Big battle fantasy rules - advice wanted

[Vindice]

Warmaster?

[Erny]

Whats wrong with Warhammer?

Are buckets of dice really a problem? Takes just as long to roll 20 dice as 1.
Is command an issue? I've yet to see a command system that gets much beyond rolling to activate easily ported into warhammer using Ld. Done it many times. If you really want to fuss over how many pips you have on the dice why not play Yahtzee?
Individual troops represented, no reasom why tropops cannot be based as stands, several models sharing one stat line.
Custom troop types are easy in warhammer. You can even mitigate for the Uruk-Hai, "problem", as much as you like. The rules don't bite if you use them to play your own army lists.
Although OOP there are many thousands of the books out there to be picked up very cheaply.
Flows well? Movement, shooting, combat, magic.

Potential problems:

It's popular.
It's obvious.
It's by GW.

Ah I guess that rules it out.

[Ethelred the Almost Ready]

Hmmm.  Thanks Erny.  As I mentioned, I haven't fantasy wargamed before until recently playing Dragon Rampant, so I don't have an issue with Warhammer.  Did mention buckets of dice not completely out of the question, I just don't particularly like it as a mechanism, probably mainly as it is not what I am used to (although now using it for DR, although the system is a little different, just 6 or 12 dice and no rolling for hits wounds and then kills, or whatever it is in Warhammer).  Finally, Warhammer is obvious, which is why I was wondering what else is out there.  I have also taken a look at LOTR rules from GW as well, as a matter of fact.

[Vindice]

The Lord of the Rings rules, although excellent (for my money the best single rules set GW produced bar 3rd edition Blood Bowl), don't scale up too well. I can't speak to the War of the Ring rules.

As I mentioned before, Warmaster is a good rules set - and, iirc, wasn't a version of it used as the basis of the Battle of the 5 Armies game a whole ago?

[Lowtardog]

The Lord of the Rings rules, although excellent (for my money the best single rules set GW produced bar 3rd edition Blood Bowl), don't scale up too well. I can't speak to the War of the Ring rules.

As I mentioned before, Warmaster is a good rules set - and, iirc, wasn't a version of it used as the basis of the Battle of the 5 Armies game a whole ago?

Youare right it was a boxed game and may fit the bill

[Severian]

Following this thread with keen interest. I'm busily preparing a couple of warbands for DR but would like to find a set that can easily handle bigger forces. I agree that DR upscaled could well work but need to get comfortable with the standard version first.

My Warhammer experience was limited to 1st edition, which I rather liked back in the day, and recently dug out for another look. It has the added attraction of nostalgia, of course, and I do enjoy all the special rules and army-specific stat lines. Somehow generic heavy foot/elite riders/warbeasts/whatever don't quite have the same appeal, although I think they probably work as well or better in practice. And the DR activation mechanic is a definite plus for solo gaming, which most of mine is. But I think I'll give Warhammer 1st another run on to the table, just for fun, when I can get enough dwarves and goblins fit for purpose.

I'd recommend a look at To the Strongest. I've tried it out for Gloranthan mass battles and it's a good game. The grid movement may not be to everyone's taste (I'm a little ambivalent about it myself) but the troop classification is pretty flexible and base/unit sizes can be completely ad hoc and inconsistent across and between armies, which is great. There's a fantasy variant in preparation, I gather, which should be interesting. In the meantime you can represent magical units as cannon, or whatever you like really. Perhaps less obvious complexity than other sets, but has the virtue of being purpose-built for very large scale games. And the basic mechanics are simple enough to be grasped (I hope) by my children in a year or two...

But I'm still not wholly convinced by any of these options, really - so have looked also at Warmaster (thanks to Hybrid Alpha for the link!), and the old Nick Lund Fantasy Warriors rules, and indeed HOTT although I've never really taken to it.

