OSSR: BATTLESYSTEM (ADnD 2e)

[TarkisFlux]

Well hello there bandwagon. You’re looking mighty comfy, there’s room for one more, and… is that scotch? Sold. Make some room. Let’s do this.

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People have been talking about mass combat minigames again recently, so this seems almost topical. At some point in the rose colored days of my youth, I thought it would be cool to be able to run big battles in DnD and to have the PCs command their own armies against their foes. But there wasn’t anything made to handle it in the rules I had picked up, just random references to a sourcebook built for those sorts of fights strewn about in various products (like Dragon Kings). So when I was hunting through a random used book pile and found BATTLESYSTEM Miniatures Rules, it was like all finding a buried treasure.

Or so I thought. I cracked it open, read the basics, and then never had a time to use them. Or never wanted to maybe, not really sure anymore. And then the book sat on my shelf, or in a box, or wherever until I pulled it a few weeks ago to get around to writing this OSSR for it. So let’s grab the scotch and get to it. We’ll be talking about the second edition of the BATTLESYSTEM (god that’s going to be annoying, so let’s shorten it) BS rules, which means this one:



and not this one:



It was released in 1989, the same year as second edition was released. It’s like they wanted a functional large scale battles game out at the same time as the new edition or something. The primary design credit goes to Douglas Niles, who is notable for some adventure modules, a bunch of novels (primarily Dragonlance ones), and not so much design work. It looks like this was his second run with wargame rules, since it seems to have followed his “Knight Hawks” work for Star Frontiers in the mid 80s. So there’s not a lot of design pedigree to really look at here, but the BS rules were playtested by Zeb Cook, which is a promising start right? Right?

Introduction
The introduction starts with a standard ‘about this book’ section, and it does a good job at laying out the whole thing. Chapters 1-5 are about the fundamentals, chapter 6 adds some intermediate stuff and special units, while chapters 7 and 8 finish it up with the advanced stuff like sieges, wall scaling, and (oh yeah) magic. Then they go on about how the intermediate and advanced rules are totally modular, and you can just not use them if you don’t want to deal with them. But you should try them first, just to be sure. After all of this they mention that, if you wanted to, you could use the included appendix to convert your PC to the BS rules. And then plug miniatures one more time, really really hard, by mentioning they have a section about painting them and how it’s just not the same without fancy tiny men to push around in diorama style terrain.

And this is about when I realize that this isn’t a sourcebook for ADnD 2e. This is a whole fucking different miniatures game that happens to have an ADnD 2e label on it, rather like the minis game for 3e (and probably 4e). I probably should have realized that from the way they went on and on about miniatures and the way that they rather strongly marginalized magic in the writeup, but I didn’t. I skimmed too much of the intro for that I guess.

But it’s pretty clear now that BS isn’t going to talk about how to run ADnD with large numbers of creatures in a way that makes sense, this is a going to tell me to stop playing ADnD and start playing BS to handle those fights. And while that might work in a “bolt another game on to deal with this other stuff” way, it had better be a simple game because I have to teach this to players when they games switch. I was hopeful for rules to talk about renewing my fighter’s free army, building up larger ones, and other sorts of things along those lines, but I’m pretty doubtful I’ll get those now. And that makes me sad.

The bottle’s not empty and maybe there’s a gem in here, so onward we go. I guess I’m doing an Old School System Review here instead, which would be annoying if I didn’t have scotch because my frame of reference is all fucked now. Here are some things to keep in mind as we continue:

• I’ve never played any of the other big minis games, and I’m generally disdainful of them. This may be fucking awesome or terribad compared to them, but I won’t know it.
• I’m familiar with the concept of pushing things around a table because BattleTech was a thing I played for a while, but it’s a much smaller scale.
• I’ve painted the pewter minis and own some of the DnD plastic minis because it’s fun to push them around a battlemat once in a while.

Anyway, the next section deals with rules changes from the 1st edition, and it sounds like the changes were generally beneficial or neutral. The old quarter page text block for units has been replaced with an eighth page for the complicated stuff and a single line of text for the simple stuff. There’s less record keeping, less math, more dice, and simpler table lookups. You don’t need a referee anymore, so your DM can sit out unless he’s running an army I guess. They changed the base sizes, but they’re larger now so you just need to go remount all of your old toys. Oh, and there are fewer spells in here than in the last edition, but they’re all described in BS game terms so you don’t need to convert those. That last one makes me a bit nervous that they’re going to leave out Wall of <anything> and similar battlefield control spells. This looks less and less useful for what I want as we go, and I’m not even out of the introduction yet. Fucking awesome.

The next few sections aren’t very important, but I suppose they’re helpful if you’re new to this sort of game and looking at the book in a store. They tell you the different things you’ll need to play, talk about running different scenarios, and how to start and end play. They tell you that the default scale is 1 inch = 10 yards. Then there is a couple of paragraphs about how you can mail questions to them and they’ll send back an answer. While that’s pretty much custserv in the snail mail era, it still warms my heart just a bit that they included it. Or maybe that’s just scotch.

Following the introduction we have a page summary of the basic rules. I think I’ll skip that for the most part, because we’ll be getting to them in more depth later. Probably. I could rage quit before that, or run out of scotch.

Chapter 1
Chapter 1 is titled “Reviewing the Troops”. It gives us wonderful definitions of common troop types like light, medium, and heavy infantry, and how the differ from each other and militia despite being all dudes on foot. These terms don’t have any actual meaning in the game as far as I can tell, they just wanted you to know that. There’s a section like this for cavalry as well, and one more for special troops. Here again we see that special is lumping all of the siege engines and unique heroes and fantastic creatures. Tellingly, fucking elephants are listed as a special unit in the same line as giants and dragons. And since they mention that infantry and cavalry figures represent 10 dudes but don’t say the same thing for special, I’m not even sure I’ll get giant infantry units out of these rules. Guess we’ll find out in chapter 7 or 8, but until then, FUCK.

