I think mass combat is one of those things everybody tries eventually. Large armies clashing, siege engines firing, monsters rampaging through ranks of soldiers, it all feels
right in the context of medieval fantasy. But mass combat is also a huge pain. A hundred soldiers making a hundred attack rolls and forty damage rolls is a massive time sink, not to mention figuring out movement, damage, areas of effect, and the like. Plenty of attempts have come and gone trying to make armies viable, and none has been good enough to convince players it’s the best way to do it. Or, arguably, a good way to do it at all.
I’ve mostly avoided mass combat in my campaigns, treating pitched battles as a backdrop to a small-scale encounter where the party individually matters. But my DMs over the years have offered a few solutions. One designed his own system, full of math. Units had hit points that represented their soldiers, and they did proportionally less damage as soldiers died. Attack rolls compared to defense on a sliding scale, because when two armies meet it’s incredibly unlikely that nobody dies, and movement was strongly limited by facing and turning speeds. Unsurprisingly, we did this all via gaming software that ran the numbers for us; if you’ve ever had a player who can’t seem to add thirteen to eighteen quickly, you can imagine asking the same player to roll damage, cut it by a third because they missed AC but hit AC minus 4, and multiply that by 43% because the unit is heavily injured. It was pretty heavy.
I had another DM who wanted to run mass combats with an honest-to-goodness game of Warhammer. That never made it off the ground, not least because the players had no interest in learning a whole other system.
Regardless of these tales of caution, I’ve wanted to run a mass combat since I first learned Dynasty Warriors was a thing. The Hyrule campaign made it to a point where such a battle was appropriate, and Hyrule Warriors had brought the setting and style together, so I bit the bullet and set to work on my own mass combat system. From the beginning I had a few principles in mind:
- It had to be simple. This was one battle, one session, in a two-year campaign. The less cognitive load it required, the better.
- It had to be fast. An hour-long turn was unacceptable.
- It had to let players matter. One character had to be as strong as an entire unit of enemies, not just because that’s awesome but because that’s how Hyrule Warriors works.
- It had to give us room to describe things in the hilarious manner we were going to use anyway. The rules themselves couldn’t be more important than our narration.
I ended up with this:
Each group of units was represented by one mini with one set of stats. Hit points and damage were kept low; the highest damage was 3 and the highest hit point total was 14. Defenses ranged from 26 to 32, attack bonuses from +17 to +21. Everything was tightly constrained to keep it out of a situation where one unit rolls over another, mostly because the players couldn’t know if they were losing a rock-paper-scissors battle until they engaged an enemy, and losing two units at the beginning of an engagement is a pretty negative play experience.
Speaking of which, each player got to control themselves (a single unit with especially high hit points) and various friendly units. The intention was that players would always have something to do; they acted on their turn, and the spearguard’s turn, and the skirmisher’s turn, etc. We intentionally staggered friendly and enemy initiatives so nobody would take several turns in a row. Players could not use their normal powers but I tried to build some of their moves into their personal units.
Each unit got one action per turn, because I thought double-moving would make the map feel trivially small and I especially did not want to say “don’t forget, you still have another action” eleven times every round like I do in normal combat. There were no attacks of opportunity or off-turn actions of any kind. The only way to do two things at once was to charge, which still got the attack bonus because it made sense to me and we’d already internalized that rule.
That’s it for the core system. There were other interesting bits, like navigating terrain, searching for allies, and performing minor quests, but the fundamentals of the session fit on an index card. It was rules-light and abstract so we could fill in the gaps with narration. I thought I had hit all of the points I wanted, and once I explained the rules to the players I’d finally be able to run a set piece I’d been wanted to do for years.
It was kinda meh.
My players really, really didn’t like only taking one action per turn, and several rounds after they expressed this opinion they found a justification: charging was the only action worth doing. It allowed you to move and attack, it gave you a +1 to the attack, it increased the damage for certain units, and it never provoked attacks of opportunity so it made sense even in pitched melee. Since units had no action options besides moving and attacking (intentionally, to keep things simple), maximizing attack efficiency became the point, and charging was objectively the most efficient thing. If I let them take two actions, and thus double-move, they might have seen any advantage to leaving enemies and exploring the map instead of headbutting them for several rounds in a row. As it was, we only got to half of the map and a third of the side quests I had planned, so limiting their actions took a lot of the fun out of my end.
I also put too many units on the board. I expected the player to fan out and try doing several things at once because they had the manpower to do it, but they lumped in tight groups and largely steamrolled the enemies they outnumbered two to one. So I added reinforcements to shore up parts of the map and press the attack, and that’s when the party split up, which suddenly put them at the two-to-one disadvantage. I should have given the players fewer units but more opportunities to rescue or gain allies, letting them shed units to defend as they progressed and keeping the same active headcount, and had my units hang back on defense instead of swarming to stage an attack in the smallest place physically possible.
One player said the game needed more randomness, because with static damage certain actions become mathematically weaker than others. I’m not fully sold on it. Rolling for damage means more time per turn in an already long game, but I can understand the argument.
