Oh that, so she’s been planning this war thing for a while now, it’s been the endgame of our current campaign for about 6 years now. I will point out that, as of the war starting, she’s actually using two systems.

We have the usual actual D&D battle if the player party actually enters into proper combat, which is largely meant for when we actively move to encounter special units ourselves, which we will be doing next week as we move to try and take out the Countess who heads up the upper markets where slaves are sold.

But most of it thus far as been an overworld strategy game style of battle she worked up for it, where we have units who’s HP signifies the number of members in that unit (Barring special units such as our party being one unit, a slime rancher we recruited, the Pirate Queen’s crew, etc), and each unit has a set damage number, a set bonus to attack, an AC and a Morale stat, like so-

Moon Warriors-Infantry HP-8 Attack +5 Damage 1 Morale +3 AC 14 Range 1

Slime Rancher-Special HP-10 Attack +7 Damage 1 Morale +2 AC 14 Range 2

Overworld battle is simply attacks of one unit on another, you choose to attack a square in range. For normal units, your damage goes to the least damaged, non special unit in the square (Ala infantry battles), and special units can choose specific targets to press a weakness or go after enemy commander units. If a unit drops below half health, they have to make a morale save or spend the current turn fleeing.

As an example, my party popped up in the middle of the city with our slime rancher and two platoons of Moon Warriors. This means our square had four units. A neighboring square had two Drow units, so our moon warriors attack there and their damage, if they hit, applies to the unit with the least damage, but either the party or the slime rancher can target a specific enemy unit to try and wipe it out with our better range or damage (The party has 3 damage in overworld). This means the infantry battles are more streamlined and the special units can more specifically target weakened units to lessen the number of attacks against our side.

Lastly, at the start of each day is the Tide of Battle roll to determine which side resolves their actions first during the day, with two actions per day (Actions currently are Unit Movement and Unit Attack, other things may become available as things progress)

Yeah, why?

So we’re at the start of a war where, thanks to saving a GOO Warlock and getting help from her connections, we’re coming up from the sewers closer to the middle of town while allies attack from opposite sides of the Drow capital.

While our 160 soldiers went off to secure the borders of the market district as our safe house/staging point, my party (5 level 12 characters, a Half Orc Berserker Barbarian, an Eladrin Celestial Warlock, a part panther Halfling Scout Rogue, a Kobold Rune Knight Fighter, and a Half Goblin/Half Yuan Ti Glamour Bard) stayed behing to go through the 50 CR1/4 Drow warriors in the area we’re in as the war is kicking off.

Yes, I know they’re they’re only CR1/4, but because their HP was just high enough, this actually did end up being more efficient as I was trying to conserve resources as it may be a bit before we can short rest.

As it stands, my Eldritch Blast is 1d10+4 per dart, and these guys had 13 HP, so any given dart on it’s own had a high chance to not secure a kill if I was going one dart per enemy.

With Green-flame Blade, my initial attack would be 1d6+4+2d8 and the rider would be 2d8+8 (since Radiant Soul can add my CHA to fire damage spells when cast, I could have added it to either but kept it to the rider). This just ended up being a more consistent damage in the amount I needed, and the total max is about the same, just split between two targets

I honestly didn’t even stop to think it was magic. My Autumn side just made a donation of 2 plat to the church (Of the Gnomish kindly trickster god, who teaches and takes. Temple was more like a comfy little home with a fireplace), made a prayer and the old lady minding the place from her rocking chair gave me a flute

So…Just have curses be permanent? Why?

It’s a thing about Law, specifically the realm of Law, Mechanus, who’s power I would guess they carry with them.

One of the (I think optional in 5e) realm rules for Mechanus is you do not make attack rolls. Instead, you treat any roll as a 10 and add your stat and proficiency as the realm removes the idea of random chance and focuses on clockwork regularity. Even damage die default to their average, which makes combat a lot more straight forward but also means you can come up on something you literally cannot hurt.

There’s a handy common level magic item in Xanathar’s Guide, called the Clockwork Amulet, which let’s you skip an attack roll and just take it as a ten, and do so once per day (No attunement, resets at sunrise). It’s a good thing in certain situations

He rose to godhood a century ago using six magical crystal gems, and in doing so both felled an Orc god and an evil Orc champion, the foul Ho’Gann

I remember a point where Magneto trapped Red Skull in a metal bunker underground with just bare minimum supplies then sealed the place

It wasn’t a dungeon, it was a harbor city we were literally just using as a point to teleport to in order to cut a week+ off our travel time. And it’s kind of thrown some wrenches into our long term issues.

As it stands it lead to a Navy Captain and her plattoon coming to see us while we were getting horses near the city gates.

That lead to him revealing to her, in a private talk, that his church has some demonic infiltrators of some sort, which will cause issues with the shade we’ve been having them throw on the Human Queen as she is controlled by the Yellow Diamond (Yes, that one), but as he did not mention that latter bit to the captain for some reason, she just has partial information, meaning she can give this to the queen as cassus belli to have her millitia march on the neutral City of Temples without knowledge that her own monarch is compromised.

If he had just not suddenly added Sir to his name, or doubled down, the worst we’d have is maybe some monster hunters coming for me thinking I’m a hag, which isn’t that bad honestly, but our current plan is less than a week from our big plan to stage an assault on a Drow capital to free them from the demon worshiping leadership, we just got this information that there may be some level of issue among the Paladin’s church, and now we have another timer until the Captain decides to pass this information along and we have the Human Empire marching on the City of Temples.

And the Paladin probably would have been fine if he’d doubled down and stuck with the “Sir”, but backing down to erase it when questioned is going to raise suspicion and make it more obvious he’s lying. With the guard getting a lucky 17 on insight roll from that, it just went downhill

From our campaign sheet, the Church of Macho Madness is Chaotic Good, Light Domain