Considering the nature of play in my developing dark fantasy system, I was thinking of designing a large scale combat architecture.  However, I've never designed wargame mechanics before and I'm not sure how to go about it, although I am certain it will use the same core mechanics as I feel they will be compatible.  In any case, I could use some advice on design.  I've been doing research on Renaissance battles and will use the concepts as a framework for the system:

*Bowmen and artillery are typically used as opening strategies, then infantry close in, and then cavalry flank the opposing side's infantry.  I need to design mechanics that reflect the advantage of using these strategies.

*In the battle of Agincourt, terrain played a decisive role in the victory of a much smaller army.  Thus, terrain and position mechanics must be at the foreground of tactical choice as is so in the standard combat system.

*When the unit commander is taken out of action or a unit otherwise loses formation, chaos ensues and they usually suffer heavy losses.  A critical success roll can represent a unit taking out another unit's commander.

*Pikemen in formation have a huge advantage against cavalry.  Cavalry have a huge advantage against any standing opponent, except pikemen (unless they are flanked or in disarray).  Pikemen have a huge advantage when charging any other type of infantry.  When opposing groups of pikemen clash, casualties are likely to be extremely heavy on both sides, and a push-of-pike contest is likely to develop after contact (a critical success or critical failure from one side will most likely be required in order to end the stalemate).  In tight circumstances, sword-wielding infantry are superior to pikemen.  Harquebusiers are deadlier against armored opponents such as knights, but are otherwise inferior to longbowmen. 

*Different subclasses will have varying levels of strength.  The lowest subclass will be commoner (unless if crossbowman or harquebusier; otherwise will only have a low melee strength), then professional/mercenary, and then the armored knight. 

Well, I've actually got more experience designing and playtesting wargame mechanics than RPG ones, so I'll pitch in with a few thoughts and some questions.

First off, would this be entirely described by words, drawn on a map, or using counters/miniatures? That might affect some of the decisions you make. Also, what sort of scale are you going for here? I know you say 'large scale' but really even small scale skirmish wargames are pretty big battles compared to most RPGs. I'm gonna go ahead and assume you mean a scale appropriate to 'a Renaissance battle' which means hundreds, if not thousands of guys on a side, which means a focus on units rather than individuals.

Which brings up the question: how will this interface with the individual parts of  your RPG (i.e. what will PCs do in these big freakin battles?). You will probably want to abstract their role a bit to avoid having two layers of complex rules (complex individual rules + complex wargame type rules), but you also don't want them to just be part of the faceless hordes (well, I would assume not at least).

I'll respond to your points in order, then if I have anything else, I'll tack that on.

Ar wrote:
*Bowmen and artillery are typically used as opening strategies, then infantry close in, and then cavalry flank the opposing side's infantry.  I need to design mechanics that reflect the advantage of using these strategies.

Ar wrote:
*In the battle of Agincourt, terrain played a decisive role in the victory of a much smaller army.  Thus, terrain and position mechanics must be at the foreground of tactical choice as is so in the standard combat system.

Ar wrote:
*When the unit commander is taken out of action or a unit otherwise loses formation, chaos ensues and they usually suffer heavy losses.  A critical success roll can represent a unit taking out another unit's commander.

Ar wrote:
*Pikemen in formation have a huge advantage against cavalry.  Cavalry have a huge advantage against any standing opponent, except pikemen (unless they are flanked or in disarray).  Pikemen have a huge advantage when charging any other type of infantry.  When opposing groups of pikemen clash, casualties are likely to be extremely heavy on both sides, and a push-of-pike contest is likely to develop after contact (a critical success or critical failure from one side will most likely be required in order to end the stalemate).  In tight circumstances, sword-wielding infantry are superior to pikemen.  Harquebusiers are deadlier against armored opponents such as knights, but are otherwise inferior to longbowmen. 

Ar wrote:
*Different subclasses will have varying levels of strength.  The lowest subclass will be commoner (unless if crossbowman or harquebusier; otherwise will only have a low melee strength), then professional/mercenary, and then the armored knight. 

