The Armchair Backstabber

A Tabletop Roleplaying Game blog about intrigue, war and social conflict in RPGs.

Category: Game Theory and Observations

The GM gets to Start and Stop Whenever They Want, Social Contract be Damned!

Questions connected this, or topics like it, abound on social media, especially Reddit. Many questions along the lines of “I’m tired of running X-game; what do I do?” or ” I want to change the ruleset, but my players will be upset; how do I tell them?” So today, I want to state it clearly, right from the start, then I’ll elucidate why: GMs get to start and stop whatever they want, whenever they want (and players then can choose to go along with it or not play with that GM).

Pretty much that’s it. I’ll say more, but this is really the crux of the matter – the GM is a person, and as a person, gets to decide how they spend their free-time. There is a social contract in groups, yes; that social contract does not obligate me to run things I don’t like, for certain amounts of time, or to accommodate your particular flavor of game to the detriment of others.

The Weird Gaming Social Contract

Not to belabor the point, but the issues I see people complaining or asking about online seem to stem from some sort of odd, yet silently approved social contract a lot of us have about TTRPGs. Specifically, that one the game starts, it MUST GO ON FOREVER. As always, we can understand why – it’s an investment of time, energy, and even money, to get into a game, set up characters and maintain the stories we all enjoy. Who wants to invest that all again into something else (this of course leads to folks sticking to one game for years, and even a single campaign, even if the steam ran out long ago and they don’t enjoy it). I’d say that social contract is wrong, or at least, needs to be rewritten.

GM = Workhorse

Your average GM getting ready for this week’s campaign session.

First of all, let’s all acknowledge it – the GM does the most work, hands down. There are very few games where all members of the group take on a lot of work to make the game run (in fact, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Burning Wheel, mostly because most of the bookkeeping during the game is in the players’ hands, and everyone is asked opinions when awarding Fate and Persona points, or during the Trait Vote – these are all explicitly shared burdens, rather than just the province of the GM; but it still isn’t everything). Otherwise, it’s pretty much all on the GM.

For those that don’t know (though…who are you? Why?) GMs do a lot of work to make a game go, even in low prep games. For example, let’s take pre-game prep. At a minimum, GMs spend time imagining what the bad guy NPCs will do, their plans, their resources, etc. Many games require GMs to plan out the opposition for conflicts (mostly fights, but could be social conflicts too). We generally want out games to be a challenge, right? So the GM has to figure out opposition to the PCs that makes sense within the context of the game and the game’s math. Some games need even more planning, like writing up dungeons, or figuring out what Factions do behind the scenes in-between sessions, or other bookkeeping and menial tasks meant to set up the game properly.

During the game itself, GMs run the show – again, at a minimum, they frame scenes, sometimes get said scenes rolling, adjudicate actions between players and the game world, and generally ride herd on the game. They’re coming up with plot or story details (often on the fly), acting as the multitude of NPCs, and describing lots of things in detail verbally or by drawing maps and diagrams.

GMs also often end up as the ones socially responsible, to some degree, about the fun others have. So, if there are personal player disputes outside of their characters (somebody feels another player is unfairly advantaged, or somebody thinks another player is disturbing the game somehow , the GM should take care of them, or any other issues (does a player want a character that doesn’t fit the game? Or somebody is harassing someone else as we play? It’s apparently the GM’s responsibility, to the point that some players will just sit passively as things happen they don’t like, and wait for the GM to signal what they should think or even feel about an at-table issue.

I remember once I had a game with a guy that was racist – he had definite ideas about how minorities in the US should act, and took umbrage when a person at the table didn’t fit whatever was in his head, or didn’t like being assumed to do certain things (as an African-American, and another friend at the table being originally from Vietnam, we took exception to this). I confronted the guy at the table when he started on one of his racist things, and he ended up leaving the game right in the middle. After he was gone, and what shocked me, was that the other players got mad about it – why did I have to make a scene? I just should have told the GM afterwards, they thought. That feels so bizarre to me – I’m an adult, no? I can handle things, and voice if I have a problem (that others may think isn’t a problem anyway).

So it’s a lot of work. For me at least, it’s quite rewarding work, but it IS work. I sometime feel tired after a game, and have even run my voice raw from talking so much.

Why the GM Can Say No

So, if I’m the GM and putting in many more hours of work into a game (as we well know many players only think about the game when they come to the table, and never again until the next session; in my experience it’s rare that players think about the game so much) than anyone else, then, I don’t see why I can’t decide where my effort will go. This isn’t job or a family commitment (and even then, people find ways to wiggle out of something they REALLY don’t want to do). No matter what, I get to decide what I do with my free time, and if I obviously don’t like something (like the game I’m running), I get to bail at a moment’s notice. Is it fair to the others? An excellent question. Communication is key. But as a GM, I reserve the right to change my mind right until we reach the table.