In all this I think the key for me is flexible basing - everything single on pennies (or tuppences, or 40mm or 50mm rounds for the bigger beasts) and then sabotted into groups or formation as needed. I've been having some fun with more elaborate landscaped basing for DR units, too, with single or multiple figures as resources or taste allow.

Anyway, just a few thoughts. Interested how others are doing in the neverending quest for the perfect rule set...

[Hobgoblin]

Whats wrong with Warhammer?

Are buckets of dice really a problem? Takes just as long to roll 20 dice as 1.
Is command an issue? I've yet to see a command system that gets much beyond rolling to activate easily ported into warhammer using Ld. Done it many times. If you really want to fuss over how many pips you have on the dice why not play Yahtzee?
Individual troops represented, no reasom why tropops cannot be based as stands, several models sharing one stat line.
Custom troop types are easy in warhammer. You can even mitigate for the Uruk-Hai, "problem", as much as you like. The rules don't bite if you use them to play your own army lists.
Although OOP there are many thousands of the books out there to be picked up very cheaply.
Flows well? Movement, shooting, combat, magic.

Potential problems:

It's popular.
It's obvious.
It's by GW.

Ah I guess that rules it out.

Interesting. I can only speak of my own experience here. I was an avid Warhammer player with 2nd and 3rd edition and then - just at the end of my first wargaming "career" - chanced upon Hordes of the Things. I didn't realise at the time that it was a new game, as the roughly produced rulebook looked ancient. My friends and I then spent a month or two playing HOTT and felt that it achieved everything that we'd wanted from big Warhammer battles but so much more smoothly and elegantly. And, most importantly, quickly. In those couple of months (before we all went off to university and turned our backs on gaming for a couple of decades), I worked out that we'd played more HOTT games than we'd ever played Warhammer (over many years) - not least because an entire campaign could be played in an evening.

Where I think the great strength of Warhammer lay was in the scenarios: McDeath, Orc's Drift, The Dolgan Raiders, The Abbey of La Maisontaal, Kremlo the Slann, The Magnificent Sven and - of course - the Ziggurat of Doom. Those were all terrific. But I'm not sure that the game itself was ever quite as good as the best of the material written for it.

Now, you certainly can solve the Uruk-hai problem in Warhammer. I guess the stat line would be something like this:

M 5, WS 3, BS 3, S 3, T 3, W 1, I 3, A 1,  Ld 7, Int 7, Cl 6, Wp 6. And then they'd have (long?) bows, light armour and shield. You might argue that like dwarves, they shouldn't get a movement penalty for armour. Either way, they'd still move a bit quicker than Men, which is as it should be. And you could give them a penalty when fighting shieldwalls (Are they in 3rd? I can't remember) of man-sized creatures. So far, so good. You could give them Animosity, but that caricatures the LotR orcish infighting rather than reflecting it. Hatred? Of elves, perhaps.

But what then? Points-wise, they're unlikely to appear in the numbers they should for Helm's Deep or whatever. They work out at 4.75 points (before equipment), so they cost almost as much as Men. And they'll be just a little bland.

That's where I think one of the main problems with Warhammer lies. It's got a lot of fun traits for a somewhat comic large-skirmish game (which is what it originally was). But it's actually quite poor at simulating the differences in fighting style between different troop types. Dragon Rampant and Hordes of the Thing's bellicose foot and warbands (respectively) are much better distinguished from heavy foot/spears or elite foot/blades than are most Warhammer troop types, which tend to convey species differences rather than fighting style.

And this is especially pertinent when it comes to simulating Middle Earth, in which most troop types are essentially human - or at least far less exaggeratedly distinct than their Warhammer equivalents. So, a Warhammer orc is distinguished by being ponderous (I 2) and resilient to damage (T 4), both of which make quite a big difference in the game, but both of which are inappropriate for a Tolkien orc ("quick as a striking snake" and no harder to kill than a human; probably easier to kill).

