Can a party of adventurers win a war?

One of the toughest things to do in a fantasy game is to determine how much impact a small number of adventurers can have on the world.  There are those missions where the party might save the world by killing a small group of cultists before they can allow an army of demons in, but those are not huge news stories, as very few people are ever made aware of the fact that they did it.

But adventurers playing a part in a war is always difficult to handle.  Few role-playing games are truly capable of intelligently placing adventurers in the middle of battles.  No matter how good they are, can they really slaughter so many enemy soldiers that they can turn the tide of the battle, and if they can, does that mean there is something wrong with your rules?

At risk for getting too far down a tangent here - part of the reason is that even the greatest strategist of historic warfare cannot properly encompass the massive differences that magic would bring to a battle.  Sure, the rule book will tell you exactly how big a fireball is and how much damage it will cause, but do we truly know what the other side would do when they expect there to be a mage on the battlefield?  What anti-magic strategies are anticipated and used?  Is it snipers?  counter mages?  divine magic?

OK, but back to a party amongst thousands - As a game master, are the outcomes of wars based on how well the player characters do, and should they be?

In my games, most often, just before the battle, the party’s side learns of some dirty trick the other side is going to try and they are sent off to stop it from working.  These turn into controllable adventures instead of being massively chaotic battles - something I as a GM am not capable of handling.  That has always been my advice for these things.

But there have been times in my world when that didn’t matter.  During the Battle of Brinston, I had two parties on the wall meeting the onslaught head on.  They were supposed to retreat; I had it all worked out.  But they didn’t.  They held their small section of the wall.  They were asking the citizens still in the area for help, like when they needed to get the wounded out of the way for a short time while the healers worked on them.  I personally found their self-sacrifice so inspiring that I had it inspire the locals as well, and by the time the army got there to relieve them, they had old veterans, police, and even some poachers on the wall fighting alongside of them.

But did they change the course of the war?  No.  The army was always planned to come in towards the end, so the ending was predetermined.  Still, they fought a hell of a fight.

In the Conquering War, a party was there in Parnania when the Latvich and orcs attacked.  They never stood a chance.  They were completely overwhelmed, on purpose.  But we had a great time having them race through the city, trying to slow down the juggernaut that was the Latvich war machine.  There were roof top battles, alleyway battles (that I never thought they’d survive), and magic erupting in the wrong places.  By that, I mean that the generals realized that there was fighting going on in the wrong sectors of the city and they diverted troops to figure it out.  So the party accomplished their mission.  They caused enough of a problem for the attackers that they slowed down the advance, allowing more people to escape.

Did they change the course of the war?  No!  But they accomplished their mission nonetheless.

Last one - The Elf Dwarf War.  At the time, the main party we were playing was utilizing fortune tellers a lot.  They realized that the elves were planning an ambush for the dwarves.  Now the dwarves knew they were going to have to fight at the castle they were coming up to, and they were planning for it.  What they didn’t know is that nearly every elven battle mage in that region had been concentrated at that one castle.

All the elven scouts were watching the dwarven army, leaving scant few on the roof of the castle.  So the party flew in, silently killed the sentries and invaded the castle from the roof tops.  HUGE battles!  The party eventually was forced to retreat (see that actually can happen in a role-playing game), but not before they had killed a quarter to a third of the battle mages inside the castle.  Not only that, but this was the night before the battle was to take place, so the mages still alive were depleted, at least to a degree.  One other thing that I put in - The battle mages were demoralized.  These were elven nobles.  They weren’t used to people actually attacking them, or killing them.  When they joined the battle, they did so in a far more conservative manner than they would have if they were high on killing dwarves.

Did they change the course of the war?  YES!  The dwarves were supposed to have taken the castle but been so depleted that they had to stop there and wait for reinforcements (and the politics of the time would have held those up for quite some time).  By allowing the dwarves a stronger victory there, the party allowed the dwarves to press on and eventually assault the elven capital (though they only damaged it - they never intended to try and take it).  After this one, I needed to rewrite a huge amount of the outcome of that war, because it had legitimately changed.

So what about the Holy War?  Can a party of adventurers on either side truly change the outcome of the war?  I don’t think so.  We’re talking about gods here.  I have not yet seen what a small group of mortals might be able to do to change the course of a war of the gods.  You want my advice though?  Politics!  A small group will not turn the tides of the war, but a dedicated push to convince people and governments to get more involved than I have planned could put enough people into play to change the course of the battles and change the course of the war.  Not that I think it will happen!