Massive battles aren’t what role playing games are good at. I have yet to see mass combat rules that are functional at a narrative level or that maintain the spirit of the rules set out in the core book. The rules don’t matter to playing on this scale. The conceit that you’re commanding armies of people often abstracts the rules to such an extent that you are either playing a board game with its own rules or the rules you started with no longer apply at all.
Creating a feeling that you and the players are involved with the battle is crucial. Allowing the players to feel that they are having an effect on the battle is vital to keeping people interested. Since the player characters are the heroes, they should have a bigger effect than being in the meat grinder of front line combat.
What are you planning?
Before you get into the finer details of planning you have to ask yourself what your intent is with the experience. Do you want to have the players commanding a field of troopers? Or, do you want the players to be the lead in an assault on an entrenched position?
In any of these situations it’s the feel that you are looking to create. The cast of characters is, on a practical level, limited to your player characters and those you want them to interact with. The unidentified masses that are being abstracted aren’t cared for beyond a basic nebulous block of potential. When the facelessness of the horde is realized, the uselessness of giving them definite numbers starts to show. It becomes much more about the feel of the situation instead of exactly what numeric value is placed upon the masses.
How epic a fight feels is in the description of the players’ actions affecting the flow of combat. If the players are each leading a different squad the feel needs to be of the appropriate scale without it bogging down in minutiae or adding several steps that can’t be ignored.
Two approaches
If the players are to be either the leaders of a group and inspiring by their actions, or dealing with the big speech and the tactics of an army, we’ll need to know where to focus before beginning to create the encounter. In both situations I want their skill rolls to tell the tale of the whole massed combat. I want them using their skills up against the unique things that large scale combat produces. For example, a social character on a megaphone yelling and inspiring their squads can feel cool even if they’re only doing a basic check.
With the characters leading an element in combat you can play to the power side of encounter feel, making the players realize how powerful they are in relation to the NPCs out there. Virtually everything in an RPG is a skill check, the skills the players choose to use show what they’re putting importance on and the battle should be resolved with this in mind. Resolving the battle with only one or two ‘acceptable’ skills cheats the players out of creativity.
When playing as squad leaders in a platoon, my group has had their cohorts’ stealth through defenses to ambush the NPCs. One of the players gave a huge speech bolstering the other players and the squaddies, and the players actions determined the results of the fight with very little rolling by the GM for the NPCs alongside the group. This allowed for the pace to be kept up while also using descriptions of what is going on around the players to become much bigger than a simple fight. NPCs would have to fall back with each defeat and missed roll by the players and they’d press forward to eventual victory with each success, with nary a roll to see if they hit or not.
With the players leading an army, I’ve found it best to treat it as a montage of scenes as they try to get different elements in place. One described scene has a player giving the rallying cry so the legions can march forward into the lines of the enemy. A second used their discipline and stubbornness to keep the hordes at bay and their own troops calm and in line. This is very abstracted from the actual rolls but allows for the feeling of epic stories without the monstrous rolling of dice that massive battles can entail.
Thinking bigger
Epic fighting can be abstract or time consuming and doesn’t benefit by adding in mechanics that aren’t directly related to what the players know already. I’ve seen several attempts with Star Wars roleplaying to add squads and mass combat that only skew things in the direction of making combats last longer and making groups so ineffective that it becomes incredulous that they’d be used.
Keeping the scale of the combat at a personal scale and allowing the effects to become vast allows for combat to that keeps moving at a good pace while also making the players feel involved.
How have you brought epic scaled combat to the table? What methods work best for you and your group? Please, let us know so we can use that technique.
