It’s been a while since the last adventure article, and I promise it isn’t dead! I will be getting back to it soon, but for now I’d thought I’d show off what I have been working on!
I have been working on a new mass combat system I could get excited about. I’ve used many in the past, from Colville’s very simple and abstract system to more complicated ones that made me give up in confusion and even WotC’s mass combat system that was just meh. One of the problems with every system I have tried was all the new mechanics and words for abilities that already existed in the 5e system and how they either went too far into simplicity or went too far into abstraction that I had no idea what an army was even made up of.
So I created my own, and it’s a mixture of abstraction and detailed information. It abstracts out individual units for an entire army, but keeps in the detailed information players might ask like just how many soldiers do they actually have and what type of equipment they have. Before I start talking about this thing that has been my sole focus for about a month now, here is a link to the warfare system.
Abstracted Reality
My ultimate goal for this system was to create something that used as many of the mechanics found in Dungeons & Dragons system and keep up a level of abstraction and detail. This means that it does require a bit more work then a wholly abstract system, but in exchange you are given more detailed information and the finished army is in a form that DMs will all recognize, and most players will recognize and understand how to use it as well.
There are a few differences between this statblock and other statblocks, the major ones being that an army has no Speed but rather a Move and that there is no Challenge Rating but rather an Army Size. Everything else on a statblock is familiar and can quickly be looked over and understood by someone who has used monster statblocks before.
But those are just the most obvious changes, other things that are changed is that Constitution is now a signifier of army size and has no bearing on the actual ability of a creature. There are still Constitution saving throws and checks, but all that is influenced by the size of the army. The score gets larger and smaller based on the army size and the number of troops; a small army consists of 100 to 3,000 troops, a medium army consists of 3,000 to 30,000 troops, and a large army consists of 30,000 to 300,000 troops.
Just like a monster’s size affects the size of their hit die, so does an army’s size affect its hit die. Small armies have a d10 per 100 soldiers, medium armies a d100 per 1,000 soldiers, and large armies have a d1,000 per 10,000 soldiers. By simplying their hit points, it means that for every hit point they lose, you can easily tell that they lost 10 soldiers.
When your army takes 12 points of damage in a round, you are losing 120 soldiers. When your army deals 28 points of damage off of that crit, you are killing off 280 soldiers and, depending on how big an army you are fighting, they just lost a sizable chunk of their soldiers.
Damage
Damage is a big question and makes it really difficult to determine how to balance armies against each other. If an army only has 300 troops and they are fighting an army with 300,000 troops, how do you decide how that works? What if those 300 troops are really, really good? Like, say they are the 300 Spartans vs the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae?
Before I make anyone incredibly angry, I know it wasn’t just 300 Spartans, there were a few thousand there but I’m making a point! Most people would say that that would be a cake walk and the damage would be overwhelming… but I wanted to created a chance for smaller forces to make them viable. So armies roll damage die based on their proficiency bonus. If you have a +4 proficiency bonus, you roll 4 times as many damage die on an attack roll. If you only have a +2 proficiency bonus, you only roll 2 times as many damage die on an attack roll.
So, the Spartans are an Elite army with a +6 proficiency bonus. They have spears and so they get to roll 6d8 piercing damage on an attack. The Persians (for the sake of this comparison) only have the experience level of an Irregular army as they keep adding in troops who had never battled before. They have a +3 proficiency bonus, and when they use their spears, they only roll 3d8 piercing damage.
But, wait. They have more troops! They have more men! They should deal more damage just because there is more of them! And I completely agree, so now larger armies get to make multiple attacks per round. A large army, such as the Persians, get to attack four times a round because they have so many soldiers in their army. In effect, the Persians get to roll 3d8 piercing damage four times every round.
Experience and size are major components of an army, and thus damage is going to scale off of both of those along with equipment bought and used.
For those curious, a round is 2 hours of conflict, not 6 seconds like in a typical round in D&D. 2 hours allows armies to move their soldiers around, make substantial blows and allows for up to 12 rounds per day if there is non-stop fighting.