First off, I'd like to thank you on your input.  I just read it and need time to mull it over in relation to my conceptual idea before I respond to those points.

Secondly, in response to your question: I've always wanted to install wargame architecture into my games, but I felt I never had the foundation to do so.  I believe my as-yet-unnamed RPG does in two ways:

1. The core system was designed to handle many entities at a time.  I bet it could accommodate 30 combatants in a skirmish without making the GM sweat; doing away with attributes, hit points, initiative allocation, large lists of special skills, and any other sort of book keeping has allowed me to build an extremely sleek engine and focus on developing tactical meatiness.  I'm fairly certain that I can translate a huge portion of the core rules to large scale without any modification.  For example, the combat phases (command, movement, attack, follow-up, misc.), which take the place of initiative allocation, can likely be installed as-is; critical failures could represent breaks in formation or loss of morale, whereas poor grounding or any other sort of bad position will increase your dice rank and thus your chances for critical failure.

2. The setting and gameplay style are appropriate.  Since many player characters will be nobles, they'll have the opportunity to command units or even lead their own personal army (or rally supporters and command them).  Also, there is not much dungeon-crawling to be had here, as I can think of no logical reason why elaborate dungeons with traps and puzzles exist.  If a wizard wants to protect his crap so badly, wouldn't it be more sane to hire guards than to pay exorbitant sums to engineers and architects?

Hey Ar kayon, is this RPG the one using the tiered dice mechanic you posted sometime ago? Or is this an addaption of your Nevercast system?

From what I know of the tiered dice system, it would seem easy enough to encompass the rules of a wargame with just a few rock/paper/scissor rules as mentioned earlier.

horomancer wrote:
Hey Ar kayon, is this RPG the one using the tiered dice mechanic you posted sometime ago? Or is this an addaption of your Nevercast system?

From what I know of the tiered dice system, it would seem easy enough to encompass the rules of a wargame with just a few rock/paper/scissor rules as mentioned earlier.

Good deal, I think if you can use the same core mechanic but scaled, that would be an excellent way to go (it would help avoid the feel of "a wargame plugged into an RPG").

I don't have much experience with pre-twentieth century historical wargaming, so I'd like to see what you come up with.

Ar Kayon, is there a doc online somewhere with your current mechanics? i've looked through the post on the front page, but it piecing together all the different tiers, attributes, and success rules is kinda troublesome.

Few thoughts to mull over-
The larger side usually has the advantage in combat, but do you want to represent this with a bonus to the die or better staying power for that side.
If you do have a bonus for more numbers, how will you determine this? (I imagen proportional size different would be measured rather than unit count) How much bonus do you grant before you declare that more men couldn't possible engage in the battle without flanking? I was thinking of the 300 movie, and though historically inaccurate it does bring up the point that only so many man can engage in a space and terrain, while not always granting a numerical bonus, plays a big part.

I agree with the upscaling idea.

Use units of troops as your combat base rather than individual combatants.

Apply the same types of stats across your units as you would see in an individual warrior. Perhaps give them different names, an individuals social attribute might correspond to the unit's "morale" attribute, "Strength" might translate across as "Might" (since both impact on potential damage)....you get the idea.

Use the same mechanisms for combat....a hit roll, a damage roll, a soak roll...whatever the individual combat system uses.

If the combat between individuals uses a hit location chart, create something similar for the unit...head wounds correspond to attacks against the unit's leader/command structure...arm wounds correspond to attacks against the unit member holding the best weapon (or the unit member best able to use their weapon)...leg wounds slow down an individual, and equivalent attacks on a unit might sap the groups morale...I'm just throwing ideas at you, don't worry if they don't seem right for the system you've got in mind.

If the combat system uses hit points, you might just give the unit a number of hit points equal to twice the number of members in it. Every 2 points of damage means that one of the unit members is eliminated, or two of the members have lost their effectiveness to the point that they fight as though they are a man down. When you're looking at big scale conflict, the small details don't matter...