Any Player Can Say No Too, By the Way

This should go without saying but I sometimes feel folks need to be reminded: the GM is a player too. In some groups (and as some now expect) the GM is supposed to bow to whatever the players want (so, if a player wants to play a murder hobo in our Victorian romance game, we’re supposed to accommodate them somehow). But! The GM is also a player in the game, and should also get some things they want. I’m not saying a GM can’t compromise – we don’t want to have the GM control our characters or railroad us in a game that essentially boils down to the GM roleplays by themselves for four hours while we watch (I’ve actually had that happen to me as a player once; sort of the lead up to Forever GM-ing). So, in some groups, the GM is in a weirdly subservient role, meant to “facilitate” the players’ fun (while neglecting their own). That’s just wrong-headed. The GM is a player in the game; they have different tools and pieces, but in the end, they’re still also playing the game, and presumably get some sort of enjoyment from the experience. Or at least they should.

This also means, of course, players can, and do, say no to playing something they’re not interested in. I know there are players that stay in a group for a game they’re not really feeling for lots of reasons: they just want to hang out, their friends are in the group, they think it’s the “only game in town”. I just think it bears saying that as a player, GMs don’t have to hang around. Yes, this game ends if the GM stops wanting to play (unless someone else picks up the mantle to run it), but they don’t have an obligation to be there, just like no one else does.

GMs are Human (and thus, make mistakes)

For my final point, I also want to remind people out there that, simply, GMs are people; they make mistakes. So, I take a long time to evaluate a system, and whether it’s right for a game I want to run. I ask question on forum, make a bunch of test characters to understand character generation. I sometimes even do a test run of the conflict systems. I listen to Actual Plays and read them as well. And yet, after all that, we can get a game to the table and it falls on its face in a way that makes me feel bad. Yes, of course, some of that may be unfamiliarity, but some of it is simply, this doesn’t work as I thought it would. As I mentioned elsewhere, I’ve often started a game in one system, and realized I needed more detail or some capability that this system doesn’t offer, but another does. I recently migrated a Viking England game from Fate to Burning Wheel, and after one session I already feel the game is better for it. Fate is a fine system, but BW fits better what I’m trying to do.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, sometimes the GM choose wrongly. We play a session or three and we know, down in our bones, the game is wrong for us, or for the table, or for society at large. We realize we don’t have time to commit to this system, or maybe it just doesn’t work the way we’d imagined in our heads. And so we want to bow out or change it. Or maybe we’re just bored – we thought yet another campaign of Your-Always-Game would be fine, and then it turned out no, really, I can’t stand it anymore.

So…GMs can Change Games? Or Even Drop Them?

Yes. A GM can bow out and do something else. It’s your time GMs. Maybe you feel like compromising on a game, maybe not. Maybe this decision will push your players away. Maybe you’ll decide to give up GMing all together. It happens. But if you’re not having fun in a game, during your free time, why are you doing it? Don’t!

August 29, 2026
An Apologia for the Short Campaign and Why I Run Them

The Bog Standard Way

It’s a truism in much of the tabletop RPG hobby that you basically pick a game and play it until everyone gets tired of it. We have plenty of stories of people playing one game (and one continuous campaign or setting) for a year or more (and the crazies who run multi-decade campaigns). It is also a truism that we should be playing once a week for 3-5 hours, so, these long campaigns have long legs indeed; upwards of 40 sessions a year and so on, for more than 120 hours.

Lots of games lean into this model. The granddaddy, D&D in all its iterations, assume a “zero-to-hero” progression, which fits perfectly with the idea that you’re going to have 40-50 sessions a year, allowing a long line of progression from farm boy to hero of the kingdom. It wouldn’t be fun, after all, to promise lots of cool powers and abilities and never see them in something like a reasonable timeframe. Most Basic Roleplaying games (like Runequest or Call of Cthulhu) work this way as well – you might start out with a few skills in the 40s to 50 range, maybe one or two above that, and start playing. Usually, skills advanced (if you used them meaningfully in the session) at the rate of 1-4% or so (depending on your system; there’s some variance in d100 based systems) at the end of each session. So, at an average of 2% per advance, it would take at least 10 sessions to move a skill from 30% to 50%, for example, with the chance ratcheting down as the skill went up (since you have to roll ABOVE the percentage to advance in BRP games). This means you might only advance 1% each time if you were unlucky on the advancement roll.

Burning Wheel is another game that works mostly with the premise that you’re going to play lots of sessions, for a long time. The advancement system really shines when you hit around the 20th session, when you really start to see some gains in the higher skills, and even a small chance of something like Artesia happening (it’s a big deal, trust me). I can add Traveller to the mix, but for a different reason – much of the game assumes long travel times between planets, and in many versions, and not terribly fast (or existent) skill advancement system. When the system DOES have advancement, it’s either absurdly short compared to the skills gained in character generation (weeks of game-time as opposed to years of game time in character generation to gain a skill level or two) or so long you won’t probably play enough game time to see it happen (one system gained you a new skill level or so every 2-4 years, though I don’t remember which Traveller system that happened in).