The next section is about units and unit sizes. There’s a bit more WYSIWYG bullshit to start with; they don’t want you mixing guys with primary weapons that are too different. Since these are masses of units instead of individual ones and the different weapons have different attack values I can sort of see the point, but it just seems heavy handed (and also minis wank). After that they talk about unit size though, and there’s some actual mechanical advice in there. They went ahead and tied morale checks to the number of figures lost from a unit, so units with more dudes in them tend to suffer more casualties before breaking down. But they also don’t get to maneuver through tight spaces, though it’s not really clear whether that’s something you can moderate with movement options. Whatever, maybe it’ll make sense in chapter 4 when they talk about movement.

The minimum number for figures in the units is interesting. They want at least 6 guys in an infantry unit (unless they’re bigger than human, and then only 4 because giant frog). With that 1 figure = 10 guys thing, the smallest infantry unit you can have in the basic game is 60 dudes. And they recommend infantry units of 12-36 figures. The focus here is army combat plain and simple, there is fuck all for squad based stuff. Maybe it’s in the intermediate rules, or maybe they just don’t care about what I want in a game (inconsiderate asshats).

The chapter ends with a section on the Unit Roster. I skipped it before, but here is the basic format for units in the game along with the basic mechanics of each thing (since it won’t make any damn sense if I do that again):

24 Light Infantry (Short Swords), AD 6, AR 7, Hits 1, ML 11, MV 12”

• “24” is the number of figures in the unit. Yes, you’re supposed to have 24 sufficiently similar (if not identical) fancy painted light infantry figures hanging around that you can put on bases and march around a board. This is more than I have painted in my life probably, and would be a significant $$ investment in the old pewter stuff. Fucking minis games.
• “Light Infantry (Short Swords)” should be self explanatory.
• ”AD 6” means that their Attack Dice is a d6. It could also have been 6+10 to mean that they roll a d6 and a d10 on their attack or 2d10 to mean that they roll 2d10 on an attack, but don’t actually add them together. Why they dropped the “d”s in the simple cases, I don’t know, but it’s kind of annoying to add them back in sometimes. I’m pretty sure that each figure is potentially good for one of those dice, so if you got all 24 of your units to run a train on some other unit you’d need a bunch of d6s. The individual dice get compared to a TN threshold chart to determine how many hits each die is worth. Yay multiple output value, multiple dice type pools.
• ”AR 7” means that their Armor Rating is 7. Since this is a 2e product lower is better, so it’s used as the TN for a pool of Xd10 to soak the total hits, where X is the number of initial hits. The highest is 10, the lowest is 2 I think. Yay variable TN d10 pools.
• ”Hits 1” means that they can take 1 hit before they have to pull a figure from the unit. There are probably units with a lot more hits, like heroes. At least these simple guys don’t have to carry around a hit tracker with them.
• ”ML 11” is their morale value. It seems that 11 is average, 13 is elite, and 15 is rare. This is checked all the time apparently. You roll 2d10, and actually add them together, and if the result is equal to or less than your ML you succeed on the check. So we can add a roll under mechanic to the pile. Hero’s don’t have a ML of their own, but can impact the ML of things nearby instead.
• ”MV 12” ” is their movement rate, measured in inches, because this is a tabletop wargame and that’s what you do. For anyone who thinks that a 360 feet is a lot of movement (because they remembered the distance thing above), remember that they’re doing things in 1 minute turns.

If you weren’t paying attention, that’s 3 different die mechanics for 3 different attributes. I know this was 2e and no one cared at the time, but looking back it makes me weep. Which would suck if it wasn’t hyperbole, because my scotch would water down and I need it to keep going right now.

Chapter 2
Chapter 2 is titled “Sequence of Play”, and it is 1 page long. It’s not even the front and back of that page, just a single side. Why this is its own chapter and not part of something else, I don’t even.

Here’s the turn order:

• Step 1: Charge Declaration – You say which units of yours are going to charge the other guys. Guy who lost initiative last round declares all of them first, except not on the first round.
• Step 2: Initiative Determination – It’s still 2e, so we’re rolling 1d10 and the lowest number wins. You get a -2 bonus for each charge you declared, so you might want to declare a bunch of those, but then you also have to make a bunch of ML checks to make those charges not fail, so maybe not. Winning init (by having the lowest modified number) means you get to choose whether to move first or second, and there are some decent tactical options in there I guess. But those are your only two options, because 3+ people will not want to play this game together.
• Step 3: First Movement – Whoever got picked to move first, does that. They move their units in whatever order they want to, though they have do all of their chargers before they can do anyone else. Along the way they suffer opportunity charges or pass-through missile fire, make opportunity missile fire, or do other sorts of other interrupt stuff.
• Step 4: Second Movement – Whoever got picked to go second does the same stuff as the previous guy did. Not literally the same stuff I guess, since they have different units.
• Step 5: Magic – Magic gets its own phase. I have no idea what happens here in general though, because those are advanced rules. But this is when it happens in the turn phases, right when you could have had a Third Movement for your non-existent second friend.
• Step 6: Melee Combat – Whoever won initiative picks a set of units close enough to brawl it out, and they do that. Then the guy who lost initiative picks a set of units close enough to brawl it out who haven’t done that yet, and they brawl it out. And they keep swapping back and forth like that until all of the brawls have been brawled.
• Step 7: Missile Combat – Any missile guys who didn’t fire during the movement step get to fire now, alternating back and forth between players until they’re all spent. As before, the guy who won init gets to start.
• Step 8: End of Turn – Book keeping and winner determination time. Then back to step 1 if no winner is crowned and you still have time left for another turn.

Steps 5-7 really bug me. I get wanting to codify things, but what is the point of having magic and melee and missile fire happen at different times? And why would you want to put magic, that interruptable mess of crazy that it was in 2e, long before anyone had a chance to actually interrupt it? Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself since I haven’t even read the chapter on it yet, but that seems like a dumb call.

