What is the best system you have experienced (as a player or a GM) for simulating something like a mass battle between two armies?

I've always kinda liked the Mass Battle rules for L5R 1st Edition, which itself I believe is based/inspired by another Mass Battle system.

The main issue I have with that Mass Battle system is that it doesn't help the player experience the tide of battle first hand. It feels too much like a minis game.

I recall a GM run a mass battle for our group (long ago, I was in my teens) where we basically had to fight until we collapsed or routed the enemy. Each round we would face more and more opponents, but eventually routed them. I can't recall what system was used (The Dark Eye rpg, I think?) or exactly how it worked, and it may simply have been the GM's own doing, but it worked really well. It was satisfying and felt right somehow.

One of my player's main complaint about the Mass Battle System in L5R is that while each round covers 30 mins of battle, and gives the character wounds and the occasional heroic opportunities, it does a poor job of giving them an idea of what is actually happening.

I'm just wondering what has worked best for you as a GM, as a player, etc.

Are there gems of mass battle systems out there that remain undiscovered?
What rulings have you successfully used to make the PCs a part of battling armies?

I'm a simulationist, so usually, massive battles are not things PCs are going to have much of an impact on. It's usually more the other way around - if PCs are in a massive battle, what happens in the massive battle is going to greatly effect what they have to deal with, and their input is rarely going to have much if any effect on the course of the battle.

For example, I've used a battle system with 100-man units and 100m hexes. Several units can be in a hex. PCs in a battle with over 1000 men on each side, will be in a particular hex, generally part of a particular unit. If the PCs are notably powerful, I might give their unit a modifier to its strength rating. But where the units move is determined by the unit commanders and communications (maybe one of the PCs is a commander, but in my games usually not), and then I use the combat system to roll for the results of overall combat, as a suggestion for how the battle in the PC's vicinity is tending to go. But then what I do, since I'm a maniac and love combat, is use that result and the units present, to set up a huge battle with many many figures on a hex map (1-meter hexes), and play that out. I have some systems for resolving battles between groups of NPCs quickly yet accurately, though I have also just played out huge combats, but that tends to involve lots of time without any PCs being involved. Then I use a combination of the wargame situation and die roll, mixed with what happened in the PC combat, to determine what happens on the wargame map.

But this happens extremely rarely unless we're doing an intentional war campaign, because my players (and I) know I'm a maniac simulationist, and we're playing GURPS with non-superpowered characters, so it's generally a bad idea to be in the middle of a huge melee, and unlikely to really change the course of the battle, even if the characters were highly invested in the outcome. Almost always, the players find other things to do, like small raids with valuable targets, rather than wading into front line combat.

I and other GMs have also just played out the whole battle using figures, or just run a large battle using figures and then GM ruled what happens in the rest of the battle.

My friends and I tend to dislike the mass combat systems that abstract entire battle results and deprive players the chance to play out the actual fighting involving their characters, since we tend to play systems where that's detailed & interesting and one of the main draws of the game. So being just told we take some damage or die or win based on abstract rules isn't what we want.

Quote from: Skarg;885442My friends and I tend to dislike the mass combat systems that abstract entire battle results and deprive players the chance to play out the actual fighting involving their characters, since we tend to play systems where that's detailed & interesting and one of the main draws of the game. So being just told we take some damage or die or win based on abstract rules isn't what we want.

That is exactly what I have a problem with as far as the L5R 1e mass battle system. I'd love to find something that instead tells me (based on where in the battle the player is, how the battle is going and which side they're on) what they end up having to fight, and run the combat that way, even if it's a simplified version of regular melee combat or something.

I just have not come across a system that does that, or does it well.

I let the computer figure that stuff out.

Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;885455That is exactly what I have a problem with as far as the L5R 1e mass battle system. I'd love to find something that instead tells me (based on where in the battle the player is, how the battle is going and which side they're on) what they end up having to fight, and run the combat that way, even if it's a simplified version of regular melee combat or something.

I just have not come across a system that does that, or does it well.

If you can, take a look at the Book of Battle for Pendragon.

