So in a couple weeks I'll be running my first attempt at a Mass Combat encounter/adventure. It will likely be the entire module is a giant battle.

So I wanted to talk about things I'm planning and then illicit advice and some tips from people who have run or played in mass combat modules before.

• So, I will have 3-4 phases of the fight as the Empire descends on the Rebel Base.
• I will have things for each PC to do if they wish, and the party will want to split up. I plan to have an air battle going on, a ground battle, and work in the base (patching up soldiers, fixing generators and weapons, etc.
• The success / failure of the PC's during their turns will alter and affect the Mass Combat Pool and Check. Success and such will mean boost dies and green dice and failures will add setbacks and purples, etc.

So, what things have you run into running Mass Combat encounters? They can be the most epic, cinematic moments in the RPG... how did you make them work well? What didn't work? Thoughts?

Thanks!

Keep on Rollin'...

Scotter23

My advice is to flowchart it out a bit. Don't just say "there's a battle.. GO!" actually determine how the battle is supposed to flow and give the players something valuable to do in each phase/encounter. If the whole Adventure is going to be the battle, plan it just as you would a normal adventure, with a mix of both combat and social encounters, that allow players to both shine and get kicked in the dump-stat.

So like:

Encounter A: Ambush at the pass (Objective: delay the Imperial column for 5 turns) Success is Upgrade to mass combat check, Failure is upgraded difficulty

Mass combat check (Success reduce village population by 1/4, Failure Village full, Advantage add a speeder to evac convoy, Threat remove a speeder, Triumph: add a squad of locals, Despair, add a squad of dissidents that actively work against the players)

Encounter B: The village evacuation (Objective: clear out the local civvies before the Imperials arrive, convince hardliners to evac load gear, set up ambush/traps for arriving Imperials) Success boost to next combat check, failure upgrade difficulty

MCC: Success = Flip 1 d-point to Light. Failure = begin next enounter with a fear check, Advantage = reduce enemy count by 1 vehicle next encounter, Threat = increase by 1, Triumph Column defended by MANPADS, Despair = Dedicated air defense vehicle next encounter.

Encounter C: Close Air Support (Objective: Cover the evac convoy as they move through the mountains)

MCC:... so on

See, you can lay out the encounters so you can do proper design and balancing while also illustrating flow and giving the battle an actual direction.

The Party splitting is kinda your call, but what you might want to kick around is to assemble some pregens (or have the players create some characters) appropriate to several scenes/encounter allowing everyone to take part in every encounter. So like the Pilot can make a trooper for ground stuff, and the troopers can make pilots for the air war. Then you can move the camera back and forth without worrying about someone getting left out.

The Party splitting is kinda your call, but what you might want to kick around is to assemble some pregens (or have the players create some characters) appropriate to several scenes/encounter allowing everyone to take part in every encounter. So like the Pilot can make a trooper for ground stuff, and the troopers can make pilots for the air war. Then you can move the camera back and forth without worrying about someone getting left out.

I won't force them to split... I just know they will. My pilot will want to take to the skies with my gunner. My mechanic/slicer will want to help repair the base and keep things going and provide support. My Jedi-types will want to repel invaders and get dirty.

So I will definitely take this advice getting some pre-gen objectives, geared towards what they're good at, so they can choose... and then have each success/failure determine what happens to the Mass Check. I like it.

I've also thought of using the squad rules from the GM Kit in AoR and give each PC a squad of helpers if they wish to lead. That might be cool.

OK, now that I know the party composition...

Try and make the encounters actually match the characters as much as possible so you can send them out together. It's ok to jump around, but I think it'll be more manageable if you can come up with a reason to keep thin in the same area for the majority of the action, as that will allow everyone to participate instead of having an odd man out.

You're actually in a really good situation.

Take an Airspeeder or Dropship that needs a pilot and gunner, and can carry troopers (LAAT springs to mind, but there's plenty of others) and have the PC's be assigned as a kind of rapid reaction force, getting assignments to run around the area tackling different problems and supporting specific parts of the battle. This can keep everyone together in the same encounter while allowing them all play to their strengths.

Go over there and get the comm station back online.

Go over there and knock out that concussion missile artillery system.

Go over there and help evacuate some villagers.

Go over there and rescue the VIP from the downed cruiser.

Get back here and keep the Gen online during a TIE Bomber attack.

Save the split up for the final base evacuation or something when frantically jumping from location to location and character to character will have more weight and feel more natural. If the entire battle is like that you'll end up with some slowdowns and awkwardness.

Squads would be recommended for encounters with big tough opposition. Tackling an AT-ST on foot, fighting those mythical 10-man minion groups of stormtroopers, sending the players out in starfighters against lots of other starfighter, so on. The point of the system is to 1)compress a lot of friendly minions in with the players to increase scale without increasing complexity, 2)leverage special effects like mission specialist to allow mediocre player areas a boost, and 3) allow the players to survive longer in really dangerous encounters. So plan accordingly. If the players can handle the encounter on their own, don't sweat the soldiers. If the players are taking on something really nasty, or you need to illustrate a bigger fight, do it.

My group must be unusual. They used the troops as a diversion during a raid on a base. I planned on 3-4 phases of mass combat, based on their battle plan.

Their plan was

1. PC's infiltrate close to base prior to mass combat

2. Troops are to engage outer patrols in large scale hit and run, meanwhile PC's use confusion to enter base after initial response force leaves.

