I sorta did what you recommended. Simulated a mass of zombies by just turning the little zombies into "hordes" (swarms) I gave them multi attack based on health though which wasn't a great idea lol. Much better to just give straight damage, especially against swarm groups. Having turn undead just delete giant swathes of the battlefield was a great experience haha
Went quite well, I let the players control the units, but also let them roll for to-hit/damage. Every unit was composed of 5 lines and every line equaled one d20 roll. When 3 lines were able to hit then damage was rolled and multiplied by the number of lines that were hit. Now when units lost hp, then every 1/5 that was lost there was a morale INT/WIS/CHA roll depending on commander and if lost then the unit disbanded. But I definitely will use the set damage next time, when I play the enemies. I had to roll too much :D
Oof, not great. I was curious to see how 5e would handle mass-combat on the usual scale and it turns out: terribly. Even with the Mob attacks rule it took 30-45 minutes to complete a round where some of the players had nothing to do just because they were far away from the action. We played for 3 sessions (I’m very grateful for how supportive my players are) and completed about 60% of the siege. I don’t think we will ever finish it, but if we ever do I’ll be sure to use these neat rules instead!
@@theoverpreparerlamenters3r436 I ran my combat sort of like this, with the swarm mechanic. Generally making stat blocks of say a guard if an army of guards and multiplying everything by 1000 or so depending on the unit numbers and such. I made some mechanics for units requiring extra movement in order to angle as well, ie if a unit is 3x1 and they want to move north but are facing west it would take two movement to do so before advancement could be made but once a unit is facing a direction regular movement can be made. A unit with 3x1 dimensions also can make 3 attacks if able and move into spaces diagonal to the group in order to encircle or flank opponents. I also made the unit gain the proficiency bonus to attack of the commander on top of their base proficiency if trained with them for 1 month per point, making focusing the commander optimal and added a moral check at half health made with the charisma save of the commander against the charisma check made by the enemy commander. Players then can choose to stay with units in order to greatly buff them if equipped with relevant abilities or leave the group to 1v1 commanders or entire battalions if they are say a barbarian who can solo 1000 troops with minimal chance of effective retaliation. Aoe spells thus deal as much damage or healing multiplied as squares or targets they can hit. My party did succeed against the armies of the dread lord in the end, but faced casualties due to low combat experience against flanking Calvary and misused their own Calvary. If I ran it again I would have done some skirmishes to ease them into warfare.
Your list of outcomes is an aspect that I hadn't seen others talk about when it comes to mass combat. I've always ran mass combats as a set piece because my players had little to no investment in the degree of the battle's outcome beyond winning/losing. There's a delicate balance to achieving the right complexity of mass combat rules for our hobby, and I think your rules achieved that. The more rules I add, the more I start thinking, "At what point do I just give up and learn how to play Warhammer?" Great job, Trekiros!
Thank you! It was *really* hard to stop myself from adding a joke about Hasbro's layoffs to that segment about how players tend to act like their soldiers' lives don't matter so long as they win the encounter. I figured it would date the video but it was TEMPTING.
We had a few mass combats before but only one I was in. We were playing Revolutionary War D&D allied with Half-Orc George Washington, reenacting the deleware crossing. Each of us were given command of a squad of 5-6 recruits that followed our own characters. We were allowed 3 unique actions. Ready- which grounded our position but readied our attack for opportunity, having advantage on the next attack and attacking as a unit. Fire- we do a clump range attack at a normal roll. Charge- where we moved and attacked with affixed bayonets. Our player characters also had a unique action when the squad we were with took damage. The squad collectively was 10 hp per body, and every 10hp of damage one of them would die, lowering overall damage output, but also lowered how much group damage was taken over time by AOE’s. We could choose to take half, all, or no extra damage on AOE attacks to protect the squad. It was a tense and engaging experience. I mourned the loss of 3 recruits because I could’ve taken the cannon ball head on but was afraid the damage would’ve instantly killed me, and thus throw my squad into disarray.
Most excellent content, as always! Definitely will help alleviate those inevitable Brad Pitt as Achilles moments “IS THERE NO ELSE?!” , that crop up when letting players run solo PCs against oncoming hordes.
I can't remember the exact thing that I ran during the 4e era at the gamestore, but there was an officially published adventure where you were able to defend a town. Things you did prior to and during the battle adds or subtracts from an overall score. And the battle itself went in stages and at some point the group could intervene at a major point, which would be different depending on the score, and if they win the smaller and important combat you would get a big boost in the score. And the ending score determined how much of the enemies and allies did, and how much of the town was destroyed or not.
Watching this video has reawakened me to the utility of swarm creatures. I love combats with a large amount of enemies but turn bloat always makes them far more fun in planning than in execution. Swarms would make all that so much easier.
OD&D WarMachine rules are the best mass combat rules for D&D. It ignores the specifics of the battle and instead allows for determination of battle results just like "roll to hit" glosses over exactly how the PC bypasses enemy defenses in a combat round. It also gives the players agency in assisting the units with equipment, training, or heroic inspiration.
Funny, I would have made the Rock-Paper-scissors in the reverse direction, because historical cavalry were poorly armored against archers while being devastating to non-pike infantry...
Same, to be honest! There's probably some aspect of warfare that doesn't translate well to the world of math & game design, but when listening to talks by game designers in the RTS & Grand Strategy genre (plus that video I linked in the description), it's pretty clear that this dynamic just kind of... appears in nearly every game of the genre. Whether or not the designers wanted it to. The Total War team basically said something along the lines of, they simulate every single sword strike and every single arrow as accurately as they can, using physics rather than game mechanics, and when they do that... this rock-paper-scissors dynamic is the result. My suspicion is, in a lot of these games, cavalry is more expensive, so your opponent tends to have 2-3 infantrymen for every one of your cavaliers. That's what I tried to represent by having one infantry battalion take up 3 hexes.
@@CyberDagger003 Not to be that guy but archers just exhausted the cavalry by pelting them with arrows and the men at arms closed the distance with maces and axes and finished them off once the horses were down
I made a somewhat easy way to do mass combat (up to 100s not thousands) divided in: -What players see -What they cannot see. With players being a part of the fighting force (not as commanders) either lending a helping hand or fighting as mercenaries. Outside player's view, each faction has HP (each HP point is a soldier, lets say, 2 armies, from 20 people to 100 or even 200) at the end of a full turn rotation, each side receive 1 dice of damage (the higher the dice, the more casualties that side may take but the battle is shorter, like using a 1d4 or 1d6 for 20 people skirmishes or 1d20 for 150... but using a 1d20 for 20hp is deadly fast!!) Players though, have to fight from 4 to 10 enemies at a time (depends on DM) and at the end of a full turn, enemies killed by players are substracted to the enemy faction HP on top of the damage dice, and enemies are filled back from the stock to face the players. Repeat until either the enemy faction is dropped to 0 men available or retreat... or until the allied faction is dropped to 0 and the players are left behind to either get swarmed or forced to run away. You can also add a leader on each faction that has a modifier on the damage dice (-2 damage received if alive, 0 if hurt, or +2 casualties if dead + retreat) My way of dictating if the leader is hurt outside player range is by receiving a critical hit (max damage on the damage dice, ofc 1d4 has a 25% chance of hurting a leader, and 5% for a d20, needing 2 criticals to kill a leader) *If the leader just happens to be nearby, the DM may place him as an enemy for the players to fight against and ignore the critical dice thing. For me it is easier to track as large battles may be going really well or bad outside player immediate intervention, but as players kill normal enemies waay to easy, the enemy faction will almost always loose... unless you gave them an unfair advantage (allied forces start with 60 people vs 150 enemies) or the allied faction had really bad rolls. Examples: 20hp skirmishes can be a merchant caravan with their guards fighting a substancial force of bandits on an ambush. Or 100 if its a small town fighting an invading force, or doing the invading whatever you like... >>I hope this was useful, and good luck for those players facing an army by themselves.
9:20 - I'd argue that calvalry specifically loses to pikemen, not infantry units in general. Having the high ground on a horse gives you the upper hand if you're holding, say, a lance, and the infantry unit just has a short little sword. They can't reach you.
Lance cavalry loses to well-disciplined pikemen (or phalangists!) IF the pikemen hold station and don't thin their line in a bad place. Alexander of Makedon spanked phalanxes *several* times by breaking through with a cavalry charge and rolling up the sides and rear of the formation. (Usually by trailing poor, long-suffering Parmenio as bait, but that's a whole 'nother story.)
This is so good. Every time I’ve run large scale combat I’ve described the Players fighting to take their specific objectives while most of the fighting happens in the background. In recent years I added a “chaos clock” where I rolled a die at the end of each round to determine a random effect that would impact the PCs as a result of the surrounding battle. I liked my system but I’ll absolutely have to try out the rules you’ve outlined.
I am currently running a campaign (My first one, actually) that combines Greek history with Greek mythology. My players are about to head to the Oracle of Delphi, where - unbeknownst to them - they will meet King Leonidas on his way to ask the Oracle if he should attack the Persians, leading to the Battle of Thermopylae. This video came at the PERFECT time to help me figure out how to make an interesting (and easy) mass combat. (full disclosure, I'm a male DM with an all-female party, and while they are 100% murderhobos, it's hard for me to get them excited about being MASS murderhobos, for some reason)
I have been testing out different ways to run it as my players are currently having to help a group of Norse-esq lizardfolk wage war against yuan-ti to get an audience with a dragon. I believe this will help out a lot with this segment of my campaign. Just in time for the last city siege.
I wonder if writing a simple python script could speed up the process without sacrificing many of the characteristics listed throughout the video. For instance, let's say two armies with cavalry, archers, infantry and artillery fight in a field, with the PC's located right in the middle of the frontlines. In this scenario, you can designate any battalion *nearby* and *decisive* to the battle to be a "foreground" unit, whereas all others are "background" units. Thus, all foreground units receive the narration, drama, and hand-rolled dice checks that are pertinent to a story, while the number and type of background units will be handled through code. Specifically, the variable number of attack roles and damage will be automatically calculated, and displayed from highest to lowest. From there, it is the DM's responsibility to assign each value to the battalion that will *change the battle the most,* thereby preventing mass combat from feeling stale. eg: a cavalary unit on the flank might receive the highest attack roles out of all other cavalary units, rather than the misplaced group about to route after being surrounded.
My only gripe is that cavalry have a major advantage against heavy footmen unless they have pikes/spears. Most footmen do carry pikes and spears specifically for this reason, but if you have a bunch of sword wielding knights and no pole weapons, you’re probably in trouble.
Excellent video. I really appreciate how your homebrew tries to use as many existing mechanics as possible. I don't plan on running mass combat in my current campaign, but this honestly makes me want to incorporate it in the next one! I especially like the idea of having the PCs act as commanders on the same battlefield, it reminds me of Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3, which were my favourite rts games.
This was absolutely the best video I'd seen on Mass Combat. I had a vague idea on how to do it, but you went it to very specific simple explanation on things I hadn't considered. I have a much clearer idea on what I am trying to do now. Thank you so much! I have saved your video and will definitely be using the PDF you made.
Amazing! I've been trying to make a mass combat system on my own since the Kingdom and Warfare is way to dense to incorperate. I just gave up and made the mass combat happen around the players as they fought a commander. I had "lair" actions on 20 and 0 initiative with had something to do with the battle surrounding them. A Barlgura clashing with an Ent crashed towards the party called for dexsaves etc. etc. It worked fine, but lacked the strategic components of your supplements. So as always, thank you and great content!
@@ToonedMinecraft Hey thanks! Just as you said, the players were simply caught up in the big battle fighting their bbeg whilst the forces of Hell and The Summer court clashed. It was more cinematic than strategic tho.
I once ran a siege in the following way: There were 3 sections of the wall: the gate held by elite knights, middle wall held by untrained militia, and ruined section of the wall to the left held by a combination of militia and city guards. In the middle of the walled city was also a keep, but nobles locked themselves inside so there was nowhere to retreat, and the besieging army were the undead who were teaveling under a mountain-like shroud of darkness. Players could choose which section of the wall to defend, but they didn't know what kind of undead would attack which section, and whichever they didn't choose I'd roll for a single time instead of running. The gate was broken by zombie ogres, followed by zombies. If players chose the gate, the combat would be them and 3 or 4 knights against about 5 zombie ogres, while normal zombies are held back by other knights at the front without rolling for zombies nor these knights. Since they didn't choose the gate, I rolled for knights and zombies and knights've won. The middle wall was a ranged battle, untrained militia vs skeleton archers and skeleton warriors with ladders. I rolled once for militia vs skeletons ranged combat, and even tho I gave militia +1 since players spent some time training them, they lost 4 to 19 and all fled the wall. One player was there so I gave them an option to try and delay the skeletons, they killed one and ran. The left side, which most players chose and the one who didn't soon joined in, was besieged by zombies who threatened to destroy the palisade in the ruined part of the wall while militia and city guard were holding them back. I planned to roll for zombies to break through, but since skeletons got onto the wall, I decided I'd instead have waves of 10 skeletons at a time (40 total) appear off the map for players and city guards to defeat. Eventually I stopped the waves, informing the players that militia came back and managed to push skeletons back. The whole battle took about 2 hours to complete, out of 5-6 hours the whole oneshot including 2 other combat encounters took
A lot of interesting stuff to think about here! I'm building up to a massive finale in my campaign thats a massive space battle, so I'll be pouring over this and your vehicle combat stuff obsessively. Thanks!
