"Anyone ever use Dungeons and Dragons as wargame engine?" Topic

I mean the basic all-powerful Dungeon Master as scenario builder and ref, in military parlance Red Team, modified d20 rules and history books in lieu of handbooks and guides, and the miniatures basically as a tool to illustrate the action?

This seems like it would solve many of the problems inherent in the wargame model today.

Crossposted to ancients specifically because it seems like they would be the ones to have tried this!

Sort of full circle really as D&D evolved from a set of wargames rules in the first place.
Do some people still dust off and play Chainmail?

1976
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1985
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I still play 2nd Ed. AD&D's BattleSystem (mass battles) game, published in 1990? If you remove the magic from the game, it will work as a 'historical' set of rules for ancient armies, up to medieval, or even renaissance, as it includes rules for basic/early black powder weapons, including canons. The rules also include siege engines, castle defenses, tunneling, etc. The aerial combat rules could even be adapted to steampunk, if desired. Officially, the rules state a 10:1 men to figures ratio. However, with larger creatures (Giants, dragons, etc.), it is a 1:1 ratio for figures to creatures. It works well enough, in fantasy games.

They also published a set of skirmish rules, BattleSystem Skirmish. BS Skirmish has a thin veneer of role playing on top, but it is a wargame, first, and foremost. Again, take out the magic, and it could be used for a 'historical' skirmish game. For these rules, one figure represents one individual man/creature.

Copies of these rules seem to pop up on e-Bay, and Amazon, almost regularly. They were offered as PDF's a number of years ago, but currently, their official web site is not offering them for sale. I hope they offer them up in the future, as they are both fun games. Cheers!

There is an obvious progression from TSR's rule sets over the years: Chainmail, 1972, d6 only; Swords & Spells, 1976, not sure about dice used; 1st Ed. BattleSystem, 1985, using all polyhedral dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and possibly d20); 2nd Ed. BattleSystem, 1990, using all polyhedral dice. The rules sets became more streamlined, and simplified, with each new iteration. I have copies of all of them, except 1st Ed. BS. I've only played 2nd Ed. BS, but I've read through the first two rules sets. The amount of bookkeeping declined with each edition, with 2nd Ed. BS being the simplest in record keeping.

2nd Ed. BS is a bucket-o-dice game, requiring rolling one die for each figure attacking. It also employs armor checks for each hit scored, to determine if it penetrates the defender's armor. It is, however, a game with broad depth of what types of forces can be played: many types of ground troops; varied types of cavalry; siege engines; war machines of different types: war wagons, chariots, or anything you can dream up, including steam cannons, as well as black powder cannons; aerial troops of varying types, maneuverability, and combat abilities. It really is a complex, but playable game, with incredible variety of troop types, weaponry, etc. Cheers!

I got my initial start into war gaming through Cavilers and Roundheads (TSR – Gygax) and Heritages Knights and Magic (I had started playing Alexander the Great (AH – Gygax as a co-designer) – D&D and AD&D led me more to the campaign aspect of war gaming.

Interestingly Knights and Magic is back in print

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The Penn State Wargames club back in the late 70s had a lot of D&D players and a lot of WRG ancients gamers and it was inevitable that the two would merge to a degree. So we had D&D campaigns which had some massive battles using the ancients armies. WRG actually handled magic and monsters very well.

I have played a Monster Mash game at GenCon twice, which was a 36-figure free-for-all that used 4th edition D&D as its base engine. Obviously more of a single-figure skirmish, but the base concepts would likely be translatable up to larger battles, esp with a referee.

This is the game that I started with: link

No, far too pathetic a rules set for me. I HAVE used The Fantasy Trip for Fantasy (and GURPS) and Twilight 2000 for modern/scifi however.

Not D&D directly, but a heavily modified D20 system mishmash from several versions.

Basically applying the things that are normally for characters to make units. Classes were about different types of units. In unit characters were treated as feats as were special things like battle honors and the like. Races modified to work better for the units specifically.

