I was just perusing through my recently acquired copy of Skull & Shackles Part 5 and noticed the rules for Fleet Battles in one of the alter sections. While I'm not running S&S at the moment (though I am intending to at some point down the line) I am in the middle of running a Kingmaker campaign, and while I like the Mass Combat rules, I feel as though they're a little lacking in certain areas.
Myself and my players are miniatures gamers to a man, and while I don't think anyone wants to break out a gaming board and units of models, I feel as though a slightly less abstract system might better suit our purposes, as my players and I are both interested in playing around with armies and warfare more than the adventure path initially includes.
My question, and thoughts, are how easy it would be to modify the Fleet Battle rules for use with land troops, taking elements from the Mass Battle rules of Kingmaker as well. Obviously an Admiral is easily replaced by a General, and Commodore's can be represented by Lieutenants or Captains or whichever rank you want. My real thought is how easily one could slot 'armies' as presented in Kingmaker into the role of squadrons, allowing each PC to control a company of men consisting of a variety of troops, say, a block of halberdiers, backed up by pikes and crossbowmen to represent a Pike & Shotte style regiment.
I need to look into this further before deciding how easy it will be, but I would welcome any initial thoughts that people have on the subject.
I tried to modify the KM Mass combat rules to make it a little more "table-top wargames" like and I failed totaly.
The KM Mass combat rules are very abstract, not looking into things like tactical movement etc.
So I would suggest one of the following two:
1. create your own Mass combat rules
2. take a look at the Tazleford encounter and take this as an good example for a mass combat scenario
For my group I will take 2. :D
The abstract nature of the rules is exactly why I feel combining them with the Skull & Shackles fleet combat rules will work well, those rules are equally abstract, but break down an army (or fleet in the case of the original source material) into more than just an 'army' of identical individuals.
Don't get me wrong, I think the standard Kingmaker rules are nice enough in and of themselves, I just like the way the Skull & Shackles rules breaks things into Fleets, Squadrons and Ships. In these house rules, those will be modified to be Armies, Divisions, and Contingents, with a Contingent being the equivalent of a standard Kingmaker army.
Having looked into this a bit over the weekend, it seems that a lot of the rules are actually combinable with little more than some changes in terminology... of course that will change when it gets to the actual combat rules, as in Skull & Shackles attack and defence are done on the squadron level, even though damage is done on the ship level. Whereas I would like to try and keep the original Kingmaker army rules as unchanged as possible, which means all of that will need to be done on the contingent level instead. I'm currently working on this, and will post up my thoughts as and when they come up for anyone who's interested.