Mass combat system

[Kane0]

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.

Something to do when work gets slow, will post it here if I get it done

[kyoryu]

The last time I ran a mass combat, here's what I did:

There was an overall track for the combat. At 0, the bad guys won and the town was overrun. At (some number), the good guys won and the bad guys were driven off.

At various points in the track, various things would happen to either the town or the bad guys - walls were breached, town had to fall back to inner keep, whatever.

The PCs were basically sent on missions, that they chose. Each mission would have several results it could have - move the result die by one (more on that later), reduce the enemy capacity in some way, etc. Missions were things like "attack the druid camp", etc. The missions were pre-designed (though I would have allowed ad-hoc ones). As an example, if you took out the druid camp, the enemies would have fewer druids (and thus healing) in future combats.

After each mission, I'd roll a die, and subtract a modifier from it. This would determine how the overall battle progressed. The start position on the track (high number, low modifier) indicated, in this case, that the town had a strong defensive position and was hard to take out, but that the enemy had a stronger military force.

This worked out really well. The players had a great time strategizing about how they wanted to tackle the bad guys, and eventually succeeded in defending the town, though at some cost.

Another cool thing about this structure is that any of the individual combats can fail. All that means is that the PCs don't get the "win" bonus, and there's another combat progress die roll (which could go either way!).

This did a good job, I think, of preserving player agency, creating the "feel" of a large combat, and putting the PCs in interesting positions without having the whole thing revolve around their success.

I think that the next time I run similar I will probably go for more "degree of success" in regards to how individual combats go, and probably more planned reinforcements. Another idea could be to have 'requirements' for some missions - in order to attack the druid camp, you first have to defeat... I dunno, something. A lot of that will depend on how long you want to play the battle for.

[kieza]

I have a system that runs on custom M:tG cards, with many of the cards representing units of troops. The aura-equivalent cards are officers, specialists, or upgraded equipment which can be attached to units. Additionally, I typically run it with multiple battlefield zones representing different fronts of the battle.

When I tried it out a few years back, my players got a kick out of designing the cards representing their characters.