Mass Combat Rules - redone

[Saraiso]

Hi Everyone,

I have been running the Wrath of the Righteous and Kingmaker AP's and the one thing that really left me lukewarm was the Mass Combat rules. It seemed like there was loads of configuration in the setup and building of an army, but during combat you just wind the two armies up (selecting tactics and strategy) then let them go at it and watch them roll attacks at each other till one falls down. Not very satisfying!

So, in an effort to improve the experience, I decided to make my own!

I have been looking at a lot of different homebrew and third party mass combat systems, including from the great 3pp book Ultimate Battle, but none of them were quite what I was looking for. The ruleset I came up with, and which is posted below, is a hybrid of ideas from many other sources as well as entirely original ideas I came up with on my own.

The key differences are that combat takes place in rounds, each of which has 4 phases (tactics, ranged, melee, rout) and that Tactics are an army's actions. Each round an army picks one tactic to use, and that determines which phase the army acts in.

There is also lots of other stuff... in an effort to make the system truly comprehensive I have included all of the army based things including several that were left out of the Kingdom Building rules. There are rules for terrain, weather, visibility, overland travel, recruiting/disbanding armies, upgrading/downgrading armies, and so much more!

If any of you feel so inclined (and want to read through the massive 73 page pdf), please give me feedback on this! I am playtesting these rules with the group I'm currently running through Wrath of the Righteous, but if anyone else wants to take these rules and playtest them yourselves feel free!

Just please give me credit if you distribute this to your friends, and don't distribute this pdf for any commercial purposes >_<

Saraiso's Mass Combat Rules

[Cyrad]

How much have you playtested these rules?

[Here4daFreeSwag]

Good to have some free alternate combat rules stuff out there. ;)

[Saraiso]

@Cyrad, About 4 battles so far.

The PC's controlled two armies and the enemies controlled between 1 and 4. With four PC's, two of them controlled armies and the other two were Aides. All were Mythic (this was the Wrath of the Righteous campaign) so the aides got to use their mythic powers as well as their boons to help the army.

I haven't fully playtested the kingdom building side of things yet, or the scouting and ambush rules. The enemy armies so far have all been out in the open and the PC armies were flashy paladins who didn't even try to sneak.

The consumption aspects seem reasonable so far, but the armies are using Supplies that they were given to start and the party has yet to establish their kingdom and start paying out of BP, so we will see how things look once they get there.

I welcome any feedback (positive or negative)!

[Knight Magenta]

I feel the main problem in the original mass combat rules is that the D20 is too swingy. Its especially visable if the armies are not big.

Consider 2 medium armies of level 1 human warriors. Their ACR is 1/3. This means that they have 3 hp. Each with OM of +0 and DV of 10. The fight here is a coin flip and is likely over in one round because the d20 is so large compared to their HP.

Likewise, I feel that +1/+2 DV for medium/Heavy armor is insufficient.

Consider 10 guys in full plate fighting 10 guys wearing their PJs. Both groups have clubs. The guys in full plate should win every time.

Now scale this up to 2 small armies; suddenly the guys in their PJs have a 40% chance to beat the armored guys in only 1 hour.

If you split the combat roll into attack/damage you can have armor give its normal AC bonus and not break all the math.

Edit: incidentally, very large, high-level but evenly matched armies would have the opposite problem. They can only deal ~10 damage max but they can easily have over 100 hp turning the battle into a slog.

[Jason Nelson]

If you're looking to expand the breadth and depth of the mass combat rules, especially making them less swingy and with more interesting tactical options, you might check out Ultimate Battle and Ultimate War from Legendary Games to see if they give you more of what you want to see.

[Cyrad]

I tend to do mass combat by making liberal use of the troop subtype. It's been very successful in my campaign

[shadowkras]

This pdf does seem to implement ideas from ultimate battle and ultimate war already, i see no mentions of either of them though.

Quote:

I feel the main problem in the original mass combat rules is that the D20 is too swingy

The same is true for the normal scale combat.

But yes, only +2 DV is a small defensive bonus.
People wouldn`t march on full plate though, that is what knights and their horses are for, the heaviest soldiers would use at most half plates or scale mails, everything else is too heavy for hours of foot battle.

