As my home campaign of Tyranny of Dragons rolled into its closing chapter, I knew I was being presented with an opportunity that is pretty rare in rgp adventure storytelling.
Namely, it was a chance to see how a massed battle of clashing armies might play out. Usually, the clashing of armies is background to the activities of the player characters. But this time, the two storylines were converging.
In the storyline, the combined armies of good dragons and the Lord’s Alliance are taking on the chromatic dragons and the Cult of the Dragon at a bleak dormant volcano known as the Well of Dragons.
Or, as one of the players at the table observed, “It’s our last stand of humans and elves against the forces of Mordor while the adventures try to destroy the One Ring.”
Something like that, I said.
“Cool,” he replied.
The fate of the adventurers — can they stop the summoning of Tiamat — still lies ahead. But the outcome of this battle would still play a factor in the direction of “my” Forgotten Realms.
Even if Tiamat is defeated, what shape will the Sword Coast take if the great armies of its cities is defeated? What happens if the armies prevail but the PC’s fall to the dragon queen? The implications of winning the battle but losing the war become more likely — and problematic.
And that, is a great springboard into other storytelling possibilities.
Picking a system
Not being a wargamer, I chose a wargaming system that I already had in my collection. That was The War Machine system from the D&D Companion set (1984). It has a simplified option, which I thought sufficient for my purposes. Basically, each army gets a character card with a computed battle rating that modifies a d100 roll for each round of combat.
As each player was essentially running a pregenerated army, I spent time providing some characteristics to each army. Not only did that help distinguish the factions from one another, it actually presented some roleplaying opportunities. As the battle progressed, you’d hear things like: “The dwarven army charges forward, of course.” “My elves are looking to fire arrows from the floating castle.” “These cloud giants can ride dragons, right?” “Sure, let’s go with it.” Â
The 5E rules fit fairly well within The War Machine matrix. However, as these armies were meeting at the end of a fairly high-level campaign (14-plus), the HD of the various combatants were maxing out on the system’s scaling mechanism. (I think the rules probably work better with armies whose combatants are lower levels).
And for the most part, we were winging it. I didn’t want rules referencing to slow us down, so if something came up, we just came to a consensus and quickly moved on.
But there was a freshness to the activity. Trying out a new rules set — when you don’t have to worry about getting it EXACTLY right — is liberating.
Visiting the Western Heartlands
One other element was introducing the landscape of this massive battlefield (actually a series of battles stretching nearly 600 miles south from Iriabor to the Well of Dragons in Faerun’s Western Heartlands). With the second edition FR campaign booklet at my side, I was sure to read a portion of any entry of any town where armies clashed.
General Ravengard is using the abandoned temple of Waukeen in Iriabor as his campaign headquarters. The Red Cloaks of Asbravn want to join the fight, even though they are clearly overmatched. Neverember’s army is marching through the bleached landscape of the Battle of Bones. The Zhents are insisting the army detour to help lift the siege of Darkhold. The halfings of Corm Orp have had their village scoured, but refuse to relocate to the recently liberated and better protected town of Hluthvar, because they’re stubborn halflings, of course.
Things like that help give the battle character and maybe even reinforce that these armies are fighting for something other than simply defeating the Cult of the Dragon.
(I picked up this tip from watching Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” Before every battle — whose locations are just names to us in this day and age — he describes something significant about each battle site to make it more memorable.)
How’d it go?
In the end, the great armies clashed. The dragons surged into battle on both sides and took each other out. We were surprised how quickly and devastating that was. But as the dragons focused on each other, there was little collateral damage. (Next time, the battlefield will be scoured by breath weapon damage, I can assure you). Then came the grind as infantry advanced under the barrage of missile fire and magic. And though it was close, the Lord’s Alliance prevailed. But the cost was high. All the armies of the great city states suffered great casualties. Going forward, expect a return of lawlessness in the Sword Coast.
But that’s for another adventure.
If you’ve had success incorporating wargaming or skirmish games into your rpg campaign, share them in the comments section, please.
This sounds like a really cool way to handle a large scale battle like that. I’ve avoided that type of thing in my fantasy games, primarily because the one time I experienced it, the GM was just awful. He had statted up about 30 different characters for a ‘big’ battle and insisted on rolling dice for every single one of them. The players and I mostly sat around and got caught up. It was the last time I attended that GM’s game.
Your way sounds MUCH better. 🙂
A lot of RPGs are (rightly) focused on the actions of the players’ characters, rather than grand actions by armies, etc. I’ve wound up, in a lot of cases, slapping together a set of quick & dirty mass combat rules for systems without their own rules just to avoid the GM fiat issue. sure, I know how I’d like the outcome to look, and we could focus on the players’ mission to [pick your strategic thing you have to do] and either their efforts sank the whole show or no, but I like the idea that your part on the battlefield might change the outcome, but isn’t the totality of the battle.
Generally, I go with something that takes the numbers of the two sides into account, as well as their general strength of arms. (Crap! they’ve got a tank!) Do a basic roll to see how they do versus each other.
Example 1: In Fate, this is pretty easy — create each force as a character with an aspect or two the players can tap (they’re the ones in the credits, after all) and maybe give them a boost for the successful (or the opposite if they failed) completion of their specific mission (take that machinegun bunker, kill the shield generator…) Run it like a normal fight with a certain number of stresses and consequences. Boom!
