Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards > LW/LW in D&D.

[Username17]

Anyway, things a mass combat system needs to do:

• A curved or dicepool RNG. For starters you're throwing what are nominally dozens or hundreds of attacks, so there should be significant mean reversion going on. Further, you're throwing in fantasy units who enjoy a bulge over spearmen that no human military units ever have. You want rare events to be rare and common events to be common, and that means that your RNG needs to be a pile of dice rather than a dingle d20 or whatever.
• An exponential to linear converter. The mass combat minigame is basically being asked to handle battlefields that have between fifty and fifty thousand soldiers on them. It's OK things bog down or get a bit wonky near the high end (because they probably won't be used as much), but no linear system run on the wetware of drunk gamers is going to be able to handle three orders of magnitude. That simply is not a thing that is ever going to happen. Fortunately, logarithms exist, which allow us to convert X times as many soldiers to a plus Y modifier. Combined with an RNG that has a curve, you can set those +Y modifiers to standard deviations and the cheese stands alone.
• At least two die rolls handling attacks. At the very least you have to differentiate between things that do more damage because there are more attacks (and can thus cause larger maximum damage to large stacks) and things that do more damage because the attacks are bigger (and thus can punch through the damage soak of high end monsters that have those things). That difference has to be emergent from the die rolls, because if there are a lot of charts to look up when your lancers hit a stack of Hobgoblin samurai or Iron Golems, the game is DOA.
• Fixed Unit Hit Points. The output of the attacks can cause casualties, wound big units, damage morale, or disorganize a unit. That could be as many as four damage tracks or as little as two. But all of them have to be relative. Because when you're dealing with an exponential to linear equation you absolutely can handle casualties as simple percentages and it will be an absolute fucking nightmare if you don't.
• An integration into the squad level RPG. This is the hardest part in many ways. The basic RPG is, obviously, going to deal in linear numbers, and if it's D&D in particular it's going to have a flat RNG as well.

-Username17

[ACOS]

You guys will never make this work. Your only hope is to say "fuck it," and make Mass Combat a some sort of single opposed roll with modifiers based on what's in the army. Anything less abstract than that is going to suck dicks.

Are you suggesting Swarm Rules?

Btw, are there any actual Swarm rules in 3.X other than the "swarm" monster entries? Something we could use to create our own swarms?

I think he may be trying to be ironic in an effort to make fun of my earlier assessment.
Or I could be totally wrong.

As to your btw question: there's the "mob" template from DMG2 (and perhaps Cityscape, IIRC); which I previously suggested as starting inspiration to scale-up and modify; but that seems to have been DOA.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank, could you elaborate a bit on having several damage tracks for mass combat and how that would work? I can envision two tracks (morale and health) but I can't even imagine how four would look like, let alone how you would be able to use them in-game.

[Username17]

Frank, could you elaborate a bit on having several damage tracks for mass combat and how that would work? I can envision two tracks (morale and health) but I can't even imagine how four would look like, let alone how you would be able to use them in-game.

On the micro scale, you track position, numbers of casualties, wounds, and in some cases morale and ability charges. But in mass battles you're not going to want to track the position of all one hundred pikemen, nor the arrows in the quivers of all one hundred archers. These sorts of things are going to be reduced to simple integers for units.

So rather than worrying about the position of every single pikeman, you might give the squad an organizational number, probably going from 0 to 10 at the most. Having the pikemen move through broken terrain or dense woods would cause organizational damage, having commanders spend time forming them back into ranks would heal organizational damage, and enemies could inflict organizational damage by flanking attacks or using magical battlefield control effects.