Pretty sure the vehicle system and this one can be used together since they both boil down to "actually let's just play 5e"... but I haven't had a chance to playtest them together yet, so there might be some unknown unknowns Let me know how it goes, and good luck with your campaign finale!
@@Trekiros Thanks, I'm going to need it! I'm a little worried that I'm being too ambitious with the scope of the thing... It'll probably be a few months before we get there, but I'll for sure let you know how it goes. 😄 I think they'll work well together too, and it speaks to the elegance of your design philosophy that these systems seem to have some natural synergy. Too many supplemental rules feel cumbersome and bolted on in awkward ways, so I really love how you keep it focused on applying the core 5e mechanics in novel ways. The main thing that I think I'll need is new stat blocks to represent squadrons of ships, but using the ones you made as a guide will help enormously!
WotC published Star Wars:SAGA Edition about 15 years ago. You might find some useful ideas in there, if you can find (access to) the books. It is another d20 derivative and has a lot in common with D&D 3/4/5.
Okay this is very well made and explained. The core idea is so elegant that it both is easy for players to understand and for dm’s to springboard into interesting scenarios. Great work! And oh man! That npc might die if battle goes wrong thing was inspired! Thinking about having red flag scenes with a favorite character be for the battle, where maybe the party sees their favorite shop keep joining the camp or something-super cool if the npc expresses their fears or goals and is encouraged by the players’ command.
Ever since i saw your simplified mass combat in the discord i had found the way to mechanically execute my campaigns finale (its Just about to happen my players called in all their allies for a big push)
So I like the system from the What's OLD is NEW RPG. It uses the method where you do strike missions like you talk about at the beginning of the episode, but it adds a layer on top of it. The players get a set of three missions each day, either set up by the gm or randomly rolled. Each one has a difficulty and victory point reward. Each day a random event happens like one side getting reinforcements, or running low on morale, or other stuff. Also each day, the players' side loses some victory points. This leads to a feeling a lot like the battle of helms deep in lotr, the players making a huge impact on the course of the battle, while also not requiring them to manage all the troops. It also has a supplamental system of rock paper scissors where if the players are commanders then each day they choose a tactic, like a shield wall, or a charge, or a pincer attack. This whole thing works at many scales too, like for a full war you could just turn the time increment up to a week or month instead of a day and have the missions take longer.
Bro, i can not thank you enough. You just took my dnd session for next sunday to the next level. Your assets and explanations are great! Again, thank you SO much!
After trying pretty much everything, I had settled with Scott Metzger’s ‘D&D 5e Mass Combat System’, which is great. I even made a custom system for it in Foundry VTT and a damage calculator. The problem is he abandoned the project and it requires all this extra work and system maintenance to play. Your system feels pretty solid and seems to solve most of these issues. I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
Good ideas in this video! I like that you streamlined the mass combat so that the players get to act almost like any other encounter with some bonuses that don't bog down the game. I am running a Ghost of Saltmarsh game, and have a similar mindset with naval combat. I was curious what your ideas might be for ship combat and vehicle combat in general that still gives all players agency over their turns. Great video as always!
Thank you! I've got a video on vehicle combat - it's for Spelljammer, but a lot of the principles I talk about in it should also apply to seafaring campaigns
A morale mechanic like in total war games is a good addition too. This means. If troops morale falls below a certain amount they rout. Running away and giving advantage to every unit that can catch them in terms of casualties. Morale can be harmed through casualties, position - ie a flanked unit will rapidly lose morale (would say a flakned unit also gives advantage to those attacking it), because other units.on its side are routing or perhaps through magical or psychological means. The inverse of this will raise morale as will the presence of a leader or player character. Player characters could take specific actions to lift the morale of their troops as well as just ordering and positioning them. This gives characters such as bards and clerics significant roles that might fit more with their play style
double damage for advantage is a bit high. an average d10 roll will be 5.5, while an extra roll and taking the higher value won't result in an 11 it will skew things higher and the average of that should be about 7. an easy way to get and average is to add the highest number to the lowest and divide by 2, and for taking the higher of 2 rolls can be done by adding 2 of the highest value to a lower value and dividing by 3. this gives a slight bump to advantage. as for the rock paper thing one use front line ratios for attack and defense and end up with the infantry/archer/ cav dynamic with different results based on how they are equipped and their formation. an example would be longbowmen with studded leather, longsword and shield with scale mail, lance with scale mail and mounted. all longbowmen in a formation can attack the front line of the enemy giving high attack values. the swordsmen can only attack with their front line, same with the cavalry but the cavalry being mounted only half the number of people in their front line halving their attack and doubling the attacks done by medium sized creatures. you kill the front line then if there is attacks left over you kill the second line and so forth. this means that the lower armor archers get killed fast when attacked, but also kill fast, so spending less time in their range makes them less potent. armor values for archers is 12(armor)+2(dex mod)=14, infantry is 14(armor)+2(shield)+1(dex mod)=17, and cavalry is 14(armor)+1(dex mod). you will create a chart for who attacks who instead of doing much math during the game, and so archers vs infantry you would subtract the attribute modifier (2 from dex) from the armor and get 15, which means that a d20 will hit 30% of the time. you multiply the average damage (4.5) by 30% and get 1.35 damage per attack, and if they are level 1 they only make 1 attack a round. in a block of 50 with 5 ranks deep and 10 rows that is 67.5 damage per round when the enemy is in 150 feet. disadvantage at long range changes the odds to hit to about 15.55% and so damage to 0.94 damage per archer or 47.14 damage per round for all 50 between 150 to 600 feet. all of this is math heavy but if once you get your x vs y chart then all you have to do is multiply using a calculator for damage amounts without any rolls, making the combat faster than normal combat. the reverse of swordsmen versus archers would be 14 AC - 2 str mod = 12 or missing on 11 and lower out of 20 (11/20=0.55) and thus 4.5 (avg dmg)*0.45(hit chance)=2.025 dmg per swordsman that can attack (the 10 in the front line if they also use the 10 by 5 formation) or 20.25 for a full stack against the example archers. cav do 2.925 per front line unit, and since they have half the front line units meeting the archer front line that is 5*2.925 instead of 10 or 14.625 damage per round, but their much greater speed means they get shot less closing the gap. the archers get attacked when they attack while in melee and so take double damage as a downside, as well as costing 2.5gp per attack for a full block, and every loss decreases their damage output. this means that the swordsmen will win if they don't get attacked before getting into melee with the archers on round 21 with 4 guys left alive, but obviously they will lose guys closing the gap and end up losing the fight, and the cav lose in melee due to the lower density, making the archers the best per individual however they also will cost much more due to the cost of arrows (1gp per day per troop and 0.05gp per attack per troop or 70.65gp for the fight with the swordsmen). the swordsmen are the cheapest, while archers cost almost the same per day their ammo costs easily make them the most expensive, and cav have the highest cost to recruit and pay daily. this means that by sheer numbers cav should be able to beat archers, while cav should lose even if matched man for man against anything, while swordsmen should be your bread and butter due to cost efficiency just like real life. this makes things work out pretty similarly to historical medieval armies, and can easily shift based on different factors like troops getting halberds and better training or boosting industrial output of arrows for economy of scale leading to more importance on ranged troops. fantasy stuff also develops with battle mages being cost efficient ranged troops if they get used a lot, but expensive to replace. PS i forgot the proficiency bonuses, but this shows the basics of the math.
Credit where credit is due: this is a great video and your document is very impressive. A refreshing take on something that's been solved for decades, but can always benefit from new and interesting perspective. Well done.
Something that I started doing to start pushing the scale of D&D combat was really honing in on good squad/horde rules. I can easily push upwards of 50+ enemies in about 10 squads. The big difference is using carry over damage so it isn't wasted unless the player is finishing off a horde. I also ran a world war 1 style trench charge once where with a little bit of prep math I figured out how many hits of average damage it took to kill an enemy. So I just rolled for hits, marked "wounds" instead of hp, and all the sudden I was able to run a 50 on 50 fight, with monsters and players, with each opposing army only taking about as much time as a normal players turn.
Je cherchais justement des vidéos sur les combats de masse DnD. Merci beaucoup, j'aime bien ton système simplifié. Comme je fais une campagne maison, j'ai besoin de savoir ce qu'il "se passe" dans un royaume alentour : des forces qui vont émerger, s'allier ou disparaître. Du coup en hors jeu, je vais voir un peu comment se présentent ces batailles et si besoin, mes joueurs devront affronter les conséquences. Merci en tout cas pour cette vidéo !
This is amazing! Been trying to figure out how to do a mass combat battle for an end of campaign war and this is perfect for my game! Can't wait to use this
I think the MCDM minion rules would be very good for mass combat, they are technically individual characters with their own stats, but not only do they die in one hit, you can kill multiple in one turn. Grouped up minions also all share iniative and attack together, dealing a static number based on how many are attacking at once. They are also designed to synergize with other, more powerful stat blocks to seem more strategic.
I've used variants from 3rd/3.5 to run mass combat depending on whether I wanted the battles to be backdrops to the action the PCs are doing, or if they've been caught up in them. First, the Guild rules from, I believe, the first PHB2, treating each army, or subdivision of the armies (battalions, companies, platoons, squads, etc.) that were part of the combat, rolling every minute or so of game time instead of the standard timescale. The second was using the "Mob" rules from, I believe, Cityscape, where segments of crowds are treated as swarms, and treating them (usually) as platoons, though sometimes as larger groups. If they were smaller, we'd just use the regular combat rules. Heroes can fight off a platoon just as they would any other enemy, though I'd give the platoon swarm more health, ac, and attacks (and deadlier attacks when they hit), until the platoon swarm gets hacked up enough to be regular monster enemies. Or are dead.
Love the video but your rps of infantry, cavalry, archers is backwards. Cavalry was more heavily armored than infantry and used to bust up formations, leading to a route. Most infantry weapons were too short to be effective against a wall of knights charging in. However, the horses were vulnerable to arrow fire and caltrops of Archer defenses. An infantry unit (difficult terrain not withstanding) is largely immune to arrow fire. So if unchecked they could march right up on an archer fortification and route them. Fun side note: A Middle Earth War Game by L. Pratt is what Gygax plagiarized for his Chainmail fantasy supplement that would later inspire Arneson to create Blackmore. So fantasy mass combat is the origin of D&D.
Massive battles seem to come up later on in the level progression, and so does resurrection magic. I can't see much value in threatening beloved NPCs with death if PCs can simply revive them with magic that refreshes every day they wake up. But you could threaten them with capture, transformation, brainwashing, psychological damage, or banishment to another plane of existence.
I like this system but I would like to add the option of champion duels prior to actual battle. It happened a lot in less than fully professional forces, it allows the players to still be an individual hero, and the champion who loses will have their unit face some kind of debuff.
Yep, good idea! It puts the spotlight on the players, which is exactly where you want it to be. Since commanders fill an important role in that system, starting with one less commander will already be a pretty substantial debuff, I think
@@Trekiros Assuming you win the duel, the loss of the enemy commander results in the unit deciding to retreat with fewer casualties, maybe less damage.
I run 2 zombie hordes with some single elite zombies and a necromancer instead of having like 20 zombies in pathfinder and it worked great, will adapt that to DnD 5e and will do for sure a battlefield.
I use actual dice to represent each group/battalion, counting down the dice as hp. Different battalions use different size dice. Each round goes through that avg damage thing with battalions, but with a random event roll check. Each round we can zoom into the combat briefly, rolling a few dice against each other to quickly describe what is going on. I usually use no more than 10 dice on either side
First time viewer of your channel, but interesting content. I was thinking there may be another way to solve the "sociopath" hero commander problem: Historically, there were very few armies that would take 10% losses and keep fighting. The morale would break, the unit would lose cohesion, and the soldiers would turn and run. And units may also just refuse to follow orders if they feel you are sending them on a suicide mission. So if morale is a factor there could be very practical limits to how sociopathic the heroes can be. Of course that may not be the tone or phantasy you want to create. If you want your soldiers to obey orders and fight heroically to the last man this wouldn't seem like a viable approach. But if you want your heroes to be the leaders who step in when all hope is lost, and rally the men to fight and lead them to victory, morale could be an interesting factor in the overall phantasy. And no, I have no idea how to model that.
