War and How to Wage It
March’s RPG Blog Carnival on War, hosted by The Book of Rev, will soon be drawing to a close. Before it does, here’s that post I promised about war within a fantasy setting. The typical D&D campaign is set in a fantastic version of late-medieval to early-Renaissance Europe, so that’s the setting I’m considering. Gunpowder isn’t a factor, but magic and mythological creatures are. This is bound to change the way a war is conducted.
For instance, let’s take castles and fortifications. These are, essentially, walls. Walls can prove very effective at protecting one army from another, helping to defend a strategic point even against larger forces. They’re cover for allies and an obstacle to enemies. Confronted with a strong castle full of defenders, many armies of the middle ages were forced to respond with besiegement — what could be a long process of waiting for the defenders’ supplies to run out, or for their commanders to make a mistake. The other major option, if the enemy could not be drawn out, was the use of siege engines, devices intended to breach or circumvent the walls.
But in a game like Dungeons & Dragons, a siege might not make sense. If the army has a complement of flying creatures, for instance, walls become much less of an obstacle. Similarly, there are many creatures that can teleport or tunnel. What impact would this have on the game world?
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A Harvest of Men: In Play
My proof-of-concept session for my war system finally came around. I’ll let the example take center stage:
The PCs were a second-level party of four, including a fighter, a ranger, a wizard, and a warlord. While on their way back to the village of Bridenford from a nearby ruin they’d been exploring, they happened across an orcish scouting party. Defeating the orcs, they found a message speaking of battle plans — Bridenford was in danger! Swiftly, they returned to warn the villagers.
The villagers were mostly untrained for war, of course, but they were rugged folk, used to wresting a living from the rather poor land and from the forest nearby. Many weren’t a bad shot with the bow, and some turned the tools of their trades into weapons, using axes or improvised polearms. (+5 to the DC for sub-par melee weapons and lack of useful armor.) Furthermore, they had leadership in the form of Daros Whitebeard, formerly a marshal of the king’s legions. Now he was a bent and lame old man, but his mind remained as keen as ever. (Overall leadership bonus: +5 — +4 Int, +1 for Daros’ level 6.)
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A Harvest of Men (III)
War Week continues! Yesterday I talked about some potential modifiers for the mass-battle system I’m working out. The bare bones of the system are in place, although the numbers might need some adjustment — the modifiers are still pretty tenuous, for instance. But the basic pieces are mostly there.
The main thing still missing is the effect of the PCs’ choices. Even if they’re soldiers pressed into service rather than an elite commando squad, they’re still the protagonists of the story. They should be able to make decisions that influence the outcome of the battle.
PC decisions
PCs have a few options to change their odds. (Major NPCs can also benefit from similar options, should the GM not choose to grant them plot immunity.)
First, a PC can expend a daily attack power to gain a +5 bonus to one d20 roll. This represents the PC using that power during one of the day’s battles. (The PC is assumed to use his at-will and encounter powers freely.) The PC can also use a daily item power or, with the GM’s permission (and some nice description) a daily utility power to gain this bonus. The PC can expend multiple powers on one roll if he likes, but the bonus is reduced by 1 each time, to a minimum additional bonus of +2.
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A Harvest of Men (II)
War Week continues! Yesterday I sketched out the basics of a d20 “war zone” system for determining the course of a large-scale battle, arriving at some tentative base numbers.
Of course, what’s D&D without some modifiers?
A lot of different things can affect the course of a battle. Trying to be exhaustively list modifiers is almost guaranteed to fail. Instead, I’ll try to consider the more likely occasions, and come up with guidelines that allow winging the more unlikely ones on the fly.
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War Week: A Harvest of Men
Back to some content. This month’s blog carnival is all about war. Appropriate; war or the threat of war makes a great plot element for just about any rpg, from fantasy to science fiction to espionage to superheroes. It also happens to be something many RPGs don’t have very solid rules for. They’re designed for conflicts on an individual scale, because the individual character is, from the player’s standpoint, what’s most important in most RPGs. But how do you handle those scenarios in which your player characters find themselves caught up in actual battle — conscripted into an army, perhaps, or leading the king’s knights against the encroaching goblin hordes?
The combat rules are usually unsuited to handling large-scale conflicts. The D&D Companion Set (and the Rules Cyclopedia) included the War Machine, a set of rules for mass conflicts, but many RPGs don’t. One way of handling this is to break a battle into a series of squad-level encounters — maybe the PCs’ squad is sent to disable a ballista, or to sneak into the enemy camp in the night and assassinate an officer. This does work very well when the characters are able to act as a relatively independent unit, and it works with both combat and noncombat encounters. (Check out The Core Mechanic’s Skill Challenges of War series for one take on handling some common war events as skill challenges.)
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