Gladiator Campaign: Any Experiences?

From "100 quatloos on the newcomers" in Star Trek to the fighting-pits of Mereen in ASoIaF and more examples than I can recall in Barsoom, gladiatorial combats are a staple in genre fiction. I don't think I've ever used them much in games I've run, though. I've been mulling the possibility of a short gladiator-centered campaign and it has some attractions:

• A rationale for recurrent combats that are vaguely balanced and where there is no reason to worry about legal consequences (rather like dungeon-delving in that respect). Generally I don't incline to combat-heavy games, but it might be interesting as a change-of-pace.
• Mixed with chances for intrigue and out-of-the arena missions: the gladiators are guests of honor at a noble's party, they are hired to act as bodyguards, etc.

So, has anybody done anything like this? How did it go?

Not personally, but I fondly remember the running rules examples in the Avalon Hill RQ3 book about the heroes fighting to survive and escape after being captured by the local potentate to serve as gladiators. Then RQ3 had Monster Colosseum.

A period as gladiators might serve as a good extended combat tutorial in a crunchier game. And if the PCs die in training, well, nobody's got too attached to them yet, and it's easy to rationalise the appearance of new ones.

Admittedly trickier to explain the presence of D&D-style magic users - far too dangerous to keep prisoner, and too valuable to waste in the arena.

Lofgeornost said:

So, has anybody done anything like this?

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Sure, this is how we played Melee. Rather like the way En Garde! developed its social milieu, we started off with a series of pit fights but eventually we wanted to know what happened to our characters when they weren't in the arena, so first there was a tavern they all visited between bouts, which turned into a neighborhood and then a town. It all ended up with a vaguely Sanctuary, Thieves World feel. Lotsa fun.

It wasn't until Grail Quest, Treasure of the Silver Dragon, and Security Station came along that we ever even considered doing anything else with Melee and Wizard, honestly. In our heads, D&D was for fantasy exploring and Melee was for fantasy gladiators.

I have run a few games where kinda-gladiatorial fighting made an appearance...

(I've been a fan of Bloodsport since times immemorial, i.e. the 80ies, for the record).

I mean, I ran wuxia. If you don't have a leitai competition, or a Bride competition, you're failing at Refereeing.

Additionally, if you have fighters in a plate or full-body chain, how come they ain't fighting on tournaments?

OTOH, you have zero guarantees that the PCs would join, if you're running a sandbox, like I do. It's good advice to divide them in divisions, too, roughly based on how much XP was sunk in fighting skills improvement.

But let's say they did join. Fine, but how do you make it seem more than a competition to roll better than the GM? IME, you have >1 ways of making that fun.

First, use a combat system that's actually interesting, and gives you meaningful decisions!

Second, you could make the competition actually depend on a single roll (advised if it's NPCs fighting). But the PCs can gain a lot* if they guess the winner, and bet on him or her.
In this mode, PCs can also try to influence who wins. In a Mythras or Pendragon game, they can try to uncover and impact the enemy knight's Passions!
But in any game, slipping him a sleeping draught before the fight, or getting him tired in an armwrestling match, or discovering weak points in his skillset, or any plot they could come up with...it could help.
Or, you know, it could still fail. It could backfire, too, regardless of being successful or not...


*Hey, some competition might actually be political in nature! Chariot races in Rome come to mind, but nobles betting their prestige on their wrestlers isn't unheard of. And fights of champions before a battle do reportedly impact the spirit of the soldiers.

Triumvir said:

A period as gladiators might serve as a good extended combat tutorial in a crunchier game. And if the PCs die in training, well, nobody's got too attached to them yet, and it's easy to rationalise the appearance of new ones.

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Also, very much this!

I started with gladiatorial combats, since the first RPG I played was The Fantasy Trip: Melee, which just has the basic combat system, and defaults to doing gladiatorial combats.

I liked it a lot, because TFT has a hexmapped combat system where even having a couple of humans with melee weapons slugging it out is relatively interesting and unpredictable, and involves choices that matter, and it gets more interesting when you add more fighters.

It's also a great way to learn tactics (again, for a combat system where there are actually tactics to learn and improve, like TFT, or GURPS). It's a great way to get new players to a system to learn how to make competent choices in combat, with the expectation and experience of death for some disposable characters, and/or to experience the development of their character's abilities and fighting styles through actual played-out experience, and actual survival of quite-likely death and dismemberment.

I particularly liked the aspect of seeing who would survive long enough to get better from experience. That's still a core of my interest in many game types (RPGs, wargames, and computer games): having everyone trying to stay alive, having that drive their choices, having lasting effects of combat, finding out what happens and who lives or dies, by playing the game, applying tactics and responding to changes in the situation, having more experienced survivors and green replacements, etc. I like getting to experience attachment and loss, feelings of triumph, fear and defeat, etc.

I think I would lose interest quickly, if it were like D&D combat where mainly you have a level and hitpoints, and you mainly just roll attacks until one side runs out of their hitpoint pile and dies. (Not to mention games where PCs can't die . . .) Combat system matters.

And, after about 5 years, even TFT started to get a bit predictable, and we wanted more details and options etc, and fortunately GURPS came out and provided that. I am still pretty satisfied with GURPS combat, especially when tuned to taste.