I experimented a bit with morale mechanics when making this video, but eventually moved the focus away from it yeah The most promising version of morale I toyed with worked like this: -Morale is a number that starts at 0 -Every time a battalion is reduced to 0 hp, you lose 1 morale if it was one of yours, or gain 1 morale if it was one of the enemies'. -Every time a commander is reduced to 0 hp, you lose 2 morale if it was one of yours, or gain 2 morale if it was one of the enemies'. -If you reach -5 morale, your troops are routed and the battle if lost. If you reach 5 morale, the enemies' troops are router and the battle is won. Then I toyed with things like "an undead army needs to reach -10 morale to be routed", "a bard's inspiration can raise morale by 1", etc... The system was nice because it allowed for battles of various durations: if the players were very tactical, they could end the battle in just a few rounds. But sometimes battles could last until the last man and feel gruelling (in a good way). But ultimately, tying victory/loss to the commanders felt both way more simple, and more appropriate for D&D since it's a game about the heroes' story. I'm still representing morale with the "group morale" trait that every battalion has, but it has become a very secondary thing
I like to run it like a war game, dex becomes attacks (and movement), strength becomes damage, con becomes hit points, Magic uses the same stat. I use the most recent edition of 40k, and convert the stats to fit the system.
Maybe add something like ‘cavalry do normal damage when flanking infantry’ to increase their utility a little more in a way that’s sensible. Reflects the extra force and weight of a charge.
Très bonne proposition pour dynamiser les combats à grande échelle ! Dans notre campagne, voyant que la gestion des troupes se transformait vite en un grand tableau excel bien flippant et chiant, le DM a décidé de zoomer sur notre groupe et de nous proposer des plus petites encounters ponctuelles qui pourraient faire pencher la balance en notre faveur, ou l'inverse si on décidait de ne pas y participer pour economiser nos ressources. Très fun, mais on a un poil perdu ce sens épique propre aux combats de masse. PS : Excellent accent anglais bg
Great video again Trek! Your approach to mass combat is very similar to ours. We allow auto damage and double it if the unit scores a hit or triple it if it’s a critical hit. There are some more slight nuances like unit damage vs single creatures, spells vs units, and such. Thanks for making this video! And happy new year :)🎉🥂
Great minds! Neither of us is probably the first to use swarms for mass combat battalions - the important thing is in how those swarms fit into the story of the campaign imo, to avoid the sociopath incentive (which is why I kept that point for last, it's the one I want people to remember when they leave the video)
As a dm who’s players have just entered Avernus in the middle of a Blood War scirmish and have to get to get past an a devil army by allying with a demon army, this advice is gold!
Love this elegant system. Please keep up the great work, love your stuff so much. Have a few specific points of feedback for you: 1) The Divine Battalion doesn't seem to have any attack action. Is that intentional? Seems weird that a bunch of Paladins wouldn't be able to attack. 2) If three Poison Splash battalions are in a row and you hit one, it seems as written that this will damage the second one, which will then damage the first and third, which will then damage the second. So that could really use a clarification. Or possibly the line in there where it says "any type but Psychic" you meant Poison instead? 3) Druidic Battalion on page 5 says "less limited" when you probably meant "more limited". 4) System could maybe use some more advice/rules on how things interact with the recommended 30 foot hexes. I'm assuming PCs can still attack against units, but I don't see anything that seems to care if a PC's attack is an area-effect spell or a single-target action. While letting a fireball insta-kill an entire Battalion is probably a fun-ruiner overall, it feels like there should be some sort of boost for choosing a fireball instead of a single-target vampiric touch. Maybe area-effect spells should do something like +1 damage per 5-foot square of the unit they would normally affect? So if I shoot my lightning bolt down the length of a line of infantry its +20 damage, but if I shoot it across the short length of that line it's just +2 damage. Since most units are 30 feet by 30 feet, the max damage would cap at +36 damage for a spell that affected their entire footprint. That would still be underpowering big A-O-E's overall, but it would be easy to adjudicate in a hurry while making it feel like spell choice and positioning still mattered at least a little. Or, you could abstract it more and make it just a simple "area effects do +5 damage per spell level". If the PCs are high enough level to cast big AOE spells, I think they're going to want to get to shine in that spotlight at least once during a mass combat, and making Fireball the same as a single-target spell kind of messes with that.
Oh, good feedback, I didn't catch that poison splash thing not the druid description. I'll edit the document later today (it should be the same link unless I mess up). For the divine battalion, I originally gave them an attack, but in playtests, having too many actions/having to consider too many options bogged things down. I had to choose between getting rid of their attack, and getting rid of the Miracle action, and I chose to keep Miracle because it was more unique - it created new kinds of situations and made the mass combat more interesting by existing. But you could swap it for a regular attack, it'd probably be fine. For AoE bonuses, here's where I am right now: in mass combat systems where AoE effects do deal more damage than weapon attacks... People tend to add homebrew rules for "cleaving attacks" that can hit multiple weak enemies in a single swing, because otherwise the mass combat encounter feels unfair to their martials. So I chose to keep things simpler, by not having any bonuses for AoE damage in the first place, and the result is mathematically the same (if both single target & AoE stuff deals double damage, and the enemies' max hit points are doubled... It's the exact same thing, just with more rules). Fireballs can still deal more damage, but only if you manage to catch 2-3 battalions in a single fireball (if you use hexes, you do that by targeting the intersection between 2-3 hexes). Same with lightning bolt - it affects 4 hexes in a line, so you can easily get multiple battalions with it. This dynamic makes AoE spells more situational (you wouldn't waste a fireball on a single battalion), but tactical games are all about rewarding players for recognizing, or even creating these advantageous situations. It feels in the spirit of the genre, to me.
@@Trekiros Good point about the hex intersections letting you hit more than one unit. I wasn't thinking that part through, and I can appreciate your logic now.
I remember the First Time I tried to properly run a mass combat. It was the first session back at a game I was Co Hosting and it was an actual siege preformed by Devil worshiping lunatics. I seperated the map into 4 zones. 3 of them were on the wall and one was bellow it. Until the advancing enemies reached the wall all I rolled for was a group roll for each defending rows archers and the balistas and the trebuchets. The fighting got slightly skewed by a bunch of black abishi making a wall of darkness when they got close enough, to blind the archers shooting into their troops. When the enemies actually reached the wall, all I rolled for properly was the ones in the same zone as the players. Everything else was arbirarily decided by a few minor dice rolls bar commanders or big dudes, who just murdered anything unimportant and then threw hands with one another. The players (Of whom I was normally one of.) lost the siege and had to flee.
Also one time one of my friends ran a LoTR 5e D&D based on Lord of the rings Battle for Middle Earth 2: Rise of the witch king. In which he used some non mentioned other weird combat book to do combat. Of which we were only present for 1 siege and 1 open field battle, then at the very end there was a foregone siege with the witch king present as it was in the game. But it was cool and I'm not sure how he kept track of everything but he did mange to get everything but the campaign was very well done even if the system we were using wasn't. We also managed to kill moghirmir using a fancy sword that we had to find the bits of made by some like ancient smith just to kill that guy.
This is useful, even though it is very simplistic. If you just do as you said, having a basic counter unit to another unit in a rock/paper/scissor style, that's gonna get boring real quick. The challenge is to always have different "rock/paper/scissor" mechanics so that the players don't get bored of the same mechanics, which is a lot of work, and how worth that is will be subjective.
great video. Happy to see MCDM Kingdoms and Warfare get a mention. It's warfare system is stand-alone and intuitive. I like in your video the inclusion of the PCs doing things in the battle.
I overall like this, though I feel I should point out that your Carrot example isn't a Carrot at all, it's by definition a Stick. You aren't rewarding players for more troops coming home, you're punishing them for losing troops. While each may not sound very different, the perception of each is vastly different. If you wanted to make it a Carrot you'd wanna set a minimum amount the players receive for winning the battle (Say like 5000 gold), and a bounty for each battalion that makes it home at the end of the battle (maybe like 500-1000 per). A great example of something representative of Carrot vs Stick is the Rested condition in WoW. It used to be that if you didn't rest after a certain period of playtime you'd get a penalty to the xp you'd get, and players _hated_ that. That was a Stick approach. So, what Blizzard did was switch things around, so now rather than getting a penalty for not resting, you get an equivalent xp buff for being Rested, and player's suddenly became very receptive to the resting mechanic. Functionally nothing changed, you're still not gaining as much xp if you're not Rested, but the perception of it shifted drastically, because now they're being _rewarded_ for resting, rather than punished for not. It's now a Carrot approach.
Good point tbh. Presentation 100% matters, and on this channel usually I try to send people the message that realism is a tool, not a goal, so that's definitely one instance where I forgot to practice what I preach 😅
I do mass combat rarely its a narrative focal point. A culminating moment. First is creatures, change statblocks to be the equivalent of 4 of the monster and an appropriate number of tgat thing. So take the bandit X4 the health, give them four attacks. Swarm enemies represent groups of enemies, at half health halve the attacks. Have a couple blocks of enemies like this. A few monsters and leader. Second allies. Have one or two blocks of allies helping the players. This way the players are still the badasses one man armies but have help. They blocks of allies are used by the players like a lair action. This makes players feel like the leaders and literally like a big bad. Third characters and story. The blocks of allies are led by friendly NPC's the players like. This can be allies the party helped coming to help. Players generally like being recognised. Do how does this look in practice. Find a battlemap (im on roll20) with some nice features like big boulders or building, these are important to have as obstacles. Players will want to position around them. Lets say they are fighting a bandit horde. Make three blocks of bandits as described above. Two are kitted for melee and will be moving forward, a third is exclusively using their crossbows acting as a ranged threat. Now add some monsters perhaps two mercenary ogres. Mention these ogres earlier in the campaign and give the players chance to attack them earlier in the campaign reducing numbers. And lets not forget special actions, maybe the players got some help from dwarvern engineers. They have let a catapult with a couple ammo types, maybe they use smoke to hide in. Now have a fitting leader like the bandit chief and give him a bodyguard or advisor in the form of a Spellcaster or assassin. These are your villains that youve hopefully developed and made players want to gun fir. They both die and the bandits flee. So how does this play out? The leader hangs back with the archers and a single ogre as bodyguard. The right hand man leads the one of the melee blocks one way. The other melee block has the ogre nearby as they are corralling it. Create big openings in the blocks, let your player set their own guys on the bandit blocks, leaving the players themselves to cleave into the flanks. Let the barbarian run of the duel the ogre while the wizard bombards spells. The rogue might be using the confusion to go for the right hand man maybe using the smoke from the catapult to get in close. Having beaten the ogre the barbarian will tear off to carve a path into the archers, while the party siellcaster is using spells to mop up the surviving enemies. Give the fight chance to duel the enemy general.
i still don't love the idea of it but hay good job actually thinking it through and giving ways to scale rewards based on success, large scale combat in D&D is often kind of a somber affair if you think too much about the life lost.
This sounds great. Especially if the players themself are allowed to create one or two of the troops that they are controlling. Do they happen to have a whole bunch of elf friends thanks to a previous quest where they saved a world tree? Awesome, now they will have a combination of an archer group and a druid group. Yes, it might feel overpowered compared to the other troops, but that is the point. It is their previous actions that lead to this group. It might make their tactics a bit more obsolete, but would also feel like an amazing reward for their previous quests and might make the world feel more alive. Same can be said for them having failed some quests. Maybe the army they are fighting against have a huge army of undead soldiers because they failed to kill a powerful undead at an earlier time, and now that is coming back to bite them in their butt! You don't even have to have prepared all of this beforehand. I am sure the players themselves will have some ideas for creations of troops from their previous quests. Using former bad guys as commanders on the other side would also be a fun way to interact with the players and have them really want to destroy the other army. I know my players well enough to know that if I were to have them face off against a former bad guy they hated that got away from them they wouldn't just want to win. They would want to demolish him/her. That would also give the players some stakes beyond only having beloved NPCs in the army.
For this sort of stuff i normally follow fantasy rule known as "the conservation of ninjitsu" im movies a 1v1 fight with a ninja will always be a tougher fight then 100 ninjas because the hero must win. Tldr you normally nerf the bad guys in a mas combat scenario in most movies. I follow that rule. If I have more than 10 enemies in the area, they all get 1 hp and 10s in all stats. Tho leader type enemies will still have their base stats as an exception for boss fight reasons.
