At the end of combat, the Director determines if the heroes earn any Victories. Any effect or condition on you that you suffered during combat (except for being winded, unconscious, or dying) ends if you want it to.
How Combat Ends
The Director determines when a combat encounter is over. While some battles—especially showdowns with important villains—can be about a fight to the bitter end, many other encounters can become a tedious slog if the heroes need to fight until every last enemy’s Stamina is reduced to 0.
To avoid a battle dragging, the Director can set objectives when they build the encounter. Once the heroes achieve those objectives, or if it becomes clear that they can win the fight with minimal effort, the Director can end the encounter. They might do so by calling “Cut!” like a film director, or they can use some other phrase or indicator.
When the Director ends combat this way, the players typically choose how the battle ends by narrating a dramatic finish. Or in rarer cases when the heroes achieve a major objective that sets off a story-defining event, the Director narrates the end of the battle with a positive outcome for the players, called an event ending (see below).
Objective Endings
While planning a combat encounter, the Director can set one or more objectives the heroes can achieve to end the encounter without dropping every last foe. Some broad categories of objectives are described in this section, but the Director should feel free to create their own. As well, Directors can always end combat anytime it becomes clear that the heroes are going to win an encounter with minimal effort, even if they haven’t achieved all the objectives.
Each of the objective endings in this section is explored in detail including looking at monster roles, map advice, success conditions, and more—in the Introduction section of Draw Steel: Monsters.
Diminish Numbers
The simplest combat encounter objective is almost always “defeat them before they defeat us.” Though the heroes don’t have to kill every last enemy in this type of encounter, winning the day requires that they push their opponents to the point where they are broken, flee, or surrender.
Defeat a Specific Foe
An encounter built around defeating a specific foe includes one or more of the heroes’ enemies commanding the rest, such as a hobgoblin bloodlord leading a group of mercenaries, or one or more particularly powerful foes among a group of weaker ones, such as a pair of tusker demons in a gnoll war band. Because these more-powerful enemies are the stars of the encounter, if only weak foes are left once the stars are gone, the battle loses its challenge and it’s time to wrap it up. It makes sense for those weaker foes to flee or surrender once their strongest allies have gone down.
Get the Thing!
Classic heroic fantasy is full of important objects that the heroes must protect from the forces of evil: magic rings, royal birth certificates, dragon eggs, and the like. Heroes often find themselves at violent odds with their enemies as they race to collect a valuable or important item from a guarded temple or castle, or when they need to steal the item from a group of enemies already in possession of it.
Objectives in this category work well when paired with other objectives, such as defeating a specific foe. For instance, the heroes must steal a ledger containing a record of criminal activity from an overmind and her lackeys. However, even if they obtain the ledger, the battle won’t be over until they also defeat the overmind, who won’t let the book go without a fight!
Destroy the Thing!
Combat doesn’t always have to be about destroying your enemies. Sometimes it’s about destroying their stuff! Burning a pirate captain’s vessel, closing a portal to the Abyssal Wasteland before it lets in an army of demons, or shutting down a massive kobold trap made of spinning blades could so hamper the heroes’ foes that the battle is no longer worth fighting once the damage is done.
Save Another
No one earns the mantle of hero without saving a few lives. Sometimes the point of an encounter isn’t to kill, but to save as many folks as you can. If the heroes rescue powerful allies from the clutches of their foes during combat, the added strength of those allies might be enough to make the remainder of the encounter trivial. When you and your companions save a griffon from a crew of poachers, the hunters become the… well, you know the rest.
Escort
Surprising as it may seem, sometimes the fate of the mission doesn’t rest on the heroes’ shoulders at all! Sometimes it rests on the shoulders of someone standing next to the heroes. The heroes’ job is to keep this important person safe as they travel to a specific destination.
Not every escort encounter is on behalf of a wise or mighty ally. Sometimes the heroes are tasked with protecting a helpless or even an actively troublesome creature, such as a hapless noble or a wayward child. They might even have to protect a bulky or inconvenient inanimate object. Whatever the case, the enemies just keep coming until the heroes get their charge to their destination.
Hold Them Off
Sometimes the heroes just need to buy time. They might need to battle a conquering tyrant’s army to allow innocent villagers time to escape. They might need to hold off wave after wave of zombies while a group of priests completes a ritual to lay the undead to rest for good. To achieve this objective, the heroes need to stay alive and protect a particular position for a number of rounds determined by you.
Assault the Defenses
The enemy holds a strategically important position and the heroes want it. The encounter ends when the heroes secure the objective defensive location for themselves, even if there are more enemies outside it. Sometimes an encounter with this objective is part of a combined objective, as when heroes must first assault the defenses, then hold that defensive position against counterattack.
Stop the Action
Sometimes combat is complicated by the fact that the heroes need to stop the villainous actions of their foes. It’s not enough to simply defeat the warriors in a cult. The heroes must also stop the zealots’ archdevil-summoning ritual! Or it might be that the heroes need to interrupt a wedding and make sure an evil mage doesn’t marry the heir to the throne. Despite combat, the mage forces the ceremony to continue! Objectives in this category have a timer associated with them. If the heroes don’t achieve the objective in a certain number of rounds, the conditions of the battle could well change. For instance, if the cultists summon the archdevil, defeating the devil suddenly becomes the heroes’ new objective!
Complete the Action
This encounter objective sees the characters charged with initiating an event, performing a ritual, and so forth. For instance, if the heroes are attempting to launch an airship while repelling a time raider boarding party, the encounter could be over the moment the heroes manage to activate the vessel and take off with just a few time raiders actually aboard.
Dramatic Finish
If the heroes are able to end a fight with a dramatic finish, the Director assigns each hero one or more of their remaining enemies, then asks that hero’s player to describe how the hero neutralizes that threat. The hero might deliver a killing blow, knock their foe out, or let the enemy flee with their tail between their legs (literally or figuratively). If the fight has more heroes than Director-controlled enemies, the Director can assign more than one hero to an enemy, then ask the players how their characters work together to bring that enemy down. After everyone gives a description, the battle ends.
Event Ending
If the Director calls the end of combat when a specific objective in an encounter is achieved, the event ending creates a big narrative finish. The Director can pick a narrative trigger for an event ending before an encounter begins, or can come up with one on the fly if that makes more sense.
Event endings can cover big scenarios such as the characters destroying a dam to unleash a river upon their enemies, or completing a ritual that causes all the demons they’ve been battling to be sent back to the Abyssal Wasteland, accompanied by visual details. For example, if the heroes are battling a necromancer who controls a horde of zombies, the undead might all crumble to dust when the necromancer is defeated. If the heroes destroy an eldritch machine sapping the land of its natural energy, the shockwave from the device’s destruction could vaporize the cultists attempting to protect it.
Fleeing Foes
If you’ve played a fantasy RPG before, odds are you’ve had an encounter where you didn’t chase down every last fleeing foe—and then one such foe grabbed another bunch of evil buddies and came back to ambush you. It takes only one experience like this to create players who promise, “No survivors. No mercy!” whenever foes break ranks. Chasing down every last foe can be fun once in a while, but it can easily turn a tactical encounter into a slog.
Luckily, this is a heroic game. Although the Director can surprise the players with dramatic reveals and twisty-turny stories, “Gotcha!” moments that make players suspicious of every fleeing bandit shouldn’t be part of those stories. If a bandit is fleeing an encounter, they’re running away to rethink their life. If they’re going for help, the players should get some sense of that—for example, the bandit screaming at the top of their lungs for help as they run toward their leader’s tent. That way, the players can process what’s happening, and will understand that stopping that fleeing bandit is part of the challenge of the encounter.