Encounter Pacing

Monsters on the Battlefield: A steady diet of humanoid spear-carriers doesn’t make for an exciting battlefield adventure—even if it’s “realistic” that such rank-and-file encounters comprise most of the PCs’ fighting. Some monsters make terrific (not to mention terrifying) opponents on the battlefield. Unlike their real-world counterparts, fantasy armies must face such varied threats as boulderthrowing giants (artillery), doppelganger infiltration teams, and dragons flying close air support. It’s particularly striking to take monsters out of their usual environment and “repurpose” them for the battlefield. Maybe an army puts barding on trained carrion crawlers and sends them toward enemy lines prior to a major assault. Perhaps another army loads its catapults with magic urns that each contain a gray ooze that eats away at the stockade walls when the urn breaks.

Magic Elements: Most armies use magic to give them an advantage on the battlefield, and the PCs will have to contend with enemy magic as they employ spells of their own. A battle against a squad of undead troopers becomes more difficult when they’re within a desecrate effect; do the PCs attack the undead directly or try to remove the desecration first? Or perhaps the PCs must ambush an enemy convoy—a task made much easier if they’re attacking from within hallucinatory terrain. Not every encounter needs a magic element, because the PCs bring a lot of magic to the table themselves. If you include one or two encounters where a pervasive magic element has an important influence on the outcome, you’ll stretch the players’ strategic thinking and emphasize that they’re playing a high fantasy game, not a medieval warfare simulation.

Environmental Effects: Even a routine battle becomes more tactically challenging when it takes place in the dark, in driving rain, or during a catapult bombardment. If the PCs adapt to the environmental effects you describe, they can get an edge on the battlefield. They can hide in the morning fog, for example, advance between volleys of arrows from a nearby unit, or sneak behind enemy lines during the dark. Environmental effects can add dramatic tension, too, as high winds stymie the PC ranger’s sniping efforts or rain turns the battlefield so muddy that the PCs can’t retreat fast enough to avoid a trebuchet barrage.

Complex and Multiple Objectives: When the PCs have more complex goals than “overcome the enemies,” they have a greater tactical challenge. It’s harder for highlevel PCs to seize a tower if they aren’t supposed to destroy it in the process, for example. Perhaps the PCs are ordered to seize prisoners for interrogation, forcing them to win a fight but pull their punches to leave as many enemies alive as possible. And what if the PCs are chasing retreating enemies northward when they see a single enemy flee westward on horseback? Whom do they chase?

Timed Elements: Many military plans rely on a specific sequence of events: Unit A has to seize the hill before Unit

B moves through the valley to distract the enemy cavalry so Unit C can charge the enemy’s lines. More complicated plans require simultaneous movement among different units, so the PCs must not only overcome the challenge but must do it at a specific time. For example, say the characters are defending a castle’s main gate from the battlements overhead. When a platoon of gnolls charges with a battering ram, the PCs can’t afford to take their time picking off the gnolls. They’ve got only a few rounds to kill enough gnolls to render the battering ram ineffective. The PCs know that the clock is ticking, so they’ll choose tactics that maximize their effectiveness for a few rounds (such as jumping off the battlements and engaging the gnolls in melee), even if those tactics wouldn’t be the best in the long term (because now the PCs are outside the walls and more vulnerable to attack themselves). You can also put the PCs “on the clock” for multiple encounters in a row. If they have to clear out a mountain watchtower by sunset, for example, they might have to rush past hobgoblin sentries on the trail, an ogre trying to start avalanches from the base of the watchtower, and then the bugbears in the watchtower. The time pressure isn’t as intense—it’s not an “every round counts” situation—but the players will feel a sense of urgency as their characters rush up the mountain. ENCOUNTER PACING

As you build encounters for your flowchart, consider adding some boxes that let you slow down the pace of encounters in game-world terms. If you have a typical group of PCs, the spellcasters will be out of spells after a half-dozen encounters. Depending on their access to healing magic, the PCs might be badly wounded or in perfect health. If you don’t take an active hand in controlling the pacing of your battlefield adventure, PCs left to their own inclinations can wind up in trouble because there are always more enemies to fight. If the fighters are healthy

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BATTLEFIELD ENCOUNTERS

Chapter 3 details a number of encounters that are ready-made for a box on your flowchart. • Cut supply line • Reinforcements • Destroy artillery • Prisoner exchange • Left behind • Take out the trebuchet • Get ’em out alive • King of the hill

If you use these encounters in a battlefield adventure that’s part of your ongoing campaign, you might want to replace the enemy forces described on pages 46 through 53 with ones of similar Encounter Levels that are more appropriate for the fantasy army the PCs are fighting. To design your own fantasy army, see the relevant section on page 24. pqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqrs

but the wizards are tapped out, some of your characters will go for action while others recommend rest—a recipe for splitting the party. And if the campaign stakes for the battle are high (a titanic battle between good and evil, for example), the PCs might feel compelled to continue fighting even after expending all their resources. In a typical dungeon, characters can often come and go as they please, so they have control of their game-world pacing. But the battle itself won’t be around forever (in most cases), so PCs in the adventure you’re creating don’t have that luxury.

