I’ve just done a pretty big update to the Rules You Can Use page with a variety of revised rules for Pathfinder 1e (but easily adaptable to other adjacent D&D-ish rulesets). In this case, check out:
Geek Related Mass Combat Rules (6 page pdf)
I originally published them as a janky blog post but since we’ve been using them for years now (like… 15!) I put together a more polished version.
Mass combat? Oh, boo! you say? Well, I get it. Most mass combat rules are not great. Usually they’re not synergestic with the PCs and their abilities. The official Pathfinder Mass Combat ruleset originates with Kingmaker, and while it’s fine, it’s a minigame abstracted almost completely away from adventuring. The same goes for more thoughtful approaches like this one on Erin Palette’s blog and the one it links to by Sarah Wilson. Which is fine for its use case, but in my experience the problem that comes up much more frequently is small unit combat, when the PCs have gathered groups of people that are just big enough to be unwieldy but not large enough that “just have the PCs make some kind of Command” checks is remotely appropriate.
This came up very early in our Reavers pirate campaign. The PCs started to gather a crew on their pirate ship. A crew composed of clumps of similar folks – a couple fistfuls of War3s from when they took out an opposing ship in one adventure, a bunch of Fighter 2/Thief 1’s from another… And they are not faceless hordes; the PCs know each one’s name. But now how to run a combat with 4 PCs and 30+ pirates against some other ship or force that has some named commanders but also “30 sailors (see NPC Codex)” or similar? You either spend an hour between PC actions rolling infinite dice or “just abstract it out.” And just abstracting it out doesn’t respect PC investments in their own abilities or their NPCs’. If they buy all their pirates a masterwork weapon – should that not affect outcomes in a way they would expect? Should you “just have the PCs fight the bosses and let the mooks slug it out?” Well, one of the joys of being a PC is not always fighting “level appropriate” foes (You are level 60! Now the map is full of demon boars! That’s World of Warcraft shit.) – it’s fun to mow down mooks.
Another challenge is that the level system is a little wonky in that it makes, say, 20 L3 pirates basically no threat in any way to a L7 character. It turns into rolling 20d20 (or 8d20 if it’s melee and they can surround the PC) and hoping for 20s, and then doing a little damage. Therefore you want to be able to put those mooks into wads, to use a concept and terminology from the Feng Shui RPG, and make them some kind of a credible threat when massed. In my rules, when you make a unit, it gets +1/2 to attack and +1 to damage for every unit member, so for example 10 pirates that would normally have “cutlass +3, 1d6+3 damage” as a unit have one attack that is “cutlass +8, 1d6+13 damage.” Not overwhelming, but suddenly not nothing for a PC a couple levels above them.
Paizo did come out with troop rules (a solid 8 years after mine, ahem) that somewhat addresses this – turns a group of NPCs into something like a swarm – but has the fatal flaw of being only for crowds of faceless unknowns, not a group of people you know, and depend on special abilities that have nothing to do with actual individual level class special abilities, feats, etc.
Hence these mass combat rules. You can form like groups of NPCs into units, they get boosted attack/damage as a unit, have a combined pool of hit points broken into single-individual chunks, but otherwise use their normal Pathfinder 1e rules. If the members of the unit have Point Blank Shot and masterwork crossbows, then guess what, the unit has Point Blank Shot and has masterwork crossbows, easy peasy. And they attack and are attacked by PCs, NPCs, monsters, and other units normally using all the customary Pathfinder rules. As they take damage, a member of the unit goes down for each chunk of hit point damage they take. For example, 10 pirates with 22 hp each – the unit has 220 hp but someone falls for each 22 it is damaged. A PC that does 40-ish points of damage with a full attack routine can chew through a couple members of an opposing unit a round.
And as members of the troop start to fall, you can easily figure out who it is with a quick e.g. d10 roll. “Oh no, Billy Breadbasket went down! He’s our cook!”
The result – exciting, personal larger group combats that don’t bog down and the PCs feel an integral part of. Tactical enough that you get the feel of battlefield command without dragging you into an external minigame.
A core design tenet that people don’t seem to understand is that minigames that are sufficiently divorced from the PCs and their primary governing ruleset harm character immersion. I was forced to make these rules because I have never come across anything that maintains the identity of participants and supports the core ruleset that they normally operate under.
So give them a try, I hope you like them! I’d love to hear feedback – these do rely on frequent rulings to operate in the thick sludge of PF rules, and I generally trust DMs to set things up well so I don’t have guidance on e.g. “only make units of a size equal to the PCs’ level plus something” or the like. And I could see some of the more detailed factors in some of the other mass combat rulesets being usefully ported over (Morale, most specifically, I haven’t found a morale system I’m totally happy with yet.)