The loss of maneuverability is also a drawback in large scale battles, agile soldiers will take advantage of terrain and speed against heavier enemies. If we start bringing normal scale benefits to large scale, walls would have to grant a DV bonus much larger than +1 DV, castles wouldnt be only +8 DV, and so on.

On that example of 10 unarmored soldiers vs 10 full-plate-clad soldiers, if the unarmored soldiers are on the top of a all, the heavy soldiers wouldnt have a chance (on normal scale) to hit them with their clubs.

Let's remember that this isnt direct combat, they arent all standing against at each other trading blows.

[Chemlak]

I'll give this a full critique once I've read it properly alongside UCam, UBat and UWar, but one thing jumped out: the army template has melee above ranged, but the ranged phase happens before the melee phase in the turn, so instead of smoothly guiding you to the next piece of info, the template makes you jump around during a battle.

Looking forward to this, actually, and I can already see some of the roots in UBat and UWar.

[Saraiso]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

@Knight Magenta
Thank you for that insight! I have only really used this ruleset for mid range armies; with both the PC's army and the enemy's armies in the ACR 2-5 range. They all had enough HP to last roughly three rounds in even a very one sided battle, so it didn't feel too swingy or to sloggy. As you say though, that will likely change on the very high and low end of the ACR scale.

There were three main reasons that I kept the DV and OM bonuses for resources at a low number.

-The first is that a mass combat round represents 1 hour of battle. While in a normal scale fight you might easily go a round or five without laying a hit on a high AC enemy, when you scale that up to a hundred troopers, the odds of NONE of them rolling a 20 is pretty slim. Odds are, at least Some of the troops of even the low AC army will get a hit in and cause some damage. By reducing an hour of fighting to a single attack roll, swinging the DV by too much effectively negates even that incidental damage. The mass combat system already boils an hour of fighting down to a single roll; I wanted to make sure that that roll always had a decent chance of success.

-The second reason is game balance. No resource should be so hugely powerful that it alone spells the difference between an even fight and a completely one sided fight for armies of comparable ACR. One ACR 2 army should always have a chance to beat another ACR 2 army, adjusted by tactics and the skill of the commander of course. Giving an army the full armor AC bonus, as you suggested, would throw that out the window. Since resources do not modify ACR, they can't (for game balance reasons) provide too much of a difference.

-The third reason is that resources are typically used by humanoid armies. Monster armies don't typically have weapons and armor, but make up for it with special abilities instead. Neither special abilities nor resources modify ACR, and both fulfil somewhat similar roles. You will notice that the +2 DV from having DR 5 is the same as the +2 DV from having Heavy Armor. This is because heavy army is the humanoid version of DR for monsters. Abstractly speaking of course.

The goal of this system is to have an somewhat abstract system for mass combat battles where armies have differences based on their race and gear, but overall those differences would be minor. The main power level of an army should be its ACR, not its gear or its special abilities.

This abstraction is why improved weapons and medium armor both give a +1 bonus, even though in a normal fight the difference between a chain shirt and breastplate (+2 AC) is way different than the difference between a morningstar and a longsword (1 higher crit range). In mass combat, both are abstracted to a +1 to OM or DV respectively.

(Also, if it helps, just imagine that DV bonuses are half AC bonuses. An "unequipped" army is assumed to be wearing light armor, so say; +4 from a chain shirt. An army with Medium armor would have a +6 AC from a breastplate or so, and an army with Heavy armor would have a +8 AC bonus from half plate. Medium is +2 more than light, and heavy is +2 more than medium. Halve this bonus, and you get the +1 and +2 DV bonuses!)

[Saraiso]

@Jason Nelson
I did actually purchase Ultimate Battle, and I sort of used that system as a basis for building this one. In particular the battle turn sequence (Tactics, Ranged, Melee, Rout phases) and the battle zones (camp, range, melee) are ideas I got from Ultimate Battle.

I liked the wide range of options in Ultimate Battle, but the combat system felt too confusing for me and my players both. The tactics in particular were really all over the place. Tactics are basically 1 round buffs, but also some of them require certain actions while others don't? Cautious Combat for example applies no matter what you do, while Furious Charge implies a rush into melee? You can't use it while engaged, but does it Require you to advance into the melee zone? can you use Furious Charge while sitting around in the ranged zone making potshots with arrows? The rules don't say!

