I'm a newer DM, and my players are doing some rather off-the-books stuff. My players are playing as commanders to a small fleet, and are on an island-hopping war campaign. Most of the time, it is battles between hundreds of NPCs, including the characters. If anybody has ever done this before, can you give me advice as to how to realistically manage the battles without rolling for 300 people?
I haven’t managed a game that large, but a couple ideas come to mind.
One is having a mini game with ship miniatures if that’s the kind of combat you prefer. Wiz kids made a game called “Pirates” with little constructable ships maybe 15 years ago, and you can pick them up for pretty cheap on eBay. If you take a look at that game and maybe add some modifiers for your players, that could be fun.
otherwise if it’s like a 300 sailor versus 100 defender battle, I would try to zoom out and treat it like a skill challenge where you’re providing feedback about the morale and level of casualties, and the players are suggesting their courses of action ( I want to rally the routing soldiers/ I want to use fire bolt to give the archers flaming arrows, etc) rolling for skills and then that influencing the battle one way or the other. Unless you want it to be a full-on wargame, I think you can run it as a very descriptive sort of tug-of-war.
It depends on how "realistic" you want the battle to be.
I don't think the "official" rules has any good solution, but you might find some homebrew/UA that can help.
Large scale battles are difficult in RPG's. They can quickly turn the game into a more tactical board game than RPG. What I would have done is focusing on the players actions, and "apply" that to the result of the battle. Try to make some smaller objectives the players can try to achieve that can win or loose the battle. A RPG like D&D is all about heroes, so I would have focused more on the "heroic" actions the PC's can do than their tactical and commanding skills (D&D really doesn't have a system for the latter). Rather create a really cool fight with the players and the really bad ass captain of the enemy fleet. If the PC's win, they win the battle, if they loose, well, they will loose the battle.
If you "need" to have some random result for how the battle around the players is going, roll a D20 for each side and compare, or you could simply tweak the swarm rules to create each side as a swarm that's fighting each other. But in my games, I would have focused in on the players and what they can do to change the outcome, since that's where the "drama" lies.
I haven't really encountered much of the shelf stuff that involves a lot of these 300+ battles, what content are you running? And doesn't this content describe a way of dealing with this? I can't imagine any DM would want to do this, 300 units is insane - are you sure this is meant to be played out?
Most of the times when these kind of battles are part of my story I narrate what is happening and describe what's happening. If they jump into combat somewhere I describe just who is right in front of them, fighting them. The rest just blurs into the background and depending on how they fare the rest of combat is also determined ( I might include some rolls for that ).
If the battles are to big, this is what I do:
- Cut the battle in segments - Develop some scenario's and roll to determine which scenario occurs, - Bucket the monsters and npc's in 'military-groups' until it's managable (e.g. if you have 300 soldiers, you could say there are 2 company of 100 soldiers, 2 platoon of 45 elites and a specialist squad of 10 - now you have 5 things to roll for. Use the damage dice to scale the damage and the losses or just make up some prepared numbers based on dice rolls.)
And what GodrickGreat said I think as well, it makes more sense for adventurers to be involved in some greater plot or an epic battle with the other commander than commanding an army for to long, I would 'sail' away from a tactical game by any thing that's at my disposal, which could be a great storm, or on an island they're at they upset the ruling criminal organization strongly reducing their efforts available....anything to turn it into an adventure again.
In general the solution to mass combat in RPGs is to have most of it occur off screen, with just a few key incidents being resolved using the combat rules. Very few mass combat rules actually much resemble the effects of playing out the battle using the regular combat rules, though the regular combat rules often produce results that don't match our images of how such battles 'ought' to look anyway (there's too much area damage in D&D to support the massed combat formations we expect from medieval or ancient warfare).
Think about any mass combat scene in films. It might be a 20 minute epic battle, but there are only a handful of up-close scenes focused on individual fights, and those fights are moving the story along.
You can describe and narrate what is happening with the hundreds of other combatants, but allow your players to slug it out with a few key monsters, and make those fights the ones that count.
I think I posted about it before but the Divine Contention module has a huge combat at the end that seems to work really well.
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I'm a newer DM, and my players are doing some rather off-the-books stuff. My players are playing as commanders to a small fleet, and are on an island-hopping war campaign. Most of the time, it is battles between hundreds of NPCs, including the characters. If anybody has ever done this before, can you give me advice as to how to realistically manage the battles without rolling for 300 people?