This thinking also allows for people who play crunchier systems to have plenty of time to learn the game. If we go back to D&D, we have a game where the complexity of the rules ramps up over time as the characters gain more levels (and thus more Feats and powers); players are introduced piece by piece, and thus, have time to absorb the new rules (assuming they make any effort in that direction).

The Case for Shorter Games

Thing is…is it worth it? For many games extending into infinity, they peter out after a while, and never reach any sort of satisfactory conclusion. I know some groups do, and that’s fine, but I can’t imagine it’s a large percentage (the researcher in me would LOVE to know, though; it’s an interesting data point). I imagine the emotional payoff would be huge, assuming a “satisfying” conclusion happened. Video games like the original Mass Effect series are considered masterpieces (well, until the very last act of the third game) because there’s so much payoff happening once you hit that point: connections you made, characters you got on your side, alliances made and broken, actions having consequences far down the line. It is a great feeling to experience all that. But that happens because a professional TEAM of writers managed the story and pacing and all that (and I can’t say enough how mad I am about the ending).

Now, here’s where I become Debby-downer. I don’t think a lot of us can pull that off. I’m no novelist or script-writer, and the PCs won’t do what I’d want them to do anyway, to make sure we reach that satisfying conclusion. How many GMs have created certain NPCs are our reoccurring main villain, only to have a PC one-shot them in a chance encounter? Or to glom onto a random NPC we made up on the spot that suddenly becomes the focus of their activities (I’m reminded once of a Star Wars game a friend of mine ran; he had a rebel contact guy whose cover was a Speeder Bike salesman; he because our main font of wisdom, and eventually, we elevated him to governor or something on the planet we were trying to free). Those sort of things are often fun, but that doesn’t mean we as GMs (or even the whole group) can make that into a satisfying wrap-up after two years of NPCs and storylines colliding.

Personally, that’s one of my fears in long games. Again, I’m no real storyteller or fiction writer or whatever; I have no idea if, after a two-year campaign, I could bring it to a satisfying end. Instead, because RPGs are game that involve rambunctious players, or fly off all over the place, or leave the game, or new people get added or whatever, that I’d eventually story myself into a weird corner I couldn’t story myself out of. Meaning, in effect, I’d feel the time was wasted. Granted, we had fun getting to that point, but not having a good end would kill some of that feeling.

Secondly, and this is very personal, I don’t really want to run one thing for that long. I’ve got a million ideas in my head, and a shelf full of games I want to run at some point or at least try out. Hell, my weirdo gaming format (because of work and other responsibilities, I can only run games once a month for about 5 hours) makes keeping the kind of continuity expected in the “play till the end of time” paradigm quite difficult. I want to try stuff; playing once a month means I have to be judicious with what I choose to play.

How and Wherefore?

Where does that leave me? Short campaigns. In general, I run things that last 3-6 sessions. I very occasionally hit around 10; it’s rare. By that point, I’m chomping at the bit to do something else. In fact, there’s a good chance that, if the campaign didn’t grab me from the start, I’ve already intellectually moved on, and so my last session or two is already getting lackluster. So I keep things short and punchy – and I work hard to bring some sort of satisfying conclusion to a story arc. Not always possible as I’ll discuss below, but the goal. Which means 2-3 games a year.

Is that fair to your players? A big question, and one I’ll write a whole blog post on, I swear! But shortly: I do feel so, and after almost 40 years of gaming, and more than 50 years of living, plus my various troubles and tribulations, I’m not willing to hold onto and run a game if I’m not feeling it, system or setting or story. My gaming time is limited; it’s my main hobby, but all those other things I mentioned make it so I can only enjoy it a certain amount. I won’t waste time sticking to something if I’m not getting out what I want; that high from a good game is what I’m chasing, after all, and why I game at all. Hell, that’s a whole other blog post (figuring out what we get out of all this) but there it is. It’s like any other entertainment – if you’re not getting what you want out of it, why stick around? If you’re not fulfilled in some way (or several ways) what are you doing there?

The addendum to this of course is that as GM, for the vast majority of games, you’re doing the heavy-lifting. You do the most “homework” between sessions, you come up with plots (or situations, or Fronts, or what have you), and even if players help you with that stuff, you STILL have to make sure and adjudicate if those makes sense at all. In the session itself you do all that turned up to 11, plus run the NPCs and monsters, deal with intro-player issues (and often the table will turn to you to even bring up issues, even if they know it’s an issue and should be brought up, they’ll defer to your doing it). It can be a lot of work. So, as GM, I feel it’s up to me to decide under what circumstances I want to deal with it. Obviously, if the players don’t like it, they can talk about it, we can negotiate a little maybe, but in the end, if I’m not having fun, I won’t run it.

What Does it All Mean?

Now, that was long-winded, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years. The topic comes up often when I describe my gaming situation (once a month, as defined by the Consolidated Spousal Treaty of Having Fun) and folks telling me that’s no way to run, etc etc. Fact is, I’ve been running short campaigns pretty much since I started back in 1987; can’t say I didn’t have free time then, but I definitely got bored with one game after a long time, and at the minimum, switched settings every 10 sessions or so.

