I was involved in a discussion of the BECMI Companion Set War Machine mass combat rules recently, and it's got me thinking about them.
I had thought about adding a version of them to Chanbara, but I'd given myself the arbitrary and artificial constraint of 64 pages, and there wasn't room. I did manage to work in a revision of the domain management rules from the same set, though.
For Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins, I easily could take the time to revise/streamline/simplify those mass combat rules, but should I?
I have never done hex-and-chit war games, although it's something I would love to try one day. I've only done a small amount of miniatures based war gaming (a homebrew system my brother and I worked up for little green army men as kids, a game of Chainmail once). My friends and I did use the Companion War Machine rules fairly often in our old campaign we had as kids, though.
The system of the War Machine is designed to give you an overall result of a battle, not a play-by-play of every move and every tactic. You do some calculations before the battle for each force. You figure any modifiers at the time of battle (with basic tactical options as optional rules that can be added on). Both sides roll dice and add the force rating, higher result wins. Check the difference in the results on the table to determine casualties and disposition of each force.
Is it perfect? No.
Is it realistic? Not at all.
Is it simple to implement? I think so.
Does it allow you to add mass combat actions to D&D without overshadowing the PCs and their adventures? Yes.
As I said already, I like this system because it's light and easy to implement, but it allows for some options to make it more complex if that's what the players want. So, audience of mine, I really would like to get your opinions on this. Would it be worth my time to go to the effort of revising/restating these rules to add to TS&R? Would you like to see something like this? Would it be useful to you? Should I spend a bunch of time on this, or not?
IMO it's worth spending a moderate amount of time on a mass combat system of some kind. The option to incorporate large battles into an RPG is just too cool.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought War Machine was way too much trouble for what little it gave you, though it's been a long time since I actually looked at what calculations you had to do. I'd say only go for it if you can drastically simplify. Hex and chit wargames actually provide a pretty good model for this. The usual thing is to have a simple chart with attacker defender ratios (something like 1:3 through 5:1) and a d6 result from no effect , pushed back, destroyed. Then some simple modifiers, like attacking across a river is -1, a fortification is -2 (or sometimes defender value is doubled), etc.
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