Just over a month back we discussed the creation of Hordes, suggesting some referee tricks for generating large numbers of creatures or characters for that desperate battle against incredible odds. We said then that we would come back to discuss ways of managing those massed enemies and allies on the field, examining how to run a battle of grand proportion without having to consider the actions of each individual involved. This is that discussion, presenting ideas for handling wars and the mass combat that often arises within them.
To give some credit, some of these ideas are drawn from war games and from systems derived from war games for the support of role playing games. It is certainly a viable option when faced with a war to set up a war game and use it to manage your battles, or even better to find a role playing game supplement designed for mass combat and use it as is or adapt it to your own purposes. I had good luck with TSR’s BattleSystem™ for Basic Dungeons & Dragons™ years ago (I have no experience with the later 1991 version designed for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons), and it has influenced some of my thoughts here.
The problem with most wars in games is the matter of what we will call scale: how do you handle combat between one hero or one monster and a unit of fifty regular fighters? This was the problem that Chainmail™ and original Dungeons & Dragons™ attempted to address. It is complicated further by the fact that units will fight units within the grand scheme of armies fighting armies, and the interaction at these three levels, at least, will determine both what happens to the characters and what happens within the battle generally.
To solve these problems, it is usually best to begin by understanding the concepts of scale and of what we will call focus. Focus is merely that which is being resolved at any given moment. Scale is the level of detail being used in determining outcomes. The two interact, in that all scales always exist and must be considered at all times, but play will focus on one scale at any moment.
As suggested, there are at least three scales that are pertinent in most mass combats. The smallest is the individual scale, fighter against fighter, and is usually very important in role playing games because the player characters are among those individuals. Above that is unit scale, the consideration of squads or companies or divisions as they move and interact on the field. This all occurs within the level of the totality of the battle, whether that would be army scale or battle scale, the give and take of all that is happening on the field at once. In some cases there may be a level above this, as for example when a battle is part of a war, and these armies are part of a larger collection of armies which may be doing battle in different combinations in different fields at the same time as part of a grand campaign or great war. In the battles I’ve run this has rarely been a significant factor; however, if it is present in the background it may impact the present fight through such factors as supply lines for resources and reinforcements anticipated for either side. It is usually necessary to resolve events at both the individual and the battle scales; it is often useful to do so at the unit scale, and sometimes at the campaign scale. More significantly, you need to consider how actions on these scales interact. How does the sum of unit interaction affect the flow of the battle generally? What happens when one hero charges into a unit of soldiers?
Focus, then, is understanding the scale at which you are working at any given moment. Because each scale has its own complications, it is frequently the case that different techniques work best when the focus changes. In general, it is most helpful to increase the level of abstraction as you move toward the larger scale. This can be done in any of several ways, according to circumstances and preferences.
Any role playing game which is likely to lead to a war in which the player characters are going to be involved in individual combat probably has sufficient rules for running individual combat, and in many cases it will make the most sense for the focus to move to individual combat whenever player characters are fighting.
When a character engages a unit, it is often easy enough to break the unit into individuals, particularly if you’re using one of the methods of generating those individuals suggested when we discussed creating them. If you’re using one each combatants or mooks, they’re all functionally the same such that you need only consider how many are in the unit and how many can engage the character simultaneously. Many combat games have rules for this. In fighting foes of the same size as the character, four to six are generally plausible, recognizing that even if they surge around the character it will take a moment for a new opponent to step into the breach left by a felled one, even if stepping on the body of his fellow doesn’t penalize his footing. If you’re looking for fairness, the character should not be able to engage more adversaries in a given space of time than can engage him in that same time, even if he is cutting a swath through them like Moses parting the Red Sea. This is not the only way to handle combat between an individual and a unit, but it will often prove best particularly when the individual is a player character.
When units face units, the most effective approach is to devise unit values. A unit is weakened by having its members disabled. Thus in a hit point based system, it makes sense to let the average number of hit points of a unit’s members represent the loss of one member’s effectiveness. At the same time, the unit should have an attack rating that is linked to the damage taken in a manner which makes sense given its attack mode. In a unit of swordsmen, only those on the front edge of the unit will be able to engage the enemy, but as they fall they are more quickly replaced, and thus damage to the unit does not impact its ability to deal damage until it is near the end of its defensive rating. A unit of missile weapons, whether bows or rifles, has a considerably greater ability to bring its full force to bear against the enemy, but at the same time it is more immediately impacted by injury to its members. There are some types of weapons that fall between these extremes, such as spear or pike units in which two or possibly three ranks of men can engage the enemy to some degree, and so these do more damage initially than the sword units but lose strength sooner, while doing less initial damage than the missile units but not being as quickly affected by losses.
