Writing The Good Fight: Running Large Battle Scenarios in TTRPGs

Much of our favorite fantastical fiction features fierce fights, mammoth melees, and wall-to-wall warfare. We all know that large battles can serve various narrative purposes, from heroic last stands and dramatic climaxes to desperate retreats and crushing defeats. A battle might be raging around our heroes as they try to reach their target, right in front of them as they enter the fray themselves, or miles away as they use the chance to accomplish something. 

At their best, battles are a great tool to add to your storytelling and a powerful way to amp the drama. At their worst, they are a great tool to break the flow of your game, and a powerful way to start players thinking about homebrew versions of the system, ones that remove the suffering they just went through.

So You Want to Have a Mass Combat

The main feature of a Battle (which is the term I'm gonna stick with) is that you have at least two sizeable, organized forces that want different things, and are ready to fight over it. The exact situation - War between nations, feuds between guilds and great families, a resistance uprising, a mercenary force attacking a villain's stronghold - is up to you; but I'm willing to bet that as you read this, you already have a pretty good idea of what you'd like yours to be.

Many systems try to accommodate this dream of yours. The hobby has roots in wargaming, so the tools to create something wargame-ish are already tucked away in the genes of our games. The latter halves and appendices of many a rulebook feature suggested methods for resolving these conflicts, running the range from a highly abstracted roll-off to straight-up simple miniature-based skirmishes. 

What these books tend to gloss over, in my experience, is actual instruction and guidance for how to make the most narrative use of battles, and how to integrate the results of these oft-detached resolution systems into your game meaningfully. So let's you and me talk a little about this, together, in a brief and concise post that's already almost 400 words long before even getting to the point. 

The Point: Using Battles In Your Game 

Now that we're pumped and impatient to start planning, it's time to hit the breaks and contemplate: What is the point of this battle? This question pertains both to the battle's role in the fiction, and its purpose in our game. 

While colorful descriptions and graphic depictions of a bloody conflict are all fine and good, a battle is only a means to an end. Without context and drama, even the most massive spaceship fight or clash of armies is just popcorn filler; and since we aren't writing the latest summer blockbuster, we should strive for engagement rather than spectacle. 

Perhaps the easiest way to look at it would be to think of battles as a "location" for your adventure. And like any adventuring location, we should start by thinking about the different parts of it, how they interact with one another, and how they affect our players. 

So, we need to ask three big questions: 

1. Who is fighting? 

Unless you've somehow decided you want to have a battle before you've decided on your game's story and setting, you have a pretty good answer to this question already. But if we want an engaging engagement, we should expand a bit more beyond the basics.

How do the opposing sides make themselves stand out? One of the easiest ways to make your battlefield come to life is giving your factions some unique traits, to give them an identity. Impressive armor and banners, weapons with a unique look and sound, unusual battlefield tools and tactics, and more. 

They could have war priests singing battle hymns, towering siege machines on spider legs, magical rivers sprouting from nowhere to bring warships in on, constantly arriving and departing dropships - by giving a faction interesting battlefield gimmicks, you not only make your battles more exciting, you're also adding things that your players might interact with during the game. What players could resist the opportunity to commandeer a mighty alien spider-tank? 

Armies aren't just homogenous masses of troops and equipment. Even the most soulless army of undead, robots or cops will have some recognizable faces in their ranks. Commanders, lieutenants and officers, elite soldiers, and even things like superweapons or veteran battalions can act as "characters" to make stand out, with unique personalities and traits. Players always latch onto things they know, or seem like they're worth knowing. Discovering that beloved allies or cool villains[1] are involved in a battle is sure to get your players more into it. 

2. Why are they fighting?

This post won't get too much into the methods of war (Although a future one might, because I'm all about that stuff), but one of the basic principles of conflict is that every war is started with a goal in mind, and every battle should be contributing towards that goal. A meeting engagement in the open, in which the sides have no goal other than the destruction of each other, are as rare as they are narratively unpliable and militarily valueless. Sure, the occasional duel of great leaders can be interesting, but as famous 5th century BC wargame blogger Sun Tzu said: 

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

Most battles are started with the goal of gaining something (territory, a strategic position, a valuable resource) or destroying something (a stronghold, industry, an important person or symbol). Consequently, there is usually an attacking side and a defending side. This opens up even more room for giving identity to your warring sides: How does the faction fortify a location? What does their siege equipment look like? What specialized weapons do they use for raids? Do they have specially trained units for this kind of mission? Does the commander have a particularly tricky strategy prepared? 