Now wounds vs. casualties is a pretty big deal in the squad level world of the RPG. Doing 10% damage to 10 opponents is extremely different from doing 100% damage to one opponent (even in games without critical existence failure, the differences in lasting implications are stark). For a game where all the squads were piles of humans, you might just abstract it entirely, and even when a squad might be 15 Cloud Giants rather than 100 Elves you still might. But there is at least a temptation to track casualties separately from wounds. Basically, attacks big enough to drop units outright would cause casualties (which would reduce the number of characters in the unit with all that entails), and attacks that are not big enough would go into some sort of wounds counter that would add up to casualties. Both kinds of hits could damage organization and morale. When a unit might be literally just a single kraken or dragon, it's pretty important to be able to track whether something is wounded but not killed as it's pretty unlikely that anything on the field is going to be able to kill it in one blow.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

That makes sense, Frank. So, I have this user case story:

One army is several regiments of elven archers with wizards mixed in and they're defending their home forest. They're being besieged by armies of orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and ogres who can't maintain detente as well as the elves can so the commander is forced to attack. The attacking army has numbers, but the elves have material, terrain, and raw badassery and can hold off indefinitely.

The elves' opening gambit is to use information warfare in the form of murdered scouts, charm spells, bribes, and soforth to exacerbate the besiegers' Byzantine Generals problem. When actual battle begins, their plan is to make a fighting retreat back to their city HQ, then the wizards and shit blast the armies in range. The attackers on the other hand want to use shit like flanking, setting the forest on fire, conducting atrocities to break enemy morale, soforth.

How would that go in your system? Like, what would be MTP'd and what would have definite inputs and outputs that would be reflected with numbers and rules? What kind of timescale would that span over? Do you think that the above scenario I gave would be an average use case or do you think that I'm eliding certain elements that you'd expect to pop up? Shit like the imparted abilities of attached CO Units or the effect and/or ability of the elves to doing an emergency army draft that does Bad Things to the Logistics and Dragons phase?

[Hiram McDaniels]

However, the actual kingdom building doesn't work. Or rather, it works as a monument to the PCs' accomplishments, not as a kingdom simulator. Kingdoms produce a fairly static income, which goes up more slowly than their upkeep costs, and there's nothing you can build to help that. The only thing that can keep a large kingdom operating is high-level PCs going and looting lots of shit to pay for the upkeep, and the building effects are primarily in support of that purpose (providing buffs for the PCs).

Is this really a bad thing though? I get that a believable, living world is a desirable quality, but the whole purpose of this L&D discussion is an exploration of the OP's desire for high-powered, PC dick swinging games where the players get to play havok with the setting and regularly kick the status quo in the teeth. In this context, I think that a game where the kingdom growth depends on PC exploits could be a good thing.

[ETortoise]

What are players and their characters going to be doing? For example, are we moving unit counters around a hexmap while our characters either acts as solos or give buffs to an attached unit?

I'd be very interested in a mass combat system that allows for PCs to take part in different levels on the battlefield based on their prestige or power. In a battle PCs could be captains in charge of 100 men, colonels in charge of a regiment of 1000 or generals in charge of a host of many thousands. It would also be interesting if command and control was limited in some fashion. I guess what I'm saying is that I have access to a few games where you move your soldiers around from a omniscient overhead perspective and I'm looking for a system that grounds things to the characters' perspectives a little more. Although a general with a flying carpet and scrolls of sending could very well maneuver his troops like he was playing a Total War game.

While I'm making unreasonable demands, what are we thinking on the strategic level? I could certainly see the PCs leading the first army south to defeat the undead legions of Vecna while sending General McNPC north to deal with his Orcish allies. Or for that matter having Marshall O'Henchman engage in a fighting retreat while the PCs travel to the Lich King's tower and stab him directly in the face.

I feel that it's important to have locations on the world map that are worth fighting over. In ACKS you really only have strongholds and cities which make things kind of sterile. I would think you'd need at least Manors (agricultural estates that provide food and money based on their size, population and fertility), Resources (things like mines that provide money and materials), and Towns (urban settlements that provide money and goods based on their connections to Manors and Resources.)

Is this really a bad thing though?

I think that throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of a working machine is much more satisfying than inserting said monkey wrench into a suspiciously monkey wrench-shaped opening.

