Best of the Web - Barfights, Flashpoints, & Shoots & Ladders

Land of Nod has a post called Bar Fights Updated.  This post is a work of beauty. It's a series of tables that model a saloon fight and reading through it I'm gobsmacked. The different results are right out of the movies, and tv westerns. It really gives a feel for a bar brawl with innocent bystanders, being thrown out windows or dragged across the bar. This is great stuff and adds chaos to larger combats. This is what a mass combat should be (from the character level, possibly combined with the Camlan Battle info in Pendragon). Even large battles could be this way. Brilliant.

He didn't link directly to his original so I dug it up myself. The Bar Fight Matrix - A Way to Handle Fantasy Slugfests. This one is fantasy oriented which isn't as dominated with bar scenes so it's less evocative but still brilliant.

Somewhat related is a post by James Young at Ten Foot Polemic called Flashpoints - PCs in Mass Combat which suggests giving goals instead of just kill the enemy. He has a lot more but thats the part that really interests me. He has a handful of suggestions for actual Flashpoints in the battle but it makes more cry out for more. At some point I'll have to compile a list of some kind because I really like this idea.

While reading over the last post I noticed an interesting post in the Ten Foot Polemic history called FLEE!! Snakes & Ladders chase mechanics. I don't really know what I feel about this one. It is probably the best chase mechanic I've seen, but it means another mini-game. I really like this but have to divorce it from the Snakes & Ladders board so that it runs more like the other systems in the games I use. Say have armor weight act as a difficulty level as well as control speed. Then the slowest member of the group has to make a DEX test against that difficulty level to determine who is catching who, maybe some kind of table at each turn and a fumble table.