...unless of course that's what the game is about. Legend of the Five Rings has a great mass battle system where individual heroes perform amazing deeds of bravery and they shape the battle raging around them.

If your basic system can handle 30 combatants, maybe the upscaled version can handle 30 units of 30 troops with just as much ease.

Perhaps you could even provide a note box in the text explaining how it can be upscaled exponentially further to create truly epic conflicts (30x30 = 900 soldiers in each "battalion", and you could run dozens of these battalions in a superscale game). Think Minas Tirith.

Again...I'm just throwing ideas out there.

Use of them or discard them, I don't mind either way.

V
   

Horomancer,

The graduated dice method can be found here.  A few of the initial thoughts on the accompanying system can also be found there as well.  Other than that, the central discussion of the system is in the link in the first post in this thread.

At the moment, I don’t intend to provide any mechanical bonuses for superior army size.  The reason for this is because on a toe-to-toe contest, the army with the greater numbers will have more opportunities to make unanswered attacks, thus increasing their potential lethality.  Secondly, if a huge army cannot mobilize properly, then they cannot bring their strength to bear.  Therefore, a numerical bonus wouldn’t be consistent to what is actually happening.  Again, drawing upon the example of the Battle of Agincourt,  Henry V’s much smaller army saw great success by forcing his opponents through a bottleneck, rendering their numbers useless.

Vulpinoid,

The system does away completely with attributes and hit points.  When I looked at these RPG conventions with a critical eye, I realized that they weren’t as valuable as they were complex.  Attributes muck up every single roll with mathematic sludge (add dex to my hit; add str to my damage) and slow down character and NPC generation.  Hit points slow down combat further with book keeping, and with the added complexity, you actually end up sacrificing realism because the concept is so abstract.

I know it seems like I’m going off on a tangent here, but I’m trying to zone in on the core values of the types of systems I like to create.  Ideally, I want this game’s large scale mechanics to play out the same exact way between players and GM as it would between generals of the Renaissance era - sans the magic and demons.  For example, the average kill percentage per timeframe must accurately reflect historical values, otherwise I’ll lose a chunk of realism. 

I don’t believe that the mechanical concepts that you identified, which are also present in many others’ RPGs, will adequately allow me to pull this off without a huge cache of clarifying rules; I’ve had this problem in earlier iterations of Nevercast where I was drowning in crunch.  I’m aiming to construct the standard combat system to be about 20 pages, and I hope to do the same with the large-scale mechanics.

However, there are two things you mentioned that I really like:

If the combat between individuals uses a hit location chart, create something similar for the unit...head wounds correspond to attacks against the unit's leader/command structure...arm wounds correspond to attacks against the unit member holding the best weapon (or the unit member best able to use their weapon)...leg wounds slow down an individual, and equivalent attacks on a unit might sap the groups morale

Perhaps you could even provide a note box in the text explaining how it can be upscaled exponentially further to create truly epic conflicts (30x30 = 900 soldiers in each "battalion", and you could run dozens of these battalions in a superscale game). Think Minas Tirith.

Ar wrote:
I salivate at the thought of incomprehensibly massive armies slugging it out and wreaking havoc upon the landscape.  I can just imagine the GM having a drawn-out duel of wits against the players for 3 sessions.  Previously, I was thinking of constructing the units in increments of 10-50, but army sizes in the thousands would require increments of 100 - maybe even 500.  Do you know of any wargames that consider such fluctuating scales?

horomancer wrote:
I was thinking of the 300 movie, and though historically inaccurate it does bring up the point that only so many man can engage in a space and terrain, while not always granting a numerical bonus, plays a big part.

What is it that the PC's are doing while all this is going on?

I think there should be small list of formations, though don't know how they would work aside from possibly granting bonuses to existing stats. The basic formation would be 'mob' which grants no bonus and could be th default state if a commander is killed in action. It could also be the only formation for untrained combatants, such as a PC rallying a town to defend it's self from some menacing bandits or the like.

contracycle wrote:
What is it that the PC's are doing while all this is going on?

horomancer wrote:
I think there should be small list of formations, though don't know how they would work aside from possibly granting bonuses to existing stats. The basic formation would be 'mob' which grants no bonus and could be th default state if a commander is killed in action. It could also be the only formation for untrained combatants, such as a PC rallying a town to defend it's self from some menacing bandits or the like.

