If I want to run a game for my players operating in an armor column, what are my options? More importantly...

>Do you have players all be in one tank as crewman
Good for when they tank operates alone, and you want a tight-knit group. Driver drives, gunner operates main gun and co-axial, loader and commander have their own MGs to use, and make sure to have occasional out-of-tank experiences, like setting up roadblocks, giving out candy to children, or clearing a building of traps in order to sleep in it.
Good for gritty survival experiences.

> Each player control their own crew with their PC being the commander?
For larger-scale games with more enemies, one player per tank, PC is the commander, and have some control over their crew of NPCs as well.
Great for thunder run-style operations, or for tactical experiences where everyone has to think. Make everyone pick a style of vehicle; MBT for boom and some dakka, IFV for big dakka and carrying troops/gear/loot, support tank with missiles and autocannon for raping rooftops and infantry, SPAAG for fending off aircraft, etc.

Heavy Metal: A Tank Company's Guide to Iraq is a must-read. It's got such gems as a tank squadron setting up a roadblock in the city they just conquered, and finding that the best way to keep people from wandering through it at night thinking they can't be seen is to set out glowsticks. Green glowsticks, set out with protective gear and tongs as if they're radioactive. Because the locals have seen too many old movies to know better, but don't believe in nightvision gear.
Or someone taking multiple attempts to shoot out a street light with an M4 carbine, before someone else just draws their sidearm and blasts it in one shot.

I ran a short Only War game where the players were a tank crew(commander, gunner, driver). They at least seemed to like it.

>How much crunch would I be in for?
A bit. It's rewarding, but a lot to learn.

Not OP, but what do I need to play out glorious tank fights in Phoenix Command? Table had me drooling already

A 1d100, a map to play on with preferably a scale of 20 yards/hex, some markers to denote tank and turret location and direction, and some tolerant friends. Advanced Squad Leader maps are, conveniently 40 meters to the hex and can be used without much issue. Pic related is a mockup of a hex overlay for use with ASL maps - the smallest hexes are the 2-yard hexes used in infantry combat.

If you want to get more elaborate, I also recommend printouts of all the important tables and sheets (there's a lot) and a couple of compasses with rotating housing and 360 degree markings. The latter is useful because of the rotating housing, which you can use to keep track of turret facing relative to the hull.

Patton's Best looks pretty awesome. I might just have to give it an order.
Only War is a contender, especially because I'm already fluent in the other 40krpg systems. I don't know much about the vehicle system in OW, but I do know that the vehicle criticals leave much to be desired. How does OW manage having everyone get one position in a tank?
I didn't know that Gaijin released their War Thunder code publicly.
This is glorious, though it does make me concerned in one respect-- modularity. To make custom content and adapt it to that sheet alone seems agonizing at best, impossible at worst.

>To make custom content and adapt it to that sheet alone seems agonizing at best, impossible at worst.

Tell me about it. I've mostly got firearms figured out, but so far all I can do with vehicles is swap out their weapons and make minor adjustments to armour, ground pressure, and turning rate.

It's all Cold War armour, right? That'll do.

Leopard 1A1A1
Leopard 1A4
Leopard 2 of unknown pedigree
Merkava 1
Merkava 2
T-62
T-62M
T-64B
T-64BV
T-72 Ural
T-72M1
T-80B
T-80BV
Chieftain Mk 9
Chieftain Mk 12
M60A1 ERA
M60A3
M1A1
M1A1(HA)

Also:
Panzer IV F1
Panzer IV F2
Panzer IV H
Panzer V A Panther
Panzer V G Panther
Panzer VI E Tiger
Panzer VI B Königstiger
T-34-76B
T-34-85
KV-1A
KV-1C
KV-1s
KV-85
IS-2
IS-2m
M4A3(75) Sherman
M4A3E4 Sherman
M4A3E2 Jumbo Sherman

That's a very nice diversity of tanks. Wish it had 48's and 26's, but I suppose that's what the m60 is at the end of the day anyway.

>Patton's Best looks pretty awesome. I might just have to give it an order.

It's a helluva lot of fun. I had it and B-17, a solitaire bomber game, on the table for weeks at a time.

The way PB handled movement was genius. Rather than move your tank, you moved the "world" around it. The tank sits in the middle of a "dart board" with enemy units & terrain markers placed at varying distances & directions around it. When you move or turn, those markers get moved instead. It kept the tank the focus of the game and meant you weren't driving across the same mapboard over and over again.

>system-agnostic
So I'm reading through phoenix command right now, but I'm failing to see how this could be system-agnostic. Everything contained within is extremely specific, and it's not conducive to either changing a real RPG's systems to use Phoenix or to change Phoenix to another RPG's systems. It's also a bit funny to make heads or tails of what the game is trying to be-- a tactical wargame or a player-based RPG system.

I'm beginning to become a bit skeptical.

For anyone who wants a bit less crunch, I advise Twilight 2000 2E.

>pretty
And if that is still too much, then Only War.

I hear good things about Twilight 2k. How is 2013 though?

>How is 2013 though?
A big step down, mainly thanks to throwing out their perfectly good old rules and replacing them with far worse stuff

>How is 2013 though?

It uses Reflex system which sucks in general and sucks in particular in this game. T2K1E and 2E are 90s designs and fairly dated, but T2013 using Reflex isn't much of an improvement.

There's a huge amount of fluff too, something like 36+ pages in the core book BEFORE you see a single rule.

All versions of Twilight are crunchy so if crunch is what you want you can't go wrong with any of them. There's much more material available for the GDW versions. The PDF Share thread will have a link to one or two Traveller troves that will have all of the GDW versions.

