Book Of War

About a year ago I was in search of some kind of quick and easy yet accurate skirmish rules for use in our Swords & Wizardry campaign.  There was a large battle coming up between our heroes and some rebel watchmen of Caladan and a small army of undead and I wanted not to have to roll the entire combat out.

At the time I experimented with the S&W mass combat rules but they didn't quite work for me.  I mixed that up a bit with simple streamlined Mass Combat rules created by Justin from Old School Psionic.  I also looked at Song of Blades and Heroes.  None of these quite worked for me.

I even looked at Warpath, a Pathfinder supplement for larger scale combats but I have to admit I was turned off by, what I felt were overcomplicated rules and cross rules.  There is no way I'd remember any of that in this day and age.

I ran some skirmish combats on my own and just wasn't totally enthusiastic about any of it.  I wanted the larger combat to flow seamlessly in and out of the general campaign play at the table.

Alas, I ended up running the combat in game at the table at regular scale.  It didn't hurt the session at all and everyone seemed to have a good time during the hack and slash battle (though it did take a session and a half).

Always in the back of my mind I hoped to find a set of rules that I can easily adapt to the campaign.

With another possible larger scale battle looming in the distant horizon I've returned to seeking a solution to Mass Combat.

I think I may have found it in Daniel Collins' Original Edition Delta Book of War.

I don't know how I missed these rules (or this blog, it's filled with plenty of useful classic D&D info).  I like his philosophy on creation of these mass-combat miniatures rules, compatible with original D&D and similar systems.

Apparently this has been a quest for "Delta" for many years and he released these rules late last year.

He seems to have put a ton of thought into the scale and balance of his mass combat rules to fit seamlessly into an OD&D campaign and it's ilk (or to be played on it's own).   In fact, one might even say that Book of War is a direct descendent of the original Chainmail.

With simple d6 mechanics that mirror the results of actual played out combat at full OD&D scale it appealed to my rules lite mentality.  The rules also covered Heroes, Wizards and Magical Creatures.

I read through the compact 24 page set of miniature rules this weekend and was pretty enthusiastic about it.  I'm giving it another read now and will probably run some test skirmishes later this week.  I'll keep you posted on my findings.

If you're looking for some mass combat rules to fit into your campaign you  might want to give Book of War a look.

Skirmish (Mass) Combat Part 2

First off, let me say that I'm not any type of expert at 'creating' gaming rules. I'm fine with tweaking and altering something that exists already and lifting and mixing from other sources but to flat out creating balanced war-game, rpg rules, - nope, not me. There are plenty of other folks out there who are much better creating something like that than me.

So I'm still looking for some alterations on the Swords & Wizardry Mass Combat rules which I've scaled down to just Skirmish Rules.

Justin from Old School Psionics came up with some simple streamlined Mass Combat rules. I'll be giving those a closer look later today.

I also ran across these sets of rules; Song of Blades and Heroes from Ganesha Games which looks promising on some levels. For only $5 for the pdf download from Lulu, it's worth checking out.

Grungi posted his results of a similar combat yesterday using the Gabor Lux's Swords and Magic Retro clone and the Ghouls overwhelmed the soldiers as well. That verifies some of the results that I've been getting in my sample combats as well. Very similar to the Swords & Wizardry Combat rules but with a few more things added.

Conclusion: Ghouls are pretty bad-ass as an 'army'.

So there's a lot to look over today but some of the questions I'm looking to answer are the following:

Defensive positions, how would they come into play and for how long?

Would monster units get multiple attacks? Some folks say yes, but how would a special attack such as Paralyzing touch from a ghoul come into play for a unit vs unit battle?

What about the ghoul units that were 'wounded', how would that be handled after the battle? In the example above, sure some of the Ghoul units were hit and their HP numbers deflated, even to zero (which doesn't mean they are killed) but how many are actually left?

How would a PC support a friendly unit in combat or moral? What about adjacent units?

Mass Combat Part 1

In my most recent S&W session we had a battle of about 40 ghouls vs about 30+ soldiers and a couple of PCs. As I wasn't yet 'fluent' in the S&W mass combat rules and thought I'd like to see the battle play out in 'real scale' we started rolling the dice. It actually worked out pretty well and didn't take too long, though we still have to finish the battle in the next session.

However....

I don't think I would run something like that again as a straight combat. So it was off to explore the S&W Mass Combat rules.

I ran through the same combat, minus the PCs, on my own to see how it would turn out compared the actual combat. Using the Swords & Wizardry mass combat rules the Ghouls pretty much overwhelmed the soldiers. Perhaps that is what would really happen? Ghouls are pretty vicious creatures and with forces of equal number on both sides the ghouls would still have the advantage.

For those unfamiliar with the Swords & Wizardry Mass Combat rules, they are part of the Core Rules and only take up two pages. The rules are quite simple, as they should be. Soldiers and monsters are grouped in units of 5 or 10, hit points added for a unit's total and you roll on the regular charts to determine out come. If a hit is scored, the unit is not destroyed (1 in 6 chance) but could be 'broken' and unable to fight until moral (d%) is made. That's just a broad stroke and if you are more interested in reading the details you can download the free version of the rules and look it over yourself.

A number of questions come up using these rules as is, and who says you have to use the rules as is?

Ghouls normally get 3 attacks per round, would this hold true in Mass Combat? Thus three chances to 'wound' a unit and roll a d6 for reaction results? That would seem pretty extreme but perhaps true to the monster. Perhaps just one attack with a d6 damage would be fine. For other monsters as well? How would you handle the paralyzing effect of their attacks?

How are PC's handled? That's not really handled much in the rules. A unit attacking a PC does half damage to the PC which could still be pretty vicious and deadly. In this case, would Ghouls still get their 3 attacks? How would the PC's presence affect the ally unit's moral on breaking?

I know the Mass Combat Rules are a very broad stroke to handle a situation like this and maybe works fine for larger scale battles but groups of about 10-50 combatants on each side should be handled by this rule as well as taking the PC abilities into account. So maybe what I'm looking for isn't mass combat but something in-between?

This week I'll be exploring this Mass Combat system and tweaking things and hopefully come up with some useful additions. I want to keep it simple and don't want to break out of the RPG and into a totally different (war) game. I'm looking to make or add some supplemental tweaks to make a combat such as this flow better within the scope of a table top RPG and make it fun, exciting and have the outcome be 'realistic' in terms of the outcome of standard melee combat.

If anyone has any thoughts on this I'd love to hear from them. I'd want to keep things pretty quick and simple using the Mass Combat rules but tweaked a bit to make it a bit more scaled to a large group of combatants and not so much an army.