The reason i am posting here is i need help with the war part. d&d is pretty lacking in massive warfare... anyone have some usefull links? I would like to have some big multiple army type battles. anything out there?
I've never seen anything
good for this in D&D. In my old 2E Combat & Tactics book, there were some rules, but they were pretty clunky. Here's the basics:
- Divide each side into "units" of like groups (no mixed units; it kills the point). The unit size is entirely arbitrary. You might want to start with 10 units or so per side, and you can split them later as people die. There's no hard fast rule here.
- On each unit's initiative it attacks another with a single attack roll. If it hits the other unit's AC, the attacking unit hits the defending unit for a number of Hit Dice equal to the number of attackers in the unit.
- Melee units have to be able to engage other units in melee to attack. Reach weapons have no real benefit under these rules, but you could easily work in AoO rules for the first round.
- Range penalties apply as normal for ranged units (firing into melee, range increments, etc)
Examples:[spoiler]So, for example, if you have a group of 100 human warriors (1 HD, AC 15 with swords) attacking a group of 100 orcs, you might want to start dividing them into groups of 10 (or maybe 20 if you want to speed things up). So, you roll initiative, and one human group attacks an orc group, and roll a single attack roll. They hit the orc group's AC and all of the orcs are killed in the group (the 10 warriors kill 10 HD or orcs). This type of fight is really straight forward.
In another example, maybe the warriors are attacking a bunch of gnolls (2 HD). Now, if you divide the gnolls into groups of 10, any successful attack from a group of gnolls will kill 10 warriors. If a group of 10 warriors hit the gnolls, they only kill 5, because the gnolls have 2 HD each. This smaller group of gnolls will now only kill 5 warriors when they hit. If two groups of 5 gnolls are near each other, you can consolidate them into a single group of 10.[/spoiler]
So, I don't know if any of that made sense, but that's the basic idea. Of course, getting fiddly with group size can totally skew things in one side's favor. The fewer groups you use, the more this favors the underdogs. The more groups you use, the longer combat takes.