It focuses on the PC unit each battle round, then summarises the overall situation at the start/beginning of each round. In general, PC success or failure has a very minor effect on the overall battle, but there are certain thresholds were these minor affects can be the difference between a minor victory or defeat and a rout for one side or the other (or vice versa).

In general, it does pretty much exactly what you're asking for. If you push forward into the enemy ranks, you'll face tougher opposition, up until you break through into the true rear ranks. If your side is winning, things will go easier, if your side is being overwhelmed then so are the PCs.

Quote from: Sable Wyvern;885516If you can, take a look at the Book of Battle for Pendragon.

It focuses on the PC unit each battle round, then summarises the overall situation at the start/beginning of each round. In general, PC success or failure has a very minor effect on the overall battle, but there are certain thresholds were these minor affects can be the difference between a minor victory or defeat and a rout for one side or the other (or vice versa).

In general, it does pretty much exactly what you're asking for. If you push forward into the enemy ranks, you'll face tougher opposition, up until you break through into the true rear ranks. If your side is winning, things will go easier, if your side is being overwhelmed then so are the PCs.

Awesome! Thank you! I actually have that book in PDF so I'll be looking into it shortly.

Does anyone know of any rules for other systems (D&D or similar OSR; or even Elric/Stormbringer/Basic) to determine how many foes (and how tough they should be) to throw at the PCs during battle, based on the conditions of battle?
Would such a system be necessary or useful to people?

Just curious if that's even a common thing in other people's games at this rate. As a GM, I'd feel pretty comfortable throwing enemies at the PCs based on conditions of the battle etc, but I'm surprised I have not come across more options for such a rules system.

And sure, having the PCs actions change the tide of battle is pretty epic and awesome, but I can't imagine that they would have all that much influence, unless the PCs were generals or high ranking officers/strategists, or if their assault on the enemy army was crucial to the tactics laid out by their own General.
This makes me think of the Lord of the Rings movie where Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn have an effect on the battle in significant ways, but are still eventually overwhelmed by the opposing force. I think that would be pretty cool to simulate in a game.

You're actually going back to the origin of the hobby! D&D emerged from miniatures wargaming. But the origin was VERY abstract by modern gaming standards. Most miniatures wargming is less detailed than cardboard wargaming, and units represented blocks of troops, and heroes in historical miniatures wargaming started out often just giving like a +1 leadership modifier to the combat unit they were stacked with. When non-historical games started having heroes who fought, they started out being heroic by being as strong as a "stand" of troops representing 50 or 100 men or something, and as they advanced were allowed to survive more or have better odds. Seems to me the origin of hitpoints as abstract death resistance has its origins in such rules.

I think I still own a copy of a book that is actually a fusion of that with your modern reference to the LOTR films, as there was a licensed set of books for miniatures gaming based on the battles in those films, and I have (had? - I'll have to hunt for it) the Two Towers book for it. I was fairly disappointed (for my own tastes/interests) in the details, as they revert to that primitive miniatures style of abstract representation - it's something like Gimli and Legolas are like other units but get 1-4 hit points instead of 1 or 2 for a no-name fighter unit.

I've seen this sort of question come up many times both in play and on forums, and I don't know of a great published solution, I think because it's a complex problem and different people want different solutions.

Quote from: Skarg;885591I've seen this sort of question come up many times both in play and on forums, and I don't know of a great published solution, I think because it's a complex problem and different people want different solutions.

I think that may just be the biggest hurdle I have with finding resources from other games, lol, but that's precisely why this sort of discussion interests me. I wanna know what works for other folks and why.

I found this within a recent google search, which is interesting (haven't read it yet, simply skimmed it) http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCampaign/kingdomsAndWar/massCombat.html
It suggests getting a bonus or malus to the overall army rating depending on individual outcome of fight sequences of the PCs. That's the sort of thing I would implement.
The rest of it is just a bunch of basic math problems I don't want to deal with, but that's just me.

I think it'd be interesting to deal with each fighting sequence within the battle as a separate encounter pitting the PCs against a group of enemies. Depending on certain key occurrences within those fights, it could alter the tide of battle to a degree, whether positively or negatively, the degree of which would depend on how powerful the PCs are within their relative army and in relation to the opposing force.

