Scenes to keep in my back pocket.

So, you need a fight/action scene in a hurry and you are not sure what to do about it. Something has happened that was not in your plans as such, and you need some way to suddenly bluster out a conflict which is fun and engaging. Maybe you are running an action adventure game and it is suddenly time to bust up some faces. Either way, it’s a fight, you have not had time to do something clever for it, and your players are expecting you to get to it now.

So, it’s good to have some basic fight structures in your back pocket that you can bust out at an appropriate moment. I design these in an essentially modular way, which means I can reskin them to be interesting in the fight I am about to have and also click together to make a full fight scene. So elements for fate I tend to keep ready to run whenever I need them, starting with the opposition:

1. 

   You are gonna want some advantage when tangling with a big guy

   Puzzle boss monster. This one is easy. If there is a big thing for them to fight then you can easily do a puzzle boss monster. The how to’s for this is very simple.

1. Give it an attack and defence stat that is very high, about 2-3 higher than your party.
2. Make that stat dependent on some other thing in the scene the players can effect. If they flip the right switches, then the stat goes down a fair bit.
3. Make its defence against create advantage a fair bit lower (at player level or one higher)
4. Give it a create advantage action on it’s initiative and an attack at the end of the round
5. If it has the advantage left from the top of the round, then it attacks every pc. If it does not then it attacks just one.
6. Give the players some pretty serious hints that the boss powers up when whatever the switch you set in step 2 is switched on.

This fight means that there is something that the players can do to neutralize the threat of a big hitter, but if they don’t do it then they will get a big smash from the big guy. It makes the consistently wail on the attack option a poor choice and encourages tactics.

Example fight I have run: There was an evil ritual with ritualist smiths playing out a “rhythm of power” on 6 magic rune anvils to corrupt a dwarven ancestor spirit into being a tentacle monstrosity. The thing had an attack and defence value of (3+ number of anvils being played) and the smiths all created advantage together on the creature for its big tentacles attack everyone attack. The players quickly found that avoiding the tentacles, draining power out of the area and killing the anvileers meant that the fight got a lot easier. 

There were also some other fighters to take care of in the area who tried to protect the otherwise helpless ritualists. When they killed a ritualist they also did stress to the monster and when they all died it was much weaker for them to kill. The players spent the start of the fight desperately weathering it’s blows and trying to drain the advantages it created and started with, then finished up romping home.

2. Horde of mooks with a leadership buff bot. This one is super simple. It covers a lot of ground for you if you want it to.

1. Get yourself a bunch of quality 1 and 2 mooks. Probably about 5-10 per pc dependent on how fighty they are.
2. Stat up 1 or two less then pc lieutenants. Give them pretty poor fighting stats, but a leadership skill and stunts to mean they just manufacture aspects on the mooks. Stuff like AoE buffs on friends, or getting more invokes on a success with style.
3. Make it so that the lieutenants are embedded in some of the squads so they can only be targeted when the squad is dead of the pcs have set up narrative permission to target them with an aspect or something.
4. Tell the players that part 3

This gives people a choice to make about how they are targeting attacks, what they are doing and who they are hitting. Also they can wade through some mooks and feel like giant badasses, since they will probably have killed like 30 bad guys by the end of the fight. The mooks with aspects are a real and present danger, but if they focus fire they can be reduced to more manageable threats. All in all a versatile sort of encounter for when the players are not facing the big bad.

Example: For this fight I had some semidivine pcs in my scion game have to fight some of the hordes of the fomori. I put out a huge squad of mooks, in that the pcs were literally standing against a hundred opponents in 10 groups of 10. (remember that this is essentially a divine themed superhero game). 

The players waded their way through to the fomori chieftains after weathering a few rounds of buffed up attacks from very dangerous squads, killed them and then waded through the remaining troops in what was a tough but memorable fight. Because there were a lot of bad guys with skill one and two, even my non coms could reliably do some damage or create advantage and felt a big part of the fight.

3. Mooks in a formation. This is a variation for well disciplined
4. , dangerous mooks. I generally give this to good quality mooks, with a leader type and a champion type in the squad. This is when the pcs have summoned the elite forces of the enemy down on them, but they are not fighting a named enemy yet.

1. Set some good quality mooks, probably 3 or so for each player.

2. 

