Mass Combat

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Blobathehutt
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Mass Combat

Post by Blobathehutt »

Hey all sorry for being away so long life is not always kind but I'm back for now!

Anyways lets get on with this, How would you handle mass combat in your game? you know like war or other large battles? I have a game that I plan on a war coming up in and I want to have a way to do mass combat in such a way that the player has some control have the outcome of the battle. So any tips for this?
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Malancthon
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Re: Mass Combat

Post by Malancthon »

Cool question. The simple answer is Combat Expert, it's more than just being good in a single fight.

If you're thinking of how to lead troops and such, using Combat Expert plus Smart and Knowledge (Military or Tactics or anything else applicable). Penalties would include the size of the opposing army (if greater than the player's army or troops). If there is a commanding officer on the other side, then have opposed rolls. If there isn't, assign an appropriate difficulty number based on how large or skilled the opposing army is. For example, a smaller and less skilled army would be an Easy difficulty, a smaller but skilled army or an equal but less skilled army would be Moderate difficulty, an equally skilled and sized army would be a Challenging difficulty, a greater skilled or greater numbered army would be Difficult difficulty (...), a greater skilled and greater numbered army would be Very Difficult, and an overwhelming army would be Nigh Impossible. You'd probably want to assign multiple challenges, such as representing taking key locations or getting a good ambush. If you want to stretch the combat out, you could say each Success requires a day to be accomplished. Then figure 2 to 5 successes wins the battle.

If you're thinking more like combat sequence, it'd probably do to make an NPC fragment that serves as a group of minions. Figure that each 10 Health equals to a member of the group or squad. So creating an NPC Fragment with 50 Health would represent about 5 or so minions. You could represent this as either Tough or make a new Ability such as Extra Minion. You could even use the Minions Ability to create such a group fragment. I'd give them a relatively minor combat abilities, such as Combat Expert +1, since usually in fiction, only one person from a group attacks at a time. You could then assign the Scale advantage if they all swarm at once (which would probably be an uncommon tactic). This would be appropriate for characters who are practically superhuman or unconventionally deadly and able to take on whole legions by themselves (like Rambo or Guts from Berserk)
Blobathehutt
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Re: Mass Combat

Post by Blobathehutt »

Thank you very much! This has helped a lot :)
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Clay
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Re: Mass Combat

Post by Clay »

It depends on how you want to handle "war" in general. If you want to treat it more like a mini game, where the heroes are directing their armies like chessmen on a board instead of being true participants themselves, you can definitely make various "NPCs" that represent groups of combatants. The main addition I would make is to create a more definitive death spiral, so that an "injured" combat group becomes increasingly less effective as it takes damage (that is, as units get incapacitated.) You can either make a Weakness to represent this, or just change the –1 Penalty when Health/Endurance is depleted to where it happens at other stages as well. (ie. Half Health –1, Zero Health –2, Half Endurance –3, and so on.) You could elaborate with all sorts of special maneuvers that leaders can do to increase attacks or enable retreat and so on.

On the other hand, if your heroes are out there on the front lines, I would treat the "war" itself as background noise. Have the heroes mow through enemies, and let their general success or failure also represent the battle itself. (Take down the main villain? The battle is won! Take heavy damage? The battle is being lost and a retreat is mandatory.)
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