Running an Epic Battle

[Super Squirrel]

First, mind you, I am not currently running a Superheroic level game. Even if I was, I don't think I'd plan something like this for a while. But I'm curious how you would run an epic battle. An epic battle is when the battle lasts hours in game. It needs to tax the characters to the limit, use up their resources and pull them to the limit.

 

It should be a battle where heroes fall, recover, and fall again. The city would be evacuated. It should be of the scale that heroes outside of the city in question give up dealing with local crime because this needs their immediate attention.

 

As an example, Doomsday vs. Superman comes to mind.

 

How would you do a fight like that in Hero System?

[Rapier]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

How would you do a fight like that in Hero System?

 

I try to tend to avoid large scale battles like this. It makes for some GREAT fiction and even better movies, but as an RPG its not all its cracked up to be.

 

If you are playing WarHammer or something it can be a lot of fun. However, the impact that one single character can have when surrounded by 150,000 other combatants is pretty small. It's just struck me as kind of a blah for the players.

 

The closest I've ever gotten is a force of 50 orcs that stormed a palisade. They hacked through a number of them and I got to decide how the NPC defenders did. It was a lot of work for not much bang for my dollar.

 

So these days, we don't do that. I've never found a system I like enough and that would incorporate the players to a degree I have found satisfactory.

[Chimpira]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

I ran something along those lines many years ago. It pulled in every superhero group in America as the PC's fought to defeat an alien invasion and give a chance for freedom to dozens of worlds.

 

In the game the PC's discovered the goal that they were looking for to defeat the invaders and they concentrated on that but for them to be able to have the elbow room needed to pull this off they needed to enlist every hero team that they could find. It was pretty cool when the PC's were fighting overwhelming odds and then all these heroes started pouring into the battleplanet. There was still more than enough enemies to go around though, but this was only to allow the PC's to take center stage and concentrate on what was needed to get done. (Which if I remember correctly was to journey through five layers of defense that were all pocket dimensions, defeat or solve all problems within and free the Celestial being that was powering the planet in the first place or something like that.)

 

Now bear in mind that the PC's had been playing for a year (every week with each session lasting a minimum of 10 hours) against the alien forces so the finale had to be huge.

[BlackSword]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

How would you do a fight like that in Hero System?

Probably abstract it so that a turn is 12 minutes or so. Still make attacks rolls at apporpriate phases, but its an abstraction of the tone of the previous few minutes of the fight. (Abort to Dodge, character has been the last three minutes on the defensive).

 

If its a large scale invasion (tens of thousands of aliens invading the world vs every superhero in the world), then I would probably use the 'mass combat' rules my friends and I have used in various other games. In that case the mass combat is abstracted, and the PCs are wandering heroes. What they do will help change the course of battle. Such encounters might be facing down an NPC hero, disabling an enemy weapon emplacement or battalion, etc.

 

This all just a first blush at the issue, would work on it in more detail if the situation actually occurs.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

If you're doing a full scale, all out super fight, then there are a few things I would make note of. First, it's tricky (although you already realized that, clearly). However, you're at an advantage, because HERO is built to simulate this exactly. So here's my (number of steps as needed and I think of them) plan.

 

1. Set up. For any fight of this magnitude to mean anything, everyone has to care, be involved, and be willing to sacrifice everything to do it. I have a few fights of this type coming up, and right now the bulk of my energy is spent making the world a place the PCs are willing to die for. Once you've crossed that hurdle, you'll have a much easier time describing the things that happen around them - you'll have developed a shared language. It allows you to zoom the camera in on specific situations that highlight the trauma.

 

2. Bigger isn't better; what you want to model is what we see in film. It isn't just that the world is coming to an end - we don't need long static shots of Galactus standing around with his feet where buildings once stood. It's more important to see Galactus in motion, doing something horrible, and focusing the camera on a normal the PCs are familiar with and showing the pain/terror through them.

 

3. Once you've successfully established the scene, and the gravity of the situation, you can start building an encounter sequence that gets the PCs closer and closer to their goal. Do you want them to attack Galactus directly? Will one of his 20d6 EBs (if he's feeling generous) be enough to scare them? Is there a "solution" in addition to pounding him into the dirt?

 

4. I'm talking about establishing the dramatic conflict. For some people it's enough to model the fight, but the fight itself is far more than simply a slug fest when you're dealing with this many supers. The dramatic angle, the RP that occurs between swings and in between turns, is what makes a fight like this memorable. I'm talking about going beyond an exchange of hits, misses and powers and instilling your combat with a true sense of drama and scale that will make it truly memorable.

 

When we watch a film and there's a DNPC involved, we cut to that person and see them hanging/screaming/crying/fighting back/unconcious before getting incinerated by the leaking gas trailing towards them. If there are multiple allies in the fight, you could also reasonably be dealing with multiple mooks - people whose job it is to wear down the PCs until they are, as you suggest, batter, bruised and barely combat capable.

 

Using any of these models will get you where you're going, whether you've made the BBEG so insanely powerful that people must sacrifice themselves, if you've built them with a specific exploitable weakness that many other people must sacrifice themselves to exploit, etc. All of this is a matter of scale, involvement with the world beyond rolling dice and dramatic sense. Is any/some/none of that what you're looking for?

[MCMaenza]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

Aren't most Hero System battles long, drawn out events? Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

When I'm doing something with a lot of combatants for me to run as a GM, I tend to pre-roll a lot of dice tables (randomly generated and printed on a sheet works). That way I can breeze through what I need to for the grunts and then have more time to focus on the other aspects (the players, the major villains, the mood, narrative, etc.).

[megaplayboy]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

The mass combat rules in FH specify using no more than 30 units.

 

To me, that suggests a reasonable upper limit to how many parties can be involved in one battle at a time.

However, you could start a battle with 20 combatants, and add 5 new combatants at the end of each turn, for up to 5 turns. That'd likely make for a multi-hour combat.

Chessex makes these mats called Mondo mats. They're 4' x 8'--two of them would make a battlefield almost 100 hexes to a side. That's pretty epic. You can get the same effect by combining a few battlemats or megamats together.

Obviously, drawing up the DEX/SPD chart in advance is a must, as is filling in the map details. You should probably also include alternate entries for any character who can change their DEX/SPD, any mentalist acting on EGO, etc.

 

Keep a simple strategy list for each NPC--a short list of attacks and defenses, stun, etc. That way, you can quickly select an appropriate action and move on to the next character.

[Gary]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

Killer Shrike had some really nice rules for mass combat posted on the Fantasy Hero board awhile ago.

[Arkham]

Re: Running an Epic Battle

 

Have the opposition use guerilla tactics. Play up the hide, stalk, pounce, fight, run, stalk, pounce, fight.

 

Have a standard 1 or two turn fight, then one side hides to they aren't ultimately beaten. But then they return when they have rested, or when the other side finds them. And the fight can go on like this for a good long while. A bit of cat-and-mouse, followed by a brutal slug-fest, followed by more cat-and-mouse.