Humanoid Swarms for Mass Combat :: 5e D&D

I was doing research on mass combat rules for D&D 5e for …reasons… and I know there's nothing completely official. There is a 2017 Unearthed Arcana for Mass Combat [PDF] published by Wizards of the Coast. In fact, there are two PDFs for this, the other likely from 2015.

In previous editions, there were the Battlesystem rules, especially the Battlesystem 2nd Edition that I was most familiar with. These were D&D's answer to other miniatures combat rules from Ral Partha et al.

In 3rd edition, there were two books, Heroes of Battle and the Miniatures Handbook that could be used for the same purpose.

But as far as an official mass combat system for 5e, there is only the playtest UA stuff above. In my research, I stumbled upon my same question on a Reddit post from a few months back.

Posts from the dndnext
community on Reddit

And one of the commenters suggested setting up stats for large groups as swarms and then run normal combat. And they linked to a page on The Homebrewery for Humanoid Swarms. This is an interesting idea because it simply enhances the monster stat block for one humanoid and expands it to an unnumbered swarm of variable size. The sizes match monster sizes above medium; large, huge and gargantuan.

• Commoner → Mob of Commoners
• Pikeman → Pike Square
• Archer → Mass of Archers
• Bodyguard → Company of Guards
• Hedge Witch → Coven of Witches

Another reason that this catches my eye is that one of the …reasons… or themes matching why I started searching this in the first place was that I wanted something remniscent of an old video game that I was a huge fan of growing up called Ancient Art of War on the Macintosh Plus (1985). There were three troop types in that game; knights, archers, and barbarians. Along with other rules, the combat advantage for the three types was similar to rock-paper-scissors.

• Knights, with their heavy armor, were strong against barbarians, but too slow to deal with archers.
• Barbarians were quick and nimble, easily crossing the battlefield to defeat archers, but fell easily to knights.
• Archers could fire volleys of arrows and easily defeat knights, but could not hit barbarians with any accuracy.

The "swarm of humanoids" has some ideas in common with this.

• Pikemen are clearly knights...
• Archers, archers
• Bodyguards are potentially barbarians (although...)

So it would be possible to use this a bit. The problem I anticipate is that you can't have a mixed squad of barbs and archers and knights in varying numbers. This was almost always a strategic way to win in Ancient Art of War. Here's some nostalgic gameplay footage I'm saving just for myself.

Bonus: Check out more along these lines with a post named mass combat belongs in the monster manual on Blog of Holding.

Pathfinder Stripped of Traces of D&D in New Rulebooks

It would be ironic that the same year that I was first instroduced to playing Pathfinder in earnest was the same year that Wizards of the Coast, in their ultimate wisdom would decide to stab themselves in confusion and cause a big controversial upheaval in the games industry by pre-releasing an update to their gaming license rules. Which in summary was going to severely hurt independent creators. There are a million blog posts about this and I don't necessarily want to rehash it here in total.

Pathfinder was very highly inspired by D&D (2nd or 3rd edition?) and borrows quite a bit of intellectual property. The possible move by Wizards seems to be tailored specifically to hit back. So the makers of Pathfinder made the proactive strategic decision to completely strip every last trace of the shared content from their rules. Read more about it at Polygon - Pathfinder stripped every last trace of D&D from its new rulebooks — even owlbears.

[Book Recommendation] Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

This book was recommended to me and I'm going to grab it through the Libby app. It was mentioned like this:

...like Samone and his coffee plants...

Ooh, that's a memory I'd not retrieved in a while. First here's the book.

My stepbrother played in a Dark Sun campaign that I ran back in the day, and he played a Halfling Druid/Thief that had a home base just east of Gulg at a small hidden hot-spring oasis. At some point, he tried coffee and decided to grow his own along with other food for himself. This book mentioned above is about an adventurer who retired and opened a coffee shop.

I've queued this up from my library, but I may purchase a copy if I like it enough. Check it out for yourself!

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition on Amazon.com

I figured I'd check it out today, and it turns out that the new version is available for pre-order on Amazon. Check out the Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition right away. I'm still catching up with the 3^rd edition books that I wanted, so I'm not sure how soon I'll be getting these. I am what you'd call a late adopter.

Dungeons & Dragons v4.0?

I wasn't sure of the credibility of this or if it was a rumor or not. It would appear that Wizards of the Coast is poised to announce the upcoming release of another updated version to the most popular table-top role-playing game ever, Dungeons and Dragons.

'D&D 4th Edition' Announced at Gen Con

Wizards of the Coast is announcing at GenCon today that it will release the 4th Edition of its category-leading Dungeons and Dragon roleplaying game in 2008, the first full new edition in eight years. The three core books will be released next summer on a monthly schedule: Player's Handbook in May, Monster Manual in June, and Dungeon Master's Guide in July. Pricing and page counts of the new products will be consistent with current packaging. Graphics have been updated, art will be used on the covers, and interior design has been opened up to make the books less intimidating to new players.

I'm guessing after review that this is for real. Read the full article at ICv2.

There are other sites that seem to be corroborating this story. For instance, EN World has a thread called 4E: What we know, however, it's not loading for me at the moment so it must be disabled or crashing at the server level from all the traffic.

Perhaps the best possible proof for me was that the Wizards.com server appears to be down right now --also most likely from the traffic.

We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Unfortunately, due to an extremely high load on our web servers, we have been unable to bring you our normal web content. We apologize for the inconvenience and ask that you please try again in a few hours! Our technical team is aware of the problem and working on it.

Thank you for your patience!

It seemed to me that they had just released version 3.0 and then they followed it up very quickly with version 3.5. The 2nd Edition came out in the early 80s or something and I didn't buy my copy of the Player's Handbook until 1996 or so. However, they are coming so fast right now that I haven't even had time to get 100% familiar with the new rules.

Thanks to Chris Flipse via del.icio.us for the above links.