. (Which, while illustrative, are a bit elaborate for a) ancients/fantasy which doesn't need to be QUITE so dense and b) your intended purpose.) I can dig some out, though if anyone is interested.

[JeenLeen]

So its not really generic (or D&D-esque), but its still pretty neat: Mobile Frame Zero is a giant robot wargame using Lego models and includes instructions on how to build several different types. Haven't ever found anyone to play it with, but I have a spiffy little army made out of Lego pieces I had lying around

I can say this is a fun system. You could possibly get it more like D&D if you really abstract what means what (e.g., have each 'mech' represent a group of warriors, with stuff like Spot/Move die being magical buffs representing casters are still alive, with Attack and Defense die being fighting strength and health).

Word of advice for anyone playing: spotting is very effective and important. I greatly under-valued it during my first games.

[VoxRationis]

The army lists for DBM tended to be changed annually anyway, since for competition games would often be won the night before by army composition and so the lists would change to favour someone else this time. (DBM had several editions, actually, fairly close to each other, with very minimal practical differences. I officially stopped caring after they reversed the grading bonuses such that they had even less effect (so why bother?) for the sake of jiggling things for the army lists. If you find a copy, aim for before version 3.0, I think).

The copy of DBM I found is 3.2, and I see what you mean about the anemic gradation bonuses. What were they like before?

[Aotrs Commander]

Basically, (S) troops aded 1 if they got less than their opponents in close combat or if they got more in shooting and (I) troops subtracted 1 if they got less than their opponent.

(If you look at the last PM I sent, there's a bit on grading factors which basically goes into more detail.)

Reversing the these factors meant that grading had either slightly less effect (which, in my opinon, made it rather pointless) or no effect at all in a lot of cases. (Because of the fact that the lower the numbers get, the easier it is to double it.)

E.g, if you are (S) Blades verses (I) (a single rank of) Warband (base +5 verses +3), without grading factors, to kill the warband, the warband has to roll a 1 (for a score or 5) and the Blades has to roll a 5+ (for a score of 10+).

Under the old system, if the Warband rolls a 3 (for a score of 6) and they are lower than the Blades, they subtracted one (so again, they would be killed if the Blades rolled 5+). Under the new system, the Blades add one if they're higher (so if they roll a 3, the Blades would have to roll a 6 to kill them, though they have to roll less if the warband rolls 1 or 2). The net result being that the grading factor mattered slightly less, since the warband was a bit more likely to survive (though die easier if they rolled very low).

(Conversely, if the Warband rolls more than the Blades, the Blades die anyway; they both mean the Blades only draw if they roll exactly one less than the warband.)

(And if the warband has a second supporting rank (making it +4 instead of +3), the change makes no difference at all.)

Essentially, it was a jiggly of the probabilities that was not, in our little mob's opinion, necessary. Basically, I suspect, it was implemented because subsequent editions of DBM were all about re-jiggling all the numbers for the new release and next set of army lists, which were re-jiggled which meant a slightly different set of armies would turn out to be the "best" this time for competitions. (Which meant if you were a competition player, it would mean you would buy a new set of rules and a new set of army lists every couple of years...) Essentially, the later editions of DBM were really basically balance patches (that you paid full price for...)