WARCOM
WARCOM, originally written by David Eubanks, is a DOS-based application
which helps play out mass-combat situations with a slight nod to
Rolemaster's War Law
system. I say "slight nod" because the WARCOM app takes much of
the abstraction of groups and armies that War Law works so hard at, and makes
that work unnecessary. This is because WARCOM does a very good job
of taking groups of like combatants as input and faithfully applying an
excellent approximation of Arms Law-based
combat resolution (e.g., open-ended attack rolls, hit points and critical results). A battle with
thousands of armed and armoured participants requiring the resolution
of hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of attacks becomes
resolvable in the course of a normal role-playing gathering.
While a DOS-based (and keyboard-only) application, WARCOM has no
problem running in a window under XP and has been used extensively in
that environment. Eubanks' original (1.0) WARCOM relase circa
1991 has been "out there" a long time (here,
for example), but I re-release it now in updated (2.3.1) form and with
Eubanks' blessing as freeware. While I have done very little to
modify the basic interface, about four good years of playtesting and
bugfixing went in and have improved the accuracy and usefulness of the
app.
To fully understand what motivates some of the features of WARCOM, it would be necessary to obtain a copy of War Law
and read how Rolemaster treats morale, exhaustion, tactics, etc.
Nevertheless, the application is still very useful even if those WARCOM
support features are not exploited since the app is fundamentally a
mass-attack resolution engine. For the Anderson Campaign "House
Rules" on how a character's Secondary Skills impact War Law characteristics, consult the list here for mentions of "War Law," as well as the stat table page here.
Return to Rolemaster main