Most DMs come to a point in their campaigns where they want to run The Big Battle. We’re not talking the players vs. a few Balors, but a real war: Storming the beaches of a fantasy Normandy, the Siege of Winterfell, the Battle of Pelennor Fields from Lord of the Rings. But when you go to set the battle up, you realize just how clunky mass combat is in D&D and most RPGs.
The problem is, most RPGs are skirmish-level games, especially D&D. That means they run well with up to about 20 characters in a battle. Beyond that, things slow down and there aren’t good ways to simulate the battle. So, you wind up having to homebrew or adapt some kind of mass combat ruleset, but these don’t always work out, either. Most mass combat expansions for D&D, for example, are basically fantasy wargames, and your players may not be up for D&D night turning into Warhammer 1100 AD.
A reader question inspired us to take it on: What do you do when you want your players to fight 300 zombies? In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave answer that and more as they break down what happens when DMs go to war.
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1:00 A reader question: How would you handle a battle with 300 zombies?
2:00 Why mass combat is and always has been clunky in D&D
6:00 Mass combat is basically opposed to what any edition of D&D is designed to do
9:00 3 basic ways to handle mass combat:
- Skill challenge
- Dynasty Warriors
- War games
13:00 D&D mass combat rules releases of the past (were still clunky)
14:00 What makes a combat “mass”? A dozen characters? Hundreds? Thousands?
17:00 5E How D&D characters change the way wars are fought
19:00 Slipping on dead bodies, siege engines, Oliphaunts! How mass combat and the chaos of war should change how D&D characters are fought
22:00 How do you keep running the big battle from slowing downplay for the PCs?
25:00 Can you put your players in charge of an army? It depends on the party
28:00 Can the enemy soldiers harm your PCs, or is it mud farmers vs. invincible knights?
30:00 How do you simulate what happens to the rest of the armies that aren’t around the PCs?
34:00 An ad-hoc system for running mass combats that impacts each player and shouldn’t bog down
37:00 Morale and victory conditions: Showing how PC actions impact the battle
41:00 How we would handle a battle with 300 zombies: It depends on our players
50:00 Final thoughts
Great episode. I’ve only listened to a few but I’ll be adding it to my Spotify. This is exactly the episode I needed and has given me lots of inspiration for how to run an upcoming warfare based campaign that my players are headed into.
I think I’ll run the game as allowing the players to prepare a certain amount and then being able to either command a unit (and providing said unit with various bonuses), or operate on their own and do separate missions during the battle (not unlike the rogue stabbing the enemy general in the back etc.).
Units will be recruited and armed from surrounding areas which some large number of different forces are working to seize.
One of you dudes put this on the Dungeon Master Resources FB page which was how I found it.