At The Table: Big Battles

In most systems, running a battle with a dozen participants is slow and difficult, but doable. What happens when armies clash and suddenly you're faced with a battle with thousands of participants? Normally a party of players characters should never find themselves in the midst of such a situation. See last week's article for reasons why. Nevertheless sometimes a story really does call for players to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with an army's rank-and-file and fight against an opposing army. Such situations tend to be more common in low-magic settings where the party are less able to wipe the floor with their enemies and level differences are less pronounced.

Today's article is about how to construct an army-vs-army battle and run it without the sheer number of participants making things unworkable.

Setup

Step 1: Terrain

The first step is to determine where the battle is taking place. The battlefield should have natural boundaries to keep it from spilling out (unless that's part of your plan) and anyone leaving the battlefield can be considered removed from the action. Draw a low-detail map encompassing the entire battlefield and highlighting any significant terrain, fortifications, roads, and environmental hazards. Also now is the time to decide on environmental factors like time of day, and weather if they will have any effect at all on the battle.

Step 2: Objectives

Mark on the map where each army's objectives are located. Is there a fortress that the attackers must take? Are the defenders simply holding ground? Are both armies going after each other's generals for some reason? Is one army simply trying to move past the other with as few losses as possible?

Step 3: Strategy

On your low-detail map, mark out roughly where each army will be starting from. Remember that armies are large and often made of several parts, so an army's starting location will be a collection of blobs rather than a single 'x' on your map. If either side is expecting re-enforcements during the battle, also mark where they will enter the battlefield from.

Starting position has a big impact on gameplay. Consider a fortress acting as the starting position for a defending army. How close to that do the attackers start? How much time will the defenders have to strike out at them and reduce their numbers before they reach the fortress's walls? Don't try to make the battle balanced. No army ever willingly walks into a fair fight.

With starting positions determined, decide on the rough routes each army's forces will attempt to take to their objectives, keeping in mind that an army may have a diverse set of units suited to different tasks. Reviewing historic battle maps can be a huge source of inspiration here.

What role does the player party play in the battle?

Step 4: Movement

Divide your low-detail map into sections. The section sizes can be arbitrary but they should generally follow terrain, with some subdividing for large areas of contiguous terrain like fields. For areas with complex terrain such as fortresses, cliffs, etc. divide the map into small, tightly-packed sections.

These sections are used to divide one large battle map into much smaller maps. Each section can be host to a single group of units. For the purpose of this article, a "unit" is a group of 6 or fewer characters, be they PCs or NPCs. Moving into an occupied section provokes an encounter with the units already there. Moving from one section to another may provide temporary benefits (such as when charging downhill) or penalties (such as when entering a forest) to the moving unit. This encourages tactical movement as forces advance across the battlefield.

Step 5: Encounters

Number each section. Now note which sections neighbour each other. If some attribute of the terrain or environment (walls, trees, water, slopes, etc.) between two sections would affect combat in some way, make a note of the effect it will have on any unit moving between those two sections. Now add detail to the sections, focusing mainly on things that will influence combat depending on which direction units come from. Remember that your players will only see a handful of sections so don't paint a masterpiece for each of them. More detail should be added to the sections containing objectives the player characters will be working towards.

Look at both army's composition and either construct full encounters to represent each unit, or simply generate the individual NPC types that will make up either army's units and randomly generate encounters from them on-demand as the battle proceeds. Remember to have stats for both army's forces just in case the players need re-enforcements.

You may be wondering, "if a unit is only up to 6 characters, how many units are in my army of 6000?" Once again this is a case of conservation of detail. The answer is 6000 is a statistic only noticeable from a bird's eye view. On the ground all that matters is who the players are fighting now and who they're fighting next. You can describe a unit as being as large or as small as is fit for the battle. The characters the players don't fight are busy fighting with other characters in the player's unit just off-camera. No need to roll dice for them or even put them on the grid. If the players win their encounter, their squadmates are assumed to also win and advance with them. If the players retreat their squadmates go with them.

Have an idea of the relative strength of each army's soldiers so you can determine outcome of all-NPC combats using a single dice roll.

At The Table

Have your battle map next to whatever surface you normally run encounters on (ie. your combat grid) so that it's in plain view of the players. On the battle map place markers to indicate the positions of friendly and hostile units.

For every unit other than the players, roll a d4 to determine how long that unit will stay in their current section before being able to move. The outcome of the roll may be modified by the size of the section, terrain, and presence of defenders. Keep in mind that a party of highly-trained player characters will generally end battles faster than conscripted foot-soldiers. It may be advantageous to for party to advance at the same rate as their allies or charge forth out ahead of them. A player character unit can move as soon as its current encounter is done.

Continue running encounters for the players and determining all-NPC encounters by diceroll until either army is defeated or completes its objective. If you've prepared well enough this system can produce a great tactical experience for players without bogging down the game with NPC-NPC interactions.

Upcoming Articles

World Building - Weaving Plot Threads: I discuss a storytelling technique commonly used to keep things interesting in long-running or episodic stories.
At The Table - Close-Calls and Character Death: My take on this much-discussed topic.

Note

My queue of articles is running out so I might put this blog on hiatus until I can get more.