Dungeons & Dragons has always been written and balanced around party combat. Most RPGs are. But that level of detail quickly breaks down when you double or triple the number of combatants. The scenario I want is not a full-blown army vs army encounter. DnD doesn't have any native "mass combat" rules anyways, but lots of people (and I believe an Unearthed Arcana article) have tried making some. No, I'm looking for something like a few dozen NPCs backing up the PCs as they fight against a few dozen bad guys and a few stand-out bad guy NPCs. Which I haven't seen anything for.
So I need to make my own rules. In fact, I have, and I just had a chance to playtest them a little recently. So if you are like me and want to do a set-piece battle that isn't quite army vs army, hopefully this will help you too. I'm going to start by outlining the system in general, the next post will fill in the mechanical details.
How Should This Feel Different From Normal Combat?
Let's be honest, most RPG combat turns into miss, miss, miss, I hit it with my axe, miss, miss, miss, I hit it with my axe. Boring. You're waiting on the other players' turns, waiting on the monsters' turns, and then a brief moment in the sun when you actually get to do something, followed by frustration if you miss or back to the waiting cycle. This Skirmish Combat system is designed for more active, grander combats. For when a lot is on the line, the fate of a city, stopping an invasion before it can start (or starting one). For when the players are leading dozens of allies into battle. And this style of combat is meant to be more engaging, to keep the players interested in the combat itself - not just the loot drop after or getting past an obstacle.Highlighting The Logistical Layer Of Combat
I once heard logistics defined as "having the right thing at the right place at the right time." This dynamic nature, different things that need to be in different places at different times, is what makes larger combats engaging. Archers are strong at range, but weak in melee - so you need to get your melee troops to the enemy's archers, or keep the enemy melee troops away from your archers. This exists even in party-scaled combat, like the MMO trinity of Tank, DPS and Healer, and it exists in RPGs like DnD. I think the big problem with RPG combat though is the level of detail and game design that goes into creating individual abilities, which steals the focus from how those individual abilities can chain together and work in coordination. One of the big things I want this Skirmish level to do is strip away some of the detail on the individual and put more emphasis on how individuals interact and can support each other. In party combat you can usually survive with each person acting on their own, but in group combat (like this Skirmish or full Mass combat rules) all the individuals have to work together or else they will be defeated (called a "defeat in detail," when a large force is beaten one piece at a time, usually because that force did not stay together).There is something to look out for however, and that's the fact that not all role-players are also war-gamers. Skirmish combat needs to be simple enough that its principles are easy to understand by those who are casually picking it up, and also needs to look as much like regular RPG party combat as possible so the player doesn't have to memorize a ton of extra rules. That's going to be a tricky balance to maintain.
Player-Focused
Another thing about this system, I'm using this for when the players are the ones leading the battle. This is designed for the players to be heavily involved and invested in the turn-by-turn flow of the fight. That means they have to be leaders, have to be driving the combat. If the PCs are just in the fight but not driving it, then you don't need rules for all the battle stuff going on, just narrate it in the background, like you would a storm or fire behind the PCs while they struggled with another goal.Because of this, every unit in the Skirmish system is generally made up of 2 parts: the Captain and the Supports. Captains are characters, PCs or NPCs, while Supports are abbreviated/streamlined groups of lower-level/lesser background characters.
