Chainmail in my OD&D

This is a companion blog post to Episode 55 of the Dungeon Masters Handbook, which talks how Chainmail expects you to adapt it for the game you want to run.

This post goes into details that seem more appropriate for written word rather than talking through them in the podcast. It'll also have links to the source materials that I've referred to over the years.

Ever since rediscovering AD&D/Holmes, and then OD&D in 2009, I've wanted to have a game where I could easily run a mass combat of dozens or hundreds of opponents and have the PCs involved - whether leading the troops, or surviving a bloody combat, or however the PCs had stumbled into the fray. 

That search started with Chainmail, took me through adopting Dan Collin/Delta's Book of War, becoming involved with Ral Partha Legacy's Chaos Wars, playing HOTT (Hordes of the Things), grafting magic and fantasy on top of Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames and now, in that big circle, back to Chainmail. 

Along the way, I found two main resources for helping me to meld Chainmail into my OD&D:

Compleat Chainmail - a discussion document/rules set of how to use Chainmail combat within an OD&D game. This was my main source of inspiration for modifying Chainmail for use within OD&D.

Grognard - a “retroclone” of Chainmail, organizing the rules into a more coherent and modern layout. Effective for deciphering what a phrase or rule might be. 

Since then, I've discovered a fantastic podcast of someone who's also actively using Chainmail in their OD&D. That would be Daniel Norton of the Bandit's Keep podcast/YouTube channel. I believe there are more podcasters also playing Chainmail in their OD&D games, but I'm not as familiar with them as I am with Daniel's content.

So if you're starting out on a similar journey, there's a lot of material available for you to mine from!

My method for using Chainmail in OD&D has been to use the mass combat tables/approach for one-vs-one, one-vs-many, many-vs-many. I experimented with a simple table based on Book of War's "At Hit" values and the foot types. It looked something like this:

The basic mechanic is to throw one die per "Fighting capability" (FC aka HD) of the attacker. If the attacker is a "unit", then it's one die per HD/FC x number of troops in the unit.

The target "to hit" is based on the armor class of the defender. (the middle table). For ease, I grouped them into defending types (LF, HF, AF).  So if the defender is wearing chain, you need a 5+ to hit.

The rightmost table is what bonuses the attacker might get, based on their type and what AC they're attacking. For this determination, I use the approach from "Compleat Chainmail" to rate attackers. 

So let's say Aeli is a skilled fighter, wearing chain and armed with a longsword. I'll rate her as HF attacking. Anyone attacking her needs a 5+ to hit. She's level 5, so she will get to throw 5 dice when she attacks. She can take 5 hits. If she's knocked to 0, she has to make a Saving Throw vs. Death to merely be injured/unconscious instead of dead-dead. 

Now this worked very well for all the types of combat. It went fast and furious and allowed me to have quite a mix of combats. 

"But Chgowiz... how is this Chainmail? Where is the type vs type with all the crazy dice combos (such as light foot needing six hits to score one hit on heavy horse)? Where's the man-to-man and fantasy combat?!"

Well, you're right, but as I mentioned before, this was my first stab at using Chainmail. I wanted to have something simple for the game with my wife. I enjoyed it well enough that I continue to use it for that campaign. 

Also, at least for my wife's game, I was less interested in the crunch as much as I was in the outcome. The focus of our duet game is much more narrative than the fiddly bits, which is why the abstract nature of this approach works very well.  

So... having developed this first iteration of an adapted Chainmail, we get to my Rescue of Hommlet game. I wanted to run an OD&D/Chainmail battle at the infamous Moathouse from the module T1 - Village of Hommlet. 

The inspiration for this was Paul Stormberg's "Battle of Moathouse" that he ran first in 2006 for Gary Gygax and other TSR notables, and has continued to run at GaryCons since. I really enjoyed the game. 

So I began my modeling/rules project and you can read all about that here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The game, as it currently stands, is more about Chainmail with some OD&D tacked on to handle magic and other situations where the RPG provides a framework to resolve things. 

As compared to how I run combat in my wife's OD&D game, I ended up far closer to Chainmail mass-combat as originally written. 

Melee combat - I started off trying to use the same approach (simple At-Hit values with bonuses for attacking as Heavy/Armored vs "lesser" defending types) as for my personal OD&D games, but I found myself having to deal with defending types of Heavy Horse, in the form of four ghouls from the caverns of the Moathouse. Rather than try to accommodate that with bonuses/penalties I decided to go with the mass-combat tables for all melees. 

It's worked out fairly well! Characters are throwing lots of dice - the units of ten bugbears and ten zombies are throwing TWENTY dice (HD/FC of 2 x 10 creatures in the unit). I see that as a feature, versus a bug. Most of the multiple HD/FC creatures end up being individual figures, so this isn't too bad. 

It also allows for 1 person vs. ten-soldier unit figures, which gets exciting, but also bears out the math that going solo can be dangerous, unless you have magical armor and/or weaponry.

Missile fire - So when I went to write this small paragraph and re-read the rules, something dawned on me. I'd had this figured out wrong!

In my previous games of the Rescue scenario, missile fire has been way too deadly. I've struggled with that, but now I think I grok why - I've been trying to mash together individual missile fire and unit missile fire in the same manner I do it with mass combat - relying on the total FC of the figure.

Except the missile results chart doesn't work that way. It's written assuming a 10:1 or 20:1 scale vs. a like number - so that the number of hits reflects that too. 

I was taking the FC of a unit's individual person and multiplying it by 10 (because I throw 10 dice for a troop unit), and throwing that number. So a crossbow unit of 10 figures of normal soldiers (1 FC x 10), I was using the FC 9-10 row. WRONG. 

I'm further backed up by this by looking at the Individual Missile fire table. A normal individual firing a short bow at someone with light armor will only score a hit about 50% of the time. Similar to results from the mass combat table. Only the more advanced individuals (representing more figures) can score hits on armored targets.

So, back to the editing table where I'll have to update my rules. I'm not quite sure what to do if a unit is firing at a single individual. It could get messy! I'm also considering that for missile fire, an individual figuring firing at a troop unit can only score 1 hit per shot. 

Morale - I've opted to go with "heavy losses" checks. It's effective and has certainly swung the balance of the game in interesting directions!

Something I am considering is how to simplify the "post melee morale" check. Right now, it's just too much math for my taste and how I like to run games. 

What does the post check do? It replicates something that a lot of wargames do based on combat results - recoil, retreat, rout or keep slugging it out. DBA and HOTT especially use this approach. Two forces collide, and one steps back because they couldn't handle the shock of the contact. I haven't cracked this one yet, but I do think about it. 

I hope you've enjoyed this look into the nuts and bolts of how I use Chainmail and OD&D. It's still a work in progress and as I listen to others with their experiences, I learn a lot!