I haven't but I'm looking at it because Savage World Gladiators is really good. (It's Arion who I generally like as a designer).

Triumvir said:

Not personally, but I fondly remember the running rules examples in the Avalon Hill RQ3 book about the heroes fighting to survive and escape after being captured by the local potentate to serve as gladiators. Then RQ3 had Monster Colosseum.

A period as gladiators might serve as a good extended combat tutorial in a crunchier game. And if the PCs die in training, well, nobody's got too attached to them yet, and it's easy to rationalise the appearance of new ones.

Admittedly trickier to explain the presence of D&D-style magic users - far too dangerous to keep prisoner, and too valuable to waste in the arena.

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Yeah, I think if I do this I will probably use Mythras or possibly Legend, which has a Gladiator's book. In either case, the magic would be much lower-key than in D&D.

AsenRG said:

Fine, but how do you make it seem more than a competition to roll better than the GM? IME, you have >1 ways of making that fun.

First, use a combat system that's actually interesting, and gives you meaningful decisions!

Click to expand...

Yes; one thing that got me started thinking about this was remembering playing the Avalon Hill Gladiator game back on the day. As I noted above, I'd likely use Mythras, which gives you a fair amount to do in combat. I suppose another alternative would be to look at some of the purpose-made gladiator games available nowadays, or maybe just skirmish wargames, and see if one seems a good fit.

AsenRG said:

Second, you could make the competition actually depend on a single roll (advised if it's NPCs fighting). But the PCs can gain a lot* if they guess the winner, and bet on him or her.
In this mode, PCs can also try to influence who wins. In a Mythras or Pendragon game, they can try to uncover and impact the enemy knight's Passions!
But in any game, slipping him a sleeping draught before the fight, or getting him tired in an armwrestling match, or discovering weak points in his skillset, or any plot they could come up with...it could help.
Or, you know, it could still fail. It could backfire, too, regardless of being successful or not...

*Hey, some competition might actually be political in nature! Chariot races in Rome come to mind, but nobles betting their prestige on their wrestlers isn't unheard of. And fights of champions before a battle do reportedly impact the spirit of the soldiers.

Click to expand...

I hadn't considered going into fights where the p.c.s were not combatants, but that sounds like an interesting idea. Certainly politics and intrigue could be involved 'on the sand' as well as elsewhere.

Skarg said:

It's also a great way to learn tactics (again, for a combat system where there are actually tactics to learn and improve, like TFT, or GURPS). It's a great way to get new players to a system to learn how to make competent choices in combat, with the expectation and experience of death for some disposable characters, and/or to experience the development of their character's abilities and fighting styles through actual played-out experience, and actual survival of quite-likely death and dismemberment.

I particularly liked the aspect of seeing who would survive long enough to get better from experience. That's still a core of my interest in many game types (RPGs, wargames, and computer games): having everyone trying to stay alive, having that drive their choices, having lasting effects of combat, finding out what happens and who lives or dies, by playing the game, applying tactics and responding to changes in the situation, having more experienced survivors and green replacements, etc. I like getting to experience attachment and loss, feelings of triumph, fear and defeat, etc.

Click to expand...

I'd not thought of the 'funnel' aspect that you and Triumvir mentioned, but it's a good idea. Or additionally, perhaps each player should have multiple characters all the time, to allow for larger combats. That would also allow for player-versus-player combat without things seeming so adversarial.

Lofgeornost said:

I'd not thought of the 'funnel' aspect that you and Triumvir mentioned, but it's a good idea. Or additionally, perhaps each player should have multiple characters all the time, to allow for larger combats. That would also allow for player-versus-player combat without things seeming so adversarial.

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Yeah, especially at first, but even later, you can play out NPC vs NPC combat, with players running the NPCs against each other, for learning, fun, variety, establishing background characters who feel real, adding some minor "troupe" or backup PCs, etc.

(There's an interesting independent programmed adventure for TFT, which isn't an arena game, but it features quite a few "scenes" to play out that involve NPCs in various situations, and the results pseudo-randomly determine the situations surrounding the PCs' later adventures.)

Neon said:

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My first thought when I read the thread title.

Peter Graves didn’t initially understand the humor of Airplane! when he read the script but his wife insisted he take the role. The rest is history.

You could do worse than look here, you start as Gladiators in this game
Funny enough a miniature war game was just released that is designed to support a gladiator campaign and managing a group of them

Edit to add I do like gladiator movies

sharps54 said:

You could do worse than look here, you start as Gladiators in this game

Funny enough a miniature war game was just released that is designed to support a gladiator campaign and managing a group of them

Arena of Blood

NEW GAME This IS NOT a Fistful of Lead game. This is not just a "FFoL supplement with gladiators". This is an entirely new game we are very excited about. It’s the first game outside the Fistful of Lead system for Wiley Games. Inside this rule book, you will find something familiar, yet...

wiley-games.myshopify.com

Edit to add I do like gladiator movies

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I actually owned, and played, some Man, Myth, and Magic back in the day. My memory is that it was an interesting idea, in some ways, that didn’t work out so well in practice. Arena of Blood looks interesting, though—thanks!