The Lord of the Rings movies had some wonderful fights. Not just visually awesome or generally cool, but genuinely exciting, with stakes and emotions and everything. To help me better design TTRPG fight scenes, I went through them and analysed what was so great about each fight, and ended up with the following guidelines.
For the purpose of this discussion, let’s ignore any opinion concerning the films’s quality – beware, I’ll be talking about some scenes from The Hobbit – and let’s just focus on the fights.
The Fellowship of the Ring
The fight outside the gates of Moria
A monstrous tentacled creature in the water interrupts a calm puzzle scene (how do you open the door?), transitioning it into a stressful combat scene that also pushes the group forward into the mines and makes it clear that they won’t be coming back through here. Nice guiding trick, but beyond that, the main lesson is some monsters are not meant to be beaten.
This monster could not be defeated, it is of too high level relative to the characters or perhaps simply defined as unbeatable by the GM. The fight against it has a narrative purpose, unlike most fights in F20 systems (“fantasy d20”, games that share DNA with D&D) which are meant to provide a gameplay obstacle. This fight it is not a challenge to be overcome, but a means to push the plot and establish an atmosphere for Moria.
The fight in Balin’s tomb (“fool of a Took!”)
Goblins are slaughtered at the entrance one by one, but then a troll arrives, and it becomes the centre of the fight. The non-combatant of the party find themselves in trouble, as the others are simply unable to protect the hobbits from such a large creature in such a small area. There are several pillars in the room that you can hide behind, but the troll breaks them while fighting, which raises the tension, and shows us that hiding behind a pillar is not a lasting solution (much like how shooting at an unending stream of goblins is not a lasting solution; the heroes have to eventually understand, the only thing to do here is run).
In addition, the room has two floors, which allows the fighters to take advantage of the height and jump on the tall monster, reach its head, and deal some serious damage. Thus the environment adds dynamism in two ways: It has multiple levels, and it changes during the fight. Both of these interact directly with the troll. True dynamism comes from combining monster and environment.
The chase through Moria
The troll is defeated, the fight against him is over, but the fight as a whole is definitely still going. A bunch of goblins start coming down from the pillars while the gang is running, then the Balor arrives and Gandalf stops it (let’s call it a story sequence that doesn’t need to be resolved through mechanics, Gandalf is obviously an NPC), then the gang has to go down the crumbling stairs while goblins shoot arrows at them. In F20, it might be better to look at each of these parts as a separate section, and maybe re-roll initiative for the section with the goblin stairs and arches, and not stick with the same initiative from the troll fight. Or perhaps it’s better to keep the same initiative count, unrelenting, turn after turn. It’s tricky, neither of these really work with the ebb and flow of tensions of these scenes (that’s because F20 isn’t generally great with tense fights).
In any case, story-wise, the entire “running in Moria” scenes form one continuous section. “A dramatic fight scene” is not the same as “encounter” – and that’s especially important to think about if you’re running F20 games where there is a clear mechanical separation between “fight” (we rolled an initiative, acting in turns) and “non-fight”.
The Two Towers
The siege of Helm’s Deep
Cool large scale battle, and the first example of some awesome things a PC can do in a huge battle scene. Aragorn throws Gimli into the orcs next to the gate in order to delay them: large scale battles can have bottlenecks, perfect places for the heroes to influence the action. The most important lesson though is that the goal in all this fighting is not to simply “kill a bunch of orcs”, but to stop them from breaching for as long as possible. This is a fight for survival – everyone tries to hold out as long as possible (until the reinforcements arrive, although they don’t know it’s gonna happen or when). You’ll notice that in the previous movie, the goal of the biggest fight was “running away”. F20 games expect us to treat fights as challenges to be overcome, but changing combat goals are key to create changing tones in play.
The Ents assault Isengard
The player character do nothing, there’s just a bunch of Ents who beat up tons of orcs and wipe the factories of Isengard off the map. It’s okay to have a dope fight scene with no player participation, if it’s cool on its own (and short). The players can just sit back and ride for a moment. In this case, literally.
The Return of the King
The attack on Minas Tirith
The mother of all battles. So big, that it needs to be divided into three different arenas: outside the city, inside the walls, and in the palace. The characters are divided between these arenas, and each one has something to do, and by and large, these are the things they are best at. What happens in the palace is not even a fight, it’s a discussion, but it is critical because the leader of the city gives terrible orders and he must be convinced otherwise. It’s a bottleneck, and it’s not combative at all. Outside the city, Legolas gets a whole Oliphant for himself to show off how cool he is, and it’s totally worth it, which means there should be a big Oliphant around to be taken down. Éowyn meanwhile has a one-on-one fight with the sorcerer-king himself, shows him who’s wearing the pants around here, and that there’s room for a dramatic duel even in the middle of a huge battle, but it really needs to be dramatic. For example, against the sorcerer-king himself.
