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Has anyone ever done a mix of a RPG with a massed battles?

I have always wanted to do this again, after getting to play in one in the 1980s (and running a couple at that time as well).

A friend ran a Greek Mythology Campaign, where we played minor heroes in the retinue or employ of actual heroes (Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Jason, etc....), where the "Hero" went off to challenge the big bosses, leaving us to fight the Ray Harryhausen Skeletons, Cyclops, or Lamia while the boss talked or played with the Gods.

And, every now and then, we would be tasked with raising an army to fight off a foe (the GM masterfully steered us right into the siege of Troy, as one of the events), at which point we would then take the place of on-table heroes in a mass combat (I think we were using chainmail, or something like it), where we would have armies of a couple of hundred figures facing off against each other.

The events I ran were Traveller and Runequest, which would have scenarios where the players were either in an invasion of a planet, or in a War between the Lunar Empire and Fronela or Sartar (since we had Macedonians, Medievals, and Celts, which worked well as these three countries).

I always wanted to get my Broo finished so that we could have an alliance of Malkioni and Lunars have to save a county from an invasion of Broo. And I never got anything finished to use for Melnibonë or Elric, or even Conan (I still have an army of Reptilliads at a friend's house in Dallas that I intended to use in a Conan Campaign, and I was working on a huge army of Skeletons for a Sygian Army - I have managed to track down replacements for the commanders of that army, but cannot find any skeletons I like, now)...

And, I don't mean things like a Skirmish battle, like a Raid on a Temple, or stealing something from a noble's villa (typical Conan sort of stuff that most RPGs have in spades - they are the POINT of most of them, are they not?).

But large, continent (or planetary) scale conflicts that then have a major impact upon the development of the world.

Anyone ever done these???

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
Has anyone ever done a mix of a RPG with a massed battles?

The Birthright campaign setting for D&D was made for something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(campaign_setting)

http://www.birthright.net/forums/showwiki.php?title=BIRTHRIGHT_Campaign_Setting

You had the usual D&D rules but the game also had quite detailed boardgame-ish regency rules where you could rule your own lands, and a bit of a highlander vibe with certain powers that one could improve by killing other people with these powers (initially, generations ago, from the gods).

And the german RPG Das Schwarze Auge (DSA) had a two part campaign book (each is supposed to take you multiple sessions) that took part during a war and made the players participate (although not as the big damn heroes) in the overall conflict without it becoming just another dungeon crawler. Its name was Der Löwe und der Rabe (the lion and the raven).

Mario wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Has anyone ever done a mix of a RPG with a massed battles?

The Birthright campaign setting for D&D was made for something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(campaign_setting)

http://www.birthright.net/forums/showwiki.php?title=BIRTHRIGHT_Campaign_Setting

You had the usual D&D rules but the game also had quite detailed boardgame-ish regency rules where you could rule your own lands, and a bit of a highlander vibe with certain powers that one could improve by killing other people with these powers (initially, generations ago, from the gods).

And the german RPG Das Schwarze Auge (DSA) had a two part campaign book (each is supposed to take you multiple sessions) that took part during a war and made the players participate (although not as the big damn heroes) in the overall conflict without it becoming just another dungeon crawler. Its name was Der Löwe und der Rabe (the lion and the raven).

Close. I am familiar with both of those.

But they don't have the players actually pushing armies of miniatures around a table using mad-combat miniatures rules.

I know that AD&D had "Battlesystem" for a while, which was supposed to fill in this gap, but it never took off.

And there was an article in The White Dwarf from around 1985 that dealt with a similar concept, but it proved to be unplayable.

But we took Chainmail, or WRG 5th ed. rules, and used them to play mass-combat games, the results of which would affect the campaign overall.

The above are affecting the campaigns though the outcomes of various "wars," but they don't seem to have the actual wars fought using miniatures.

The Greg Stafford RPG Pendragon has a similar Warfare system, where the players take command of a unit of knights on the battlefield, but they have no actual miniatures rules; just rules for abstracting the battle, and for various actions a unit of knights might take on the battlefield.

MB

Various 40K RPG's contain massed battles, with varying levels of abstraction.

WHFRPG 1st Edition and WHFB 3rd Edition had crossover.

From memory I think that there was a guide in the back of WHFRPG that had the guide to converting profiles (pretty straight forward: divide by 10 on most stats).

WHFB 3rd is quite good as the Equipment lists and Bestiary are as extensive as most RPGs and have points values for everything.

As for the Space side of things the most straight forward I can think of are WH40K: Rogue Trader which Is essentially a cross between and battlegame and an RPG or there's the BattleTech games/RPG of the same vintage (not sure if it was the case later on).

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Various 40K RPG's contain massed battles, with varying levels of abstraction.

Yes, this was one of the things that first drew me to it in the 80s.

I miss my Men-in-the-moon.... Not an "Official" Chapter (few of those existed in that day), but they were impressive looking.

MB

Pathfinder has rules for kingdoms in the Ultimate Campaign book, but the system is very abstract.

And, yes, back in the day TSR had Battlesystem, and f few adventures that contained full battles. (Heartstone Pass, I believe.)

The Auld Grump

BeAfraid wrote:
Has anyone ever done a mix of a RPG with a massed battles?

I definitely have. There are couple of ways I like to approach this.