Oooo this are all so great! I love that book includes battle maps to print out for these grand scaled assaults as well. I was thinking of adding objectives to a battle, similar to the implication that aerial units would be destroyed by archers adding objectives like a siege tower that you must guide and defend to a castle at the end of the valley or a few portals that mist be capture lest they keep summoning reinforcements! Furthermore, I was thinking about how this combat could b interesting against a single unit like battalions and the party are meeting an incoming tarrasque, hellbent on destroying a city. How might you adjust the tarrasques stat block n abilities for this? I feel this would take out some of the tactical aspects of this combat…
Very nice video, as useful! This is my first comment on your channel, and first of all I just want to thank you for your always excellent content! I just have some doubts on your Battalion statistics: basically my question is, how many people do you think a Battalion such as yours should have? I understand that this could be a tricky questions since you use the swarm exactly to avoid to keep track of how many people are involved in the fights, how many are dying, and so on so forth. I also understand that until there is a battalion against battalion mechanics it doesn't really matter the hit points and the damage, but the proportion is the only thing that matters: it's no use to have a battalion of 10k HP and 2,5k average damage or whatever , if they smashes each other in 4 turn or so. It matters, though, if my players can go through a battalion of 1000k people and just obliterate it if they are 4 people at level 5 XD It doesn't make so much sense, and it kind of make these huge armies far less scary. So, my answer is that since you gave your battalion 100 HP, and a single guard has 11 HP and a Commoner has 4 HP, maybe a good approximation, considering the solider of a battalion a bit nerfed down, is that there are something like 25 people in a Battalion? And since you recommend to have a number of battalion less than 20, I would expect that these stat blocks works for armies of no more than 500 people, if I want to keep the fights player vs battalions realistic. Does it make sense, according to you? I guess that a possible "fix" that I could do if I want to keep this sensation of player vs army consistent is to scale HP and average damage of your battalion considering that your battalion is around 25 people, and if I want create a huge battalion of 250 people I could just multiply your HP and damage for 10? And a huge army of 2.5k people then becomes 10 of these scaled battalions. The more I scale these stat block, the more the player will be "useful" in combat against armies, and the more it would be more a battalion vs battalion kind of think (that also makes sense in REALLY huge army fights). Does that make sense to you, or is it just rubbish? Thank you very much!
So this might be a bit of a roundabout answer but... One thing I hope people take away from my channel is, realism is a tool, not a goal in and of itself. The goal is always for our players to have fun. Verisimilitude helps the players have fun because it allows them to more easily suspend their disbelief... but the moment you start having battalions with 2000 hit points that can one shot a level 20 character, that same verisimilitude isn't helping your game anymore, it's harming it. You really don't need all that much to get a player to suspend their disbelief. They don't generally care whether a battalion has 10 or 100 or 1000 soldiers, that sort of nitty gritty logistics won't really change the decisions they take at the table. You might have especially nitpicky players who'll need to know that otherwise they literally can't get immersed in the story... But in my experience, most players will be perfectly content being told there are "a lot of soldiers", even if it's vague. The players' imagination will fill in the blanks with whatever amount of soldiers they think is appropriate: one player will picture battalions of 50 soldiers, another player at the same table might picture battalions of 1000. That's perfectly fine. I also tend to describe battalions that have taken a lot of damage as having a lot of wounded soldiers, or having a bunch of stragglers run away from the battlefield out of fear. This also helps unbind the notion of hit points from the notion of how many soldiers there are. The hit points represent the amount of meat that's still capable of following orders. I've described the same army of 10 battalions as having "about a thousand soldiers", and "hundreds of thousands of spears shimmering in the sun", just because one time it was in tier 1, and the other is was in tier 3, and I wanted to portray the escalating scales without making the game any more tedious to run. This was for the same group of players, just a year apart. Not a soul seemed to notice.
@@Trekirosyes, your answer really makes sense. It can be whatever I want, and it makes sense for me mostly in every scenario... But if you describe a battalion of 1000 people, with 100 HP, and your party of 4 level 5 adventurers decide to face it by itself, do you just let them cleave all the 1k people by themselves? 😅 For all the rest of your points you are right. It makes no sense to scale the battalion in this way, especially if it is a swarm that can one shot a level 20 character.
If you still want to do mass combat, but not as a grand scale battle, but more as a skirmish from the POV of your players, there are some things you can do to speed things up. As D&D is derived from wargames, it is not that hard to go back to its roots. Start by forming groups of identical NPCs into units that roll for initiative. When its their turn, move them into position and select another unit or units that they will be targeting. Set the DC, roll to hit, count the hits and deal damage, using average damage or even average number of hits to speed things up when hitting another unit. (If you hate maths, roll for it a couple of times and then just eyeball it. Can be done in advance.) Deal damage and kill NPCs one-by-one to minimise partially wounded with healthbars. If appropriate, abstract the damage to hits, meaning decide how many hits they can take before going down. Players seamlessly interact with everything else as normal. An example: A tribe of bugbears descends on the village of Weissdorf. You stand ready to meet them, side by side with the local militia. Everyone, roll for initiative. Ealirel, you go first. I stand my ground and shoot two arrows at the bugbear chief. (10) (18) One hit. Roll for damage. (11) Solid hit. The chief dodges one fof your arrows, but the second one hits him in the shlouder and he staggers back. He breaks it and lets out a roar. Bugbear chief commands his brutes to advance. They charge the militia. (14) (5) (17) (16) (7) Three hits. Three brave defenders are crushed by their blows. The remaining militiamen strike back. (11) (3) (18) (20) (1) (22) (9) Two hits and one critical hit. Two bugbears meet their end. Out of the bushes emerge goblin skirmishers. They see Ealirel shooting arrows at the bugbear chief and decide to attack her. (19) (8) (15) Two hits. (6) (8) Ealirel, arrows come down at you, dealing 14 damage! ... next round The mele between bugbears and militia continues. The weakened bugbears strike another defender down. However, the militiamen are unwavering and kill another attacker. ... next round The bugbears attack again but are unsuccessful, they decide to turn and flee. The militiamen pursue and manage to finish off one of them.
Cavalry is for flanking. Full frontal assaults rarely went well against infantry or moderately dug in archers. Instead, I would give cavalry more damage when they have their pack tactics enabled with another friendly unit. Archers can defeat anything if they shoot at it long enough and if the cavalry gets bogged down by meatshield infantry, they should die to archers. Archers deal very little damage in melee and infantry is weak but tanky.
*Question:* Does this have to be done with grids, or is there a way to do it in theater of the mind? My guess is that since this is purely tactical, grids would be needed, but I have a strong preference for theater of the mind, so if there's a way to facilitate that I'd love to know about it. My favorite treatment of simple mass combat in a singleplayer RPG is in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. You're put in middle of a battlefield where tons of other warriors are fighting each other from two different sides. Each enemy soldier you kill grants you a point, and each general you kill grants you several points. Meanwhile, the other side is just passively gaining points as time goes by. If you get to the point threshold before the enemy team does, the other team retreats. Granted, this is less of mass combat of battalions and more involving your players in a huge battle where you can condense and abstractify a large number of troops, but it was inspiring to me as a DM.
Theater of the mind can start being a bit difficult to manage once you have more than 5 or 6 creatures on each side. What I'd probably do in your shoes is at least give the player a very abstract/not to scale diagram of the battlefield, divided into a couple areas like "rear", "left flank", etc... so that you can easily reference these pre-established areas when talking about where a unit is moving And yeah Assassin's Creed is... Surprisingly good at mass combat. I almost included examples from Brotherhood in the video, but then forgot to in the edit xD
Disclaimer: great video, super informative, and a huge help. I'm just sick in one thing, and it's kind of a big deal to me... Can you explain Commanders and what they do a little more? 1: They take up a 30ft hex? Or can they move within and through ally battalions? 2: On a war horse, they move 60ft, so they aren't attached to a battalion? 3: Is there any damage/HP ratio, or is a Fighter facing down an Infantry battalion alone swinging for 1d12+4 against 100HP? Do the hundreds of enemies at least get advantage attacking the PC? Is a Paladin Laying on Hands healing a full battalions HP for 15? How is this internally consistent? Usually can an attack which wouldn't take out a single hobgoblin all of a sudden taking out a 10th of a 200 strong hobgoblin battalion? Did I miss something, or does battle enhance level 5 PCs to demigods? Or is it that they are attached to their own battalion, like a personal guard, that is using their HP and abilities so that everything is kind of scaling up? Again, amazing video, I just need a little clarification.
I had a tobacco-spitting centurion sneer at the PCs... "Yeah, yez kids is nothin' but a special ops team. You'd be lost in a real battle with ten thousand guys on each side. Now leave me alone and go assassinate a princess or somethin'."
I would put normal combat immediately around the PCs so that the players feel like they r in the thick of it, but as for the armies; I’d divide each side into units with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in them with each person representing 1 HP of that unit (but losing HP just means that person was downed but may not yet be dead, allowing for healing of armies). So the amount of health showcases in a 1=1 manner how many people r dying around u, n u let each player command a handful of these army units (probably have each unit be different, like mounted cavalry archers, spear n shield infantry, magical or non magical medics, mages or artillery, etc).
This seems really nice. I will try this for the final of my campaign. 3 Armies all fighting each other for the fait of one city. But i´m a bit concernd, that the Arcane divison and the other parts got way to less Hit points. The 2 babarians can easylie deal around 50-60 DMG in one round.
The main reason I went with these HP values was so that battalions would take 2-4 rounds to eliminate one another. Then I went with Challenge Rating 5 because most of my playtests were around level 7 to 10, and CR 5 was when it felt the best for my players. But if your party is very high level, you could bump the challenge rating of the battalions, by increasing the hp and damage accordingly - so long as it takes 2 to 4 rounds for one battalion to eliminate another, in my experience at least, that's the metric that matters. On another hand, I kind of failed to mention it in the video, but I like to describe a battalion reduced to 0 hit points as being routed, rather than decimated. It's less that every single mage is dead, and more that the ones who weren't in immediate greataxe range in the past 6 seconds have reconsidered their life choices and surrendered.
@@Trekiros Of how many fighters do we speak in your Imagination per Division of 50/100 HP? I will narrate 0HP Like 0 Moral. (But for the undead it still will be HP).
Depends - I've used the same stat blocks to describe armies of a couple hundreds, and armies of a couple thousands. The exact logistics are less important than the choices we put in front of our players, imo.
@@Trekiros I have now tried this out, my party consists of 6 level 13 characters equipped with magic weapons and items. They all have at least +9 to their attacks, so they hit the troops almost automatically. I also gave each player 1-2 troops which they could control themselves. Adapted to which allies they were able to win in the now 2-year campaign. The battle is still ongoing, but the special rules were well received. However, the Atrillery felt a bit useless at first. And I increased the movement speed in some areas due to the 1000*700 feet species size. (In the city *2). Meanwhile the troops are significantly reduced and also the enemy's commanders. They were also the ones who could be dangerous to the heroes. The troops posed only a minor threat. (Warlock and bard already have almost 100hp). So it's time for the two BBEG to enter the stage. Up to this point, the troop rules have been a lot of fun and increased the pace of the game. Thank you . However, a few things were strange or questionable. Can you pull the whole troop with Eldritch Blast "grasp of Hadar"? Or only parts? Can you indirectly hit the troops in the "Arcane Divison" illusion with a fireball? Can you stop Arcane Division spells with a counterspell? Can you marry an entire division with "Ritual"?
Thank you for the great video, can’t wait to actually implement these! May I ask what is the map making tool you used to create the battle maps? Thank you!
How did it go last time you ran mass combat in D&D?
I sorta did what you recommended. Simulated a mass of zombies by just turning the little zombies into "hordes" (swarms) I gave them multi attack based on health though which wasn't a great idea lol. Much better to just give straight damage, especially against swarm groups.
Having turn undead just delete giant swathes of the battlefield was a great experience haha
Went quite well, I let the players control the units, but also let them roll for to-hit/damage. Every unit was composed of 5 lines and every line equaled one d20 roll. When 3 lines were able to hit then damage was rolled and multiplied by the number of lines that were hit.
Now when units lost hp, then every 1/5 that was lost there was a morale INT/WIS/CHA roll depending on commander and if lost then the unit disbanded.
But I definitely will use the set damage next time, when I play the enemies. I had to roll too much :D
Oof, not great. I was curious to see how 5e would handle mass-combat on the usual scale and it turns out: terribly. Even with the Mob attacks rule it took 30-45 minutes to complete a round where some of the players had nothing to do just because they were far away from the action. We played for 3 sessions (I’m very grateful for how supportive my players are) and completed about 60% of the siege. I don’t think we will ever finish it, but if we ever do I’ll be sure to use these neat rules instead!
It went well, but my Barbarian Player didn't quite understand the rules I came up with (I asked him after the session, he still had fun).
@@theoverpreparerlamenters3r436 I ran my combat sort of like this, with the swarm mechanic. Generally making stat blocks of say a guard if an army of guards and multiplying everything by 1000 or so depending on the unit numbers and such. I made some mechanics for units requiring extra movement in order to angle as well, ie if a unit is 3x1 and they want to move north but are facing west it would take two movement to do so before advancement could be made but once a unit is facing a direction regular movement can be made. A unit with 3x1 dimensions also can make 3 attacks if able and move into spaces diagonal to the group in order to encircle or flank opponents. I also made the unit gain the proficiency bonus to attack of the commander on top of their base proficiency if trained with them for 1 month per point, making focusing the commander optimal and added a moral check at half health made with the charisma save of the commander against the charisma check made by the enemy commander. Players then can choose to stay with units in order to greatly buff them if equipped with relevant abilities or leave the group to 1v1 commanders or entire battalions if they are say a barbarian who can solo 1000 troops with minimal chance of effective retaliation. Aoe spells thus deal as much damage or healing multiplied as squares or targets they can hit. My party did succeed against the armies of the dread lord in the end, but faced casualties due to low combat experience against flanking Calvary and misused their own Calvary. If I ran it again I would have done some skirmishes to ease them into warfare.