The biggest change I made (at least in my opinion) was changing Tactics into Combat Actions. The tactic you choose defines the action your army takes, and in this way the Tactics phase becomes WAY more important than before. Forcing the enemy to reveal their tactic first means you know not just whether they are getting an OM or DV bonus, but also what action they are taking, and you can plan your own action to take advantage of theirs.

It also serves to simplify the combat round. Instead of an army being able to make ranged attacks, advance into melee, make melee attacks, and possible retreat to the ranged zone again all in one round; now you just do one thing each round. My players have said they find my system much less confusing in actual play than the rules in Ultimate Battle.

Actually, many of the rules in my version of Mass Combat are attempts to simplify confusing or overcomplicated rules from Ultimate Battle and Ultimate Campaign, and to unify everything into a single coherent system.

[Saraiso]

@Chemlak

Thanks for pointing that out! I modified the army template to show ranged above melee to make it easier to read.

[Chemlak]

I'm still working my way through, but I will say that so far I'm liking this. A lot.

I will have many questions, I'm sure, but the layout and material so far has been good (I'm somewhere around p20 of a complete read through).

My sole negative comment so far? Do a grammar check for cases of "armies" (plural of army) and "army's" (thing possessed by an army).

Really good work.

[Chemlak]

I've just spent the last hour reading through and I have more comments to make.

However, if you do not have it yet, get Ultimate War. If you cannot get Ultimate War, let me know and I will gift you Ultimate War.

I shall come back with my suggestions, ideas, and thoughts later today (in about 4 hours), but suffice to say that barring some very specific points, I think this is amazing.

Having said that, though, I can see the benefits this has gained from Ultimate Battle, and that makes me slightly nervous because the document you've presented is a modified "best bits" from UCam and UBat, and that touches on some risky copyright grounds.

[Chemlak]

Okay, so I'm just going to run through my notes first, and then we'll see where it takes us.

These are all my personal opinion. Please do not think that I hate any part of this, these are suggestions which I think could improve on this work.

1) p16. Rout Phase. I don't like the name. I don't have a better suggestion and I know it's pulled straight out of UBat, and it makes sense, but I think a better name should be possible.

2) p28. Expert Flankers Consider rewriting the text to the following (emphasis added to show change): The army is skilled at surrounding the foe and distracting them, at the risk of spreading out too much and being more vulnerable.

3) p29. Fighting Withdraw. Should be properly named Fighting Withdrawal.

4) p30. Pincer Maneuver. This tactic should absolutely exist. I'm struggling to identify whether the situational nature of the benefit (+4 OM against one enemy unit already engaged with an allied unit) and the penalty (-4 DV against all other enemy units) makes this one better or worse than Expert Flankers which just provides those same modifiers to all enemy units, and as such should only one of them actually be a learned tactic (my preference would be to let this one be a general tactic that anyone can use, perhaps with a tweak to the numbers).

5) p43/44. Almost all non-magical resources require a smith, but even heavy siege engines don't require a military academy which is one of the buildings I'd consider being required for high-end war-making equipment. Perhaps require a military academy for some tactics?

6) p45 (also glossary/definitions p8). Armor, medium. This is actually the default armor level for armies presented in Ultimate Campaign. I love that you decided to go for light, medium, heavy, but medium armor should be the norm, not an addition. This then leads to the Speed problem, which is that a normal humanoid army in medium armor has a Speed of 1. All of your tables reflect this, but I think it would be better served with light armor being a rebate (-1 DV, +1 speed, -2 BP cost), and "normal armies" having an assumed 1-step speed reduction. This also feeds into the problem of mounts. A light horse hits a medium load at 229 lbs, and once you factor in a rider, his armor, and his weapons, a saddle, and all the other riding equipment, it's very easy to tip into a medium load and have to slow the mount down. Which leads me nicely to...

7) p45. Armor doesn't have a material option. I think being able to kit an army out in Mithral or Adamantine armor would be awesome (expensive, but awesome). Also, mithral armor would go some way to allowing encumbered armies to speed up to their normal movement rate.

