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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen | Player's Guide
Battlecry! / How to Have a War

Onward to Victory (Points)!

Source Battlecry! pg. 202
The Victory Point subsystem is particularly well suited for war campaigns—it might not even need a change of name! Typically, you’ll want to use Victory Points when the characters have sufficient power or strategic pull to determine the outcome of the battle. Campaigns, especially about the futility or absurdity of war, should leave them out when the party can’t make the difference between victory and defeat.

Victory Points let you concretely show the group’s impact on another layer of the war. This is most often a tactical group’s impact on the operations level, with their contributions changing the fate of a particular battle, holding a key location, or even evacuating a city in time. But a group focused on building supply lines, gathering intelligence, or making strategic decisions might see their efforts (and the associated skill rolls) play out through Victory Points deciding battles they aren’t even present for.

Victory Point Scale: Wars can last for centuries or be over in a single day. So, it’s important to consider the speed at which you’re telling that story. An epic campaign can unfold in the bloody final days of a single siege, while months or years with shifting strategic goals can likewise pass in a few sessions.

Decide whether to use Victory Points and set the scale based on the time you expect it to take at the table. A series of raids to meet a strategic objective might play out as a quick encounter for the rulers of a large nation, while a tactical group might approach each raid as an adventure with its own total of Victory Points. But a longer scale is appropriate for those rulers if the process of cajoling allies to join the raids takes most of a session or they decide to lead from the front lines.

Using this structure can be a powerful tool for pacing and tone. If you’re presenting this war as a glorious endeavor, a vicious fighting retreat might be a long encounter with the PCs holding the line while their allies withdraw, accumulating Victory Points to potentially save everyone. But when focusing on the darkness of war, that retreat might stretch over an entire adventure with the Diminishing Victory Points variant, where each failure represents deaths on their grueling march to safety.

You may find yourself having to adjust this scale on the fly as players show you where their interest is. After all, the barbarian staying up to watch over the army’s camp doesn’t mean their player wants to spend hours fending off the soul-sucking boredom of standing guard and chasing down individual enemy scouts. And teleport can bring strategic personnel to the battlefield at a moment’s notice. Even after you’ve laid out the Victory Points subsystem for the players, keep in mind the barbarian’s watch might be better resolved by Perception checks, and a ruler’s Warfare Lore check might represent a battle with the enemy lieutenant.

Objectives: All sides of a battle are fighting for a reason. Even if one side’s strategic goal is complete destruction of their opponents, the fatalities of a given battle are typically in service of a more specific objective. Wanting to hold or take a location is common, as is stopping or delaying the movement of an opposing army. Even when death is a goal, it’s often an individual leader’s death rather than an entire army.

This is one of the reasons Victory Points can create a better representation of warfare than encounters alone. Just because the heroes hold a fortification or break the enemies’ morale doesn’t mean that the opposing army is wiped out to the last soldier. Although there are exceptions, most soldiers survive on both sides of the typical engagement.

It’s also worth considering these objectives on a tactical level. Even without Victory Points, this can help keep fights varied and interested, but it’s worth extra consideration when awarding points. Disrupting communications, incapacitating a general, or holding a bridge could all be worth Victory Points. Although all of them could be accomplished by wiping out swathes of enemy forces, keeping the focus on the objectives gives creative players a chance to reach them using fewer resources and ultimately contribute more to the final result.

Defeat: In times of war, no plan survives contact with the enemy. While the player characters can turn the tide of a battle or a war with Victory Points (they are the protagonists, after all), war is something bigger than just the heroes. Depending on the tone of your campaign, defeat might be a dreadful certainty or completely off the table, but putting it in the party’s hands raises the stakes.

Strategic or operational defeat can be tricky to present when the PCs are still able to fight. Focus on the actions of the NPCs around them, such as a commanding officer calling for a retreat or the common soldiers routing. It’s important to keep the players’ choices open, whether to retreat with their fellows, hold the line to assist the retreat, make one final valiant assault, or continue fighting in some other way.

Unlike tactical defeats that so often result in the party dead, larger-scale defeats can just move the campaign into a new stage. Failing to defend a city under siege means that characters who remain are now behind enemy lines, fighting more as a resistance cell than an army. Meanwhile, retreating means a chance to regroup, resupply, and recruit new allies with more focus on operational questions.