Your list of outcomes is an aspect that I hadn't seen others talk about when it comes to mass combat. I've always ran mass combats as a set piece because my players had little to no investment in the degree of the battle's outcome beyond winning/losing.
There's a delicate balance to achieving the right complexity of mass combat rules for our hobby, and I think your rules achieved that. The more rules I add, the more I start thinking, "At what point do I just give up and learn how to play Warhammer?"
Great job, Trekiros!
Thank you!
It was *really* hard to stop myself from adding a joke about Hasbro's layoffs to that segment about how players tend to act like their soldiers' lives don't matter so long as they win the encounter. I figured it would date the video but it was TEMPTING.
We had a few mass combats before but only one I was in. We were playing Revolutionary War D&D allied with Half-Orc George Washington, reenacting the deleware crossing.
Each of us were given command of a squad of 5-6 recruits that followed our own characters.
We were allowed 3 unique actions. Ready- which grounded our position but readied our attack for opportunity, having advantage on the next attack and attacking as a unit. Fire- we do a clump range attack at a normal roll. Charge- where we moved and attacked with affixed bayonets.
Our player characters also had a unique action when the squad we were with took damage. The squad collectively was 10 hp per body, and every 10hp of damage one of them would die, lowering overall damage output, but also lowered how much group damage was taken over time by AOE’s.
We could choose to take half, all, or no extra damage on AOE attacks to protect the squad.
It was a tense and engaging experience. I mourned the loss of 3 recruits because I could’ve taken the cannon ball head on but was afraid the damage would’ve instantly killed me, and thus throw my squad into disarray.
Most excellent content, as always! Definitely will help alleviate those inevitable Brad Pitt as Achilles moments “IS THERE NO ELSE?!” , that crop up when letting players run solo PCs against oncoming hordes.
I can't remember the exact thing that I ran during the 4e era at the gamestore, but there was an officially published adventure where you were able to defend a town. Things you did prior to and during the battle adds or subtracts from an overall score. And the battle itself went in stages and at some point the group could intervene at a major point, which would be different depending on the score, and if they win the smaller and important combat you would get a big boost in the score. And the ending score determined how much of the enemies and allies did, and how much of the town was destroyed or not.
Watching this video has reawakened me to the utility of swarm creatures. I love combats with a large amount of enemies but turn bloat always makes them far more fun in planning than in execution. Swarms would make all that so much easier.
OD&D WarMachine rules are the best mass combat rules for D&D. It ignores the specifics of the battle and instead allows for determination of battle results just like "roll to hit" glosses over exactly how the PC bypasses enemy defenses in a combat round. It also gives the players agency in assisting the units with equipment, training, or heroic inspiration.
Funny, I would have made the Rock-Paper-scissors in the reverse direction, because historical cavalry were poorly armored against archers while being devastating to non-pike infantry...
Same, to be honest!
There's probably some aspect of warfare that doesn't translate well to the world of math & game design, but when listening to talks by game designers in the RTS & Grand Strategy genre (plus that video I linked in the description), it's pretty clear that this dynamic just kind of... appears in nearly every game of the genre. Whether or not the designers wanted it to.
The Total War team basically said something along the lines of, they simulate every single sword strike and every single arrow as accurately as they can, using physics rather than game mechanics, and when they do that... this rock-paper-scissors dynamic is the result.
My suspicion is, in a lot of these games, cavalry is more expensive, so your opponent tends to have 2-3 infantrymen for every one of your cavaliers. That's what I tried to represent by having one infantry battalion take up 3 hexes.
Famously in Agincourt, cavalry bogged down by muddy terrain was mercilessly shot down by mass formations of archers.
@@CyberDagger003 Not to be that guy but archers just exhausted the cavalry by pelting them with arrows and the men at arms closed the distance with maces and axes and finished them off once the horses were down
I made a somewhat easy way to do mass combat (up to 100s not thousands) divided in:
-What players see
-What they cannot see.
With players being a part of the fighting force (not as commanders) either lending a helping hand or fighting as mercenaries.
Outside player's view, each faction has HP (each HP point is a soldier, lets say, 2 armies, from 20 people to 100 or even 200) at the end of a full turn rotation, each side receive 1 dice of damage (the higher the dice, the more casualties that side may take but the battle is shorter, like using a 1d4 or 1d6 for 20 people skirmishes or 1d20 for 150... but using a 1d20 for 20hp is deadly fast!!)
Players though, have to fight from 4 to 10 enemies at a time (depends on DM) and at the end of a full turn, enemies killed by players are substracted to the enemy faction HP on top of the damage dice, and enemies are filled back from the stock to face the players.
Repeat until either the enemy faction is dropped to 0 men available or retreat... or until the allied faction is dropped to 0 and the players are left behind to either get swarmed or forced to run away.
You can also add a leader on each faction that has a modifier on the damage dice (-2 damage received if alive, 0 if hurt, or +2 casualties if dead + retreat)
My way of dictating if the leader is hurt outside player range is by receiving a critical hit (max damage on the damage dice, ofc 1d4 has a 25% chance of hurting a leader, and 5% for a d20, needing 2 criticals to kill a leader)
*If the leader just happens to be nearby, the DM may place him as an enemy for the players to fight against and ignore the critical dice thing.
For me it is easier to track as large battles may be going really well or bad outside player immediate intervention, but as players kill normal enemies waay to easy, the enemy faction will almost always loose... unless you gave them an unfair advantage (allied forces start with 60 people vs 150 enemies) or the allied faction had really bad rolls.
Examples: 20hp skirmishes can be a merchant caravan with their guards fighting a substancial force of bandits on an ambush.
Or 100 if its a small town fighting an invading force, or doing the invading whatever you like...
>>I hope this was useful, and good luck for those players facing an army by themselves.
9:20 - I'd argue that calvalry specifically loses to pikemen, not infantry units in general. Having the high ground on a horse gives you the upper hand if you're holding, say, a lance, and the infantry unit just has a short little sword. They can't reach you.
Lance cavalry loses to well-disciplined pikemen (or phalangists!) IF the pikemen hold station and don't thin their line in a bad place. Alexander of Makedon spanked phalanxes *several* times by breaking through with a cavalry charge and rolling up the sides and rear of the formation. (Usually by trailing poor, long-suffering Parmenio as bait, but that's a whole 'nother story.)
This is so good. Every time I’ve run large scale combat I’ve described the Players fighting to take their specific objectives while most of the fighting happens in the background. In recent years I added a “chaos clock” where I rolled a die at the end of each round to determine a random effect that would impact the PCs as a result of the surrounding battle. I liked my system but I’ll absolutely have to try out the rules you’ve outlined.
I am currently running a campaign (My first one, actually) that combines Greek history with Greek mythology. My players are about to head to the Oracle of Delphi, where - unbeknownst to them - they will meet King Leonidas on his way to ask the Oracle if he should attack the Persians, leading to the Battle of Thermopylae. This video came at the PERFECT time to help me figure out how to make an interesting (and easy) mass combat.
(full disclosure, I'm a male DM with an all-female party, and while they are 100% murderhobos, it's hard for me to get them excited about being MASS murderhobos, for some reason)
I have been testing out different ways to run it as my players are currently having to help a group of Norse-esq lizardfolk wage war against yuan-ti to get an audience with a dragon. I believe this will help out a lot with this segment of my campaign. Just in time for the last city siege.
hey that sounds interesting, did you already try the system? how did it go?
I wonder if writing a simple python script could speed up the process without sacrificing many of the characteristics listed throughout the video.
For instance, let's say two armies with cavalry, archers, infantry and artillery fight in a field, with the PC's located right in the middle of the frontlines. In this scenario, you can designate any battalion *nearby* and *decisive* to the battle to be a "foreground" unit, whereas all others are "background" units.
Thus, all foreground units receive the narration, drama, and hand-rolled dice checks that are pertinent to a story, while the number and type of background units will be handled through code. Specifically, the variable number of attack roles and damage will be automatically calculated, and displayed from highest to lowest. From there, it is the DM's responsibility to assign each value to the battalion that will *change the battle the most,* thereby preventing mass combat from feeling stale. eg: a cavalary unit on the flank might receive the highest attack roles out of all other cavalary units, rather than the misplaced group about to route after being surrounded.
My only gripe is that cavalry have a major advantage against heavy footmen unless they have pikes/spears. Most footmen do carry pikes and spears specifically for this reason, but if you have a bunch of sword wielding knights and no pole weapons, you’re probably in trouble.
Excellent video. I really appreciate how your homebrew tries to use as many existing mechanics as possible. I don't plan on running mass combat in my current campaign, but this honestly makes me want to incorporate it in the next one! I especially like the idea of having the PCs act as commanders on the same battlefield, it reminds me of Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3, which were my favourite rts games.
Every video you put out is a massive boon for my campaigns. Thank you so much, and happy new year!
Happy new year to you too!
This was absolutely the best video I'd seen on Mass Combat. I had a vague idea on how to do it, but you went it to very specific simple explanation on things I hadn't considered. I have a much clearer idea on what I am trying to do now. Thank you so much! I have saved your video and will definitely be using the PDF you made.
Amazing! I've been trying to make a mass combat system on my own since the Kingdom and Warfare is way to dense to incorperate. I just gave up and made the mass combat happen around the players as they fought a commander. I had "lair" actions on 20 and 0 initiative with had something to do with the battle surrounding them. A Barlgura clashing with an Ent crashed towards the party called for dexsaves etc. etc. It worked fine, but lacked the strategic components of your supplements.
So as always, thank you and great content!
Honestly, that sounds pretty nice for a battle where the players aren't "commanders", just people who volunteered to help fight.
@@ToonedMinecraft Hey thanks! Just as you said, the players were simply caught up in the big battle fighting their bbeg whilst the forces of Hell and The Summer court clashed. It was more cinematic than strategic tho.
Looks like a great concept.
Elegant! Another plug-and-play system that'll easily fit into my existing campaigns, thank you Trek!
currently planning a mass combat for my quasi-ragnorak for the end of my norse inspired campaign. Love you videos man!
Another great video
I once ran a siege in the following way:
There were 3 sections of the wall: the gate held by elite knights, middle wall held by untrained militia, and ruined section of the wall to the left held by a combination of militia and city guards. In the middle of the walled city was also a keep, but nobles locked themselves inside so there was nowhere to retreat, and the besieging army were the undead who were teaveling under a mountain-like shroud of darkness.
Players could choose which section of the wall to defend, but they didn't know what kind of undead would attack which section, and whichever they didn't choose I'd roll for a single time instead of running.
The gate was broken by zombie ogres, followed by zombies. If players chose the gate, the combat would be them and 3 or 4 knights against about 5 zombie ogres, while normal zombies are held back by other knights at the front without rolling for zombies nor these knights. Since they didn't choose the gate, I rolled for knights and zombies and knights've won.
The middle wall was a ranged battle, untrained militia vs skeleton archers and skeleton warriors with ladders. I rolled once for militia vs skeletons ranged combat, and even tho I gave militia +1 since players spent some time training them, they lost 4 to 19 and all fled the wall. One player was there so I gave them an option to try and delay the skeletons, they killed one and ran.
The left side, which most players chose and the one who didn't soon joined in, was besieged by zombies who threatened to destroy the palisade in the ruined part of the wall while militia and city guard were holding them back. I planned to roll for zombies to break through, but since skeletons got onto the wall, I decided I'd instead have waves of 10 skeletons at a time (40 total) appear off the map for players and city guards to defeat. Eventually I stopped the waves, informing the players that militia came back and managed to push skeletons back.
The whole battle took about 2 hours to complete, out of 5-6 hours the whole oneshot including 2 other combat encounters took
A lot of interesting stuff to think about here! I'm building up to a massive finale in my campaign thats a massive space battle, so I'll be pouring over this and your vehicle combat stuff obsessively. Thanks!
Pretty sure the vehicle system and this one can be used together since they both boil down to "actually let's just play 5e"... but I haven't had a chance to playtest them together yet, so there might be some unknown unknowns
Let me know how it goes, and good luck with your campaign finale!
@@Trekiros Thanks, I'm going to need it! I'm a little worried that I'm being too ambitious with the scope of the thing... It'll probably be a few months before we get there, but I'll for sure let you know how it goes. 😄
I think they'll work well together too, and it speaks to the elegance of your design philosophy that these systems seem to have some natural synergy. Too many supplemental rules feel cumbersome and bolted on in awkward ways, so I really love how you keep it focused on applying the core 5e mechanics in novel ways.
