Endless Hordes


Homebrew and House Rules


Hey all,

I was wondering if anyone had come up with rules for dealing with endless hordes in pathfinder or 3.5
The kind of setup - a beleaguered group of PCs desperately trying to hold off a never ending horde of monsters while the rogue frantically tries to unlock the very solid door so they can escape.

Basically i'm trying to establish a set XP for an encounter with an unspecified number of monsters.

All help welcome!


Lawmonger wrote:

Hey all,

I was wondering if anyone had come up with rules for dealing with endless hordes in pathfinder or 3.5
The kind of setup - a beleaguered group of PCs desperately trying to hold off a never ending horde of monsters while the rogue frantically tries to unlock the very solid door so they can escape.

Basically i'm trying to establish a set XP for an encounter with an unspecified number of monsters.

All help welcome!

Bump for this!

How are you doing your horde? What is the mechanic for more baddies showing up?

The Exchange

As far as I know, PF has never dealt with this kind of mechanic, but in D&D 3.5's Cityscape you will find rules for "mobs" which borrow heavily from the swarm subtype. It's a good way to reduce the huge number of die rolls and XP awards involved in a Thermopylae* situation.

(*Ref: Battle of Thermopylae, most recently memorialized (in a way) by the comic & movie 300.)


Vuvu wrote:


How are you doing your horde? What is the mechanic for more baddies showing up?

Haven't tested it (i may be in the wrong part of the boards :-s) but i was planning d6 monsters appear per round.

If i assume that thats 3.5 monsters per round and it will take N rounds for rogue to get the door open then that leads to:

xp total = 3.5xXPxN

But i wondered if anyone had come up with a better, probably more balanced, method.
What im going for is a sense of panic and dread not a TPK.


Lawmonger wrote:

Hey all,

I was wondering if anyone had come up with rules for dealing with endless hordes in pathfinder or 3.5
The kind of setup - a beleaguered group of PCs desperately trying to hold off a never ending horde of monsters while the rogue frantically tries to unlock the very solid door so they can escape.

Basically i'm trying to establish a set XP for an encounter with an unspecified number of monsters.

All help welcome!

Are you PFS GMing? If not, just dictate the XP amount. You can have a literal endless monster supply and not get excessive XP from the encounter this way.

If you are PFS GMing, what I would say is that you have a set number of combatants, with all XP based on the total number of combatants, and that the success of lockpicking constitutes the successful completion of the encounter and full XP. Typically, though, this results in excessively large XP values unless you somehow compensate, such as having APL-3 or so monsters in your horde, which means you could reasonably see your players deciding to just kill them outright, which defeats the whole purpose.

You have to really work to make the "run away" option seem like the best choice for any party, in my experience. Most will gleefully wade into combat if it seems like even a remote possibility of success. This was something discussed in another thread, as well.


I'd be careful with mobs as they are pretty dangerous. Off the top of my head I remember a simple mob of commoners being a CR 8 and doing like 3D8 per round. Unless your players are pretty high level, this can either rip them apart pretty quick.

You could instead come up with a large scale combat system, maybe using the characters CMB as the base roll (give bonuses due to spells or special abilities), against a chart of your creation. The better they roll, the more monsters they take out and the less damage they take, with bonuses or penalties being applied to the rogue picking the lock, as a low roll indicates a monster or two getting through the line and giving them some grief, while a high roll might be a minute of absolutely no distractions.

I'd suggest
CMB result
0-10: killed 1d4 monsters, but took 3d6 damage, rogue takes a -2 penalty to Disable Device and 2d4 damage
11-15: killed 1d8 monsters, took 2d6 damage, rogue takes a -1 penalty to Disable Device and 1d6 damage
16-20: killed 2d6 monsters, took 1d8 damage, rogue takes a -1 penalty to Disable Device
21-25: killed 3d6 monsters, took 1d4 damage.

adjust the numbers to fit the capabilities of your party and decide how many rounds of mass combat are needed and go from there. I would also suggest suitably epic descriptions of the eviseration of mass enemies, to make the players feel even more bad arse and heroic.


@ Lincoln Hills - I hadnt considered Mobs, thanks! Re thermopylae, Herodotus' account is better than both :)

@ Serisan - i'm not gming for PFS but i think its a mechanic worth looking into - its rather a fantasy/horror staple after all. Thankfull the fact that the horde'll be chasing them the way they want to go and the fact that my group are both used to the idea of running away and all pretty attached to their PCs will help. Besides opening the door is just my example as its what i intend to do specifically but what im hoping is to produce some quick and dirty rules that could work for "survive till dawn against the undead horde style encounters" - no escape just wait for the sun to rise and incinerate the horde of vampire spawn/ wights whatever...


I'll give this one bump.

Anyone got any further ideas?

Grand Lodge

This is pretty easily handled by GM discretion. As soon as the PC's are confident the tide is beginning turning to their side, add more fresh screaming angry foes. You should have these enemies be 1 or 2 CR below the party level.

As for experience, maybe multiply by 1.5 because you've extended one combat sequence, giving limited abilities to heal up? Depends how hard it is.

EDIT: Is it wrong that this thread reminds me of the original Starcraft "Buy enough time for the refugees" mission? XD


@KesslerGunner - thats more or less what i had in mind, that and the LotR scene in the mines of Moria, before the troll turns up...


I Recently Did Something Like This Actually. There Were 7 Goblins (with various class levels) Initially Against A Duo Of PC's. They Had To Display An Awesome Amount Of Force To Knock Over A Giant Tree To Cross A Swamp, While Every Round An Additional (random) Goblin Showed Up. At One Point, One Of The PC's Tried To Call Them Out And Use Himself As A Decoy, So I rolled Something Like 2D6+1 For Every 5 Points On His Intimidate Check.
Hope It Helps.

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