Chainmail was my gateway drug to roleplaying games, and remains one of my favorite ways to play fantasy exploration/combat scenarios. But I often run across parts of the game where I know what I'VE always done, but I am not sure how anyone else would interpret the same rules. One of these is the way heroes (and superheroes) work in mass combat.

When heroes encounter other individual figures on the 'fantasy combat' table or 'man to man combat' it is pretty obvious what is supposed to happen. But when they participate in mass combat you have to make a decision about what the rules really mean, with dramatic consequences for game play. I think the closest you could come to a literal interpretation of the written rules would be that when one individual hero faces off with one or more 1:20 scale units (i.e., figures representing 20 combatants each), then the hero attacks as 4 'units' of a type given by his or her equipment (heavy foot, armored foot, etc.), and the enemy units must score 4 hits in the same turn to kill him.

Given the way the odds work in the mass combat tables, if the hero and foes were of a similar 'type', that means on average you would need to have 24 units, or 480 men (orcs, whatever) simultaneously attacking him in order to have an even-odds chance of killing him. This is obviously insane; setting aside what you think about how tough heroes are supposed to be, in a game with ~1 inch wide units it isn't remotely possible to even get this many around one figure in the first place! Similar issues arise when other individual 'fantasy' combatants engage with mass-combat units, but let's focus on just this one case at first.

I always wondered what people do about this. It is pretty important to the game, and therefore also essential to how you would play OD+D using Chainmail rules. My reaction was that I rejected the idea that a single Hero figure could use the mass combat tables, and instead resolved all combat between heroes and non-heroic, non-fantasy combatants using 1:1 scale rules (either the man to man combat rules, or, my favorite, simply applying the standard mass combat tables to 1:1 scale).

What did you do?

Well, as the writers of the rules played it, we played it as written.  So yeah, on 1:20 scale, a Hero will mow through regular troops like wheat.  All fantastic creatures will.

We usually played 1:1 when playing fantasy.  But at 1:20 we played it as written.

Wow. I'd be surprised if you ever encountered a situation where a hero could be killed in mass combat. In fact, I suspect one hero would inevitably defeat an army of any arbitrary size if you gave him enough time. He'd remove something like 1 unit per turn, and have no meaningful chance of being defeated each turn, because there would never be enough units around him to put him down with 4 simultaneous hits.

Of course, if you resolved a Hero's fights using the Man-to-Man rules, then a small number of the exact same foes have a very good chance of defeating him. Many of the weapon vs. armor match ups on that table have close to 50:50 odds of a 'hit', whereas the standard mass combat rules assume a 1:6 chance of a hit between similarly equiped foes. That, plus the fact that in Man-to-Man combat each combatant gets a chop means the same standard combatants dole out something like 60x as many hits per turn per combatant, and a hero who encounters 4 combatants per turn has about a 1:16 chance of being killed per turn. Once I realized the insanely huge contrast between what a hero can do at one scale vs. the other, I just dumped the standard treatment of them.

Another tweak I have always used is that I treat all 'multi-hit kill' fantasy units as being defeated by an INTEGRATED hit total, spread across any number of turns, rather than simultaneous. The rules stipulate that some things are killed off by so and so many total hits over multiple turns, whereas others are only killed by so many simultaneous hits. I quickly found that all those figures were functionally invincible, even when they were not otherwise that tough in man-to-man or fantasy table rules.

Shrug.  We played as written for decades.  I also don't think I've ever seen a battle where one side had fantastic combatants and the other didn't.  Sending regular men against a Hero is SUPPOSED to be a slaughter.

Strokes, folks, etc.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1035148Wow. I'd be surprised if you ever encountered a situation where a hero could be killed in mass combat. In fact, I suspect one hero would inevitably defeat an army of any arbitrary size if you gave him enough time. He'd remove something like 1 unit per turn, and have no meaningful chance of being defeated each turn, because there would never be enough units around him to put him down with 4 simultaneous hits.

Of course, if you resolved a Hero's fights using the Man-to-Man rules, then a small number of the exact same foes have a very good chance of defeating him. Many of the weapon vs. armor match ups on that table have close to 50:50 odds of a 'hit', whereas the standard mass combat rules assume a 1:6 chance of a hit between similarly equiped foes. That, plus the fact that in Man-to-Man combat each combatant gets a chop means the same standard combatants dole out something like 60x as many hits per turn per combatant, and a hero who encounters 4 combatants per turn has about a 1:16 chance of being killed per turn. Once I realized the insanely huge contrast between what a hero can do at one scale vs. the other, I just dumped the standard treatment of them.

Another tweak I have always used is that I treat all 'multi-hit kill' fantasy units as being defeated by an INTEGRATED hit total, spread across any number of turns, rather than simultaneous. The rules stipulate that some things are killed off by so and so many total hits over multiple turns, whereas others are only killed by so many simultaneous hits. I quickly found that all those figures were functionally invincible, even when they were not otherwise that tough in man-to-man or fantasy table rules.

Wizards and Weeabo fightan magic cannot be defeated by ordinary mortals!

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1035147Well, as the writers of the rules played it, we played it as written.  So yeah, on 1:20 scale, a Hero will mow through regular troops like wheat.  All fantastic creatures will.

We usually played 1:1 when playing fantasy.  But at 1:20 we played it as written.

Pretty much how we did it. I think that my thought was that a Hero was a single unit on the sand-table and we never really worried about the scale after that. The end result could certainly be that a Hero became an army, but we were fine with it. I'll admit in retrospect it seems a little strange, but that's the way we played.

