Pen and Paper Wargaming: Battle Resolution
My Hellfire campaign to build a kingdom from the tattered scraps on the edge of a falling empire has been going well, but it’s not much of a miniature wargame. It’s strictly been a pen and paper endeavor with elements of solo, and logistic, and strategic gaming. Early battles were decided by a LLM too stupid to trust for long, which left your ‘umble host with a conundrum: how to play out battles in a reasonable timeframe with reasonable chances for wild success and failure?
Friend of the blog and sometime Orcish warlord, Caleb Hines, rides to my rescue with a link to Bob Cordery’s blog. (Naturally, it would be Bob.) Bob dredges up from the distant past an article originally published in something called The Nugget (1991) that details a quick and dirty resolution method that borrows from Risk, adds some detail, and makes it perfect for resolving battles the likes of which Hellfire and the Fall of Empire? generates. Ideally, you’d be playing these battles out on the tabletop using the OG Hellfire rules, but if you don’t have the figs and you’re more interesting in the campaigning than the fighting – I put on my King hat not my General hat for these – SCRUD works a treat.
Bob reports:
SCRUD (Simple Combat Resolution Using Dice) was devised by Tim Price:
The mechanism works as follows:
- Roll 1D6 for each unit (both friendly and enemy) taking part in the combat
- The resulting dice for each side are lined up opposite each other, highest first. (If one side has more dice than the other, any dice that are extra, and score less than the lowest dice of the side with the fewer dice, are ignored)
- Compare the paired off dice
- The higher dice beats the lower dice (Equal scores are ignored)
- Each dice defeated represents a push-back in large combats, or a death in smaller combats. Three such defeats eliminate one of the opponent’s units
Bob’s got a full workup on his blog, along with a similar alternative called EDNA, that were just want the doctor ordered for my campaign. With these tools, we can count our coup, trade our prisoners, and be back to the O-Club in time for tea – the way proper gentlemen wargamers should.