# Domains at War: RPG Mass Combat as a Wargame



## Tav_Behemoth (Apr 29, 2013)

Domains at War was featured in the EN World news a while back - Folks: Attaching a Wargame to your RPG? Alex Macris is doing just that. - and now it's been successfully crowdfunded, with 19 days left to go in its Kickstarter campaign. 

The goal of Domains at War is to extrapolate d20 combat from the 1:1 roleplaying scale to create a fast-playing wargame that's fun to play in itself, and can also serve as the mass combat system for any RPG that shares concepts like hit points and armor class.

One of the great things about this approach is that you can zoom in and out between the actions of individual heroes and monsters and the larger conflict they're involved in. Depending on how much you want the game to focus on any given situation, you can play it out at the table through roleplaying, an abstract resolution system, or a detailed tactical wargame. Each are based on the same set of rules, so they're familiar to players and give the same range of outcomes.

At Gary Con I ran two games using Domains at War, _Scouts of Zidium_ and _Battle of Zidium_. In _Scouts_, the players went behind enemy lines to capture and interrogate a warlock who could give them information about the capabilities of the forces they'd face in _Battles_. We role-played this out using the Adventurer Conqueror King System, but if the group had wanted we could have used the system in _Domains at War: Campaigns_  to abstract this process of gathering intelligence (and hiding your own movements from the enemy's scouts) into a few dice rolls. Likewise, the _Campaigns_ rules for maintaining line of supply to armies on the march provides lots of opportunities for roleplaying or mass combat: the party could go on a mission to ambush the enemy wagons or convince a city to stop selling food to the enemy army, or they could just send a unit of troops to cut the supply line or besiege the offending city.

When we played the battle with _Domains at War: Battles_, the information about enemy spellcasters and commanders gained from the captive was decisive. As a wargame, it places a lot of emphasis on the role of individual commanders. When used as part of a RPG campaign, this means that the entire party is engaged; they're working together to coordinate the units they lead in a unified strategy, while also taking advantage of individual initiative. In the Gary Con game, the ultimate fate of the battle was decided by a duel between a barbarian archer and the Auran general, which we played out at the roleplaying scale. (Because we were using the epic battle rules, four RPG rounds passed for each mass combat round). When the general finally failed a saving throw against the barbarian's poisoned arrows, it was extremely satisfying to then zoom out to see how the loss of his morale benefits caused the units under his command to waver or rout. I've played with a number of other d20 mass combat systems, but none felt so seamlessly integrated between the individual focus of a RPG and the strategic command decisions of a wargame.

_Campaigns_ and _Battles_ are complete and playtested, and available for Kickstarter backers to start playing with right away (check the first update for links). The next stretch goal will combine both Campaigns and Battles into a single hardcover for folks who want it on their shelf in the same format as ACKS and the Player's Companion.


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