A big fight is coming up for my campaign – the Red Sashes have been weakened to the point where Ulf Ironborn is seeing them as prey. While the PCs don’t have a gang of their own (except for the Cutter on his lonesome) yet, they will be participating in the fight – to secure loot from the Sashes, to get on good terms with Ulf, and to secure a certain number of bodies for this death-essence addicted androgynous demon butcher. The Red Sashes will also be pulling as many of their allies into this fight as possible, as their own numbers are low. Many variables in play, meaning a lot of ease in determining complications. Exciting!
However, I have not done extended battle scenes much before, Blades or otherwise. So, a couple questions for the people who have – how’s it different from regular play? What should I watch out for? What tricks have you employed to make the experience be memorable, as the first major fight in a campaign should be?
(P.S. – also really looking forward to more gang details in the book. The fact that the gangs have allies and enemies of their own contributes a lot to making these groups feel like relevant and dangerous even when the PCs are just cutting their members up into ribbons.)
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I’d personally handle it like a regular heist which probably will be “assault plan”. I think the clue is to have memorable locations (araber shop, roof tops, aboard gondols, in their favorite vice-den, etc – and memorable opponents and bystanders.
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My advice is to use a map — a big one, really big, so that you don’t lose track of all the participants. Make sure the terrain has a lot of options for taking cover and ducking in and out of the fight; lots of obscurement so the PCs can’t see all the enemies, and vice-versa. Be sure it has cool interactive elements like chains to swing on, fires to kick people into, etc. so the fight doesn’t devolve into an exchange of stabs.
I’d also use a slightly more formal turn structure: after all the PCs go, any NPC/gang that wasn’t engaged by the PCs gets “initiative” and can hurt someone. That should encourage the players to spread their attacks around and not just focus fire on the biggest, baddest guy. When the NPCs act I’d try to avoid having them just attack; use those interesting terrain elements to spice things up.
Finally, nothing sets the players on their toes in a big fight like having Wave 2 of enemies show up, and then Wave 3. A long fight against “balanced” enemies is usually more fun and memorable than struggling against overwhelming odds.
Also, this sounds like it is going to generate about a bazillion Heat. Good luck!
As I am not aware of any method to be alerted to updates to a post unless you have commented on it, some people might “subscribe” to a topic with /sub so they get alerts when someone else posts a comment. In this case, I was interested in what other people might say, but didn’t particularly have any advice or comments to add at the time.
As far as maps go, I think depending on the group, having maps visible to players can sometimes be a detriment, as that interesting tactic that a player just dreamed up involving a chimney and the window on the building opposite isn’t possible because those things just don’t line up on the map. For myself, I’d much rather be able to say to the player that asks “Of course everything lines up” and let them try there insane schemes. It’s possibly less of an issue in games that don’t have “grid mechanics”, but I definitely have found that 5e D&D games have the players give much more interesting and dynamic actions if they are going from theatre of the mind than something they can see.
That said, I do like to keep a map of my own, hidden to the players, that I can roughly keep track of everyone’s general position, particularly in large combats. Then when a player jumps off a balcony, swings on the chandelier, and kicks the boss, it doesn’t matter that that’s technically 5ft more than their movement speed; however, it is a useful reminder to me that the player is no longer stood on the balcony ten turns later when it collapses.
I’d agree to having a bit more of a case of making sure everyone gets a go, but particularly given the way that no NPC technically gets a “turn” in BitD, I’d use more of the conversation approach to the turns. So the Cutter just wades in and takes on a huge group of thugs, taking half their number down, then you turn to the Lurk and say “You spot one of the thugs in the alley train their crossbow on the Cutter, taking advantage of the distraction: what do you do?”