What are some good systems for running games of medieval fantasy military strategy and politics?
Something in the veins of ASoIaF, Fire Emblem and Warcraft (pre-WoW).
Royal disputes, castle seizing, village raiding, knightly duels, capturing and rescuing royal hostages, all while leading small armies but still retaining the importance of heroes in the battlefield.
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Oh shit, GRR is a GURPSfag. That's nice.
bump
Pendragon is 100% about all of this, man. Take a look, Pendragon 5th edition's what you need.
Thanks, this looks realy cool! Apparently it has a big focus on expanding your character's history through generations of offspring, and that sounds pretty cool.
Burning Wheel. Good for royal disputes, knightly duels, royal hostages, politics and contacts. Not so much focus on military strategy though. I think someone made a hack for that
I really like Burning Wheel, but I wanted basically the opposite of it: a system with good crunch for military strategy and politics, and lighter on the character and social interaction rules.
Houses of the Blooded, but it does have the unfortunate aspect of being a setting as well as a rulebook.
You could try out the Green Ronin ASOIAF RP game. I hear the nation/kingdom rules are a bit shit, but the system is otherwise tight and mass combat works.
Mount and Blade I guess
I remember playing a Night's Watch one shot at a con, and it was tons of fun but I can't really remember how the system worked beyond being a d6 dice pool thingie.
I guess it makes sense though, I really should check it out. Is the combat abstract or is it based around using minis and grids?
Bump for interest
Legend of the Five rings is literally everything you described, complete with rules.
Not him, but I've GM'd two ASOIAF campaigns so far.
For small engagements (each side of the battle having about 5 units) it can be done abstractly. Anything more and it requires grids and minis, or at least something to represent soldier types.
I'm not a big fan of the system. I like generating a House and having the monthly House Fortune rolls. The book has about a dozen different soldier "classes" (Archers, shield infantry, guerrillas, cavalry, etc) but besides infantry, archers, and cav, everything feels samey. Each unit has 3 stats that are relevant to its job, and that's really it. That's why the classes feel samey.
Units can go down pretty fast, especially against archers and their armor piercing.
The mechanic of "tell Unit 1 more than one order per round and it gets harder for them to respond" is a nice touch of realism in medieval warfare. Otherwise, the rest of the system is just a broken mess. It's so easy to become god in one stat/role, and the intrigue/talking system is more confusing than it needs to be.
Thanks for the insight. Have you ever tried a system that does mass battlles/skirmishes right without breaking everything else?
We had this thread yesterday. I'm not reposting my wall of text.
We did? I can't find anything in the archive.
Sounds neat. Which edition would you recommend checking out?
Reign might also be worth a look. It's a system with a strong emphasis on having characters run organisations.
I've known about Reign for a while, and I think it sounds really neat, but haven't heard much on the system from other people.
I know it uses a ORE, which was used in Godlike, which I was a player for a short campaign and absolutely loved.
>Mountain Blade
>Bannerlord never ever