I do hope that some of you will be nodding along and realize that this is me describing how you’ve been doing things for years, or thinking maybe that IS what you should have been doing all along. Like any social grouping, I know social pressure is a powerful motivator – some of you may be hesitating to end a game you KNOW isn’t what you want, and others of you may be feeling guilty for ending it, especially if your friends are protesting the end since they didn’t get to whatever thing they were planning for the character (I once had a player who had a Feat build outline for a D&D 3e character from levels 1-10; somewhere around 7th level he finally expected to get to “the good stuff” and was marking time till then).

As always, there are more articles that I’ve written, which you can have a look at here: Articles

August 22, 2026
Why I Like Crunchy Systems (It Seems)

Gotta Start at the Beginning

Okay, this is a long, endless topic in TTRPG gaming circles. I know. I’ve engaged in quite a few of those arguments (on both sides!), and I wanted to touch on it today because it recently became an issue – specifically, I was running Fate Core (my own choice, in fact, I’d lobbied hard for it) coming off a Genesys Shadow of the Beanstalk short campaign. Thought I wanted something more “character focused” because we were doing an historical fiction game, and based on conversations we had in our Genesys game (which is a pretty traditional medium crunch game with special dice, once you get down to it). We did characters quickly (five people, all new to Fate, in about an hour, so pretty good – with all the attendant bad jokes, chatter, and questions about how things worked).

We did that first session (3 hours). Played fine, players had fun, but for me, the GM, I found it extremely hard to run. Not because I hadn’t run Fate Core before – this was my 6th or 7th campaign using it; I know it backwards and forwards. But it was different this time, and I think now, a total mismatch in a certain, specific way (the crux of this post!). It wasn’t because the rules didn’t work – they were fine, and as said, players grokked them quickly. The game did everything I had wanted it for (to wit, to have players be able to define themselves with Aspects as roleplaying prompts, to codify things like sidekicks and using the Fate Fractal to denote things like their court faction and all right mass combat rules). Should have been a perfect fit. Wasn’t.

In this case, and the topic of today’s post, I want to explore why that is. My current thesis, if you will, is that the Fate Core game, when rolling dice and adjudicating things, didn’t really give me enough information to say what was or wasn’t happening. The background of the rules also didn’t really “inform” my adjudication, for lack of a better term. I needed details the game couldn’t give me, by design. I mean, I knew that going in (and technically “easiness” it what I’d chosen it for, what my players had even asked for). I believed I could just fill in those details from my head and my research. I was very, very wrong. By the end of the session I was mentally exhausted, and even had a headache. I’d felt this before, after certain sessions, so it got me thinking.

The issue is crunch. Or in this case, the lack of it. But also certain crunch (not all crunch is the same!). So I’d reframe this as details that need to be made up vs. details the system generates for you. It’s weirdly specific I grant, but I think it really touches on what was bothering me when I ran it. Basically, Fate was incapable of generating or providing certain details which I, as a GM, find useful when talking about things.

Let me give an example. The Fate Core mass combat rules (via the wonderful System Toolkit) gives you a pretty decent system to run mass combats; following the Fate Fractal, you treat military units like characters: you give them Skills and Aspects, and even a Consequence or two. You know exactly how they work because they work like everything else in a Conflict, with a few extra rules (mostly about what Leaders/PCs can do there). But…

You know what those rules don’t care about? The size of your force. Do you have 300 heavy cavalry or 1000? For these rules, it doesn’t matter (unless you, the GM, decide it does via, say, the Scale optional rule, and even then, you’ll need to decide how many whatevers mean the next Scale level; you need to make those thresholds. Also, the game doesn’t really say what happens when a unit is injured (i.e. takes a Consequence). Do you lose half the unit? The whole thing if it has a single Consequence? Some percentage?

(Seriously guys, size matters!)

While it’s okay to handwave that, at some point, my players at least will ask – how many troops did we lose? How long does it take to recruit and replace them? What’s their combat effectiveness (stats) now? Fate doesn’t touch those things (because it doesn’t want to and isn’t made to), but it made me feel weird. I ALSO wanted those answers, because they were vital to the next step – what should the PCs do? Chase after the other army? Are we strong enough? How hurt do we think they are? Or for my NPCs? I had a game once where my NPCs were accidentally victorious (I’d made their army weaker than the player army but three bad decisions and disastrous rolls later, there it was). Logically, holding to the game setting and verisimilitude, what made sense now? What should the NPC commander do?

And maybe that’s where more crunchy games win for me. They help me roleplay the NPCs. Yes, there’s much more to keep track of, and often, more to prepare for a session (I was doing some prep for our switch to Burning Wheel actually before writing this post). This takes time. There’s more to adjudicate, and procedures to follow. And yet…for all that, I find it easier to run. Because of the extra crunch, I had enough extra detail to hang my hat on, which helped my thinking.

