FrankTrollman wrote:Dungeons and Dragons has always wanted to have men with spears marching around, and that in turn has always been very difficult to do. I've been thinking about the constraints that such a subsystem operates on.
- When military campaigns become expected, every character needs to have abilities that are relevant on that scale.
When military campaigns become a thing, no character can have abilities that invalidate armies of orcs.
Armies can't be an all-purpose answer to everything, because it is still desirable to do things on the individual scale.
Military confrontations need to be resolved as quickly as any other subsystem that not every player is especially interested in.
I don't think that any of those statements are particularly contentious. But unfortunately it means that there's no easy way to fit a mass combat minigame of any sort into 3rd edition D&D. Many spell casters gt access to abilities that invalidate armies at shockingly low levels and there just isn't a way to integrate phalanxes of Hobgoblins in a way that makes sense.
Which means that realizing the dream of having high level warriors becoming dukes and marching soldiers around and still taking time away from the army to hunt dragons actually requires a ground-up redesign of D&D. And the entire system needs to look into being integrated into large battles from the very beginning.
-Username17
The core issue here is that it subscribes to the Clauswitzian ideal that armies primarily exist to win field battles. This is a very limited view of what armies are or can be.
In reality battles are only a tiny fraction of an army's entire lifespan. More often than not an army marched or simply sat in one place. We remember armies for their battles not because they were so common, but precisely because they were very rare and extraordinary events to begin with.
If we instead apply the idea that an army is an
institution - a broader definition which means that an army is not just "a group of guys with pointy sticks that fights battles" but also one that is a "garrison force to collect taxes and prevent revolts", "an avenue for the hobgoblin minority to serve as auxilia and eventually gain full citizenship", or "a way for a rich prince to play warrior and promote his sycophants as its officers" - then it becomes entirely possible for adventurers and armies to exist side-by-side despite the adventurers being able to delete entire battalions with the wave of a wand.
More specifically, it's because armies are able to do things that adventurers can't. You can't have five adventurers acting as a garrison and tax collection agency for a country of hundreds of thousands of people. Adventurers likewise can't be tasked with baby-sitting thousands of hobgoblins with their own very different culture and try to instill a specific fighting doctrine into them; nor would they have the patience to play pretend-war with some bored prince.
In short, adventurers exist outside of armies because most of the tasks armies are supposed to do are too big (garrison, tax collection, etc) or too beneath (babysitting princes) their own concerns.
If adventurers do need to interact with an army - like say they need help to invade another Kingdom whose in uncooperative about "saving the world" - then it should be in the context of the party interacting with an
institution over an extended time frame. It should be closer to a montage sequence in a movie where a plan comes together over many days or weeks; as the party sways the institution over to their side.
A good framework for these kinds of "montage" sequences are "ladder" challenges. The party starts at the bottom rung (present state), and want to get to the top rung (the desired state). To ascend the rung they have to complete various challenges presented by the DM which could be self-contained adventures or encounters. Success lets them ascend the rung, while failure means they stay in place or are forced to go down a level. A time limit is then added to all of this to add tension and pressure.
This same "ladder" can very much be applied to field battles as well, albeit with the twist that the battle starts at the middle of the ladder which is the "Both our army and the enemy army can still fight" state, whereas the top and bottom represents one side (friendly or enemy) winning outright.
As with a traditional ladder, the DM throws the players challenges that are more personal in nature and suited to their character's skills - like say having a scouting mission where the party tries to determine the strength of the enemy line and eliminate a group of enemy scouts, or having your warrior challenge an enemy officer to a duel - and party's success or failure influences movement along the ladder.
In addition, there could be a separate "army" roll at the end of each challenge - with each army simply rolling off against each other based on their relative strength - with the winner getting a free advancement along the ladder in their favor. This simulates how the armies still operate on an entirely different level and how a party can only do so much to help it.
I know this system pretty much removes most of the tactical elements on the battling side - no "move this unit of archers two hexes to the right and fire" - but it can actually support a wider range of tactical situations based on the DM and player's imaginations; which would also often be a better fit for the group's current party. And really, in an RPG, do you really need to be able to move a unit of archers two hexes, or would you rather have the party slay an Ogre sitting on top of a hill so that your army's archers can move into that position safely and rain arrows down on the enemy?
In short, rather than burying the party in another mini-game where they would potentially spend more time being accountants figuring out its current strength or logistics level, the "mass combat" mini-game should instead be a highly abstracted system that directly adds to the overall campaign story by generating interesting and context-relevant encounters; as encounters are the core dramatic element of RPGs in the first place. To do otherwise is to dangerously balance the game between two very divergent elements with the risk of not satisfying either one.