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.

At The Table: Complex Skill Checks

Often times in more sophisticated campaigns you may want to devise some complex action for the players to perform. Things like repairing a piece of machinery or performing a lengthy magical ritual aren’t well-covered by most rule systems. Often these actions are too important to players’ success or the plot to wager on just one skill check. This is where the concept of complex skill checks comes into play.

What is a Complex Skill Check?

A complex skill check is, at its core, single large action spread across several skill checks. Complex checks are designed for situations where an action will take several combat rounds to complete and in this capacity are useful for adding tension to a high-pressure scenario. Complex skill checks also have varying degrees of success depending on which rolls succeed or fail. That feature makes them useful for checks with no retry, where however far you get is the limit of what you achieve. I’ll provide examples of both uses below.

Building Complex Skill Checks Into Encounters

If you are going to use a complex skill check it should be the focal point of the encounter. The character(s) performing the check will need to devote their full attention to the task at hand. If enemies threaten them the other party members will have to defend them. Damage to a character performing the check may reduce their chance of success. Complex skill checks are also time-consuming, increasing the chances of being interrupted by friends or foes. The farther into the complex task the player gets, the more difficult each individual check becomes, further driving up the tension.

Performing a complex skill check is a lot like spellcasting and for the most part can be treated the same way as concentrating to maintain a spell. Damage to the character increases the difficulty proportional to the damage received, violent motion increases the difficulty my a similar amount, and sudden noises or distractions also increase the difficulty by a predetermined amount.

Performing Complex Skill Checks

If the task involves several actions that can be done in parallel (such as opening a series of valves), then several characters can participate at the same time. They do not grant Aid bonuses to each other. A single character performing a complex action can receive an Aid bonus from a non-participating character if the action being performed would normally allow it (typically physical actions allow assistance and mental actions do not). All participating characters make their skill checks on their own turns if in combat, or simultaneously if not. Once all the dice for one set of actions have been rolled, tally up the successful checks and determine the level of success.

Often complex skill checks require a specific series of steps. Different steps in a series cannot be performed in parallel and typically (but not always) have to be performed by the same character. A failure at one step usually ends the complex skill check, but some complex checks may have branching outcomes that allow for some failures. GMs use your imagination here.

Complex Check Stat Block

Each step of a complex check has several statistics that describe what’s necessary to perform it:
Max participants: The maximum number of characters that can work on this step in parallel
Prerequisites: Things a character must have to participate in this step
Skill check: The skill check each participant must perform during this step
Successes to Proceed: The number of successes needed to proceed to the next step or complete the check. These might be per-participant or a total number overall.
Max Failures: The number of failures, which if surpassed, cause the whole process to fail. These might be per-participant or a combined total.
Time: How long this step takes to perform

Example Complex Skill Checks

Perform Ritual Magic

Step 1: Prepare ritual area
This requires writing a magic circle on the ground
Max participants: 4
Prerequisites: All participants must possess the ability to scribe scrolls
Skill check: Spellcraft DC 5+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 4 total
Max Failures: 2 total
Time: Two minutes per check (2-12 minutes depending on number of participants and if they need to retry)

Step 2: Set Up Ritual Components
You must correctly arrange the spell components within the ritual circle
Max participants: 4
Prerequisites: Trained in Knowledge (Arcana)
Skill check: Knowledge (Arcana) DC 10+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 4 total
Max Failures: 2 total
Time: One round per check

Step 3: Perform Invocation
The senior spellcaster stands within the prepared ritual circle and casts the spell
Max Participants: 1
Prerequisites: Must know the ritual spell
Skill check: Spellcraft DC 15+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 1
Max Failures: 0 (failure destroys ritual circle, requiring start over)
Time: one round


Operate Complex Mechanism

Step 1: Analyze how it works
You must examine the mechanism and correctly deduce how to operate it
Max Participants: unlimited
Prerequisites: Trained in Disable Device
Skill check: Disable Device DC 22
Successes to Proceed: 3 total
Max Failures: 0 per participant (You get the wrong idea about how it works and must stop helping. Other participants may proceed.)
Time: 10 minutes per check

Step 2: Open steam valves
Four valves must be opened in unison
Max Participants: 4 (aid allowed)
Prerequisites: none
Skill check: Strength DC 14
Successes to Proceed: 1 per participant
Max Failures: 0 total (not opening all the valves together causes a small explosion and breaks the machine, making retrying impossible)

At The Table: Dynamic Difficulty

Ahaha you thought I was going to miss another week, didn't you?

It's a problem every Game Master faces at some point: how to keep the game moving when not all players are present. To some extent Pathfinder is set up to handle this. If you're doing by-the-book encounter generation then you know that encounter challenge ratings are for a range of party sizes and not specific numbers. For instance a party of 4 or 5 people generally have the same challenge ratings, a party 5-6 have a higher one, etc. Often with one player out normal encounters don't get much more difficult, but what about encounters designed to be challenging?