I’ll give one more weird example. Had a bog-standard fantasy game I was running in Savage Worlds (specifically because their mass combat rules are pretty good and quite fun). However, game was missing something; players felt it too, and I said let’s switch to GURPS. When I started replanning that game, I kept trying to decide how much troops, “realistically”, the PCs would have; what made sense? I could decide myself (that’s what I’d done for the Savage Worlds game, after all, for the three sessions we played before switching). But on a lark, I used the Realm Management supplement for GURPS to figure out the size of the military forces for the enemies around the PCs, and their own army. This fixed a lot of things in my head once I had some concrete benchmarks to work with. Realistic? Probably not at all. But eminently useful.

(So what I’m saying is, can you boil all of medieval economics down to like, one number? Please?)

Now, this isn’t to say all crunch is equal. As I said, I like crunch that helps me describe and adjudicate, that helps me build the world in my head so I can describe it to players. For example, I’m not terribly in love with the crunch in combat of some versions of D&D and Pathfinder – I find fiddling with Feat interactions, and what they do from round to round, exhausting. Whereas GURPS and Burning Wheel (both of which I’ll surely write about at some point on this blog) feed me the sort of detail that gets my brain going. So BW ended up the game I’m running now because it combined my original goal (something character centric) with the detail I needed.

One last thing before we end. In some circles, a lot of this debate centers around how much work it is to run more crunchy games, and people just being busy as you get older (spouse, kids, more work, more responsibility, etc. etc.). I had a kid (but they now have left the nest, alas), still have the spouse (who still lets me game), and yes, much more responsibility, but, I don’t know, I seem to be handling it. Now, this could simply be a function of knowledge (I know GURPS and BW quite well at this point), but I find that the planning and world building decision-making necessary for both games makes me do work up front, but quite a bit less when actually running, and smaller prep in between. It’s odd, since there IS prep in between, but it feels handleable. When I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark, I weirdly felt there wasn’t enough homework for me to do! Turns out I enjoy that stuff too, as part of the hobby.

So anyway, I hope this helps some of you! It took me quite a bit of time to put my finger on why I gravitate towards crunchier games, and almost always end up cutting my lighter games short, and coming back to the heavier stuff. And, I can’t say enough, nothing is wrong with light and medium crunch games; I’ve run plenty of them and had good fun. But for the longer term, it seems I need a bit more crunch to enjoy the game.

As always, there are more articles that I’ve written, which you can have a look at here: Articles

August 18, 2026
My Obsession with Mass Combat Systems
Mass Combat – a Major Story Element

This one is actually based on a post I wrote elsewhere some time ago in social media, and realized it’s a pretty large topic that is also very specific, so I wanted to make it my first real blog post here.

I’ve noticed that I don’t take a system seriously as a thing I might use unless it has a mass combat system; in fact, I tend to not buy something these days, even if I’m otherwise interested, if I know it doesn’t have one. Especially if the background of the setting implies mass combats occur or are important to said background and there’s STILL no mass combat system there.

You see, I mostly run political games, and I often angle the games towards eventually having mass combats or it’s built into the premise. For me, then, mass combat is an absolutely needed feature, and games that won’t even attempt it aren’t really my bag these days. As well, I seem to want system that “help me”, meaning rolling dice and interacting with the system gives me data, which I can use in my descriptions, to set up challenges for players, or to add complications or rewards somehow (another blog post for another day). So when I’m saying a particular system is “good”, I means it does a number of those things well and narratively points me in directions.

Systems I strongly dislike usually fall under “GM fiat – describe the battle as background and focus on PC action” or “the army is so abstract that you just roll dice a few times and move on; players have nothing to do with this and can’t affect anything in any case.”

So, I have played a whole lot of them and looked at a whole bunch of other ones, and ground my teeth over games that should have one but don’t. I consider a system good if I can do army and vehicle mass combat with it, and if it scales easily between small units and giant armies. Or at least, gives me some room to try that in some fashion.

Here’s a list of the ones I’ve played or tried over the years, and ones I’ve examined in some detail, hoping to squeeze something out.