The other main problem with Warhammer, in my experience, is just that it takes so long to play. I alluded to this earlier: my abiding childhood memories of the game involve a fair bit of frustration when it was Time To Go Home and the battle seemed to be hardly underway. Of course, this was before movement trays, so that might make a bit of difference. But the speed of HOTT's turns  - and the way in which the game always seemed to be forcing tactical choices upon you - was a revelation back then.

Part of that is just that Warhammer is a bit clunky. Roll to hit, roll to wound and roll for armour makes means that a typical combat round has three times as many rolls as its equivalent  in HoTT. Is there an attraction in this? I think there is, in a small skirmish. When your small band of chaos warriors is advancing, it can be nice to know that half of them were dead men were it not for their armour. But in a big battle, it's just more rolling, gathering, rolling - which adds, incrementally, to the time taken.

A final, more minor point is that Warhammer statlines contain lots of stuff that's hardly ever used (Int, for example, unless you suffer from Stupidity). And I can't see how all that detail gives much much more bang for your buck. Indeed, I think that SBH with two stats works much better as a skirmish than Warhammer with twelve.

None of this is to condemn Warhammer or GW. I had lots of fun with it. A fair bit of frustration too: but the original scenarios - and scenarios designed in their vein - are pure gold. And that's where I think the game's real strength lies.

[Erny]

But that would be to play warhammer straight out of the book. Something the book suggests you don't do.

Helm's Deep? Conventional wisdom places attackers at a 2:1 advantage to defenders and this is exactly what the siege rules suggest. Given it is a senario why stop there the forces of Saruman can out number the northmen by as many as you like. Do other rules systems cover the suprise attack by super orcs bred by a traitorous wizard in a different way other than, "write your own senario"?

Warhammer is a tool kit that can handle any situation. I've used it for starwars and Jedi, WW2 skirmish, ancient battles using 28mm and 6mm, supers and fantasy. It's never let me down. It's strength is it's versitility, it's a tool kit that can do anything if you have the imagination. The ancient battles rules demonstrated the difference between different troop types with only minor additions to the rules that really anybody could think up. I've been using it to fight battles in middle earth for at least twenty years. Published senarios are great. The unpublished ones dreamed up on a long drive or conversation down the pub/over the internet are the best.

Oh and if the stat lines include things you don't need, don't use them.

[Hobgoblin]

My Warhammer experience was limited to 1st edition, which I rather liked back in the day, and recently dug out for another look. It has the added attraction of nostalgia, of course, and I do enjoy all the special rules and army-specific stat lines.

I have a copy of 1st which I bought second-hand as a kid. I've never played it, though. It's always struck me as the most intriguing of all the versions that I've seen, especially the implied mash-up RPG/wargame of the scenario with the wizard's tower. It's that sort of thing that the 2nd edition scenarios seem to bring to fruition. I like the looser, more open-ended setting.

Somehow generic heavy foot/elite riders/warbeasts/whatever don't quite have the same appeal, although I think they probably work as well or better in practice.

I think what you think is right! There is a huge appeal in all those little differentiations, but they sometimes seem to not add up to all that much. In contrast, DR and HOTT really distinguish troop types by fighting style and interaction with terrain. It allows the miniatures and the paintwork to provide the "fluff" over an effective set of mechanics.

In all this I think the key for me is flexible basing - everything single on pennies (or tuppences, or 40mm or 50mm rounds for the bigger beasts) and then sabotted into groups or formation as needed. I've been having some fun with more elaborate landscaped basing for DR units, too, with single or multiple figures as resources or taste allow.

That's exactly what I was aiming to do until I cracked and fled to 15mm for Mayhem and dusted off my old multi-based 28mm armies for HOTT. And then started assembling a few more ...

One thing I've found is that DR plays really well with HOTT elements so long as you have a couple of single-based models to deploy if need be for casualties. As most of my HOTT stuff is three to a base, I never need more than two individuals.

