I have been working on a new homebrew that I’m going to start up in about a month. My plan is to start off with all of the PCs fighting in a massive battle, which will be part of an ongoing war. I don’t really plan on having them fight anything very strong in the battle, just a lot of very low level enemy soldiers.
My concern is that starting with a huge battle will set the wrong tone/expectation for encounter/combat for the rest of the campaign. Or that there are negatives to doing this that I have not considered.
Just wondering if anyone on here has tried this before and what your experiences were.
The main problem is that players don't particularly like being irrelevant, so I would either set it up so they're in a skirmish that, while irrelevant to the larger battle, feels meaningful and possibly heroic for the PCs, or I'd just do the battle as a cut scene/opening cinematic, rather than something actually played out.
In something like this you have to answer the questions, what is their goal, what is their win condition, what is the lose condition.
The goal has to be something achievable by the small group in a battle that size, and it has to be clear what they can/should be attempting. It can be as simple as escaping a losing battle, Stealing intel/items in the chaos, freeing a prisoner etc.
If the fail condition probably shouldn't automatically result in a TPK.
The question is, if the battle wil lset the wrong tone for your game, then why do you want to include it?
Opening a game with a battle and having the actual game play through a battle would be a cool way to play it. Use minion rules (1 hit = dead) and make engaging with the enemy a cause for slowing them down. Make it all timing-critical - the enemy are bringing up a ram, get it destroyed. The ladders are going up too fast, stop them. Each one relies on getting there (slowed by minions) and then resolving the encounter. The battlefield becomes a dungeon - the ongoing battles are the walls, the minions to fight through are the traps, and then the main events are the encounters. Getting stuck into the battles (walls) might prove a shortcut, or it might instead make for a major delay. Suffice to say, their encounters won't wait for them! This would make the first session the battle, and would also have the capacity to make it define their campaign, depending on if the battle is won or lost.
Now, if your campaign is going to become a murder mystery, starting with a battle is, as you say, going to set the wrong tone. Whilst some things are cool (this would be cool), they also need to fit.
So what tone do you want to set for your campaign?
Make them the Special Forces unit sent to destroy a bridge, or assassinate a key enemy NPC, or otherwise doing something that only specialist troops could achieve.
If they are new players then being in a larger combat could be a fun way to introduce them to mechanics, but if they already know how to play then it's a bit empty.
I actually started a campaign where they characters were caught off guard as a foreign force invaded a sovereign nation. They were swept up in the fight and found themselves fighting skirmishes as they fled. They also managed to find a number of civillians who they took under their wing as they evaded the invaders. This was simply to be a set up for them to be pulled together. Instead, they took it upon themselves to free to people from this invading army. It was really well received and that initial session really bound them together as a force for good.
Thanks for all the feedback thus far, it would probably have been helpful for me to explain a little more on the campaign and the world it takes place in from the start, my apologies for not doing so.
Ill try to keep this as short as possible:
The camping takes places mostly in a place called the Five Kingdoms which are a conglomerate ran by "The Council." A few hundred years prior to the campaign a rift was opened and a blight started pouring through, a group of very powerful arch mages created a sort of magical force field/bubble (known as the Veil) around a decent sized section of the continent to try to contain the “blight.” At the point where the campaign starts off the rift has opened to the point that an army of “evil” has come through and is threatening to destroy the wards used to create the veil.
The arch mages need reinforcements/”cannon fodder” to slow down the evil army while they reinforce the area where the wards are, so they create a bunch of random portals throughout the realm and random people from all over drop into the battlefield. This is how are the PC will be introduced to each other.
Ultimately the Arch Mages will be slightly successful in protecting the wards, for a time at least, and the will bamf the remaining “cannon fodder” including the party out from inside the Veil. I will have someone in the party role a d100, the result of the role will determine where on the continent the party gets bamfed to.
There will be some foreshadowing in the battle of a BBEG who is leading the attacking army, but that is somewhat of a miss direction, eventually through the campaign the party will hopefully/possibly learn that there is an evil power behind the scenes controlling the Counsel of the Five Kingdoms for nefarious reasons, and while the attacking army is mostly made of “evil” beings, they are not unjustified in their reasons for attacking.
