Large scale battles

[Russell Wallace]

I noticed in a couple of earlier threads people talking about needing
several hours to run a fight with a few dozen combatants; it seems the
campaigns in question were run fairly strictly by the rules.

I'm curious as to how by-the-rulebook GMs would handle something like
these...

In Kyounin (run by me), the assault on Greystone Keep: an air battle, a
big magical duel (also involving the firing of a nuclear missile),
another air battle, a ground assault involving thousands of combatants
in total, a wide range of technical and magical weaponry. Playing time:
one session, a few hours. As far as I know no system ever created is
even capable of handling this at all, and creating such a system would
be a bigger project than I'd want to spare the resources to undertake.

In Everway (I was a player in this one), the battle of the Twisted
Chasms: a quarter million combatants in total, with large numbers of
special units and magical effects (weather control, dragonfire,
necromancy, special artifacts etc). Again, playing time was one session;
the system maybe perhaps could have handled it, but not until after the
GM and players had died of old age.

Obviously both of those battles were run extremely rules-light. It
wasn't just a case of background narration though - in both cases the
PCs were active participants to the extent that their contribution made
the difference between victory and defeat.

How would by-the-rulebook GMs handle these? Would you just switch to
running rules-light for something on that scale, or is there another trick?

If the former, can you use the same technique for battles where you
_could_ play them out by the book but it would take a wearyingly long
time to do so?

[Will in New Haven]

Post by Russell Wallace
I noticed in a couple of earlier threads people talking about needing
several hours to run a fight with a few dozen combatants; it seems the
campaigns in question were run fairly strictly by the rules.
I'm curious as to how by-the-rulebook GMs would handle something like
these...
In Kyounin (run by me), the assault on Greystone Keep: an air battle, a
big magical duel (also involving the firing of a nuclear missile),
another air battle, a ground assault involving thousands of combatants
one session, a few hours. As far as I know no system ever created is
even capable of handling this at all, and creating such a system would
be a bigger project than I'd want to spare the resources to undertake.
In Everway (I was a player in this one), the battle of the Twisted
Chasms: a quarter million combatants in total, with large numbers of
special units and magical effects (weather control, dragonfire,
necromancy, special artifacts etc). Again, playing time was one session;
the system maybe perhaps could have handled it, but not until after the
GM and players had died of old age.
Obviously both of those battles were run extremely rules-light. It
wasn't just a case of background narration though - in both cases the
PCs were active participants to the extent that their contribution made
the difference between victory and defeat.
How would by-the-rulebook GMs handle these? Would you just switch to
running rules-light for something on that scale, or is there another trick?
If the former, can you use the same technique for battles where you
_could_ play them out by the book but it would take a wearyingly long
time to do so?

I have generally avoided large battles such as the one you describe.
However, I did run one about six years ago that involved two very large
armies.

On one side: The Usurper (he would have called his enemy The Usurper
but he lost) with 70K foot, 10K horse, numerous minor mages and priests
and four important Mages and two dragons.

On the other side: Taijer Wu, true heir to the throne of the Empire of
the Sun (because he won) He had 50K foot, 15K foot, numerous minor
mages and priests and two important Mages and one dragon. The true heir
himself was an important combat unit as he had flying capability and
some awesome magic weapons. The true heir, both of his important Mages,
the girl who rode his dragon and three fighters were Player Characters.
His General of Cavalry was an NPC who had been with him for the whole
campaign and his backstory also.

I ran the battle using a hybrid of WGRG sixth edition rules with the
rules from our Glory Road Roleplaying game for the magic and for
individual combat (of the latter there was very little) The important
Mages had a great impact on the battle. One of the true heir's
important Mages was killed countering the efforts of the important
mages on the other side while his other important mage threw the front
lines of the usurper's foot into confusion and near mutiny and then
avenged his comrade by destroying the two surviving enemy important
mages.

The true heir used his flying power and his ability to communicate wth
his staff and his cavalry commander to give his side a huge advantage
in intelligence, command and control, rather than flying about doing
derring-do. The dragon rider managed to keep the enemy dragons
occupied, although both the rider and the dragon were killed in the
end.

The Fighter Player Characters fought some interesting combats but,
truthfully, had no real impact on the battle as a whole, other than to
keep the true heir's staff protected.

The fight lasted about six hours of playing time. One long session for
us. Then the true hier became emperor, his surviving important mage
went to Polynesia in a snit over the true heir telling him what spells
he should learn and the others all retired.

