Designing a rebellion

[zorba1994]

MY PLAYERS STAY OUT!




Can we continue? Let's...

So basically, next session, I'm going to have an elven war party invade and take over the PC's base city. They already have connections with the thieves' guild, that will be setting up a revolt. I have a full map for the city laid out. The question is, how should I play out the revolt? My original thought was to have the players basically help decide where the thieves' guild used its resources to fight the occupation, and then to quickly simulate the battles the PCs don't participate in.

How should I go about doing this/is there a better way?


Also worth noting: I've decided that a certain part of the city contains an insane necromancer that will use the ensuing chaos to try to unleash...more chaos. If the PCs don't investigate that section, then they have to deal with them too. Also, I've decided that if the PCs don't put down the occupation in X days, the empire responsible for protecting the city will come in and *help*. Except that because of racial tensions, they'll enact military rule, and go about killing/abusing elves, so that's not an optimal result for the PCs either.

EDIT:
Here is the map for the city:
http://i379.photobucket.com/albums/oo234/gamecenterpodcast/Nalthor.png

I've decided that the widest streets are 40 ft across (so, 8 squares), and the smallest ones are 5 ft across (1 square, and as a result, most major battles will steer clear of the back alleys).

[Whybird]

What I would say is that the PCs' hometown coming under occupation sounds like it could cover several sessions' worth of plot. Hell, you don't know what their response to the elven occupation is; they'll likely want to try and do at least something to stop it, and if the elves are an unbeatable foe as they're coming in but a fair challenge during the liberation that's going to jar.

So what I would do is give the PCs a more merciful time limit on the empire coming in to mop things up. Let them run missions for the thieves' guild smuggling weapons in, spying on the elves to learn about their generals' vulnerabilities, disrupting supply lines, and freeing prisoners before you actually get to the stage where there's open fighting in the streets.

Then I would run the revolution itself as another series of missions, possibly laid out as locations on the map, that the PCs can choose from. If you can, make it so that the PCs can fail a mission without dying -- so if they're breaking political prisoners loose, for example, they might succeed or fail at keeping the key ones alive. That way you can have the revolution succeed or fail in shades of grey depending on how well the players do.

You sort of have that already with the necromancer; you might also include a bunch of other individuals your PCs are at odds with (particular criminal gangs; foreign embassies; mage guilds; churches to the wrong sort of god) in the city who 'help' certain areas if the PCs don't get involved, cementing their hold on them and creating plot later down the line.

I wouldn't bother running the battles that the PCs aren't involved with at all. How the fighting goes in that area of the city is too important a question to be left to dice. Instead, have the decision be informed by what the PCs did in advance of the revolution. The map you've got is great, and is a really cool thing to lay out in front of them as the thieves' guild go "okay, we need support here and here and here, but I'd not recommend actually doing anything mechanically with it.

[Hidden Sanity]

A simple trick would be to give various combatants and units not near PCs a 'die rating' and resolve conflicts not involving PCs by rolling allied dice(Based on collective die rating) against enemy dice(based on their collective die rating.)
You can add various circumstance die for tactics and the like as you see fit.(i.e. an extra bonus for ambushes.)



I'm going to make up a story as an example:

So let's say a standard guard unit is, for arguments sake, a 1d8 die rating.
In one engagement, your thief guild spy report says there three guard units and one royal guard unit(Maybe a 1d10? 1d12? 1d8+2?) The PCs don't know.) protecting the target; the PCs could have done this one themselves, but decided to go elsewhere instead. So the PCs and the thieves patch together a force to go instead.

A standard untrained rebel unit is 1d4 with a +1 to surprise attacks

A standard rebel unit that got training from the defected captain is 1d6 with a +1 to surprise attacks

A standard Thief unit is 1d4, but has a +3 to surprise attacks, Thieves can scout/spy to increase your sides intel.

Lobo the one-eye and his little gang are 1d8 worth and +2 for ambushes, but as he's a minor story character, he also gets a special in that any ambush he plots will have a higher chance of successful being an ambush, and for every four units in a surprise attack with Lobo leading it, the attack gains an additional 1d4. Lobo and his gang can scout/spy to your sides increase intel. Lobo always escapes a failed ambush.

So the PCs get Lobo to go and lead an ambush, giving him a thief unit to help with scouting and the ambush, a trained rebel unit and two untrained rebel units, organizing a surprise attack.

The PCs do their stuff and you resolve this mission by rolling 4d4+1d8+1d6+8 and comparing it to 3d8+1d12+4(Defensive bonus as the royal guard sensed something was off due to their special of giving every unit under their command a +1 defensive bonus against surprise attacks, If the PCs had done more information gathering then they would have learned about this guards minor fame for sensing ambushes), which will determine the success or failure. You arbitrarily determine allied losses and the like based on the degree of success or failure.