Also, we’re now up to 54 (scotch) different die mechanics for different things in the game. Miss unified die mechanics yet? I sure do.

Up next is Chapters 3, 4, and 5: Morale, Movement, and Combat respectively. The chapter on movement alone is longer than the rest of the book up to that point, because it's a tabletop wargame and that's a thing they do I guess. Should be up in a couple of days, after I get more scotch.

[Maxus]

This should be enlightening.

Aaand in the thread it goes

[Red_Rob]

There’s less record keeping, less math, more dice, and simpler table lookups. You don’t need a referee anymore, so your DM can sit out unless he’s running an army I guess.

If you were actually using this to resolve mass battles in your D&D campaign it's more likely that the DM would be playing the opposing army of were-goblins that is marching on your players Kingdom or Barony or whatever. Which means you'd need another DM to DM the first DM whenever you played 1st edition BATTLESYSTEM!

It's hilarious that they just gave up on modelling half the spells though. I mean, how could the ability to conjure an impassable wall of stone prove useful in a battle, right?

[shadzar]

ahh. the set of books that should have been called "Mini wargaming is dead thanks to RPGs, so lets try to recreate mini wargaming."

think i landed with a copy of one of those books from a collection on eBay when i was buying one of the core rules CDs. dont think i ever opened it after one time.

[TarkisFlux]

The scotch drip is going, the chapters have been read, so it’s time for more.

Chapter 3
Chapter 3 is Morale. Why this is chapter 3 instead of something more immediate like movement or combat I don’t know. But it’s here, so let’s talk about it. I guess we should start by being happy that it exists. Mechanical rules to make units turn and run? Yes please. So yay for existence. But are they any good….

Morale comes in 3 flavors: Good, Shaken, and Routed. Shaken guys can’t charge, can’t move into the front of an enemy (but can still flank), and can’t keep moving if it suffers pass-through fire. Do you have any idea of how those things work? I don’t. A routed unit can not attack anyone at all, and can not stop moving if it gets hit by pass-through fire and has to move away from all of the enemies towards the edge of the board. Which is nice and all I guess, except that I still don’t know what those things are.

There’s a list of times when you have to make a morale check, mostly standard things like “when first figure lost” and “when half figures lost”. But there are also a couple of weird ones, like “when you start a charge” and “when a charging unit hits an obstacle”. Seriously, you have to make a morale check to start or continue a charge. I’m not sure what happens when you fail that yet, but it’s not sounding good. They also say that you don’t have to make more than 1 morale check per step, though you can if you want to. I have no idea why I would want to.

Making a check uses the previously discussed 2d10 roll under. With average dudes at 11, they break morale 45% of the time that they roll for it, while elites break 29% of the time, and rares break only 17% of the time. There are all sorts of morale modifiers as well, like +1 for each rank of the unit (whatever that means), -2 for making an opportunity charge (whatever that is) when you didn’t previously declare a charge, and a bunch more. There are also some death spiral ones, like -2 if half of the figures in your unit are dead, -1 if shaken, and -2 if routed. So it looks like you can start with pretty high morale (+x from ranks), and then lose some of that and suffer more penalties and wind up below your starting morale level as the battle goes on. Which seems pretty reasonable actually (or it would if I knew how the figured ranks out), and like it does an ok job of modeling attrition and unit fleeing. It uses its own die mechanic for it, which is annoying, but it’s slightly curved and that probably works well enough here.

After that we get into the effects of a morale check. They point out that a charge initiation check and rally check uses the same mechanics as a general morale check, but are different from a general morale check in that there is no failure consequence. Everything else is a “general morale check”, and just a sort of complicated way to deal with forced or elective retreats and morale drops. Short version: fighting retreats are your friend if you have the room. Dropping from shaken to routed also requires two failed rolls on the same turn, which should probably not happen if you still have a decent morale and feel like playing the odds.

The charge initiation thing is weird though. Aside from using the 2d10 roll and your morale rating, it’s not actually a morale thing. If you fail on your initiation roll, you can’t charge. I’m not sure if you can still do regular movement or not, because it’s not clear. I’m not actually sure why this is introduced here instead of in movement with some short reference that high morale units are better at charging. It would have worked with the basic morale bit they give you back in the beginning. But here it is nonetheless.

Rally checks are just general morale checks that let you fix up your morale in place of a move if you’re shaken, or in an attempt to stop your forced movement if you’re routed. I have no idea if it’s worth the move loss or not, because I still don’t know how that whole thing works yet.

This whole chapter seems almost backwards. There’s a page long table about the effects of general morale failures right next to where they’re talking about why you’d need to make a morale check (ya know, that list that includes charging) that you see before you see the part where they break those morale check types up. And since “general morale check” is not all that different from “morale check”, it really got me worried that making charges was just asking for my mounted troops to fucking rout and quit the field. Quit leading me into bad assumptions book! It’s not fucking helping after the scotch I’ve been drinking.

Chapter 4
This is the movement chapter, and it is 17 pages long. That is longer than anything else in the book, and actually longer than the Intro + Chapters 1-3 together. It is a rather dense chapter, because you’re really supposed to care about realism in troop movement and whatnot.

They start off talking about formation, regular and irregular, and about how those formations effect your movement through various terrain. I still don’t have any idea what basic movement is though, so thanks for that. It’s helpful maybe? And you can switch from regular to irregular for free, but switching back costs 3” of movement (if you’re even capable of it). 3” is 90’ of move… and seems sort of excessive. given that they have no more ½” (15’) between the figures in the unit to represent the formation difference. Even large units would be hard pressed to find 3” of space for 1 guy on a fringe to move while forming back up.

They also talk about ranks in the formation section, which is a rather technical bit about rows. Short version: make rectangles where each row has the same number of guys in it. Don’t do that, and it’s not a rank.

