Mass combat system

[Resileaf]

Had a conversation with friends yesterday after our weekly gaming session, where we talked about tabletops that had good mass combat systems, and we couldn't really think of any system that did. Well, there was Five Rings that had an interesting system, but it was far more focused on "How well does your character do during the battle" rather than having a particularly good mass battle mechanic. Do you guys know of any system that has really good mass combat and army management mechanics?

[Khedrac]

Companion D&D had WarMachine which was an excellent mass combat system (wargame style). The unit size was as flexible as you wanted it to be (anything from small squads to large forces) and it did allow for all classes to be army commanders. The only thing it lacked was ship-to-ship combat for which the Sea Machine rules were added in the module M1 Into the Maelstrom, but that was more limited as each ship had to be a seperate unit.

AD&D 1 & 2 had two different versions of BattleSystem which were more of miniatures skirmish games, but was highly praised by those who liked that sort of game. (I believe one version did cover larger forces quite well, but I don't know which). A single token usually either represened a small squad or a single "heroic" character.

[Kiero]

Domains@War for ACKS is good enough to be run as a standalone wargame in it's own right.

[Quarian Rex]

Second vote for ACKS, but take a look at this post I just made in another thread for a bit of an ACKS/3.P kitbash that I think has some legs.

[Duff]

A Song of Ice and Fire RPG does (unsurprisingly) include a mass combat system with some strengths and weaknesses.

pluses

• Quite fun to play
• Allows PCs to be heroically fighting whole units or taking leadership roles. Even a character with no skill adds to their unit's attacks and morale
• Reasonably simple to learn
• Give a high impact to the stats of the key figures. This suits a "heroic war". I house ruled in the understanding that heroes attacking units works more by the hero killing officers and leaders more than by actually killing scores of soldiers

Minuses -

• Not very realistic
• The rules have some big holes - For example, infantry are 100 man units but cav are 20 men. Cav can dismount to become infantry. When this happens, are they 20 men who fight like 100? Are they some sort of weakened unit? Do 80 extra men join the unit?
• A skilled archer using the heroic "1 man against a unit" option can rip through an army
• There's no system for what happens between your army leaving your keep and arriving at the battlemap which is probably only 1/2Km on a side. Any actions around picking the site for battle are purely narrative

[LordCdrMilitant]

Had a conversation with friends yesterday after our weekly gaming session, where we talked about tabletops that had good mass combat systems, and we couldn't really think of any system that did. Well, there was Five Rings that had an interesting system, but it was far more focused on "How well does your character do during the battle" rather than having a particularly good mass battle mechanic. Do you guys know of any system that has really good mass combat and army management mechanics?

Dark Heresy ;). Especially so if you have an old fart with BFG and Epic 40000, then you can really have big battles in all theaters!

In all serious, I actually do just grab a bunch of minis and use regular 40k rules at some points when running DH.

[The Library DM]

I assume by “mass battle system” that you mean a system designed to simulate the actions of large bodies of troops— that is, hundreds to thousands (or even ten thousands) of infantry, cavalry, etc., etc..

The next question then becomes how you want such a system to handle this. Are you looking for a “theater of the mind,” where the battle is mostly abstracted into calculated numbers and maybe some dice rolling or card play, but no actual representation of troops on a board or table, or physical placement and maneuver of the same?

Or are you wanting a physical game, as a board game or table top miniatures game, where the movement and positioning of troops is crucial, and requires visual and tactile representations (whether chits, markers, or figurines) on or among equally visual/tactile representations of battlefield terrain and obstacles?

Or, in other words, do you want to “imagine it out” or do you want to “game it out?”

[MeeposFire]

I played Alpha Strike (a more mass combat version of Battletech) and it was great fun. It seems to be great for medium to decently large sized forces (truly huge armies may be better off using Battleforce but I have not tried that yet).

The game was easy to use and mobility is a big part of what can make you succeed.