As soon as you pit your diminished party against an encounter that's rated "Hard" or "Challenging" against their full strength you quickly start running into problems. Suddenly that 1-player disadvantage turns into a huge power gap that can turn a fun but challenging encounter into a desperate struggle to survive. This article will outline some techniques to help balance a 1- or 2- player disadvantage and how to apply them depending on what's missing from the party. If more than 2 players are missing, you should probably postpone your game. These tricks can only stretch the encounter rules so far before they risk breaking the game. Also remember that these techniques can be used in reverse to increase difficulty if you feel your party are having too easy a time or if someone's friend wants to join for one game.

Enemy Hit Points

Quite simply, give enemies more or less HP. This is by far the easiest way to adjust encounter difficulty. It can be used to increase or decrease difficulty based on party size and falls within the rules perfectly because most enemies have hit dice that represent a range of possible HP values. The fact that most GMs use the average HP printed on the stat block does not negate the fact that individual enemies may have more or less HP as long as it's a possible outcome from rolling the enemy's hit dice.

The key factor that enemy HP changes is the expected length of the encounter. A enemy with more HP will take more turns to kill, require more attacks, more spell slots, and more healing. If your party is missing damage dealers this is a very easy way to help balance them out. This is less useful with missing support or healing characters because if your damage output is still high you'll probably have time to heal after the encounter is over.

Enemy Gear

This only applies to enemies that wear gear, obviously. If your party is missing healing or support characters, one option is to adjust what gear the enemies are using. With HP adjustments the aim was to control how long the fight goes on for but with gear adjustments the goal is to keep the fight duration the same and instead alter the amount of damage the party take or the party's chances of damaging the enemies. This can make up for the Bless spell from the absent paladin or an application of Channel Energy from a missing cleric. Usually just changing one carefully-selected item is enough to adjust the difficulty. Choosing how to adjust gear can be more difficult than changing HP, however, because gear changes can alter far more numbers and aren't nearly as easy to do on the fly or justify in-universe. For that reason I only recommend using this if you have sufficient time to prepare.

Enemy Number

An obvious way to make an encounter harder or easier is to change the number of enemies encountered. This is easier at low levels when enemies with fractional CRs are common and much more difficult when dealing with packs of CR 5 monsters. The addition or removal of a single enemy can drastically change the difficulty of an encounter, especially when terrain and movement are considered. For this reason I don't recommend just adding or removing a member of a monster pack.

What you can do, however, is alter how long an enemy is in the fight for. This can be done through HP adjustments to just one or two combatants but can also be done by making them cowards. Having an enemy flee combat both limits the duration of the fighting and introduces the exciting possibility of chasing them down or having them go get reinforcements, effectively turning one encounter into two smaller encounters with a short break in between. This can be useful for any party composition, but don't get carried away and string together more than two encounters or you'll risk tiring your players and their characters out too quickly.

Favourable Terrain

As I've described before I like to set up encounters in arena-like spaces and rooms with lots of random set dressing to provide obstacles and cover. This makes battles more dynamic and invites players to come up with novel tactics for overcoming enemy positions. The availability of good cover (especially when fighting ranged attackers) can significantly alter the balance of an encounter.

For example, if your party's primary melee tank is missing you might rebalance an encounter by adding difficult terrain between the party or the enemies that the enemies must cross to engage the party, giving your remaining attackers an extra round to deal damage before the enemies can close to attack their squishy hides. 

Another example might be removing some cover from the enemy's side so it's easier for your ranged attackers to hit them.

If your party is missing its ranged attackers you might remove obstacles from both sides to make it easier for your melee characters to close in.

In any case, these kinds of alterations will alter both the fight length and the enemy's opportunities to do damage, thus giving great flexibility to deal with any deviation from the planned party size.

Favourable Circumstance

For non-combat encounters, how do you deal with missing someone with necessary skills? For instance, what if your best diplomat is absent? Logically you'll want to reduce the DCs of these skill-based encounters to a level such that someone who is present can succeed. The problem then is how to make it not seem artificial. The easiest way for that is to come up with some in-universe circumstance that explains why it's easier. Maybe the shopkeeper the party want to haggle with is of the same race or alignment as the player elected to do the haggling, or maybe a festival in town is distracting the city guard enough to make infiltrating the castle vault easier. Use your imagination and the possibilities are endless.

Double Rolling

Do not use this if you can avoid it because it makes the game less fun. Sometimes when all-else fails you just need to fudge it. Unlike the other techniques which are all numeric changes, this one is the GM playing games with the enemy's luck. Double rolling is exactly what it sounds like: roll two D20s for enemy skill checks, attack rolls, etc and pick the result you want. This has the potential to give the party or the enemies miraculously good luck and tip the balance in the favour of the group you want to win. Obviously this must be used sparingly as it takes a lot of the excitement out of encounters if one side always does poorly. And it's, y'know, cheating. Doing this requires no preparationat all, is not particularly suited to any party configuration, and can change from encounter to encounter if people have to leave mid-game.