Example 2: For our Battlestar Galactica game (using old Cortex) we see a lot of fighter action — massive numbers hitting each other. For simplicity sake, I have the two sides roll their attack vs. defense based on their piloting skills. If one side is bigger than the other, give them a shift to a bigger die. (Our air group of 50ish fighters is fighting a Cylon air wing of 300 or so…6/1 odds. The Cylons get a step up from d12 for their agility to d12+d4, say, plus their pilot skill..) Whatever number over the defense you get, that’s how many you take out. Do it again in reverse to see how the other side did. I use the scaling rules to get a sense of time — personal scale (what the characters are doing) rounds are the usual 5ish seconds, but vehicle scale (squadrons, etc.) is roughly a minute a round, and capital ships banging away at each other is about 10 minutes or so.
Quick and easy, not a super-accurate simulation, but good enough to handle the big action while the players are doing their thing, and it doesn’t bog down action.
I did similar for our Hollow Earth game when we were seeing Maoist vs. Nationalist forces fighting around us while we were trying to do a tomb raider scenario. How many Health points does the army have? The commanders roll their Warfare tests, and the number of successes is subtracted from the army health. Figure each pass is roughly 15 minutes or so for company to battalion level fights, more like 30 for division and up.
By odd coincidence I ran my first savage Worlds mass combat battle last week as the culmination of my Deadlands Reloaded The Last Sons campaign and I have very mixed feelings about it.
One player was happy. One was Meh. The third was very meh.
I was unimpressed with the experience and will avoid such episodes as much as possible in the future, prefering to go actual on-the-grid wargamy (which is doable in Savage Worlds but not necessarily a great idea, so I may be using an actual wargame to do the fighting). There was simply too much load on the GM (me) and not enough on the players. I was doing alll the work.
I began my gaming experiences with board and war gaming anyway since there was no RPGs in those days (maybe Diplomacy qualifies the way we played it back then) so going the Traveller route is sort of second nature (There was an extensive library of Traveller-universe wargames available in the early 80s so any mass engagement was likely to be played out as a Dark Nebula or Mayday scenario; you can still get all the stuff in pdfs if you want to relive the glory days BTW).
I think what is needded is a system similar in approach to Savage Worlds mass combat, but played out more like Trillion Credit Squadron with each side having “counters” representing units that face off against each other in an abstract way. I’ve never been a fan of TCS but after Friday’s events at Medicine Wheel I want something more engaging than what Savage Worlds provides, and which allows a direct observation of the tactical situation by all parties so they can intervene and get clever.
Excellent post with brillant points. As a DM/Wargamer/LARPer, I cannot agree more. Every battle needs to have an objective, possibly different for both sides but definitely conflicting. Losing a few fights and having to choose where to apply your ressources (aid the elves in their hour of need or support your dwarven allies?) could add a lot of drama (you forgot the halflings but they’ll never forgive you).
Those big battles have big stakes, but they are also great opportunities to talk about the world you play in. From the alliances, the equipment of the troops, down to the generals, the bagage train and the rank and file soldiers themselves. You get to talk about and to them, see what gods they pray before battle, what preparations they need and how their morale holds.
Soldier morale is of paramount importance (at least, if not more than weapons) before, during and after a fight. This is where the heroes can shine, for they are certainly known figures, and if they fight from the front of units, they will be cheered and appreciated. If the wizard saves the day, she may be feared yet respected. While if the rogue leads a night raid, she may get grudging respect, but little appreciation from the honest soldiers. If none of your soldiers care for the cause (why are we saving the dwarves anyway? They never share the beer!), your odds of winning aren’t good.
During a fight, strategies and turning points are much more exciting then numbers and character sheets. The same can be applied to the heroes : I prefer describing three turns of intense combat where they are attacked from every side, with the confusion, the noise, the danger rather than turn by turn actions.
As for systems, the simpler the better. Roll two dice take the best, choose if it’s a d8, d10 or d12 according to circumstance and the classic rock-paper-scisors (cavalry beats archers who beat infantry who beats cavalry), do 3 rolls of that and every fail is a wound/morale loss out of 3 hp per unit. Anything could work as a system, but something light and fast is better to keep the fight quick and intense.
I’m running the Kingmaker Adventure Path for Pathfinder, and we are in the 5th book, which introduced the mass-combat rules for PF (improved in Ultimate Campaign). My players are realizing they are outnumbered, but not yet outmaneuvered– I hope they can capitalize on that.
I’m a long-time wargamer, so mixing games like this is something I like to do. Unfortunately, my players are usually not wargamers, so they want to avoid fighting the DM on his “home turf”, as it were. PF’s system seemed abstract and quick enough, but oddly, it came out too abstract for the players when we first tried it. We’re on v3 of house rulings.
Next month’s game will feature more of a focus on the PCs’ actions on the battlefield, while the action happens in the background. Their successes will push the outcome of the battle.
I’ve had mixed success with spaceship games (Traveller– not one of the wargames: meh, or Star Frontiers: better) in the recent past, as well. Twilight:2000 and Space:1889 major combats have turned out better, perhaps because most of my players then were already wargamers.