[DSA/D&D] How to stage a really exciting battle?
masqueradeball:
I once brought up the subject of meaningless character death to a fellow player and I really like his answer, which was that no death has to be meaningless even if it wasn't heroic at the time. I'll give what I think is a great example from D&D inspired lit: In Dragon Lance, when Tanis Half-Elven, hero of the War of the Lance, dies by being stabbed in the back during a struggle with an unnamed evil knight, nothing happens. No one was saved by his sacrifice, no one was motivated by it, but it changed the tone of everything, and for the readers who has known and loved Tanis, it meant the world.
If your willing to let the game meander off the action movie path to addressing questions like how the other player's character's feel about their friends "meaningless" loss, there could be a wealth of significance in the event.
Peter Nordstrand:
What is DSA?
Eero Tuovinen:
Das Schwarze Auge, a German roleplaying game akin to low-fantasy D&D. I'm mostly familiar with it because my brother translated a computer game based on it into Finnish several years ago, and because it seems to be a point of common experience for our German roleplaying friends.
Alexander Julian:
My group is currently doing a high fantasy style game and we had some of the same problems. Our goal was to recreate anime style epic fights with all the climaxes and still have tension with no dice fudging.
Here’s what we did.
Got rid of all our old systems and used a severely hacked version of seventh sea. The gook, henchman, villain mechanic works really well for emulating heroic combat. The final villain is always given stats as slightly weaker than the Hero’s. Thus giving them more than 50 percent chance to win. Yet not so weak that there is no tension or that he’ll die easily. We’ve taken out any type of critical hit so it takes a good few blows to kill the big bad guy anyway.
So the question becomes. What happens when they don’t win?
Well they don’t die unless they want to. Zero hit points means being removed from battle.
If everyone is removed from battle then they still might have won, but at a terrible price.
So in case of having lost say, a player can choose to sacrifice himself and die in killing the big bad guy. No roll required. Dramatic death scene.
Or if they loose they might survive but their failure has meant the big bad guy has gone ahead with his evil plan and destroyed a village, killed a love one, whatever. So vengeance against this act becomes a priority. They seek him down and fight again and so on.
All of this was after ages of trying to emulate heroic fiction with traditional systems and realising that ‘no’ you can’t have both tactical challenges and a dramatic dice roll that beats the big bad guy and saves the day.
Since player death might not be on the cards we had to think of something else they’d loose if they failed.
Julian
Kevin Smit:
The battle I ran that my players enjoyed the most was a kind of "end boss" style affair. The characters had decided to disrupt a ritual being conducted by some nasties in a hidden city under Las Vegas. They decided to do it by summoning a very powerful being aligned with their interests. Of course, summoning the being required a good bit of work on the characters' parts, so when it was actually show time, I went the extra mile in putting together a description for the event.
You might try increasing the scale of your combats. Often GMs will limit the size of combats in order to control how long the battle takes. Having to roll for 4 baddies isn't too bad, but rolling for 7+ baddies and 4 allied NPCs to boot can get onerous, especially if you have to look up rules for special actions along the way. Instead, determine the actions and consequences of NPCs outside the main fight by fiat and only roll if something directly affects a player. This allows you to factor in many more participants than would otherwise be possible. You can have a bigger battle raging in the background while your characters take actions which affect the final outcome.
In acting there's a saying that goes, "precede every statement with an action." In roleplaying, turn the statement around. Take no action without saying something first. Don't let one swing of the sword or one twang of a bowstring go just by saying, "ok, you attack, roll. 16? Plus 3... Nope, you missed." Spice it up. Good descriptions are the stuff of good combats.
If you can make it work, try running your combats in simultaneous action. Have each character announce their action and make the appropriate rolls in initiative order if the system calls for it, then put it all together in one description of what happens. So instead of going from player to player and making mini descriptions at each stop (snoozefest), synthesize it all into one big action-packed description.
Some of the discussion so far centers on stakes. I've always been of the opinion that character death should only take place if the player desires it or the player has been intentionally stupid. System rules for taking a character out of a fight instead of dying sound good to me, but my players have always said that they enjoy the threat (or illusion anyway) of the possibility of character death.
Hope some of this helps.
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