Upcoming Articles

World Building: Zooming Out From Region to Realm - More basic geography and defining nation-states
At The Table: Complex Skill Checks - Dice rules for performing more complex actions

At The Table: Agile Fighting

Flashy combat tactics are cool. Many action movies feature swift, agile heroes executing physics-defying acrobatics to get into striking range of their enemies. At the table you may find rogues or monks wishing to do the same thing. The Pathfinder acrobatics skill describes how you can use it to walk over uneven terrain, jump on to or off of obstacles, and cross gaps, but it leaves out important actions like hopping over short walls or jumping from one stepping-stone to another. These are the kinds of obstacles commonly found in a combat encounter that an agile character with flashy style may wish to traverse to close with their target

Presented here are some guidelines for skill DCs to traverse small-to-medium obstacles at speed. Each obstacle the character intends to traverse will require one acrobatics check and subtract a number of feet from their move distance proportional to how much effort is required to traverse it. DMs concerned about combat balance might want to require a feat (I suggest calling it simply "Parkour", requiring a Dex modifier of +3 or more) to use these maneuvers, or tune the DCs to personal taste.

Applied Acrobatics

Scramble up over a waist-high obstacle: DC 17, costs 5' of movement.

Hop across similarly-sized objects: DC15, Requires getting onto the first obstacle by scrabling up or dropping down but no movement penalty for obstacles of similar height.

Example: Annale the Monk wants to quickly get across a room scattered with boxes. Climbing the first box reduces her available movement by 5', leaving her with 25' of movement in a single move action. Three boxes are between her and her destination, requiring her to hop across them. Each check she succeeds gets her another box closer to her destination. A near-fail will stop her movement but allow her to stay atop the boxes. A bad fail will cause her to fall off.

Wall kick: DC 20, costs 10' of movement plus a 10' minimum run-up for a total of 20' to execute.
This difficult maneuver involves running, jumping, and kicking off a nearby wall to gain additional height. Checks: With a running start of at least 10' such that at the end of the run-up you are next to a wall (or pillar, large tree, etc), make the DC 20 Acrobatics check, and an Acrobatics check for the high jump you aim to make. Add however much you beat the DC 20 check by to the result of your high jump check, then determine if the new result beats the DC for the high jump. Failing the jump leaves you standing at the base of the wall where you started the jump.

Example: Thorai the Ranger wants to jump to a good ambush position seven feet off the ground in a tree. She's a skilled acrobat with a +10 acrobatics skill. The jump DC is 28, putting it out of reach except for a very-good roll but attainable with a well-executed wall-kick. She starts 10' back from the base of the tree, runs straight for it and kicks off. First the wall-kick roll results in a 26, then the high jump roll results in a 25. Thorai beat the wall-kick DC by 6, so she adds 6 to her outcome for a result of 31 and successfully pulls off a seven-foot-high jump that would have otherwise been near-impossible.

Pounce From Above: DC 5 + Opponent's CMD, ends movement.
You jump onto an enemy from above. If the enemy is smaller than you by 2 size categories or more, you stomp on it and land in an adjacent space. If the enemy is larger than you by 2 size categories or more, you land on top of it. If the enemy is within 2 size categories of your size, you can attempt to grapple it with a +5 circumstance bonus on your CMB roll. Regardless, if your fall is high enough to cause damage both you and the target take the same amount of damage from your fall onto it. Your target still gets attacks of opportunity if it sees you coming.

Pounce From the side: Modified Grapple check, ends movement.
You leap at your opponent and attempt to tackle him with a running start of at least 10'. This is mechanically a charging grapple and not actually a direct application of Acrobatics. Instead, use your Acrobatics bonus in place of your dexterity modifier in your CMB when determining the outcome of the grapple. Attacks of opportunity still happen if your target sees you coming. Failing the grapple leaves you prone.

Hopefully these give you some ideas of other ways your to spice up combat with agile characters.

Upcoming Articles

World Building: Adding Racial Variety - Elven cultures on Teredahar span the gamut of refinement and savagery.
At the Table: Dynamic Difficulty - The healer called in sick! Cancel the raid? I think not.

At The Table: Breaking Through Walls

Picture this situation: You have a well-prepared prepared boss encounter with nicely-arranged arena and list of tactics the boss will use. The plan calls for the boss to disable the party's main attacker and then flee when his health gets low. Everything goes according to plan until the boss attempts to make his escape. The PCs roll well and shrug off the boss's disabling attack. When he tries to escape instead of being forced to let him go the party pursue. The boss throws open his secret door and dashes out of the building, with the party hot on his heels.... And then what?