Next up they talk about frontage, which is the number of figures who make up the front row. Which seems like the sort of thing they wouldn’t need to talk about, but maybe it matters more. There’s also a lovely picture of a unit of 18 figures with 12 in the front (bent in a couple of places) and 6 in the back, and a discussion about how it has a frontage of 12 and only 1 rank. I really wish I knew why I needed to care about this stuff.

And now a detour to column formation and the benefits and limitations it has for movement. Which has basically nothing to do with frontage except that there is a frontage limit, but it’s here anyway. It talks about how they don’t have to pay for “wheeling”, whatever that is, but has to stop 3” shy of an enemy unit if it makes use of that benefit. Again though, I don’t fucking know how to do basic movement yet, so none of this is particularly meaningful to me.

This seems to be a recurring problem with the basic rules. I’m starting to think they’d make more sense if I read them backwards after chapter 2. I know that there are things in a game that reference other things and that you may need to accept some things on faith until you get to them, but it’s like they didn’t even try to minimize that sort of thing here. They just do a really terribad job of putting the rules in a learning order. Maybe more scotch will help (sorry liver).

The next part is “How to Move”. Fucking finally. It’s a rather straightforward “declare move, measure, move as far as possible, deal with it” setup. You can’t measure before hand, and you’re supposed to run into things where you run into enemy units before you wanted to or where you don’t have enough move for what you wanted. You also can’t move through another unit, even if it’s yours, and if you get blocked by one of your guys and have to stop you can’t go back and the first unit the rest of the way later. Built in tactical blunders I guess.

That basic move is only in a straight line, or up to 45 degrees to one side or another. You also pay for frontage changes, facing changes, and turns as deductions from your maximum move. Like the re-forming cost above, these seem pretty steep. A left or right face turn for some or all of your guys costs 2”, or 60’, or movement while an about face costs 4”, or 120’, of movement. I’m pretty sure that turning around wouldn’t cost me 120’ worth of movement over the course of a minute, but maybe it’s different when I’m in a unit with a couple hundred other people.



Oh, and you have to pay those costs separately if you want to have people facing in different directions, like when you make a square, because troops can’t just turn the right way and then stop before completing an about face I guess. You also can’t move at all while your guys are facing in different directions, so you have to pay that again before you can do go anywhere. What the fuck?

They talk about wheeling, which is where you move and pivot and pay for movement based on the distance that they guy farthest from the pivot point travelled. That’s fine I guess. It’s certainly less expensive that fucking turning in place, and it gives a decent bonus for column formation units who want to make U-turns. There’s a bit about changing frontage or formation, where you pay 1” per guy moved out of place. Guys who move in a frontage change also get to pick their facing for free (which is almost surprisingly nice given the stuff so far). And that’s sort of reasonable, because of the magic of conga-lines, but falls flat for symmetric re-organizations where you pay a lot more than you really should.

They talk about a march to the rear that is no more 4” of movement, regardless of how much more move you could have, and that it’s basically the same thing as the morale movement except it uses your whole move. But it’s distinct from the morale move, because we talked about that already and they had to define it as its own thing. Also, that one was a bonus move I guess. Ugh.

Okay, this is starting to hurt, so it is drink more time. While I get another glass, I’ve got a question for any of you who have played wargames before: were they this fucking terrible (inappropriately expensive, limited, and strict) about movement?

The next part is on facing and frontage for irregular units. They have to pay twice the already ridiculous amount for changes in facing, and also have a minimum ranks that they have to maintain. And if they aren’t able to maintain that because of battlefield conditions or whatever, they start losing figures as casualties until they can do it. Pro-tip: irregular units are terrible.

Next we get to Movement and Enemy Units. Because that’s different from moving your own units I guess. /cry

When you move your guys into an enemy unit, the figure that hits gets stuck there. You can keep moving the rest of your guys, but you can’t change facing or formation (a wheel seems allowed though).

The enemy unit you moved into is similar screwed, and can’t make normal movement or facing changes. They do get three special options though. They can make a Fighting Withdrawal, which is a 4” retreat / march to the rear that may also provoke at attack from the enemy figures. It’s a special separate thing, because they needed to fill pages I guess. They can instead perform what is technically called Flight (not the actual flying thing), where they get a free about face and run the fuck away at full move while the enemy take some pot shots. They say it’s like routed movement but without being routed (but they still haven’t actually defined that movement yet ). Lastly, they can Wraparound, where they go all in, expand their front and wheel the sides around the enemy. They’re nice enough to say that you pay for frontage changes and the larger wheeling movement and not facing changes, but this still falls flat because it’s a symmetric reorganization of half your army on each side and you pay for it twice as a result. A better set of wheeling and reorganization base rules would have made this redundant.

Fuck, a better set of “can you do this while touching an enemy” tags would have made this whole part redundant.

But while those sound comparatively ok give all the other things so far, they’re all written with the expectation that you don’t run into someone on their flank or the rear. I’m not sure if you can do a fighting retreat if you get flanked. I would assume that a flight while flanked or rear attacked would not involve a full about face, but it doesn’t actually say that. And a wraparound while flanked or rear attacked leaves you with some of your guys still flanked or rear attacked while the rest are head on. It’s a huge fucking oversight, and I don’t know what to do with it. Admittedly, it probably doesn’t matter because I don’t think I’d ever play with these movement rules.

The next part is Movement and Missile Fire, which is all about how guys with slings or spears or bows can fire during movement instead of missile combat, if they want to. There are some conditions you have to meet, but whatever. If you have bows, you can actually attack twice, just on different phases of the turn (so any two of your move, his move, or missile attacks). If you have mounts, you can move before and after firing, everyone else just gets to fire before or after. So of course you want mounted archers. Halfling outriders have not been invented yet I guess.