[Hiram McDaniels]

I think that throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of a working machine is much more satisfying than inserting said monkey wrench into a suspiciously monkey wrench-shaped opening.

That is a fair point.

Here is my question then, is the intent of Logistics & Dragons as a game of campaign world-buggery explicit, or do players have to go hunting for it Johnny card style?

[TheFlatline]

I'd be very interested in a mass combat system that allows for PCs to take part in different levels on the battlefield based on their prestige or power. In a battle PCs could be captains in charge of 100 men, colonels in charge of a regiment of 1000 or generals in charge of a host of many thousands. It would also be interesting if command and control was limited in some fashion. I guess what I'm saying is that I have access to a few games where you move your soldiers around from a omniscient overhead perspective and I'm looking for a system that grounds things to the characters' perspectives a little more. Although a general with a flying carpet and scrolls of sending could very well maneuver his troops like he was playing a Total War game.

Battlelore I think had command & control based on nearby leader units.

So does Warhammer/40k. More traditional Command & Colors divides the board up into thirds, and you draw a hand of command cards that activate units on different portions of the board to represent the fog of war and the ability to get orders through in a timely manner.

There's a lot of solutions you could use for the fog of war or the C&C structure.

D-Day at Omaha Beach (one of the better solitaire wargames ever made) starts you with one unit activation with a few automatic self-preservation moves per half of the beach. Units can turn hero which activate on their own, or eventually you get battlefield HQ and generals that can activate units within range. Without these extra activations the game is basically impossible to win.

I could see a system similar to that where dedicated fighters/generals activate nearby units and become force multipliers.

Magic in a fantasy setting obviously short-circuits the traditional C&C system. With divining, telepathy, and other magical abilities you have a command of the battlefield that most generals throughout history would kill to have. I seem to recall a story about Alexander watching a battle taking place before him and one of his entourage asked him how the battle was going and Alexander confessed he didn't know because it was one big dust ball of a skirmish, and rode down into the battle to find out how it was actually going on. Divination would change that pretty fundamentally.

[TheFlatline]

On the micro scale, you track position, numbers of casualties, wounds, and in some cases morale and ability charges. But in mass battles you're not going to want to track the position of all one hundred pikemen, nor the arrows in the quivers of all one hundred archers. These sorts of things are going to be reduced to simple integers for units.

So rather than worrying about the position of every single pikeman, you might give the squad an organizational number, probably going from 0 to 10 at the most. Having the pikemen move through broken terrain or dense woods would cause organizational damage, having commanders spend time forming them back into ranks would heal organizational damage, and enemies could inflict organizational damage by flanking attacks or using magical battlefield control effects.

Now wounds vs. casualties is a pretty big deal in the squad level world of the RPG. Doing 10% damage to 10 opponents is extremely different from doing 100% damage to one opponent (even in games without critical existence failure, the differences in lasting implications are stark). For a game where all the squads were piles of humans, you might just abstract it entirely, and even when a squad might be 15 Cloud Giants rather than 100 Elves you still might. But there is at least a temptation to track casualties separately from wounds. Basically, attacks big enough to drop units outright would cause casualties (which would reduce the number of characters in the unit with all that entails), and attacks that are not big enough would go into some sort of wounds counter that would add up to casualties. Both kinds of hits could damage organization and morale. When a unit might be literally just a single kraken or dragon, it's pretty important to be able to track whether something is wounded but not killed as it's pretty unlikely that anything on the field is going to be able to kill it in one blow.

-Username17

Makes sense. Casualties are long term degradation of combat efficiency (the "steps" that most wargames relegate units to as they take damage). "Health" is their squishiness or how much punishment they can take before their combat efficiency is degraded. Morale is probably the short term "health bar" that is in flux pretty much constantly. In a more complex mass combat system morale would probably be tied in pretty closely with the ability to receive and act on orders in a quick manner.