First and foremost if any of the player's from my Marvieval campaign are about to read this they should stop.
Ok, so I need a little help for my next session. PFRG, lvl 3 party, 4 players. One of my players just hired about 50 lvl 1 adventurers to help him make a raid on a "thieve's guild" at the docks. Unbeknownst(sp?) to him, he then proceeded to tell the head of said guild his plan. So the thieves know they are coming, and the higher ups are planning to throw the fight to allow the players to think that they've "cleaned up the city". My plan is to leave about 30-35 street thugs in the warehouse the players are planning to attack and then have an explosion close off all the back doors, or allow the party to start a fire the has the same result. Story-wise, I know what I want to happen, but I don't want it to appear to the players as a scripted event, because most of them are pretty experienced and can't really be trusted not to meta game in this particular campaign.
I looked into the mass combat from kingmaker but my armies are too small for those rules to really work, so I need some rules set, or formula ideas involving dice rolls that can handle this type of low scale mass combat.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
Warpath has some pretty usefull rules for mass combat, it might be a good place to start.
Reviewed Warpath, it's functional, but doesn't look to be much of a time and effort save (in terms of set up) over the normal combat since the armies are both so small, and with the PC army being rather varied in units due to their method of acquisition I would have to break the armies down even further.
Does anyone know of perhaps a more modular squad based rule set?
hmm....I hadn't considered twisting the kingmaker rules like that but i like the way that looks. much obliged Dudemeister