Book of War Skirmish Rules and seamless D&D RPG play

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Chgowiz
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Book of War Skirmish Rules and seamless D&D RPG play

Postby Chgowiz » Tue Dec 08, 2015 9:08 am

Hi CSW,

I've been a longtime fan of Daniel Collin's "Book of War" Mass Combat rules. At a 10:1 scale, it is quick, easy to learn, fun to play and very open to integration with D&D as it is "statistically representative" of the core D&D rules and approach.

One of the things I've wanted to do in my existing D&D RPG campaign is provide games at all levels, whether 1:1 dungeon, 10:1 skirmish or assaults and even bigger, like on an abstract HOTT or OHWG level. The problem was how to move PCs from D&D into the bigger scale, without losing the fidelity on their skills or inflating their effect to unrealistic proportions at the larger scale.

With Book of War, I found the path and I've just finished using a houserule supplement to have the player adventurers from Enonia soundly defeat the Orcs at the Battle of The Three (The battle for the Fort). @PatrickWR probably remembers the old Dalewoods Wayfarer's Inn - the Orcs had turned it into a fort to serve as a beachhead on an assault against Enonia. Not anymore!

The whole thing worked really well and I wanted to share this with you guys in case you ever had need to do something like this. I know you use an existing ruleset, SBH, I believe? But in case you wanted to mix D&D with mass combat, here you go...

Delta's Book of War
My Supplement - The Fellowship
Blog post on the battle mixing the two scales in the same session

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timlillig
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Re: Book of War Skirmish Rules and seamless D&D RPG play

Postby timlillig » Tue Dec 08, 2015 9:16 am

The D&D (maybe expert?) rules had some sort of system for mass battles, didn't they? I never used them, but how do they compare to Book of War?

It has been quite some time since I played D&D with any consistency, but I would be open to a game, given available time.
-Tim

xnickbaranx
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Re: Book of War Skirmish Rules and seamless D&D RPG play

Postby xnickbaranx » Sun Dec 27, 2015 1:11 pm

During AD&D 1st Edition TSR released a mass combat system called Battle System. It came with a million counters and 2 whole miniatures. If I remember correctly there were rules for assigning how many of each monster each counter represented. It was a pretty weird system compared to what I'm used to today but it was meant to allow for accurate representation to carry out large skirmishes up to massed battles between nations.
Broken Contract Design Blog: http://brokencontract.blogspot.com

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Eilif
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Re: Book of War Skirmish Rules and seamless D&D RPG play

Postby Eilif » Sun Dec 27, 2015 5:19 pm

I guess I missed this first time around. Interesting stuff you discovered and come up with. I don't RPG myself, but I skimmed through your post and it looks like you've found a good solution to your game integration.

It looks like you put about 8-12 minis per side onto the table, yes? That's pretty close to a standard Song of Blades and Heroes game. Of course SBH doesn't seamlessly blend with D&D. However, SBH does have it's own sister game "Tale of Blades and Heroes".
http://www.ganeshagames.net/product_inf ... ucts_id=23
I don't own TBH, but from what I understand it's easy to take characters from the 1-fig(PC)-per-player encounters of TBH into the 8-14 fig-per-player battles of SBH.
-Karl


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