In-Battle Downtime: You can avoid depleting the PCs’ strength and resources to a perilous level by creating inbattle downtime for them—time away from the fight while the battle continues. This concept is similar to strategic downtime (discussed in Chapter 1), differing in the degree to which the characters remain directly connected to the events of the adventure while taking a break from the actual fighting themselves. During strategic downtime, the PCs might leave the vicinity of the battle and do something besides fight the enemy; during in-battle downtime, they remain close to the action but aren’t currently engaged with the enemy themselves. You can set up both short in-battle downtimes (in which the PCs have up to an hour or two between encounters) and long downtimes (enough time for spellcasters to rest and prepare spells). Doing so gives the PCs a fair shot at overcoming repeated challenges without punishing the spellcasters or forcing the PCs to fight beyond the limits of their endurance. In-battle downtime works best as a DM’s tactic when you explain the slowing of the game-world pace with a reason tied to the game world. Here are some ways to justify in-battle downtime.

Awaiting Orders: If the PCs are taking orders from higher-ups, they might have to wait for further orders after an encounter—especially an encounter that succeeded or failed spectacularly. If a runner has to make her way through a tangle of friendly troops, find the correct headquarters tent, and wait for the commander to decide what to do next before returning to the PCs, it might be hours before they get new instructions. Even if the PCs can communicate magically with their commanders, they might have to wait a long time for new orders. The commander might be pondering a strategic dilemma, waiting for something to happen elsewhere, or simply too busy to issue new orders to the PCs right away.

Ordered to Hold: No army is perpetually in motion, mainly because it’s much harder to keep track of moving units than it is to command stationary lines. PCs who do particularly well might have to hold their positions until the rest of the army catches up (in either a geographic or strategic sense of the term). Unless an army has an overwhelming reason to hurry, most commanders will take care to consolidate gains made on the battlefield, make sure supply and reinforcements are ready for the next phase, and keep the various units that comprise the army working as a cohesive whole. That means the PCs might bide their time for several hours before the army needs their services again.

Grunt Labor: Even elite troops sometimes have to dig their own trenches. If another front desperately needs a supply wagon but the drivers are casualties of war, the PCs might get pressed into service as teamsters. You can provide in-battle downtime by giving them orders that don’t necessarily involve combat or NPC interaction but still take up game-world time.

Environmental Delays: When thunderstorms gather across the battlefield, the weather makes communication, fighting, resting, and reconnaissance more difficult and often results in delays in the plans of both armies. Bad weather is a chance for PCs to rest and make further battle plans—and you get the side benefit of using the storm to account for changes in the terrain (a mud-soaked field can be much harder to cross than dry earth) and possible changes in the enemy army (the arrival of new troops, a stealthy retreat of an outnumbered army, or the like). One obvious environmental delay is nightfall. If neither army has many soldiers with low-light vision or darkvision, it’s almost impossible to organize much more than sporadic skirmishes at night. Besides, most humanoid armies need to sleep periodically to be at their best. And even low-light vision and darkvision aren’t as good as the sort of vision allowed by ordinary daylight. Imagine yourself sneaking around a lightless battlefield, able to see only enemies and landmarks that happen to be within 60 feet of you. Even dwarf or orc armies fighting on the surface curtail their activities at night, because it’s too easy to lose contact with your comrades in the darkness. The only armies that push on despite darkness are the truly desperate and those armies that can see in the dark and never need to sleep, such as undead armies or forces made up of constructs.

Travel across the Battlefield: It might seem simple to move from a stationary army’s right flank to its left flank, but doing so can be time-consuming. The rear echelon of an army can be a chaotic place, with supply trains moving in and out, patrols questioning everyone for passwords, and old fortifications hindering movement. If the PCs are traveling to join a unit that is itself on the move, the journey can take even longer because it’s hard to find a specific unit amid the tumult of battle. Only in a rare battle will such travel take more than a few hours, so this is a better justification for short downtimes than long downtimes. (It’s hard for spellcasters to rest while they travel in any case.) But travel behind the lines typically involves neither combat, NPC interaction, nor tough decisions on the PCs’ part, so it’s a good way to provide some downtime and then get back to the action quickly.

Assigned to the Reserves: Particularly if the PCs have elite status within their army, they might get assigned to be part of the army’s reserves. Commanders generally commit their reserves only when the situation is critical—on either the verge of a breakthrough or the brink of disaster. This arrangement ensures that any task the PCs undertake