Fixing D&D's Mass Combat

How did it go last time you ran mass combat in D&D?

Your list of outcomes is an aspect that I hadn't seen others talk about when it comes to mass combat. I've always ran mass combats as a set piece because my players had little to no investment in the degree of the battle's outcome beyond winning/losing. There's a delicate balance to achieving the right complexity of mass combat rules for our hobby, and I think your rules achieved that. The more rules I add, the more I start thinking, "At what point do I just give up and learn how to play Warhammer?" Great job, Trekiros!

We had a few mass combats before but only one I was in. We were playing Revolutionary War D&D allied with Half-Orc George Washington, reenacting the deleware crossing. Each of us were given command of a squad of 5-6 recruits that followed our own characters. We were allowed 3 unique actions. Ready- which grounded our position but readied our attack for opportunity, having advantage on the next attack and attacking as a unit. Fire- we do a clump range attack at a normal roll. Charge- where we moved and attacked with affixed bayonets. Our player characters also had a unique action when the squad we were with took damage. The squad collectively was 10 hp per body, and every 10hp of damage one of them would die, lowering overall damage output, but also lowered how much group damage was taken over time by AOE’s. We could choose to take half, all, or no extra damage on AOE attacks to protect the squad. It was a tense and engaging experience. I mourned the loss of 3 recruits because I could’ve taken the cannon ball head on but was afraid the damage would’ve instantly killed me, and thus throw my squad into disarray.

Most excellent content, as always! Definitely will help alleviate those inevitable Brad Pitt as Achilles moments “IS THERE NO ELSE?!” , that crop up when letting players run solo PCs against oncoming hordes.

I am currently running a campaign (My first one, actually) that combines Greek history with Greek mythology. My players are about to head to the Oracle of Delphi, where - unbeknownst to them - they will meet King Leonidas on his way to ask the Oracle if he should attack the Persians, leading to the Battle of Thermopylae. This video came at the PERFECT time to help me figure out how to make an interesting (and easy) mass combat. (full disclosure, I'm a male DM with an all-female party, and while they are 100% murderhobos, it's hard for me to get them excited about being MASS murderhobos, for some reason)

Watching this video has reawakened me to the utility of swarm creatures. I love combats with a large amount of enemies but turn bloat always makes them far more fun in planning than in execution. Swarms would make all that so much easier.

Funny, I would have made the Rock-Paper-scissors in the reverse direction, because historical cavalry were poorly armored against archers while being devastating to non-pike infantry...

I also like the idea of “if an attack usually has one target, it deals half damage to a swarm, but if it’s AoE the damage is normal”

I have been testing out different ways to run it as my players are currently having to help a group of Norse-esq lizardfolk wage war against yuan-ti to get an audience with a dragon. I believe this will help out a lot with this segment of my campaign. Just in time for the last city siege.

Excellent video. I really appreciate how your homebrew tries to use as many existing mechanics as possible. I don't plan on running mass combat in my current campaign, but this honestly makes me want to incorporate it in the next one! I especially like the idea of having the PCs act as commanders on the same battlefield, it reminds me of Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3, which were my favourite rts games.

I can't remember the exact thing that I ran during the 4e era at the gamestore, but there was an officially published adventure where you were able to defend a town. Things you did prior to and during the battle adds or subtracts from an overall score. And the battle itself went in stages and at some point the group could intervene at a major point, which would be different depending on the score, and if they win the smaller and important combat you would get a big boost in the score. And the ending score determined how much of the enemies and allies did, and how much of the town was destroyed or not.

9:20 - I'd argue that calvalry specifically loses to pikemen, not infantry units in general. Having the high ground on a horse gives you the upper hand if you're holding, say, a lance, and the infantry unit just has a short little sword. They can't reach you.

I've been planning my campaigns war in the 9 Hells for a while and I feel like this was the final piece of the puzzle. Thank you so much!!

A lot of interesting stuff to think about here! I'm building up to a massive finale in my campaign thats a massive space battle, so I'll be pouring over this and your vehicle combat stuff obsessively. Thanks!

This is so good. Every time I’ve run large scale combat I’ve described the Players fighting to take their specific objectives while most of the fighting happens in the background. In recent years I added a “chaos clock” where I rolled a die at the end of each round to determine a random effect that would impact the PCs as a result of the surrounding battle. I liked my system but I’ll absolutely have to try out the rules you’ve outlined.

Every video you put out is a massive boon for my campaigns. Thank you so much, and happy new year!

After trying pretty much everything, I had settled with Scott Metzger’s ‘D&D 5e Mass Combat System’, which is great. I even made a custom system for it in Foundry VTT and a damage calculator. The problem is he abandoned the project and it requires all this extra work and system maintenance to play. Your system feels pretty solid and seems to solve most of these issues. I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks for sharing!

Elegant! Another plug-and-play system that'll easily fit into my existing campaigns, thank you Trek!

currently planning a mass combat for my quasi-ragnorak for the end of my norse inspired campaign. Love you videos man!

Amazing! I've been trying to make a mass combat system on my own since the Kingdom and Warfare is way to dense to incorperate. I just gave up and made the mass combat happen around the players as they fought a commander. I had "lair" actions on 20 and 0 initiative with had something to do with the battle surrounding them. A Barlgura clashing with an Ent crashed towards the party called for dexsaves etc. etc. It worked fine, but lacked the strategic components of your supplements. So as always, thank you and great content!