8) p48. Weapon materials. Excellent idea! The cost should probably be 1 BP per 40 gp. I do understand keeping the numbers simple, but the way you have it now, equipping a medium army (100 people) with adamantine weapons costs 60 BP (approx 240,000 gp), when actually buying 100 adamantine weapons for cash would cost 300,000 gp (75 BP).

9) p71. Typo: ARC should read ACR in final paragraph on the page.

Okay, so that's the whole of my suggestions regarding the text as written. I really like this. I think it's probably the best, most unified set of mass combat rules I've seen which are based on the Ultimate Campaign rules, and that's coming as an unreserved fan of Ultimate Battle.

I really would love to see how this stacks up with the modified unit sizes from UBat and the combined arms rules from UWar.

[Saraiso]

@Chemlak: Thanks for all the wonderful feedback! Don't worry, I am glad to hear your impressions of this ruleset and I don't at all take criticism as an expression of hate =3

I don't have Ultimate War, though it sounds like a good book? I'll look into acquiring and reading through it.

I made these rules mostly for the use of my personal campaign which is the Wrath of the Righteous AP. As such, all of the battles so far have been pretty standard land based stuff, so I didn't want to overload my players with a bunch of alternate rules for air and sea and underwater combat. Similarly the one "siege" in the campaign so far has been against a mostly ruined castle and I wanted to leave the fortifications as a simple backdrop to the fighting, and not get into deep siege rules. I remember reading the description of Ultimate War and thinking it wasnt relevant to what I was doing, so I stuck with just Ultimate Battle. I will certainly go revisit that book though, and maybe incorporate a modification of those extra systems into Phase 2 of my house rules.

I'll try to answer your points as you posted them:

1) I thought about changing it to the Morale phase, but then the tactics stop making as much sense. (Why would you use the Retreat tactic in the Morale phase?). If you have any better name for it, I am open to suggestions. I can't think of anything better off the top of my head.

2) Done.

3) Done.

4) The difference between this and expert flankers becomes most apparent when your side has two armies and the enemy side has one, in which case you can use Pincer Maneuver to get a +4 to OM without taking any corresponding penalty. Even in multiple army situations this is going to be usually better than Expert Flankers because you gain an OM bonus against the enemy you are attacking (you wouldn't use Pincer Maneuver if you weren't attacking an army engaged with an allied army, right?), but you only take a DV penalty vs armies you are Not attacking. So if that melee army attacks you back, you have no DV penalty, making this tactic superior to Expert Flankers.

Expert Flankers on the other hand is a more general tactic; not requiring a second allied army to use, but also providing less of a benefit against your army's primary target (+4 OM/-4 DV vs +4 OM and no DV penalty).

As to making it a general tactic; I am torn on that. On the one hand I can see how this type of tactic is something that any army could use (everyone can get Flanking in normal combat after all), but on the other hand you could make the argument that only a skilled commander would order their army to deliberately flank another army rather than just advancing straight into melee.

I also want to keep the number of core tactics as small as possible, so there is that. If you can come up with a good alternate version of this tactic (with at most a +2 bonus/penalty) that could be a free tactic, I am open to the idea.

5) I admit, I didn't spend as much time on this section as i should have. I went with the bare minimum to keep complexity down, but there are definitely some resources that should have additional requirements. I just went through the list of settlement buildings in more depth and modified some resource requirements. See if that makes more sense now?

I absolutely don't want any tactics to have a settlement building requirement to learn. Even "primitive" armies of barbarians from the wilds can make use of advanced tactics if they have a good commander, so I don't want to limit the list of available tactics to penalize armies without a developed kingdom. I much prefer the idea of keeping settlement restrictions to Resources, and leaving Tactics alone.

6) I went with armies using Light armor as the default level because of the idea of a basic army as a bunch of peasants with pitchforks and scythes. They would typically be wearing padded or leather, if anything and using simple weapons. An army wearing medium armor also typically has martial weapons. By shifting the baseline down to light/simple instead of Ultimate Campaigns medium/martial, I added a few more options for cheap ways to outfit a low level humanoid army and also set the base speed for humanoid armies to be the same as for non-humanoid armies that don't use armor.

