Do you like mass combat?

do you like mass combat?

have you or a pc ever had an army? how did it go?

I like it in theory, but most implementations of it are fucking awful.

The Captain looks like the Major just got done fucking him in the ass

You're not wrong

that just comes with the smile that the major always had.

he always looks like he had the best sex ever

> rolling initiative alone takes 13 hours

I feel like Hellsing in a lot of ways really fits into oWoD

Nearly happened. One of the PCs decided that close quarters with no plan was the time to spring an ambush by his disorganised group of peasants and pilgrims that he'd given random and uncontrollable supernatural abilities to most of against a slightly numerically superior group of trained, armed and armoured soldiers who explicitly believed they were dealing with sorcerers and had a fortress with readied archers 100 metres away. If he hadn't gotten everyone killed doing that I probably would have had to have bought out mass combat rules as soon as his group got larger.

I've baited players with the idea but they always either miss it or just ignore it.

>not taking the chance to utilize the medieval cheat code, peasants with spears.

Just treat formations as a single entity.

Just did a mass combat today with the party in pathfinder. 190 zombies in a dungeon, and I used the troop template for it. So it got treated as a single monster with an arbitrarily large size category(although it occupies spaces fluidly), and a singular HP bar. Single combined AC, and it has specialized attacks that deal automatic damage in melee.

Pathfinder's solution to mass combat works wonderfully. Just use troop templates, remove to-hit rolls entirely for them, and it'll go by quickly.

My party managed to clear the entirety of that 190 zombie horde in less than 30 minutes, and over the span of 6 ingame rounds. I went into greater detail over in the /pfg/.

Most medieval combat occurred between professional warriors, be it warrior-aristocrats or mercenaries.

gurps mass combat is nice

yea, but the moment crossbows show up professional warriors aren't nearly as important.

That doesn't work in every game. I do like the idea of "Hitpoints" just being how many people are still standing in a unit, kinda like Star Control 2's away craft.

...You do realize the guys using the crossbows were professional warriors too, right? In fact, some of the best known mercenaries in Europe?

Nice meme I guess

yea some training is nice, however crossbows require much less training that swords and bows needed.

however once magic shows up, put your eggs in one basket

guys I played total war lmao

i've actually shot a crossbow and longbow, the crossbow was far easier to use

Well, a few players technically owned an army I think, though none of them ended up actually leading them in the field. At the end of the campaign, there was a demon army that various NPC allies were fighting while the players were busy dealing with the BBEGs. Then my cleric asked his god to help out with the fight and the demon army started getting smote by beams of heavenly light, saving a lot of our allies who were getting butchered on the field. It was a pretty cool moment, if hand-wave-y.

To elucidate, there were multiple parties with multiple DMs, it was the final joint session, and we were all level 20. The DMs wanted to scale things in accordance with our overall collective power, but the scale just got absurd. The BBEG was some sort of hyper demon that took the form of a giant flesh diamond that was thousands of feet across. It was accompanied by a giga tarrasque that was, to my recollection, "roughly 29000 feet tall". I'm not sure how such things were meant to be fought, but the DMs ran it like a normal combat. The DMs let us go at it for a while, coordinating how much damage was dealt by each party, until we passed some threshold and "won".

That whole campaign just went nuts after around level 12.

dont forget automatic weapons and artillery

Congratulations? That doesn't change shit about how peasants were very rarely used in medieval warfare.

Which is of course why military training and standards have only increased in quality and expense.

that's because the news cares about casualties. we could crap out men with nuggets and do a good job.

plus warfare changed to skirmish tactics.

Do I?!
I'm very partial to PDF related, though Veeky Forums doesn't seem to like it all that much. I like the idea with masses of soldiers still being important to win the day, with PCs acting as great heroes of legend. A bit like the protagonists in LotR, now that I think about it.

Your standard of "good job" must be rather low, and your weird attribution to "the news" is disconcerting. You're a civilian, aren't you?

My DM did it fairly well. He took the HP of 10+ enemies and put them in a single "unit," and the unit could attack multiple times. It was simple and it worked.

no my standard of a good job is a nuke from orbit

your usin your noggin but alter it to neutron type nuclear bombs and your on to something

>not antimatter bombs

Good luck being second place

Let's put it this way.

1000 barely trained dudes with nuggets vs 10 navy seals the nuggets win.

Both of those vs a nuke, the nuke wins.