As you say, there's quite a bit of fun to be had in multi-basing stuff.

[Hybrid Alpha]

Actually, Warhammer with the magic toned down, and something akin to the command rules from Warmaster bolted on, could  work well. I would use an earlier version such as 3rd, 6th or Warhammer Ancients. As those are the ones I'm familiar with. Actually, using Bolt Action's "draw a dice from a bag" activation system might work too.

What I like about Warhammer is that the basic rules are easy to learn, you can quickly make just about any unit imaginable and the rules are easily modified to suit whatever flavour of fantasy you want. In particular I like the psychology rules for fear, terror and panic - rallying broken units is always fun, especially when they get back in the fight and turn the tide. Combined with Warmaster's command system, or Bolt Actions activation system, you have a pretty good fog-of-war going on for solo play.

If you stay away from the army books and make up your own units the game is pretty balanced. The army books tended to add all manner of army specific special rules, some were very unballanced. This caused the game to bog down as a lot of these rules were similar but different. Unless you played a lot is was tricky remembering them all.

I would probably play it with multi-based units and track casualties rather than individually based units, but I'm thinking about trying this with my 15mm collection, individually based 15's gets pretty fiddly. It also speeds up movement, setting up and packing away.

Something else Warhammer has in its favour (for me) is the sense of character and personality that each unit and hero has in the game. You know exactly what each unit and hero is armed and equipped with. That is probably what I find lacking in games such as kings of War, Hail Caesar and Warmaster. In those games units and heroes are boiled down to very limited and generic stat lines. It makes for faster games, but it does take away some of their character and I do miss that.

Hmm - I think I might give it a try this evening in my endless quest for those illusive "perfect" rules. I know they don't exist really, but trying to find them is fun

[Hobgoblin]

But that would be to play warhammer straight out of the book. Something the book suggests you don't do.

True! But the counter is "do other systems work well without having to mess around with the rules?". For me at least, the minimal "time to table" with HOTT, DR and SBH is a huge advantage. Mayhem doesn't, initially at least, have the short time to table, but it is a pretty complete, slick and self-contained ruleset.

Helm's Deep? Conventional wisdom places attackers at a 2:1 advantage to defenders and this is exactly what the siege rules suggest. Given it is a senario why stop there the forces of Saruman can out number the northmen by as many as you like. Do other rules systems cover the suprise attack by super orcs bred by a traitorous wizard in a different way other than, "write your own scenario"?

Of course the siege book is another sizeable (and out-of-print) tome. I do remember having some fun with the rules (and the Mighty Fortress, of course!). Mayhem, though, gives you siege rules within the PDF.

Warhammer is a tool kit that can handle any situation. I've used it for starwars and Jedi, WW2 skirmish, ancient battles using 28mm and 6mm, supers and fantasy. It's never let me down. It's strength is it's versitility, it's a tool kit that can do anything if you have the imagination.

I'm sure that's true, but I'm not sure that it's any less true for comparable games. I mean, HOTT armies cover everything from ancient battles to zombie apocalypses. And those are just some of the suggestions in the rulebook: someone posted a Baywatch army on this forum!

I'll give Warhammer this, though - it is more "scaleable" than most games. So you can use it to fight an SBH-style skirmish (like the Ziggurat of Doom), a DR-sized game (like the Dolgan Raiders) or a massed battle. I don't think it does any of those things quite as well as the rulesets that specialise in one size or another, though.

And with it you get the other thing I forgot to mention: IGOUGO. That can make for pretty boring games, especially big ones. Now, as you say, you can adopt an activation system. But there surely comes a point when it's like the axe with the head and the handle replaced at different times.

I suppose the implicit question here is "what are the mechanisms that make Warhammer so good?". So, SBH and DR have their activation systems and rapidity of play; HOTT and Mayhem have the budgeting of command points; and all four have really effective interactions between troops and terrain.

