WW1 Era War Games

WW1-era tanks.

Landships!

But prioritizing a soldier purely because of his birth goes against my republican sensibilities. Wat do?

You don't rescue him because he's LORD Flashheart, you rescue him because he's Lord FLASHHEART, flash by name, flash by nature.
youtube.com/watch?v=yP1vSIOmCc4

Here's a loyalty exercise for your squad, mate

Your squad is placed in an outpost near the frontlines in the mountains. It is a critical post, overwatching one of the many passes through this section of the Alps. A new patrol arrives, and its squad leader brings news. A communist revolution has arisen in your homeland, and this newly arrived comrades reveals that he is a member of this very same revolution. He urges you to join him, kill all the officers and noblemen, then march home to join the revolution and join an international brotherhood of mankind. Leaving your post will let your fellow soldiers further down the pass be dangerously unprepared should the enemy make an attempt on the pass, but the patrol leader says the foe is convulsed in revolution as well and their armies will soon revolt. Do you believe him? Is this a trick by the enemy to make you abandon your post? Are yourselves members of the international brotherhood? What do you do?

bumping for more WWI

Night raids on enemy observation positions ahead of the main lines.

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>communists

Quick, somebody invent the helicopter so we can give this guy a free ride

>flankers/saboteurs. Trying to sneak behind enemy lines and causing as much destruction to logisitics as possible. Taking out artillery dumps, ammunition caches, cutting telegraph lines, etc.

this actually sounds rad af-- i'd love to DM something like this for my players.

Does anyone have any idea what kind of system would be good for a game like this? For this DnD seems... eh.

Actually, how did the not Europe parts of the war go? Amerifat education doesn't teach me shit because we weren't involved

Africa was mostly uneventful, with the notable exception of German East Africa.

War kicks off and Germany has a couple of colonies in Africa, all of which are surrounded by Allied colonies. They pretty quickly get gobbled up, since Germany doesn't have much in the way of military resources there.

However, in German East Africa, which had the largest concentration of German forces, things didn't go according to plan for the Allies. Their first major attempt to invade the colony came in November 1914 when a large force of Empire and Indian troops attacked Tanga, a German port. What followed was one of the most disastrous episodes in British military history. After making good progress into the centre of the town, German attacks caused some of the Indian troops to rout, which was then followed by swarms of angry bees attacking the invaders. Later, this was talked up into a fiendish plot by the Germans, who had bred these killer bees in preparation for an attack. This also gives the battle its nickname of the Battle of the Bees. Pursued by angry bees and vengeful Germans, the Allied attack turned into a full blown retreat. They fled back to their transports, leaving behind hundreds of rifles, 600,000 rounds of ammunition, 16 machine guns and enough clothing for the Germans to last a year.

The German commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, then proceeded to fight a very effective guerilla campaign over the next four years. He knew he couldn't win against the forces arrayed against him, so instead his objective was to tie down as many forces as possible. This he achieved remarkably well; by the end of the war, nearly 1,000,000 Allied personnel had been involved in trying to track the elusive German force down. They raided throughout East Africa, salvaging the guns from the cruiser Konigsburg and fighting in Mozambique, Rhodesia and the Belgium Congo. Lettow-Vorbeck was the last German commander to surrender, doing so on November 25th, 1918. The Allies never managed to comprehensively defeat his forces.

Also worth mentioning in Africa is the Battle of Lake Tanganyika. The Germans started the war in control of this vital waterway, which lay between German East Africa and the Belgium Congo. The Germans had two tiny armed boats on the lake, but that was enough to give them command of the water. They raided Belgium ports and sunk the Belgium and British steamers on the lake. The British, in response, hauled two 12metre speedboats 4,000 miles up from South Africa to the lake, and launched a sneak attack against the German ships which left the Germans either sunk of captured.

It's a quite bizarre tale of Lilliputian naval warfare in the middle of Africa, and a contender for a campaign if ever I saw one.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck is the most successful guerilla fighter in human history.

>Because war is boring as shit.

Fixed.

Shoot the bastard

I'd heard of the lake battle, and vaguely of Lettow-Vorbeck's guerrilla campaign, but not bees thing

there were bands of deserters who survived in no mans land until the last year of the war

Dont know why your using 5e for WW1; there are other systems then dungeons and dragons.

Anyway, focus on either the first 2 months of the war or the last couple of months. Either are better for a rpg as the war is very mobile in these periods. If you insist on 5e then do the first 2 months as the modern tactics and armaments are still being misused and developed. Look into the early captures of Belgium forts.

What would be a better system?

GURPS is good. Great gunplay
The general thread is very friendly

GURPS also does a good job of just simulating what can only be described as war autism. As I have seen in my last session where I had to calculate the damage caused by a half ton of tnt going off.

Oh hey cool, I'm working on a WWI era table top game, although it'd work well for any time between Napoleon and before WWII.

>What would be a better system?
>Gurps

Like fucking clock work. Next will come the fate fags.

Posting some arts

Nobody on Veeky Forums even likes FATE, senpai. Cool your tits.

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OP, how did the session go?

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They spent two hours picking out gear for their cadets, then marched out to a field for their first Field Exercise.
Along the way they were surprised by a minefield (training mines filled with paint).
Still trying to work out a way to deal with those.

I had them use engineers tools to try to disarm them, and if they failed that then they would have to DEX save to try again.
There was bitching from one of them who failed all his checks and was covered in paint.
One of them has a trap finding skill to spot landmines even with minimum roll, and another used mage hand to clear a path.

After that they reached a flag with their next instructions.
Hold that point and defend the flag for two days or survive 5 waves of infantry. They have to stay within 300 feet of the flag and can't tamper with it.
They surrounded the flag with a trench and hunkered down.

An enemy force twice their size charged at them. There was some conflict about being prone and in cover, eventually decided you couldn't have a cover advantage while prone.
The rifles we're using have a range of 200/800 and do 2d10 damage. Sniper teams used a spotter (help action) to negate range disadvantage.

The gun is truly the great equalizer. It didn't matter if you had 30 hit-points or 8. A single crit was enough to end anyone on the field.
They outlasted the first wave, who eventually retreated after taking away the wounded.

I'm worried that one or two of the players will kill someone.