The first is to use Mayhem for the massed battle portion of the game. It meshes well with any d20 system game since it uses all the various die types. Here's an example of how to set it up:

1. Before the adventure begins, the GM creates an army at a specific point value. This can include building a stronghold if you desire.
2. The GM then divides that point value by the total number of encounters that the player characters will have. These are army points. These will be awarded for the encounters that are central to the plot line or directly related to the final battle in some way.
3. For each encounter that the characters overcome satisfactorily, they receive the default number of army points. If they fail, miss an important clue, or only simply survive, they receive only 85% of the army points. If they perform in epic fashion or discover an especially useful piece of information, then they receive a 10% bonus above and beyond the army standard army points.
4. This means that if the characters perform consistently at the satisfactory level they will be on equal footing during the last battle.*
5. Before the final battle, the players use these army points to either create/build their own forces from scratch or 'purchase' forces created by the GM. The latter can be both fun and thematic as the forces created by the GM will likely be related to the story, regions, races, and encounters. Either way can work depending on your group.

*If the characters have either performed very poorly or gained an especially valuable clue, you can have a special side quest or bonus mission available where extra army points can be gained to even things up or give them an advantage. Perhaps they've discovered where the command tent for one of the evil overlord's lieutenants is located and are going to perform an assassination run before the main battle begins?

You can also use the campaign system to build strongholds and border keeps and allow the players to alternate between large scale battles and traditional roleplaying from session to session.





The other way is to use the Heroes of Battle supplement.



I think it's an underrated supplement that many have never heard of. It abstracts many concepts, but it's has some great ideas that can be integrated into almost any RPG with a little work. It can even be woven and mixed in with the Mayhem method above with little-to-no effort.

Good luck!

The Warcraft supplement for D&D 3.5 had a pretty decent mass battle system, too.

And I mean the Warcraft supplement that was released around WC3's release, NOT the World of Warcraft one.

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
Pathfinder has rules for kingdoms in the Ultimate Campaign book, but the system is very abstract.

We used that in the climax of a short campaign once, it works fairly well. You do have to use your imagination more than usual, but I don't know how else you can really integrate it into a tabletop RPG without introducing a proper wargaming rule system. In our game, we basically did some rolls and basic decision making for the battle itself, leading up to a final confrontation with the enemy characters, at which point we switched back to using the regular Pathfinder combat rules (our DM had some friendly and enemy mooks occasionally enter into the combat area of this final confrontation, to mix things up a bit).

The 40k RPGs have fairly elaborate combat systems, but I actually prefer to play regular 40k to simulate large battles that are happening. What we've done as part of the narrative is mostly just use the results of those games to add flavor. We do those in-between actual sessions of the RPG. It would be really neat if there was a way to do true cross-over.

Battletech would be the other system that does RPG/battle crossover (I haven't played the RPG portion). Battletech of course has a focus on Mech combat, but I rather like the combined arms aspect of the game (which includes infantry and tanks).

 DanielBeaver wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
Pathfinder has rules for kingdoms in the Ultimate Campaign book, but the system is very abstract.

We used that in the climax of a short campaign once, it works fairly well. You do have to use your imagination more than usual, but I don't know how else you can really integrate it into a tabletop RPG without introducing a proper wargaming rule system. In our game, we basically did some rolls and basic decision making for the battle itself, leading up to a final confrontation with the enemy characters, at which point we switched back to using the regular Pathfinder combat rules (our DM had some friendly and enemy mooks occasionally enter into the combat area of this final confrontation, to mix things up a bit).

I actually very much like the systems - enough that I bought 3rd party supplements that expand on the system. (It helps that Paizo maintains a webstore that carries everybody's games, including their competitors.)

The Auld Grump

BeAfraid wrote:
Has anyone ever done a mix of a RPG with a massed battles?

I have always wanted to do this again, after getting to play in one in the 1980s (and running a couple at that time as well).

A friend ran a Greek Mythology Campaign, where we played minor heroes in the retinue or employ of actual heroes (Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Jason, etc....), where the "Hero" went off to challenge the big bosses, leaving us to fight the Ray Harryhausen Skeletons, Cyclops, or Lamia while the boss talked or played with the Gods.

And, every now and then, we would be tasked with raising an army to fight off a foe (the GM masterfully steered us right into the siege of Troy, as one of the events), at which point we would then take the place of on-table heroes in a mass combat (I think we were using chainmail, or something like it), where we would have armies of a couple of hundred figures facing off against each other.

The events I ran were Traveller and Runequest, which would have scenarios where the players were either in an invasion of a planet, or in a War between the Lunar Empire and Fronela or Sartar (since we had Macedonians, Medievals, and Celts, which worked well as these three countries).

I always wanted to get my Broo finished so that we could have an alliance of Malkioni and Lunars have to save a county from an invasion of Broo. And I never got anything finished to use for Melnibonë or Elric, or even Conan (I still have an army of Reptilliads at a friend's house in Dallas that I intended to use in a Conan Campaign, and I was working on a huge army of Skeletons for a Sygian Army - I have managed to track down replacements for the commanders of that army, but cannot find any skeletons I like, now)...

And, I don't mean things like a Skirmish battle, like a Raid on a Temple, or stealing something from a noble's villa (typical Conan sort of stuff that most RPGs have in spades - they are the POINT of most of them, are they not?).

But large, continent (or planetary) scale conflicts that then have a major impact upon the development of the world.

Anyone ever done these???

MB

Games Workshop used to do this with Warhammer fantasy. a long time ago, in another lifetime that I once had.



good times, good times.