Monday 19 March 2018

Mass Battle Stats - scaling things up

In most RPGs, the combat stats for an individual might just as well be the stats for a unit. Here are some thoughts on effective scaling:

The main thing is to choose an appropriate scale. Generally speaking, you want a 2-digit number of figures/chits on the board for it to feel like a battle, and something like 20-50 figures is ideal.

Times Ten Scale - "Battlesystem"
A unit is 10 men - a squad. A group of units is a company of ca 100 men.
Distances on the board/battlemat are x3, feet become yards, so 5' > 15' or 5 yards.
Time is also x3, so each unit round is 3 rounds of individual combat. Resolve 3 individual rounds for your PCs, then roll a unit round to see how the army is doing.

Times One Hundred Scale - "Hastings"
A unit is 100 men - a company or century. A group of units is a brigade of ca 1,000 men.
Distances on the board/battlemat are x10, so 5' > 50'.
Time is also x10, so each unit round is 10 rounds of individual combat. Resolve 10 individual rounds for your PCs, then roll a unit round to see how the army is doing.

Few battles will need a larger scale, but...

Times One Thousand Scale - "Cannae"
A unit is 1000 men - a brigade. A group of units is an army of ca 10,000 men.
Distances on the board/battlemat are x30, so 5' > 50 yards, 150'.
Time is also x30, so each unit round is 30 rounds of individual combat. Resolve up to 30 individual rounds for your PCs, then roll a unit round to see how the army is doing.

Examples:
A force of 200 men becomes 20 units, in 10-man squads.
A force of 2,000 men becomes 20 units, in 100 man companies.
A force of 20,000 men becomes 20 units, in 1000 man brigades.

Resolution
Treat each figure as a unit of the appropriate scale. Roll initiative etc as normal. One roll per side is fine, but individual rolls by organised group of units (company/brigade/army) or their leaders works well too, and may better reflect the disorganised state of battle.
Have groups of figures/units organised into cohorts/brigades of ca 10 act on their turns.
For a unit group, roll to hit for all units/figures. Use average weapon damage. Add up the number of hits and multiply by damage. Remove figures whose hp equal up to that damage total. Fractions can be ignored, since some damage is bound to be wasted, except for lone units.
Use morale rules as normal for your game.

Sunday 11 March 2018

Made it!

Today the pub where I host my Wilderlands D&D Meetup said there was Rugby on TV, so they wanted a £260 credit guarantee (bargained down from £300) to let us play there. I had been going to say no, but my players convinced me otherwise, that they could eat and drink that amount - and they did, £290! Made it! :D

This may have been our last week with only three GMs running, all Wilderlands, all same campaign world and map, just a few miles apart. Next week we're adding a 4th GM in a linked campaign setting, which will let us increase size to 28 (24 players & 4 GMs) - and one of my players is pretty keen to make it 5 GMs if I let him go... :) ...That'd let us have over 32 people playing 5e D&D in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy!

Thursday 1 March 2018

3e/PF to 5e Conversion

I ran a bunch of Pathfinder adventures using 5e. It is definitely harder than running OSR material in 5e, but remains doable. I had several handy monster conversion metrics:

Halve AC over 10. Halve stats over 20 (& cap at 30, obviously). Increase damage +50%. Increase hit points +50% at levels 1-10; at very high level the listed hp are often fine as-is. Ignore feats and weird crap on multi-page stat blocks, but look out for signature abiliities to convert.
Finally, calculate attack bonus & save DCs using the 5e rule of Proficiency + Stat bonus, +8 if it's a save DC.

This works great 95% of the time. I occasionally fluffed when eg converting to Legendary status, the headless horseman who could throw a 15d6 hellfire ball 4 times/round was a mistake - with massive damage spell-type attacks you may want to keep the 3e/PF damage as listed.

5e D&D Followers & Henchmen

I think the big lacuna in 5e DMG for domain/lord play is the lack of follower rules for high level PCs. So I've been adapting the 1e DMG rules, which work well - eg I rolled on the Fighter table for a Barbarian-14. I use the Thief guild rules for Rogues establishing networks. For a Cleric establishing an urban temple I used a formula for cult followers = (level + CHA bonus)x5 - but if she establishes a proper holy fortress I'd probably use the DMG armed followers table for her too.

For PC-class Henchmen I'm also using the 1e DMG rules, with a level limit of 1 per Tier, which closely matches the DMG limits. So:

PC Level > Henchie level
1-4 > 1
5-10 > 2
11-16 > 3
17-20 > 4
20+Boon > 5

Max number of henchmen = PC CHA bonus+2, so from eg 1 at CHA 8 to 7 at CHA 20.