Mass combat, the Easy Way

A not entirely inaccurate representation of our huge battle this past weekend.

Last weekend I kicked off my latest campaign, The Chronicles of Mystara. I am starting a years-long open world hex crawl for ALL my friends, family, and anyone else brave enough to join us (more about that in a later post).

My daughter and I kicked off the campaign in the backwoods of The Duchy of Karameikos, in the city of Kelvin. After wandering around the town and gathering half a dozen rumors, my daughter decided to head north up the Volaga river to Castellan Keep… the canonical site of B2 — The Keep on the Borderlands.

I am so excited to finally be running this module. I have placed the Caves of Chaos somewhere on the map in almost every campaign I’ve ever run, but players have never taken the bait. Within the hour my kid and I were burgling kobold lairs and pitting the fractious factions of the caves against one another.

Too many goblins

MtG - Goblin Offensive

On our 3rd expedition to the Caves of Chaos, my daughter rolled a very favorable reaction roll upon entering the goblins lair. The goblins excitedly invited our party to assist them with a raid on the orc lair in cavern B. My daughter agreed to join forces, and the goblins disappeared into the caves to muster their troops for the onslaught.

Instead of deciding on a reasonable amount of goblins to join the strike team, I just had my kid roll 4d6. She rolled a whopping 19 and I immediately regretted my decision to run this game procedurally. Our party of 6 PC’s and NPCs would be joining a strike team of 19 goblins to attack a warren of 12+ orcs.

My daughter is 8 years old, and a D&D veteran at this point, but I know she does not want to sit through 40 attack rolls per round to figure out the outcome of this battle. Ain’t nobody got time for that. I needed a tool.

Dice, abstraction and divination

The answer to the question ‘how am i going to represent this many goblins in a meaningful tactical battle’ was sitting right in front of my face. I had rolled 4d6, and there it sat on the table. 3 dice showing the number 6, and one die showing a 1. I could just use these dice to represent groups of goblins marching into battle.

Dice served first as a divination tool to determine how many goblins were joining the attack. Then the dice served as an abstract representation of squads of goblins marching off to war. So my our miniatures marched off with their squad of goblin-dice to the orc warrens. Once there, I could represent the orcs themselves as yet more dice. Then I realized I didn’t have to roll attack rolls at all. I could just roll the dice themselves to determine the losses in any squad!

On-the-fly rules

Here’s what I came up with for my dice-squad battle rules during play.

• The goblins and orcs were treated as one ‘side’ in the battle, and I rolled initiative for all the ‘monsters’ vs the players.
• Monsters were represented by d6’s, each d6 being a ‘squad’ with the face-up number representing how many monsters remained in the squad. Red dice were goblins, blue dice were orcs.
• Players take their turn as normal, attacking any squads they wish. If they drop an orc or goblin per the normal rules of D&D combat, I reduce that die by one tick.
• On the monsters turn, all squad die monsters act simultaneously.
  • If a squad is attacked by another squad, the squad die will be rolled at the end of the round to determine the new number of units in the squad. If you roll higher than the current number, re-roll.
  • If a squad die is at 1, and attacked by a squad, the lone creature is dead.
  • If a squad is attacking players, roll normal attack rolls for that squad against PCs.

Future Rulings

Seeing the rules written out above really exposes a lot of potential corner cases and fun enhancements that could arise from this little simulation. I don’t think I’ll write up any official rules for this, as it worked perfectly well just adjudicating things on the fly, but the next time I run larger scale combat this way I’ll keep the following ideas in the back of my head.

• Advantage and Disadvantage - If a squad has some sort of environmental advantage, roll an extra die and use the better result.
• Hit Dice - For squads of creatures with multiple HD, represent the number of HD with the die instead of the number of creatures. For example, for a squad of 6 creatures, each with 2 HD, use a d12.
• Maximum Casualties - A squad die can only take a maximum number of casualties equal to the opposing squad die. So if there are only 2 goblins left, attacking 6 orcs, the minimum number for orcs is 4.
• Splitting Squads - Dice could 'split' to take separate actions.

…again, I could go on and on and make this into a crazy mini-game, but that’s not the point of this. The point is that we can track position, movement, attacks, and casualties all with one measly little die. We can use the results to inform the fiction and keep the play flowing quickly and get to a satisfactory result for the players that they can feel is fair.

Conclusions

The way the dice flowed from being a tool of divination, to representation, to combat resolution was terribly exciting to me. It was simple and moved naturally from the player asking a question about the world, to showing the effect on the world.

I look forward to exploring the world of Mystara with my friends and family more, and sharing the fun with you!