3. PC's secure objective while troops attempt to ambush/delay the response force

4. PC's escape base while troops fade into the background.

The plan did not survive contact with enemy, as the PC's needed additional help during the escape phase and radioed additional instructions. It worked pretty well until I used a despair on the mass combat roll to knock out the rebel communications. The PC's were on edge until they could find out how many troops survived.

I've also thought of using the squad rules from the GM Kit in AoR and give each PC a squad of helpers if they wish to lead. That might be cool.

Definitely do this for the pilots. A pilot with a squad of friendly minions in tow can actually engage the enemy and is much less worried about being killed or knocked out of the fight quickly.

In my opinion, the best simple framework for Mass Combat is found in the Savage Worlds core book. Lemme summarize, then we can see how to modify and expand on it.

Each side has a Commander and a number of tokens. The larger force gets 10 tokens, while the smaller has a proportional number. In almost all cases, the Empire will have more than the Rebels. Each battle round (which can be an hour or so), the commanders make a Warfare check, with the larger force getting bonuses. The side that wins removes a token from his enemy, or more, with greater degrees of success. When a side loses tokens, the commander has to make a morale check to keep his men from fleeing. A battle will almost never result in the loss of all tokens, as one side will almost certainly retreat after a couple rounds of pummeling.
Enter the PC's. Each round, each PC makes a Fighting, Shooting, or Spellcasting roll to represent how he's doing in the battle. If he does badly, he takes a bunch of damage. If he does well, he takes less damage and gives his Commander a bonus to his command roll.

Now, that's the vanilla, quick-and-dirty version for determining the outcome of a battle in just a few rolls. That battle can be done in five minutes. We don't want that! We want Heroic Opportunities!

How we use Heroic Opportunities will depend on how specific we want to get with our objectives. Rebels do not show up just to fight, they have a couple of objectives they want to accomplish, then they want to get the hell out of Dodge. At least one PC group should be going directly after this objective, and it should have several stages. The other aspects of the battle are there for support.
So let's say the Rebels are launching an attack on an Imperial weapons factory, and attempting to kidnap or kill the Moff who's being given a tour. The factory is on the edge of a rough industrial city, with a nearby garrison, so there are a fair number of Imperial troops already patrolling nearby, with plenty more ready to reinforce. We're going to have several groups here. First, we have the elite commandos attacking the factory. They may split into two teams: one to neutralize the Moff, the other to plant explosives at key points. They need to find the Moff, defeat his security detail, dispose of him in some way, and then escape. Demolitions may wish to start things off by blowing up the parking garage and landing platform so that he can't just jump on his shuttle and escape.

So that's a decent adventure right there, but hardly Mass Combat. Fortunately, the Rebels have also seeded the city with guerrilla fighters with orders to prevent reinforcements from reaching the factory. So any PCs in this group will see heavy street fighting, and this is also where random Heroic Opportunities can come up (they don't have to be random, but they can be). Each Mass Battle round, this PC makes some sort of check to provide the Commander with bonuses. if you want to keep it that simple, that's fine. But you also have a collection of Opportunities that can give even bigger bonuses. You can use a table, with a die roll to see what comes up. You can have a small deck of cards. Whatever. These will have things like:

• Take out that walker! The squad's position has a new threat: an AT-ST walker. Using whatever they have on hand, they need to blow that sucker to pieces. Doing so gives their Commander even more bonuses.
• Hold the line, you maggots! This works best after the Rebels lose one or more tokens. Faced by overwhelming odds, some of the Rebels start to flee. The PC needs to rally them, probably using Coercion or Leadership, and preventing the loss of a token.
• Time to bag us an officer. An Imperial officer is nearby. If the squad moves fast, they may be able to overrun his position and take him prisoner. Or they could just blast him.

But wait! You also have air support! Much like the ground troops, PCs here are mostly trying to keep token loss to a minimum. Up here you have extra Opportunities, like dogfighting with an enemy Ace, or destroying ground vehicles attempting. If the Demolition team is having trouble, they may be able to send you coordinates for an airstrike, and you can hit one of their targets for them. Or, if the Moff is about to escape, you may need to destroy his rescue shuttle.
All the while, the Commander (who may or may not be a PC), has to make command rolls to keep things together. He's facing an overwhelming force from that garrison, and each token he loses makes if harder for him to prevent his troops from retreating. If he's successful, he keeps the reinforcements from reaching the factory, and the commandos have the best chance of escaping with their objectives completed. If he fails, and his soldiers rout, Stormtroopers will be flooding the factory the next round. The commando team's situation becomes desperate, and they may need to abandon the mission, or leave it partially finished. If the Moff is their prisoner, but they're still deep in the complex, they may decide to just kill him and run. The Demo team may have to choose between blowing the place up and escaping with their lives (I like to imagine a squad of stormtroopers bursting into a room to find a crazed demolitionist holding a remote, with a smile on his face. "About time you boys showed up. Let's go to Hell together." Boom.)

So, this is kind of a lot, and you don't want to use it every session. But a huge battle every now and then can be memorable. Also, since the party is split, don't be afraid to give them some NPCs to control. Make use of PC-controlled minions and the Squad rules from the Game Master's kit. Whip up some rivals that will be with each PC. When Barbara and Wallace's characters are leading the commandos, Hugh and Bradley can play a couple of those commandos. Meanwhile, when Hugh is fighting in the streets, everyone else plays a rival in his squad. Be sure to give these rivals names and little quirks, so that the players can loudly lament when they get blasted to smithereens. "Eustace! Nooo! You were so short, and had such a weird lazy eye! Sleep well, sweet prince. You'll only come up to St. Peter's shoulder, but he'll keep checking behind him nervously to see what you're looking at."