The Great
1. GURPS Mass Combat – I consider this the gold standard. You’ll need to buy the Mass Combat supplement to use them. Easy to use, quick once you’ve set it up (setup being calculate the forces ahead of time, but that’s also relatively easy). Plenty of choices for the players to make (regarding tactics per turn and their own roll in the battle), and space for PCs to affect the battle in different ways and help or hurt the commander’s final resolution roll for each turn of battle. I’ve used this in a few games now. One note – it doesn’t really focus on individual units on the battlefield, but the overall composition of forces (which can impact the battle, like having more air superiority or something like that); so if you want unit to unit action that isn’t really what happens here. My players have always enjoyed this one. One thing that’s missing is rules for starships as mass combat units – the rules cover everything from chariots to futuristic hovertanks, but the vehicle side doesn’t include spaceships for some reason. There’s a Pyramid article that does touch on this, sort of. For a game I ran, I used the water ship unit stats and didn’t worry about it too hard.
2. Savage Worlds – my players have also liked this one a lot. One of the few games that have the mass combat rules in the corebook. Like GURPS, it doesn’t really care about individual units and doesn’t even really look at if you have superiority in one fact or another (as GM, you can add to the battle roll for this if you want, but it’s up to you). Fast and easy, plenty of impact from PCs. Fits well with the “Fast, Furious, Fun” moniker. It’s fuzzy on details for the actual forces and tactics and such (but it’s SW, so that’s fine). It doesn’t have rules at all for raising forces or feeding and watering them, so that’s a minus, but Savage Worlds as a whole doesn’t touch that stuff so it isn’t really expected. More germane to the topic, was it fun? Unequivocal yes.
The Good (I think)
1. Fate Core – for this review, I’m referening the rules in Fate System Toolkit. There are other third-party Fate mass combat rules (like those in Diaspora) but I’m not concerned with those. Quite abstract and focused on units with Aspects and such, but it actually works fine and got the job done. I thought the way it handles individual actions was odd for me (PCs don’t REALLY affect the battle directly, but at the same time they kind of do by lending Fate points, taking hits for the unit, or increasing unit stats by being there in command). It was all a bit to abstract but that isn’t surprising for Fate. I used it a lot in a Rome campaign and it was quick and easy, and having PCs do things with the zone system was fun (especially having to overcome obstacles like Wooded Terrain or creating Aspects like Hasty Barricade).
2. Burning Wheel – I like them, but then, I like BW (I have a strong, strong bias at play here; you were warned). You can find these rules in the Burning Wheel Anthology Volume One. Originally I thought the mass combat system was overly fiddly and annoying, but now that I’ve had time to read it (and realize simplicity isn’t my thing) I’ve warmed up mightily to it. I haven’t actually run them yet, so I may change my mind (though I should get the chance in the next few months from this blog post!). Plenty of ways for players to affect the outcome. Like GURPS, it has rules for raising forces and replacing troops and all those sorts of things, plus BW things like defining the Doctrines and Traditions the unit runs under. Focuses on units rather than the army (so, one unit might be light infantry, and another cavalry or ships), which leads to my only real complaint – seems to think human forces won’t be more than 1000 per unit (though the rules themselves note you might have up to ten units or so). From what I can see it’s easy to extend the chart however to have larger units in a battle. Otherwise, I’m excited to give these a try. The system also, a little oddly, references the armor and weapon rules for individual characters at times (for example, armor rules are used to block against mass combat casualties; weapon rules are used to calculate how injured a PC might be if their unit got hurt). Also has rules for using ships in mass combat as forces, so an extra thumbs up from me. I should also note that Torchbearer 2e also has mass combat rules (in the Lore Master’s Manual) which seem awfully similar to these in form, at least at first glance. I haven’t run TB2e at all, so I haven’t really looked more carefully at these rules.
3. Genesys – another one I haven’t used but it seems good on paper. You can find these rules oddly in the Ships of the Shattered Empire book (which is, you guessed it, about ships in their Embers of the Imperium setting) but there’s nothing in the rules that wouldn’t make them applicable to historical World War II or fantasy or whatever. The rules cover both armies and vehicles as combatants, so that’s nice. Seems to have enough narrative detail to be interesting, and all the other elements I’d expect (choices for players to make, ways for them to affect the outcome, and the system generates enough details to help narrating the battle). Only tiny issue is it does not natively scale to larger numbers, but if you ignore the examples (and they are listed as examples) you can change the scale of forces to whatever you want. I’ll have to maybe finally dust of the Honor Harrington-esque space navy game in my head and give these rules a try.
4. Burning Empires – a little complicated (but isn’t everything from Burning HQ?), but it worked at the table and led to some gripping, fun battles that weren’t even slow or complicated once we got going. Some of the rules are fuzzy at the edges, but works well enough, though can take some time to resolve the first few times. Plenty for players to decide about, and the rules scale REALLY well (if abstractly) from a small fire team battle up to a planetary invasion. In my current BW campaign, if I end up not liking the native mass combat rules, I’ll absolutely be using these instead.
