I am currently working on preparing a home-brew campaign for my group which for when our current GM finishes his campaign or just wants to take a break from being GM. I have only run 2 campaigns and both were sort of failures (in my opinion at least), the first ended with 3/4 of the party being killed and the sudden decision that the 1 living character was actually a spy for the villain and the time. The second campaign I continued from the last and let the 1 remaining character stay and had the other 3 be evil, and that just ended with more chaos than I could handle (burning a bar to the ground, killing guards, permanent enlarged half orc female in party, all after the first campaign where one of the party members killed a man's young daughter in his arms after the party freed her from a curse)
The campaign I am now working on, I have been working on it since at least August, the plot I have been working around is the player's characters being involved in a war between the nation they are from and that of one that is bordering them, I was planning to have them initially be on the battlefield itself and after a while have them do more covert things for the war. My problem is I have no idea how I should go about running a war, like running the combat.
~Gwynbleidd43254
That's good. Or you could use these: Rules for Mass Combat.
I would also recommend skipping the actual warfare. At most, I would say figure out a one-roll method, with modifiers for the opposing generals, advantageous numbers, terrain, special units, and finally the PC's success/failure in their mission.
The PC's might open the gates to the castle, but if the enemy commander is prepared for this and has a counter attack planned, the PC's side could still lose, as an example.
Something to remember, not all win conditions for war are "kill the other side". If the PC's are involved in protecting a civilian evacuation across a bridge, they don't need to beat the other side, they just need to protect the bridge until all the civilians are across, then retreat across it themselves and destroy it, slowing the enemy down.
Another thing to consider, is at some point a character will be caught in an arrow volley. Instead of rolling a giant number of attacks, a reflex save might be faster and easier.
Lastly, decide how you want to handle the Leadership feat. One possibility is to give it to them for free when they're at that level, then instead of having them bring their cohorts with all the time, give them multiple missions to accomplish. If they have two missions that need to be done simultaneously, they get to decide how to split the party resources to best accomplish them. For example, they could send player A and B, along with player C and D's cohorts to do one mission, while player C and D with A and B's cohorts do the second. This gives it a little more of a unit feel to the game and works pretty well (my group has used this kind of setup for various games since the late 90's when we played the Darkstryder campaing for d6 Star Wars).
The later books in the Kingmaker Adventure Path had some interesting sections dealing with combat on a larger scale than the individual tactical miniatures rules you see in a typical Pathfinder session. I recommend taking a look at those if you haven't already, and seeing what you can pull out and use for your own scenario.
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If you want to have the PCs on the battlefield, your best bet is to make stat blocks for friendly and enemy "units" - so a unit would be, say 20 orcs, or 50 goblins, or something like that, but those 20 or 50 soldiers all share a single stat block.
So, for example, let's say you want to have a unit of 30 human warriors.
Each warrior has an average of, let's say 7 hit points. So the unit as a whole has 210 Hit Points. Call it a 30 hit dice creature for effects involving hit dice. If you want to get fancy, you can have it "lose hit dice" as it takes damage at a rate of 1/7 hit points. When the unit is at 0 hit points, either all of the soldiers are dead or else the unit has broken apart and fled.
Each warriors is wearing studded leather and a shield: AC 13. Since they've been trained to fight as a unit, each guy is helping to guard the guy next to him, so consider that each is using "aid another", so just to be simple we'll say each guy is getting a +2 circumstance bonus from the guys on either side of him - so the unit as a whole has an AC of 15.
For Saves, use the basic troopers save and add a +2 circumstance bonus for his mates. Give the unit the swarm traits that prevent spells and such from attacking individuals: so things like charm person and sleep won't affect the unit but a fireball still will. Use your discretion.
When a PC attacks, they attack the unit as a whole - as if they were fighting one big creature.
For CMB and CMD: use the individual's CMB and CMD plus the number of guys or hit dice in the unit. So if each warrior has a +1 BAB and +1 from STR and no dex bonus, the unit's CMB is going to be +32 and CMD is going to be 42. If you want to get fancy, these numbers can go down as the unit "looses hit dice"
The really tricky part is determining how the unit attacks. Easiest is to have the unit attack once vs. everything in base contact - PCs, NPCs, or other units. Units should auto-hit other units, which simulates the carnage of battle, but should have to roll against AC for PCs, so the PCs get to feel heroic - Take the individual soldier's Highest attack bonus and add some kind of circumstance bonus. Probably +4 or +6, since each soldier will have a buddy next to him "aiding another" or flanking. Damage should be normal weapon damage when attacking an individual, or 5x normal weapon damage when attacking another unit. For ranged attacks, make the attack an area of effect (massed archery saturating a certain area) with a set damage (say, 5x normal ranged damage for an individual) and anyone within the area of effect can save for half.
All this requires some prep, but no more than for a regular encounter, I think.
It depends on how much detail you want to get into. The biggest potential issue with RPing PC involvement in large-scale conflicts or politics is breadth of options available to them - forcing you to choose between railroading them, or ad-libing a lot.
Couple years ago I GMed a war-centric campaign; my advantage was that the party picked its "niche" - they were a gang of halfling commando saboteurs / partisans mostly focused on the work behind enemy lines.
