Considering Testing Out My Mass-combat Rules

[Aldragon]

My birthday party is coming up pretty soon, and I am contemplating running a one-shot game in my modified version of Termina. It will involve a large group of imperialistic foreigners interacting with the Great Bay, which will probably result in a playtest of my mass combat rules.

With my current setup, the Gerudo and Zora both have populations in the thousands or maybe low tens of thousands (thanks in part to the fact that magically enhancing food production and preservation is very easy. Termina is really big in this interpretation.). The two factions are at war with each other over territory, but after open war proved too costly for both sides, this has become a cold war broken by occasional skirmishes and intermittent acts of terrorism/"adventuring". The Gerudo control the majority of the ports, and thus get a large amount of money from traders and tourists/vacationers. The Zora dominate the underwater areas, however, and can sabotage ships quite easily if extensive defensive measures are not taken. They have a few ports and can smuggle goods much more effectively.

Clock Town is generally neutral in political conflicts like this, and day-to-day governmental functions in the 5 disputed and technically independent towns of the Great Bay are performed by bureaucrats and soldiers who's loyalties ultimately lie with it. The faction which is currently "protecting" a given town will generally have a garrison of several hundred soldiers in it.

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That's all I've really thought of for now. I should get around to posting my latest draft of the mass combat rules once I've statted up some units for each side.

[Aldragon]

Some ideas for units:

Zora skirmishers with water bombs, harpoons
Zora mages, lightning blasts, summon fog, defensive shield
Zora bard, buffs allies, work together to alter terrain on a larger scale than mages
Zora summoner, creates and commands monster allies
Zora knight, wears heavy shell armor and fights with a lance

Gerudo Halberdier
Gerudo Duelist
Gerudo Archer
Gerudo Witch, messes with minds of targets, controls winds
Gerudo Gravespeaker, calls up and commands ghost-type monsters (because the Gerudo have a big set of catacombs under their main Great Bay fortress)

Town guards with 3 shot clockwork rifles + bayonets and maces (assume the gunpowder in this world is less awesome as a propellant, so semiautomatic guns are balanced with semiautomatic crossbows.)
Carpenters who can set up fortifications in a hurry

Adventurer with Seed Shooter, quarterstaff, flute, some special martial techniques, spells, and at least one combat-relevant performance

Second adventurer who uses a bunch of technological gadgets.

Flamethrower invader
Clockwork Armor invader, tough armored unit with a powerful melee attack and a very inaccurate shoulder-mounted rocket pod (rockets hit somewhere within 5 squares of the target area and have limited range)
Spear-wielding sailor invader
Warmage invader
Invader officer with pistols, some support ability

[Aldragon]

Any ideas for ways the militaries for one of the factions described could be expanded or made more interesting? I'm still on the fence as to whether I'll put all the players in charge of one faction or let each choose a different group with different objectives.

Also, if anyone knows where I could find a couple of decent coastal town maps, that might be pretty handy for what I'm planning. I'm going to use pictures on card stock as unit representation, so I might as well produce a game board at the same time.

[Da' Vane]

There's really two different ways you could handle mass combat in Zelda RPG:

1) Have the forces split into light, shadow, and neutral units, and have the various factions pick sides, pretty much like Warhammer, to recreate the War of the Seal and other mass battles.

2) Reduce the scale to skirmish level, and have each faction consist of a few types of unit in smaller warbands, akin to something like Chainmail, or even Mordheim.

Without creating a mass load of new units for each faction, there really isn't enough scope within each faction presented to provide a unique army for each one. The light races would largely consist of heroes, with one or two regular units, while the shadow races would consist more of regular troops and monsters than anything else.

For example, you might have Goron Warband that consisted of Darunia, Biggoron, a unit of Goron Warriors, and maybe a Dodongo. Meanwhile, you might have a Keaton Warband consisting of several units of Keatons.

It is perfectly feasible that, if mass combat is something that is desired, we could include the mass combat stats and point values with the encounter entries. Of course, it would be preferable to get those entries done first...

[Aldragon]

Once I've got the basic mass combat rules done to my satisfaction, I'd probably be willing to stat mass combat versions of monsters we have up here on the forums. My current concept is more something to be used in a regular game when a conflict ends up being too big to easily resolve with the d20 rules, but I could easily tweak it into something that worked as a standalone game if that is desirable.