   These lot look more trouble by being all ranked up

   Give them a lieutenant buff bot, who has a good leadership score and a stunt for creating advantage
3. Give them a champion about as dangerous as the pc’s hardest fighter.
4. Start them off with the aspect “in formation” or “defensive cover”. I don’t tend to let mooks aid each other in defence. However, for these elite mooks, while they have an aspect saying they can, they can all give aid bonuses in defence of each other.
5. Split the mooks into 2 groups, one with the champion, one with the lieutenant.
6. Tell the players that the defensive aspect is why the bad guys can aid each other in defence.

The players will hopefully soon realise that they are fighting people with a defence of 9 or so, and an attack of 9. This is nightmarish. Hopefully soon they will be trying to overcome the aspect letting them all aid each other in defence so that the big hitter can whittle the numbers down a little. Usually this ends up being a difficult fight where the pcs see the advantages of thinking about how to tactically overcome some bad guys.

For an example of this was when some pcs in a game I ran fought against a hobgoblin phalanx. They soon realized that they needed to get them out of their tight formation and defensive position if they wanted to win.

4. The “immune to damage except” fight. This fight is one where you are fighting a boss creature from an old school computer game. Specifically, it has some well telegraphed weaknesses that are the only places where it takes damage, or does not have an ungodly defence score. This is a nice easy one to set up

1. stat out a villain who can challenge the pcs in a fight (think action economy and higher skill than them). Give it less stress than you usually would since it will be ignoring some hits.
2. give it an obvious weakness
3. make it immune/highly resistant to damage when it does not get targeted in the weak spot.
4. Let the players create advantage to tag the weakness, and then I tend to not give the bonus for invoking the weak spot, just the opportunity to attack and damage.
5. Give it a super power attack every so often, that hits like a steam train but means that it also gives free invokes on it’s weakness.

This fight is all about setting people up to be aspect boosted and ready to hit the bad guy when it is possible to do so. It means players can use non fight skills to try and find and expose the weak spot so you can then hit and kill the otherwise impervious enemy. It allows you to have pcs plausibly (ish) fight extremely big bads, if they know how to hurt it.

Example: This one is the classic dragon or boss fight. Wait until he or it exposes a weak spot, then attack for as much damage as you can. I had a dragon with a weak underbelly, who would expose it (creating the exposed weak spot aspect and a tag) as a cost for using its area of effect breath weapon. 

5. The finely tuned enemy fighting machine fight. For this fight you want the enemy party to be an intricate and frightening fighting machine. Something which works together extremely well when every single cog works. The players then have to work out how to avoid that machine synching up as it will straight murder them if it does.

1. Put the main fighter in, with a fight that is equivalent to the party’s main fighter and some stunts. Favourites of mine include getting a bonus to attack when invoking multiple aspects created by their allies on themselves or getting a bonus to damage when invoking aspects created by their allies on the party.
2. Have a secondary fighter who has a stunt that when he succeeds with style on an attack he creates aspects with invokes (or two invokes if you are a bad person) instead of a boost. Give him an ability to create aspects on himself during the fight to his advantage.
3. Someone who is a create advantage monster. They have some ability to create advantage well, or give benefits to the rest of the enemy party. I had one who created advantage, gave an extra invoke when he did and then also helped (+1) a different person on the enemy side. Make sure there are clearly defined situations that they can do this, and that the players can manipulate these situations into coming up.
4. Give players some action advantage. The enemy party should be smaller than the pcs.

In the fight, the buffing machine puts buffs on the main and secondary fighters. The secondary fighters self power up. Next turn the secondary fighters attack and probably succeed with style. The main fighters then attack and do monstrous damage. Someone is sad (don’t take them out on the first cycle through). Them begin this cycle again and see if the pcs have noticed that they need to disrupt the buffs on the create advantage guy and the secondary fighters, because then the whole cycle falls apart and they can go ahead and survive with some advantage, then murder the create advantage guy. This shows players how potent team work is and gives a fight where disrupting this nonsense becomes important, as there is a real big hit if they fail to do so.

The scenery or situation:

Fight scenes are better when they happen in a dynamic or interesting area/situation. I generally want to avoid slugfests as much as possible and make sure that there are different, interesting choices every turn. So I try to put together different places or things happening for the fight scenes to keep them fresh. I am, however, at over 1500 words, so I am going to check out here and make the fight locations and how to mix and match part of my next entry.