5. Dune 2d20 – this worked well for my group! It has some decisions for players to make as they build their pool and manipulate the dice; it’s VERY abstract, but neat in that it lets you have Assets than can be used specifically to affect mass battles. I ran it and mass combat was a big feature of that campaign (players were establishing a new house on the corpse of an old one, essentially). It was really fun; squishy in places between switching from the macro to the micro, but that worked too, ultimately I remember people had fun and the general PC was enraptured.
The Frustrating
1. Mythras – I REALLY like Mythras as a system, but the mass combat rules (found in the supplement Ships and Shieldwalls or the Mythic Britain book) for some reason, like Burning Wheel’s, only scale to having, say, at most, a few units of a bit more than 1000 soldiers in them (and each unit of each type is counted as a separate thing). For me this is very odd, given that Mythras has a whole bunch of historical fantasy supplements, many of which scream out for a good mass combat system. Take Mythic Rome for example. I ran a game in Mythic Rome using the S&S book; even running a single Roman legion of 5000 men against a similar sized force would be a nightmare of 5-10 units on a side because of how units are used and how damage is calculated for units. The rules were written for Viking England, where armies weren’t terribly large, but outisde of that narrow purview, it gets weird (as said, Late Roman Republic battles could easily reach 50000 on a side). Running it was actually pretty fast, and my players thought it was fun (they liked the Special Effects system in these rules a lot), so it works well, but not at the scale I’d like. Also, no rules for mass ship combat (which is, for me, horrible in a book called Ships and Shieldwalls). M-Space, on a side note, has a system for resolving extended conflicts, and the author has informally suggested ways to use it for battles, but that was EXTREMELY abstract.
The Not Great
1. Reign 2e – You can find these rules in the main corebook. The mass combat rules for Companies at that level are fine; it’s all very abstract, you make a roll based on the Company action you want for that Company turn, and that’s that. The mass comabt rules for actually controlling an army in the field (called Die Men!) are actively not good. There’s no way for individual players to affect anything, or get hurt, or anything else, really; your players don’t even need to be there, which is different than all the other rules reviewed above, as they at least require the PCs to be part of things). Also, for some reason the author only supposed battles of around 1500 men will happen, tops, which again is ludicrous, especially for a “generic” fantasy game (I know bigger battles can happen, but you only get 15 dice in your roll, and ostensibly, each die is supposed to represent a unit – anything above 15 units on a side and you have to wait until enough units are destroyed to start lowering those 15 dice pools, making a big battle take forever). The top unit size is 100 men, which is the main problem here (but not the only problem). The system also supposes some optional battle order lag thing for battles which isn’t realistic at all (since most system assume a “battle round” will be some minutes or even hours or days, they don’t worry about this), and overstates the chaos in battle here with this, which I guess was the intention.
2. Trinity Continuum – Found in the first corebook, I don’t know what to make of it. It’s technically for mass vehicle combat for some reason, but you can bend it to handle mass infantry combat (and their own examples show that). But the rules are loosey-goosey, but not in the fun, Fate way, but in the “we threw this here because we had some extra pages” way. I think. Like much in the book, it’s very possible I can’t parse the prose and they really work well and are fun. It’s abstract, and I can’t tell how they work at the table.
The “Why don’t you have mass combat rules?”
1. Runequest (and by extension, Basic Roleplaying) – just…why not? Much of Runequest lore is based on big set-piece battles that changed the narrative of the world. It’d be great to play those out, or other things between clans and tribes and such not in Dragon Pass. The game even has a Battle skill, which lists some effects for rolling it, and not much more. It’s kinda annoying that it doesn’t have proper battles, and no way to stage them. A glaring, obvious oversight (this made worse because a different Chaosium game, Pendragon, does have a fiddly but serviceable mass combat system – why can’t it be cleaned up and ported over?
2. Traveller – also…why not? There are, I acknowledge, ground mass combat rules in the Mercenary boxed set (which I hear are terrible; the old ones in Classic Book 4 were serviceable, but I only ever used them a handful of times). For a science fiction game set in space, where you have PCs that can be former Admirals, neither Classic, nor the new Mongoose versions, have a mass space combat system, and that’s a crime. There’s some sort of something in the 2e High Guard book about rolling damage for multiple units, and I heard there’s something a little more fleshed out in the new HG 2022 book, but I have a bet it isn’t great, but no idea. It would otherwise be the perfect system for the Honor Harrington game in my head, but can’t do it. By these rules, why do Commodores and Admirals even exist? What do they do?
3. Wrath and Glory (and all the other WH40K or Warhammer Fantasy rule sets) – like, I get there’s the tabletop miniatures game, but I detest minis; I want a version connected to the RPG rules I’m using (and those PCs) so I can fight the battles the setting implies are happening RIGHT NOW. It’s really odd we NEVER got a RPG-based system for any of those games. Turns me off ever running them.
So, that’s all the ones (I think) I’ve actually played, save for Genesys and Trinity, which I’ve only read. It’s one of the reasons I tend to stick to generic games, because they tend to have mass combat systems that are fun and involve the players, and can scale. Some other generic-ish games have them but they don’t really scale, even for the time periods they are about. And some systems which SHOULD have them don’t.