Using the logical parameters explained above, I also need to figure out a way to model loss of formation (due to movement speed, terrain, etc.).  As of right now, I have no concept of how to do this.

Ar Kayon, what sort of input do you want on this thread?  There are things I could say but they are mostly negative and my reading of your statements suggests youyr pretty committed to this idea.  In which case, I think you shouyld just go ahead with your concept, test it, and see how it works.

let me just say thought that althuogh a lot of texts on topics of how historical battles were conducted are written in a firm and confident style as if we know things certainly, in fact it's a lot less clear.  You mention, for example, push-of-pike, but even there it is disputed that it ever really happened.  Furthermore, I asked you want the PC's were doing and you responded with an explanation of what the players were doing.  I didn't ask about the players, I asked about the characters.  I think you need to review precisaely what function such a wargame has in an RPG; there are many wargame rulesets around and any number of them could be borrowed to represent a conflict inspired by or derived from an RPG in progress, but all of them require that you stop roleplaying and start wargaming.

contracycle wrote:
Ar Kayon, what sort of input do you want on this thread?  There are things I could say but they are mostly negative and my reading of your statements suggests youyr pretty committed to this idea.

let me just say thought that althuogh a lot of texts on topics of how historical battles were conducted are written in a firm and confident style as if we know things certainly, in fact it's a lot less clear.  You mention, for example, push-of-pike, but even there it is disputed that it ever really happened.

Furthermore, I asked you want the PC's were doing and you responded with an explanation of what the players were doing.  I didn't ask about the players, I asked about the characters.

I think you need to review precisaely what function such a wargame has in an RPG; there are many wargame rulesets around and any number of them could be borrowed to represent a conflict inspired by or derived from an RPG in progress, but all of them require that you stop roleplaying and start wargaming.

It sounds like large scale combat then would really come down to being in a formation or not being in one. It cold be that without a leader the soldiers would make decisions based on their judgment, which would ultimately result in some groups branching off from the main body (peasants running away or young buck nobles looking for some action) and getting themselves crushed because of it.
So what's from keeping you from just treating the army like a single combatant and using your current single combat rules? 

horomancer wrote:
It sounds like large scale combat then would really come down to being in a formation or not being in one. It cold be that without a leader the soldiers would make decisions based on their judgment, which would ultimately result in some groups branching off from the main body (peasants running away or young buck nobles looking for some action) and getting themselves crushed because of it.
So what's from keeping you from just treating the army like a single combatant and using your current single combat rules? 

First off do you have terrain rules? For just regular combat between people. Also how do you handle a single fighter being out numbered?

I see large scale combat boiling down to how many men can actually engage in combat at any given point, and this would be controlled by terrain and formation. There is only so many people that can actually get into a melee against another combatant before they aren't effective anymore. I'm not sure if you have rules for flanking or the like, but I would guess that the worse anyone could ever be off in a fight is being surrounded by 6 other attackers , at which point only an extreme difference in skill, equipment, and footing will give them a fighting chance.

This should be true for large scale battles.  Here formations would acts as a single combatant to determine stats and facing direction. Size would represent how many warm bodies you have to drop before the formation is broken.  Leadership keeps a formation together when it does pretty much any action, and if there are numbers involved in leadership it may mean how many formations can be controled at once or maybe how many casualties can be suffered before the formation breaks.
Pretty much the idea is that a formation going head to head with another formation is the same as two combatants squaring off. With the larger side effectively having more HP (i know you don't use HP but you get the idea). If one side is sufficiently larger they can break up into smaller formations acting like multiple attackers. Here is where terrain plays a key roll since the other formations can't flank unless there is actual space to do so in. This way you can have small very well armed and trained units take on forces many times their size by using bottle necks. Or something like a small knot of hero's cutting their way through a flank to attack the leaders at the center.
Every group of fighters attacking the same direction would be a formation, so if you take for example the British Square (or what ever it was called) where all the riflemen square up and face different directions, they would effectively be 4 combatants being back to back.

