Roleplaying Mass Battles/Wars?

[New Cult King]

Howza,

I'm looking for some kind of system dedicated to roleplaying as a general or king of some sort, in order to command epic armies in the conquest of surrounding territories.

Now I know some systems have rules for massed battles, but I'm effectively looking for the roleplaying pen and paper equivalent of the Total War PC games.

Does such a thing exist?

[Badbones777]

None that I can think of off the top of my head-the sheer scope of such an undertaking tends to mean that when it is addressed
as part of an RPG ruleset it tends to be abstracted and resolved with tables rather than anything particularly in depth. Part of the problem of
course is that in a battle even a fantasy-genre hero would be vulnerable to being arbitrarily killed in a swirling melee/cavalry charge/stray arrow
etc. Being on the receiving end of this is obviously not fun as a player if a character you have invested in is snuffed out just like that.

If there is no (or little) character input/danger then the table roll (modified by any traits etc that the PC's have, and a description of the broad tactics they will employ vs
the battleplan you as GM know the NPC forces will use) might be perfectly acceptable. If you have access to any epic scale wargame sets (and have the time!) then using
that might also be a way to go. The only other thing I could think of is if you can pick up from somewhere a copy of the Armies of Death Fighting Fantasy Gamebook (I forget
which number it was, but I want to say 20 for some reason). As I recall there was a section towards the end of that where instead of the usual final fight against the big baddie
you had to choose which troop types to send against whatever enemy unit the book threw at you with some match-ups proving disastrous-maybe some adapted version
of something like that could work?

Such a thing is very difficult to do in a pen and paper RPG without sacrificing depth or else being so complicated and time consuming you might as well have played a table top
wargame in the first place! Good luck though, I'm sure you'll think of something!