Running GURPS Mass Combat

[Jürgen Hubert]

In about six hours, I will run my first Mass Combat session. On the side of the heroes are TL3+2 forces - largely TL3, but with some advanced elements. On the side of the villains are a variety of primitive but Arctic-adapted forces - and this battle plays out in the middle of the winter.

So, any suggestions you can give for running Mass Combat?

[vicky_molokh]

For me, the largest problem was with handling less-abstract actions by the PCs:
They filled a few boats with flammable/explosives, and sent them on a suicide mission against the (three, IIRC) enemy ships. Now I had to either estimate the TS of that out of nowhere, handle it in non-MC rules and port over the results, or do something more complicated.

[Ronnke]

Have the Mass Combat Spreadsheet handy, you can find it linked in these forums. It is very useful.

Before rolling Significant Actions, have the characters describe what awesome actions they are trying to pull off. If they succeed, then things happen as described, if not then you (the GM) get to describe how that action went wrong and things didn't go as planned.

If the player's Significant Action idea was particularly good/interesting, then break from the mass combat and play out the scene instead of rolling the Significant Action. Depending on how that scene plays out, you decide what sort of Strategy bonus should be granted to the Force Commander.

[dfinlay]

I let my PCs roll against up to 3 skills relevent to what they were trying to do and give a +1 bonus to the chance of getting a SA for each success, but then make them actually play out a quick vignette representing the SA and give the SA bonus (not neccessarily the +1, depends on what they accomplished) only if they took good advantage of the situation granted by the vignette well. For example, the archer might get a chance to shoot an officer while spearmen are charging at him and if he gets the shot off with a hit, it gives a -1 to the enemy's strategy roll.

I also have a few NPC heros on the enemy side who are attempting SAs that I then tell the players about as significant points in the battle and/or have them showing up in each other's vignettes to try and stop each other. The opportunity presented by an SA may even be a chance to take down an enemy hero.

Finally, in addition to 2d of damage and being captured or 6d of damage, on a misfortunes of war, I allow 2d of damage and put in a bad situation (we play some GURPS combat which starts with them surrounded and cut off and goes until they fall or get out, for example). This allows a better feeling of agency and can be pretty fun, but my rules do slow things down a fair bit.

[Onkl]

All very good advice, thank you. In my games using Mass Combat the players always complain about the lack of player agency during battles. I'll have to give these a spin.

Cheers