Old, badly formatted RPG Blog Carnival post. Links to proper RPG Blog Carnival stuff will be in the newer posts. Mostly because this one sucks out loud.Keeping It Together: How to Keep War Compelling - Basics30 March 2009, 5:44 am(This is a post for the March RPG Blog Carnival, this month at The Book of Rev.)
So, you've got a group of PCs, and you want to run them through a war. What are you to do?
Ignore everything around them, that's what.
No, I'm not kidding. Give them a few visual cues that tell them that they're at war; they're in a transport zooming down from orbit, and they've got their laser swords and a whole stack of future-weapon wielding stormtroopers. Give them a wide intro to the battlefield, what's happening, who told them that they're there, and have their transports drop them off in a little box canyon where their objective is. The most strategic box canyon on the planet, that is a secondary objective for the whole war, and let them secure it and get into trouble while trying to clean it out. Then ignore everything that's not happening inside of that box canyon.
Why? Because your characters don't give a damn about what's happening out there, for one. And for two, it's pretty stupid to penalize them for something that happens outside of the scope of their effort. In fact, I dare say that it's downright disasterous. You can have other things happening outside that they can hear about, but don't try to draw them away then penalize them for it.
This will also cut down on the party's natural tendency to split up. You need to keep them together, in the same geographic area at least, so that they can still work cohesively. If you make them interact with only NPCs for a while and you're not able to give those NPCs depth, people stop caring. So keep them together so that they can riff on one another. If they have troops under them, make sure their troops feel like they are their own humans, even if they're canonically clones from a superior genetic specimen.
During the war, do your best not to split the party to different attack groups. Even if it means that everyone has to be a different rank but on the same level, power-wise. Most systems have a way to pull this off, but make sure the character in the "lead" is the player who isn't going to get stupid with in-game power. Those will melt a game from the inside, or the person in question will go down a hole and find a pair of friendly grenades going down after him.
So, how do you get anything -done-? Make sure that their actions affect the war. That's all. Have them meet with enemy generals. Give them the feeling that they can end the whole thing if they're just in the right place at the right time, and give them tantalizing glimpses of that moment. Make them want to jump at it.
Then, once they've got that hunger for ending the war? Let them. But when they do it, you can change the entire face of the conflict. Their initial goal will be met, but let it carry terrible unresolved issues with it that were ignored or are just obvious from positions other than theirs. Now, you can stop ignoring the periphery, because now it matters. So many new problems will have appeared that the group can't possibly handle them all, or so they believe.
This is where you let them wander. Take away what command structure they had before. Set them free, with a bit of guidance, and watch as they try to fix things, or make them worse.
Then, of course, you can bring in that BBEG you wanted from the edges of the story...
Source: An Undisciplined Oaf Quartet
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