Do we need War rules?

[bholmes4]

Since we are mentioning other useful titles I should point you all to the one I plan on using (at least until something else comes along):

http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... hread=6477
http://www.lulu.com/shop/daniel-collins ... 91327.html

I bought the pdf and though I haven't used it yet, it seems to be simple enough for my tastes and yet still fun/interesting enough to play. I have no desire to learn the complex rules in Battlesystem or other alternatives. I have a growing collection of boardgames and something I am learning is that there are some very simple, yet elegant ways to handle battles that are still satisfying for the players. The Book of War is the closest I have seen to some of these but there is still room to take it further.

[GnomeBoy]

For what it's worth (1 cp?), we once used the D&D miniatures game (circa 2005-ish) with the PCs boiled down to equivalent stats. Worked quite well, making for fast play for a large number of units. Much faster than the couple of 90's era experiments with Battlesystem...

[Aplus]

From some of the reading I've done (not actual play), Kings of War by Mantic Games seems like it would be a good bolt-on system. It's short and simple, free, and pretty much all you'd have to figure out is which type of hero units to convert the PCs to (and be totally okay with the possibility of them dying, like was said before).

At any rate, DCC doesn't need it's own mass combat system. There are a billion options already available.

[dark cauliflower]

Since we are mentioning other useful titles I should point you all to the one I plan on using (at least until something else comes along):

http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... hread=6477
http://www.lulu.com/shop/daniel-collins ... 91327.html

I bought the pdf and though I haven't used it yet, it seems to be simple enough for my tastes and yet still fun/interesting enough to play. I have no desire to learn the complex rules in Battlesystem or other alternatives. I have a growing collection of boardgames and something I am learning is that there are some very simple, yet elegant ways to handle battles that are still satisfying for the players. The Book of War is the closest I have seen to some of these but there is still room to take it further.

thanks for posting this. It might be what Im looking for until we the DCC Mass Madness war game rules come out. Im glad I didn't spring for a Battlesystem used set yet, put my gold into this. It doesn't seem to have got much coverage in the blogs, maybe thats why I never heard of it before now. I'd rather hear about this on sum of the OSR blogs instead of another round of Gygax the wonder child ponderings.

Have you done any tweaking to it yet for DCC?

[bholmes4]

Have you done any tweaking to it yet for DCC?

Honestly, no I haven't. I do think it could be done with some minor tweaking and on-the-fly rulings though. If you want to learn more check this out:
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.ca/2011/09/bo ... rules.html

In that link you can find one of the pages from the book and a quick overview of the rules. If you read his blog further you can find play examples and such. I suggest you check them out.

The core idea is that you use d6's instead of d20 combat. Going off of memory, heavy armour is hit on a 6, medium on a 5 and light on a 4 (or something to that effect). Typically figures represent 10 men and you roll a d6 for each figure. Thus if you had 50 archers you would roll 5d6. If they are shooting at a 30 charging heavy infantry they would kill one figure for each 6 result.

It's more in depth than that but that is the basic idea (assuming my memory serves me). For DCC I see no reason you would need to tweak the basic combat rules. Spells might change things up a bit but you could work around that.

[beermotor]

Swords and Spells is Supplement V, and it suuuuuucks. Chainmail is probably better. I'm with the others who say that such rules are likely not needed.

[dark cauliflower]

Have you done any tweaking to it yet for DCC?

Honestly, no I haven't. I do think it could be done with some minor tweaking and on-the-fly rulings though. If you want to learn more check this out:
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.ca/2011/09/bo ... rules.html

In that link you can find one of the pages from the book and a quick overview of the rules. If you read his blog further you can find play examples and such. I suggest you check them out.

The core idea is that you use d6's instead of d20 combat. Going off of memory, heavy armour is hit on a 6, medium on a 5 and light on a 4 (or something to that effect). Typically figures represent 10 men and you roll a d6 for each figure. Thus if you had 50 archers you would roll 5d6. If they are shooting at a 30 charging heavy infantry they would kill one figure for each 6 result.

It's more in depth than that but that is the basic idea (assuming my memory serves me). For DCC I see no reason you would need to tweak the basic combat rules. Spells might change things up a bit but you could work around that.

yeah, according to him, the author, you get the same results on the mass scale as you would in the smaller dnd system but with a d6. That's a pretty cooly assertion. So 1 fighter against 1 orcy should give us the same results as you'd see with 10 fighters against 10 orcys.

The cool thing is that the game supplement looks real simple... 24 pages of stuff. That's about what I'm looking for in turms of rule upload.

I have to go over the blog. He did something cool and simulated the giant ghoul dump that happens in Death Frost Doom. Just curious how many elfs and halflings it would take to beat that back!

[dark cauliflower]

ha! This is the blog post I was talking about:
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2012/03/f ... f-war.html

This is great stuff to read. Nest time you go to Death Frost Doom take war elephants with you. I don't tink I have 2000 minatures sitting around... but dang it I have to run this simulation!