I felt this was a better baseline to stick with, and then modify from there. If you want to use medium armor as a baseline and change Light to be a rebate, you can certainly do that for your game! Doing so would necessitate defining an army as armor-wearing or non-armor-wearing right off the bat though; as armored armies would have a base speed of 1, while non-armored armies would have a base speed of 2.

The light/simple baseline also serves to slightly increase the power of humanoid armies in relation to monster armies, as like you say most armies fielded by kingdoms will have medium armor and martial weapons. I felt this was a good balancing choice as most monster armies have several special abilities that give them advantages over humanoid armies already. Ultimately though, its just a +1 OM/DV difference and it probably wont make a big difference to modify it one way or another.

I did update the Mounts resource to replicate the weight issue though. Light mounts prohibit Heavy Armor. Heavy Mounts allow Heavy Armor. I wanted to avoid lots of conditional bonuses and penalties, so just simply saying "no heavy armor for light mounts" seemed a simple way to go about it. Armies typically do not march while overburdened anyway, as that is a sure fire way to arrive at a battle fatigued and at a disadvantage. When given the option I am trying to go with simplicity over realism for these rules.

7) Added. Armor now has a Material option with modifiers for Mithral, Darkleaf and Adamantine. Other materials are possible with GM permission.

8) This is again simplicity, and in this case consistency, rather than realism. 1 BP is roughly 5000 gold, and so to outfit an army of 100 people with 50gp worth of materials costs 1 BP. Its not strictly realistic, but it makes the math work out with the other BP based calculations so I felt it was a worthwhile trade. It's also a lot easier to divide most of the material costs by 50 than it is by 40. Mithral for example is 500 a pound, which is 12.5 times 40, but an even 10 times 50.

9) Fixed. Thanks to that, I also found a similar typo in an earlier section!

Thanks again for your feedback, and I'm glad you like it! I did add a credits blurb at the beginning, because I don't want it to seem like I am trying to steal other people's ideas!

The download link should point to the updated doc now.

[Lazlo.Arcadia]

Personal suggestion for Mass Combat: Reference Heros of Battle from 3.5

The main difference there is the complete lack of any attempt to deal with combat as a true form of mass combat. Rather it simply uses the large scale battle / war as a back drop for the adventures of the PC's who typically take on the roles of special forces commandos. That said, the large scale battle (LSB) would have certain "swing points" written into the story arc. Example: if the players destroy the bridge the bad guy reinforcements don't show up. If they fail to destroy the bridge, X amount of additional orc reinforcements show up on day 3 & 8 which overwhelm the defenses by day 10.

These swing points I have typically mapped out in a flow chart fashion. With a couple of dozen of these you can easily map out an entire war time campaign setting, the spin off story arcs would provide enough materials for months (if not years) of additional game play.

This is not to knock on books like Ultimate Battle, etc as I think they are all excellent works, but they tend to greatly overshadow the PC's in the attempt to codify how an army should function.

[Guardianlord]

Necromancer Here!

Seriously though I do hope the OP @Saraiso is still active, just started looking into Mass Combat for an upcoming campaign section, and this PDF seems like an excellent resource.

I have a question about the combat Ranges (Camp, Ranged, Melee).
Would it make more sense to add in more ranges to represent Long range (Bows), Medium Range (Thrown Weapons/Most Blast Spells), Melee (reach and cavalry), and Melee (Close, fully engaged).

This would make movement on a HEX a little more important, and obviously make slow armies very vulnerable to ranged. But this would also give cavalry a chance to shine (maybe can move 2 range spaces per action?)

Or does this sound like it is adding unnecessary complexity to a relatively abstract combat?

I ask because my players armies are thrown weapon soldiers (Spears) going against entrenched Longbow wielding armies.
The melee specialists are movement boosted light skirmishers (60ft regular unit move speed) versus heavy armour infantry (20ft regular unit move speed). And while the gear is represented in the DV and OM values, an approaching spear unit would get hit multiple times before closing ranges on a bow unit group. And the Heavy infantry would realistically not be able to strike an army moving back to ranged stage.
Or is there a more abstract way of incorporating this?

@Lazlo.Arcadia
I think this is important too. The PC's need a sense of agency and power in the narrative. I am hoping to give them direct actions they can attempt to gain a tactical or resource advantage!