[Pauly]

There is no good large scale fantasy wargame, at least none I have ever played. Most attempts are porting over an ancient/medieval era wargame with a layer of magic jammed on top (for example Warhammer Fantasy Battles). Generally speaking the more detailed the magic the less good the wargame and vice versa.

For something that is
- epic in scale
- easy to learn
- fast to play
- cheap
The only real contender is Hordes f the Things (HoTT), of which an updated version was released recently.
It is very abstract, but games can be played with relatively few figures to result in an hour or so.

For sci-fi Epic 40K is a cool system, although it has a bit of a ‘rocket tag’ problem in that the first side that gets in a good alpha strike usually wins.

[The Library DM]

There is no good large scale fantasy wargame, at least none I have ever played. Most attempts are porting over an ancient/medieval era wargame with a layer of magic jammed on top (for example Warhammer Fantasy Battles). Generally speaking the more detailed the magic the less good the wargame and vice versa.

For something that is
- epic in scale
- easy to learn
- fast to play
- cheap
The only real contender is Hordes f the Things (HoTT), of which an updated version was released recently.
It is very abstract, but games can be played with relatively few figures to result in an hour or so.

For sci-fi Epic 40K is a cool system, although it has a bit of a ‘rocket tag’ problem in that the first side that gets in a good alpha strike usually wins.

I’m not a fan of WHFB, but I believe was a fantasy system before it became a historical system (WHAB). But it’s tied to a specific fantasy world, which, though obviously inspired by the original D&D, isn’t D&D.

Part of the problem with mass fantasy battles in the D&D world is that D&D was itself created as a medieval world with magic layered on top. Thing is, magic is like technology— if you introduce it to a society, that society is going to radically change. So if you have a world where individuals can lob magically created fireballs to explode into massive bodies of troops, you’re going to wind up with significant changes in the military tactics of that world— not unlike what happened in our own world with the advent of tanks, machine guns, and precision bombs. No longer will you want tightly spaced ranks, side by side, but very loose, open units where the effectiveness of a fireball is mitigated because the troops are too spread apart to take out more than a few at a time. And that’s just the changes brought about by one spell! AFAIK, no current fantasy battle game attempts to recreate tactics “from the spellbook up.” But then, that’s not generally what people want to imagine, anyway. They want the Charge of the Rohirrim from LotR, and they want fireballs flinging about left and right. Realism can take a hike.

Personally, I like the Warmaster game, also from GW, though, alas, OOP. It does do mass medieval combat well, with the effects of magic largely simplified and abstracted. (For those with a Tolkien bent, there was also an LotR-style version named The Battle of Five Armies, which offered the forces from The Hobbit (the novel, not the awful movies), and modified the magic rules to that setting as well. Like Epic40K, the game has a “grand tactical” scope, using 10mm figures mounted en masse on rectangular bases (“stands”), with three stands forming a “unit”. Most battles involve 12-15 units per side, though the game can handle more. Great game, far superior to WHFB. For awhile the rules for WM were available as free PDFs online from the author (Rick Priestley), but I don’t know if that’s still the case.
For those reluctant to invest in miniatures, Warmaster can be played with cardboard markers instead of figures, and there are lots of fan-created markers out there in the Web as well.

[LordCdrMilitant]

There is no good large scale fantasy wargame, at least none I have ever played. Most attempts are porting over an ancient/medieval era wargame with a layer of magic jammed on top (for example Warhammer Fantasy Battles). Generally speaking the more detailed the magic the less good the wargame and vice versa.

For something that is
- epic in scale
- easy to learn
- fast to play
- cheap
The only real contender is Hordes f the Things (HoTT), of which an updated version was released recently.
It is very abstract, but games can be played with relatively few figures to result in an hour or so.

For sci-fi Epic 40K is a cool system, although it has a bit of a ‘rocket tag’ problem in that the first side that gets in a good alpha strike usually wins.

You're not going to get epic in scale out of anything miniatures based, I think. You're going to be going to hex and counter games or up by then.

[Kane0]

I played Alpha Strike (a more mass combat version of Battletech) and it was great fun. It seems to be great for medium to decently large sized forces (truly huge armies may be better off using Battleforce but I have not tried that yet).

