Help me brainstorm some ways to make a warfare subsystem using the GMG’s guidelines. So far I have a few different victory point tracks
—INTEL for gaining information that gives your side an advantage.
—MORALE for gaining soldiers and uplifting their confidence in battle.
—RESOURCES for equipping and feeding your army.
—DRILL for training your army into a more organized and unified force
So far I Imagine using it for a long campaign where the PCs are trying to travel all over a kingdom to unite the different peoples of the land in order to fight the big looming threat that is impossible to defeat unless most of the peoples work together. Doing typical quests not just for treasure but securing alliances too and gaining magical and powerful tools to use for the inevitable war when it comes. Keeping track of those different scores will tell you how your PCs went about it and can dictate how the final battle goes.
Any other factors I’m missing? Any other way to use the subsystem rules for my idea or other mass combat type of thing?
I think maybe like maybe you split it into two sections: preparing for battle, and battle itself.
Preparing for battle I think could work well if done kind of like the infiltration examples, gaining you a bunch of bonuses or tokens you can cash in on the day of the fight (although maybe recruiting does just build up some other scale, which you use as a health bar later on), although you should probably put a harsher timeline on it. Depending on the feel you're going for, you could make the rounds take way longer, like months or years (although I imagine that one is thematically way better for things like playing the invading empire or an interplanar army).
Like your listed options there would be pretty good examples for this. You could also implement several ways For recruiting soldiers. Say like, maybe if you conscript a bunch but crit fail the check they might turn against you at an inopportune moment, or cause other difficulties. You could even make the different ways have different DCs, so while forcing people to join you is way riskier than making them want to join, the DC is also lower. Drilling, etc. would definitely be a good way to get tokens you can cash in during battle to change how it's going (so e.g. the other side messes the army up with a dragon, but the player is like "We trained for this" and cashes it in for a reroll).
For the combat itself, I think maybe the way to do it is either split every player into running their own squad, or give them alternatives like a sabotage mission if they'd prefer to be helping the fight in other ways. If army size was determined by points in the previous step, have it count down in conflict when checks are failed, but the other side count down when checks succeed.
Oh right also, for morale, can do that at certain events and point loss thresholds, face an infiltration-style complication.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Ironfang Invasion has a battle subsystem that works just fine in the new edition, having actually used it. You basically spend the time before the battle preparing and training the settlement you're protecting, which translates to doing skill checks to build up a reserve of defense points. These points basically act as your settlements HP.
When the battle begins, the enemy begins to deplete your defense points. This happens over time slowly, but there are specific specialized forces that get deployed which can deal damage must faster. The PCs need to fight these as normal encounters, except the more rounds they take dealing with any given threat the more damage us dealt to the town.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, separating "strategy" and "tactics" into two games seems sensible, they operate at very different scales.
I dig the idea of stealing from the infiltrating rules. You're basically heisting victory from the jaws of defeat.
I think a key thing to look for is how your system will allow the PCs to sometimes lose a battle, without losing the whole war. So make sure the plot doesn't depend on them always succeeding.