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I met up with a gaming buddy I hadn't seen in a while, who had bought a copy of the Mayhem mass battle rules since I last saw him, so for this game session we decided to give them a try with our Warmaster armies.
I worked up some quick stats for my High Elves and his Skaven, worked out a couple of 200 crown lists as per the author's suggestion (giz a shout if you want to see them), and we pushed two bases together for each unit, decided to measure in cm at 10mm, and had at it. Slowly, because neither of us had a thorough read of the book in a while!

This won't be an in depth batrep, because I didn't take too many good pics (though see the end of the post) but here are the forces at the end of turn one:



High elves on the near side, left to right: Ellyrian reavers, archers, a block of 3 spearmen (two BoFA proxies and an elite unit represented by phoenix guard), and more archers. General on the big round base and a hero on the small round.

Skaven on the far side: a block of 3, one stormvermin flanked by two clanrats, rat ogres, a rat swarm, and jezzails. Three characters: a warlord, a packmaster, and a warlock engineer.

There should've been a third clanrat unit in there. I did tell him, but he decided to play on without it. He was a bit surprised about how quickly his army was whittled down, but I wasn't!

One nuance to get used to, but quick, is the amount of command points that can be rolled. With three heroes, three standards and leadership D6 on the skaven; and two heroes, one elite, and leadership D12 on the elves; we both had the potential to roll 36 Cp. And we didn't roll too far off that. It seems a lot, but the overdrive system soon took care of that! We had to think about where to allocate dice: for the big push or for those guys standing over there doing nothing. That's partly what attracted me to the rules in the first place.

Anyway, you can see the bog-standard plan at the end of turn one: shooters and fast cav to the flanks and hills, big blocks of infantry shuffling down the middle. The rat swarm is charging ahead in anticipation of bogging things down.

Moving on a bit:



One unit of clanrats broke off to interrupt the reavers, but got a disrupt token from the hill archers for their trouble. The jezzails moved up and blasted the archers on the right. You might notice the range is a bit longer than the max 12cm their rifles rule should get: with things taking a while to get moving, we decided to bump shooting and command ranges back up to inches. More thoughts on that later. Meanwhile, the infantry continued to shuffle.



The rat ogres went into overdrive and charged right into the phoenix guard. The first big clash of the game. The rats got a soft counter from impact and a charge bonus. The phoenix guard were readied. Both rolled 2 D8s. Both rolled a one.



BOOM. Mutual critical hits.

Y'know, all the unit kills in this game turned out as the results of criticals. That weird aura of 'rolling ones' I project turns out to have some use...



Last pic, and things have moved on a fair bit, 'cos I forgot about the camera. In a nutshell, on the right flank a unit of spearmen shuffled right, wheeled, charged past the swarm and nobbled the jezzails. Then they turned and whacked the clanrat unit that had moved up, and chased the warlock engineer into the rat swarm. The other spearmen unit shuffled left and got stuck into the rat swarm, hoping to get rid of it before the stormvermin got there.

On the left flank the reavers spent an extra command point to aim and shot into the flank of the clanrats, who were heading towards the archers on the hill. Wiped them out. But while the archers tried skewering the rat swarm themselves (we got a hint of how resilient the attrition rule made them) the stormvermin followed the dead clanrats uphill and did the job themselves.

Now, having spears and ranked fighting (representing halberds), they could have charged the reavers and given them a bad day. They threatened the elf hero enough to make him hide among the reavers, as it was. But instead they decided to head for the elf general for a(n almost) last-ditch attempt to win, which meant turning and presenting a big, fat rear arc to the fast cav and their short bows, as they crested the hill. One critical hit later...

The game went pretty well. We two players and some interested passers-by seemed to think so. We did have a few drawn-out moments as we reacquainted ourselves with the rules, and ran into a couple of hiccups with layout and slightly vague parts.

Overall though, two thumbs up.

Two wee thoughts about army building. I gave all the characters bumped-up stats to make them a advantage to any unit they join, but it's a lot of crowns that might be spent elsewhere, if they don't. I also hmmede and hawed about sticking the heroic rule on the reaver unit (giving them a built-in character, essentially), 'cos although their danger rolls for movement were usually pitifully far below their D12 potential in this game, they soon zipped out of command range of the two existing characters.