The game was easy to use and mobility is a big part of what can make you succeed.

Alphastrike is good fun, i’d be interested in a D&Dified version

[Pauly]

I’m not a fan of WHFB, but I believe was a fantasy system before it became a historical system (WHAB). But it’s tied to a specific fantasy world, which, though obviously inspired by the original D&D, isn’t D&D.
.

WFB uses Don Featherstone’s “bucket of dice” system (roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save) from the 1960s. While WAB and WECW post date WFB in terms of publication, the engine WFB uses was designed for these eras originally. Both WAB and WECW are much much better wargames than WFB. 1st edition WFB was much lighter on the fluff and worldbuilding than later editions. The worldbuilding was to avoid litigation from TSR and/or the Tolkein estate, and took a long time to become established, with whole races being added (Skaven) deleted (Fimir) or completely re-written (Slann/Lizardmen)

[kyoryu]

In the context of an RPG, consider the alternatives.

Instead of playing out the war, figure out the key battles in the overall fight, and put the players there. Or, if it's a rout, have the PCs try to escape. If it's a crushing victory for the side of the PCs, figure out another objective as part of that (capturing key individuals, etc.) and go from there.

Kind of a cinematic approach to it. That keeps the game focused on the PCs and what they're doing, rather than interrupting your "RPG" for "medieval wargame".

[DrMartin]

ACKS is good if you buy into the whole economic system. Everything revolves around the gold pieces in this game and maintaining a domain and an army are no exceptions.
I haven't played with it but I've been told the authors did double check their math.

The OSR game Red Tide has an expansion for domain management called An Echo, Resounding which includes rules for domain and army / mass battles. They are not really mass battle, as each army unit is abstracted to a creature, whose stats are the stat of one of its typical member. So your militia of level 1 infantrymen? has the stat of 1 infantryman. Goes against a unit of trolls? that has the stat of a single troll. A unit of humanoids is 100 people, a unit of monster is the size of a typical lair. Heroes and commanders give special benefits to units they are attached to. Individuals vs an army unit are instakilled, unless they count as an army unit themselves (big monsters like dragons, and with an optional rule heroes of high enough level).

There's a few more rules of course but that's the basic chassis - and it works really well, because they didn't strap a new system on an rpg, they used the rules that were already there and just changed the zoom settings. Players don't have to learn anything new to engage with the system, which is a big plus. It also doesn't break the flow of the game any more than a regular combat does - something that switching to a whole different system (tried with warhammer fantasy once) did: new map, new minis, new rules (we begun with a CR/level to army point conversion table, ended up just eyeballing it).

I have actually played with this system and had a lot of fun. Better in my experience than the pathfinder army rules (easier to implement, fit better into the general domain management rules, and the PCs matter more. This last point changes if one implement the third party additions in ultimate battle, but I still prefer the Red Tide implementation)

[Khaiel]

There are essentially two main types of mass battle systems:

1. Those focused on the troops, in which the PCs either play a minor role or act only as commanders (Only War, GURPS Mass Combat).
2. Those focused in the actions of the PCs, with them either being shoved into the critical points of the battle or being superhumanly powerful and possibly deciding the way the fight goes (Deathwatch, Anima Beyond Fantasy)

.

Basically the first type are more realistic, the second are more fantastical. There are, of course, systems that fall somewhere in the middle. I haven't really played a lot of games where mass battles were really important, but I think the GURPS Mass Combat one was really good. It was a nice balance between hard numbers and abstraction, although maybe some of the numbers could have been tweaked a bit. Also, like most GURPS, as long as you understand the math behind it, adapting it into another system isn't hard.

However, in my experience, only a very specific subset of players actually enjoys that kind of system, and I would suggest something like the Anima and Deathwatch mass combat systems (Funnily enough, the mass combat rules for those two systems are actually somewhat similar in concept, and have a very "Dinasty Warriors" feeling to them).