They talk about firing on your opponents move as well, which I think is pass-through fire (finally) even though they never actually use those words. Again, you have to meet certain conditions to do it. There’s the whole ‘you can’t measure first’ thing going on though, and if they’re out of range you just wasted the attack. Yay more built in tactical blundering.

There’s a section on charges finally too. You can set up for your charge, as long as it doesn’t cost you more than 3”. And you get a 50% movement bonus… that is added on to the beginning of your move after setup as a section (to a max of 6”) where your charge gains no bonus. They say this is to cover the realism thing where you have to build up your speed first. It’s nice that they bring realism in here, instead of back when I was paying out the ass for facing changes . Otherwise it’s everything you expect from a charge, the bonus to attacks (defined in the next chapter I guess), the lack of turning, and so on. Oh, and if you miss with a charge because they’re out of range, the unit automatically becomes shaken, which means it can’t charge again without rallying :headdesk:.

The tactical blundering baked in here is starting to look like

Next up is a section on Rout Movement, which is a lot like the combination of Flight and being Routed. There are some extra restrictions on the movement in here, but with the exception of the new “you can’t change frontage unless you have to” rule (which should have been in the routed condition in the first place), it’s all stuff that we could infer from the previous routed description and the flight movement. So, more redundancy basically.

The chapter ends with a discussion of terrain’s effects on movement and charges. They also include a bit about favored terrain and how you get to ignore movement penalties in those areas. I can’t help but feel that this is pretty bog standard stuff. And also glad that I’m done with this chapter.

So. Movement. Super detailed, but also super redundant and full of edge case holes. I am not amused. I think I’ll wait on combat for a bit.

[zeruslord]

Reforming really is a pain in the ass. It's not just about how far you move, it's also about getting into alignment with everybody else, making sure no one is sticking out in front, and getting everybody into step. I assume the "turn" is intended to represent turning the whole formation, not each individual turning in place, in which case those costs are a lot saner. The reorg cost sounds pretty crazy, but depends on base size. The "no measurement" thing is supposed to be part of player skill. It's pretty common in wargames; the grognards love it because realism, but it adds an extra element of learning curve that can really only be acquired by playing games at that particular scale, so it sucks for everyone else.

[TarkisFlux]

Reforming really is a pain in the ass. It's not just about how far you move, it's also about getting into alignment with everybody else, making sure no one is sticking out in front, and getting everybody into step. I assume the "turn" is intended to represent turning the whole formation, not each individual turning in place, in which case those costs are a lot saner.

Turning the whole unit like that like that is handled by wheeling, which is somewhat sane I guess. But the actual right, left, and about face moves are just turning in place, and then going in that direction. They seriously have a pick of a 5x3 unit that makes a right face and becomes a 3x5 unit. And lost 60' of movement as a result.

[Hadanelith]

This sounds very much like Warhammer Fantasy. But suckier. A lot suckier. A lot more fiddly. And not in a good way. And I'm not claiming WF is great to start with. But it's still better than that pile of complicated fuckery.

[hogarth]

My brother bought the first edition of Battlesystem, but I don't think we ever played it. All the stuff about formations and morale and movement/action phases was too complicated for what we wanted and it didn't feel D&D-ish at all.

The tokens were kind of neat, though.

[phlapjackage]

Yeah, I bought this book and played it a few times. Didn't map well (at all) to our D&D games, and we were already into Warhammer Fantasy, so this one...sucked. Rules were too complicated for what it was, and it took a longgggg time to finish a battle.

[Username17]

D&D started with a wargame where you marched tiny men around with no magic or dragons or anything. Then people wanted to add elves and dragons and shit because they were awesome and besides that way you had less pewter to paint. And so naturally, people wanted wizards and heroes because they were even more awesome and required even less pewter to be painted. Then people just started playing the wizards and heroes directly and roleplaying and shit, and that's D&D.

But if you're going to make a wargame from D&D, it seems to me that you have to start from the standpoint "people are in this to see what happens to the wizards and heroes who are their fucking D&D characters." It just doesn't make sense to go back and try to take another crack at a magicless game about marching tiny men around and try to patch the magic and heroics in later.

-Username17

[TarkisFlux]

I’m pretty disappointed with the BS minis rules at this point, but I signed on for this so here we go.

Chapter 5

The combat chapter. The basic mechanic was suggested a while back, but here it is in a bit more detail: “Roll your Attack Die(ce). Determine hits based on results of dice: 1-3 is no hits, 4-5 is 1 hit, 6-9 is 2 hits, 10-11 is 3 hits, 12 is 4 hits. Defender rolls 1d10 for each hit, each die equal to or higher than their AR negates 1 hit. Unsoaked hits are applied to the unit, removing a figure for every X hits (where X is the hit rating of the unit). Extra hits are just tracked near the unit.”

In melee you hit your opponent, then they hit you back, and then you both remove casualties. In missile fire, you fire your stuff and then they remove casualties immediately. Oh, look, pass through fire (or whatever it’s actually called) is awesome. And normal missile fire (which happens after melee) is so-so, but I guess it’s what you do if you don’t have a better option.

And of course there are edge cases. Sometimes you’re being flanked in melee by the army that is also beating away at your front, so they have to split their AD pool into “flank”and “front” hits so you can defend with the appropriate AR. And your archers have to worry about LoS to and from each figure, so you can score more hits with your archers than there are eligible targets to remove. And so on. You can either get a multiple to your damage dice (number, not type, rounded up) or a bonus to your armor (so you soak more hits).

A few things stand out at this point. Units take damage pretty much whenever they get hit in this game, because you don’t soak all of the hits when you’re rolling the same number of d10s as you took hits. And units with low hits lose figures pretty quickly. The rules for who is eligible to attack are kind of weird, but they basically work out to “get more hits (and hit more in return) by spreading out”, but if you can pair that with a flank or a rear it often works out. With even a modicum of decent tactics, units in a fight dwindle and break fairly quickly it seems. And that’s ok I guess.

