I am struggling to find a good RPG mass combat system or more accurately small units combat system. I need the system for:

- emulating the actions of player characters in the field of battle in command of small units where players can at the same time both make leadership decisions and fight it out individually (a la some Bernard Cornwell novel)

- I need this kind of system both for my upcoming Kaldoric civil war and I want a similar system for WWII squad/team level actions (in the latter think RPG version of ASL)

- I don't want to use miniatures, rulers, hexgrids or even counters, well a few counters/chits and the like might be alright, but I definitely don't want to make my RPG sessions into strategy game sessions

- I don't like the straight up point systems which seem so prevalent. I would in most cases decide the outcome of the overall battle by GM fiat. Sometimes player characters feats could influence or even turn the outcome of the battle.

- I don't want to track the actions of every individual fighter. I want to track the actions of individual PCs in the context of the battle - and I want their actions to be pretty much as detailed or only slightly abstracted comared to a regular one-on-one encounter

- The system must have a good and easy to use morale system. I liked the basic concept of firefight in the old Behind Enemy Lines game.

Anybody have any ideas?

Field of Honor, a fan based system, could be what you are looking for.

Combat is abstracted, but not quite like the points system, and uses HM mechanics.

Individuals characters can fight it out in standard HM combat, and their results will effect the outcome.

There is morale, but it's abstracted ino the units combat effectiveness.

I like the system in general, but have on and off been working on some rules changes that work better IMO>

http://www.harnmaster.us/downloads.html

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

GURPS Mass Combat...but that requires a knowledge of GURPS 4e, and in all probability, would require you to play GURPS rather then HM or whatever you use. Still, its cheap on the e23 website. You might be able to get it to work

Just thinking about it, HarnMaster would abstract into a mass combat game extremely easily. I'm just "thinking out loud" here, but consider for a moment this idea.

For any battle, you decide on a standard unit size, say 10 individuals. Units are considered to be composed of effectively identical individuals, and the unit statistics are simply the statistics for that average individual. Then you run the fight - just as though each aggregated unit was a single individual fighting.

Except no hit locations. Wounds are translated into casualties. (Casualties include injuries as well as deaths.) Shock rolls become morale rolls. Stumble rolls and DTAs translate into tactical errors and exploits. As casualties increase, so do the physical penalties, in just the kind of death spiral you expect in mass combat.

In the time it takes to learn any new game system - and decide whether you like it - you could just clean up the details of this idea. Everyone already knows the rules, and there are no problems translating the gaming scenario into combat statistics. I think you could make it work pretty easily.

Actually Pokep, that idea has some similarities to Field of Honor

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

Thanks for the great tips guys!

I really like the De Bellis Antiquitatis (DBA) wargames rules take, here, and you can use a simplified version of the basic mechanism as follows:

1. Assign each 'side' a bonus - typically around 3, minimum 0 and absolute maximum 5 - representing the two sides' relative combat power.
2. Roll a d6 for each side and add their bonus to it.
3. If it's a draw the fight is deadlocked, if one side rolls higher but does not double the other side's roll then they are winning/pushing their opponents back but the fight continues with the losers getting -1 next time, and if one side doubles the other the loser routs and the day is won!

Keep rolling until the battle is decided, roughly one roll per dozen rounds or so of PC action. Events that affect the battle just give bonuses or penalties, but bear in mind that, because of the 'double' rule, a -1 to side B is much more likely to be decisive that a +1 to side A...

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Balesir
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- Eschew Obfuscation!

For my mass combat, I went along the same lines for infantry as presented in Battletech. Just added some low tech options. At one point I used the mass combat ideas from ICE.

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"The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light."

Bushido - still availabe as a PDF from DriveThru has a decent battle system that allows PCs to take part and decide on the degree of risk they expose themsleves to. That in turn adjusts the number of heads they take and their honour. That's where I'd go for the basis of a 'PCs in the middle of a larger battle' mechanic.

You might look into Pendragon. It has a pretty good mass combat system.

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Fulk

Good reference, Gallus.

I'd like to come up with a system that uses the combat simulation for large scale combat similar to the way Field of Honor Does. Very much designed to be used with HM stats, no real interpretations needed (I.E. is my 65 ML group of yeoman a B or C class troop?).

I'd like to combine this with more of a Bushido based system for individual results (Rolemaster had some things for this too, throwing in the occasional "horse found" or "wounded man on ground stabs you with a dagger" etc. etc.).