As always, there are more articles that I’ve written, which you can have a look at here: Articles
August 17, 2026
Introduction to the Armchair Backstabber

How I got here and why

The Origin Story

Well…here I am, finally. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was about 12. I soft-began the hobby when my mother started buying me Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was hooked instantly and had a pretty sizable collection when a friend of mine (we used to trade CYoA books with each other) told me about D&D and did I want to try it? That was back in 1987 and I played a REALLY large number of games since then, from the “basic” stuff like Call of Cthulhu and Traveller all the way up to mega-crunchy things like Living Steel and Millennium’s End (which used a plastic overlay to randomize combat hits and hit locations).

Anyway, in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a few trends in gaming, and a few trends in my very specific gaming, that led me to writing this blog. I won’t fool myself into thinking my preferences for a game are universal or even interesting to anyone except me. But they are particular, and I’m hoping someone (or several someone’s) are interested in my niche of the niche of the niche part of the tabletop RPG hobby.

What I Noticed

Most games in our shared hobby fall into what I like to call “adventure mode”. That is, a main assumption of the game is that players will want to “adventure”. In general, this seems to be go out on quests (or the modern and future equivalent, missions), and get loot or plot points or whatever. Player Characters are various kinds of “peon”, for lack of a better term: people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, who might do various tasks for people above them, but do not, themselves, wield any influence or power over the game setting itself, unless they are one some earth-shaking quest or activity that the GM allows to change things.

This also assumes a few other things. PCs aren’t usually terribly tied to their communities or anything else, really; they’re ne’er-do-wells free to list where they may. PCs are also heavily armed and supremely dangerous and everyone is more or less okay with that; basically, small groups of heavily armed people who show no compunction to NOT solve problems with violence are not perceived as immediate problems. Lastly, the PCs are assumed to be the sorts that won’t take any authority over them, and will, in fact, actively fight it, while also, often, simultaneously upholding the political/social/mythical status quo.

Mind, there’s nothing wrong this! As said, a great many successful, popular games follow this format. It goes without saying a vast number of video games use this format as well. It’s exciting after all, and fun. There’s fighting, exploration, interesting loot, and more fighting. Plenty to do, plenty to enjoy.

But…

Thing is, in all those years of gaming, I realized – I hate this pattern. Or at least, I’m bored with it, and since I generally GM, it’s not something I want to do. This might be a function of getting older; I mean, some years have passed since 1987, but I’m not really interested, and haven’t for a long time now, in doing some random weirdo’s mission to get whatever or talk to whoever (or more importantly, as GM, to play as that random weirdo handing out world-shaking quests to the group of randos that met in a tavern a few days ago).

To me, and possibly me alone, there’s something fundamentally weird about “adventuring”. To be a touch more specific, I find where this activity isn’t tied to anything: not to culture, society, family, or anything, I’m finding it harder and harder to suspend my disbelief and get into it. Early in my gaming career I gravitated to games like Runequest (especially the Glorantha kind) that assumed you were part of community, and you were doing things for and because of that community. This of course later led to games like Vampire, where you could engage in social machinations that rival your favorite period piece or 90210-style teen drama. Not exactly my cup of tea (I’ll get to that in a moment) but heading in that general direction.

Of course, you say, totally-not-a-strawman-reader, you don’t have to play all games in “adventure mode”! My group has whole sessions we don’t roll any dice! Well, yes, that’s true, and you’re right, but that isn’t what I want to get to. Can I play games in the style I want? Sure! No one will stop me. But do most games facilitate what I’m looking for? Not really, which is the crux of the matter.

So What IS My Cup of Tea?

As I commented to someone recently, what I want is probably pretty weirdly specific. Given I don’t want “adventuring” (which, as posited, is the default for many-a-game), what do I want?

The short answer is: politics. The longer answer is: politics/war/community building/social conflict.

So, politics. But why?

Here’s where I briefly delve into pop-psychology and assume a whole bunch of things about myself I can’t prove and would probably make a trained psychologist go mad. To wit: I think such games are fun because I like those sorts of stories where people/cyborgs/alien fish heads/whatever have to make choices within their socieities that impact others around them, while balancing other societal concerns and their own sense of self or honor.

The video game Mass Effect, for example, has remained one of my top games ever, and one of the smaller but important reasons is quite simple: the game doesn’t assume you’re a peon. From the start, you’re someone people in power take seriously. As the game moves on you start to affect politics and whole worlds and societies. You lead fleets into battle and handle crises that determine where people stand, how they live and die. THAT’S the stuff I want. I spent a large part of my gaming career as some peon doing fetch quests. No more! It’s one of my principal problems with Skyrim (an awesome game I spent way too much time playing): they let you gain leadership of a guild (several guilds, actually) but in the end, you’re still, basically, a murder-hobo adventurer. Your positions and titles ultimately mean nothing (except you get to take society goods and it’s not considered stealing – that’s, I’m a little embarassed to say, kinda sweet).

What This Blog (Hopefully!) Will Be

This is my attempt, looking at tabletop RPGs, and probably the occasional computer/console RPG, to examine our hobby and see where particular games gives us room to delve into our fantasies of amassing political power or societal influence, of moving armies or starting revolts, and, in general, of being able to be political, and have that be what the game is about.

What’s that, totally-not-a-strawman? You say you don’t like politics in your games! Well, I get that I guess; you want a certain kind of fun. I mean, you do you, yeah? But for me, to badly paraphrase the Bard, the politicking is the thing. And I’m hoping to look at games that facilitate that sort of play (and occasionally comment on those games that could be this way but aren’t, or games that say they are but actively get in the way).

In any case, in the coming weeks and months I hope to elucidate those themes in this blog, to the enjoyment of all! And if you’d like to see how I’m doing that, have a look at the latest articles I’ve written (or any of the past ones too): Articles

August 17, 2026