The main thing that I think I'll need is new stat blocks to represent squadrons of ships, but using the ones you made as a guide will help enormously!
WotC published Star Wars:SAGA Edition about 15 years ago. You might find some useful ideas in there, if you can find (access to) the books.
It is another d20 derivative and has a lot in common with D&D 3/4/5.
@@rogerwilco2 oh, interesting! I'll def try to hunt that down. Thanks!
Okay this is very well made and explained. The core idea is so elegant that it both is easy for players to understand and for dm’s to springboard into interesting scenarios. Great work!
And oh man! That npc might die if battle goes wrong thing was inspired!
Thinking about having red flag scenes with a favorite character be for the battle, where maybe the party sees their favorite shop keep joining the camp or something-super cool if the npc expresses their fears or goals and is encouraged by the players’ command.
Oh boy new Trekiros content
I've been planning my campaigns war in the 9 Hells for a while and I feel like this was the final piece of the puzzle. Thank you so much!!
Ever since i saw your simplified mass combat in the discord i had found the way to mechanically execute my campaigns finale (its Just about to happen my players called in all their allies for a big push)
This is the v2 of that same doc from a couple years ago. TH-cam gave me an excuse to make it go through a bunch of iterations and make it better :p
@@Trekiros i figured that was exactly what it was, sine i didn't remember the restitances Part in the original
So I like the system from the What's OLD is NEW RPG.
It uses the method where you do strike missions like you talk about at the beginning of the episode, but it adds a layer on top of it.
The players get a set of three missions each day, either set up by the gm or randomly rolled. Each one has a difficulty and victory point reward.
Each day a random event happens like one side getting reinforcements, or running low on morale, or other stuff.
Also each day, the players' side loses some victory points.
This leads to a feeling a lot like the battle of helms deep in lotr, the players making a huge impact on the course of the battle, while also not requiring them to manage all the troops.
It also has a supplamental system of rock paper scissors where if the players are commanders then each day they choose a tactic, like a shield wall, or a charge, or a pincer attack.
This whole thing works at many scales too, like for a full war you could just turn the time increment up to a week or month instead of a day and have the missions take longer.
Bro, i can not thank you enough. You just took my dnd session for next sunday to the next level. Your assets and explanations are great! Again, thank you SO much!
Thank you for this new year present!
After trying pretty much everything, I had settled with Scott Metzger’s ‘D&D 5e Mass Combat System’, which is great. I even made a custom system for it in Foundry VTT and a damage calculator. The problem is he abandoned the project and it requires all this extra work and system maintenance to play.
Your system feels pretty solid and seems to solve most of these issues. I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
Really nice design, very clean.
Good ideas in this video! I like that you streamlined the mass combat so that the players get to act almost like any other encounter with some bonuses that don't bog down the game. I am running a Ghost of Saltmarsh game, and have a similar mindset with naval combat. I was curious what your ideas might be for ship combat and vehicle combat in general that still gives all players agency over their turns. Great video as always!
Thank you!
I've got a video on vehicle combat - it's for Spelljammer, but a lot of the principles I talk about in it should also apply to seafaring campaigns
Amazing video as always, not sure if I'll ever really get to use this one but the concepts are always interesting.
I'm actually mad that this came out today but i ran a mass combat game last session. Oh well I now can keep this for next time! Great video!
A morale mechanic like in total war games is a good addition too. This means. If troops morale falls below a certain amount they rout. Running away and giving advantage to every unit that can catch them in terms of casualties. Morale can be harmed through casualties, position - ie a flanked unit will rapidly lose morale (would say a flakned unit also gives advantage to those attacking it), because other units.on its side are routing or perhaps through magical or psychological means. The inverse of this will raise morale as will the presence of a leader or player character.
Player characters could take specific actions to lift the morale of their troops as well as just ordering and positioning them. This gives characters such as bards and clerics significant roles that might fit more with their play style
We can always trust you to come up with actionable, interesting ways of solving these issues! Thanks for yet another great solution
double damage for advantage is a bit high. an average d10 roll will be 5.5, while an extra roll and taking the higher value won't result in an 11 it will skew things higher and the average of that should be about 7. an easy way to get and average is to add the highest number to the lowest and divide by 2, and for taking the higher of 2 rolls can be done by adding 2 of the highest value to a lower value and dividing by 3. this gives a slight bump to advantage.
as for the rock paper thing one use front line ratios for attack and defense and end up with the infantry/archer/ cav dynamic with different results based on how they are equipped and their formation. an example would be longbowmen with studded leather, longsword and shield with scale mail, lance with scale mail and mounted. all longbowmen in a formation can attack the front line of the enemy giving high attack values. the swordsmen can only attack with their front line, same with the cavalry but the cavalry being mounted only half the number of people in their front line halving their attack and doubling the attacks done by medium sized creatures. you kill the front line then if there is attacks left over you kill the second line and so forth. this means that the lower armor archers get killed fast when attacked, but also kill fast, so spending less time in their range makes them less potent. armor values for archers is 12(armor)+2(dex mod)=14, infantry is 14(armor)+2(shield)+1(dex mod)=17, and cavalry is 14(armor)+1(dex mod). you will create a chart for who attacks who instead of doing much math during the game, and so archers vs infantry you would subtract the attribute modifier (2 from dex) from the armor and get 15, which means that a d20 will hit 30% of the time. you multiply the average damage (4.5) by 30% and get 1.35 damage per attack, and if they are level 1 they only make 1 attack a round. in a block of 50 with 5 ranks deep and 10 rows that is 67.5 damage per round when the enemy is in 150 feet. disadvantage at long range changes the odds to hit to about 15.55% and so damage to 0.94 damage per archer or 47.14 damage per round for all 50 between 150 to 600 feet. all of this is math heavy but if once you get your x vs y chart then all you have to do is multiply using a calculator for damage amounts without any rolls, making the combat faster than normal combat. the reverse of swordsmen versus archers would be 14 AC - 2 str mod = 12 or missing on 11 and lower out of 20 (11/20=0.55) and thus 4.5 (avg dmg)*0.45(hit chance)=2.025 dmg per swordsman that can attack (the 10 in the front line if they also use the 10 by 5 formation) or 20.25 for a full stack against the example archers. cav do 2.925 per front line unit, and since they have half the front line units meeting the archer front line that is 5*2.925 instead of 10 or 14.625 damage per round, but their much greater speed means they get shot less closing the gap. the archers get attacked when they attack while in melee and so take double damage as a downside, as well as costing 2.5gp per attack for a full block, and every loss decreases their damage output. this means that the swordsmen will win if they don't get attacked before getting into melee with the archers on round 21 with 4 guys left alive, but obviously they will lose guys closing the gap and end up losing the fight, and the cav lose in melee due to the lower density, making the archers the best per individual however they also will cost much more due to the cost of arrows (1gp per day per troop and 0.05gp per attack per troop or 70.65gp for the fight with the swordsmen). the swordsmen are the cheapest, while archers cost almost the same per day their ammo costs easily make them the most expensive, and cav have the highest cost to recruit and pay daily. this means that by sheer numbers cav should be able to beat archers, while cav should lose even if matched man for man against anything, while swordsmen should be your bread and butter due to cost efficiency just like real life. this makes things work out pretty similarly to historical medieval armies, and can easily shift based on different factors like troops getting halberds and better training or boosting industrial output of arrows for economy of scale leading to more importance on ranged troops. fantasy stuff also develops with battle mages being cost efficient ranged troops if they get used a lot, but expensive to replace.
PS i forgot the proficiency bonuses, but this shows the basics of the math.
Great resource, just ran this this weekend and it went very well. Dead simple to run and--critically-- explain to players.
Very interesting and helpful information on mass combat. Really appreciate your resources!
Credit where credit is due: this is a great video and your document is very impressive. A refreshing take on something that's been solved for decades, but can always benefit from new and interesting perspective. Well done.
Something that I started doing to start pushing the scale of D&D combat was really honing in on good squad/horde rules. I can easily push upwards of 50+ enemies in about 10 squads. The big difference is using carry over damage so it isn't wasted unless the player is finishing off a horde.
I also ran a world war 1 style trench charge once where with a little bit of prep math I figured out how many hits of average damage it took to kill an enemy. So I just rolled for hits, marked "wounds" instead of hp, and all the sudden I was able to run a 50 on 50 fight, with monsters and players, with each opposing army only taking about as much time as a normal players turn.
Je cherchais justement des vidéos sur les combats de masse DnD. Merci beaucoup, j'aime bien ton système simplifié. Comme je fais une campagne maison, j'ai besoin de savoir ce qu'il "se passe" dans un royaume alentour : des forces qui vont émerger, s'allier ou disparaître. Du coup en hors jeu, je vais voir un peu comment se présentent ces batailles et si besoin, mes joueurs devront affronter les conséquences. Merci en tout cas pour cette vidéo !
This is amazing! Been trying to figure out how to do a mass combat battle for an end of campaign war and this is perfect for my game! Can't wait to use this
I think the MCDM minion rules would be very good for mass combat, they are technically individual characters with their own stats, but not only do they die in one hit, you can kill multiple in one turn. Grouped up minions also all share iniative and attack together, dealing a static number based on how many are attacking at once. They are also designed to synergize with other, more powerful stat blocks to seem more strategic.
This looks like a lot of fun to run! Thank you for all the great content!
I've used variants from 3rd/3.5 to run mass combat depending on whether I wanted the battles to be backdrops to the action the PCs are doing, or if they've been caught up in them.
First, the Guild rules from, I believe, the first PHB2, treating each army, or subdivision of the armies (battalions, companies, platoons, squads, etc.) that were part of the combat, rolling every minute or so of game time instead of the standard timescale.
The second was using the "Mob" rules from, I believe, Cityscape, where segments of crowds are treated as swarms, and treating them (usually) as platoons, though sometimes as larger groups. If they were smaller, we'd just use the regular combat rules. Heroes can fight off a platoon just as they would any other enemy, though I'd give the platoon swarm more health, ac, and attacks (and deadlier attacks when they hit), until the platoon swarm gets hacked up enough to be regular monster enemies. Or are dead.
this sounds incredibly exciting! I've always struggled with mass combat and I think this will do magnificently! thank you so much!
Love the video but your rps of infantry, cavalry, archers is backwards.
Cavalry was more heavily armored than infantry and used to bust up formations, leading to a route. Most infantry weapons were too short to be effective against a wall of knights charging in.
However, the horses were vulnerable to arrow fire and caltrops of Archer defenses.
An infantry unit (difficult terrain not withstanding) is largely immune to arrow fire. So if unchecked they could march right up on an archer fortification and route them.
Fun side note:
A Middle Earth War Game by L. Pratt is what Gygax plagiarized for his Chainmail fantasy supplement that would later inspire Arneson to create Blackmore.
So fantasy mass combat is the origin of D&D.
Massive battles seem to come up later on in the level progression, and so does resurrection magic. I can't see much value in threatening beloved NPCs with death if PCs can simply revive them with magic that refreshes every day they wake up.
But you could threaten them with capture, transformation, brainwashing, psychological damage, or banishment to another plane of existence.
...I wish I'd thought of those when writing this thing, those are great
I like this system but I would like to add the option of champion duels prior to actual battle. It happened a lot in less than fully professional forces, it allows the players to still be an individual hero, and the champion who loses will have their unit face some kind of debuff.
Yep, good idea! It puts the spotlight on the players, which is exactly where you want it to be.
Since commanders fill an important role in that system, starting with one less commander will already be a pretty substantial debuff, I think
@@Trekiros Assuming you win the duel, the loss of the enemy commander results in the unit deciding to retreat with fewer casualties, maybe less damage.
A minute in and you’re already more helpful than most videos
Thank you so so much
I run 2 zombie hordes with some single elite zombies and a necromancer instead of having like 20 zombies in pathfinder and it worked great, will adapt that to DnD 5e and will do for sure a battlefield.
Amazing content and came just at the right time for my campaign! I can only echo what everyone else has said here
I use actual dice to represent each group/battalion, counting down the dice as hp. Different battalions use different size dice. Each round goes through that avg damage thing with battalions, but with a random event roll check. Each round we can zoom into the combat briefly, rolling a few dice against each other to quickly describe what is going on.
I usually use no more than 10 dice on either side
First time viewer of your channel, but interesting content. I was thinking there may be another way to solve the "sociopath" hero commander problem: Historically, there were very few armies that would take 10% losses and keep fighting. The morale would break, the unit would lose cohesion, and the soldiers would turn and run. And units may also just refuse to follow orders if they feel you are sending them on a suicide mission. So if morale is a factor there could be very practical limits to how sociopathic the heroes can be. Of course that may not be the tone or phantasy you want to create. If you want your soldiers to obey orders and fight heroically to the last man this wouldn't seem like a viable approach. But if you want your heroes to be the leaders who step in when all hope is lost, and rally the men to fight and lead them to victory, morale could be an interesting factor in the overall phantasy. And no, I have no idea how to model that.
