The Gaming Den

That's awesome. That sounds like an actual playable example of what we're all trying to create. You got anything written down about how you presented and resolved this stuff? Because if so, you win the thread. As noted, it's GURPS Mass Combat for 4e and while I don't think it's the end-all solution...

The core of my starting argument is again really simple. RPGs are about dramatizing heroes and individuals. Wargames are about dehumanizing individuals to allow the control of thousands of soldiers. How can you mesh the two and make it a compelling experience without feeling disjointed? That's not ...

Another instance when the PCs might care about a battle but not care enough to get involved is when they send an NPC commander to reduce an enemy's secondary fortification while they deal with another more important fortification. They can't be at both places at once, but they do care about the outc...

-Also, some means of generating a morale score would be good, and then that morale score is the thing that gets reduced by the enemy's total power in combat phases, with a rout phase at the end where we determine the actual casualties. Routs are where most of the casualties happen in real life, and...

Can you use scouts/divinations to get a good estimate on the opponent's modifiers? Can you use illusions to give false reads on your modifiers? You should have rules for gathering and evaluating intelligence and performing counter-intelligence operations that work similarly to the rest of the mass ...

I'm not sure that dividing the army into parts is useful. If individual troop contributions are just abstracted into troop strength and their Skirmish, Shock, Spell, and Melee values, then I don't think it hugely matters which abstract bunch of values is where on the battlefield. Attacking the left ...

Uh, thanks, Niles, I guess? Anyway. The campaign is currently on hiatus while we do some playtesting for another project, and will continue on a slower schedule in 2018 as we alternate with another game. I haven't updated the blog because I got crazy busy at work over the summer and fell out of the ...

You do understand that the units are entirely abstract and we're not putting minis for each unit on the board?

Also, the Exalted solution that you're proposing where units are suits of armor worn by PCs doesn't work at all.

First off, I'm not writing a D&D mass combat mini-game, because as I have said upthread, I play GURPS and have a perfectly adequate mass combat mini-game already. I'm making suggestions, based on that system and my experience with it, on things other people want to do for a D&D mass combat m...

Price lists for medieval Europe are a pain: you're talking a 500 year time span across a continent. Prices varied a lot from location to location and from decade to decade, depending on local resources and recent events. The Black Plague, for instance, made everything more expensive by killing off a...

Low level characters are just part of the rank and file. This is both really boring, and really disempowering/disencouraging to the players. Basically you're boiling low level mass combat down to either a) no or b) shut up and listen to the GM's monologue about how the battle goes. I don't have a p...

So how does an individual player character go about interacting with this mass combat system. Spend a round to cut down enemy fodder, use a standard action to yell inspirational commands? It's an abstract system, so that's way too detailed. Mass Combat battles should be resolved in turns that repre...

I honestly don't know what a 'wilderness system' would do. As a GM, I'd pay money for a system for generating weather on a national scale that adjusted for terrain and produced plausible results. Something that could produce "it was storming in Sardina on Tuesday, so there is rain here in Auvi...

And that's precisely because the alternative always boils down to: a fire giant unit shows up in a game of Warhammer Fantasy. Look at mlangsdorf's "abstract mass combat mini-game". (Which turns out to be GURPS.) In order to do what you want to do, you have to temporarily stop playing your...

The current crop of PCs each count as 10 high quality, well-equipped troops in their own right, so 6 of them is like 60 special forces troops against 100 garrison troopers. The mass combat engine says that the high quality troops should win those fights, maybe with minor injuries. We're currently pl...

The reason I am certain that you can have that is because I have been running a Fantasy Mass Combat game for the past year using an abstract mass combat mini-game with tactical choices, and the PCs do win a lot of their battles in the preparation and they win and lose some of their battles on the f...

From an RPG sense, it also shows how a small group of characters with non-combat related skills could end up winning a battle for one side or another outright. You don't need to be able to cast Fireball if you can just bluff check your way into making the enemy commander over-confident to the point...

But we're talking about constraints that exist on mass combat minigames. Here's an interesting set of them: Heroes like the player characters exist. Monsters that the player character heroes fight in the personal combat minigame exist. Armies exist Those don't sound particularly contentious, and I ...

) * 1d4 daggers, 1d6 short swords, 1d8 longwords and so on I think fans are going to revolt if you don't have weapon damage scaling, but I don't think it needs to be that exact formula. D&D4e would have done itself some minor good if it had doubled weapon damage dice and I think that change wou...

1. Hit die should correspond to level. What's the fucking point of making construct HD so shitty and then just giving constructs three times as many HD to compensate? If you want monster attack bonuses, AC, saves and HP to be appropriate to their challenge rating, give them good progressions on the...

I just did something similar where the PCs branched timelines, and alternated encounters between the two. I had to track resource use between the two timelines (so the wizard cast spells A, B, C on timeline 1 but had cast B, C, D on timeline 2) but it wasn't too hard. It certainly made for a surreal...

SJ Games recruits their freelancers from people who do articles for their in-house gaming magazine, Pyramid. The theory is that if you demonstrate the ability to deliver a couple of 4-10 page articles without missing deadlines or being too difficult to work with, then they'll give you a chance on a ...

So there's two things I'm trying to model: * A G17 pistol and a G18 pistol are equally controllable in semi-auto mode, but the G18 firing bursts is a way to waste ammo really fast. So we need a mechanism for low ST weapons that become uncontrollable * A modern SAW is just freaking heavy, but it's a ...

Thinking about modifying recoil slightly: Every weapon has a Str (or Body) minimum and a Recoil number. Str is the minimum Str to use the weapon without penalty in SA mode, once per IP. Firing modes and Effective Recoil: SS: Half recoil (round up), -1. SA: Half recoil (round up) for the second shot ...

So I'm refining my group's house rules for SR4e, which at this point are a pretty extensive rewrite of the core rules (alt.War, EotM, etc). Looking over foci, I have a couple of thoughts: * Power foci are just bad for the game. They're boring and they encourage corpse looting (just for greyhawking, ...