The terrain rules haven’t been fully developed yet, but I imagine they will be straightforward: at x height above your opponent, you get +1 skill, and for poorer ground, movement increments are smaller.  I also imagine that terrain would have some different effects upon larger groups that wouldn‘t be a significant factor in the standard combat rules.  For example, rocky or forested terrain would quickly disorganize a formation.

Generally, a combatant can only take one combat action in a round, whereby your facing is determined by the last opponent you acted against.  Therefore, multiple opponents pose a threat by two virtues: seizing the opportunity to flank you while you are engaged with another combatant, and making unopposed attack rolls against you.  When you are flanked, the attacker receives +1 to their skill comparison against you.  Also, opponents making unopposed attacks against you can automatically close the distance (utilizing the optimal range of a weapon is an important factor in combat).
To counter this, characters who are seasoned warriors (many beginning player characters will already have substantial combat experience) will be granted the group fighting ability, which allows them to take opposing action against two or more combatants in a single round, thus negating the above two threats.  However, any character can move small distance increments while making combat actions, so it is possible to stave off multiple opponents by backing up and handling one at a time.  Also, inexperienced opponents are unlikely to attack you all at once or make a coordinated attack due to caution and hesitation (low morale); once a combatant manages to break past your guard or hurt you, then they’ll overwhelm you.  Experienced warriors who are vastly outnumbered will be able to take advantage of this dynamic to prevail (no hit point cushion).

On a side note, I think your point on a 6 to 1 optimal ratio for outnumbering the opponent is accurate, but what if all your opponents had spears or pikes?  I think I will need to visualize opponents on a hex-based map for this combat system, although I am reticent to do so because I don’t want to restrict combat resolution to grids and spaces.

So if I want to lead an army in your game, how would I do that mechanically? Would i need some special class/feat/skill to perform the task of leadership? Do I have to make a roll for every 'leader' type action i make or only certains? Do i need to roll at all? Is there a number asssociated with leadership so that some people are better at leading than others? Will certain skills a character has bleed over into the formation he is in charge of?
I think that needs to be tacked down before the formations can be figured out in any meaningful manner.

I don't see how leadership will directly interact with troops during battle; it's not as if you can talk to them or rally them with a speech while everyone's screaming and stabbing each other.  You can give commands via standard bearers or horns or something, but that is relevant to judgment rather than skill.  As for morale, that should increase either through effectiveness during battle or any measures you take prior to combat (i.e. roleplaying interactions).  The point I'm trying to stress is that elements in the game rules should only be abstracted as long as they don't seem arbitrary.  In my opinion, making leadership rolls during the battle would appear arbitrary.  What manner of persuasion could a commander possibly employ in the chaos of a battle to prevent a decimated unit from turning tail?

In the standard system, tactical leadership is also based upon judgment; there are no skill rolls to make.  During the command phase, you call out a command (e.g. "gather to me", or "charge!") so that your group may act in a coherent manner.  Perhaps as you develop leadership, it will be assumed that you coordinate and rehearse various tactics with your group during downtime.

Ok, so there are no numeric or mechanical trappings to being a leader. You get to lead men by virtue of having people do what you tell them too.

How will you determine if soldiers can hold a formation or not? I can see two different reasons you've stated, terrain and moral. It seems like Moral would be something linked to a number or possibly even a roll, but terrain seems more of a flat yes/no on whether or not the formation can physically fit where you want them to be.
It would also seem to make sense that the formation would have some powers based on it's unit composition. Say you have a bunch of farmers turned pikemen. Not going to have group fighting, so the formation as a whole gets one facing direction. A group of hired mercenaries on the other hand would be able to take being surrounded much better, and could have the equivalent of Group Fighting. This could be a reasonable work around if you didn't want to have to keep track of various unit size and facing directions.