Will in New Haven

--

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail
better."
Samuel Beckett, "Worstward Ho", 1983

Post by Russell Wallace
--
"Always look on the bright side of life."
To reply by email, replace no.spam with my last name.

[psychohist]

Russell Wallace posts, in part:

How would by-the-rulebook GMs handle these? Would you just switch
to running rules-light for something on that scale, or is there
another trick?

If the former, can you use the same technique for battles where you
_could_ play them out by the book but it would take a wearyingly long

time to do so?

This is where using the Chainmail rules as your D&D combat rules would
come in handy, since they were originally designed as miniatures rules
for battles.

At one point in my campaign, there was a civil war, and large scale
battles seemed to be likely. I made up some miniatures type rules,
designed to have approximately the same result as a detailed man to man
system but using larger units. I was never completely happy with how
the scaling, but they worked okay for the one siege I used them at.
They did have the feature that individual player characters could still
use the normal individual rules.

Pieces of the siege were actually played out over several weeks, as the
siege took a fair amount of character time. It was an interesting
battle in a number of respects, one of which was that there were player
characters on both sides.

Warren J. Dew

[gleichman]

Post by Russell Wallace
I'm curious as to how by-the-rulebook GMs would handle something like
these...

Normally I'd love to answer these sorts of questions, but the examples given
are so far from my tastes (extremely high magic, and mixed magic/tech)
that... well I just don't relate well enough to them to even understand the
goal. So I'll have to pass on commenting on the examples given.

Ignoring the examples and responding what seems to be the underlying
question is easier: how does one use a traditional scale rpg to resolve a
mass scale battle in a limited amount of time (single session)?

The answer is, you can't. You're going to either have to ignore or break
scale at one point or the other, even if such a decision is handled by the
rules of the game itself (which a number of systems do). Once you break
scale, the normal range of resolution options is open again and resolving
the battle could take anywhere from seconds to weeks of play.

Did I completely misunderstand the question?

[Russell Wallace]

Post by gleichman
Ignoring the examples and responding what seems to be the underlying
question is easier: how does one use a traditional scale rpg to resolve a
mass scale battle in a limited amount of time (single session)?

Well, how you resolve a mass battle without going rules-light or
freeform in particular.

"Break scale, but don't break system more than needed, or replace the
bits you break" seems to be the answer I'm getting; scale up the system
you're using to treat formations as atomic units, and/or import or
create some form of war game rules.

It doesn't jump out at me that these techniques are applicable for
shortening the mid-sized combats with dozens of figures, though I think
there's a lot of simplifying that could be done from straight D&D.

[gleichman]

Well, how you resolve a mass battle without going rules-light or freeform
in particular.
"Break scale, but don't break system more than needed, or replace the bits
you break" seems to be the answer I'm getting; scale up the system you're
using to treat formations as atomic units, and/or import or create some
form of war game rules.

For our Fantasy games, we choice the same method as Warren did. Examining
the core combat system in some detail and modeling its results up in scale
producing a 1:10 and 1:100 scale battles. We've managed battles containing
tens of thousands nicely with the system as a result.



The thing about his however is that a change of scale like this must
introduce concepts considered unimportant to the original RPG ruleset if any
degree of realism was to be maintained. A straight up-size modeling approach
would produce horrid results. People in groups do not act like individuals-
thus the Mass Combat rules for AoH include things you'd never see elsewhere
in the game- morale rules for example. Meanwhile other things (like the
concept of friction which slows decisive combat) are handled by expanding
the time scale vs. result.



All in all, a very complex area to model in game design.

[psychohist]

Brian Gleichman posts, in part:

The thing about his however is that a change of scale like
this must introduce concepts considered unimportant to
the original RPG ruleset if any degree of realism was to
be maintained. A straight up-size modeling approach
would produce horrid results. People in groups do not
act like individuals- thus the Mass Combat rules for AoH
include things you'd never see elsewhere in the game-
morale rules for example.

I'm curious - did you handle these battles like miniatures battles,
with the players in charge of their units, subject to the rules?

In my case, I continued to "run all the NPCs", including all the
multicharacter military units. The players just played their
characters; some of the characters did give orders, but that didn't
translate directly into a game mechanic.

This allowed me the leeway to handle morale for units without specific
rules, as I would for individual gamesmaster characters normally. It
might not have scaled well to battles as large as you mention, though.

Warren J. Dew

[Russell Wallace]

Post by psychohist
I'm curious - did you handle these battles like miniatures battles,
with the players in charge of their units, subject to the rules?