In this kind of situation it's easy for a DM to get flustered. Suddenly the action is outside of your nicely-planned arena and quite possibly outside of the dungeon entirely. The PCs are still immersed in the action but any significant break in the pace will quickly break that immersion. What you need to do is keep the action moving, break through the walls of your dungeon, and let the fight break out into the street/woodlands/fire-plains outside.

Here are some things to consider that will make it easier to let the action break out of the dungeon.

1. What's the lay of the land?

This is simply a starting point. Where is the dungeon? Is it a cave on a mountainside or a nondescript townhouse's basement? What kind of weather and terrain might be found outside of such a location? What time is it?

2. What's typically found in that environment?

A carefully-planned arena will generally feature obstacles and random set dressing that provide cover for players and enemies or generally make combat more interesting and dynamic. Adhoc locations outside of your planned dungeon need these things as well. A hillside outside a cave may be wooded or littered with boulders. A city street may have various buildings, carriages, merchant's stalls, and lamp posts. If you're not sure what the environment will look like or have in it I recommend looking online for pictures of similar environments for inspiration.

3. What's going on outside?

Once you've answered 1 and 2 this is easy. A city street in daytime will have random people just going about their business. At night it will be empty save for vagrants and night-owls. For outdoors locations roll a die to determine the weather. In the wilderness you can optionally roll a random encounter to add unexpected monsters to the encounter, saying they were drawn by the noise of battle. 

4. How will people/things outside react?

Wild animals may flee or attack. Rough terrain may shift and slide. In cities the reaction to a battle will vary with the city's lawfulness and general danger level. Citizens in very dangerous cities may regard the party's battle with complete apathy, or possibly even aid the villain.

5. Don't Hesitate

When the party take things off the rails mid-encounter, just start drawing more stuff on your battle mat like it was always there. You can fill in details as you describe them, just keep your tone of voice the same as during the battle, keep using the initiative order from the previous battle, and get back to the action as quickly as possible.

At The Table: Adding Detail to Combat

Combat is a core element of D&D. The vast majority of the rules are related to adjudicating combat, and the majority of character's abilities are only really useful in combat situations. The side-effect of this is that combat is a very mechanics-heavy math break that can break player's immersion in the game as they study their character sheets, battle mat, and dice. One simple way to help hold players in the universe is by adding more description to events. Instead of simply saying "the Orc's attack misses", a GM wanting to improve immersion could say "the Orc swings wide, leaving a gash in the wall behind you" while looking across the table at the player who is being attacked. Producing these descriptions quickly without pausing or stammering requires either practice or preparation. Here are some guidelines to help you provide these on-the-fly descriptions of action:

Know the surroundings

This comes naturally when designing an encounter. Most encounters can be thought of as taking place in an arena, be it a dungeon room or square kilometer of woodlands. Whatever the area you expect your battle to take place in, be sure you know what's in it. Focus on things likely to be interacted with or stood near during battle like as walls, terrain, and anything players or enemies might use for cover.

Know the actors' defenses

To effectively add detail you'll need to know what defenses the players and enemies have. This is important so you know if you can describe an arrow glancing off a fighter's shield or being stopped in a flash of light from a wizard's Mage Armor. The easiest way to keep track of this it to have access to a copy of each of your players' character sheets, and keep track of temporary defenses (like Mage Armor) on a scratch pad.

Melee Attack Misses

Result relative to AC	Attack stopped by*	Example Outcomes
Close call -1 to -2	Armour, or Natural Armorr	The attack got past your defenses and struck your body. You were saved only by your armour "The warhammer strikes with a loud crunch, but your armour holds" "The blade glances off your armour, trailing sparks"
Blocked -2 to -5	Shield or Deflection	The attack was on-target but you kept it from hitting your body "You parry the attack with your shield" "The blade is turned aside by your magic defenses"
Miss -5 or lower**	Dex	You evaded the attack, or it went wide and hit something around you "The Golem swings his axe high and you simply duck under it" "The Orc swings wide, smashing the table next to you and scattering its contents across the floor"

Ranged Attack Misses

Result relative to AC	Attack stopped by*	Example Outcomes
Near-miss*** -1 to -3	Natural Armour or Shield	"The shot embeds itself in your shield" "Your arrow breaks against the dragon's scales"
Close -3 to -5	Armour, Deflection, or Dex	"The bolt plinks off your armour" "You sidestep the shot"
Miss -5 or lower	Object or terrain	"The arrow embeds itself in the wall behind you" "The shot goes sailing off into the night"

*If the character doesn't have this defense, pick the next one down
**Within reason, a very bad role doesn't require any player ability to evade
***I use a home-rule where projectile near-misses have a chance of hitting a randomly-chosen adjacent target.