Matt Colville made a book called Strongholds & Followers that has good rules for mass combat.
edit: I should point out that it’s very basic rules for mass combat and he has a second book coming out “soon?” that will have more detailed stuff.
I haven’t managed a game that large, but a couple ideas come to mind.
One is having a mini game with ship miniatures if that’s the kind of combat you prefer. Wiz kids made a game called “Pirates” with little constructable ships maybe 15 years ago, and you can pick them up for pretty cheap on eBay. If you take a look at that game and maybe add some modifiers for your players, that could be fun.
otherwise if it’s like a 300 sailor versus 100 defender battle, I would try to zoom out and treat it like a skill challenge where you’re providing feedback about the morale and level of casualties, and the players are suggesting their courses of action ( I want to rally the routing soldiers/ I want to use fire bolt to give the archers flaming arrows, etc) rolling for skills and then that influencing the battle one way or the other. Unless you want it to be a full-on wargame, I think you can run it as a very descriptive sort of tug-of-war.
There is an Unearthed Arcana from WotC regarding mass combat, maybe that helps?
https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/mass-combat
It depends on how "realistic" you want the battle to be.
I don't think the "official" rules has any good solution, but you might find some homebrew/UA that can help.
Large scale battles are difficult in RPG's. They can quickly turn the game into a more tactical board game than RPG. What I would have done is focusing on the players actions, and "apply" that to the result of the battle. Try to make some smaller objectives the players can try to achieve that can win or loose the battle. A RPG like D&D is all about heroes, so I would have focused more on the "heroic" actions the PC's can do than their tactical and commanding skills (D&D really doesn't have a system for the latter). Rather create a really cool fight with the players and the really bad ass captain of the enemy fleet. If the PC's win, they win the battle, if they loose, well, they will loose the battle.
If you "need" to have some random result for how the battle around the players is going, roll a D20 for each side and compare, or you could simply tweak the swarm rules to create each side as a swarm that's fighting each other. But in my games, I would have focused in on the players and what they can do to change the outcome, since that's where the "drama" lies.
Ludo ergo sum!
Hi,
I haven't really encountered much of the shelf stuff that involves a lot of these 300+ battles, what content are you running? And doesn't this content describe a way of dealing with this? I can't imagine any DM would want to do this, 300 units is insane - are you sure this is meant to be played out?
Most of the times when these kind of battles are part of my story I narrate what is happening and describe what's happening. If they jump into combat somewhere I describe just who is right in front of them, fighting them. The rest just blurs into the background and depending on how they fare the rest of combat is also determined ( I might include some rolls for that ).
If the battles are to big, this is what I do:
- Cut the battle in segments
- Develop some scenario's and roll to determine which scenario occurs,
- Bucket the monsters and npc's in 'military-groups' until it's managable (e.g. if you have 300 soldiers, you could say there are 2 company of 100 soldiers, 2 platoon of 45 elites and a specialist squad of 10 - now you have 5 things to roll for. Use the damage dice to scale the damage and the losses or just make up some prepared numbers based on dice rolls.)
And what GodrickGreat said I think as well, it makes more sense for adventurers to be involved in some greater plot or an epic battle with the other commander than commanding an army for to long, I would 'sail' away from a tactical game by any thing that's at my disposal, which could be a great storm, or on an island they're at they upset the ruling criminal organization strongly reducing their efforts available....anything to turn it into an adventure again.
Old Birthright world had Mass Combat rules.
Else, if you really want to go nuts, look at either Warhammer or OPR Fantasy, build some armies, and then have the characters as heroes/leaders...
In general the solution to mass combat in RPGs is to have most of it occur off screen, with just a few key incidents being resolved using the combat rules. Very few mass combat rules actually much resemble the effects of playing out the battle using the regular combat rules, though the regular combat rules often produce results that don't match our images of how such battles 'ought' to look anyway (there's too much area damage in D&D to support the massed combat formations we expect from medieval or ancient warfare).
Think about any mass combat scene in films. It might be a 20 minute epic battle, but there are only a handful of up-close scenes focused on individual fights, and those fights are moving the story along.
You can describe and narrate what is happening with the hundreds of other combatants, but allow your players to slug it out with a few key monsters, and make those fights the ones that count.
I think I posted about it before but the Divine Contention module has a huge combat at the end that seems to work really well.