But it also means that the game can not represent heroes who are immune to a basically infinite number of much lower level guys. A large enough army can kill a hero with any number of hits and the lowest possible AR value. Any attempt to port these mechanics to a system with a geometric power growth seems basically doomed. 3e DnD certainly fits that curve (for casters anyway), and AD&D 2e probably does too. Since this was made for that system, this is a pretty catastrophic failing.



So… yeah. I’m pretty sure we’ve just failed at our basic premise, representing large scale armies against higher level armies and heroes in AD&D. There might be something in the specifics that change that, but it looks like people fall over faster than crit fishing would otherwise cause. I’m not even pissed off at this point, I’m too busy being disappointed. Which is saying something, because normally scotch is a fighting drink for me. Fuck minis games.

I think we’ll just summarize it from here to get it over with, and if anyone wants more details on a section I can add them later.

Intermission 1: Basic Scenarios
Before they get to the next chapter, they are kind enough to drop in a few scenarios for you to run through with the basic rules. Since the basic rules amount to pushing fighting men around, that’s what you get here as well. It is not really worth discussing, other than to point out that they exist.

Chapter 6
Ah, the intermediate rules. Here’s what’s included:

Skirmisher units! Because you wanted a bunch of guys who were even more irregular than the irregular units in placement, but didn’t pay ridiculous movement costs for turns. They also have their own movement rules and attack limitations to learn. About the only interesting thing about them is their ability to run away during the opponent’s turn. Fucking awesome.

Special Formations! Shield walls, pike blocks, and mixed lines (melee front, archers rear) oh my. The first two are basically new special condition modifiers for AD or AR, and the last lets you take split missile / melee actions in some rounds. And also kill archers instead of melee guys when you suffer casualties, or the other way around. I’m sure there might be a situation where that’s useful. Maybe.

Forced Marches! Extra distance in exchange for a morale check at the end.

Heroes! Rules for the individual finally, sort of. You can’t be attacked by as many guys as a normal unit, you move individually (unless you attach yourself to a unit because), and you don’t pay for facing changes. So, you can be hit slightly fewer times than I imagined above, but you still can’t soak your stuff.

Commanders! These are like heroes, but your army has to have one per unit within a particular range, or the unit performs half as well. For those who like adding failure points to their games, I guess. But they might have a charisma bonus, so you make morale checks slightly more often.

Firearms! Like arrows, except that you can’t soak the damage. And sometimes, they do auto-hits on their own unit because of misfires.

Dismounted Cavalry! Who even cares?

And that’s the chapter. Thankfully.

Intermission 2: Imtermediate Scenarios
Let’s try out our new rules:
Scenario 1: Skirmishers for everyone!
Scenario 2: Commanders for everyone! Everyone is worse off.
Scenario 3: Want to use some guns on the enemy (and yourself)? At least this one mixes in another intermediate rule and also adds skirmishers.

Chapter 7

The advanced rules. What do they consider advanced? Well, let’s see what’s included…

Flying Creatures! 2e maneuverability makes a showing here, and it almost doesn’t seem out of place here. It’s basically a limit on wheeling, which seems sort of appropriate in a game that makes a big fucking deal out of movement and turning. They also get their own combat options, including dogfight, and special rules for using missile weapons, charging, having pikes set against them, and so on. Also, falling damage. And morale penalties for flying.

Stampeding Animals (yes really)! I don’t even

Undead Units! They have to have commanders, and those commanders have to be priests, because there are no necromancer wizards of course (poor specialist necromancers). Priest heros, who we don’t know anything about yet, can also turn them. You need a d20 for this, and it’s the only thing in the game that you need a d20 for.

Fortifications and Fortresses! Ok, this is actually worth taking a break from summary for. Not because the rules are good or anything though. They’re built on something that doesn’t work, so it’s nor surprising when they don’t work either. No, these are worth discussing for a completely different reason.

They have a number of pictures in this section, things that look something like these two (rather nicely done, but otherwise completely unrelated and used here only for illustrative purposes) setups spoilered below:

Does anything in those strike you as odd? They look a lot like normal fantasy battle and minis layouts right? And that’s what they are... which is why they completely fucking fail to work with BS’s explicit scale. Each inch of that board is supposed to be 10 yards, and each figure 10 guys. There is already a game at the scale represented in these pictures, it’s the one BS is supposed to be scaling up from. So scaling back down to it and telling me that I can move armies into houses is crap.

And also hilarious. You have cottages that take up about half of a football (American or otherwise) field. Roads that are on the same scale as modern thoroughfares. Defensive walls that are 150’ high, 30’-60’ wide, and leave you room to move whole units in formation behind your archers. There are rules for fighting in narrow 1”-2” (ya know, fucking 10-20 yards wide) passages. And rules for stairways and permanent ladders that you’re supposed to be able to move your unit up. And rules for moving through windows. All of which you do 10 men at a time.

It’s not all bad I guess. They at least include a section about scaling ladders and grapples, breaking down gates, dropping missiles from walls, battering rams, and other fun looking war machines and siege towers. But since the scale is all wrong and they ran with it, none of it is useful. For example, it takes 2 hits for a unit to break down shutters. You honestly might have to dedicate 30 men (3 figures) to a set of shutters to break it in a round.

One last bit of wtf, they tossed in limits on what different sized figures can damage. Small units top out at hurting building features with 20 or less hits. A stone house or section of wooden palisade is 30 hits. Goblin sappers and dwarven / gnomish engineers are now explicitly forbidden from inflicting damage on them. Just go home guys, this game hates you.

Chapter 8

Finally, the last magic chapter.

