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When you’re designing a battle for an FRP adventure, how do you make it different from every such battle that you’ve had in the past? How do you make it more interesting than a mere dice-rolling exercise? It’s even more difficult than it sounds.

I have a novel solution to offer to these problems, but first I need to explain where this solution comes from.

The Origins of an Idea

It started with a confluence of random circumstances. As part of the process of compiling The Best Of 2012, I had to at least glance over most of the articles published here at Campaign Mastery in that time frame.

Concurrently with that process, I continued to read a book that I mentioned a week or two earlier, “The Superhero Reader” by Hatfield, Heer, and Worcester, and also had a conversation with the co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club [Pulp] Campaign in which we talked (as a side-topic) about the Hero Games series “The Ultimate [X]”, and in particular the PDF he has just acquired, “The Ultimate Energy Projector”, which will complete his set of these sourcebooks.

Fragmentary thoughts from all these sources – plus a couple of web sites about forthcoming movies – came together like a string of tumbling dominoes to present a number of new perspectives on the problem, and my immediate thought was that the notion that derived would make a reasonable article for Campaign Mastery.

I couldn’t get to writing it immediately, and by the time I came to write these words, the idea that I came up with had evolved through several generations to become rather more useful and significant than it was initially. In the process, this article has transitioned from an interesting but abstract theory to a piece of concrete and practical advice. However, I’m not entirely certain how clearly others will perceive the solution and why it should be effective if I offer just that practical advice, so the article will have to replicate the evolutionary path already trodden by my mental meandering.

So that’s what’s on today’s menu: A little RPG Theory, a surprising twist, some practical implementation, and then maybe a little more theory to wrap the whole bundle up and tie a neat little string around it.

Battle Factors Under GM Control

GMs have only a few parameters that they can alter to achieve the goal of making a battle interesting:

  • Antagonists;
  • Environment;
  • Circumstances & Context;
  • Base Antagonist Tactics;
  • Gimmicks.

These deserve a little amplification, principally in terms of the degree of constraint experienced by the GM:

Antagonists

The GM has broad latitude in terms of the antagonists. However, the need to make the battle challenging confines his choices; individual foes cannot be so weak as to fall at a single blow from a PC, and they must be sufficiently capable of inflicting damage on the PCs, which place a minimum capacity on the individual constituents; At the same time, they cannot be so strong that PCs will fall after a single hit, and the collective capability cannot exceed by too great a margin the collective abilities of the PCs. There are also practical difficulties that constrain the number of simultaneous combatants, and finally, metagame restrictions based on the GM’s ability to actually referee the combat.

By the time all these factors are taken into account, the GMs choices in this respect are considerably restrained.

Environment

The GM has total control over the environment in which the battle is to take place, save only that it should not be instantly lethal or any participant. Moreover, he can achieve substantial benefits through enabling the antagonists to make intelligent use of the environment to enhance their capabilities and minimize their vulnerabilities.

Circumstances & Context

This variable deals with two separate but related elements, incorporating both the explicit reasons why the battle is taking place and what the rewards of winning appear to be prior to the end of battle and subsequent investigation. Both these factors can have a significant impact on the mindsets of each set of combatants, and can also impose additional environmental factors that can be exploited. The GM has total control over these factors as they relate to the antagonists and in some cases will have limited control over the PC side of the battle.

Base Antagonist Tactics

Surprisingly, Fantasy characters are often broader in the range of available tactics than superheroes, who are far more constrained to respect a theme or concept. The tactics that the antagonists employ are completely within the GMs control, though they may or even should be constrained by some of the other factors discussed, such as environment. The original thrust of this article was going to be the benefits that could be achieved by thinking of fantasy characters as “superheros” and thematically constraining them in order to make it easier to make effective choices in the other parameters.

Gimmicks

Everything else that constricts combat options or adds additional options comes under this heading, including supernatural “environmental” considerations, gates to other realms, the accessibility of reinforcements, and magic items that give characters additional combat options. There are a bewildering array of such options available to the GM, and this too can be simplified by the principle of “theming” and “categorizing” the participants along the lines of a superhero battle.

The Relevance Of Super-heroics

In many ways, it’s easier for the GM of a superheroic campaign, simply because there are so many decades of past art upon which to draw, and because most of the sourcebooks for such games employ or describe archetypes in terms of the effect of their abilities, their combat styles, and the ways these can interact.

All you have to do to access this past art is to use a known super-villain as an exemplar of the type of combatant that the PC or NPC is, find an opposition who matches their dance partner, and then draw on the fight as depicted in the comic book for inspiration.

For example, if you have a character who is a strong and nimble combatant with relatively few special abilities, and a foe who is much stronger but less nimble, you could draw on a battle between Spider-man and The Rhino (who doesn’t wear a suit of power armor in the comics. Or, if the enemy is a wizard who likes to toss lightning bolts, you might base your battle circumstances on one of the many battles between Spider-man and Electro.

Effectively, this puts every writer and artist who has ever worked on the comics “on staff” as creative consultants to the GM. If there’s a particularly interesting gimmick, tactic, or circumstance in the comic, all you have to do is translate it back into fantasy terms and you’re all set.

Every issue of a comic is likely to contain at least one combat sequence. It’s necessary for the creators of that combat sequence to overcome the same hurdle that you’re facing – the need to make the fight interesting. Why not copy their solutions?

For example, let’s take a cold-based character and a combat sequence in a factory. There’s a furnace for smelting metal, there are all sorts of chains hanging from the ceiling, and so on.

