Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
I don't understand how that would work. 50 figures in a GURPS battle (or TFT) sounds like a book keeping nightmare, and many hours of play.
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The first time I ran a battle with 200 figures in TFT, it was the climax of a rebellion campaign where the sessions leading up to it had mostly featured small actions and then rallying and organizing an army out of villagers. It did take a lot of work to prepare for it (mostly making the home-made counters), but the figures were organized into squads with appropriate IDs on the counters, and those squads were mostly moving and fighting together, and action could be resolved by section of the battlefield rather than pan-battlefield adjDX. It was a bit much, and did take a few hours.
That was after GM'ing TFT for about 4 years.
50 figures is pretty big, but not really very hard for me, even in GURPS (at least, it wasn't after like 7 years TFT and a couple of years of GURPS), as long as there aren't a lot of wizards with lots of spells to think about.
Organization does help. With parties of characters who have their own sheets, the GM can make a GM Control Sheet (q.v. GURPS) or a combat sheet that lists the relevant combat stats - I find one line per character is often possible even for GURPS characters with different armor on each body part.
Some GMs "cheat" by having many NPCs have the same stats. I usually don't do that. Sometimes I do when I really want to speed things up. (I also have a system for
really speeding things up when it's just some NPC soldiers fighting each other.)
I get that I'm a bit unusual. I've played a lot of much more complex wargames, am really good at mental math, have memorized GURPS 3e, played for many years, am a programmer, etc. But it also doesn't really seem to me to take very long even when (experienced) non-technical GMs run things. It might also partly be that I love playing TFT/GURPS combats, so I'm almost always enjoying taking the time to play out a battle.