Wargame and RPG Hybrid

[Froley]

Wargames are fun. I enjoy chainmail but it is missing the whole individual character creation and developement. Controlling an army is fun and so is having your own guy to control so why not do both. In the Game you would control two things; 1. A kingdom and Army.  2. A "Hero" Character that would go around the world. The game would be called WARH (Wargame and RPG Hybrid). Is this idea good or should i slay it right now?

[J. Scott Timmerman]

I think it's a great idea.  If I understand your concept correctly, I think attempts have been made in major commercial roleplaying games.  I tend to have my differences with the rules they've developed, however. 

War, in conquering and defending realms, is a major aspect of White Wolf's Exalted game, which is based around heroes chosen by the gods.  I believe there are also rules for mass combat in D&D now, but I haven't looked at their rules.

-VD

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

You might be interested in checking out how role-playing was invented - it began with wargamers who asked, "Hey, what about the captain of that army? What if he was in love with the captain of the other side?" Or upon a particularly strange turn of the dice, resulting in an unusual outcome, "Wow! I wonder how that happened? Do you think there was a spy, or maybe there was some kind of drama going on?" People even published novels on the basis of this thinking back around 1970.

A lot of people think role-playing emerged from the wargame Chainmail, in the form of Dungeons & Dragons. This is not true. Role-playing was occurring among quite a few groups, all of whom were mostly wargaming, but had shifted to various degrees toward the dramatic, individualized stories in a number of ways. One of them was Dave Arneson, whose original Blackmoor campaign was the basis for, eventually, adapting the rules of the small wargame Chainmail to individual conflict in 1974. Others included Greg Stafford (White Bear and Red Moon) and M. A. R. Barker (World of Tekumel), who along with Arneson can rightly claim the credit for the hobby's origins; Gygax was a late-comer by comparison.

Anyway. Enough lecturing, sorry about that. What I'm tryin' to say is that people have been attempting to coordinate the wargame-level tactical and even experimental experience at the level of armies and cultures with the role-playing-level of people and drama for a long, long time. If you have some ideas about how to do it, that's great! But you're joining a tradition of endeavor, rather than posing a new idea, and so it'd be a great idea to delve into some of the existing examples.

A relatively recent one (about ten years old) was Heavy Gear, which tried to present compatible rules between tactical big-robot combat and relatively traditional 80s-style role-playing, such that when Mariko hopped into her big ol' robot, you shifted from her skill list and disadvantage points to the hex-map based, relatively traditional 70s-style combat section. How well it worked, well, it kind of depends on one's priorities. But you should probably check those rules out as a good example.

Best, Ron

[Froley]

Thanks for the feedback

Blackmoor has always fasinated me, correct me if i'm wrong but i do believe that it is the longest running war type game? anyway my whole idea would be that you could. Play as a general or "god" and shape the wars or you could be a man in your kingdom or country. This would give the game a wide diversity.

anyway thanks for the thoughts and I'll keep this idea going  :-)

[Aaron Blain]

I have a friend who's a huge Warhammer 40k nut. A while back we started doing exactly what you are describing. Each of us played as the sergeant of a squad, our GM made up some additional mechanics and other than that we basically just played 40k in the context of an RPG. Sometimes we had small DnD-scale skirmishes, sometimes we coordinated larger battles. It's tremendous fun. I'm currently working on a diceless, possibly GMless system to do something quite similar, for two reasons. One, I think Warhammer is way too convoluted (I hate long lists of "special abilities"). Two, I think "realism" and "balance" should be defined during play by the players, democratically.

It's funny, actually. I doubt Chris is reading this, but since the "RPG" portion of our rules was defined so nebulously, our GM would usually say (from a Warhammer mindset), "what you say happens on a four-plus". If you hadn't heard of them, Engle Matrix games are a cool way to put wargaming in an RPG context.

Are there any "aha" moments that drove you to post? Do you have a "point of divergence" you'd like to share? Or initial ideas?

[Noclue]

I just picked up The Riddle of Steel and its supplement, The Flower of Battle. TFOB is supposed to add large scale combat to the mix. I just got it, so I don't know how well it plays, but perhaps someone here has used both and can comment on how they jibe. My understanding is that the play focusses on the hero's (read PCs), while handling a lot of the mass combat in the background.