It is a bit of bookkeeping, and requires some preparation, but it's a decent pseudo representation that the PCs might have fun with, and a hell of a lot quicker than playing out the entire combats. It will require some arbitrary on the spot decisions (PC asks 'well, what if we give them half the stolen explosives to use in the ambush, that should help them, right? We know someone in Lobo's gang can handle explosives because we foiled their bomb plot back when we first met them.')

[zorba1994]

Both of those ideas sound great! I will definitely be incorporating something along those lines.

[Gryffon]

If you have the option to do so, I would recommend checking out Mike Mearls "Ruling Skill Challenges" articles from Dungeon #166 + #167. They give some great ideas for running large scale battles as skill challenges, including having results in one section of the battle affect another.

[Gwic]

One of the great things about D&D is that you can blatantly incorporate other games as part of the gameplay. In that vein, I'd recommend (depending on your players' experiences and interest) using some large-scale combat game as your basis.

I'd recommend playing Risk on your map by dividing your map into neighborhoods that act as independent zones. You can quickly roll out most combats, the players probably already know how to play it, and it's easy to work in secondary elements. For instance:
- That necromancer could be a third faction/color.
- Players could be heros whose presence (each) add one die to their allies roll. (Roll an extra die when attacking or defending; it's a big bonus).
----- The elven military could have similar heroes...
- RP elements like an enemy taking a tunnel into your flank just involves moving their force's tokens around.
- Each Risk turn can equal 1 encounter.
- Let player's burn daily powers for some combat advantage
----- Healing powers could be used to revive lost units.
----- Controller powers could force an opposing force to not use a die this round.
----- Damaging powers could kill a unit for every X damage they deal.
- Holding something like the Armory or the Hospital could have other effects.
- Strategic goals/concessions can have RP consequences (abandoning the orphanage could lost them a lot of respect from the city people).

Hope this helps!

(PS - Forgive my formatting, but doing sub-bullets is tough on this txt system.)

[zorba1994]

One of the great things about D&D is that you can blatantly incorporate other games as part of the gameplay. In that vein, I'd recommend (depending on your players' experiences and interest) using some large-scale combat game as your basis.

I'd recommend playing Risk on your map by dividing your map into neighborhoods that act as independent zones. You can quickly roll out most combats, the players probably already know how to play it, and it's easy to work in secondary elements. For instance:
- That necromancer could be a third faction/color.
- Players could be heros whose presence (each) add one die to their allies roll. (Roll an extra die when attacking or defending; it's a big bonus).
----- The elven military could have similar heroes...
- RP elements like an enemy taking a tunnel into your flank just involves moving their force's tokens around.
- Each Risk turn can equal 1 encounter.
- Let player's burn daily powers for some combat advantage
----- Healing powers could be used to revive lost units.
----- Controller powers could force an opposing force to not use a die this round.
----- Damaging powers could kill a unit for every X damage they deal.
- Holding something like the Armory or the Hospital could have other effects.
- Strategic goals/concessions can have RP consequences (abandoning the orphanage could lost them a lot of respect from the city people).

Hope this helps!

(PS - Forgive my formatting, but doing sub-bullets is tough on this txt system.)

This sounds very interesting. Also, maybe defender-style powers would make it so that if your side loses a unit, you can roll a d20 and 15 or higher means that you keep the unit.

I should probably also determine a way to distinguish "dead" from "wounded". Not everyone that's a casualty dies.

[katana2665]

If I may, it doesn't sound like a rebellion, more like warding off an attack in force.

It's resistant to occupation as opposed to oppression. Those who really create rebellions generally have little to lose. They simply just don't like the way the ruling dictator or governing power run their lives.

My suggestion would be create an inner unrest already in place, maybe because there was a military coup in the dead of night. The result of which would be elite inner circle controlling a very large number of headcrusher's.

The people in there secret basement meetings could be creating the resistance, but without a military to help them, they would have little chance of winning back their city.

Hence the Elven force coming covertly to their aid.

Now it becomes a struggle for the city. Even if the PC's have a controlling interest in the previous government, you could sick the dogs on them until they kill the black hats and escape into the back alley ways in an effort to find someone that can help (the resistance). You can even have a separate adventure where the PC's have to steal out in the dark to link up with an elven command and bring them back through the sewers (which the elves would resist.

You should also look up Libyan resistance weapon factories. The build everything from scratch or rebuild those weapons that they are able to win in battle.

Good luck with it.