Spellcasting
You know what is a massive pain in my ass? Spellcasters. They cheat, you create a chasm and they make a bridge with wall of stone. You make a monster that can’t be damaged by mortal weapons and they enchant the fighter’s blade with magic weapon. They are big ol’ cheaters and can do a million things with the snap of their fingers. And did I mention they enjoy blowing things up with fireball? It’s just not fair.
So how do you corral and beat spellcasters into submission and make them a functioning part of your army? My philosophy was to simplify and abstract what they can do. Take the basics of what spellcasters do and remove the idea of spell slots. As each round is 2 hours, that’s a long time and a spellcaster can burn through their spell slots in a handful of minutes. Instead, we take what they can do and turn it into specific actions they can take. They can deal damage, heal their army, scare their enemies and more. They are a power house of damage, but they are rare, at least I would assume in most worlds they are rare. Thus, you are limited by the number of casters you have in your army, but luckily you only need a few to be effective. Currently, you only need 1 spellcaster per 100 soldiers to deal some actual damage to the army and I find that nice.
Sure, a single caster could cast fireball and hit a sizable group of soldiers, but soldiers don’t always die to fireball, some will be protected by their comrades taking the brunt of the explosion and they can hide undercover. But when you have 20 casters all casting fireball, now you are dealing damage that an army is going to take notice of.
All this to say, spellcasting is powerful but it isn’t OP. You need a lot of spellcasters and they need are limited to how often they can take part in a day with the strongest of spellcasters only being able to take part for 3 rounds, or 6 hours, per day.
Specialized Units
Like I mentioned before, I wanted an army that is composed of multiple banners, legions and loyalty, to operate as a single entity. But how do you do that? Well, you lump them all into one thing. Great. But now, there is nothing special about them. How do you make an army of spearmen feel unique when fighting another army of spearmen? Specialized units allow you to make a small portion of your army unique with different equipment or different abilities, like calvary, or produce massive siege engines that will destroy your opponents.
These units allow you to have some customizations and do more with your army than one thing. It helps to cut down on costs and you can create a vanguard or elite force that can be truly fearsome.
The only problem I kept running into is… how do you make them viable? They are a small force, how do you deal with their damage? I decided that due to how small they are, they only ever get the normal die of damage for their weapon instead of getting an amount equal to their proficiency bonus, and if they are especially small they only ever deal half damage on a hit. It nerfs a bit of their usability, but because this doesn’t affect the damage output of the regular army, it’s a good solid chance to do a bit more damage or to add a bit of strategy into the game. If the calvary break off and head towards the siege engine while the two main armies are attacking each other, either the army is going to have to break off their attack and go defend their siege engines, or watch as their siege engines are destroyed.
Traits & Bonuses
Something else to differientiate armies is their racial make up, which looks horrible when you type it out…. Thanks D&D! Anyways, the ancestrial make up of an army determines what racial bonuses and traits they’ll earn but every army gets a trait and continues to gain traits and skills as they get more experienced. This just allows armies to focus on specific things and become known for operating in a specific type of way. It also makes it so that an army of aarakocra will operate differently than a mixed ancestry army as it should.
Even More Things
Now, I could go on and on about how I learned way too much about fortifications or that the traction trebuchet was used long before we ever had the counterpoise trebuchet or that the ballista is an anti-personnel device and wasn’t that good at shooting at a structure, but at that point… You might as well read the rules, I’d be parroting a lot in there, but for a quick summary of information you can find in there…
I include rules for:
Upkeep and paying your army
Fortifications and how long it takes to build a wall or moat
Siege engines and their effect in battle and in rounds
Traveling and how fast an army marches from one place to the next
Weather conditions and how that effects combat
Morale and how your army might break on you during the fighting
And so much more!
This was over a month of research, writing, testing, and repeating it all over again to get a system that is abstract, but still has some gritty details in there. I wanted to mimic real-life, but remove a lot of the sludge and crunch that would go along with it.
I hope you like it, and even if you don’t end up using it, maybe there are a few things in there you can steal for your own games.