Only real issue was handling heroes and similar special things, but setting them up along the line of the NPC classes worked well enough for the heroes. Monsters and the like were the hard part and where it started having issues.

I hopefully still have the files for it around from when I was working on it, I'd stopped when the people I was playing with at the time ended up transferred and others left for other reasons.

Once. Group played a huge siege game using D&D rules. Back in the early 80s when we could roleplay for days on end with nothing else to worry about. I think it took a whole weekend – and I mean the entire weekend.

Got my start with ancients/medievals with Chainmail. That was 71/72. We played with the old Wasatch Wargamers down to Salt Lake City at John McEwan's house. He'st he fellow who wrote "Starguard" and "Orilla", and produced a whole slew of minis for it.

Anyway, this was before Gygax produced a short 2-4 page addendum to Chainmail so that guys could play Arthurian games with Merlin, fight dragons with St.George,etc. That's the first little twinkle of what would become D&D.

I still like Chainmail. Good set of rules.

I've played Battlesystem back in the day. However I really like the old D&D Miniatures games and Star Wars. They are a blast to play because they are pretty simple: attack bonus + d20 must be greater than the defense/armor class. Damage is in hit points and a model with 0 hit points is defeated. It doesn't get any simpler than that. The rules are all over the internet too since Wizards/TSR isn't supporting them anymore.

4th edition D&D was essentially a skirmish scale miniatures game.

Golly, I use Chainmail for medieval/renaissance.

Really interesting replies, thanks! I'll have to track some of these rules down and check them out. It seems like most of you had positive experiences with them. From a gaming perspective, I think that the dungeon master and PC model would be really interesting in the context of horse and musket games, where each PC would be an individual officer, who'd have to deal with real problems, such as riding his horse around the battlefield, dealing with traffic jams on small roads, and not actually knowing where the enemies troops are located. This would also allow a human to step in to the action in the person of the DM to make sure that time and causality plays out in a logical manner. This would basically be a fun, streamlined version of kriegspiel. The use of minis would be more demonstrative than anything else. This would allow games to take place over multiple days and battlefields quickly. It's interesting that most wargames have gone to a purely oppositional model like chess as opposed to a collaborative one like D&D. Both could clearly work.

As above, I have played Wargames using the original Chainmail. I also had some very satisfactory military type encounters using normal D&D, but they are really a fairly lousy set of rules in all sorts of senses.

I run many, many historical games in an RPG format though, generally player team vs player umpires. Works extremely well for attacker defender situations, especially post 1900 as it makes hidden movement so easy to do and you can do realistic planning without written orders. "State your intentions gentlemen".

I thoroughly recommend it as an approach, although obviously it doesn't work for competitive tourney type situations.

I suspect the initial post was a bit misleading. Isn't the issue really about using the 'GM versus players' format, with limited intelligence for what amounts to a committee of players-as-officers/leaders/heroes?

I'd suggest the Vietnam rules 'Charlie Company' or my own Sudan game, 'Science versus Pluck'. Both use that format.

Neither one is much like D&D in terms of game mechanics, but many RPGs aren't, either. D&D is a brilliant concept, but its rules system is rooted in 1970s over-fussiness.

I hope its not totally misleading 😀

D&D is an easy to explain "thing" tho and the fun level is usually pretty high. Actually I had in mind that very same 70s era DM Handbook, which would list things like the time to build bridges, to feed a battalion, the weight of caissons v. Wooden bridges, etc. My vision is s game where you role play an officer minus the paperwork.

That's my point :)

You are looking at the format, with the players having the sort of information a real officer would, but not knowing *everything* about the situation in front of him.

If you don't mind my shilling for my own game, you can get a PDF of 'Science versus Pluck' on sale for a massive $3.74 USD this week ---

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I tried to years ago as a base for ancient/medieval rules. The "superstructure" soon outran the "base" and I had to change it. The basic format in my mind had a limited growth potential.

As above, Mexican Jacks most excellent 'Science vs Pluck' is the game you are looking for.