I experimented a bit with morale mechanics when making this video, but eventually moved the focus away from it yeah
The most promising version of morale I toyed with worked like this:
-Morale is a number that starts at 0
-Every time a battalion is reduced to 0 hp, you lose 1 morale if it was one of yours, or gain 1 morale if it was one of the enemies'.
-Every time a commander is reduced to 0 hp, you lose 2 morale if it was one of yours, or gain 2 morale if it was one of the enemies'.
-If you reach -5 morale, your troops are routed and the battle if lost. If you reach 5 morale, the enemies' troops are router and the battle is won.
Then I toyed with things like "an undead army needs to reach -10 morale to be routed", "a bard's inspiration can raise morale by 1", etc...
The system was nice because it allowed for battles of various durations: if the players were very tactical, they could end the battle in just a few rounds. But sometimes battles could last until the last man and feel gruelling (in a good way).
But ultimately, tying victory/loss to the commanders felt both way more simple, and more appropriate for D&D since it's a game about the heroes' story.
I'm still representing morale with the "group morale" trait that every battalion has, but it has become a very secondary thing
I like to run it like a war game, dex becomes attacks (and movement), strength becomes damage, con becomes hit points, Magic uses the same stat. I use the most recent edition of 40k, and convert the stats to fit the system.
Am planning for my campaign to wrap up in my homebrew world with a sort of…steampunk terminator invasion from Mechanus. This video helped, thanks
Maybe add something like ‘cavalry do normal damage when flanking infantry’ to increase their utility a little more in a way that’s sensible. Reflects the extra force and weight of a charge.
Très bonne proposition pour dynamiser les combats à grande échelle ! Dans notre campagne, voyant que la gestion des troupes se transformait vite en un grand tableau excel bien flippant et chiant, le DM a décidé de zoomer sur notre groupe et de nous proposer des plus petites encounters ponctuelles qui pourraient faire pencher la balance en notre faveur, ou l'inverse si on décidait de ne pas y participer pour economiser nos ressources. Très fun, mais on a un poil perdu ce sens épique propre aux combats de masse.
PS : Excellent accent anglais bg
you just did the divine work of the gods my friend, thank you!
Great video again Trek! Your approach to mass combat is very similar to ours. We allow auto damage and double it if the unit scores a hit or triple it if it’s a critical hit. There are some more slight nuances like unit damage vs single creatures, spells vs units, and such. Thanks for making this video! And happy new year :)🎉🥂
Great minds!
Neither of us is probably the first to use swarms for mass combat battalions - the important thing is in how those swarms fit into the story of the campaign imo, to avoid the sociopath incentive (which is why I kept that point for last, it's the one I want people to remember when they leave the video)
Just in time man, you're a blessing for all DMs
Just what i have been looking for~
As a dm who’s players have just entered Avernus in the middle of a Blood War scirmish and have to get to get past an a devil army by allying with a demon army, this advice is gold!
Love this elegant system. Please keep up the great work, love your stuff so much. Have a few specific points of feedback for you: 1) The Divine Battalion doesn't seem to have any attack action. Is that intentional? Seems weird that a bunch of Paladins wouldn't be able to attack. 2) If three Poison Splash battalions are in a row and you hit one, it seems as written that this will damage the second one, which will then damage the first and third, which will then damage the second. So that could really use a clarification. Or possibly the line in there where it says "any type but Psychic" you meant Poison instead? 3) Druidic Battalion on page 5 says "less limited" when you probably meant "more limited". 4) System could maybe use some more advice/rules on how things interact with the recommended 30 foot hexes. I'm assuming PCs can still attack against units, but I don't see anything that seems to care if a PC's attack is an area-effect spell or a single-target action. While letting a fireball insta-kill an entire Battalion is probably a fun-ruiner overall, it feels like there should be some sort of boost for choosing a fireball instead of a single-target vampiric touch. Maybe area-effect spells should do something like +1 damage per 5-foot square of the unit they would normally affect? So if I shoot my lightning bolt down the length of a line of infantry its +20 damage, but if I shoot it across the short length of that line it's just +2 damage. Since most units are 30 feet by 30 feet, the max damage would cap at +36 damage for a spell that affected their entire footprint. That would still be underpowering big A-O-E's overall, but it would be easy to adjudicate in a hurry while making it feel like spell choice and positioning still mattered at least a little. Or, you could abstract it more and make it just a simple "area effects do +5 damage per spell level". If the PCs are high enough level to cast big AOE spells, I think they're going to want to get to shine in that spotlight at least once during a mass combat, and making Fireball the same as a single-target spell kind of messes with that.
Oh, good feedback, I didn't catch that poison splash thing not the druid description. I'll edit the document later today (it should be the same link unless I mess up).
For the divine battalion, I originally gave them an attack, but in playtests, having too many actions/having to consider too many options bogged things down. I had to choose between getting rid of their attack, and getting rid of the Miracle action, and I chose to keep Miracle because it was more unique - it created new kinds of situations and made the mass combat more interesting by existing. But you could swap it for a regular attack, it'd probably be fine.
For AoE bonuses, here's where I am right now: in mass combat systems where AoE effects do deal more damage than weapon attacks... People tend to add homebrew rules for "cleaving attacks" that can hit multiple weak enemies in a single swing, because otherwise the mass combat encounter feels unfair to their martials. So I chose to keep things simpler, by not having any bonuses for AoE damage in the first place, and the result is mathematically the same (if both single target & AoE stuff deals double damage, and the enemies' max hit points are doubled... It's the exact same thing, just with more rules).
Fireballs can still deal more damage, but only if you manage to catch 2-3 battalions in a single fireball (if you use hexes, you do that by targeting the intersection between 2-3 hexes). Same with lightning bolt - it affects 4 hexes in a line, so you can easily get multiple battalions with it. This dynamic makes AoE spells more situational (you wouldn't waste a fireball on a single battalion), but tactical games are all about rewarding players for recognizing, or even creating these advantageous situations. It feels in the spirit of the genre, to me.
@@Trekiros Good point about the hex intersections letting you hit more than one unit. I wasn't thinking that part through, and I can appreciate your logic now.
Me being a Skaven player knowing full well that I will sacrifice 18 of my 20 units just to capture a city
If they didn't want to be sacrificed, why did they decide to be that cheap to make, huh?
I have the yelling of “Skaven Slaves!” Stuck in my head for to much Total war 2
This is a phenomenal video. Amazing work!
I remember the First Time I tried to properly run a mass combat. It was the first session back at a game I was Co Hosting and it was an actual siege preformed by Devil worshiping lunatics.
I seperated the map into 4 zones. 3 of them were on the wall and one was bellow it. Until the advancing enemies reached the wall all I rolled for was a group roll for each defending rows archers and the balistas and the trebuchets. The fighting got slightly skewed by a bunch of black abishi making a wall of darkness when they got close enough, to blind the archers shooting into their troops. When the enemies actually reached the wall, all I rolled for properly was the ones in the same zone as the players. Everything else was arbirarily decided by a few minor dice rolls bar commanders or big dudes, who just murdered anything unimportant and then threw hands with one another.
The players (Of whom I was normally one of.) lost the siege and had to flee.
Also one time one of my friends ran a LoTR 5e D&D based on Lord of the rings Battle for Middle Earth 2: Rise of the witch king. In which he used some non mentioned other weird combat book to do combat. Of which we were only present for 1 siege and 1 open field battle, then at the very end there was a foregone siege with the witch king present as it was in the game. But it was cool and I'm not sure how he kept track of everything but he did mange to get everything but the campaign was very well done even if the system we were using wasn't. We also managed to kill moghirmir using a fancy sword that we had to find the bits of made by some like ancient smith just to kill that guy.
THANK YOU THIS IS WHAT EXACTLY I WAS LOOKING FOR LIKE FOREVER! I LOVE IT! NEW SUB THERE SIR!!
This is useful, even though it is very simplistic. If you just do as you said, having a basic counter unit to another unit in a rock/paper/scissor style, that's gonna get boring real quick. The challenge is to always have different "rock/paper/scissor" mechanics so that the players don't get bored of the same mechanics, which is a lot of work, and how worth that is will be subjective.
great video. Happy to see MCDM Kingdoms and Warfare get a mention. It's warfare system is stand-alone and intuitive. I like in your video the inclusion of the PCs doing things in the battle.
I overall like this, though I feel I should point out that your Carrot example isn't a Carrot at all, it's by definition a Stick. You aren't rewarding players for more troops coming home, you're punishing them for losing troops. While each may not sound very different, the perception of each is vastly different. If you wanted to make it a Carrot you'd wanna set a minimum amount the players receive for winning the battle (Say like 5000 gold), and a bounty for each battalion that makes it home at the end of the battle (maybe like 500-1000 per).
A great example of something representative of Carrot vs Stick is the Rested condition in WoW. It used to be that if you didn't rest after a certain period of playtime you'd get a penalty to the xp you'd get, and players _hated_ that. That was a Stick approach. So, what Blizzard did was switch things around, so now rather than getting a penalty for not resting, you get an equivalent xp buff for being Rested, and player's suddenly became very receptive to the resting mechanic. Functionally nothing changed, you're still not gaining as much xp if you're not Rested, but the perception of it shifted drastically, because now they're being _rewarded_ for resting, rather than punished for not. It's now a Carrot approach.
Good point tbh. Presentation 100% matters, and on this channel usually I try to send people the message that realism is a tool, not a goal, so that's definitely one instance where I forgot to practice what I preach 😅
I do mass combat rarely its a narrative focal point. A culminating moment.
First is creatures, change statblocks to be the equivalent of 4 of the monster and an appropriate number of tgat thing. So take the bandit X4 the health, give them four attacks. Swarm enemies represent groups of enemies, at half health halve the attacks. Have a couple blocks of enemies like this. A few monsters and leader.
Second allies. Have one or two blocks of allies helping the players.
This way the players are still the badasses one man armies but have help.
They blocks of allies are used by the players like a lair action. This makes players feel like the leaders and literally like a big bad.
Third characters and story.
The blocks of allies are led by friendly NPC's the players like.
This can be allies the party helped coming to help. Players generally like being recognised.
Do how does this look in practice. Find a battlemap (im on roll20) with some nice features like big boulders or building, these are important to have as obstacles. Players will want to position around them.
Lets say they are fighting a bandit horde.
Make three blocks of bandits as described above. Two are kitted for melee and will be moving forward, a third is exclusively using their crossbows acting as a ranged threat.
Now add some monsters perhaps two mercenary ogres. Mention these ogres earlier in the campaign and give the players chance to attack them earlier in the campaign reducing numbers.
And lets not forget special actions, maybe the players got some help from dwarvern engineers. They have let a catapult with a couple ammo types, maybe they use smoke to hide in.
Now have a fitting leader like the bandit chief and give him a bodyguard or advisor in the form of a Spellcaster or assassin.
These are your villains that youve hopefully developed and made players want to gun fir. They both die and the bandits flee.
So how does this play out?
The leader hangs back with the archers and a single ogre as bodyguard.
The right hand man leads the one of the melee blocks one way. The other melee block has the ogre nearby as they are corralling it.
Create big openings in the blocks, let your player set their own guys on the bandit blocks, leaving the players themselves to cleave into the flanks. Let the barbarian run of the duel the ogre while the wizard bombards spells. The rogue might be using the confusion to go for the right hand man maybe using the smoke from the catapult to get in close. Having beaten the ogre the barbarian will tear off to carve a path into the archers, while the party siellcaster is using spells to mop up the surviving enemies. Give the fight chance to duel the enemy general.
i still don't love the idea of it but hay good job actually thinking it through and giving ways to scale rewards based on success, large scale combat in D&D is often kind of a somber affair if you think too much about the life lost.
This sounds great. Especially if the players themself are allowed to create one or two of the troops that they are controlling. Do they happen to have a whole bunch of elf friends thanks to a previous quest where they saved a world tree? Awesome, now they will have a combination of an archer group and a druid group.
Yes, it might feel overpowered compared to the other troops, but that is the point. It is their previous actions that lead to this group. It might make their tactics a bit more obsolete, but would also feel like an amazing reward for their previous quests and might make the world feel more alive.
Same can be said for them having failed some quests. Maybe the army they are fighting against have a huge army of undead soldiers because they failed to kill a powerful undead at an earlier time, and now that is coming back to bite them in their butt! You don't even have to have prepared all of this beforehand. I am sure the players themselves will have some ideas for creations of troops from their previous quests. Using former bad guys as commanders on the other side would also be a fun way to interact with the players and have them really want to destroy the other army.
I know my players well enough to know that if I were to have them face off against a former bad guy they hated that got away from them they wouldn't just want to win. They would want to demolish him/her. That would also give the players some stakes beyond only having beloved NPCs in the army.