That said, I favor just dividing units into political factions. Instead of a "Goron Warband" I have a band of smiths from Snowhead and their associates. This can give me something like the following:

Goron Smith (basic unit) x3
Goron Grenadier (tosses bombs, can set an explosive charge to be ignited by another explosion) x2
Goron Iron Warrior (slow, but tough with a powerful melee attack)x2
Hylian Guide x1 (skirmisher with a bow and settable snares)
Frost Dodongo (breath weapon damages, slows, and alters terrain) x1
Tame Wolfos x2 (fast, but also pretty weak, good for attacking mages or other soft targets)

[Da' Vane]

Yet, most of the time the various major races that would have warbands tend to cluster together anyway, and these are commonly a single region or area in any given game. As such, it's fairly easy to split the groups however you like.

Skirmish level games are the games most likely to evolve from any regular roleplaying game session. This is because a party of characters would effectively function as a unit, but also be able to function individually if desired, and the opposing forces would simply be the combination of several encounters at once. In fact, it's fairly easy to remain in the roleplaying level for this type of scenario if you are willing to focus solely on the PCs and have the other combat as background detail. Skirmish level games are also more likely to be tactical, and involve the use of scenery much more - whether it is holding an important site or raiding a dungeon that can't normally be explored.

Larger scale games are more likely to be one-off scenarios or specifically designed for this level of play. They can be integrated with standard roleplaying, but generally it would require a few specific types of campaign to enable these large scale battles. It is always possible that a campaign that involves a lot of skirmish scale encounters could eventually lead to a series of larger scale battles, but this is very rare to happen naturally, without a lot of pre-planning on the part of the campaign.

Skirmish level shares so many similarities with roleplaying level games that these systems tend to borrow extremely heavily from them, whereas it is all too tempting to build an entirely new system from scratch for larger scale games simply because cross-compatibility is so rarely neccessary. The worst mistake of all is trying to combine a large-scale combat system with a roleplaying system to create a skirmish level hybrid: if you want any cross compatibility, then choose either a roleplaying system or a large-scale combat system, and then evolve it in the desired direction.

Since we've already got a roleplaying game system here, we can fairly easy develop skirmish level, and then wargame level rules from this. The majority of the changes would involve streamlining what would otherwise be lots of dice rolls at once, and dealing with new gameplay factors which become inportant at the relevent stage, such as morale and leadership.

[Aldragon]

I should link the thread where I started talking about my mass combat system: http://z12.invisionfree.com/Zelda_RPG/inde...topic=3416&st=0

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Any thoughts as to how much advantage I should give for favorable terrain with things like Gerudo pirates fighting on ships? I'm leaning towards 1d6 or 2d6 onto the offensive or defensive dice pool.

Also, I'm going to give more automatic hits out to units in the first full draft. A dice pool system with a Target Number of 5 means that you should be throwing around a lot of dice if you want to get more than a couple of hits normally. I need to boost people's capability to do things if I want to keep the game from devolving into people standing in place swinging at each other ineffectually for multiple turns in a row.

Looking at Shadowrun as a basis for how many TN 5 dice a character should throw at a task, I'm leaning towards 6+ dice for offense for a standard soldier, 10+ for an noticeably better one, and maybe 20d6 or more for a big boss monster capable of easily wiping out a normal soldier in a single round. Since I've got a Soak pool, I should probably give almost all soldiers at least one automatic hit. I'm going to trade 4 dice of offense for a single automatic hit when calculating stats, since that's what Shadowrun does and I've found its dice pool system to work fairly nicely.

[Da' Vane]

You should really look more towards how you convert your units to and from Zelda RPG - as this means that lots of the rules would already be predesigned for you.

It's actually quite hard to convert two different types of possibility resolution systems. The main difficulty with TN based systems is that you get diminishing returns with each added die to the die pool, so a +1d6 bonus to a die pool of 2d6 is much more significant than a +1d6 bonus to a die pool of 5d6. However, in percentile systems a +10% (or +2) bonus is always a +10% (or +2) bonus whether you add it to a +10% chance or 50% chance.

Note that this is strictly based upon the statistical probability of using dice - and doesn't take into account the natural diminishing returns you get from adding bonuses to an already high ability. Both types of resolution have the effect that a +1d6 or +2 bonus represents a +100% increase for an ability that is only +1d6 or +2, but only a +20% increase if the ability is already +5d6 or +10.

Ultimately, the TN resolution system gets lumbered with diminishing returns penalty twice (from two similar, but still significantly different sources), where as the percentile system only suffers it once.