Yeah, that's what I usually have tried to do, but since my characters tend to have fairly mortal power levels, they don't have a lot of effect.

What I've done is try to make conversion factors between the wargame system and the personal combat system. So wargame unit ratings correspond to a certain number/quality/equipment/condition/morale for fighters in the personal combat system. That gives you what the enemy and allied troops are like in the locations where the PCs are, and it can also give you how much effect the damage done during personal combat has on the wargame units.

However it might be the case that the PCs are acting as leaders, or their actions also inspire their own men or cause fear in the enemy, which may lead to non-material effects such as die-roll modifiers or morale effects or status changes (depending on what the wargame system has). Some of that might be possible to make hard rules for, and others might want GM discretion.

A tricky thing, at least for the systems I've used, tends to be time scale, and different results between systems. That is, the wargame system may say each turn is 15 or 30 minutes long, and often has results like standoff, disruption, unit retreats, battle rages, etc., whereas if I play out a combat 100 men versus 100 men in TFT on a 30-meter front, one side may be completely slaughtered in less than 5 minutes. That's because the personal systems are designed to get things resolved quickly, and not to simulate what actually happens in combat, where a lot of time is spent in confusion, hesitation, and other non-lethal activities.

Also you keep mentioning the fights as the PCs having to beat NPCs, but if they're with a friendly unit, they would be amidst many allies as well. That both helps the PCs survive, and also dampens the PCs effects on the battle, because even if the PCs are much better than their foes, if there are also many more allies fighting enemies, those allies might still lose the fight even while the PCs are doing a great job.

Quote from: Skarg;885612Also you keep mentioning the fights as the PCs having to beat NPCs, but if they're with a friendly unit, they would be amidst many allies as well. That both helps the PCs survive, and also dampens the PCs effects on the battle, because even if the PCs are much better than their foes, if there are also many more allies fighting enemies, those allies might still lose the fight even while the PCs are doing a great job.

True. And I think the key is determining in advance how the battle would end without the PCs influence, be it positive or negative. At least that's what I would try to determine as reasonably as possible.

Yeah, I've tried a variety of methods with regards to that. It depends on the system and tastes, as will all of it, but ya, I've tried:

Method 1:
Resolve combat using battle system, as if PCs were not there, as an indication of how the battle is liable to go if the PCs don't do anything. Use this to guide how to set up the personal-level battle the PCs have to play out.
Play out the personal-level battle.
Translate the results of the personal-level battle into results or modifiers to the pre-rolled result at the battle level.

Method 2:
Just use the situation from the battle level to determine what kinds/numbers/location of friends & foes are involved in the personal-level battle.
Play out the personal-level battle.
Use the results of the personal-level battle to modify the situation and/or results at the battle level.

Method 3:
Remove the friend & foe units from the battle level that are immediately present where the PCs are. Include those, or a proportionally-reduced number of those, in a personal-level battle with the PCs.
Apply the results of the personal-level battle directly.
Resolve the rest of the battle as if the removed units were not there at all, and/or apply a modifier based on how well the players did in their personal-level battle.

I think these are equally good approaches.

Methods 4 & 5 I don't like as much, but I've seen used often in published games and computer games. The bias is to give the players more influence/responsibility on the effects:

Method 4:
Generate a personal-level battle based on a proportionally scaled-down sample of the larger battle.
Play out the personal-level battle.
Re-extrapolate the results of the personal-level battle more or less directly to the large scale battle.
(Example: 4,000 orcs and 8,000 goblins attack 400 dwarves and 3,000 humans & the PC's. Make a battle with 20 orcs, 40 goblins, 2 dwarves, 15 humans, and the PCs. Then apply casualties and retreats at about the same number - 200 combattants per figure in the personal battle. Or maybe decide that frontage and morale issues mean the conversion factor is different for each unit type.)

