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