TL;DR: GURPS Mass Combat does what you are asking for fairly decently and with enough abstraction to not be too cumbersome, and can be adapted into other systems. But I still wouldn't recommend that kind of system to most groups.

[LordCdrMilitant]

There are essentially two main types of mass battle systems:

1. Those focused on the troops, in which the PCs either play a minor role or act only as commanders (Only War, GURPS Mass Combat).
2. Those focused in the actions of the PCs, with them either being shoved into the critical points of the battle or being superhumanly powerful and possibly deciding the way the fight goes (Deathwatch, Anima Beyond Fantasy)

.

Basically the first type are more realistic, the second are more fantastical. There are, of course, systems that fall somewhere in the middle. I haven't really played a lot of games where mass battles were really important, but I think the GURPS Mass Combat one was really good. It was a nice balance between hard numbers and abstraction, although maybe some of the numbers could have been tweaked a bit. Also, like most GURPS, as long as you understand the math behind it, adapting it into another system isn't hard.

However, in my experience, only a very specific subset of players actually enjoys that kind of system, and I would suggest something like the Anima and Deathwatch mass combat systems (Funnily enough, the mass combat rules for those two systems are actually somewhat similar in concept, and have a very "Dinasty Warriors" feeling to them).

TL;DR: GURPS Mass Combat does what you are asking for fairly decently and with enough abstraction to not be too cumbersome, and can be adapted into other systems. But I still wouldn't recommend that kind of system to most groups.

You know, I've run Deathwatch quite a bit, but what is it's baked-in mass combat system?

I don't think I've ever used it. I just default to rolling a pile of D6's like it's 40k or using a lot of horde-type enemies.

[Khaiel]

The Horde system IS Deathwatch's mass combat system. You just need a bunch of hordes on both sides, and possibly some PCs on one side and a bunch of Elite or Master level enemies on the other side. If you want to make it more nuanced, Rites of Battle has rules to use requisition to get troops and other resources assigned to your squad, which can be used as a basis for building a force, but most of the rules are on "This is how to represent a crapload of enemies. This is how your characters can kill them by the dozen. Go have fun, this is a power fantasy after all."

[LordCdrMilitant]

The Horde system IS Deathwatch's mass combat system. You just need a bunch of hordes on both sides, and possibly some PCs on one side and a bunch of Elite or Master level enemies on the other side. If you want to make it more nuanced, Rites of Battle has rules to use requisition to get troops and other resources assigned to your squad, which can be used as a basis for building a force, but most of the rules are on "This is how to represent a crapload of enemies. This is how your characters can kill them by the dozen. Go have fun, this is a power fantasy after all."

My players are afraid of hordes. Can't be dodged, almost always hits, +2d10 to damage, etc. Especially after the incident with the pink horrors.

Also, I don't think the hordes actually work very well as a mass combat system. As a player fighting a squad of cultists or something, it works well to make the cultists a legitimate threat to the space marine, but a squad of cultists fighting a squad of guardsmen does pitifully little to each other just because of the oddities of the rules.

[Segev]

To the OP, I need to ask: are you asking for a system for running a mass combat, where the players control multiple units? For that, I'd almost recommend a wargame, even though I know most aren't exact matches for any particular RPG. At least cribbing some basic rules. Interestingly, D&D got its start as a fantasy wargaming supplement to Gary Gygax's Chainmail game, which was a medieval wargame system he was homebrewing.


If what you want is to run PCs in a mass battle, then 5e has a reasonable way of approximating how many attackers hit a given target when you have too many to deal with rolling individually. Using average damage speeds things up, too.


I've been toying with a mass combat concept lately, and I think the easiest way to do it is to treat units as single entities in terms of hit points, assume - unless you have very good reason for mixed composition - that a unit is made up so primarily of one kind of troop that they can be fungible, and then just tack any "special" characters you need (commanders, heroic troops, etc) as indiviuals you can place at any point in the unit, who can move through it as difficult terrain (if not just normally; depends how tightly-packed the unit is).

Then, when two units go against each other, figure out their facings, and roll using the "figure out how many soldiers hit" method against the other.

