Is a War Like a Dungeon?

Let’s consider an adventuring party fighting in a war.  By war, we mean that there are multiple battles, a huge number of troops in the same vicinity, some manner of opposing sides (at least two), and some manner of objective, even if it is “kill all the other guys”.  That should sound like a war to you, right?  The important difference here is that we’re talking about a war and not about a single battle.

Nearly every game master knows how to run a dungeon.  They’re great!  They’re typically linear, so the party of adventurers needs to pass from one encounter to the next in an organized and pre-determined order.  Nothing could be easier (at least nothing involving herding a bunch of player characters).

So can that be accomplished in a war zone?  No.  It cannot.  BUT!!  Some of it can.  Let’s focus on what can be generally the same.

A war zone can be run like a dungeon, or at least a wilderness adventure.  First, you need a fairly detailed map of the war zone.  The only reason this is harder than the dungeon is that it is far larger.  You can map a dungeon down to 5’x5’ squares, but a war zone is at least a couple hundred acres.

What can often work here is to have the big overall map and then get more detailed in the villages.  Even if you have to use the same village map to represent more than one place, that’s OK.  Often, just turning the map so the players enter from a different direction can be enough to eliminate any advantage they might get from using the same map multiple times.

But clearly a dungeon isn’t only a map.  It is at least a map with descriptions of where the monsters are.  That’s really what we’re going after in this post.  Often times, it is possible to simply see the war zone as a dungeon and place your enemy forces (and allied forces) where they should be.  When the party gets to a new village, which side owns the village now?  Who has troops there?  What troops are there?

Just like a dungeon encounter, knowing what the stats are for these folks and what they are likely to be doing when the party arrives is what you need to run that encounter / fight.  But that is the common problem with some dungeons - the enemy is just suiting there doing nothing.  This actually works in a war zone.  Soldiers sitting around doing nothing is called “guard duty”. Depending on the soldiers and their officers, shows exactly what they would be doing during these times.

But here is the main thing that has to be considered:  wandering monsters.  Hopefully, when you run a dungeon adventure, if the party sits still for any length of time, the monsters in the dungeon may be encountered as wandering monsters.  They don’t just sit 15’ away from a party of fresh meat and wait to be attacked.  They have some basic level of curiosity or at least self-preservation and try to be aware of their environment.

War zone “dungeons” need to be far more active.  If the party attacks a village and defeats the small squad of soldiers left there to protect the place, the others in the army need to react.  Reacting might be posting more sentries.  It might be organizing several squads to begin patrolling the region.  It might be consolidating forces so they can better deal with a group capable of picking them off one squad at a time.  Most likely, these will be the escalating reactions to continued losses to the party.

But there are a lot more things going on as well.  Messengers are carrying orders from place to place.  Well protected officers will be moving around to inspect the troops.  Logistics and supplies will be moving around, whether that is getting arrows to archers or collecting the food stuffs the various squads have “collected” from the locals.  An army doesn’t sit completely still.  (Neither should a dungeon, but that’s another post.)

But one of the most important differences between this style of war zone and a dungeon is that the encounters cannot be executed in a linear fashion.  Assuming you did actually lay out the war zone in this dungeon-like fashion, the party can slip past certain encounters and into others that you thought should be handled later.

You are the GM.  To a degree, you can just decide that the first encounter they have will be X, then Y then Z no matter what they do on the map, but players have a nasty habit of not following a GM’s script.  If the first encounter is intended to be with a messenger, the party (at least every party I’ve ever GMed) will hide in the wilderness and refuse to go anywhere near the roads.  So let’s just agree, that you won’t be able to control the order the encounters occur in.

Is this the best way to run a war zone?  Probably not, but it just might be the easiest.  It will be very important that you work out ahead of time what the reaction to certain party actions will be.  If a village on the outskirts is attacked, what will the army do?  How will the top officers know?  If a village they thought was protected or “behind the lines” gets hit, how will the respond?

The other thing is that wandering monsters list.  Who is moving around the territory?  When a party is in a war zone, they should expect to encounter the enemy often, but how?  What do patrols look like and how many are there?  Do they fight first or signal first?  Is one of them expected to flee from any encounter to make sure the bosses get word?

How are they moving their supplies around?  An active group of adventurers aka saboteurs could cause a great deal of havoc simply by attacking and burning the rations that were supposed to be delivered to the troops.  Is the enemy utilizing simple patrols of soldiers or active anti-saboteur groups?  These are things that can be pre-determined and then sprung on the party either seemingly randomly or actually randomly.  It’s not as though you need to have the messenger’s route detailed on your map and he will be at exactly this spot every day at exactly this time.  That would be an incredible amount of planning.  But still, knowing that there are six messengers who each try to hit eight villages in a day to check on the troops there - That can give you an idea of how much time the party has to attack and get away before their work is discovered.

Real wars are nothing like the controlled setting of a dungeon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use some of the same concepts to make your FRPG war zones both active and controlled.

This post was written as part of the soon to be released Paladin vs. Paladin aka All About Holy Wars, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with paladins aka holy knights as well as the holy wars they fight in, even if those wars are against other paladins (which is when they are the most fun!).

To get the full Game Masters’ edition when it is published, you will need to be a part of our Patreon project.  There will be no free version of this edition.  Seeing as this is a double sized edition (at least over 80 pages) and the culmination of most of the last year (plus) of Small Bites editions, anyone who has been getting involved in our Small Bites project is going to want to have this edition.  Interested?  Click the link here.