Exchange of Realities

For RPG Blog Carnival, again.

Unfortunately for the combat-disliking player, one of the advantages often found in war is that invading armies or civil strife can serve as an easy intense plot twist. Which often means you’ll get into a story without any idea it’s coming, and as a result build for whatever the game was billed as when it was first pitched. So it’s not unheard of to find yourself with a character who, while potentially devastating in her chosen area of expertise, is at best either weak to mass combat or just plain squishy and at worst not entirely sure which end of the sword to hold—and this character has just been thrown into a situation where not being much of a fighter gets you killed. Needless to say, this isn’t much fun, but you can’t just sit it out, can you?

What, then, is a non-warlike character to do when war can’t be avoided? It’s easy to say “improvise”, but it can be hard to tell what might be useful. Here are some tricks to keep you occupied, useful, and hopefully out of too much trouble.

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1. Propaganda. Play up your side’s virtues and the other side’s horrors, stoke the fires of heroism, hint at what might await anyone fool enough to let the other side just come in and do what they please. If your tongue is your strongest weapon, this is a useful trick to pull. While it’s particularly devastating when the opposing army wants to occupy rather than conquer (and as a result needs the cooperation of the locals), it can be used to great effectiveness as a recruiting tool or as a way to mess with a conflict in general. Used carefully, it can create or remove support for a conflict, increase or decrease the resistance of people who would otherwise be noncombatants to the foe, or bring more volunteers under a given banner. The best part (for survivability, anyway; the GM may be less than amused) is that you don’t even need to be in the general vicinity of your army.
2. Morale. It’s important that the soldiers believe they can make a difference, that they’re doing the right (or at least the necessary) thing, and that they’re going to win the next few fights or at least make the opposition wish they’d never had to fight. But it’s also true that the more an army needs someone to take care of this, the less likely they are to have such a person, particularly when the army’s on the losing end and the Glorious Leader is spending time that would usually be spent pepping the troops back up on trying to come up with maneuvers that will keep everyone alive. If you haven’t got any other job, and you think you might be able to help, stepping into this role could make you a hero in your own right.
3. Medic! Sure, the really useful healers are going to have magic, extensive knowledge, or medical technology (and possibly combinations of the above) to lean on. But a fact about armies is that there are a lot more people getting cut up (sometimes even outside of the actual battles) than people to fix them up, and either way it takes longer to heal someone than it did to make him need healing. In the healer’s tent, every pair of hands can count one way or another, particularly if the owner of the hands knows a thing or two about what she’s doing. Applying fresh bandages to people who need them, taking care of the light injuries to save the experts for the heavy ones, trying to figure out who’s badly hurt and who’s as shocked as injured—even a volunteer can make a strong showing in that, and when things get rushed she may have to. As a bonus, on-the-job training is practically inevitable. A warning—if you’re doing your rush-healing and triage on the battlefield, the job might get a bit more dangerous, and regardless of where you do it being the medic carries an abnormally high risk of tragedy. Be careful.
4. Supply management. You’ve probably heard the maxims about an army running on its stomach, and any fool knows an army needs weapons—and those are just the obvious requirements of a fighting force. Who’s making sure everyone’s got what they need? If you’ve got a head for numbers and a gift with inventory, you might serve well as one of the chosen few. Sure, there’s little glory in it, but there’s also less risk, and while civilians may forget it, the soldiers not understand it and the brass conveniently ignore it, the service you’re doing is vital.
5. Errand-running. It may seem a little desperate, but making sure that messages get from the people who send them to the people who need them is still a useful service. As an extra bonus, you’ll get to know a lot of different people in the process, a potentially useful thing for any of the preceding jobs. (Besides, if they like you, they might let you hide behind them if things get dicey. Always useful.)

And this is just the stuff you can do before the enemy really gets involved. Tomorrow, more war options for the non-warlike character, this time looking across the lines.

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