We begin with a section on special magical abilities. Weapon invulnerability is discussed and looks sort of impressive, and is then promptly neutered with a “guys with 3 hits can punch you normally” line. Breath weapons get a couple of paragraphs. Units can cause awe or horror, which are just morale checks for being near them (priests cause awe, and wizards cause horror). There’s a thing for magic resistance, which works exactly like AR for normal hits and not at all how MR worked in second edition. And lastly we’ve got a bit on level draining, poison, and paralysis… which have been translated into “cause horror, bigger AD” rather than anything interesting. Oh, I guess paralysis has something special too, but it’s in appendix 2.

The chapter then moves on to spells. I know I said before that they didn’t bring a lot over, and I meant it. Here’s a selection of what they did bring.

[*]Wizard 1: Magic Missile
[*]Wizard 2: Stinking Cloud
[*]Wizard 3: Dispel Magic, Fireball, Fly, Haste, Lightning Bolt, Protection from Normal Missiles
[*]Wizard 4: Fear, Wall of Fire
[*]Wizard 5: Cone of Cold, Cloudkill, Hold Monster, Teleport
[*]Wizard 6: Lower Water
[*]Wizard 7: Mass Invis
[*]Wizard 8: Mass Charm
[*]Wizard 9: Meteor Swarm

[*]Priest 1: Bless
[*]Priest 2: Chant, Spiritual Hammer
[*]Priest 3: Dispel Magic, Prayer
[*]Priest 4: Cure Hits, Divination
[*]Priest 5: Flame Strike, Insect Plague, Wall of Fire
[*]Priest 6: Find the Path, Wall of Thorns
[*]Priest 7: Creeping Doom, Fire Storm
[*]Priest 8 and 9 didn’t exist in this edition, so there is nothing at those levels.

And that’s all of them. The above selection is every spell in the book. They mostly revolve around dealing damage, but there are a few movement and initiative and other weird ones out there. I guess they’re reasonably well ported. They didn’t forget the scaling, so fireball targets a single figure and gets an AD of 3d8 and is wasted against a normal army unit because the hits don’t transfer. Lightning bolt is actually stronger than fireball in this setup, because it gets the same damage but a 3” travel line and similar starting range. And we’re ignoring filling a space vs. a 5’ line, but whatever. It’s pretty much all boring stuff anyway, and doesn’t do much to fix the rest of the problematic things here.

At least it’s a short last chapter.

---

And now we can move on to the appendices. Because it’s an AD&D 2e product, and there’s like 4 of them.

Intermission 3: Advanced Scenarios
More fightings you can do, this time with a ridiculously large keep, flying guys and undead, a dragon, and some spellcasters.

Appendix 1
Converting your AD&D character to the BS system. Most of this is somewhat expected. Complicated formulas for adding up your THAC0 and max damage per round to get a AD value, an AC to AR conversion, a level to hits conversion…

Wait a sec. Oh. Oh, this is fucking awful. So, there’s a rule back in the magic chapter that I didn’t bother discussing in summary that says you can’t have a spell of a level higher than your hits. And the hits conversion for wizards and priests is non-linear (Note: preceding strikethrough is a drinking related error) 3 levels to 1 hit, so it doesn’t match the normal spell progression at all. Your high level converted character never gets to cast their normal spells in battle, even the ones the BS rules bothered converting over, or you ignore that and use your normal spell spell slots and NPC casters of the same level just suck ass.

There’s a bit more on converting things here, but fuck it. That last failure pretty much does it. Let’s wrap this up already.

Appendix 2
There’s pre-converted AD&D 2e monsters in here. It would be nice if you wanted to play the game with them, but I don’t. There’s also the paralysis thing in here somewhere I imagine, but meh.

Appendix 3
Scenario construction suggestions / rules and unit point costs. Because this sort of thing doesn’t deserve an actual chapter in a book about playing with these rules. And point costs can’t be placed with the converted monsters.

I really shouldn’t just try to power through these things towards the end, because I’m almost out of scorn and this seems a particularly poor layout decision worthy of heaping it on.

Appendix 4
Miniatures painting! Tips, tricks, and whatever to help you make the most of your brand new pewter and paint. And also to help you not field a bare army I guess. I’m not even going to read this.

I’m out of scorn, and out of another bottle of scotch. And that’s the BS Miniature Rules, 2nd Edition.

[wotmaniac]

Okay, first of all -- you double-posted. While I normally don't care about shit like that, that post is WAY too long to not take care of that.

But it also means that the game can not represent heroes who are immune to a basically infinite number of much lower level guys.

Are you sure that this isn't a feature, instead of a bug?
I'm not saying either way -- just posing the question.

[TarkisFlux]

Okay, first of all -- you double-posted. While I normally don't care about shit like that, that post is WAY too long to not take care of that.

Didn't see that last night, and it's gone already... so thanks to whoever fixed that.

But it also means that the game can not represent heroes who are immune to a basically infinite number of much lower level guys.

Are you sure that this isn't a feature, instead of a bug?
I'm not saying either way -- just posing the question.

On it's own, it might be a feature. Whether you outgrow low level threats or not is a design decision, not any sort of mandatory game piece. But when the game is supposed to let me have my AD&D character join in large scale battles, where you do pretty much outgrow low level threats (except for crit fishing), yes, this is absolutely a bug.

[wotmaniac]

(except for crit fishing)

okay -- that right there settles the point for me. when you're in a "death by a thousand paper cuts" situation in d&d, it is the accumulation of crit possibilities that is the threat.
thanks.

[TarkisFlux]

That's fair I guess. I mean, you could break out 300 archers and probabilistically kill a high level fighter with good armor with crit fishing, and those 300 guys aren't unreasonable in this game since they are just a 30 figure unit. I can admit some hyperbole, blame the scotch, and soften my position on the fullness of the failing, but the mapping is still weird. You may need a lot more or a lot less to deal with any particular character. The conversion instructions, the mechanics changes, and the fact that the normal mitigation tactics in the small scale game have been obscured or are non-existent here all add up to a game that doesn't work as you would expect from simple scale ups. A lot gets lost or garbled in the translation, and I stand by my original statement that it does a poor job of representing AD&D 2e on a larger scale.