In this connection, it is simple enough to dispense with dice by recognizing the role averages play in dice-based games. If, for example, members of unit A need to roll 16 or better on a 20 sided die to hit members of unit B, then one in four will make successful rolls (because there are five successful rolls in twenty). Similarly, if a sword does one eight-sided die of damage, on a typical hit it will do four and a half points of damage, which can be rounded to five (or four, if you prefer–just be consistent). Now we multiply it by the number of combatants who are able to attack–we’ll suggest that this is a sword unit with eight in the front rank–and we find that of the eight attackers, two hit for a total of ten points. Compare that to per character ratings of the defending unit, and learn from this how much that unit has been weakened.
In this, it is not necessary to assume that any particular individual is dead. All that is determined is that the unit is less able to fight, until it is dispersed and rendered useless on the field. If there are particular individuals whose lives might matter later, another means can be used to determine whether they are found alive after the battle.
It may sometimes be that a character attacking a unit will use this approach, particularly if he is using an area attack such as a grenade or a fireball. If the game allows individuals to roll a defensive roll against such attacks, rather than have the entire unit roll individually, assume that that percentage of the unit that represents the probability of success made the roll successfully, and the rest failed.
Unit combat and army scale combat can also be resolved by using the skill of the commanders. In this approach, each unit or army is regarded a weapon, and its quality as a weapon is evaluated. The skill of the commander is then rolled, modified by the quality of the unit, and each roll taken as representing an attack. This works particularly well if the commanders are player characters, or if they are known non-player characters; it brings the abilities of the commanders sharply into focus, suggesting that victory depends in a very significant degree on whether the commanders make sound decisions and provide good leadership. It also takes some of the tactical questions out of the hands of those players. Rather than have the battle depend on whether the players or the referee make better use of their armies, it assumes that good successful rolls on behalf of the commanders indicate that whatever they did worked to their advantage. You could thus reduce a Civil War battle to an individual combat between Lee and Grant, in which Lee has significantly greater skill but Grant has a significantly better weapon. Rolls are made as they fight each other, and all the troop movements are color describing their successes and failures.
One can similarly ignore the specific tactics involved and rely on a device designed to track the ebb and flow of the battle. Multiverser’s General Effects Rolls have worked well for this. The dice are rolled, the result read as favoring or opposing the player’s hopes, modified by the referee’s assessment of the balance of the situation at the moment, and on a favorable roll the player character’s side advances. Such techniques can also take into account tactics brought in by the players through their characters. For example, according to the chart for the Multiverser game, a 21 (on a 3d10 roll) is “Bad Enough”. If the battle has already been going badly, this could indicate a breach in the defenses and a growing desperation among the troops. If instead the player has just launched a promising foray against the enemy lines, this may indicate that the enemy lines are holding but falling back a little bit.
These approaches to unit and army levels of combat can still be mixed with the individual level of combat in meaningful ways. If the player is leading a unit to assault the enemy artillery position, he can fight the unit leader of an opposing unit while his unit takes on theirs, and meanwhile a shift in the fortunes of the army may indicate that enemy troops are being driven from the path so that he will have less resistance once he gets past the current fight. If he defeats the unit leader, he can begin attacking the unit in individual combat based on how many are still fighting, or the referee can handle his contribution as a bonus to the abilities of his unit in the offensive. The rolls that determine the general flow of battle are interpreted with consideration given to the successes of the characters individually, and at the same time the circumstances facing the individual characters are adjusted according to how the battle is going more generally.
There are certainly other techniques that make for simplified battles while retaining the impact individual characters may have on the outcomes. These have worked in my experience, making the few wars I’ve run work smoothly and credibly to the enjoyment of all the participants. It may take a bit of work to adapt these to your game, and even to determine which techniques are most likely to support the sort of play you envision, but overall the war should play more smoothly with the assistance of some of these ideas.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
