In the tabletop world of 4e, there are plenty of factors a DM has to consider when making an exciting encounter. The type, role, and number of monsters, the terrain the encounter occurs on or in, where the PCs and NPCs are placed when initiative is rolled, the resources the PCs should be expected to have spent when the encounter has started, rewards for finishing the combat, any skill challenges that need to be run, and plenty more. Or, at the very least, that’s what I put into my encounter planning.
Some of those buckets I keep the same in almost all the encounters I make, others I like to tweak with when ever I can. One of the latter is the terrain. For me, a good encounter always something in the terrain that provides an option or can alter the flow of the encounter for either side. Things like controllable traps, movable pieces of terrain, magic hotspots, etc are easy to spice into an encounter and are often all you need to go from a bland fight to a memorable one.
There’s something I’ve been wanting to start playing with, something that affects a lot of RPGs, not just 4e. Terrain is easy to do if you limit it to a two-dimensional abstraction. Which makes sense given the tools we have to use. Battle mats, dry erase tiles, terrain titles, virtual table tops, graph paper, or just minis on a blank table all provide amazing facilities for battles represented in 2-D. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But sometimes, incorporating some sort of 3D terrain or better creating the illusion of 3D is one of those ways to turn a simple encounter into something more. And one easy way to do this is steal something from the video game Mass Effect.
Now, if you’ll allow a fanboy a quick tangent, the Mass Effect series of games is so loaded with trope-ariffic and set piece encounters that if you’re looking for a rich vein of media to mine for your encounters, you could hardly do better than these games. For those who’ve played the second installment of the series and are 4e DMs, quick excersize. The following should be easy to imagine as 4e encounters: the final room of Mordin’s recruitment mission, the terrain for and the final fight for the Quarian’s recruitment mission, and the loyalty missions for archangel and Samara as skill challenges.
And all that is in the sequel to the game I want talk about today.
In Mass Effect, near the beginning of the game, you’re shown a tall tower where the galactic council sits. It’s a massive spire on the titanic sized Citadel space station, requiring a very, very long elevator ride to traverse. During the climax of the game (Spoiler alert), the Citadel is under attack, and your squad is trying to reach the top of the tower for the climatic battle.
The invading force has other ideas, turning the lift off. Commander Shepard, your character, blasts out the window of the lift, engages the magnetic locks on their boots, and climbs the outside of the tower vertically, all while under assault by enemy forces rushing down the tower to your position.
The fights that take place as you’re climbing up the tower are similar to the countless other ones you’ve had so far, but there are subtle clues that everything is shifted 90 degrees. When you take cover behind something, if you look down you’ll notice you’re actually on a window and you’re taking cover behind a space awning. Every so often a cut scene occurs showing the large battle ship docked to the top of the tower, showing the correct context of the tower. When play resumes, the ship is shown in a different view, from the bottom up, always looming ahead of you near the horizon, not above you.
It was a pretty impressive series of fights that gets the blood going, not because the game threw anything new at you, but just because every so often the game would remind you “You’re fighting on the outside of a tower you’re steadily climbing. You’re the biggest bad ass in the galaxy.”
So now that we’re 700 words in, how do have a fight up a tower in your 4E game? Depends.
1) Actual three dimensional play. If you’re a graduate of the Mike Krahulik school of D&D crafting, grabbing a Styrofoam cylinder or two, cutting a grid onto the surface, and using something peglike to mount your minis on is an hour’s project. Watch an episode of Doctor Who while doing this and it’ll go by in no time. Something a little less ambitious is printing out a basic grid and rolling the paper into a tube. Use toothpicks with little flags on the end and you have the same effect.
2) Fake three dimensional in only two. If you’re like me, a lot of your games take place online with a virtual table top, which can do a shared 2D grid well. Or, sometimes all you have is a battlemat, wet erase markers, and no time for prep. The ‘tower’ you’re climbing up is just a rectangle map, with the added twist that the east and west ends wrap to one another, mimicing the going around the tower effect. As DM, have the enemies move from one edge to the other, to demostrate the idea to your players and to help sell the effect.
Either way, you’re going to have a few wrinkles to deal with. Tower windows if barred will be difficult terrain, and may have defenders inside the tower shooting out or poking with a polearm. If the windows are glass, perhaps the PCs can ‘fall’ in, run up a set of stairs back out the tower, all in a physics bending ‘Portal’ type puzzle. Perhaps the enchantment only projects 4 feet away from the wall, so creature taller than that trying to walk up it will have gravity pushing down on their torsos. (Giving the PCs yet another reason to hate the gnome who shrugs this effect off). Defenders at the top of the tower may be able to throw rocks down at them, which from the PCs view will look like a rock propelled right at them. PCs could even attempt to throw enemies ‘up’, which would be ‘away from the tower’, which is ‘all the way down to the ground’.
There’s plenty of things to play with here, these are just the first things that came to mind. (Feel free to share any you come up with below) And if you set it up right and use some sacrificial minions to demonstrate the unique rules of the encounter, even if it’s just on a flat simple battle map you have players thinking about the available options if you bring the scary third dimension into play.
Mike Hasko .-._. PsychoPez
(I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite vertical combat encounter on the Citadel.)
So, in what ways have you been able to incorporate 3D effects or terrain into your encounters?
I haven’t had the chance to do any 3D yet, but my former DM (now my player) built a pyramid out of styrofoam, with 5 levels to fight on. He made it so each level cut away so we could actually play on each smaller surface area as we made our way to the top.
3D definitely adds a great extra to a battle. Your idea is interesting, and I may just steal it and see how it works out!