The ancient battles rules demonstrated the difference between different troop types with only minor additions to the rules that really anybody could think up. I've been using it to fight battles in middle earth for at least twenty years.

That's another out-of-print ruleset, though, isn't it?  

What sort of additions does it make to the Warhammer system?

Published senarios are great. The unpublished ones dreamed up on a long drive or conversation down the pub/over the internet are the best.

No one could argue with that!  

I think one vindication of the long Warhammer statline is that it gives lots of potential for interesting scenario mechanics. So a high-tech device left by the ancients might require an Int test to activate (with tragicomic results if the test is failed ...), or a particular character might be good at insulting people, provoking a charge if a Cl test is failed, and so on. And that is a very real strength.

That goes back to those very first Warhammer scenarios - the "RPG meets wargame" feel. That, I think, is Warhammer's greatest asset. Against that, you could argue that Warhammer combat - in calculations and dice rolled - is about as complex as Runequest combat - but without the gritty flavour and flying limbs that that game provides. So the complexity of process doesn't translate into variability of results.

Here's an example. Let's take a standard lizardman fighting a standard orc - one on one - in a single round of combat. In Warhammer, there could be a resultless draw, the lizardman could be wounded and pushed back or the orc could be killed. The lizardman can't be killed, but the orc can. That, as I remember it, is that. And that's on three dice rolls each.

In Runequest (similar amount of calculation and dice-rolling) the possibilities are vast. Either fighter could be wounded in myriad ways, or both could, or neither could. Either could be killed. Either could fumble in some spectacular way. The chances of each outcome would depend on the traits, but there would be no impossibilities. That's on three or four dice rolls each (depending on parries).

In SBH (assuming Q3, C4 and Q4, C3), either could be knocked down, or pushed back, or killed outright (depending on who's active). The orc could be gruesomely killed. This is on one dice roll each.

So, Warhammer does give you RPG-like statlines, which helps its scaleability and the creation of excellent and interesting scenarios (and that is a very, very big plus), but it doesn't give you the variability of outcomes that a dedicated skirmish game or RPG system does - despite involving as much or more complexity.

To balance the criticism, I come back to the statline: it does give you plenty of options when covering things that the rules don't (like splitting units, for instance). And it does provide fertile ground for scenario features. Those are considerable plusses.

[Severian]

I wonder if a good deal of the characteristic quality of early Warhammer isn't to be derived from the original subtitle: The Mass Combat Fantasy Role Playing Game. I certainly came at it from an RPG background (Basic/Expert D&D, then AD&D, then RQ) and it was quite liberating to be able to plan, and occasionally execute, large tabletop battles with exactly the same figures originally bought for and used in RPG gaming. Better still (as Hybrid Alpha says) you could have heroes with all the heft and character you liked, who took a real part in the action.

Wargaming, on the other hand, was the serious stuff done with WRG rules and Bruce Quarrie Napoleonics (another happy hunting ground of specific national stat lines and special abilities, as it happens, but that's another story). You could have generals, sure, but they had function rather than character.

With an RPG, of course, your opponents are always distinguished by species (orcs, goblins, kobolds, whatnot) and not by combat function, so it's not surprising that that's where Warhammer started. The fact that this might give you functional convergences between troop types you might expect to behave in rather different ways might not have been envisaged but isn't really surprising. But I don't think I really minded (or even really noticed), because the sheer fun of it and the chance to plot how the Silmarillion battles could be fought on a 6'x4' table were what mattered. But the rules' starting point was how the individual elf or goblin fought, not how they fought en masse considered tactically. The fact that one of the original 3 volumes was a bare-bones RPG character development system for heroes &c is all of a piece.

As I say, I only ever played 1st edition Warhammer so can't really talk about how it developed later. But I suspect its character as a "somewhat comic large-scale skirmish" (as Hobgoblin neatly described it) with strong RPG roots explains some of its colour and texture, including the problems/issues discussed. But I still like the game very much, not least because it is so good-humoured and open to adaptation - just like a good RPG, in fact. But I wouldn't expect it to model command and control decisions in the way that a "pure" wargame might. This is not necessarily a bad thing!