(I'm assuming that part was to the previuous poster, not me...)

Post by psychohist
In my case, I continued to "run all the NPCs", including all the
multicharacter military units. The players just played their
characters; some of the characters did give orders, but that didn't
translate directly into a game mechanic.

In principle, that might have worked at the Twisted Chasms, say for the
parts where PCs noticed the enemy were spotting for artillery fire and
gave the move order just in time; except for the parts where PCs did
things like try the artifact, just in case, and dropped a couple of
dragons that way.

It's not clear to me even in principle though how that could have worked
at Greystone Keep, where one PC dueled with the Dark One in the sky
(needing nuclear backup), and the second took the form of a shoggoth to
smash through the gates. Probably though this wouldn't have been a scene
that would have occurred in your campaign?

[psychohist]

Russell Wallace wrote:

It's not clear to me even in principle though how that could
have worked at Greystone Keep, where one PC dueled
with the Dark One in the sky (needing nuclear backup), and
the second took the form of a shoggoth to smash through
the gates. Probably though this wouldn't have been a
scene that would have occurred in your campaign?

No, it wouldn't; no nuclear weapons. Still, it's not clear to me why
running duels, even with extremely powerful entities, is intractible
for mechanical rule sets; if we're talking about a duel, the problem
isn't with having too many units to handle, is it?

Warren J. Dew

[Russell Wallace]

Post by psychohist
No, it wouldn't; no nuclear weapons. Still, it's not clear to me why
running duels, even with extremely powerful entities, is intractible
for mechanical rule sets; if we're talking about a duel, the problem
isn't with having too many units to handle, is it?

Right; I'd moved away from the original question here and was groping
towards a different one, which I can now phrase as: how do you handle
unusual events?

Or put another way: Given a desire to run rules-heavy, is one of the
incentives for using the same setting for many years, the fact that this
allows rules to be acquired/created for the sort of events that are
likely to occur in that setting, so you don't have the problem of things
happening for which you don't have rules?

[gleichman]

Post by Russell Wallace
Or put another way: Given a desire to run rules-heavy, is one of the
incentives for using the same setting for many years, the fact that this
allows rules to be acquired/created for the sort of events that are likely
to occur in that setting, so you don't have the problem of things
happening for which you don't have rules?

I've ran the same settings for decades because I love those settings (Middle
Earth most of all).

I do however as a result reap the benefit you note.

[psychohist]

Russell Wallace asks about my handling of unusual events in light of my
heavy use of mechanics in a long running campaign.

My answer is somewhat similar to Brian's; at the core, my interest is
in running a long term campaign in a consistent manner so that I can
observe its historical development. The use of mechanics is secondary
to that.

In a shorter term or closed ended campaign, unusual events might be
expected to come up only once, and handling them on an ad hoc basis may
be fine. From the standpoint of a long term campaign, though, anything
that comes up once is likely to come up again. I prefer to have
mechanics for them where possible so that I can handle them
consistently, even if the next occurrence is years later.

Sometimes things do come up that aren't already covered by the existing
mechanics, and new mechanics are created for them. As you suggest, the
gradual accretion of these mechanics does help ensure coverage in a
long term campaign.

Warren J. Dew

[Russell Wallace]

Post by psychohist
In a shorter term or closed ended campaign, unusual events might be
expected to come up only once, and handling them on an ad hoc basis may
be fine. From the standpoint of a long term campaign, though, anything
that comes up once is likely to come up again. I prefer to have
mechanics for them where possible so that I can handle them
consistently, even if the next occurrence is years later.

Ah, that makes sense - yes, if I was running the same setting for that
long I'd probably want more mechanics support too.

[gleichman]

Post by psychohist
I'm curious - did you handle these battles like miniatures battles,
with the players in charge of their units, subject to the rules?

Yes.

Many of the units were player owned, other characters were of birth such
that being granted command was reasonable. Yet other characters were on the
field as individuals.

PCs of course were never subject to morale rules beyond those decisions made
by the player. The units they were with were however. The system also
includes significant modifiers for leadership.

[Simon Smith]

Post by Russell Wallace
I noticed in a couple of earlier threads people talking about needing
several hours to run a fight with a few dozen combatants; it seems the
campaigns in question were run fairly strictly by the rules.
I'm curious as to how by-the-rulebook GMs would handle something like
these...
In Kyounin (run by me), the assault on Greystone Keep

<snip>

Post by Russell Wallace
In Everway (I was a player in this one), the battle of the Twisted
Chasms

<snip>

Post by Russell Wallace
How would by-the-rulebook GMs handle these? Would you just switch to
running rules-light for something on that scale, or is there another trick?
If the former, can you use the same technique for battles where you
_could_ play them out by the book but it would take a wearyingly long
time to do so?

