Comment on “Mass Unit Battles”

This post continues where the last one left off.

I'll try a tiny example. Suppose the players are in charge of a fighting force of 300 men. Your weather system dictates that it is lightly raining in the morning when the troops awake. A druid in the party casts a spell to predict the weather and learns that it will continue raining all day, more and more heavily. There's an enemy castle five miles from here that the players hope to take. If the party elects to move their army toward the castle, then naturally the terrain for any small scale battle would be whatever is between their current position and the castle; perhaps a random roll would dictate whether the eventual battle would take place nearer to or further from the castle itself, with some possibility of the enemy fighting force not coming to meet the party's until they're right upon the castle.

With the weather predicted, whenever the eventual small-scale battle takes place, the weather would be preordained as rainy -- but since we already used a random roll to say how close the small-scale battle will be in relation to the castle, then logically the further the players got toward the castle, the more time had passed and the heavier the rain would be at the time of the small-scale battle.

I'm having trouble coming up with a more elaborate example, but I think that the general idea of "player decisions as commanders translate into constraining the space of possibilty for the small-scale battle" is a good one.

Finally -- regardless of whether you buy my ramblings above -- you know how in Warhammer or similar wargames, the players agree on whether to field 500 or 1000 or 1500 point armies, and they build their troops to that budget? The decision by the party to take on a more or less challenging battle (as Pandred lays out) seems strikingly similar to *handing the DM a points budget for his side.* The DM takes stock of the forces at the enemy's disposal, picks up to that budget's number of HD in any combination he sees fit, and boom, you've got your opposing force composition. And no trouble at all to program an Excel or code randomizer to calculate that X HD force from an overall enemy army roster.