Fighting in RPG scenario design

I regularly listen to two podcasts on RPGs, The Grognard Files and What Would the Smart Party Do. Both are interesting and thought provoking, and sometimes they both cause me to want to respond in more detail.

Smart Party Episode 128 was all about fights, and it got me thinking about how scenario design can help make fights more interesting. I’m not going to cover whether I think fights are a good or bad thing, but instead think about what scenario designers can do to make their fights more interesting.

A few things caught my eye.

Not to the death

In my experience, many RPG fights consist of a long slog of dice rolls to slowly whittle away a creature's hitpoints. I know I've been guilty of doing that—but I am also aware that in a fight I’m often too busy thinking about the rules and mechanics that the foes don’t always act in an intelligent manner. (The fun combats are when players act intelligently and set things up to succeed—which is one of the things I really like about Fate's use of create advantage.)

So not all fights should be to the death, and sensible foes should surrender or flee when outmatched.

This has (at least) two advantages.

First, fights should become shorter and more memorable.

Second, your foes will seem more intelligent. No longer will they continue to fight even when clearly outmatched.

Third, dealing with prisoners gives the PCs some interesting decisions and roleplaying opportunities.

Objectives

In real life, fights usually happen when two sides have conflicting objectives. If you're playing a wargame you normally have a missions to achieve--take that hill, knock out those 88s. You are rarely expected to kill absolutely everything in your path.

Similarly the opposition has their objectives.

So when you have NPCs that the PCs are likely to fight, it's worth clearly stating what their objectives are.

For example, in the Liminal game I am running in a couple of days, the PCs encounter vampires intent on taking out a werewolf gang. So the vampires want to kill the werewolves. But they shouldn't be suicidal, and the scenario isn't clear either way.

So if I were writing this adventure up, I would describe their objectives as:

Vampire Objectives:

• Kill all the werewolves
• If outmatched, try to flee and return when stronger
• Failing that, surrender.

Now I've never done that before. I like to think my foes have had a modicum of intelligence, but I'm probably flattering myself. For example, when I think back to The Crasta Demon, the first battle is a razorlin raid on a caravan that the PCs interrupt. It's a straight fight to the death, the razorlins don't act sensibly and simply try to attack the players. 

Razorlin warband objective:

• Attack the caravan and raid it for booty
• If outmatched, retreat to den, using archers and spear-throwers to cover the retreat.

That's much better! I even have time to think of some simple tactics for the razorlins—something I probably would have time to do when I'm running combat.

I've got plans to revisit The Crasta Demon, so maybe I need to include the razorlin camp in it. (It's possible I've already done this by the time that you read this.)

(Monster of the Week has a similar approach and gives its NPCs, monsters and locations motivations, which is the story-purpose for that NPC, monster or location. I've talked about Monster of the Week previously.)

Dialogue and Clues

My final takeaway is to remember that even though combat is a highly mechanical part of the game, we’re still playing a roleplaying game. While fighting, what information can the bad guys blurt out while trading blows? This might be clues as to who they’re working for (Ariadne sends her regards!), what their motivations are (Give us the books now!) or a clue to the next scene (Fall back, fall back! We’ll get them at Skull Rock!).

But as I can never remember that sort of thing in the heat of the battle, it’s worth thinking of them in advance. And if you’re designing a scenario you can clues for the monsters to say in battle.

Next steps

And now to put it into practice—first by revisiting some of my old scenarios…