Making a Battle Royale fun to play

[Amnestic]

Short version: Is there a way to make an encounter with 8 groups (one of which is the player party) fighting each other that's fun in the moment beyond the concept of chaos?

Long version:
A prospective short-form campaign idea I've had was a tournament, because it's crunchy, lets people flex their abilities, lets me force a 2SR per 1LR on them, doesn't require much in the way of battlemaps and lets me mess about with terrain hazards without worrying about them making sense in the 'narrative'. Something which lasts for a few sessions, with perhaps one day of fighting/session.

The 'introductory' encounter I'd originally envisioned was a battle-royale in which a number of parties (and by parties I'm being flexible with my monsters, it's not all 'adventuring party' types) all go head to head against each other at once to earn a spot in the tournament proper - a way to thin out the applicants.

But as I laid down my little monster tokens I was struck by the unfortunate realisation that actually going turn to turn on this might be...kinda dull while still being overwhelming (in the information sense rather than in the "we're getting butchered" sense) for the players and that they might feel like they're bit-players when it's 7 DM 'parties' and 1 player party. The 7 DM parties wouldn't just be fighting the players, but also each other, to be clear, and that's part of what my concern stems from: it's the DM rolling dice against themselves but on a wider level than say...a small group of player-allies fighting alongside the players vs. some enemies. In a sense narratively it makes sense that they're not the stars of the show: they're just one of eight groups in the battle royale, but what makes sense isn't necessarily fun to play, and at the end of the day fun is the key.

It would be a lot of book-keeping on the DM's side, which I'm not necessarily averse to now, but I might be when it actually gets to running the thing.

Has anyone run anything similar to this, or any advice to ensure it's interesting to players? Is it a real concern if you were on the player side? Or is it a lost cause from the start and should I go back to the drawing board from square 1?

[KorvinStarmast]

Short version: Is there a way to make an encounter with 8 groups (one of which is the player party) fighting each other that's fun in the moment beyond the concept of chaos? Yeah play Starcraft. :smallbiggrin:

(For that large of a group you need multiple referees/GMs)
And have 7 or 8 groups of players.

[DarknessEternal]

Resolve the NPC party vs NPC party with, at most, a single roll. Even less would be better.

A DM rolling dice against itself is the most boring and narcissistic thing a DM can do.

[Skrum]

Yah just make a judgement call about what's happening to the other characters. If an NPC is interacting with a player, make normal rolls, but if they're interacting with another NPC, just have predetermined things happen.

I'd recommend that each NPC takes X damage for each adjacent enemy NPC (maybe 10?) at initiative count 0. Or maybe just have it apply to any NPC that isn't engaging a PC, representing getting hit by ranged attacks. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you can do it in less than ~1m - including some colorful descriptions of the action.

[Kane0]

Have the players handle those other teams when they arent directly involved? Like theyre a team of sidekicks or something but if the actual PCs are also on the field they revert to DM controlled opposition

[IChosePoorly]

Have the players handle those other teams when they arent directly involved? Like theyre a team of sidekicks or something but if the actual PCs are also on the field they revert to DM controlled opposition

Was going to suggest this - it's a neat opportunity to let the players use some new mechanics and abilities.

[Spo]

A DM rolling dice against itself is the most boring and narcissistic thing a DM can do.

This. The only thing that would be worse is if the non-player teams were made up of DMNPC’s.

[Eldariel]

One option is to pre-roll the NPC vs. NPC parts of the fight if they're to be stuck in the same massive battleground. Just adapt to the PC actions but follow the same shell for the NPC events (i.e. "Team 1 does X to Team 2"). This lets you just have a spreadsheet of "this happens" without handwaving the stuff and making it feel bull****/railroaded to the PCs. This is honestly what I think you have you do if you're going with the mass battle and want the on-screen stuff to use die rolls; it just all has to be done in advance far as possible so that the players don't have to spend a vast amount of time watching ~28 enemy turns to 4 of theirs.

This runs into the mass battle issue of this system; it's just not really all that fluid unless you have a computer running the NPC parties (AI programming experience? It would probably not be a terribly large task to build a makeshift system for that.).

It would be easier to do a Team vs. Team in a bracket tournament style. You can preroll all possible pairings (happily enough with 8 initial teams you're not dealing with all that many fights: 3 on the first round and 4 possible combinations for the second round if you pre-determine which are on which sides of the brackets since the remaining two play-off matches are PC matches unless they get eliminated) and then let the PCs just enjoy the slideshow, which should be suitably enjoyable especially if you get the PCs involved in some betting action and such [and afterwards make it clear that you played through them and fought them out fair and square] or let the players take time off playing one of the monster parties against another. Something that keeps the players engaged.

[Bobthewizard]

For everything that doesn't directly involve the PCs, either choose the outcome yourself if the sides are unbalanced, or use a simplified method. I like to use a coin flip to determine the winner and percent damage suffered.

So 100 orcs vs a dragon, roll a coin flip for the winner. If the sides are slightly imbalanced you can change the 50:50 coin flip to an 70:30 or 90:10 one.

Then the winner escapes with 1d100% damage, either the number of orcs that died or the damage the dragon took.

Then create a few balanced encounters for the PCs to be directly involved in, adjusting these as the background plays out and the players choose their actions.