By Chris Acuff

If you can’t tell by the two posts I have written about the 40k based system Wrath and Glory, I have a bit of a wargaming background. Most of that is 40k, but I really like some Bolt Action when I can get my hands on it. I am not sure why I find these games so compelling, but I can tell you it is a very different kind of compelling as a TTRPG.

TTRPG’s main focus is the characters, their connections, and the stories they weave. That is why massed combat is so difficult to make work within a TTRPG because once you start extrapolating to groups larger than the party, the emotional weight the players have invested in their characters disappears. It just doesn’t work well, and I recommend not doing it, not in the normal sense. 

And believe me, I have TRIED to get them to work in D&D.

A couple of years ago, I ran what my friends and I call the “Grey Campaign.” 

This campaign was focused around the idea of powerful factions vying for control, the leaders of which were all so powerful as to make impossible for the players to oppose directly. There was some sense of good and evil, just as I would argue there is in the real world, BUT these factions all had their interests and corruption that made everything just that much more grey. Each player had some faction that they were part of, owed some kind of allegiance to, or were running from. Rather than being direct agents of change against the factions specifically, I was more focused on trying to find what the party could do together to change things in small ways, to nudge the factions along and change the directions and relative levels of their vast amounts of power, or change the world in the way that they aided a faction, without having leadership of it. 

It made for a really incredible story- we once spent two full sessions with everyone arguing in character over whether or not they should give a trapped pit fiend to a couple of wizards who wanted to use it to create an artificial god (they eventually did, and one of the players who witnessed its birth became this new god’s herald) BUT, it took some getting used to because it disrupted the heroic fantasy feeling, my players often had a sense of frustration because their designs were never fully realized, the factions always had their own way in the world. Interestingly, we all seem to enjoy talking about it more after the fact than we did playing it. There have been multiple conversations recently where the campaign has come up recently where the ideas from it have had an impact in the way we think, both about games and life.  

That is how I feel mass combat works in a regular TTRPG. The idea of it is cool, and the story it can generate is cool, but most of the time players do not enjoy directing abstracted lines of soldiers when they want to be doing the cool thing of individually slinging fireballs as their own character. 

But not in Wrath & Glory.

That’s right, I’m talking about it again. 

W&G has a “mob” mechanic where you can bunch up a lot of weak enemies into  a single blob (they increase their size category on the map) and say now this is a blob of 8 dudes. 

When the players target that mob, every point of success above the mob’s defense means you are targeting another entity, allowing you to kill multiple in one go- because the enemies are so weak it is assumed they die to 1 point of damage. When the mob attacks, each additional number in that mob adds to the number of dice rolled to hit- and because rolling over what you need to hit in W&G allows you to carry some of that value over to damage, you can abstract all of the attacks of however big that mob is into a single roll. 

The power fantasy of being able to destroy massive numbers of weak enemies is fully realized, and the possibility of having these mobs fight each other is easy to implement as well. This system is so lightweight, that one of the feats a character can take is to recruit a retinue, a mob allied to that character that follows them around and can help out in combat. 

I love this system immensely. I think it is really important that characters be able to fight hordes of greeblies to demonstrate their power as they grow, but having to run 10+ weak enemies, even if most of them die to fireball, is hellaciously slow in a system like D&D. 

Additionally, the W&G system accounts for melee / martial class type attacks into a mob really well. Since combat is a bit more abstracted (unless you are using one of the options to empty your weapon’s magazine, an attack roll with a gun is not a single shot, but an abstracted value of the effect of your shot(s). Same with a melee weapon.) the “every success above their defense value hits an additional guy” is easy to imagine and run without having to deal with how many multi-attacks a character in D&D has. 

Now, these systems are balanced for different things. D&D combat is meant to take longer in number of rounds to feel very heroic and deliberate. I would argue W&G is balanced to have combat feel quite fast, happen more often, look more cinematic and be more chaotic and swingy. 

Still, I think if you are like me and like the idea of running mass combat, I think porting over some kind of version of this mechanic to D&D could be feasible. Below is my attempt at starting this work. 

1. Value of to hit roll above the target mob’s AC + (number in mob / 2) = the additional number of targets hit in a more abstracted attack (we would eliminate multi-attacks for all attacks targeting mobs in a turn) This should scale well as characters level up. A success against the AC, but with nothing beating the spillover value, still only targets 1 member of the mob. 
2. Area of effect damage spells would hit a number of the mob equal to the spell’s radius, half that if the target makes a successful save. Unless you as a DM want to have a fireball eliminate the whole group.
3. Mobs targeting players get + the number of entities in the mob added to their to-hit and damage rolls

This is not a perfect port, not yet, because D&D is not designed for this mechanic. But, I think if you want to try it to run larger scale battles, it is a start. If you do try it, let me know your results.