Recent Play Summary and Thoughts on Mass Combat

From My Younger AD&D Campaign

The Blackstone Campaign

My AD&D 2e campaign is my ‘younger’ AD&D campaign at 18 going on 19 years old. It is very much a ‘hopeful post-apocalyptic’ setting. The main play started a few centuries after a catastrophic series of wars and the resulting plagues and famines wiped out over 80% of all humans and humanoids and collapsed all existing nations. The nations of the setting are enclaves of civilization surrounded by vast areas of wilderness dotted with the ruins of vanished empires.

While most adventuring is on Samar, or the Great Northern Continent, the very many PCs that have gone through the campaign have adventured almost everywhere on the vast planet.

Overall Play

Following my typical Jazz Band expectations and player-driven action the players drive who, what, and so on. A mixed group has been in the northern baronies engaged in adventuring and a bit of political intrigue with some also going beyond the frontier to explore ancient ruins with yet other PCs. Yet another band in the general area recently attacked an Orc tribe to great effect, too.

Others are sailing the Great Central Ocean and raiding humanoid ports, fighting pirates, and trying to deal with the dungeon called the Maze of Frustration (named by the PCs). This is another cloud of various PCs from various players that mix n’ match as they meet, part, and travel.

Another area of focus has been the Dells, a group of small, young nations (with a few player domains being central to the region) with PCs exploring ruins, dealing with bandits, and engaged in the high-risk, low-stakes politics of tiny nations. This is an area I want to focus on today.

Recent Mass Combat

Blackstone has had mass combat from virtually the beginning, although usually the mass combat of the Early Medieval scale (scores to hundreds per sides) and less often the large forces of the linked play report from 2013. A recent session (we average 3 a week between Seaward and Blackstone) featured mass combat in the southwest Dells as the PCs (a party of 6 PCs and 15 henchmen with a few retainers, 28 altogether), minding their own business, encountered a strategic village (road junction and river crossing) of hill dwarves (part of Stonedell) besieged by over 250 gray dwarves (a mysterious, evil race). NOTE: What follows is very, very condensed from a very long session.

The series of actions began with the party being ambushed by gray dwarf outriders mounted on spiders with 10’ leg spans that leapt into battle, their riders using lances. The ensuing battle proved the dwarven leader had a belt pistol, as well. The party was injured, but killed enough of the outriders, including the leader, that the survivors fled, blowing an alarm horn. The rest of that day were marked by a series of meeting actions with the other outrider band and then the party setting up a well-hidden cold camp. The PCs successfully avoided being spotted by some sort of flying scouts in the night.

The next day the party scouted to within sight of the village through the trees as seeing it was besieged before they prepared to misplay approach on the road to learn dispositions. The gray dwarves sent for a unit of pike and shot (a core of 80 pikemen flanked by two units of 20 gray dwarves armed with blunderbuss). The party was pleased to have lured such a unit into the close open as on PC used a magic item to summon an air elemental then commanded it to form a whirlwind and attack the dwarves. As the air elemental attacked the gray dwarf commander ordered them to scatter - revealing the gray dwarves had a heavy cannon! The cannon was fired at the air elemental as the party charged its emplacement.

What followed was a very tense for the players race to get to the cannon before it was reloaded and before the onrushing dwarven leaders got to it or the party all while the air elemental was hunting the pike and shot dwarves (its given command) and the village defenders desperately engaged the other siege forces to tie them down. The PCs did manage to get to the cannon (its crew fled at the last moment) and then the party thief invisibly left for his own reasons as the party engaged the arriving dwarf captain for a pretty serious melee that opened with firearms from both sides.

The PCs did drop the evil captain as their own cannon crew (the retainers mentioned earlier, brought because one PC was planning to buy a cannon!) reaimed the weapon to fire on a forming gray dwarf unit. The death of their commander plus the cannon broke the enemy forces and cleared the field.

As the PCs mopped up after this they were able to get word to the capitol, set out pickets, and do some scouting. Over the next in-game week they learned that Black Mountain is now a gray dwarf stronghold defended by cannons and bombards and that a full-scale war is coming to the southern Dells.

The PCs traded ear and new fame for a small (much more portable) cannon and departed for their already-planned next foray.

Follow On Effects

As usual, all the adventuring led to a fair amount of AFT (Away From Table) discussion, texting, and emails. I typically spend about 20-30 minutes a day dealing with player messages and needed adjudications and the players talk among themselves much more than that. After this series, though, I was up to an hour a day for a few days!

A few domained PCs in the Dells are working on war preparation, PCs far away might move closer to participate, and other PCs are working to leverage the war into profits and political clout.

The Difference Between War Games and Mass Combat in RPGs

As a very brief note that I might someday turn into a full article, I want to point out something subtle but important. War Games and Mass Combat in RPGs are different in important ways, if subtle ones. The main issue is war games are made for mass combat and with a few exceptions not anything else so the systems, rules, interactions, and so forth are about mass combat and largely balanced for mass combat. The interest is the skill of the players.

RPGs are about the individual player characters and their individual powers and actions with mass combat being a sub-mechanic. Even in something like BattleSystem a powerful PC has a very outsized impact in mass combat because they are supposed to in an RPG. It is because, no matter how much they resemble, they are different games.

That’s why in AD&D a low-level magic-user with a very simple, low-level magic item can wipe out entire mass combat military units or how a single mid-level fighter with another, different, simple magic item can melee with an entire military unit and destroy it with small risk. A massive number of mass combat war games do not deal with strategic logistics is any way - armies don’t have to deal with logistics trains, long-term weather, water supplies, not even arrow resupply. Many more also don’t deal with tactical consumables - archers never run out of arrows, for example. And how do you get reinforcements? What impact does a loss of hundreds of men have on the nation? All well beyond the scope of war games, but all crucial to how a fantasy RPG works.

I am not saying ‘mass combat doesn’t/shouldn’t/can’t happen in RPGs’. Heaven knows I have plenty of mass combat in my games! What I am saying is that it is different and that DMs or PCs viewing it as ‘just plug in a popular mass combat game and never think about encumbrance, weather, resuupply, reinforcements, the harvest, etc.’ is going to really warp your RPG into something that makes zero sense internally.