One, some or all of:

Switch systems, including to a wargame system. For instance, if I had a big
RuneQuest battle to run, I'd give serious consideration to switching to
Dragon Pass.

Run a few rolled sample fights for a representative cross-section of the units
involved, and then extrapolate those results. Ideally set them up in such a
way that I have a list of 'unit A beats B, B beats C, C beats A', such that
if the PCs' generalship tends to pit As against Bs, their side prevails, but
if the predominant conflict is As vs Cs, the bad guys win.

Use some generic mass combat rules if the system has them (i.e. if the
system has a mechanism for multiple units to combine skills in some way), or
even custom-write some for the fight.

Run a selection of sample battles through a computer, so I can see the range
of likely results.

Exploit the 'bulk characteristics' of the system. To give an example of what
I mean, in the D20 system, every 400 combatants will on average give one
attack roll of 1 vs 1, one attack roll of 1 vs 2 . . . and so on up to one
attack roll of 20 vs 20. So I could assume a perfect spread of dice luck and
then resolve the combat 400 units at a time. Assuming average damage for
each of those combinations, it starts to become reasonably clear how long
the battle ought to last. I can then factor that in to my 'battle
choreography'.

One change from the standard rules I almost certainly would make, is to
grossly expand the length of a combat round. Say I've determined that the
average barbarian last six rounds against his samurai opponent before
being beaten, and the system normally uses ten-second combat rounds. I'd
cheerfully inflate that to six hours simply on the assumption that no
small-unit combat game gets the timing right when expanded to handle large
numbers of units. In fact, I'd think about lengthening the combat round as
soon as a combat reaches a few dozens on each side.

The bigger the battle, the more of these I'd want to do (how many I
actually /would/ do is another matter ;-( ). Ultimately I suppose I'd want a
table of who fights who, and how long it takes the winner to win for each
of the planned combats, and then I'd need another table of fights that
would only happen if the PCs intervened. The bigger and more complex the
battle, the more prep work I'd feel I needed.

Caught flat-footed by a big fight, I'd probably roll for a selected few NPCs
and barring outrageous flukes I'd assume everyone else does about as well
(or badly) as they do. To avoid fluke rolls distorting the outcome, I'd
probably just ban special results, i.e. a 20 in a D20 system isn't a crit,
it's just a hit; 99 in RuneQuest is just a miss, not a fumble.

So in summary, the bigger the battle, and the less prep I've had the
chance to do, the quicker and dirtier I'd get when running it.

[Rupert Boleyn]

Post by Russell Wallace
How would by-the-rulebook GMs handle these? Would you just switch to
running rules-light for something on that scale, or is there another trick?
If the former, can you use the same technique for battles where you
_could_ play them out by the book but it would take a wearyingly long
time to do so?

I'd probably rig up a conversion of the PCs to something useable with
the mass combat rules in GURPS, D&D, Bushido, or Aftermath (the latter two
being my favourites as they have good (IMO) systems for determining what
happened to any PC participants), and use that. If none of the PCs were in
a position to make a difference to the outcome of the battle I'd pre-roll
that before the session, and just roll the results of the PCs decisions
WRT to how they conducted themselves, and any one-on-one combats they were
involved in. If there were PCs in position where player decisions could
affect the outcome of the battle I'd instead sort out the info that the
PCs would have, and resolve both the mass combat and any individual
actions in-session.

[Del Rio]

Post by Russell Wallace
Obviously both of those battles were run extremely rules-light. It
wasn't just a case of background narration though - in both cases the
PCs were active participants to the extent that their contribution made
the difference between victory and defeat.
How would by-the-rulebook GMs handle these? Would you just switch to
running rules-light for something on that scale, or is there another trick?
If the former, can you use the same technique for battles where you
_could_ play them out by the book but it would take a wearyingly long
time to do so?

Not being a by-the-rules GM, I run battles like that by
treating units like people. Morale factors and leadership
weigh heavily. I typically involve players by having their
deed affect the morale of units - their own and the enemy's.
If anyone has any actual leadership experience, I let them have
a unit, and use their leaderhip to inspire the unit to perform
better, rally them when they've taken a severe blow, etc.
It's all very, very rules light.