As the party travels from wherever they get bamfed to after leaving the Veil, they will start to hear rumors that the Veil has small holes starting to form in it and that “monsters” are starting to try to make their way through, they will also learn that the Council has found out that people were teleported inside the veil, and then back out, and they have sent out soldiers to find and arrest these individuals, under the guise that they might be infected by the blight.
Some of the options that will be subtlety presented to the party as they progress will be the idea of trying to repair the veil, or trying to close the rift altogether so there is no more need for the Veil. Both of these plot lines will lead them to possibly discovering that there is a evil power controlling the Council.
The party is made of 6 players, two of them are fairly experienced, two have played once or twice before(short campaigns and one shots), and two of them are brand new to DnD.
I think that the way that I would do the battle is to have them blip into an area where they are not part of the main army. Possibly prior, have them introduced the the Sgt or Captain of their group. If they are all Level 1, explain that the Sgt or Captain is an experienced campaigner (hopefully they will understand that this means they are Lv5 or Lv7 or something).
Then blip in and the Captain tasks them to investigate x or y where they can go fight some low level things and get their first fight out of the way. Then when they return to their group they see the rest of the group battling similar minions and the Sgt or Captain is laying waste (as a Lv 5 should do to goblins). They should see this at a distance, far enough away so that they cannot get there easily.
Then have a big nasty come in (from out of the forest or around some rocks) and single hit and take out the Sgt/Captain and all the rest of the group with relative ease. This should hopefully portray to your party that they should NOT fight this enemy (think of a Frost Giant attacking a group of 1st level characters). Then have others members of their same army come running past them screaming "run for your life" "there are millions of those big evil nasty" and get your group to retreat/run/regroup at another location.
Now the BIG RISK here is players will ALWAYS think they can win. So there is a good chance that they will want to take the big nasty on. So either you will have to make it painfully obvious that they should not fight it (or many of them). Possibly have another Sgt/Capt from another unit who is retreating tell them "there are too many of them, we need to save ourselves while we can. Live to fight another day."
Then go from there.
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I have been working on a new homebrew that I’m going to start up in about a month. My plan is to start off with all of the PCs fighting in a massive battle, which will be part of an ongoing war. I don’t really plan on having them fight anything very strong in the battle, just a lot of very low level enemy soldiers.
My concern is that starting with a huge battle will set the wrong tone/expectation for encounter/combat for the rest of the campaign. Or that there are negatives to doing this that I have not considered.
Just wondering if anyone on here has tried this before and what your experiences were.
Thanks.
The main problem is that players don't particularly like being irrelevant, so I would either set it up so they're in a skirmish that, while irrelevant to the larger battle, feels meaningful and possibly heroic for the PCs, or I'd just do the battle as a cut scene/opening cinematic, rather than something actually played out.
In something like this you have to answer the questions, what is their goal, what is their win condition, what is the lose condition.
The goal has to be something achievable by the small group in a battle that size, and it has to be clear what they can/should be attempting. It can be as simple as escaping a losing battle, Stealing intel/items in the chaos, freeing a prisoner etc.
If the fail condition probably shouldn't automatically result in a TPK.
The question is, if the battle wil lset the wrong tone for your game, then why do you want to include it?
Opening a game with a battle and having the actual game play through a battle would be a cool way to play it. Use minion rules (1 hit = dead) and make engaging with the enemy a cause for slowing them down. Make it all timing-critical - the enemy are bringing up a ram, get it destroyed. The ladders are going up too fast, stop them. Each one relies on getting there (slowed by minions) and then resolving the encounter. The battlefield becomes a dungeon - the ongoing battles are the walls, the minions to fight through are the traps, and then the main events are the encounters. Getting stuck into the battles (walls) might prove a shortcut, or it might instead make for a major delay. Suffice to say, their encounters won't wait for them! This would make the first session the battle, and would also have the capacity to make it define their campaign, depending on if the battle is won or lost.
Now, if your campaign is going to become a murder mystery, starting with a battle is, as you say, going to set the wrong tone. Whilst some things are cool (this would be cool), they also need to fit.
So what tone do you want to set for your campaign?
