Those are the two ends of the spectrum, I think.

I just don’t feel that D&D’s basic rules are a sound foundation for mass-combat-as-strategy-game.

Okay, perhaps I chose the wrong movies… ;^) But I think you understand the general notion I am attempting to discribe.

Yep, and eventually I’ll write the full series of articles on the history of mass combat rules in tabletop RPGs. I’ve started the research for it, with Mentzer (somewhat mathy, but they hold up surprisingly well 34 years later), ACKS (looking at the D@W free version right now, though I clearly need to upgrade to the big-boy version), etc.

I’m actually not sure: is there remaining disagreement to discuss, or do we pretty much agree that there can and should be one 5e ruleset for mass-combat-as-backdrop (a shorthand explanation for the L5R/Heroes of Battle model) and another for mass-combat-as-strategic-minigame (Mentzer’s War Machine rules, Birthright’s battle card rules, etc.)?

I specifically disagree with your point about Braveheart. Hilariously wrong as their depiction of the Battle of Stirling Bridge is (starting with the absence of a bridge), we DO see William Wallace give orders for the mounted Scots to retreat, circle around, and annihilate the English bowmen. We don’t follow the riders’ perspective, because the movie emphasizes the tension of the Scottish nobility ditching Wallace at the most important moments, but when they do show up, we see them from very much a third-person perspective.

Similarly, at Falkirk, much of the audience’s perspective on the battle is actually King Edward’s, who stays back and orders units to act. The battle isn’t completely from the antagonist perspective, of course, but nor is it entirely focused on Wallace, Angus, &c.

Return of the King, particularly in its Extended Edition, also gives a pretty even balance of individual and wider perspective. We see clashing cavalry charges that aren’t from any one character’s point of view, the Rohirrim and the forces of Gondor gradually losing despite the protagonists achieving most of their apparent objectives, and finally a major arrival of reinforcements – the Dead Men of Dunharrow. There are also a good number of individual actions, but only the slaying of the Witch-King of Angmar seems to make a lasting difference. Everything else is just PJ letting Legolas’s player cause some havoc and mitigate what is otherwise shaping up to be a crushing defeat.

Obviously, none of these battles were played out with dice – Braveheart was marginally constrained by some notion of history, and for all that PJ was willing to change, the outcome of the Battle of Pelennor Fields was not one of them. Because I’d like to be able to tell an ever-wider variety of stories, though – ahem, Birthright always comes to mind – I would like mass combat rules that achieve wargaming-style goals, rather than always using mass combat as a backdrop for PCs to show off individual prowess.

That’s what’s great about this hobby (especially in our age of easy mass publishing) there are thousands of ways to get from A to Z; So you can usually find one that works best for you and your group, and i can find one that works best for me and mine.

For example, we’ve seen a dozen-plus articles detailing various “Domain Management” options for D&D; ranging from fairly simple and abstract, to very complex and detailed.

Mass Combat systems in various RPGs over the decades have run a similar large spectrum.

I’m fine with someone publishing a wargame set with room for heroic action and calling it 5e’s mass combat rules. I don’t care how they get there, but I do think there’s a sufficient subset of players who want to engage with the fantasy of being generals while also playing an action hero that this is worth doing.

To me, the idea that PCs should only play the special-forces combatants achieving objectives in the battle is like saying that movies should only ever be about the people doing the actual hand-to-hand (or whatever) fighting. There are a lot of perspectives in such a battle, all of which can reasonably be protagonists, and I want to see D&D support that.

I think that when you stray too far from “cinematic” and PC-focused mass combat rules and start worrying too much about ranks, formations, maneuver, and other “simulationist” concerns… Well, D&D just isn’t the right engine for that. No matter how many extra rules you layer on, it’s just the wrong foundation.

I think it would be far easier to figure out how to add the D&D PCs as heroic models to a wargaming system, then to add wargame units and tactics to D&D.

‘Dragon Rampant,’ by Osprey, is quick to learn, fairly inexpensive, and it unit creation rules are robust enough to handle just about anything in the Monster Manual.

They allowed the battle to happen largely in the background of the scene, “zooming in” on the individual actions of the hero(es), much like a Hollywood movie.

We don’t see the units wheel and maneuver in ‘Braveheart’ or ‘Return of the King,’ and we really don’t need to. Hollywood gives us a general feel for the flow of the battle, cuts to a hero doing a cool thing, gives us another shot showing how that effected the overall battle, then cuts to a second hero doing another cool thing… until eventually one side wins.

Why not just model everything off of Myth: The Fallen Lords?

As it happens, I am a huge Cornwell fan, most especially of The Warlord Chronicles. His other works are excellent as well, of course. 🙂

Your point about formations more or less spells out why the Romans ditched the phalanx and developed the maniple. Or, to put that more briefly, I couldn’t agree with you more. Simplification can go too far and sacrifice too much of what the user finds useful or interesting.

I’m not yet sure how I think mass combat should work, but this is awfully useful for helping me figure that out. 🙂