It is important that the battle is important. Even if one of the involved sides is a ludicrously massive empire with seemingly infinite reserves of manpower and resources, and this barely even registers as a blip on their radar, it should at the least be a big deal for the other side. A battle with no stakes for anyone involved might as well just be replaced with an avalanche or earthquake that the players must avoid, since those are similarly devoid of narrative drama. 

3. Why are the players here?

Our first two questions give us the nature and outline of the battle. Where our PCs are, and what they're trying to accomplish, is how we determine how the scenario will actually look in our game. 

Probably the most common place for PCs to be is within the warzone but not in the actual battle, as this is where the greatest variety of things can be encountered. Distant fighting can be observed and possibly influenced, troops from both sides can be encountered and interacted with in various ways, civilians might be found hiding, saboteurs and pillages might be interrupted. The tools and methods of the warring factions can often be encountered here - Players might find themselves having to hunker down to avoid barrages of magic bombardment, helping field doctors to fight off a terrifying bioweapon, hiding from a lumbering war machine, or surprising (and being surprised by) a teleporting squad of shock-troops that lands right on top of them. 

If our PCs are in the very middle of the battle, then they will witness first-hand the impact of the war. They can see the flow of battle as troops move and fight across the front, hear the sounds of struggle and death all around them, feel the destructive power of war machines. The PCs might be personally involved in the fighting at the front and helping their allies, or they could simply be caught in the middle of battle they have no part in and want to escape. The thick of it is also the ideal place to introduce the factions' most powerful weapons and combatants - showing an opposing champion cut down a group of soldiers is a good way to establish their strength - just be ready for the players' fight-or-flight response. 

On the flipside, players might be on the outskirts, where they're unlikely to see the main forces of both sides. They might be using the battle as a distraction to infiltrate an important stronghold, sneaking past scrambling reinforcements and guards. They could be escorting a VIP away from the battlefield, trying to keep a low profile and dealing with both the threat of roaming forces and the panicking wildlife. Or they may find themselves seeking a recently-slain sergeant's remains, hoping to find a crucial item before the main army comes back to gather its dead. Just because they're further from the fighting doesn't mean they can't feel its impact.

In addition to the where and the why, the when of the player's actions will also determine what they see. If the battle has yet to truly be joined, players could encounter scouts, troops maneuvering into position, supply shipments running to and fro, defensive positions being set up and completed, and the occasional early skirmish. During the battle, the chances of encountering a fight are the highest, along with travelling couriers and reinforcements, support units looking for an advantageous position, ambushes and more. Towards the end of the battle they're most likely to see the final climaxes and "winning moves" of the battle, the retreating losers and pursuing winners, non-combat units arriving to tend to the wounded and put out fires, battlefield scavengers looking for loot, and the like. 

A battle is just many smaller stories, happening all at once. Most of them violent.

There are, of course, many other questions you could be asking yourself - what is the tone of this battle, what are the relationships between involved characters, what smaller stories are happening during the battle - but these questions are the same you'd ask if you were creating any other interesting adventuring locale. Once you've established the big three, all the possible scenes and twists and moments will most assuredly spew forth from your mind and all your notes. You're the best judge of how to make what's happening interesting to your players.  

Whether your game will involve planting bombs on the bridge, storming the bunker, sneaking aboard the flagship, or dueling the Golden General himself, remember that what separates a battle from most scenarios is that a battle is dynamic and ongoing. Reinforcements might show up, artillery shots might start raining down, a raging melee might spill over into the location where players are, a tank could break through a wall at any moment. You could emulate this by making a "random event" table to roll on during scenes, or by simply introducing complications and twists when you feel is dramatically appropriate; just remember that no event in a battle is truly isolated from the rest of it, and that there's no assured victory or crushing defeat that cannot be dislodged by a well-timed explosion.   

A Swift and Decisive Victory

Whatever your scenario is, remember that a battle is an important, ongoing event. The setup, execution and fallout have an immense amount of moving pieces and variables; and while we could never (and should not try to) consider every single one of them for the purposes of our game, we should give some thought to what the most interesting ones are, and how to bring them into the game. Not for the sake of a more accurate combat resolution (that's what all those mass combat systems are for), but to create a more interesting game to play.

1 Why are the forces of evil always "cooler" than the good guys? We tend to root for the underdog, and when we make the bad guys look stronger, the good guys look more sympathetic, as well as making them tougher for having won. Plus, the players themselves have more fun fighting the enemy that seems more interesting to fight. Of course, if you don't have any explicit good guys, or if you just want to play against type, freely make make the involved factions equally zany and dangerous-looking. Just don't underestimate the value of classic tropes.