Empire Skirmish Combat

Empire Skirmish Combat

One and a half years ago, I wrote a review of a D&D 3.0 rulebook called Empire by AEG. In this review, I wrote the following: "After that, there’s an appendix with optional rules that are mostly concerned with skirmish combat, but I don’t really care for that." But now I do care about that, because I'm really struggling with my semi-abstract GURPS combat system, and I am interested in seeing how others have done it. So, let's take a look at these skirmish rules and see if there is anything useful for my GURPS project.

In this book, the skirmish combat rules are meant to cover smaller battles between what can be resolved using the normal D&D rules and mass combat rules in the same book. That's basically the same thing I'm looking for - the normal GURPS combat rules and GURPS Mass Combat rules got the rest covered. GURPS Mass Combat is a bit controversial in the GURPS community, and even my own opinion of it has changed a lot. I used to think it's a quite poor book, but now believe that it's pretty damn good. This is actually important, because I received a profound piece of feedback with regards to my abstract combat - "Are you sure you want to reinvent mass combat?" It made me realize that my friend is correct, and I really shold narrow down my focus on skirmish combat. GURPS Mass Combat will do the rest, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

The scale is the same as in the normal D&D rules - each square is 5 ft., and each round is 6 seconds long. This is something that makes things easier mechanically in D&D, but something that will not work well in GURPS. Sure, GURPS Zombies has horde action rules that use the same scale as regular GURPS combat, but I want to expand the time scale as well. This is something Empire does not do, because the normal D&D timescale still is somewhat passable.

Anyway, in Empire skirmish combat rules, you have to separate the combatants between "mobs" and individuals. Mobs are composed of identical soldiers, while individuals are PCs and major NPCs. Mobs get a size increase based on their size. A mob contains up to 20 individual troops, which is a good limit, in my opinion. A battle can have several mobs on each side, containing 100+ individual troops, but anything bigger than that is the domain of mass combat. Thus, I might need to introduce a similar limit. As I was told - do not reinvent mass combat. The book also cautions against using mixed troops within a mob, as that would produce inappropriate results, and on this scale it'd be easier to simply treat them as two separate mobs. That's sensible.

Depending on the mob's size, they receive an attack bonus and an AC penalty up to +5 and -5, respectively. Large mobs are more likely to land hits, and are easier to hit. This is yet again sensible, and I tried doing the same in my own ruleset, although I limited the bonus to hit a mob to ranged combat. What I find amusing is that this penalty/bonus table is almost exactly the same as the Rapid Fire Bonus table from GURPS.

Mobs have certain limitations in actions. For example, when fighting another mob, a mob cannot disarm, grapple, etc. On one hand, I think this is sensible to avoid "partially affected" mobs where 8 soldiers are grappled and the rest are not. On the other hand, why can't a mob of 10 orcs grapple a mob of 5 goblins?

Mobs attack the same way individual characters do, but that attack bonus from the mob size is applied as a bonus to the natural die roll result. In other words, it affects critical hit threats. For each 5 points by which a mob surpasses the target's AC, the mob scores one additional hit. Essentially, this is the same as Recoil in GURPS or Speed Factor that I made up for my rules. When damage is allocated, wounded fighters are assigned damage first, and they are considered dying once they reach 0 HP. Thus, this is basically an attack against the HP pool of the mob.

Mobs can be split into submobs for the purpose of attacking. For example, a mob of 10 orcs that threatens a mob of 4 goblins, and two PCs, can split into a mob of 2 orcs attacking one PC, 3 orcs attacking the other PC, and 5 orcs attacking the goblins. However, when the mob is attacked, it is treated as a single whole - do not split it into submobs. This is something I was trying to implement in my rules, but failed to word properly.

Individuals use the regular combat rules, but when they attack a mob, the damage dealt does not carry over from one mob member from the other, unless the individual has Cleave and similar stuff. Also, individuals can walk through mobs to a certain degree. When it comes to area effects, damaging ones deal damage based on the percentage of coverage, and a single save is made for the entire mob. As for the other effects, it's a bit vague. It says that at least half of the mob must be affected, or the mob as a whole does not get affected. But if a half or more is affected, does only the half gets affected or the whole mob (if that makes any sense)? Not sure.

Mobs have a pool of attacks of opportunity equal to the number of mob members. They can spend as many as they want when an action triggers such an attack. Mobs also get some new actions, such as mass bull rush, or overwhelm. The latter is something like a mob version of grappling. Nice.

Finally, there are simple morale rules that are more or less enough for this scale of combat.

Overall, the rules are quite nice, but it seems that special abilities and spells should've been given a bit more thought when it comes to mobs. There are some interesting aspects that I might borrow for my ruleset, but the main problem here is that the regular rules are scaled up in size, but not in time - and scaling time is one of the main requirements for GURPS.