Looking for a resource-based resolution system

[pwykersotz]

I'm going to run a game on Saturday that is part of a longstanding D&D 5e campaign. The short version is that the hometown of the party is being overrun by the bad guys. Now, I don't want to run mass combat with armies or anything like that. Instead, I'd like to focus on the players doing their best to mitigate the damage and achieve advantages over the enemy.

I'd like their goals to be flexible. Choosing whether to fight more monsters, save more people, save books or magic items, attack supply lines, and whatever else we can think of. I'd like to have a ranking system for these things, and let their actions determine what happens to the town and the people after this. I also want the players to be able to quantify their amount of success, even if only in an abstract sense, so they can stragegically progress through the scenario.

I could design a simple system to handle this, but I figured that I might be reinventing the wheel. Is there a system that might help me do this?

[LibraryOgre]

I tend to use a cinematic system of branching choices to do things like this... Here's scenario A. Depending on what you do in scenario A, it leads to B1, B2, B3, or B4. Depending on your B, it leads to C1a, C1b, C2a, C2b, etc. It lets me preplan based on a variety of outcomes.

As a simple abstract? Maybe roll a d20 (or 2d10) for each of the various goals, with bonuses based on who they assigned to various tasks? Like you might have

Sabotage
Save Property
Save People
Slay Monsters

As your four categories. And they devote characters to each, leading to a modifier. Your Fighter might get a special bonus if he's put on Slay Monsters duty; your thief might get a bonus on sabotage, etc. Since it's 5e, you might go with granting advantage in certain circumstances. And then you roll, perhaps with an opposing roll from your monsters depending on how they allocated (your allocations should be done beforehand; for drama, put them in a sealed envelope, and only open them once the players have decided on their allocations)), and you compare the rolls and see the results.

[ElChad]

Way of the Wicked presents a point based system that makes it every action you take increases the overall odds of success. You can find them in the first two books as far as I am aware.

So you would have in your book a checklist of possible things they can do, and the points they are worth. Depending on how many points they achieve determines the success against the bad guys.

[pwykersotz]

Mark Hall, those are good thoughts, and this is what I'll need to resort to if I can't find a better way. What I'd like is a system that can do most of the heavy lifting. Some sort of game or basic toolkit to run what basically amounts to a tabletop RTS. The reason I would like this is because balance takes time and care, and my time to devote to this is minimal right now. I don't want to create an engine to deal with this, I want to refluff a completed one.

ElChad, thanks, I'll take a look!