Method 5:
Generate a personal-level battle that more literally represents just the part of the battle where the PCs are on the field.
Play out the personal-level battle.
Have a system or pre-chosen victory conditions which will lead to different outcomes of the battle as a whole.
(Example: The GM describes or lays out the map of the overall battle, and perhaps with player decisions, determines what part of the battle the PCs are involved in. He sets up a personal-level battle to represent that, and the results of that battle determine what happens in the rest of the battle, as well.)

Method 5b:
Like Method 5, but the victory conditions and results may be linked to achieving certain things in a logical or semi-logical way.
(Examples: The players' battle involves fighting a conspicuous enemy leader's force. If they can kill that leader, the enemy army will panic and collapse. Or, critical locations as cinematized in the LOTR films at Helm's Deep: Play out defending the archer wall. The Keep will stand if 60% of the archers remain and the wall is not breached or overrun. If the walls falls, do the front gate battle: if the players can keep the gate from being knocked down for a certain time, the tower will hold. If the gate falls, do a last battle at the gate. If that falls, the GM needs to decide whether Gandalf comes to the rescue, or not.)

It shows how different RPGs are from Wargames that epic combat is very  hard to do right using an RPG system (especially if you do not integrate mechanics borrowed from Wargaming to do it).

Pendragon 5e I think is the best one I've run into.

What was the D&D setting where the characters are rulers of a nation? Birthright or something? There are rules in there for mass combat. I don't know how good they are, I never played it. Just remember reading them 20+ years ago.

A question for Skarg as well as others - since the wargaming I do the most is actually cardboard operational games, what sort of generic wargaming systems are you using for your RPGs mass battles?

Quote from: Rincewind1;886855A question for Skarg as well as others - since the wargaming I do the most is actually cardboard operational games, what sort of generic wargaming systems are you using for your RPGs mass battles?

I've used several. The first one I used (and still do sometimes) was a slight extension of the combat system from Avalon Hill's boardgame Alesia. Roman units each represent one cohort. Less organized units represent more men, and have lower stacking limits and other special rules (e.g. they have greater problems when fighting in multiple directions at once). Ranged weapons can fire 2-3 hexes away. There are rules for forts and ramparts and so on. I typically have a counter represent 100 men.

A friend of mine created systems which built on the rules from Metagaming's Chitin and Sticks & Stones microgames, which suited him, but I was a player in his games and didn't get into details of how his system worked.

For the most part, these rules were used to resolve battles that took place in the campaign, mostly when the PCs were not even at the battle location, or if they were, they were there as spectators, spies, commandos, messengers, looters, rescuers, people running away from a military search for them or others, or just trying NOT to get caught in any of the military combat.

I've also used different mixes of miniatures rules, usually adapted to counters rather than actual miniatures, as I'm not really into miniatures, don't have them, and when using them, I tend to find them more clunky than counters and they don't show the unit values on them, etc.

More recently, I tend to home-brew a system based on a combination of the above. I tend to try to do a more detailed mapping of the troops as I represent them in personal combat to the battle, and I combine it with the system I use for speeding NPC vs NPC soldier combat in personal combat - basically I figure out what the usual outcomes are between matchups of troops using the personal combat system, and reduce that to a 1d12 or 1d20 (sometimes 3d6) die roll table, which can be used both for a matchup of NPC troops in personal combat, or as  an input to the battle-level resolution. In other words, I go a bit insane on detail, because I enjoy doing that.

The GURPS Mass Combat rules, re-printed in various forms throughout the books, I have mixed feelings about. I think it is useful for guidelines for what factors it makes sense to consider when rating military units based on their equipment, training and experience and so on, which can be useful for figuring out what values to use. However I don't like the actual combat system at all because it has no map, it combines all the detail of the troops into one sludge combat factor, I hate the way the casualty allocation works, and it reduces a whole battle to a few rolls, and the player risk/consequences I wouldn't use except for NPCs no one particularly cares about.

For naval combat with oared galleys, rams and possibly mounted catapults and so on, I still really enjoy Metagaming's Ramspeed, especially if you can get the expanded rules which were published in Interplay magazine. For sailing ships, I  like the movement system from Avalon Hill's Wooden Ships & Iron Men, and I've combined it with Ramspeed. WS&IM of course has cannon rules too, if needed.