I'm running a Birthright campaign and the plot line came to a point of an epic battle so I thought we should try out the new Unearthed Arcana: When armies clash rules.
Basic plot was that the PCs are a group, largely from Rosoene, that leads a couple mercenary companies hired by the Baron of ghoere. The Baron wants to invade Rosoene and wants the merc companies to join him for land titles. Some of the PCs are already from Rosone and are of Noble title, so they obviously tookoffense and the conversation in the war tent turned violent.
This turns into several PCs and NPCs scrambling in different directions to covince companies of troops to join their cause.
Everyone scatters to different groups of troops and rolls a charisma check of some kinda per stand to convert them to fight for them and the DC is based on the troops loyalty to one side or another. The goal is for the PCs to get over the river out of Ghoere alive and hopefully with some loyal mercenaries.
Anyway, we are all long term wargame geeks, so something like this is totally in our wheel house. I used the premade human templates out of the back of the Monstrous Manual. I printed them out and handed them to the PCs to run.
Not every base = a stand of 10 guys. So the baron had 630 troops vs 530 troops and a 300 man human wave.
The Barons force:
1 Baron (bandit lord in plate mail)
Magician (4th level wizard)
34 light infantry (guards)
15 Archers (scouts)
12 cav (knights)
2 kings guard (gladiators)
The Angry Worms (the PC merc companies):
3rd level fighter
3rd level storm cleric
3rd level paladin (oath of ancients)
3rd level (ranger2/rogue1)
17 light infantry (guards)
8 archers (scouts)
18 mercenaries (veterans)
30 army support personelle (comonners)
10 lizardmen (lizard folk)
We then translated it onto a true gaming table.
So in gneral the rules held up really well. The scale worked really well, as did the premade units and the commander rules. I made a few slight modifications. For one, it's birthright, so we have people with the warcraft skill, which basically could be substituted for the commander pursuation and intimidate roles, which isn't really a material change. I also have a guy who blooded with the warlord trait of Andurias, so I gave him advantage on initiative. Agian not a change to the mass combat rules.
But when we started playing it became obvious we need some larger changes, or else the mechnics of the rules get in the way of the battle.
1. Hit points: With 150 models on the board representing some 1500 troops, you just can't track hit points... So what I did was roudn to the closest 10 when it came to hit points. So a guard has a 11 hit points, so a stand can take one hit. Vet has 58 hit points so they can take 6 hits. This made it really easy to track with with dice and we just pulled whole models as soon as there was enough damage.
2. Initiative: So at first I was going to do initiative per unit (ie a group of stands), but that was way too much tracking of units so I just did one mas initiative check for the baron and one for the PCs. We also rolled off initiative every turn, which was actually really fun and made a lot of big differences.
3. Challenges: So the PCs started challenging of commanders to one on one battles. So I would give them 10 turns of one on one battle in one mass combat game turn. It worked well with the rules and was really heroic.
The only problem we ran into were spells are odd. For one, a lot of spells have ranges of 30 ft and have area effects of 15 ft cubes. So they are unusable in mass combat... So I would allow 15 ft cube spells to work. It opens up a lot of smaller, fun spells. Also, there are no opportunity attacks, units are basically locked in hth unless they retreat, but what about other bonus actions? We played it that all other bonus actions are eligible, but who knows.
Overall, the rules where totally usuable after we made those tweeks. Mike Mearls! If you are reading this, put out a big table of units please! Archers, light cav, heavy cav, trebuchets, bolt throwers, maybe some castle rules. That would be awesome!
Anyway, for those still reading.
The Baron had a trap set at the bridge and fortified the crossing with 200 light infantry and 60 knights on horse back. The PCs ran toward the bridge, as they took heavy archer fire and battled against the bridge gurad, with the result of huge casualties on both sides.
The human wave of commons are this point made it's way to the archers which led to the archers being largely pulled down in hth but pretty much all the commoners slaughtered to bow fire.
The PC general then issued a single combat challenge to the leader of the bridge guard and won, which converted the bridge guard to the PCs side. The victory was to be short lived as the bridge guard cavalry and light infantry reserves slammed into the converted troops. The Baron then arive and charged cav into the rear of the army on the other side of he bridge. In the pincer attack, hundreds of soldiers perished over the next two turns of combat, until the PCs knocked down the brige send much of the barons troops into the river and stranding the baron and his guard against the PCs rear.
The storm cleric then challenged the Baron to one on one combat, which seemed a fool hardy choice for my PC, but as a DM I let my PCs take on as much danger as they want. Amazingly, the Baron whiffed alot and the PC killed him, commiting blood theft and gaining the power of his blood as he stabbed the baron through his heart. (Yeah, I love Birthright too!).