[Red_Rob]

Battlesystem was transparently just a bog standard Ancients wargame with token attention paid to magic and the odd monster. It didn't really attempt to apply the D&D setting or tropes to mass warfare, or think about the logical results of the crazy troops available to your average D&D baron. If I was wanting to wargame out a D&D battle I would probably stick to something simple like Hordes of the Things.

[wotmaniac]

stuff

agreed.

[tussock]

PCs are super-tough to kill in BS. On their own, they get way more hits than a whole unit with the same HD each, and only one step lower attack die. If they hide in a unit they're immortal unless the unit is wiped out, and even then they only die 30% of the time.


Oh, and in 1991, they released BATTLESYSTEM SKIRMISHES. Designed for 1:1 scale with 10-50 critters (so up to PCs&Co vs 40), where attacks are converted to 1 per 4.5 total average damage, with leftover modifying your THAC0 on a big-ass and accurate table, and hits are 1 per monster HD with a lookup table for PCs that can also modify their AC a bit to suit. Everything moves pretty normally, scale 1"=10', there's standard morale, simple bases, they've just sped up the hit point damage calculations.

Infact, SKIRMISHES is basically all the 2nd edition you'd ever need, spells and monsters and items and everything, in 100 pages, and probably a better game because it doesn't spend scores of pages telling the DM to screw you over. Chock-full of minis artwork too.

[shadzar]

and probably a better game because it doesn't spend scores of pages telling the DM to screw you over.

except that isnt what 2nd did. it just told the DM they arent a babysitter there to wipe the noses and asses of their childish players that were too immature to handle it themselves, and not not give into them like the WotC editions did.

want to end the hyperbole and lies, or do you like sucking on a barrel of cocks?

[TarkisFlux]

PCs are super-tough to kill in BS. On their own, they get way more hits than a whole unit with the same HD each, and only one step lower attack die. If they hide in a unit they're immortal unless the unit is wiped out, and even then they only die 30% of the time.

No, they really aren't. "Ultra Heavy Cavalry (knights; level 5+ fighters)" have 4 hits, an AR of 5, and an AD of 8. To get the same numbers on a hero, you'd need to be level 7-10, have an AC of 0-1, and have a max per round damage of 4 or less per round (with a smaller window as your fighter THAC0 goes down with your level). A hero of the same level as that unit will have fewer hits, but likely a better AR and AD - basically the exact opposite as you just described. And while that AD might boost their survivability a bit, they're still likely to die to less than 10 hits, and that's not even hard.

The thing about hiding them in a field of mooks is pretty irrelevant to their individual survivability. Sure, it's hard to kill you when you're throwing wave after wave of your own men at them. That doesn't make you badass, that makes you Zapp Brannigan.

[tussock]

Uh, cavalry get extra hits and AD (that particular cavalry is basically impossible by the rules for building units), and there's special rules for solo PCs on pp106 (where they get lower AD for being alone but extra hits at higher levels).

BTB, to have AD 8, a mounted level 5 fighter unit (10 guys) would need no magic or Str or specialisation and to use only a dagger, and be riding a light horse. A heavy horse with any rider is at least AD 12.

I must further insist that being able to hide in a unit and become mostly unkillable is a good method of survival. I care not that it's cowardly, I simply mention that it's true.


@Shadzar, you be trippin.

[TarkisFlux]

Uh, cavalry get extra hits and AD (that particular cavalry is basically impossible by the rules for building units), and there's special rules for solo PCs on pp106 (where they get lower AD for being alone but extra hits at higher levels).

BTB, to have AD 8, a mounted level 5 fighter unit (10 guys) would need no magic or Str or specialisation and to use only a dagger, and be riding a light horse. A heavy horse with any rider is at least AD 12.

On individual conversion, I'll admit to missing that part. I had been drinking and was rather frustrated with the book by that point, so I was skimming and missed it completely. I've updated the relevant section above already.

What does that change... a mounted fighter gets a bunch less hits because of the weird averaging, gets an even larger AD, and has a similar AR if his mount has similar barding (which it probably doesn't). On the other hand, an unmounted one will have more hits, similar AR, and an AD one step down than to an equivalent HD unit figure by mid levels. Being on a horse sucks for defense I guess (wtf?), and I grant that for non-cavalry units you were right about the tradeoffs. That makes them slightly harder to kill, but I don't know that it makes them "super-tough". A good AR would make them super tough, but that can still be managed by positioning most of the time.

BTB - That cavalry unit is straight out of their bestiary (page 111). It actually has AD [12]8, but only the 8 was particularly relevant to the discussion as that's the non-"first round lance" melee value. While that could be a typo, the same value on the regular heavy cavalry on the same page is [10]8, and that looks a bit small as well. Did they even follow their own conversion rules?

I must further insist that being able to hide in a unit and become mostly unkillable is a good method of survival. I care not that it's cowardly, I simply mention that it's true.

I didn't say it wasn't a good method of surviving, I said it was irrelevant to their individual survivability. Staying behind in your harem demiplane is an even better method of surviving, but also doesn't say shit about your ability to personally face down large numbers of low level troops. If you're not actually hitting and being hit by creatures because you're in the middle of a unit, you're not actually engaged with anyone and the fact that you don't die at that point is expected and trivial.

If you instead mean that you can just deflect any hits scored on your hero to the rest of the unit, page 60 says that you are wrong. Hits inflicted against a hero from directly adjacent melee guys (or possibly melee guys with reach weapons, it's not clear) and from one firing figure with a missile group can target him directly, and those can't be passed off.

[tussock]

Did they even follow their own conversion rules?

No, they did not. It looks possible to get numbers that bad if you work at it, but home-made units should be universally better than the examples, which may have been the plan.

Hmm. I should write a mass combat system for 3e.