I'm going to be running a mass combat/war game in eberron soon and was wondering what rules systems have people been using. I'm familiar with 2nd ed Birthright mass combat, Kingmaker mass combat, and green ronin Trojan Wars systems.
What system do you use?
What systems have you used?
What system works best for character integration?
What system works best for high magic settings?
What system is easiest to teach players? (my players generally hate to read anything but a one page overview).
I've used the mass combat rules from Trojan Warby Green Ronin, which is also d20. It works really well, but requires quite a bit of work in advance because it's akin to rolling up a character: You select feats and special offensive and defensive maneuvers depending on how big your forces are. Essentially, you have each player be in charge of X amount of troops and they battle equal sized groups of NPCs. As captains, they can call out enemy captains for single combat and it affects how their units react. Pretty cool stuff, and since you are already familiar with it, you should be able to get the party up and running quickly.
I made quick-reference sheets of all of the maneuvers and feats so that the players could review them instead of waiting whilst one person pored through the book.
Hiya.
What system do you use?
What systems have you used?
What system works best for character integration?
What system works best for high magic settings?
What system is easiest to teach players? (my players generally hate to read anything but a one page overview).
War Machine rules from BECMI (Companion and Masters is where it all is). That's the answere for all of the above questions. It handles all that, relatively easily I might add. I believe the Rules Cyclopedia also had all (or most) of the rules as well.
^_^
Paul L. Ming
I'm going to be running a mass combat/war game in eberron soon and was wondering what rules systems have people been using. I'm familiar with 2nd ed Birthright mass combat, Kingmaker mass combat, and green ronin Trojan Wars systems.
What system do you use?
What systems have you used?
What system works best for character integration?
What system works best for high magic settings?
What system is easiest to teach players? (my players generally hate to read anything but a one page overview).
We use:
- For armies (~400+ soldiers on the field), we use 3e's Fields of Blood (Eden Studios).- For 'skirmishes' (~399 soldiers or less), we use 3e's OMCSII (Mongoose).
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Both are great, and (for us, at least), fit the above scale (FoB assumes, for example, 100 soldiers in a unit - so 400 soldiers on the field would be the minimum of 2 units per side... a simple combat for that system). OMCSII can be fully scaled and easy to create units (but it doesn't integrate into the realm management system we use, and doesn't do extremely large scale - like sieges - well; but works great with smaller battles and is much easier on the DM to design/build/setup). Thus, we use both systems as both have a place in the games we play - FoB for realm management and armies, and OMCSII for things like ship combat between crews, for example.
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We have used the above, plus 2e's Battlesystem rules. They weren't too bad for the time (but required a large number of miniatures or markers).
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- Best for character integration? Both. They both have rules for PCs.
- Best for high magic? Hmmm... Probably both. (FoB has large-scale battlefield/army magic, for example.) OMCSII can work with whatever spells you use in your campaign for the most part.
- Easiest to teach? Probably OMCSII, but FoB is pretty easy to understand as well. (My players don't want to learn too much of mass combat rules, and they have figured out BOTH of the systems we use.)