And that led to the first uncertainty of the rules, due to slightly mixed-up assumptions. We started off treating a hero's free move like that in Warmaster, but at regular movement rates it wasn't enough to move them up with the units. We needed to spend command points to push them along. The rules hint at this, but aren't explicit.
I mentioned we had a bit of indecision with measurements. Some stats like a longbow's D20 or fast cav's D12 seemed a bit much in inches, for 10mm, but after a turn or two, centimetres seemed too little. The reavers didn't seem to move as fast as they ought, and the skaven player wasn't happy with the 12cm range on his jezzails.
Thinking about it, part of the problem may have been the two small intro armies on a big table, and more units might keep the action going. Although in the main, I'd say we could go back to inches, but paying a bit more attention to default values vs. full danger rolls, or effective range vs. potential range. Thinking of 10mm rifles in terms of the default 6" seems fine on the face of it*; and while 10mm longbows being able to shoot 20" seems a lot, it'd be a lot harder to roll 20" on a D20 than 12" on a D12. It also might be that volley fire on bows might be more important compared to direct damage and kills, than I originally thought. Nuances, y'see!

*There's the possibility of giving a unit of jezzails one of the game's pre-generated war machine profiles, maybe the bolt thrower. Longer range for the skaven non-standard rifles, and the resilience war machines get from the damage rules could represent the pavises.

Lastly, some more (and better) pics at my opponent's own writeup, here:

http://bearded-dice.co.uk/manday-at-ndwgc/

Just an fyi... the pics aren't coming up for me at least.

Ha. I thought it seemed a bit too good to be true when the pics showed up for me first time. (Funny, they still seemed to work on my laptop here, compared to my tablet). Anyways, they're stuck up in the Dakka gallery now. Hopefully that fixes it.

Good battle report and a really useful introduction to the rules - thanks!

How do you find Mayhem for modelling your unit choices? It sounds like there are more options than, say, Lion Rampant?

Photos are showing just fine now.

Ta Mo!

Momotaro wrote:
How do you find Mayhem for modelling your unit choices? It sounds like there are more options than, say, Lion Rampant?

Heh. I've seen some of the recent complaints about Lion/Dragon Rampant's simplified unit choices. I'm generally fine with it, but I understand the grumbles.
But, getting to the point, with Mayhem you literally build your units from the ground up. Spend a certain amount of points ('crowns') on overall army leadership (which affects the cost of standards and rolls for command points); on the three basic unit stats - movement (MOV), combat quality (CQ), and ballistic armour/avoidance rating (BAR); then on various weapons, equipment and unit traits. You spend more on the better stats and things, obviously. Apply them to whatever minis or units that you like, as you see fit.*

Rather than being too restrictive, I think some might see it as too fluid. You don't have to use the same stats for the same unit from one list to the next, as long as you've got it all totted up (or if it suits a scenario) or, possibly, if it doesn't go too wacky compared to what's represented by the minis. I.e. spearmen minis equipped with spears and shields should probably be given the spears and shields rules, natch, though how fast they move, how well they fight, what stoic or fearsome or sorcerous abilities they have, might be a bit more up in the air, and subject to interpretation or personal whim. Still, you pay yer crowns for it, in the end.

Personally, it helps me to think up a profile for a basic human as a baseline, then tweak that for different units and races according to background, tropes, or even stats in other systems like Warhammer. E.g. I imagined average human infantry with D6 MOV, so used D8 MOV for all infantry in this game to represent both fleet-footed elves and scuttling ratmen. But in future games I could pull everything back to D6 MOV, or give D6 MOV to heavier infantry like phoenix guard and stormvermin, or bump something like rat ogres up to D10 MOV, etc. etc....

For anyone coming from a Warhammer perspective, with long statlines, long procedures and lots of unique unit rules, there might still seem to be some 'restrictions'. (I still have a toehold in that mindset, meself) Though not many more than other unit-based games like KoW, IMO. For example, it might seem strange that the CQ stat and roll includes what in the Warhammer system would be the whole combat ritual from hits to leadership tests.
Also, something that still niggles me, but not to any great extent, is that shooting ability is all down to the weapon's own stats. E.g. orc archers with long bows will shoot just as well as elf archers with long bows. Can't help but think a simple trait like 'expert archer' would shake things up a lot. But still, something as simple as switching to short bows, and a better CQ to show how much better arrer boyz are at up-close krumpin' than pansy elves, can go some way too. And it is about the effect of the whole unit, representing dozens or hundreds, rather than whichever few individual minis are within range!