My apologies if this is (as I suspect) a wordy restatement of the blindingly obvious.  

[Hobgoblin]

What I like about Warhammer is that the basic rules are easy to learn, you can quickly make just about any unit imaginable and the rules are easily modified to suit whatever flavour of fantasy you want. In particular I like the psychology rules for fear, terror and panic - rallying broken units is always fun, especially when they get back in the fight and turn the tide. Combined with Warmaster's command system, or Bolt Actions activation system, you have a pretty good fog-of-war going on for solo play.

All true. I should add that early Warhammer - with the make-your-own profiles and suggestions-only sense of freedom - very much passes the all-important Goblin on a Lizard Test. That is, you have a model of a goblin riding a giant lizard. Can you play it smoothly and quickly without having to mess around with the rules? Yes, you can - and you're actively encouraged to do so. (Later editions fail this test, I believe, but the early ones pass with flying colours.)

If you stay away from the army books and make up your own units the game is pretty balanced. The army books tended to add all manner of army specific special rules, some were very unballanced. This caused the game to bog down as a lot of these rules were similar but different. Unless you played a lot is was tricky remembering them all.

That's very true. A lot of rot set in with Ravening Hordes (for the 2nd edition), I think. In contrast, Forces of Fantasy (for first ed.) was all inspiration and amusement.

[Hobgoblin]

With an RPG, of course, your opponents are always distinguished by species (orcs, goblins, kobolds, whatnot) and not by combat function, so it's not surprising that that's where Warhammer started. The fact that this might give you functional convergences between troop types you might expect to behave in rather different ways might not have been envisaged but isn't really surprising. But I don't think I really minded (or even really noticed), because the sheer fun of it and the chance to plot how the Silmarillion battles could be fought on a 6'x4' table were what mattered. But the rules' starting point was how the individual elf or goblin fought, not how they fought en masse considered tactically. The fact that one of the original 3 volumes was a bare-bones RPG character development system for heroes &c is all of a piece.

That's excellent analysis!

 Like you, I got into Warhammer from RPGs (RuneQuest, principally) and, yes: the expectation was that an orc was an orc. Which is exactly what Warhammer provides (if you want your orcs as 7' monsters rather than Tolkien-style goblins, but that's another story ...). And like you, I didn't notice. I remember finding the notion in the HOTT rules that a warband was a warband and a horde a horde, whether made up of orcs or lizardmen or humans, almost disturbing at first - and then a revelation. And that's because, as you say, the RPG expectation (RuneQuest not withstanding) was that a goblin was a goblin, and that his weaponry and training was a lesser factor than his essential goblinhood.

[Polkovnik]

While I am very happy with Dragon Rampant for skirmish level games I can't help but think about playing large battle fantasy games - for Middle Earth.  
What I want is something that is easy to play solo, has plenty of command decisions but not too complex.  
For this subject the basic mechanics should be mainly those of historical gaming with some magic, able to field a few monsters, and allow for the odd hero.  I am not particularly keen on card driven games or buckets of dice but these are not necessarily out of the question if the game flows well.

You might want to try Sword & Spear - I would say it meets your requirements to the letter.
The fantasy version of the rules will soon be published, but you can read some reviews of the ancient & medieval rules here:
http://polkovnik.moonfruit.com/sword-spear-reviews/4586094213

I'm not much of a solo gamer but I've played a few solo games to playtest points values and some of the new rules in the fantasy version and I think it works really well as a solo game.

Here's some pictures of a Battle of Five Armies Game:











There are other battle reports from playtest games, and other discussion about the forthcoming rules on my forum:
http://polkovnikproductions.freeforums.org/sword-spear-fantasy-f11.html