Out numbered and and beaten the kings guard traded safe passage with the body back across the river in exchange for safe passage of the paladin and 20 commoners that survived the battle on the other side of the river.
So yeah, EPIC D&D at a different scale is why these mass combat rules are awesome, and I hope they put a smidge more work into them.
Anone else try out these tule yet?
Yeah, I've used them in a single encounter; where a small troop of humanoids had broken off from a major battle and were terrorizing local towns in their retreat path.
The rules themselves worked fine; but, I didn't have nerly the number of units/stands as you're talking about.
The battle, where the PC party had arrived at the next likely town to be pillaged in time to assemble a resistance and create minor fotifications, went pretty easy for the PCs; I hadn't realized that all the humanoids had for ranged attacks were spears (60' range). I decided to leave it that way, since they were just deserters anyway.
The battle still took some time, since there were enough enemies; but, the PCs/townsfolk had a minumum of 7 rounds to lay down archer fire, before the humanoids were close enough to use their ranged weapons. The players felt pretty good about the whole thing; even though there were civilian (non-PC) casualties, once the humanoids were able to bring their weapons to bear. A few humanoids even made it to the fortifications, before being defeated.
The only anomoly, on the monster side of the equation, was the enemy leader; an ogre mage (oni) that was, until this encounter, a recurring threat to the party; one that just kept escaping the PCs, to rear his ugly head anew, at some later time. Finally defeating the ogre mage was an added bonus for the PCs/players; one which probable made an otherwise "easy" encounter more memorable.
As far as the HP issues you've brought up: I like the additional granularity of the current system; as well as the fact that it requires less conversion from the MM stats. Although, I could see where a simplifies version would be useful with the increased number of units/stands. Curiously, how did you adjust damage numbers to suit?
Agreed. You really get an understanding how powerful the long bow is when you can shoot them at long range enmass. It's a very different thing than a solitary ranger in a party. I had sent an NPC to the furthest away unit of Lizardmen and a PC had grabbed the archers before she made it. Let's just say there was no recruiting of lizardmen.
As for damage we simplified it as well. When a commander was singled out we tracked damage for real, but for stands we did "1 wound" per 10 real damage you caused (round up under 10). I also had crits do double the wounds. If you use average damage for all the NPCs it's easy to keep track of and entirely takes the step of rolling damage out of the combat.
It sounds a little complicated, but in preactice it was very quick and easy to get. Even the gladiators (ie the kings guard) (which are a CR5) were only doing average of 13 damage a swing, so pretty much every hit was "1 wound".
The eastiest way to simplify huge combats is to just make all the guys 1 hit minion or a 2 hit minion or a 3 hit minion, etc. Then just track the hits with D6s.
This ultimately is what all war games above skirmish pretty much do anyways. Instead of 43 hit points you have 4 wounds.
Ah, using the average damage is the key. That wouldn't work for me, I like rolling the dice as much as the players.
However, in a situation with vastly more units (on both sides), I might enforce that ruling for both sides as well. I may yet get the chance, if I ever get my AD&D campaign converted; the PCs were a mercenary company, each individual PC commanding a specific portion of the troops.
Nice pics! And glad it worked out for you.
I was really disappointed with the "mass" battle rules from UA. I also DM a Birthright campaign, but our battles are between thousands of individuals on both sides (10-15 Birthright "units" for each army). I could have scaled all the numbers, but then PC interaction would have become wonky, so I just use a heavily modified verison of good old Warmachine from D&D Companion.
lawrencehoy wrote:
I have used these rules as well, and I greatly enjoyed them.
In my case, the players were escorting a group of refugees to what they thought was a safe haven in a nearby Dwarven town. Unfortunately that town had been under seige due to its location on a key mountain pass.
The enemy army, lead by a half-giant(goliath) Sorceror had intended to simply smash the outer defenses, bypass the town's formidible keep and continue on to their target. The players were able to sneak in along with the refugees and link up with the beleaguered Dwarves. They harrassed the enemy enough that a splinter of the force broke off to assault the keep.
I did have to improvise some seige equipment such as mantlets and some rules for a ram. (I used Ogres as the enemies catapults). All in all the enemy suffered greatly due to the defenders hardened position. They were able to successfully break though the heavy door to the keep but were forced to retreat due to losses a round later.
My PCs enjoyed it, especially once the fighting came to close quarters as their group was mostly melee focused.
Need some additional rules and fine tuning. I agree that if Mike can manage some additonal content and more 'militarized' monsters for use in stands along with a healthy smattering of war equipment and it will make me love 5e all the more.