The author, Brent Spivey, has some pre-made army lists up on the Bombshell site. I haven't looked at them yet - IIRC they might have a few different racial quirks; although I'd say you won't find anything like orc animosity or a screaming bell result chart! And if you're here, thinking about moving from Warhammer to other mass battle rules, that might not matter too much anyway.

* edit: though this whole essay of a post might be moot if you meant 'what's the list of options like?' In which case, maybe a similar kind of number to Dragon Rampant (definitely more than LR) though they aren't as restricted to certain unit choices as some in DR.

No that's perfect V, a great description of the build process.

I like the idea of more control over the base stats, and the fighting styles defined as special abilities ("spear", "shield") at least makes everything consistent and puts the rules in one place. See what you mean about the "longbow" problem though.

As for army lists, I'm torn - it's nice to have things done for you, and even just to get an idea of what the author intended to make a reasonably interesting army, but on the other hand they never seem to quite capture my own conception of the armies, or the range of units I press-gang into service. Are skeletons fast and dangerous but brittle, or slow and clumsy but take a lot of damage to put down? I like having the choice.

I kind of like Lion Rampant's (and even Dragon Rampant's) limitations - we've played them a few times now and there's a rhyme and reason to a lot of the options that really comes out in play. The rules are actually really tight and well thought out.

Still... Mayhem sounds like it's worth a thorough investigation. I'll take a look at the author's army lists too. Thanks!

Momotaro wrote:
I like the idea of more control over the base stats, and the fighting styles defined as special abilities ("spear", "shield") at least makes everything consistent and puts the rules in one place.

I particularly like how weapons, armour, and some traits don't really give you extra attacks, strength points or defense levels, per se, so much as extra oomph in a more abstract way; often against certain unit types. (Which makes manoeuvre and positioning more important, IMO) Those spears and shields, for example - spears improve your combat ability vs. cavalry, which admittedly isn't so unusual for a lot of games. Shields don't affect your dice but can let you take the default CQ result after you roll a CQ die. (Normally you choose one or the other before rolling) It's not an auto-save, but it can help if both players roll badly.
Even something like swords, which would be no-effect hand weapons in Warhammer (until parry came along) and other games, give a boost vs. infantry units. I don't know how realistic that is, but I like it!

See what you mean about the "longbow" problem though.

I don't know if it helps the other ranged weapons, but I think the longbow situation might be further mitigated, as I said in the first post, by the fact that I don't think they're really meant to cause much direct damage. They have the longest potential range for hand-held weapons at 20", but you still have to roll that distance on a D20, and then they have the lowest chance-of-damage stat in the game too. Their volley fire rule helps the chance to hit, but only pushes units back if successful. More battle-line disruption, less Legolas putting arrows through the eye of an oliphaunt at ten paces!

As for army lists, I'm torn - it's nice to have things done for you, and even just to get an idea of what the author intended to make a reasonably interesting army, but on the other hand they never seem to quite capture my own conception of the armies, or the range of units I press-gang into service. Are skeletons fast and dangerous but brittle, or slow and clumsy but take a lot of damage to put down? I like having the choice.

I know what you mean. I think that's why I haven't looked at the lists myself.

I kind of like Lion Rampant's (and even Dragon Rampant's) limitations - we've played them a few times now and there's a rhyme and reason to a lot of the options that really comes out in play. The rules are actually really tight and well thought out.

Still... Mayhem sounds like it's worth a thorough investigation. I'll take a look at the author's army lists too. Thanks!

No probs. I've looked at other big-battle systems like Lords and Lands, and Legions of Battle, and haven't ruled them out; but Mayhem's combination of unit-building, action points, rock-paper-scissors mechanics and polydice stats push the right buttons for me. I'll stick with it for mass fantasy battles, for now, and Dragon Rampant for big skirmishes. My biggest problem is whether to use the same 28mm minis for both!