Now imagine if you had a Superhero....

I don't have any problem with any one treatment of heroes. I figure it's like disliking how a bishop moves in Chess - that is what the piece's 'powers' are in the game, and if you don't like it you can keep your yap shut and just go play another game. So, heroes who are immortal in mass combat are fine, if that's the treatment of 'fantasy' units that you want. Assuming you have a broad mix of such figures on both sides, it all works out in the wash.

What I find weird (and what inspired me to play Chainmail the way I do) is that the same basic game system treats them very differently depending on which part of the rules you have in play. This is particularly true if you are mixing Chainmail and D+D, as the first core books of OD+D imagined. A 4th level fighter in what we think of as 'standard' D+D would probably lose an evenly-equipped toe-to-toe fight with 3-4 orcs. The same figure fighting the same sorts of foes using the Man-to-Man rules (the suggested core rules in OD+D!) would probably be evenly matched by 8-10 orcs or more, even if you used D+D conventions for damage and hit points. The same combatant using pure Chainmail Man-to-Man rules (4 hits in a turn to die) would be evenly matched by something like 30-40 orcs. And, the same figure using Chainmail mass combat rules is invincible when facing standard orcs. It just points out the huge range of what D+D 'is' when you accept all the stuff that was in the rules when it was created. Somehow the community settled on the version where the most common character type (fighters) gets a bit harder to kill as the game goes on, but doesn't get much better at fighting. But if you flip around the game as it existed when first published there is these completely differ versions of the fighter right there.

Edit: my personal taste is that the fighter above level 0 should be similarly powerful at all scales of play (roleplaying game, skirmish, mass combat), and that the most enjoyable power level is most like Chainmail's Man-to-Man combat rules. That is, much more powerful than the standard D+D fighter, and much less powerful than the mass-combat Chainmail fighter. If the game had always worked that way (as it well might have, but for an arbitrary seeming set of choices early on), you might have changed the path of the game. If a fighter feels like an intrinsically cool character as levels start to rise, there would be much less push for kewl powerzzz, items, hybrid magic using fighter-like classes, etc. The whole game might have ended up with quite a different feel.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1035215I don't have any problem with any one treatment of heroes. I figure it's like disliking how a bishop moves in Chess - that is what the piece's 'powers' are in the game, and if you don't like it you can keep your yap shut and just go play another game. So, heroes who are immortal in mass combat are fine, if that's the treatment of 'fantasy' units that you want. Assuming you have a broad mix of such figures on both sides, it all works out in the wash.

What I find weird (and what inspired me to play Chainmail the way I do) is that the same basic game system treats them very differently depending on which part of the rules you have in play. This is particularly true if you are mixing Chainmail and D+D, as the first core books of OD+D imagined. A 4th level fighter in what we think of as 'standard' D+D would probably lose an evenly-equipped toe-to-toe fight with 3-4 orcs. The same figure fighting the same sorts of foes using the Man-to-Man rules (the suggested core rules in OD+D!) would probably be evenly matched by 8-10 orcs or more, even if you used D+D conventions for damage and hit points. The same combatant using pure Chainmail Man-to-Man rules (4 hits in a turn to die) would be evenly matched by something like 30-40 orcs. And, the same figure using Chainmail mass combat rules is invincible when facing standard orcs. It just points out the huge range of what D+D 'is' when you accept all the stuff that was in the rules when it was created. Somehow the community settled on the version where the most common character type (fighters) gets a bit harder to kill as the game goes on, but doesn't get much better at fighting. But if you flip around the game as it existed when first published there is these completely differ versions of the fighter right there.

Edit: my personal taste is that the fighter above level 0 should be similarly powerful at all scales of play (roleplaying game, skirmish, mass combat), and that the most enjoyable power level is most like Chainmail's Man-to-Man combat rules. That is, much more powerful than the standard D+D fighter, and much less powerful than the mass-combat Chainmail fighter. If the game had always worked that way (as it well might have, but for an arbitrary seeming set of choices early on), you might have changed the path of the game. If a fighter feels like an intrinsically cool character as levels start to rise, there would be much less push for kewl powerzzz, items, hybrid magic using fighter-like classes, etc. The whole game might have ended up with quite a different feel.

That's a very interesting observation, Larsdangly. And yes, I'd agree it might have changed the feel of the game:).
In fact, I think you're overlooking a possible development. Had Chainmail been retained with its different subsystems, people might well have gotten used to the fact that the same stats mean different things depending on which sub-system you're using to resolve the outcome.
That's an idea that seems really hard to grasp for some players today, alas;).

However, I must also point out is that the Hero getting more powerful against an army is almost the same as having mook rules in action, and resolving the fight using the normal system:D!

Moving this to the Other Games forum.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035763Moving this to the Other Games forum.

Your forum, your rules. However, keep in mind that for many of us Chainmail was our combat system for quite a few of our early OD&D campaigns. (We ran some with CM and some with the "alternate" system.) It's a legitimate RPG topic....

I feel it important to note that neither of the creators ever played anything recognizable as D&D with CHAINMAIL.  Dave Arneson used the Fantasy Combat Table for his first few Blackmoor sessions, but started working on his Blackmoor system (a skill based system with combat similar to Tony Bath's Ancient rules) in 1970.

I can't recall if it was the WRG7e fantasy notes or Hordes of the Things that suggested that heroes in mass battles are likely accompanied by a warband of companions that the bards conveniently forgot to mention.