Turning Characters Into Captains
By and large PCs work the same way as Captains as they do in regular party-level combat. They have the same hit points, and use their usual attacks. Defense is a bit different. When dealing with 12 vs 12 combats, there is no such thing as nobody getting hit. While a few attackers may miss, others will hit, enough so that on average some amount of damage is always dealt. Seeings how damage is already being randomized by rolling dice, that will represent how many hit out of the group. So Armor Class needs to be re-worked. What we do is convert it to Damage Reduction. A Captain's DR is just a lowered form of their AC. Any Energy Resistance works normally.Another big change is that Captains get a Resolve Modifier. Since there are groups of people all working together in the fight, we need to measure how well the unit is acting as a whole. In real life many battles have been won, or turned decisively, when a group dissolved into individuals and lost their will to fight. I didn't want to call this Morale like in other versions of DnD or other games, I'm using this in my own way after all, so I call it "Resolve." A unit's Resolve DC is the number a Captain has to roll to keep the unit together and following orders. We don't use it a lot, if a unit charges a superior force in what looks like a suicidal maneuver there is no Resolve check as long as they have a Captain. After all, combat is dangerous and so the Supports know they might be killed. That's just to cut down on the amount of dice-rolling; I want the players spending more time thinking about and analyzing the battlefield than juggling dice. Also, it means that breaking an enemy unit's resolve is something the players have to plan for, and they don't have to worry about their own soldiers running away at random. Captains don't check Resolve for themselves, under the principle that the GM/system should not force a player's actions or take away their agency. Likewise NPC Captains are under the GM's control (and the GM is always free to throw an even/odd die if they want to leave it in the hands of fate).
Lastly, Captains can also have special abilities. I'm not sure about exactly how to so this one. Normally I'd say that a Captain Ability would be for characters who took the Leadership feat or such. But that isn't as big of a thing in DnD 5e, and I don't want to limit non-fighter-centric characters from being able to contribute. So I'm tempted to make a list of 5 or so abilities for each class, and then let every character pick one every 4-5 levels from their classes. Speaking of abilities, since this is group combat a character's abilities need to be re-examined. In order to effect the combat as a whole a character needs to use an ability that effects multiple people and lasts for minutes or more. So some class abilities may not have a noticeable effect. And spells have to be re-examined as well, which I'll talk about later. I haven't sat down yet to pour over the books and figure out which class abilities should do what.
Oh yeah, Captains can also lead more than one support depending on their level.
Cannon Fodder... er... I mean... Supports
Now the real meat of the system, the Supports, the people (and maybe animals) that are following our heroic players into battle. We can't track each supporting individual, well, individually, since that would be tons of extra bookkeeping. But we can turn them into a special kind of character. Now, I don't really like the mass combat systems out there that just reduce every army unit to a character. That seems to be over-simplifying things. But in this case, I think it can work with one change to how characters work. In party combat each character is perfectly and fully capable in combat until they totally drop out of combat at 0 HP. So I think if we make a Support like a character, compacting several individuals into one set of numbers, but - with Supports as they lose members they also loose effectiveness. Supports have 3 tiers: Coherent is around full HP. Shaken starts at about 66% HP. And Faltering is from 33% HP to 1. Of course 0 HP means the unit has been totally Destroyed. For each tier the Support's attack damage gets lower, the Resolve DC gets higher, and units that depend on each other for defense (like a phalanx) lose defense as well.Most Supports also have a special ability, which is the main function of that unit. So Calvary can Charge, Archers might have a Barrage, stuff like that. Speaking of which, Supports have a class, like players, so Infantry, Calvary, Artillery. And they have a level, since they need to scale with the players in order to stay relevant.
Supports do just that, they Support the Captain and each other. So each Support has a damage rating (for both melee and ranged) that gets added to the Captain's regular damage. This creates one damage total for all the units. However, Supports can act without a Captain, they just will do their own damage and have a flat d20 roll for their Resolve, so they will not be as effective as a Captain/Support combo, and they will be more likely to fail Resolve checks.
The Flow Of Combat
Speaking of damage, let's go over the combat turn in general. In party combat each round is 6 seconds long. For Skirmish combat, each round is 1 minute. Party combat also measures everything in feet, while Skirmish uses "zones." A zone is a general area that's big enough for several units, say about 9 units of any number of Supports each. Just because two units are in the same zone does not mean they are engaged in melee combat (zones are big). By default personal ranged weapons can reach to an adjacent zone, while artillery usually reaches 3-4 zones. A Support's movement speed is how many zones it can cover in one turn.The first thing is to set the battlefield. The GM needs to know what enemies are involved and where the battle will take place. The players need to know what Supports are available to them, and decide on who is commanding what. Also the players need to pick a starting position for their forces, from wherever the GM allows.
