Massive Battles

[House Stark]

Does this book have a section that covers Massive battles,

Or is there a plan to put out a supplement for such actions.

[hedgewizard]

There are rules for managing units (each unit is 100 people, cavalry is 20) in mass combat. From my own perspective, they are pretty robust without bogging down into the minutiae and still playable in a relatively quick timeframe.

[trystero]

I'd love to see a more abstract mass-combat system in a later supplement, though: to my mind, something along the lines of the systems in Pendragon or GURPS, which let you know how the battle affected each character without requiring you to play out tactics, would be a great strategic-level match for the tactical-level system in the book.

[AdvocateJack]

I'd also not it would probably be no problem just upping the size of the units and not changing the rest of the rules if you wanted a larger battle. Thus instead of a unit of 100 a unit might be 200, 250, or even higher.

[hedgewizard]

I'd also not it would probably be no problem just upping the size of the units and not changing the rest of the rules if you wanted a larger battle. Thus instead of a unit of 100 a unit might be 200, 250, or even higher.

Absolutely, and you can have any number of units under your command. I think they're basing it (the unit size) off of fairly average sizes.

[wycca]

I'd also not it would probably be no problem just upping the size of the units and not changing the rest of the rules if you wanted a larger battle. Thus instead of a unit of 100 a unit might be 200, 250, or even higher.

Absolutely, and you can have any number of units under your command. I think they're basing it (the unit size) off of fairly average sizes.

That's probably my first choice, but by no means the only - it will depend on my players. Of course, large-scale battles will be fairly rare IMO. Not only is it a large problem to field thousands of men, but it's unlikely a PC house will be in charge of it - they're much more likely to be a tiny cog in a big army. Even if it does crop up (campaign finales), there's not going to be tons of instances where it's practical to have such large engagements, it's going to be more likely that it's going to be a series of smaller engagements using the sizes in the book, although 5000 calvary charging 20000 infantry in an open-field does happen (I'm more a fan of a Gettysburg-style campaign, ie Peach Orchard, Little Round Top, etc type places). I'd leave it up to your group how to play it out. Most groups, I'd think, won't have trouble with smaller engagements which help decide overall engagements that may be huge (the narrator just telling them how the larger battle plays out, as long as it's reasonable), while the truly die-hard, will want to play out each unit over the course of months. That has some appeal, because it should be a truly epic and memorial engagement - deciding large swathes of your game world!

[House Stark]

As long as there is something in the book about Massive battles, the D20 game talked about a supplement that was going to cover that, but well all know what happened to GOO.

The game that I run has rebellions and stuff like that, so there is times when a house will call up its banner houses and there may be a large scale battle on the Trident

To me if I march as part of House Starks banner I could be with something like 5,000 other people.

And if I was with Tyrell I could be part of 10,000 man army. So I don't want to roll out every battle. But I want to have a solid method for getting an outcome.

[KingslayersHand]

Personally, I have always liked this program, Mass Combat, for mass combat on a huge scale that I didn't really want to roll or play out. You get some randomness via dice, and you can adjust a number of factors as modifiers.

Hope it helps you.

*I will link it in the following post since the board won't let me in this one.

[KingslayersHand]

This is the link for the Mass Combat program

http://www.farlandworld.com/program.html

Enjoy.

[House Stark]

the program is the best I've seen, and it does just what I needed. Thank you very much for this

i'm sure I know a lot of people that would love to know about this...

[inmygravenimage]

I've used the free mass combat rules for Conan in that past to represent this, which are quite neat and very cinematic. However, TBH I think GR's are very slick, and intend to switch to them wholesale.

This is slightly away from your original point, but may be of interest: I found it very useful when running a mass combat game involving PCs to think of it as a horizontal dungeon, as it were, and decide in advance on possible optimum, neutral and negative outcomes to the battle overall. This enables you to run massive engagements whilst having hero-scale actions that slot in nicely, which is great from a player perspective: they can see the scope of the battle as a whole, whilst having an individual effect.