>Share thread will have a link to one or two Traveller troves that will have all of the GDW versions.
Way ahead of you user.
As for crunch, does the game have some level of abstraction for handling squad / platoon combat as opposed to individual units? What book would I find the rules for this in?

In the tradition of the 80s the idea was that you could slot Phoenix Command (or parts of it) into your favourite RPG to replace subsystems you felt needed more ~realism~.

This makes more sense if you approach it from the Small Arms/Hand-to-Hand angle, as you can use Phoenix Command's to-hit system with Call of Cthulhu and still roll 2d8 for damage for your rifle - or use Call of Cthulhu's to-hit system and use Phoenix Command's hit location tables to determine the injury and its consequences.

It's why it's so important to specify the attributes and skills of a character in qualitative terms, and probably why a 3-18 attribute range is used; it converts easily to most of the popular RPGs of the era.

The Mechanized supplement is less suited to this kind of slotting in as it abstracts a lot of things (it doesn't even work well with the rest of Phoenix Command, as there's no wounding for vehicle crews, just OK/Incapacitated/KIA) and is very large.

>handling squad / platoon combat

T2K? No, it doesn't. It's straight RPG, man-to-man, PC versus PC/NPC combat. GDW did published squad level rules for it's sci-fi line in Striker and Striker II. Although meant for Traveller, they can handle WW2/modern combat very well by simply capping the technology involved.

One warning, both Strikers are very C3I "heavy". You send units orders, for example, and then determine to see whether they receive and/or follow them.

/hwg/ will be able to give you several recommendations for WW2/modern squad. They'll even have copies of some rules in their troves too.

Is this it? These seem like wargaming resources, no? I'm mostly referring to something in the vein of Formations from 40krpg's Only War; rules for infantry groups that expedite the combat procedure when dealing with massed infantry.

That's the 1E version. It was written for Classic. The 2E was written over a decade later for another version of Traveller called TNE. Striker is both rules and a design kit. If you're not designing guns, tanks, etc., it's pretty straight forward. If you need to design stuff more complicated than a squad of infantry of if you need stuff other than the designs in the book, you're in for some work.

If you want everything "prepackaged" (and who doesn't!), Striker isn't what you want. You mentioned Warhamster so a spin-off called Bolt Action (BA) might be something you'll find familiar. It has a huge number of "army lists' for various ETO/PTO locations and periods listing the costs for various units and suggesting which units allegedly worked with which.

On the plus side BA is quick to learn, is relatively new, uses a common base size, and has a good number of supplements. On the minus side BA is derived from Warhamster and takes a very fast & loose attitude towards historicity.

/hwg/ has a love/hate relationship with BA. I don't play it myself, but I think it's a serviceable set of rules which succeeds very well in filling the "fast, easy, cheap, & dumb" niche. Everyone needs a "First Wargame" and BA is a great choice for that.

/hwg/ would be a good place to ask any further questions. The anons there play a wide range of WW2/modern games and can give you their opinions regarding them.

Well that's part of the problem, these are tabletop wargaming rules. I'm looking for RPG rules. In the 40k roleplaying games by FFG, there were rules for handling groups of enemies as one entity-- a formation-- as opposed to each unit having a turn. This made encounters around several squads or platoons exponentially faster to manage.

Apart from the 40K RPG rules you mention, I only know of one other RPG that has anything like anything remotely like that; MegaTraveller.

In either the Rebellion Sourcebook or Referee's Companion there's a system there's a system for taking individual PCs/NPCs "amalgamating" them into a unit, fighting a battle, and then applying any damage the unit takes back down on the individual PCs/NPCs.

GURPS has a mass combat system which is fairly high level. Units are rated in various ways, each side submits plans to the GM, DMs are awarded for various stuff, a contested strategy roll is made, a winner declared, and casualties then applied to the units in question. IIRC, the system is in Compendium II for 3E and there's a pdf with the system for 4E.

Other than that, I don't know of anything like the 40K system for "real" as opposed to fantasy wargaming.

Interesting. Kind of surprising hear about a lack of anything else in between skirmish-sized and massive-sized battles. I suppose I'll have to snoop around more or, worst case, homebrew a system.

GURPS has another mass combat system in its Traveller - Star Mercs book.
It's very much on the light side, makes use of whatever difference there might be between the two forces, the commanders' skills, and recommends the PC's actions be a modifier on the roll for their side. It's simple enough that it can handle any engagement size.

This is goddamn amazing. I'm not sure if I'd play it directly, but just the idea of players in-tandem controlling different parts of a model sounds interesting. Reminds me a little of Artemis for PC.

>Interesting. Kind of surprising hear about a lack of anything else in between skirmish-sized and massive-sized battles.

There's plenty of rules covering the "middle", there's just little or nothing covering it like those 40K rules you wrote about.

While a single stand with minis on it can be used represent a squad, company, battalion, etc., I don't know of any rules which group all stands together into one "entity" for combat purposes.

DBM and DBA groups stands together for movement purposes and multiple stands can attack one stand. Combat results are still "measured" in stands however.

Well, if I might clarify. The 40k formation system isn't built for grand strategy, "command skill versus command skill," it's built for integration into standard combat. A formation is comprised of a singular leader unit and a number of smaller units under his control. They collectively take one turn in combat at the same time, and the number of attacks they make is based on how many units there are in the squad. Per unit in a squad, the squad gets a +5 bonus to hit; and for every +10 for its success, it scores an extra hit. Likewise, when damaged, for as many hits as it takes that are capable of dealing damage through armor and toughness reduction, that amount of units are dropped from the formation.
Its utility is not for an offsite strategist's usage, per say, but rather for the tank's coaxial MG to cut through 10 men in one fell swoop.