Every time I read that...I see "War Pigs" (whereupon the Black Sabbath song starts in my head) and I have to re-read it.

re: WaRPGs:

To an extent I feel that this is kind of what D&D is designed to cover, only on a unit to unit level. Especially 4th Ed.

I guess the way to handle a full on WaRPG would be for everyone to play a commander of a unit, and then for the GM/ST to effectively mount several units vs. the PC units for full on war scenarios.

The difficulty in setting up a game like that, though, would be that it would have a high bar for entry, cost wise, and time wise. Either the ST would need to have the miniatures to let the players play with them, or the players would need to buy them. There's a lot of painting there too. So rather than just the associated book, you'd need the book + miniatures to play, + setting pieces. All pretty pricey, unless you already happen to have the minatures. Targeted for 5 players + 1 GM, that's 12 units worth of minatures, plus enough scenery to cover differing terrain in the storyline, plus the book.

And I'd point out that there's a game that's kind of already designed to handle this, that being WarMachine. Seriously, they even have like a full RPG to boot. You could run a mixed chronicle that incorporated the WarMachine miniatures war game, and the WarMachine RPG. Since there's only one (admittedly expensive) book, you only need one. There is also a Warhammer RPG, which I think has more books. The trick is finding enough people with sufficient collections of the right game-- I've noted that of my friends who do miniatures, most of them have different favorite games they collect from.

Narratively, you'd also have the issue of how to handle character death. Obviously unit commanders are important tactical targets in most war games. They tend to die-- in fact, in Warmachine you only win a conflict when all unit commanders are cleared from the field. So you'd need a narrative tool to explain that away to have a continueing storyline.

In Medieval battles, the commanders were frequently in armor so thick it was more or less impossible for them to die accidentally (stray arrow, etc.), and they were usually captured and ransomed back to their countries, rather than killed (unless, you know, they'd really pissed someone off). This premise could easily be adapted to War Machine or any other battle sim game to keep the PC's from dying just because they lost a battle.

Or you could just do the Shadowrun thing and kill 'em off every time they lose. For some reason, Shadowrun was still fun, despite the nigh-Cthulhu-like mortality rate for PC's.

Hi, only recently noticed this post. Thanks for the kind words!

The comments on this post have been really interesting and they've explored different options. The parallels to D&D 4th edition are there indeed, as the game's combat system is pretty much a miniature game in its own right.

The old versions of Warhammer and WHFRP were pretty compatible, and the boardgame/"RPG-lite" Warhammer Quest was actually pretty close too (how did I forget that one?). Maybe a system that could easily be used in both roleplaying and wargaming would fit the bill. That way you could both play an RPG and occasionally factor in a bigger fight scene without too much hassle. Again, D&D 4th ed springs to mind, but I don't really care for the way the fighting rules differ so vastly from the roleplaying aspect of the game. D&D4 is pretty much a tactical combat system with the addition of character development :D

Mikko / Dawn of the Lead