Couple of things I've changed for my version of Field of Honor -

1) Unit's ability in bad terrain was based strictly on armour worn, for instance heavy troops on wooded terrain are worse off than lighter troops. In actuality, armnament has as much to do as anything else. Pike, polearms or large shields are not good in rugged terrain.

2) Mounted got too much of a multiplier, 2x IIRC. Mounted troops had mobility, but struggled against densely packed infantry that held their ground. Changed the mod to a 1.25, but gave "cavalry advantages" to the side with more/better quality cavalry, which could also be negated to a point by pikemen.

3) Archers - a bow was the best weapon one could have. In actuality, undefended archers could be easily ridden down. Chnged archers in a way similar to cavalry.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

BTW - For those that ask if that detail is important, I feel it is so. It makes barbarians who generally cannot hold their own on the open field much more effective in rugged terrain.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

I used a tweaked 'Field of Honour' - re-christened 'Field of Dishonour' - for a Rethemi Civil War campaign. It performed well, particulalrly when I upgraded the Kuboran capacities in rough terrain as you suggest.

Where can we find this 'field of honour' of which you speak?

Let me have an email and I'll see if it's still somewhere on my hard drive.

See post #2 in this thread.

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Með kveðju, Thorvald
http://www.last.fm/user/hrafnsbjarg

Sorry, Exchook, I assmued you were interested in the tweaked one I'd used. If I can find it I'll send it and you can compare.

Alun

That would be great

BTW - It would be nice to have a supplement for FOH, call it maybe "campaign of honor"

There are some campaign rules for table top games I think would be interesting to implement, things like scouting, foraging, etc. etc.

One of the things that I would like to some how work into field of honor would be rules for establishing a "location" for the battle, i.e. what kind of terrain the battle will be fought in.

Some of it's logical - a Agrikan force attacking a Kubroan Village will eventually fight at the village unless Kuborans force the issue beforehand.

But how to decide the terrain would be the tough part. I think it would have to be something taking into account the type of terrain in the surrounding hexes where a possibility of battle exists. Scouting would also help those trying to decide where a battle may take place. Something else also taking into account both sides familiarity with the local area (somethig like rengade Kuboran scouts for an Agrikan party would be helpful here, like indian scouts working for the U.S. in the indian wars).

Some sort of opposed roll taking into account these modifiers would work best I would think.

Other things are foraging and scouting - Cavalry works the best generally for this, but terrain plays a factor as well. Light Cavalry based armies were very effective at this due to the amount of horse that could be dispatched from the main body.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

My Rethemi campaigns were based on a 'nodal map' with the noides defining the key strategic locations - usually towns linked by 'trails/roads' requiring fdifferent numebrs of movement points to move along to the next node. Some nodes were connected by sea routes.

As the objective was to mirror a strategic sweep and focus on the decisions of the King/Tormau/Techen/Church/Kubora (& GM controlled Gragun swarms were used to ensure the Kuboran had to maintain a home guard of sorts), rather then the tactial decisons at battlefield level simple was best.

I used the Kingdom Map to identify the general nature of the terrain in any node - typically open/mixed woodland in any town hex, but forest for the 'Kuboran nodes' and some of the less civilised bits of the Hohnam Blight etc. and assumed that the defenders had choice of terrain and would adopt the local terrain best suited to their cultural tactics. Hence the Kubora would stick to ambush in forest and try to take advantage of woods in more mixed tarrain; attaching Agrikans would then have to go to them and accept the poor terrain. In the reverse situation the Agrikans would tend to settle for open terrain where they could see their foe coming and prepare a sheild wall of sorts; then the Kuboran eitehr decides to accept battle on those terms or not.

The defender always had the option to fall back and occupy whatever fortifications were present in a hex (so long as they cotrolled it, obviously). If they didn't control it then the defender could asally forth to aid his allies in the field.

Then the Field of Dishonour provided and entirely abstract resolution of any battle.

Interesting, Gallus

I was trying to compare a Rethemi/Kuboran campaign with a Roman/Gallic or Germanic one.

But the comparisons are not the best. The Gauls and German tribepeople of terra were more centralized (particularily with the Gauls who had true cities of 10k+ .

The Gauls and Germans were also almost entirely agrarian, which means less forest of course (My Kuborans are also heavily agrarian, though I have not changed the map)

This would make Kuboran ambushes easier - if they are in almost entirely forested regions.

