http://lostpict.6sided.net/2011/09/30/battle-of-pelennor-fields-lotr-lunacy/

I participated in this a few months back. As the title says, it was lunacy. Near a thousand minis, using SBG rules? Anyways, it was fun and the set up looked awesome. Wouldn't have had it any other way. The setup was chaotic. After the third turn, the 4 individual scenarios became combined. So me and the Haradrim had to kill 100+ Rohirrim in 3 turns, or the 100 strong Army of the Dead (with the Three Hunters) would smash us. On the bright side, one of the Mumaks trampled around 8 ghosts, 4 Haradrim, 1 orc and 1 orc Captain.
Anyhow, a very fun battle that took 5 hours to get to the 5th turn. Next year (this was at a yearly gaming convention) we're going to have a WotR BoPF battle, which I really look forward to.

1) Disallow Shielding (except for Heroes)
2) Remove entire Cavalry model if mount killed (except for Heroes)
3) Ignore banner rules (just pretty to look at)
4) Shooters shot at closest target (heroes get to choose) - exception for Terrorifying monsters
5) Start at one end of the Melees and progressively work to the end (i.e. no hopping around except for Heroic combats)

5) People don't play like this already? Odd, that's how we've always done it.

4) Shooters shot at closest target (heroes get to choose) - exception for Terrorifying monsters

Anyway, I ran the the largish SBG Pellenor Fields game at Southern Front in back in September referenced a couple of posts back. (I saw my blog back-referenced and thought I would see who was gawking at the lads.) I intentionally left out Gandalf since he was busy with Denethor and dying Faramir. Pretty much everyone was in the game including little Pippin trying to burn down the Siege engines with a torch. The rules were straight SBG with the priority fixed for the first 3 turns and the character profiles out of the big blue rulebook.

No, because if you have priority you get to decide order of fights, and that could have a tactical impact (who is trapped, who isn't). I think it's a good rule for big engagements (tactically it probably averages out), but for anything less than 1000 points I think it might steal something from the game experience.

When I said characters were missing I was mainly thinking of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. But a fantastic looking game with some great pictures nevertheless.

For the house rules, they are aimed at speeding play - especially at conventions.

Rule 2) reflects that in a battle with over 100 cavalry mounts on each side, the dishorsed grunts get left behind when the cavalry charges. Putting dismounts on the ground mostly just results in the need to move a bunch of minis each turn that have little relevance to the cavalry that is still in the fight. This battle had 137 good and 113 evil cavalry mounts.

Rule 3) basically prevents lots of re-rolling. Since banners mostly cost all equally, it pretty much evens out assuming both sides had fielded roughly equal numbers of banners.

Having done this a lot, I have never missed either of these rules for large games. In both cases, the house rules were designed to speed play by simplify a skirmish rule-set into something manageable for 1000 models. I usually use these anytime total model count passes 100. I also use them with the Age of Trebuchet variant for Dark Age games.

Lost Pict

They were there, they led the 100 or so Dead army.