Because the goal is to get the players more involved in combat, initiative is handled differently. The players always go first. Whenever a player interacts with an NPC unit they both roll damage (even if one side totally destroys the other, there will still be some blows from both sides - in 12 v 12 combat the odds of "instant death" are pretty slim). Once a player has finished commanding all their units, that player then chooses the next player to act. Again, this is to try and reinforce teamwork between the players. Once all the players have gone, if there are any NPC units that haven't acted the GM moves them.
On a turn units can move once and attack/ use an ability once. Or the unit can move twice, not attacking or using any abilities. Other things might use an action like climbing ladders/ stairs.
Warmages and Battlepriests
Magic is a tricky thing in general, but it gets more difficult in Skirmish combat. Because of the longer time for each round, and the fact that multiple characters are involved, some spells (and abilities, these guidelines could work for both) would not logically have much of an impact. Take "True Strike," a cantrip that gives the caster Advantage to hit on the next attack roll. From a Skirmish standpoint, this spell is useless, a single attack with advantage to hit is not a big enough change to effect the round. But from a game design standpoint, saying that a character's abilities are useless is not a good thing, we don't want players to get frustrated. So at the moment (and this may change a little or lot with playtesting) I'm going to strike a compromise. Some spells are useless, like True Strike. But lets look at another spell, "Mage Armor." As a 1st level spell that grants AC to any single character not wearing armor and lasts 8 hours, we have some room to play with here. So, the core principle of Skirmish magic is: lowering one type of effect can be used to bolster another effect. So that 8 hour duration is long, too long. A first level spell should not last the entire battle. But the single target is too weak, like with True Strike, buffing a single character is useless in group combat. So lets create the Warmage version of the spell - by dropping the duration from hours to a single Skirmish turn we can increase the effect to cover the Captain and all attached Supports. We don't do AC, just DR, so we'll say the spell is a DR bonus, like +2 (or +caster Int mod?), but it's supposed to only effect unarmored targets, so we'll say the DR bonus only applies to Captains or Supports with a DR of 3 or less. Now the spell can be useful, but it is still kind of weak - which makes sense given that this is just a 1st level spell.So, single-target spells need a long duration to lower to make then effective. Spells that already hit a group, like a combat spell that has a Line or Cone of effect work normally (since they are already designed to hit multiple targets). I'm tempted to say that Burst spells, like a Fireball that hits everything within range, would actually get a bonus to damage since they completely cover their area of effect. Skirmish combat doesn't use saving throws, this is just to reduce the amount of bookkeeping, so some spells that have a save might use a Resolve check instead. Which brings us to...
Resolve Checks
Every support has a Resolve DC, like 11+. This is a d20 roll with no modifiers if the Support is acting alone, or with the Captain's Resolve Modifier if the Support has an attached Captain. Special abilities by Supports and Captains will have a specific effect if the Resolve check succeeds or fails. Sometimes the effect on a failed check is that the Support becomes "Broken." Resolve represents how well the Support is acting as a single force, so when a Support's Resolve fails they have stopped acting together. A Broken Support does half damage, has half their DR (rounded down, minimum of 0 for both), and will move away from combat as quickly as possible. Once the Support has gotten out of combat they will stop and hold their position, only moving again to escape enemy forces. Any Captain can move next to a Broken unit any try to re-form them with a Resolve check. On success the Support loses the broken condition and acts normally, on a failure the unit remains broken.Resolve is a powerful effect. Historically there have been many battles where units have lost their resolve and turned the tide of battle. Penalties to Resolve also stack during the same turn. For example, one player has a special ability that forces the enemy to make a Resolve check at -2. The enemy passes the check. The player hands the turn off to another player, who has the same ability. Now the enemy has to make a check at -4, because the stresses of combat are piling up. This is to encourage the players to work together.
Resolve isn't just a weapon, some abilities that buff friendly units will call for a Resolve check too.
So that's an overview of my Skirmish system/ house rules. This was designed for DnD 5e, since that's what I'm running at the moment, but I think it shouldn't be too hard to adapt this to other systems. Next post I'll get into the details of how the system works so you can try it yourself if you want.
You can find the rest of this series here
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