In the 5e DMG, I forget the method; it's easier than what I'm about to outline, but I think has a similar spread. How I'd do it without the DMG on hand to look up the rules is this: figure out what the d20 number required to hit the target is; assume that, if you roll that value, half the unit hits. For every +/- 1 from that number on the die, add/subtract 5% of the number of attackers - i.e. the number adjacent to the target, in melee; the whole unit with ranged attackers - to the number that hit. This isn't perfect; there's more of a bell curve to it, because it's a lot more similar to rolling with Advantage, but it will get a close-enough approximation for most purposes.

Treat unit damage as massed; just sum all the hp of any creature you're not tracking individually. Every "creature's worth" of hp the unit takes, one of those creatures drops out of combat, whether retreating, or being left behind, or dying. Assume that the "front line" has reinforcements until the unit size falls below the front line's size.

When a unit fights solo creatures (e.g. PCs), model the unit's front line and just let there be enemies to keep replacing any that drop until the unit breaks.

If you want morale, you can treat any damage done to the unit as "morale damage" as well, and require the unit to roll a Charisma Save (using any leader-figure's Charisma save, if you like) with a bonus equal to their hp minus the morale damage. Maybe even introduce mechanics for inspiring bards and leaders to reduce morale damage (possibly even driving it negative, if you want potential to-the-last-man fanaticism). I'm thinking DC 0 for the save, baseline, with any enemies making Intimdation checks setting the DC if they take the action to try. Even DC 0 becomes hard to meet as sufficient morale damage exceeds remaining hp of a unit, after all.

Alternatively, you could just say that a unit breaks at 50% hp loss, and anybody facing PCs remains by default (though the DM can decide they also choose to attempt to Disengage or simply flee, if they think their surivival chances are better that way), but there aren't any more climbing over the bodies to replace the ones that fall next.


The beauty of this, for PCs-on-army-units, is that you can really keep the number of dice you have to roll for the melee enemy unit down to however many are right on top of the PCs.

Meanwhile, if you really want to run unit-scale combat, you can do it by simply having the units move as blobs that take up half the normal space for that many troops, unless they're more of a mob (in which case they take up the normal space, and also your special troops you're tracking individually within can move freely about rather than treating the unit as difficult terrain). Still treat facing as normal; medium creatures take five feet of facing. Even though they're densely packed, they still need room to use their weapons. Worst case is ranged units; they all can fire, so use the massed arrows rules.

Second-worst case is units with reach; you can pile on double the number of attackers in a straight line, and something like half-again if they can get a surround.

[Resileaf]

Snip

I was very much asking... In general, I would say. Probably more armies vs armies.
Not for myself, mind you, I'm not planning on running a game with mass battles like that (could have been useful in the past though), it's very much to get an idea of if it was ever done well. This has been quite enlightening.

[Segev]

I was very much asking... In general, I would say. Probably more armies vs armies.
Not for myself, mind you, I'm not planning on running a game with mass battles like that (could have been useful in the past though), it's very much to get an idea of if it was ever done well. This has been quite enlightening.

It's, unsurprisingly, done best by wargames, rather than by RPGs. Warhammer Fantasy is a good system to look at for some core mechanics that can be reasonably adpated to generic fantasy, though the actual unit compositions are very setting-specific. Not as much as War Machine's, but I wouldn't recommend War Machine for mass battle, either, because while it does unit-scale combat, it is small-unit scale, usually a handful of troops and a couple of mechs.

[Khedrac]

It's, unsurprisingly, done best by wargames, rather than by RPGs. Warhammer Fantasy is a good system to look at for some core mechanics that can be reasonably adpated to generic fantasy, though the actual unit compositions are very setting-specific. Not as much as War Machine's, but I wouldn't recommend War Machine for mass battle, either, because while it does unit-scale combat, it is small-unit scale, usually a handful of troops and a couple of mechs.

Which "War Machine" are you referring to? The "War Machine" system from Companion D&D handles large armies better than it handles small units in many ways...

