CF on a Grand Scale

[zerogain]

There is a serious potential in my next session this Friday for things to go from bad to worse to very very worse.  At the extreme end I see a fight of awesome proportions:

Side #1 (which has divided purpose):
2 wizards
a wizard's apprentice
a knight of the cross
2 s.i. type cops
a champion of an old god

Side #2
A white court assassin and master killer
What amounts to a grade-a wizard
His summoned creatures (2 nightgaunts from Lovecraft's Nightmare Lands)
a first rate swordsman with superhuman talents
four human acolytes.

If everything hops in the handbasket for a ride to the warm place, then the party is getting joined:

Side #3
2 ogres (minimum)
4 sylphs (minimum)
Perchange a middling Sidhe lord

Side #4
A bunch of red court vampires

Obviously if this goes the way it looks like it might, then I will be mandated to focus on where the players are at and just have the rest of it be background chaos.

Quesions:

1.  How would you handle that background chaos as background chaos?

2.  Any ideas on handling the simulation of the larger battle, other than handwaveology?

[HobbitGuy1420]

Anyone who's not directly interacting with the heroes, roll and add the average of their highest combat stats.  That's how well they're doing in the chaos - throw in snippets of background description to show what's going on.  Someone starts interacting with the characters (or vice versa), take their roll as an indication of how well they're doing, stress/consequence-wise.  Fudge it a lot, if you need to.

[cgodfrey7]

A suggestion that may help is to determine either a primary leader of each group or a random rotation of people in the group.  For the primary leader, have the rest of the people in that group following his orders, such as "Attack that ogre" or "Launch a fireball at player x" where that entire group sort of adds to what the leader does somehow, whether it be running interference, forming barriers, gathering assessments to be tagged, etc.  For the random rotation of people in the group, just focus on what the current person would do and the rest are helping somehow or milling about, then next round it is the next person in the rotation's turn to do something.  This gives the background some variety while not being overwhelming. Assuming the random group idea, if they work together, maybe add +2 to the current person's roll to signify that the rest of the group is somehow helping that person.

[sinker]

A good idea might be to add a scene aspect of "Warzone" or even "Giant CF" in addition to however else you want to run the different sides.

[deathwombat]

CF+ Cluster Froofoo?

[Motman]

I have had battles such as this in other systems.  What I normally do is have a single "captain" on a side determine the results for that side.  All of the NPCs on a side, not in direct confrontation with the PCs, have their battle and skill checks based on that captain.  If the captain rolls well on his attack, his side does stress to one of the others.  If the captain rolls poorly her side takes stress.  This would be a CF character sheet.

You can have removing stress the equivalent of killing off an NPC.  e.g. The Wizard on Side #2 takes enough stress to cause a minor consequence so he decides to take 1 or the acolytes out of the fight.  If she had to take a Severe consequence the White Court assassin is taken out.  You can determine the number of consequences and stress available to a side based on their numbers and skill levels.

The ones fighting against the characters can be taken out of the CF side of the battle and run them individually.  Of course you could still have them in the CF character sheet.  If another team causes enough stress to the side the characters are directly fighting, have a kill steal come in from behind to take them out.  "The Knight of the Cross luges at the Ogre pinning his leg to the wall with Amoracchius, as he does this the White Court Assassin strikes him in the throat with an iron dagger finishing him off!

The only difficulty I have had was trying to get a good cut off point between the CF character sheet ad individual battles.  Normally I would make the CF sheets fight each other and have the PCs fight a smaller number of bad guys and let their actions determine the outcome and/or give bonuses to the CF combat.  I have done this with 3 sides, but never 4.  Hope you figure something out.

[Sitrein]

As far as I see it, you can try to map out everything with all possibilities ahead of time and let things go from there. Problem with this: Dennis Ave. Players will always go Dennis if they can and trust me when I say they ALWAYS can. Honestly, best possible thing I can think of given the way that the DFRPG works is that you use handwaveology. You DON'T use specific predetermined mechanics for it - you don't need them. Just keep it in mind, be thinking of what would be happening about now, and then fudge it to be the most likely/fun.

In the games I run, I find that this is hands down the best way to run them. You should know all the major things but don't try and plot out every little thing. DFRPG just isn't really meant to be run that way. Just be very good at spot improvisation and don't be afraid to call for a 5min bathroom break or food break while you rework a couple things.