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Has anyone ran a game where one army was a party of around 5-8 HQ go against a typical army or just troops?

I'm curious because I want to experiment something like that and its common in high fantasy for a party of powerful wizards and soldiers mowing down squads of grunts.

Isn't that what cold star and hive tyrant spam was early 9th edition? Back before the rule of 3s.

If you mean Infantry characters…
They’re not that much more durable than regular Infantry. 2-4 extra wounds, maybe a 4++ that the others lack.

If you mean ANY character…

That's the newest Adeptus Custodes Detachment in a nutshell.

You play a bunch of Shield Captains and Blade Champions and stay away from each other as you massacre the enemy.

If it counts, back in late 3rd/early 4th edition (don't remember for sure) we ran 1000 points of Imperial Guard up against the Forgeworld Bloodthirster An'ggrath.


It was... messy.

Oh and the Last Chancers in 3rd [4th?] Edition were 291 points vs. Your opponent who played 1500 to 2000 points.

You might want to look into the 4th edition version of Kill team (back when it was your customized squad of dudes fighting a horde of mooks.)

Also worth looking into: the Death Watch rules from mini wargaming, and the Movie Marine rules from... fifth(?) edition.

 NivNeos wrote:
Has anyone ran a game where one army was a party of around 5-8 HQ go against a typical army or just troops?

I'm curious because I want to experiment something like that and its common in high fantasy for a party of powerful wizards and soldiers mowing down squads of grunts.

It kinda works if you use the combat patrol rules and dense terrain to avoid just getting shot to death. Most characters are not that great at killing a lot of models though, as they usually act as multipliers on the unit they lead.

There also is the issue of the game being just 5 turns. There is only so much a hero can do in 5 activations.

Maybe you are better off with using a system agnostic TTRPG system, for example Savage Worlds has all the tools to run a 40k themed combat.

Over the years there were rules for the Tau 8 of Farsight, who were a whole army due to a Riptide and other expensive suits being in there.
Daemons every now and then worked with just princes and/or big daemons.

Also, fluffwize Custodes are the character army.

Jidmah wrote:

 NivNeos wrote:
Has anyone ran a game where one army was a party of around 5-8 HQ go against a typical army or just troops?

I'm curious because I want to experiment something like that and its common in high fantasy for a party of powerful wizards and soldiers mowing down squads of grunts.

It kinda works if you use the combat patrol rules and dense terrain to avoid just getting shot to death. Most characters are not that great at killing a lot of models though, as they usually act as multipliers on the unit they lead.

There also is the issue of the game being just 5 turns. There is only so much a hero can do in 5 activations.

Maybe you are better off with using a system agnostic TTRPG system, for example Savage Worlds has all the tools to run a 40k themed combat.

TTRPG is the natural solution but switching to a completely different system for a campaign is abit silly unless the engine was built for it.

Yeah, practically you want to be in an area with lots of hiding spots and chokepoints. I think it would be wise to have the battlefield be built with the party's advantage. You also mention the 5 turn limit and that can be an issue as they do have a low action ecomony.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:Over the years there were rules for the Tau 8 of Farsight, who were a whole army due to a Riptide and other expensive suits being in there.
Daemons every now and then worked with just princes and/or big daemons.

Also, fluffwize Custodes are the character army.

I should look at those for inspiration. Also don't know why Custodes didn't cross my mind beforehand XP

JNAProductions wrote:If you mean Infantry characters…
They’re not that much more durable than regular Infantry. 2-4 extra wounds, maybe a 4++ that the others lack.

If you mean ANY character…

Yes, I did mean ANY character, but a diverse set of characters. General, psykers, monsters.

 NivNeos wrote:
Yeah, practically you want to be in an area with lots of hiding spots and chokepoints. I think it would be wise to have the battlefield be built with the party's advantage. You also mention the 5 turn limit and that can be an issue as they do have a low action ecomony.

Combat patrol also does a bunch of other things to make solo characters more viable(as leaders always run solo) - units are usually split into multiple parts of 5 or more models, more restrictive LoS rules (models from other units essentially become obscuring) and tactical options.

I've run a boarding patrol on the same map as a regular battle, with the two being connected via portal. The other part was a contested missile base which could fire a deathstrike missiles at the regular battlefield for each held objective.

I think the rules are still free to download, otherwise check wahapedia.

Another idea would be to allow all characters to be considered leaders for the entire group. That could cause some serious mayhem if all those buffs stack

Would you mean something like the Horde mode that came out last year?
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RCDEfbaJafpfVCU-8iDjCZe_uoPjZLYz

If you want to play seriously outnumbered play Combat Patrol with Imperial/Chaos Knights!

They get a chunk of soldiers and you get 2 models.

Yeah, Chaos & Imperial Knights are ideal. Then again, one can do a party-vs-army game by taking inspiration from The Glymmsforge Catacombs. Very quick clashes but they're tied together in a campaign where you can recover points, artifacts and attract the attention of boss characters.

I like the idea of a Daemon Prince going full-Sauron on a swarm of guardsmen and storm-guardians.

Can always do it as an asymmetric mission.

Player 1 gets X Character Models.

Player 2 get a standard army.

The points levels needn’t be the same, as it’s the Victory Conditions that provide the balance. For instance? The Character Army only needs to slay equal points in enemy models, or have at least one survive the battle by the end of the final turn.