Developing Interesting Historic Battles

There is a difficult issue that arises whenever you are trying to game master a major battle in a role-playing game.  Hopefully, your rules are such that the player characters cannot simply slaughter thousands of enemy troops, but how are you going to make the party important in the battle - after all the player characters are really the center of the world, at least to the people you are interacting with.

This is difficult, because you don’t want to make it as though four to eight people can affect the outcome of a major war.  That would make the enemy either stupid or incredibly weak, and there doesn’t seem to be much justification for making them either.  So, where’s the balance?

The balance comes in using some of history’s craziest tactics.  How can you do that?  Watch videos!  No really, watch youtube or whatever your favorite video site is.  Search on something like “top ten craziest tactics” or “top ten battles won in odd ways”.  These are out there for you to find and in addition to being interesting (since we know you are into battles or you probably wouldn’t be playing role-playing games), they can give you ideas that you need.

Now Fletnern is NOT Earth!  There are no 60K on 45K battles.  Garnock has the largest (human) army, and they only have about 65K guys.  Some of them have to stay home and guard the walls.  So, you are probably going to be starting by reducing the overall number of folks on both sides.  That helps your PCs quite a bit.

Now you have to make that crazy idea work for your campaign.  I like to have the PCs working with a team of NPCs, maybe a platoon of soldiers led by a maverick young officer.  This allows for a couple of things.  If the enemy should be hitting and killing lots of people, they have the platoon to kill instead of your PCs.  No, it’s not fair, but I prefer not to kill PCs just because they are in a huge battle.  Perhaps more importantly, if the PCs don’t come up with a cool idea, the young officer can.

But can you really steal these ideas?  Maybe.  Some of them don’t work.  Most ideas having to do with tanks might work by replacing the tanks with knights, but because of the gun issue (knights typically don’t have range bombarding capabilities) this won’t often work.  Some of the ancient battles, especially when Alexander the Great fakes someone out will work.  Yes, sometimes using modern tactics can work, but the idea of letting your PCs use something that the great generals could have thought of but never bothered to isn’t very likely.  That’s where the young officer can come in.  He can spot something special about the terrain that the PCs didn’t catch and offer some crazy idea that might just work.

I still don’t think you have the party and the platoon slaughter thousands, but they might be able to stop 400 enemy soldiers from sneaking through a pass that allows them to get behind the main army and thus save the day, even if no one really knows they did.  They can distract and thus misplace huge numbers of the enemy by leading them on a goose chase.  (That seems to have been a Mongol tactic when tied to run, fire, run again.)

The point is - You don’t always have to come up with everything yourself.  Using things that actually happened #1 means it could work and #2 eases the stress on your brain - at least a bit.  We’re always trying to give you idea sparks; sometimes we need to give you ideas about where to find your sparks.

 

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This post was written as part of The Legions of Garnock aka All About Fantasy Military Superpowers, 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 is showcasing one of the most powerful militaries and how they handle their strategies and their various equipment load outs, as well as artillery, armor, officers, and a whole bunch of other things that might give you great ideas for your campaign.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 93 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.