Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Crynuss Jun 03, 2015 22:36:59	Hi everyone, just signed up and first post here.   I just got into 5E and really enjoying it. I'm working on my own campaign at the moment and have an idea that I need some help with.   I have an idea of a main hub for the party. It's a refugee camp where they have been sending people they rescue from an evil army sweeping across the land. What I'm trying to develop are ways to "level up" the camp. Food, weapons, supplies, morale, training etc. Doing quests and buying things for the camp is easy enough to equip them or train, but I don't want it to be they got a sword now they can fight like heroes.   I would eventually like the players to turn the refugees into an army themselves to fight the evil army, but going from scared farmers to soldiers is a bit tricky.   Any ideas how I could track effectiveness of the camp or readiness or whatever to get them ready for war, and how effective they would be in the fight?     Thanks!
#2 OGRE1984 Jun 04, 2015 0:21:43	look in the articles for unearthed arcana; battlesystem for mass combat rules. loyalty and morale rules from DMG should help as well. look at commoner vs. guard and use downtime rules to train the commoners into guards. more training for scouts perhaps? you could also toy around with giving first level class option to a special core group to reflect like special forces training. i haven't read the battlesystem rules yet, but i recomend keeping things simple. skirmish level battles vs. large army warfare. heroes of battle for 3.5 might help give some ideas, i recall an idea about victory points and recognition awards.
#3 FactOfFiction Jun 04, 2015 0:56:20	If you are willing to put up with the extra work - you can allow them to take few of the camp refuges as henchment and train them while (hopefully keeping them alive) during their adventures. Then the trainees can in return become teachers. For example if they want to train some of their refuges as fighter - they one or two of the strongest and they join them only with the hp and proficiencies of a fighter and their background before comming to the camp. They over the course of 2-3 encounters (if they survive) they raise to a lvl 3 fighter and retire from adventuring to training duty. Make sure the henchmens never catch up enough with the party so they don't overshadow them and are more of an responsibility than an advantage and it should be ok.   If you wan't to train one of the henchmens in a class/archetype that is not present in the group - make it a quest itself to find some dusty old grimoire or training manual or even recruit a proper teacher. If they start to bring too many henchmens with them - just use some AOE attacks and traps to cut their numbers - the more people they bring with them - the harder it will be to keep all of them alive.   After that you can use some of the trained refuges for a quest hooks. Maybe they have a promising valor bard, but now that he can swing a sword - he is dead set on going on a quest to save the love of his life against odds that for the clear headed seem impossible unless he gets some help. Hit them with a plague so that they have to find a cure or a doctor fast enough if they don't want to loose big part of their camp. Meet them with a tribe of proud warriors that fight against the same enemy, but have decided it's their fight and their fight alone, so the party have to earn their respect before being able to recruit them.   Things like that.
#4 iserith Jun 04, 2015 11:43:42	I am seeing a lot of what you'd like for your players to do, but are your players bought into doing what you want here? Is this their goal or is it yours? It's worth considering.   Assuming they want to do this, then "turn refugees into army" is a character goal. Now you need to know what their approach to this will be and, given the size of this task, it will probably spawn multiple sub-goals. Once these are clear, you can then place challenges between the characters and the achievement of each of these goals. If they succeed, then they achieve that sub-goal and make progress to their overarching goal. So "get weapons to equip the army" might be a goal, the challenge might be a lack of weapons due to the current state of war. How do they deal with this? Perhaps they steal a cache of weapons from the enemy or negotiate with the dwarves for armaments. Once they've succeeded in that, they need to train the refugees to fight. How do they do that? Perhaps a quest is in order to find veterans from an army broken by the villain and convince them to help. Or whatever. Present the challenges to their goals, then ask the players how they deal with it. Narrate the result accordingly.   To sum up, just follow the design loop: character goal --> challenge --> achievement. Repeat. And then it becomes easy to see how to set up your adventures and campaign. Effectiveness can be ascertained by setting particular benchmarks to achieve. If they achieve them all, they are capable of beating the villain's army. If they achieve most but not all, then they can beat the villain's army only if the PCs can pull off some critical mission during the battle. If they fail to achieve most of the benchmarks, then the refugee army is doomed, but it slows down the villain's progress - for a time.
#5 Tempest_Stormwind Jun 04, 2015 11:58:51	I see from your question that you seem to want a system of rules to operate within ("track effectiveness"), while the responses experienced GMs are giving you are more narrative-driven. It's not like you're going to find something like +2 Combat Readiness, -1 Morale or the like ready to go, nor would that necessarily be the best way to handle this.   I think a narrative loop is the way to go here. When the time comes to press your army into battle, ask yourself "If the PCs failed every task, what would the outcome be? If the PCs didn't do anything extraordinary, what would the outcome be? If the PCs went above and beyond in the pursuit of preparing the army, what would the outcome be?" And then just go with that.       All that said, my group is about to start up a game which has a civilization-building component to it - clearing out wilderness or sea routes to make things safe for our civilian allies to settle and expand - which is related to your concept. I'll see about passing along anything we come up with. (However, I'll be joining the game late, it seems, since my schedule is kind of full.)       EDIT: It occurs to me that if you need a system, you can also poach Renown (DMG 22). Instead of representing rank in an organization, it reflects readiness of your army - strength of your soldiers, size of your army, and so on. Deeds spent improving the army are the ones that increase renown, with the actual renown score reflecting the aggregate result. Your "system" is therefore just a matter of assigning levels of overall army strength to particular renown breakpoints (for example, using the UA When Armies Clash system, stands start out as Commoners, but are replaced with Guards or Veterans at higher Renown ranks); actually running this once that's designed is as simple as the regular renown system.
#6 guachi Jun 05, 2015 22:11:05	The old BECMI War Machine rules are very good. You can find them in the C part of the rules set - Companion - or the Rules Cyclopedia which was a hard cover compilation. The Rules Cyclopedia is available for ten dollars on dndclassics.com. War Machine has good but simple rules for calculating the effectiveness of an army based on a variety of basic traits - weapon quality, training, leader quality, leader level, weapon type, spell use, etc. It might even give you good ideas for adventure ideas.   The henchman idea is great and War Machine gives you a way to calculate the results from having higher level leaders (because small unit leader quality matters) Also, look at Battle System for 1e or 2e. I picked up a near mint boxed 1e battle system for $20 on eBay last fall. Battle System and War Machine serve different purposes - the former is small scale combat and the later larger scale.   I found them both (especially War Machine) immensely useful running campaigns in the '80s.
#7 Crynuss Jun 04, 2015 21:01:29	Thanks everyone for the responses so far. I'm getting a lot of ideas here.   For implementing them I admit I haven't thought that far ahead. I haven't run a game yet, we're still playing a game my friend is hosting then I will be next.  So I have plenty of time to figure out how I want to do this. This part of the campaign will also be fairly late in the overall story, so it will give me lots of time to set up those challenges and achievments that have been mentioned. See what's happened so far with the characters and kind of approach they've taken.   I definitely agree that if they don't do anything to help their camp function then it won't be ready, so taking the idea of alternatives is a great idea. As for the tracking, it doesn't necessarily have to be a set of rules, maybe just a basic chart or ideas on categories that I can add my own numbers to, kind of like loyalty in the DMG , but I will be checking out everything people have mentioned.   Thanks for all the advice so far