I was looking for this, I have one player building an army, so it's good to have it
I just use the 1st edition rules for "War Machine". I think it's on Companion Set.
Works smoothly
For this sort of stuff i normally follow fantasy rule known as "the conservation of ninjitsu" im movies a 1v1 fight with a ninja will always be a tougher fight then 100 ninjas because the hero must win. Tldr you normally nerf the bad guys in a mas combat scenario in most movies. I follow that rule. If I have more than 10 enemies in the area, they all get 1 hp and 10s in all stats. Tho leader type enemies will still have their base stats as an exception for boss fight reasons.
Oooo this are all so great! I love that book includes battle maps to print out for these grand scaled assaults as well.
I was thinking of adding objectives to a battle, similar to the implication that aerial units would be destroyed by archers adding objectives like a siege tower that you must guide and defend to a castle at the end of the valley or a few portals that mist be capture lest they keep summoning reinforcements!
Furthermore, I was thinking about how this combat could b interesting against a single unit like battalions and the party are meeting an incoming tarrasque, hellbent on destroying a city. How might you adjust the tarrasques stat block n abilities for this? I feel this would take out some of the tactical aspects of this combat…
Very nice video, as useful! This is my first comment on your channel, and first of all I just want to thank you for your always excellent content!
I just have some doubts on your Battalion statistics: basically my question is, how many people do you think a Battalion such as yours should have?
I understand that this could be a tricky questions since you use the swarm exactly to avoid to keep track of how many people are involved in the fights, how many are dying, and so on so forth. I also understand that until there is a battalion against battalion mechanics it doesn't really matter the hit points and the damage, but the proportion is the only thing that matters: it's no use to have a battalion of 10k HP and 2,5k average damage or whatever , if they smashes each other in 4 turn or so.
It matters, though, if my players can go through a battalion of 1000k people and just obliterate it if they are 4 people at level 5 XD It doesn't make so much sense, and it kind of make these huge armies far less scary.
So, my answer is that since you gave your battalion 100 HP, and a single guard has 11 HP and a Commoner has 4 HP, maybe a good approximation, considering the solider of a battalion a bit nerfed down, is that there are something like 25 people in a Battalion? And since you recommend to have a number of battalion less than 20, I would expect that these stat blocks works for armies of no more than 500 people, if I want to keep the fights player vs battalions realistic. Does it make sense, according to you?
I guess that a possible "fix" that I could do if I want to keep this sensation of player vs army consistent is to scale HP and average damage of your battalion considering that your battalion is around 25 people, and if I want create a huge battalion of 250 people I could just multiply your HP and damage for 10? And a huge army of 2.5k people then becomes 10 of these scaled battalions. The more I scale these stat block, the more the player will be "useful" in combat against armies, and the more it would be more a battalion vs battalion kind of think (that also makes sense in REALLY huge army fights).
Does that make sense to you, or is it just rubbish?
Thank you very much!
So this might be a bit of a roundabout answer but... One thing I hope people take away from my channel is, realism is a tool, not a goal in and of itself. The goal is always for our players to have fun. Verisimilitude helps the players have fun because it allows them to more easily suspend their disbelief... but the moment you start having battalions with 2000 hit points that can one shot a level 20 character, that same verisimilitude isn't helping your game anymore, it's harming it.
You really don't need all that much to get a player to suspend their disbelief. They don't generally care whether a battalion has 10 or 100 or 1000 soldiers, that sort of nitty gritty logistics won't really change the decisions they take at the table. You might have especially nitpicky players who'll need to know that otherwise they literally can't get immersed in the story... But in my experience, most players will be perfectly content being told there are "a lot of soldiers", even if it's vague. The players' imagination will fill in the blanks with whatever amount of soldiers they think is appropriate: one player will picture battalions of 50 soldiers, another player at the same table might picture battalions of 1000. That's perfectly fine.
I also tend to describe battalions that have taken a lot of damage as having a lot of wounded soldiers, or having a bunch of stragglers run away from the battlefield out of fear. This also helps unbind the notion of hit points from the notion of how many soldiers there are. The hit points represent the amount of meat that's still capable of following orders.
I've described the same army of 10 battalions as having "about a thousand soldiers", and "hundreds of thousands of spears shimmering in the sun", just because one time it was in tier 1, and the other is was in tier 3, and I wanted to portray the escalating scales without making the game any more tedious to run. This was for the same group of players, just a year apart. Not a soul seemed to notice.
@@Trekirosyes, your answer really makes sense.
It can be whatever I want, and it makes sense for me mostly in every scenario...
But if you describe a battalion of 1000 people, with 100 HP, and your party of 4 level 5 adventurers decide to face it by itself, do you just let them cleave all the 1k people by themselves? 😅
For all the rest of your points you are right. It makes no sense to scale the battalion in this way, especially if it is a swarm that can one shot a level 20 character.
Great work! Though in history battlefield cavalry often were superior to the infantry (depending on the period) the overall approach is just so great!
If you still want to do mass combat, but not as a grand scale battle, but more as a skirmish from the POV of your players, there are some things you can do to speed things up. As D&D is derived from wargames, it is not that hard to go back to its roots.
Start by forming groups of identical NPCs into units that roll for initiative. When its their turn, move them into position and select another unit or units that they will be targeting. Set the DC, roll to hit, count the hits and deal damage, using average damage or even average number of hits to speed things up when hitting another unit. (If you hate maths, roll for it a couple of times and then just eyeball it. Can be done in advance.) Deal damage and kill NPCs one-by-one to minimise partially wounded with healthbars. If appropriate, abstract the damage to hits, meaning decide how many hits they can take before going down.
Players seamlessly interact with everything else as normal.
An example:
A tribe of bugbears descends on the village of Weissdorf. You stand ready to meet them, side by side with the local militia. Everyone, roll for initiative.
Ealirel, you go first.
I stand my ground and shoot two arrows at the bugbear chief. (10) (18)
One hit. Roll for damage. (11) Solid hit. The chief dodges one fof your arrows, but the second one hits him in the shlouder and he staggers back. He breaks it and lets out a roar.
Bugbear chief commands his brutes to advance. They charge the militia. (14) (5) (17) (16) (7) Three hits. Three brave defenders are crushed by their blows.
The remaining militiamen strike back. (11) (3) (18) (20) (1) (22) (9) Two hits and one critical hit. Two bugbears meet their end.
Out of the bushes emerge goblin skirmishers. They see Ealirel shooting arrows at the bugbear chief and decide to attack her. (19) (8) (15) Two hits. (6) (8) Ealirel, arrows come down at you, dealing 14 damage!
... next round
The mele between bugbears and militia continues. The weakened bugbears strike another defender down. However, the militiamen are unwavering and kill another attacker.
... next round
The bugbears attack again but are unsuccessful, they decide to turn and flee. The militiamen pursue and manage to finish off one of them.
i love you
Cavalry is for flanking. Full frontal assaults rarely went well against infantry or moderately dug in archers. Instead, I would give cavalry more damage when they have their pack tactics enabled with another friendly unit. Archers can defeat anything if they shoot at it long enough and if the cavalry gets bogged down by meatshield infantry, they should die to archers. Archers deal very little damage in melee and infantry is weak but tanky.
*Question:* Does this have to be done with grids, or is there a way to do it in theater of the mind? My guess is that since this is purely tactical, grids would be needed, but I have a strong preference for theater of the mind, so if there's a way to facilitate that I'd love to know about it.
My favorite treatment of simple mass combat in a singleplayer RPG is in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. You're put in middle of a battlefield where tons of other warriors are fighting each other from two different sides. Each enemy soldier you kill grants you a point, and each general you kill grants you several points. Meanwhile, the other side is just passively gaining points as time goes by. If you get to the point threshold before the enemy team does, the other team retreats. Granted, this is less of mass combat of battalions and more involving your players in a huge battle where you can condense and abstractify a large number of troops, but it was inspiring to me as a DM.
Theater of the mind can start being a bit difficult to manage once you have more than 5 or 6 creatures on each side.
What I'd probably do in your shoes is at least give the player a very abstract/not to scale diagram of the battlefield, divided into a couple areas like "rear", "left flank", etc... so that you can easily reference these pre-established areas when talking about where a unit is moving
And yeah Assassin's Creed is... Surprisingly good at mass combat. I almost included examples from Brotherhood in the video, but then forgot to in the edit xD
Very nice, succinct video!!
Disclaimer: great video, super informative, and a huge help. I'm just sick in one thing, and it's kind of a big deal to me... Can you explain Commanders and what they do a little more?
1: They take up a 30ft hex? Or can they move within and through ally battalions?
2: On a war horse, they move 60ft, so they aren't attached to a battalion?
3: Is there any damage/HP ratio, or is a Fighter facing down an Infantry battalion alone swinging for 1d12+4 against 100HP? Do the hundreds of enemies at least get advantage attacking the PC? Is a Paladin Laying on Hands healing a full battalions HP for 15? How is this internally consistent? Usually can an attack which wouldn't take out a single hobgoblin all of a sudden taking out a 10th of a 200 strong hobgoblin battalion?
Did I miss something, or does battle enhance level 5 PCs to demigods?
Or is it that they are attached to their own battalion, like a personal guard, that is using their HP and abilities so that everything is kind of scaling up?
Again, amazing video, I just need a little clarification.
I had a tobacco-spitting centurion sneer at the PCs... "Yeah, yez kids is nothin' but a special ops team. You'd be lost in a real battle with ten thousand guys on each side. Now leave me alone and go assassinate a princess or somethin'."
Would love to see this system in action!
I would put normal combat immediately around the PCs so that the players feel like they r in the thick of it, but as for the armies; I’d divide each side into units with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in them with each person representing 1 HP of that unit (but losing HP just means that person was downed but may not yet be dead, allowing for healing of armies). So the amount of health showcases in a 1=1 manner how many people r dying around u, n u let each player command a handful of these army units (probably have each unit be different, like mounted cavalry archers, spear n shield infantry, magical or non magical medics, mages or artillery, etc).
Excellent!
my uncle's gonna love this only it's 5e and he's kind of a bit of a grognard.... can't be that hard to adapt.
This seems really nice.
I will try this for the final of my campaign.
3 Armies all fighting each other for the fait of one city.
But i´m a bit concernd, that the Arcane divison and the other parts got way to less Hit points.
The 2 babarians can easylie deal around 50-60 DMG in one round.
The main reason I went with these HP values was so that battalions would take 2-4 rounds to eliminate one another. Then I went with Challenge Rating 5 because most of my playtests were around level 7 to 10, and CR 5 was when it felt the best for my players.
But if your party is very high level, you could bump the challenge rating of the battalions, by increasing the hp and damage accordingly - so long as it takes 2 to 4 rounds for one battalion to eliminate another, in my experience at least, that's the metric that matters.
On another hand, I kind of failed to mention it in the video, but I like to describe a battalion reduced to 0 hit points as being routed, rather than decimated. It's less that every single mage is dead, and more that the ones who weren't in immediate greataxe range in the past 6 seconds have reconsidered their life choices and surrendered.
@@Trekiros Of how many fighters do we speak in your Imagination per Division of 50/100 HP?
I will narrate 0HP Like 0 Moral.
(But for the undead it still will be HP).
Depends - I've used the same stat blocks to describe armies of a couple hundreds, and armies of a couple thousands. The exact logistics are less important than the choices we put in front of our players, imo.
@@Trekiros
I have now tried this out, my party consists of 6 level 13 characters equipped with magic weapons and items.
They all have at least +9 to their attacks, so they hit the troops almost automatically.
I also gave each player 1-2 troops which they could control themselves.
Adapted to which allies they were able to win in the now 2-year campaign.
The battle is still ongoing, but the special rules were well received. However, the Atrillery felt a bit useless at first.
And I increased the movement speed in some areas due to the 1000*700 feet species size. (In the city *2).
Meanwhile the troops are significantly reduced and also the enemy's commanders. They were also the ones who could be dangerous to the heroes. The troops posed only a minor threat. (Warlock and bard already have almost 100hp).
So it's time for the two BBEG to enter the stage.
Up to this point, the troop rules have been a lot of fun and increased the pace of the game. Thank you .
However, a few things were strange or questionable.
Can you pull the whole troop with Eldritch Blast "grasp of Hadar"? Or only parts?
Can you indirectly hit the troops in the "Arcane Divison" illusion with a fireball?
Can you stop Arcane Division spells with a counterspell?
Can you marry an entire division with "Ritual"?
Love this video and I love the rules you propose. But why didn't you include an example? Play out a short combat so we can get a feel for it?
❤️🥳👍🏿
Thank you for the great video, can’t wait to actually implement these! May I ask what is the map making tool you used to create the battle maps? Thank you!
Amazing stuff! Where can we find those 4 example maps if I wanted to download them?
Thank you!
If you click the name of the maps in the PDF, those are links to the maps as images
Oh, I feel so silly for having looked so far and missed what was right in front of me. Thank you for all the exciting game design, and happy new year!