But besides those points the session wasn’t actually all that bad. Turns were fast; we just had a lot of them. The scary enemies were scary, the players got to do what they do, and the mundane units had both moments of great heroism and moment of hilarious failure. The terrain in the half of the map we did use was relevant. We didn’t have to go over the rules several times over the course of the night. The system hit every point I wanted and the session did what it needed to do in the context of the story. It just didn’t do either as well as I would have liked.
My players have since assured me that they were not as miserable as I thought they were. I’m not sure how much of that is my tendency to read the table as less happy than it actually is, or their tendency to remember good things better than bad, or something else. I’ll have to look at it a while longer and decide if this is something worth salvaging.
The moral of this story is that if a player and the DM each expect the other to come up with something and neither does, you get 90s hip hop in your Italian Renaissance. We were both waiting for information from the other to fill out the design space we had; I wanted him to figure out my family details so I could fit my character into the setting without forcing him to bend it around something I determined in my ignorance, and he wanted to leave that as open as possible so he didn’t step on my creative freedom.
The Wild West of D&D Content Publication
I used to visit the official D&D website every day or two, back when 3E was the hotness. In those days the site was nothing but content: new monsters, new spells, new items, new class features, all available for perusal or download. I have several folders of the art galleries from published books, and I think I have almost everything from the Map-a-Week archive. Even the ads for an upcoming book had previews of that book with playable examples of the things you’d find it it. Many of those pages still exist if you know where to look for them, and they’re an amazing resource for session material and inspiration.
In the move to 4E, the site changed. I think there were two big reasons for it. The first, and the only one I think people saw when it happened, was money. D&D Insider started, a monthly subscription service that gave players access to the aforementioned art galleries and new content. I think it was also the only place to find errata for a while, though that might have just been my inability to find it after the site redesign. I can’t fault the business aspect of it; it’s more profitable to sell some material than give away all of it. But with half of the content effectively locked behind a paywall, it became much less fruitful for a poor gamer to visit.
The other reason was quality control. The content on the website wasn’t tested the same way content in books was. There simply wasn’t time. We had to treat website material like we did material from the D&D magazines: either accept it carefully and allow it in your game on a trial basis in case it wasn’t as balanced as it purported to be, or save yourself the time and ban it out of hand. 4E was a very tight ship regarding balance. It couldn’t have anything that didn’t get a certain amount of testing and consideration because it couldn’t afford to let anything break the mold. The 3E style of website content couldn’t work with it.
There was another things that came from both of these points: the death of the SRD. The 3.5E System Reference Document was a downloadable list of files that gave you everything you needed to play the game without buying a single book. They were stripped of lore (meaning there were no gods, so good luck, clerics) and art and anything proprietary (beholders, mind flayers, the like) and in a few cases readable formatting, but they were there.
The 4E SRD exists, which I actually didn’t know until this week. In fact, this is probably news to every person I’ve spoken to about 4E over the last several years, especially the ones who’ve written their own content. It seemed its release was fairly quiet, and it’s not very useful besides. It’s just a list of the things in the books that can be used in licensed products. For example, it doesn’t say “the fighter does X at level 3”, it says “crushing blow” and trusts you to look it up. It’s not a document we can use to reference things in the system, so it’s not a System Reference Document at all. It’s just a list of things you can say about 4E without getting in legal trouble.
…Technically, if I’m reading this correctly, I can’t even legally tell you what I can legally tell you about the ostensible SRD. It’s probably safest to just link it.
I’ve gone off-topic. The point is that anything on the website takes a while to get to me, especially after things got even worse in the move to 5E. The site now has no content, just ads. As I write this the top five articles are for an adventure, a standalone dice game, shirts, an adventure, and a series of video games. If you’re interested in D&D the tabletop roleplaying game, like I am, and you create your own campaign settings, like I do, you can use none of this in your game. As I’ve said before, D&D as intended kind of isn’t for me any more.
But in bungling through archives I did find something that gives me a glimmer of hope. Wizards now has a real, honest-to-goodness SRD for 5E and provides an official, endorsed way for people to publish their own content. You can even charge money for it, and receive some of that money. It’s called the Dungeon Masters Guild and it’s actually pretty neat.
Yes, you can only use it to publish 5E material, even though they’re actively selling their own books from other systems on the same site. Yes, you can only publish material set in Forgotten Realms, because that’s what they want players to like (a sensation with which I, as a fan of professional wrestling, am very familiar, and there’s a whole other blog post about the similarities there). Yes, you’re probably still going to have to bribe your DM to allow any untested, unsupported content you find. But it’s a step in the right direction, and it’s the kind of thing that makes me more excited about 5E than I have been in a while, even if I don’t plan on putting anything up for download myself.
Heck, it might even give Wizards some ideas. The top title as I write this is the “Gunslinger Martial Archetype for Fighters”. Based on this I’d say there’s a market for guns in D&D, like there always has been. The only mention guns have gotten in any official Wizards material in the last fifteen years is a mention in the DMG that says “we suppose you could have alien guns that shoot lasers, perhaps”, so there’s an opportunity here. Though there’s probably equal odds between Wizards saying “huh, that’s clearly popular and we should do something with it” and saying “huh, that’s really popular, but we can’t top it so let’s do another Drizzt thing instead”.