[LordCdrMilitant]

Which "War Machine" are you referring to? The "War Machine" system from Companion D&D handles large armies better than it handles small units in many ways...

Warmahordes, presumably, since he mentioned 'jacks.

[Segev]

Warmahordes, presumably, since he mentioned 'jacks.

I wasn't aware there were more than one. But yes, this one. The one that Iron Kingdoms is the RPG for.

[Marcloure]

Mouse Guard does war pretty well with its Conflicts system, it's dynamic, fun, and can build a lot of tension, an it even counts with items for war (like maps, traps, etc). What some can consider a downside is that it is not a simulation nor is a move-by-move war system.

[KineticDiplomat]

Well, it depends on the game and universe assumptions.

D&D is horrifyingly bad for this sort of thing - besides generally mismodelling anything to do with medieval combat, players are often Dr. Manhattan by the time they control large scale fights. Indeed, one of the premises of D&D is that a mid level party is virtually immune to the common man...mass combat becomes dynasty warriors, table top edition. All the troops are just there to make the heroes and bad guys look amazing before dueling. And at that point, why bother modelling them?

Still, if you’re willing to overlook the system in the name of a story, you might consider the following:

Burning Empires system. Very narrative, mainly consists of each side submitting maneuvers ahead of each turn, and those maneuvers playing out on an abstract scale. Specifically done so you can play it with a piece of paper and a pencil, and simulate everything from a dozen men to continent wide campaigns. Not so good if you want to know exactly how many arrows you have left or something.

Field of Glory works well for most muscle powered conflicts. Miniatures optional. As for fantasizing it, because it works on points of advantage for units relative to others, you can mod up a thing for your world pretty easily. Magic is best resolved as some sort of artillery for damaging spells, and various morale of advantage effects for others. It is based on reality though, so do t expect it to handle anything larger than a war elephant that well...that said, if you absolutely had to have a t-Rex squadron, this would do it.

Black Powder might also work, what with it being pretty simple to use even though it is obviously geared towards, well, black powder. Still, hard to get simpler than “this unit has X close combat dice, Y shooting dice, and Z hits it can take before it starts being at risk to break and run”

[MeeposFire]

Alphastrike is good fun, i’d be interested in a D&Dified version

That would be interesting and if it came out I probably would try it considering how much I enjoyed the couple games of Alpha Strike I have played.

[Zakhara]

Prince Valiant has an excellent system for handling mass combat. It's called "battle" (in contrast to duels/jousting/etc.), and is handled in an abstract, narrative manner. It's functionally a variant combat skill, one which is very helpful since battles are very hard to survive (to the point that you gain experience just for surviving each turn!).

OD&D, due to origins in Chainmail, could be argued as having a "mass combat" system by association, but Swords & Spells is arguably more in line. It and TSR's earlier Warriors of Mars employ an interesting diceless resolution, making huge conflicts a bit smoother.

[Khedrac]

D&D is horrifyingly bad for this sort of thing - besides generally mismodelling anything to do with medieval combat, players are often Dr. Manhattan by the time they control large scale fights. Indeed, one of the premises of D&D is that a mid level party is virtually immune to the common man...mass combat becomes dynasty warriors, table top edition. All the troops are just there to make the heroes and bad guys look amazing before dueling. And at that point, why bother modelling them?

Yes, and again, no. This is very true for most versions of D&D, but again BECMI (the version with a good mass combat system) come back to balance the equation. The Master series of modules (specifically M5 Talons of Night iirc.) introduced Squad Combat rules where a small group (e.g. 10) of relatively low-level characters who have trained to fight together can become a reasonably challenging opponent for a high level character (30+).

[side note]One of the things that makes D&D very different from other RPG game names is that most of the different versions of D&D are really different games based on the same precepts; with most other systems the different editions are rules tweaks (e.g. CoC 1 = 2 = 3 = 4... though I understand =/= 7).
This leads people to generalise - they assume that all the versions of D&D have pretty much the same strengths and weaknesses, which simply isn't true.
I've probably done it myself, but with D&D it is rarely correct![/sidenote]