Mass Unit Battles

Yesterday I reworked a page on the wiki, Block Hex, which discusses the use of 145 yard wide hexes to map towns and cities, as well as tactical battle-maps. This is a subject not particularly interesting to a great many "story-based" players, who don't want their character's lives judged by anything as irksome as "randomness" or "total disregard for one's ego"... but for others, there remains the concept that seeks to embrace war and all it's indifference, collateral damage and, well, actual significance, as opposed to the personality needs of a player's blessed character.

Of course, no combat system I've encountered has ever achieved this.  I've read some that claimed to do so, but since D&D players tend to put the individual on a pedestal, it's hard to capture that sense created with wargame set-ups from Avalon Hill in the 1970s, when whole armies evaporated on hillsides like so many mook kobalds before a 17th level fighter lord.  Back when fighters got one attack per level against creatures with less than 1 full hit die.  Remember those days?

The trick as I see it, the solution for which I've not devised either, is to ignore the D&D combat system altogether when resolving large unit combats.  Don't try to represent it exactly.  A combat system, whether its RISK, Axis and Allies or Panzer Leader, is merely a way to resolve moments of strategy and tactics in a believable, methodical way that rewards thinking despite randomness, thus allowing players with experience and foresight to succeed repeatedly against those who think "tactics" boils down to getting there first with the greatest number.  I had a lot of experience in those hex-and-counter games in the 70s, before I'd heard of D&D.  No one needed to convince us that winning demanded a plan of action, not reliance on die rolls.

Of course, nearly everyone who plays D&D right now — particularly those who despise tactical combat approaches — are all in with the "stand-face-to-face-and-roll-dice-til-someone's-points-run-out" method.  The game has been redesigned to death to achieve this end result, which is described, universally, as boring.

But at least no one always wins.

Back in '77-'78, around the time I was in grade 9, we had a fellow who would not miss a session.  His name was Todd.  I wouldn't exactly say he was "accepted;" I remember quite a few contemptuous arguments about Todd when he wasn't present.  This was because when it came time to choose teams, Todd was going to be on either theirs or ours; if ours, we were going to lose in the end; if theirs, we were going to win.

As a general, one has to imagine Daniel Edgar Sickles, who incompetently led his men on the second day of Gettysburg from a strongly defensive position into a spectacular slaughterfest where whole companies were effaced from the planet, for... reasons.  This thankfully ended his military career.  Todd was Sickles right down to the ground.  For Todd, the best way to win a battle against hulled down tanks in forest hexes with infantry was to charge directly across a wide open field, "surprising them," as Todd would have put it.  This would encourage the others to try and explain just why this was stupid and how he might learn from the experience, but none of that went with Todd.  He wasn't there to learn how to play, dammit.  He was there to play.

Modern D&D has made it easier to be Todd because "being Todd" is how the rules work now.

But I digress.  A large-unit tactical game ought not to do this.  There ought to be features that make it matter whether or not I order the units across that creek bed or through this forest, in a relatively predictable, progressively experience-giving manner, despite the necessary die roll.  Numerous war games of that period had this... and this, I remind the reader, is the headspace and culture that embraced D&D and encouraged it's early growth.

Because, like the games we knew, it was tactical.  And we liked that.

But then, we got older, got out of school, had families, got to busy working... and a bunch of kids who were raised on non-tactical video games ruined everything.

I'm not bitter.

I don't know what that tactical large-scale block-hex game would be.  If I stumble across it in the cobwebby parts of my brain where I keep the rules of Car Wars stuffed in the bottom drawer of an unused bureau, I'll let you know.

If we were to install levelled characters into a larger "unit" that moved upon the battlefield, those levels and their skills would have to be accounted for in some manner.  The presence of magic, of course, is the stumbling block.  How do we rate a high level mage within a host of 400, attacking another host of the same size, acknowledging that the mage (at least in AD&D) has limited spell-use over time — and thus, over time, matter less and less in terms of that unit's overall power?

In my game experience, against a large force, running a mass combat precisely how a small combat is run, an 11th level mage runs out of any real significant power in about 20-25 rounds.  By then, most of their big spells are spent, leaving them the tactical equivalent of a third or forth level caster, who might still sting a little but has done what they can to swing the tide of battle.

I don't have an answer for that, either, but we must acknowledge that in larger hex tactical battles, time is far more relevant than it is in a standard D&D fight.  Distance between points of reference requires that.  Time likewise diminishes the strength of OD&D casters fairly quickly... so that, in the end, it's still the waves and waves of fighting combatants that matters.

The only question I can solve is that of "survival."

Let us say we have two mass units of 400 souls each, filled with levels and non-levels, especially the latter.  The fight and both sides experience 25% casualties.  That's not deaths, that's just the reduction of combatants to a point where they can no longer engage.  Naturally, we wonder just exactly who this includes... and the temptation is to nitpick our way through the process of specifically rating the loss of exactly this many soldiers and levels down to the last individual.  A mistake, of course.  We shouldn't care.  The overall unit is re-rated and that's all we need do.  Unit Red Vanguard diminishes from a power of 20 to a power of 15.

BUT... suppose there are leveled players of the party in there?  Are they dead?  We've taken away their right to roll their d20s to hit by shoving them into a mass of others and saying, "Oh no, you're overall contribution is insignificant.  You can roll for the Red Vanguard mass as a whole, but not for yourself individually."

Just listen to the storygamers moan...

But do they survive?  Does the player's 4th level ranger survive?  Or is the ranger part of the general casuality pile, and what state are they in?  Unconscious?  Dead?  Anxious players want to know.

Well, if it's a 25% loss, then we can make that a die number to be rolled and anyone caught in that segment might be either unconscious or dead.  Then, because levelled persons are logically resilient, and higher levels more so, we can assign a base number for whether or not the character has flat out died when the dust has cleared.

Funny how that seems more arbitrary that a dragon unleashing a breath weapon.  Ah well.

We could say, all leveled persons within the casualty pile have a base 50% chance of survival.  This can then be augmented by F1 +50% = unconscious survival, where "F" stands for Fibonacci and the subordinate number equals both the number in the Fibonacci sequence and the character's level.  F1 = 1, F2 = 1, F3 = 2, F4 = 3, F5 = 5, F6 = 8, F7 = 13, F8 = 21, F9 = 34, F10 = 55.  Therefore, a 9th level character would have a 50+(34/2) = 84% chance of being unconscious/wounded and a 16% chance of being dead; while a 10th level would automatically survive.  Or we could impose a necessary 1% to 5% chance of failure, regardless of level, so that there'd always be some chance of death, depending on how hard we wanted to go at this.

Naturally, the manner in which these numbers are assigned, or what the base chance is, can all be debated.  There's no necessary right answer until the system is gametested.

This is what I've got on this subject.  Thank you.