Suggestions for Mass Combat…?

[Chris Rice]

Originally Posted by FireHorse

I have a scenario / adventure in which the players would be part of a much larger battle. While the players would resolve their own combats normally, obviously it would be wildly impractical to use normal methods to determine the outcome of every individual melee within that larger battle.

However, I do want the outcome of the players' fights to affect the overall outcome — they're the Heroes, after all, and they'd be facing off against the Leaders (and high-ranking sub-Leaders) of the opposing faction, and Morale can sway the tide of battle. (If you kill a group's Leader, for example, it should make their followers more likely to break.)

So I'm looking for two different things:

1. A method for deciding the outcome of many separate fights, without having to roll each one individually; and…
2. A method of applying Morale (resulting from the outcome of the players' individual fights) to the outcome of the larger battle as a whole.

Any suggestions…?

A simple method:Break the opposing forces into companies or squads depending on total size. Assign each of these groups stats as if it was a single character and let them fight as if single characters just as standard Melee rules. A unit keeps fighting till ST0 at which point the unit is not destroyed but breaks and flees. You can figure casualties based on ST loss (bear in mind ST0 is not total loss of all figures in the unit.)

Example: Army of 200 Orcs v 80 well equipped Soldiers and knights.

Decide how many units you want to handle, say 10 each side. So an Orc squad will have 20 figures and a soldier squad 8 figures (assuming you want equal numbers of squads.

You can make all the Orcs the same for ease of setup or different if you wish, same for the Soldiers. The PCs can form one squad of Soldiers.

When you play the battle, the PCs fight individually against the individual Orcs in the Squad they are facing as if in a standard Melee battle and the rest of the battle is abbreviated by fighting squad v squad as if the squads were individuals.

You can scale this up or down as desired and add whatever complexity you wish. I've done this in the past and it works fine.