An Unexpected Journey
Escaping the goblin caves
A notoriously weak moment, because the dwarves just keep rolling, lower and lower, one on top the other. Then they run outside and climb trees, and are saved only thanks to the eagles. Hard to say I learned much from any of this.
The Desolation of Smaug
Dwarves in barrels
Awesome scene. Silly, for sure, but that works for 75% of the games I run. The fight takes place on the move, down a specific path – the river sweeps away the dwarves, who are being chased by everyone else, orcs and elves. By frolicking from one river bank to the other, the elves get an opportunity to show how graceful they are, including by stepping on dwarves; and remember that the dwarves are the PCs, not the elves. This gives the players a new and bizarre tactical space, where they need to use their actions to move their barrels in order to allow Legolas to jump to the other bank. The dwarves can hardly fight with weapons (if they even have weapons), and the main thing they are able to do is try to steer the barrel according to the natural obstacles of the river, which they then direct against orcs. A very interesting fight.
The Battle of the Five Armies
Orcs raid Dale
Even more than in Minas Tirith, the battle in the streets of Dale felt “urban”. The civilian population was in danger and had to be taken care of, and a significant part of Bard’s actions were to try to protect civilians (including his family). This is especially noticeable in a scene that highlights two other excellent environmental qualities of a city, when Bard jumps on a cart and rolls down a street to drive his sword into a troll. The first is that the streets of a city are full of things that can be exploited; and the second is the slope itself. It’s no coincidence that all the interesting cities in Tolkien’s world (those that don’t just get burned down by a dragon, anyway) are built on top of some slope. It really used to be a common practice, because it’s easier to defend a high position, and that means that in many cities there are a lot of slanted or winding streets, which can be used for (for example) gaining momentum on an attack.
Legolas fights Bolg on Ravenhill
A collapsing tower, what a wonderful environment to fight in. This combat starts with Legolas forcing the troll to topple the tower, taking advantage of an enemy, using them to change the terrain. After he climbs the tower-turned-bridge, Bolg comes to confront him, instead of, say, picking up the elf and threatening to kill her or something. Because foes can have honor or pride, which makes them want to face you personally (and thus create a dramatic duel). If your system has rules for this, it’s even better, because this gives the players the power to initiate such moments.
The fighters are running out of tower, their arena is getting smaller, and a trick that both fighters ustalise is trying to force the other off their feet. Legolas again gets a chance to show off his elvish grace as he steps on top of falling bricks to reach (relatively) stable ground. Legolas also keeps losing weapons, because he runs out of arrows, and then he has to give up his sword, and then he only has knives left. It’s interesting, and adds a dynamic to the combat – he is required to rethink his approach each time. The part where he throws the sword to Thorin is an excellent moment as well – even though the two are fighting in different places, they can influence each other and help each other.
Thorin fights Azog
Again, Azog could have sent a thousand orcs to kill Thorin, but he wants to face him himself. Yes, a main villain has to be smart – and there’s no doubt that Azog is very smart – but that doesn’t mean he’ll never put himself in danger. A main villain can certainly be too proud, as we see here, becoming personally interested in ensuring that Thorin’s royal line is severed, to be known as the orc who did it. Azog pick up some sort of a chain-mace in preparation as the fight moves on to the ice, leading to Thorin being able to prove that you don’t mess with a dwarf when it comes to engineering – he uses the fragile surface to drop Azog into danger, just by dodging. Then Azog pulls a similar trick and proves that you don’t mess with an orc when it comes to a sheer savagery, because he slices through the ice with one swing and rips off Thorin’s leg, impaling him on the spot. Great fight.
In Conclusion
Here are the two main lessons I take from these films.
1. Nowhere in the movies do you fight just because. Each combat has some sort of narrative significance: either it flows naturally from what happened before in order to establish and maintain a tone, or it is part of a massive battle. Because of this, most fights have a goal that is not simply “defeat all enemies”. This includes the two last duels we’ve discussed: Legolas tries to save Tauriel, and Thorin wants to defeat Azog specifically.
2. Terrain is ultra-important. It needs to be malleable, either because it’s crumbling by nature (like most buildings in Middle-Earth, it seems), or because it’s ice that can be broken, or maybe it’s constantly changing because it’s a river. All participants in the fight should have some ability to change their environment, whether on purpose or by accident, and doing so should be as useful as “making an attack roll”.
This analysis isn’t over – next time, I’ll hone in on the fight against the the troll in Balin’s Tomb, which is perhaps one of the best fantasy fight scenes ever filmed.
This article was originally written for Play in Theory, an Israeli ttrpg theory blog