The approach I picked was a multi-layered one: first, I sketched out the course of war, including locations and outcomes of major battles, strategically important pivot points etc. That gave me "this happens if PCs don't get involved" baseline. From there, I sketched first dozen (chronological) branches, working out in detail what happens in the first stage of war, where PCs can be expected to get involved, and how does their involvement, success and failure at certain points affect the flow of war. This creates a fairly realistic-feeling war sandbox, but requires a lot of prepwork and research.
Your other option is to abstract the war, use it as a backdrop, and run a storyline over the "war", anticipating points of PC involvement and not bothering with assuming causal branches or butterfly effect of PCs' actions. That's a fairly railroady option, which may make your life easier, as well as players' game simpler, if they're used to "follow the clues" approach to the gaming, as opposed to sandbox.
~Andro
Thank you for the responses, I really like some of the suggestions, like Wolfsnap's suggestion to have units share a single character sheet which is something I will most likely do. And for those who suggested I take a look at different books (Later Kingmaker books, Rules for Mass Combat, and The Saxon Stories) I will attempt to get a hold of the books and at least browse through them to see if they will be helpful.
Korpen, your comment about the style of war (State-centric vs Pre-modern personal perspective), my idea for the war strike me as a little of both with the ruler of a neighboring country declaring war on the PC's country due to the refusal to extradite the PCs.
Again thank you all for the responses, they are all helpful and I will be sure to consider them while doing work for the campaign.
~Aod43254
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The best battle mechanics I have ever seen are in the Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game. Basically the battle rages around the players and they have opportunities for heroics within the battle itself. Capturing the enemy banner, charging enemy archers, saving an overwhelmed commander, holding the line, that sort of thing. The more risky the situation the more that it influences the battle. High risk equals high reward.
That to me is more enjoyable than rolling some abstract battle where the players have little to no input. I'm sure it can be converted to work in Pathfinder quite easily.
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If you really want to make it feel "epic" I'd suggest putting the PCs in command of a siege engine. One guy is on catapult, one guy on ballista, etc. A siege engine usually requires four rounds to reload and fire, or one round if four guys working on it, so let's say three soldiers are helping each PC. Then draw the battlefield. Treat each army as a sort of swarm, and whenever a player hits a square, just remove the piece from that square instead of tracking HP.
Also, the enemy has siege weapons too, so the PCs can try to race them to see who wipes out their enemy's army first, or they can play "dueling snipers" with catapults.
If you don't do this...
That's good. Or you could use these: Rules for Mass Combat.
...then maybe you should check out this.
The later books in the Kingmaker Adventure Path had some interesting sections dealing with combat on a larger scale than the individual tactical miniatures rules you see in a typical Pathfinder session. I recommend taking a look at those if you haven't already, and seeing what you can pull out and use for your own scenario.
The Kingmaker stuff is cool (using it now), but Warpath is something I will be looking into.
Their is a D&D 3.5 book called "Heroes of Battle". It will help.
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In general, what's best in my experience is to treat the heroes like commandoes, not soldiers, and to keep the focus on them. Putting them in a truly mass combat situation with nothing to do but to cause damage can get pretty aimless pretty quickly. Good missions are things like delivering messages, assassinating enemy leaders or champions, intercepting messages, "Saving Private Ryan"-style recovery of crucial NPCs, recovery, theft or destruction of powerful magic items, taking out bridges or other structures, social encounters with neutral parties, etc. As far as adjudicating how the larger war is going, I'd just run that as plot - the war is going as well or as poorly for any given side as the plot demands, although you should have it go well in areas the PCs are involved in if they did well on their missions. I don't think that creating rules for randomly figuring out how various battlefronts that the PCs aren't involved with are going adds much unless you can actually get the players involved in that.
Their is a D&D 3.5 book called "Heroes of Battle". It will help.
This is a really good suggestion. Even if you dont want to use the 3.5 mechanics it has ALOT of advice on how to handle this sort of thing in gerneal.
My personal view is to treat the party as a special forces unit. You dont put navy seals on the front lines, they have special missions to deal with specific targets or objectives during or away from the battle. And even when they are among a big battle, keep the majority of it in the background, and let the players deal with a small portion of it. Think of the Return of the king, during the siege of minas tirith, there was battle all over the walls and outside, but gandalf was dealing with the force of trolls at the gate. Dont roll dice for the whole battle, just the parts the players are involved in (try to discourage them splitting up).
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I think Joyd and Kolokotroni hit it on the head. I've been running a mega campaign for close to a decade now. There has been a huge interplanar war going on the whole time.
At first I tried to have mass combat rules and all that. I even tried using Warhammer with the outcome of the game deciding the in game results.
In the end, the most effective/fun use of player time was Special Missions. Make the players feel like they AND their characters are an important part of it, not just names on a regiment roster.
Take advantage of a wide variety of options for battle. The characters can use skills/spells to affect the battlefield (cast Create Pit Trap and then place an illusion on it, K:Engineering to improve upon the armies siege engines or K:Nobility/History to anticipate your enemies tactics), and hunt down enemy commanders. But make sure to mix it up. One assassination mission is fun, three of them gets boring. Give each session/adventure a theme/style of play.