The fantasy equivalent might be a cave with a pool of natural magma at one end that has been dammed, in which the cold-and-ice-wielder has hung many chains from the ceiling, too loosely held by pitons to be used for climbing, and too high to be within reach of the PCs – perhaps with one or two that have been affixed more securely.

The cold character can lob a ball of ice into the magma to create a steam explosion, or many smaller particles to fill that end of the cave with fog. He can surround the ends of the chains immediately above the PCs with a ball of ice until they become too heavy for the piton to hold – turning the chains into boulders raining down on the PCs from above.

As a last resort, he can use a similar technique to collapse the dam, spilling lava out into the chamber. He can ice up the floors to make them slippery under the PC’s foot. He may have carved small channels across the chamber floor containing water that he can rapidly freeze, expanding them enough to shatter the floor underfoot and drop the PCs into another cavern below – possibly one filled with more magma. He could freeze silver strands to form ice javelins with an electrically-conductive core – useful if one of the enemies likes to use a wand of lightning, or if the bad guy has something along those lines up his sleeve.

He may have prepped a huge snowball up a channel, held in place by a chock that he can pull out simply by tugging a rope – think of the boulder in the first Indiana Jones movie. There may be a pool of acid that the PCs have to cross – he can cover it with a thin layer of ice and snow to hide it’s true nature until it’s too late.

There are lots of such ideas – those given above were all off the top of my head, and I have no doubt that I could double that number without too much effort, just by digging out a couple of issues of The Flash in which he fights Captain Cold, or an issue of Batman in which he goes up against Mr Freeze, or any issue of the X-Men in which Iceman takes part.

Some of the ideas may be too far-fetched to be plausible in a fantasy environment, others may be marginal but forgivable if entertaining enough, but if the PCs have to run such a gamut before they can even get to this character, they will know they’ve been in a fight – and they’ll remember it for a long time!

Beyond The Source Material: Superhero RPGs

And that’s where the article was going to end, when I started writing it. But one final thought occurred to me…

Superhero RPG sourcebooks are full of strategies that can be employed by characters of one archetype against other characters of either the same or a different archetype, and advice on how to make superhero battles interesting. Borrow and adapt it to grow your own original tactics using the principles explained already – just equate each PC to an archetype and look at the advice for challenging such archetypes. I would suggest that you first “get your feet wet” using the illustrated examples provided by the comic books to start with, though.

Someone once told me that combat should make up 1/3 of a good game session, as a rule of thumb. While I don’t necessarily agree with that ratio – it depends what else is going on in the adventure – battle remains a major slice of the activities at the game table. Make them more interesting and everybody wins, regardless of the outcome!

A Post-script:

I couldn’t conclude this article without pointing readers to Johnn’s excellent Hazards Of Combat series here at Campaign Mastery – an oldie but a goodie!

And now for something completely unrelated…

…but that should still be of interest to readers: a couple of Kickstarter projects that are of definite interest.

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Flat Plastic Miniatures

The first Cab off the rank are Flat Plastic Miniatures by Arcknight, which look absolutely fantastic. With just under four weeks remaining to the campaign, this project has already raised more than 400% of its target! Unlike most Kickstarters, this shows no sign as yet of slowing down and it’s on-track to unlock every stretch goal they’ve listed! A number of different people have contacted me, excited about this project, and it’s easy to see why; it’s that same excitement that is producing the campaign’s success.

For anyone like me who is paintbrush-challenged when it comes to miniatures, this is definitely worth a look. And then a second, and a third – in fact, as many as it takes you to decide to sign up as a backer! You can check out the campaign’s page here or by clicking on the image above.

Tabletop role-playing game (RPG) modules by DigitalD20

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From a kickstarter campaign that is going gangbusters to one that could really do with a bit of love from CM’s readership. Paraphrasing the email that I got from Fernando Garcia, responsible for Communications for the operation, DigitalD20 are a group of role players and lovers of new technologies attempting to create a distribution platform for d20 system RPG modules in digital format using new technologies (tablets and smart phones) while maintaining the spirit of pen and paper. The idea is to provide, in a single module, all the information needed to play immediate and easily. With DigitalD20 gamers will be able to share their own modules with the gaming community. Note that I have had to reduce the size of the image above to make it fit my page!

My thoughts: I don’t use a tablet or smartphone, which seems to make me different from about 99% of the population. In fact, I don’t use a mobile phone at all. So I’m not qualified except to say that it sounds fine in theory, looks fantastic, and would be one more incentive to change that status if the project were to get up. There will also be module editor software that runs on a wider variety of platforms such as PCs.

In fact, the more that I read about the planned project, the more interesting it sounds. An interactive real-time map showing the PCs location, and linked to the parts of the adventure that players could reach from that point, facilitating more open adventure designs. An optional “slaved” app for the PCs to use on their devices for tracking the adventure and creation of a campaign “diary”. Immediate access to all the (official) rules that you need to run an encounter that’s part of the adventure, plus illustrations, handouts, and props that can be digitally distributed to players.

Let’s be clear, here: this campaign is to finish the software which is at an advanced design stage, and develop a major multi-module adventure to be distributed with it, incorporating music and art. Back the creation of the module and you also get the software/apps that you need in order to use it, in other words, or back the creation of the software and you get a free module as well as the capability to use it for your own adventures. And, of course, if the system works as advertised, there’s nothing to stop people from making their home-grown adventures available to others. That could mean hundreds of new adventures each month that you can access for ideas.

I think that the potential upsides – if you have access to the required technology – make this worth taking a chance on. Sure, you can view documents on your existing technology without much trouble; but the potential interactivity and capability to avoid needing to go rules-hunting in the middle of the adventure make this approach potentially much more game-friendly.

Take a look by clicking on this link or on the illustration above.


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