I guess my thought if there is mixed woods/pasture areas, where would the battle take place? I would guess if there is a path to an objective (Kuboran village) that is relatively free of forested area, the Rethemi would stay on this - an the Kuborans could either fight them in the plains or hole up in the village. Or maybe attack the Rethemi forces in a forested area if there is one on the path.

I wonder if too large of a force makes ambush difficult? I'm really not sure here, just guessing.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

Intuitively the scale of the ambushing force must have an impact. My FoD tweaks never dealt with that because Rethemi battles are typically among hundreds, rather than thousands of warriors. The degree of abstraction was enough to encourage starategic decisions that seemed right: once the players understood the effect of terrain on their troops' 'fighting value' natural caution tended to keep knights out of forested hexes and Kubora out of clear hexes, except when intelligence suggested the feudal troops were elsewhere. In those cases the Kubora usually came of better against local militia which is all that most settlements had. They'd then retreat into forest (or woodland as the campaign went on and their confidence grew - and the Orderial backbone of the feudal players suffered attrition). My recollection is that in the end the only thing that saved the Kingdom from the barbarian hordes were som,e unlikely allinaces and a 'random' Gargun incursion into Peran that drew some tribal strength back into the forest.
As an aside it's important to have a mechanism to reflect the risk to borders which don't have PCs on the other side. e.g. though my cmaapign had a player for Jithius Mariam on the Thardic border I needed rules to stop him simply flinging everything he had over the border. Likewise I had no Kandayan PC so there needed to be a way to discourage the Copper Hook from abandinging the border in favour of carving up the realm. Finally I needed a way of ensuring the Kubora had to keep and eye on the Gargun of the Rayeshas, as described above.
This was handled (again as an abstract) by having seasonal random rolls which put limits on the freedom of action for 'bprder areas'. In effect if this season Jithius rolled X% then that was the % the senate allowed him to commit to a 'foreign adventure'. Next season it might be doubled or halved depending on the political machinations within the senate. In a similar way the Kandayan and Gargun threat was assigned a % seasonally and that required whoever was controlling the Copper Hook (and a couple of other barons) or the Kubora to leave a certain % of their strength as a deterrent on their borders. It annoyed PCs not to have complete control over their fates, but unless you can supply players across every border to porvide a 'rear echelon threat' it's simply not fair to allow them to ignore the risks they woudl face.

Absolutely, Gallus. There would have to be some sort of limitation to what had to be kept at the borders to deter other countries preying on this "weakness". A good mechanic for this his tough - you seemed to have arrived at one.

I would think perhaps aome reaction rolls modified by the forces that Rethem for instance could still put forth on the Kandian/Thardic Borders. Leave to little and you risk an invasion, though it's not always going to happen, and depends much upon current relations.

Of course, I would think a good option for a Kuboran campaign might be to levy 1/5 or so of the knights and yeomen - and pay them as mercs after their obligations have been fullfilled. Perhaps also get one of the miltary orders that has lands that are close to the Peran border, and offer them Kuboran lands following a sucessful campaign.

Then you still have 4/5 of the levy available for Tharda/Kanday, though the expense of keeping a "regular army" for the Kuboran campaign could be detrimental to the crown.

To really do this right one would need some sort of method for figuring the macroeconomics of the crown and it's "war chest". I do think "special aids" could be levied as well, these were common in the middle ages for war (or even buying off viking attacks ). I'm not sure if canon has a provision for this though.



Yeah, small scale ambushes with forces in the numbering of a few hundreds would be much easier to tactically figure than trying to do so with forces numbering in the thousands.

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Hmm Gurthang. What a nice name for a sword....

Get yourself a copy of Chivalry and Sorcery 1st edition and 2nd edition. These systems have all the information and rules you will need for portraying massed combat in your games and the detail is outstanding. You can even have the characters fight in the battles without having to go right into individual combat by setting them a "Bravery level based on Ferocity. It is what I use over the past 25 years and the guys love it.

Shane

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Chivalry & Sorcery on Harn - http://chivalrysorcery.myfastforum.org/index.php
http://davout.blogspot.com/

Chivalry & Sorcery ehh?
Have a copy in the library somewhere. Seem to remember the excessively small print that caused alot of eyestrain. Good rational system that was a great improvement over the D&D 1st edition I was playing at the time. Hard to find players though, of course now I'm playing HM3 which tells you that they're always someone out there as nuts as you are.

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...and I'm not dead yet...