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Make them the Special Forces unit sent to destroy a bridge, or assassinate a key enemy NPC, or otherwise doing something that only specialist troops could achieve.
If they are new players then being in a larger combat could be a fun way to introduce them to mechanics, but if they already know how to play then it's a bit empty.
I actually started a campaign where they characters were caught off guard as a foreign force invaded a sovereign nation. They were swept up in the fight and found themselves fighting skirmishes as they fled. They also managed to find a number of civillians who they took under their wing as they evaded the invaders. This was simply to be a set up for them to be pulled together. Instead, they took it upon themselves to free to people from this invading army. It was really well received and that initial session really bound them together as a force for good.
Thanks for all the feedback thus far, it would probably have been helpful for me to explain a little more on the campaign and the world it takes place in from the start, my apologies for not doing so.
Ill try to keep this as short as possible:
The camping takes places mostly in a place called the Five Kingdoms which are a conglomerate ran by "The Council." A few hundred years prior to the campaign a rift was opened and a blight started pouring through, a group of very powerful arch mages created a sort of magical force field/bubble (known as the Veil) around a decent sized section of the continent to try to contain the “blight.” At the point where the campaign starts off the rift has opened to the point that an army of “evil” has come through and is threatening to destroy the wards used to create the veil.
The arch mages need reinforcements/”cannon fodder” to slow down the evil army while they reinforce the area where the wards are, so they create a bunch of random portals throughout the realm and random people from all over drop into the battlefield. This is how are the PC will be introduced to each other.
Ultimately the Arch Mages will be slightly successful in protecting the wards, for a time at least, and the will bamf the remaining “cannon fodder” including the party out from inside the Veil. I will have someone in the party role a d100, the result of the role will determine where on the continent the party gets bamfed to.
There will be some foreshadowing in the battle of a BBEG who is leading the attacking army, but that is somewhat of a miss direction, eventually through the campaign the party will hopefully/possibly learn that there is an evil power behind the scenes controlling the Counsel of the Five Kingdoms for nefarious reasons, and while the attacking army is mostly made of “evil” beings, they are not unjustified in their reasons for attacking.
As the party travels from wherever they get bamfed to after leaving the Veil, they will start to hear rumors that the Veil has small holes starting to form in it and that “monsters” are starting to try to make their way through, they will also learn that the Council has found out that people were teleported inside the veil, and then back out, and they have sent out soldiers to find and arrest these individuals, under the guise that they might be infected by the blight.
Some of the options that will be subtlety presented to the party as they progress will be the idea of trying to repair the veil, or trying to close the rift altogether so there is no more need for the Veil. Both of these plot lines will lead them to possibly discovering that there is a evil power controlling the Council.
The party is made of 6 players, two of them are fairly experienced, two have played once or twice before(short campaigns and one shots), and two of them are brand new to DnD.
Thanks
I think that the way that I would do the battle is to have them blip into an area where they are not part of the main army. Possibly prior, have them introduced the the Sgt or Captain of their group. If they are all Level 1, explain that the Sgt or Captain is an experienced campaigner (hopefully they will understand that this means they are Lv5 or Lv7 or something).
Then blip in and the Captain tasks them to investigate x or y where they can go fight some low level things and get their first fight out of the way. Then when they return to their group they see the rest of the group battling similar minions and the Sgt or Captain is laying waste (as a Lv 5 should do to goblins). They should see this at a distance, far enough away so that they cannot get there easily.
Then have a big nasty come in (from out of the forest or around some rocks) and single hit and take out the Sgt/Captain and all the rest of the group with relative ease. This should hopefully portray to your party that they should NOT fight this enemy (think of a Frost Giant attacking a group of 1st level characters). Then have others members of their same army come running past them screaming "run for your life" "there are millions of those big evil nasty" and get your group to retreat/run/regroup at another location.
Now the BIG RISK here is players will ALWAYS think they can win. So there is a good chance that they will want to take the big nasty on. So either you will have to make it painfully obvious that they should not fight it (or many of them). Possibly have another Sgt/Capt from another unit who is retreating tell them "there are too many of them, we need to save ourselves while we can. Live to fight another day."
Then go from there.