Mass Combat Rules Constraints

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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mlangsdorf
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Post by mlangsdorf »

Zinegata wrote: Your campaign in particular is unusual because you have two characters per player - with one character being specialized as a battle piece and the other as an individual diplomat, and that the "battle" party and the "diplomat" party tend to work separately.
The composition of the two teams changes over time, though. Aisling and Ariana swapped teams between session 5 and 6, for instance, and since then, the players tend to ad-hoc teams based on what they expect they'll need to do.

Greex the cowardly kobold actively avoids combat, but he gets pulled into a lot of infiltration missions because he's the best PC for getting into an orc stronghold unnoticed. All the generals have had to get into personal-scale fights, and all the diplomat/individual action PCs have fought in plenty of mass combats, both as a strike team of heroes and as contributors in a battle of with hundreds or thousands on a side.

And the campaign was originally set up for 1 character per player; the troupe style thing got pushed on me after several players came up with multiple concepts they really wanted to play and insisted they get the opportunity. The flexibility to do multiple things at once has really helped the PCs, but the game could have worked with 1 set of PCs that did everything.
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virgil
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Post by virgil »

After reading the actual book itself, what's the flaw in using a rejiggered GURPS Mass Combat?
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Username17
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Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:After reading the actual book itself, what's the flaw in using a rejiggered GURPS Mass Combat?
It doesn't plug into any abilities in the main game you're playing.
GURPS Mass Combat is certainly one of the more reasonable places to start. As is, weirdly enough, L5R Mass Combat. But you'll ultimately want something that takes inputs from the RPG you're playing and which the RPG you're playing is intended to produce outputs that can be used as inputs by it.

Which is a longwinded way of saying that what you actually want is a mass combat minigame that is symbiotic with and created side by side with the fantasy RPG in question. So that your characters get abilities that interact with mass combat and so that when the players do surprising things to get stuff from the monster manual on their team that you have a meaningful way of adjudicating what that does for your army's chances.

To go back to the first post, this means that you need to have character progressions that do get abilities that interact with your mass combat system and don't get abilities that completely invalidate having armies in the first place. On the flip side, the mass combat minigame needs to be able to meaningfully differentiate getting hobgoblin infantry, getting fire giant rhinoceros riders, and getting giant eagles. Or whatever else it is that the characters in your game could conceivably add to their army or fight against in another.

-Username17
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