Lately I've been thinking back at some of the more massive encounters I ran as a DM. A swarm is something I don't like to throw in too often because of how long a large battle take, but when they're pulled off right I find they can be pretty cinematic and fun as hell. I once threw a level 5 party of mine against a small goblinoid village, pitting the poor guys against 20+ goblins (I may have used the advanced template for the goblinoids, I forget), 10 or so hobgoblins and around 4 ogres just for good measure.
The human ranger, human archaeologist bard and gnome alchemist that fought them were able to hold down a couple of choke points and murder everything that lived. IT WAS EPIC! Bomb splash damage was downing guys left and right, the archaeologist was able to cripple the horde with a slow spell and the ranger was at least decent enough to not die.
Have any of you here dealt with very large encounters? Did any DMs find them difficult to balance? For those with experience, do you find that the amount of paper work makes such battles dull?
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I play a lot of superhero games (and wish I played a lot more!) and one of the fun parts of that genre is the assumption that the PCs, at some point, are going to wade through a bunch of mooks or minions, playing goonsweeper and sending two-bit thugs flying in all directions.
I love that sort of thing. It's cool to feel all powerful and stuff, and the occasional horde of lesser bad-guys can help build up the players enthusiasm before the 'big bad battle' or a frustrating puzzle or moral dilemna or whatever.
It's also a bit sand-box-y, I think, to have the party not only occasionally run into something a bit above their CR, but also to allow them to occasionally run into something that they can steamroller. Just because the party hit 4th level, doesn't mean that all the orcs, hobgoblins, etc. within a hundred mile radius despawned and were replaced by more-CR-appropriate ogres and whatnot!
With larger groups, we'd sometimes just do averages, such as assuming that X percent of the critters saved vs. an area of effect spell, or that X percent of the archers hit a given character, rather than rolling out ten attacks or twenty saving throws. Not always though. If nobody is in a hurry to 'get it over with,' sometimes rolling a handful of dice can be fun.
In 3.X, the push to make every single encounter a finely-tuned CR- appropriate nail-biter that consumed X amount of 'daily resources' or whatever kind of left that sort of thing on the wayside.
I agree with Set. It's fun to let the characters show how powerful they're getting by plowing through a horde of lesser creatures now and then.
Defending a keep or whatever, a la LOTR, can be very heroic and make the ladies like you. You can average things if it gets tedious. If it isn't tiresome for your players, kill some friggin' orcs!
Lately I've been thinking back at some of the more massive encounters I ran as a DM. A swarm is something I don't like to throw in too often because of how long a large battle take, but when they're pulled off right I find they can be pretty cinematic and fun as hell. I once threw a level 5 party of mine against a small goblinoid village, pitting the poor guys against 20+ goblins (I may have used the advanced template for the goblinoids, I forget), 10 or so hobgoblins and around 4 ogres just for good measure.
The human ranger, human archaeologist bard and gnome alchemist that fought them were able to hold down a couple of choke points and murder everything that lived. IT WAS EPIC! Bomb splash damage was downing guys left and right, the archaeologist was able to cripple the horde with a slow spell and the ranger was at least decent enough to not die.
Have any of you here dealt with very large encounters? Did any DMs find them difficult to balance? For those with experience, do you find that the amount of paper work makes such battles dull?
Battles against lots of enemies are Ok with some GM preparation.
I make a Battle Sheet with basic combat stats and separate HPs for all the enemies in kind of a column layout so I can mark off damage easily.
I have lots of generic plastic figurines in different colors from all types of different board games I have bought over the years. I will assign different styles and colors of figures for different types of enemies. For example some of the goblins might be Barbarians so I will note on my Combat Sheet the red figures are Barbarians, the blue one is a cleric, the green ones are archers, etc.
The main problem I run into is keeping track of is this the Barbarian goblin that has taken 4 damage or the one that has taken 8 damage. When the players kill one it is easy just remove it but keeping track of how hurt each figure is can get difficult.
One solution I saw was a GM I played with had a bunch of little plastic football player figurines that each had a number on their jersey. He would note the jersey number of each monster on his Combat Sheet. He got the football figurines from some football boarded game. They were handy for lots of enemies to keep track of them.
Also sometimes to simulate a large battle the enemies will come in waves or a few a round. The party might kill 50 goblins but there might never be more than say 20 figurines on the battle map at any given time.
It also makes it more interesting to mix a few bosses or bigger enemies in the fight. For example you might decide on round 6 a troll burst onto the scene which causes a lot of the goblins to back up and pause for a round.
Sometimes I use the actual Swarm rules. Later in the fight the goblins might get desperate and release the women and children on the attackers which I might handle as several Swarms. Which often can catch the characters with high armor class that are feeling invincible by surprise as Swarms do pretty much automatic damage each round without having to roll to hit. It can also cause morale questioning as suddenly destroying a tribe of raiding goblins means stomping on babies and beating kids off of your back.
These type battles tend to make the characters feel powerful as the characters are fighting individuals that are weaker then them man to man.
They are difficult to balance and sometimes I will change the pacing that enemies enter the battle if I feel I have miscalculated badly but generally I let the chips fall where they may. The players might have to dig deep into their consumable resources or even run away if things go too badly.
As a rule though I believe the game goes better when players fight enemies that are individually stronger than they are man to man. It is probably cliche but I think a boss and his lackeys is generally best for a dramatic fight, two to four enemies.
One big enemy can be tough to get right also. A single enemy that has the defense to stand up to a full group for very long often has the offense to kill a person in the party very quickly. You kind of need a boss that is stronger on the defense than the offense. If the boss is offensive slanted it is kind of like a gun fight. It is often over very quickly, someone is almost certainly going to die, and luck plays a large part in who wins.
I stole the idea of minions from 4e and threw it into a game in the form of a horde of ghouls. The party comes into a cavern where the BBEG is a "ghoul queen" and her "children" need to feed. In walks the party and battle ensued.
I agree that if the party's going to occasionally run into a CR 5 or a few CR4's at level 3, shouldn't they also hit a few CR2's or even a CR 1 from time to time?
For minions give em 1hp and have them save or not save, or half of them save vs area effect stuff. I'm currently planning a reboot campaign. The first 3 levels involve the characters fighting goblins, heading to their lair, and taking out their REAL masters, only to have the goblins counter attack and mass against the city. Inevitably they'll deal with a small horde here.
But I also like the hordes to be a real threat too. 4 minion goblins but they all have improved grapple. They surround your cleric, survive long enough to make their attacks, and suddenly the 5th level cleric is being pinned under the combined might of the swarm while up steps the 1 statted 2nd level rogue bugbear... wearing a spiked cestus...
Finally in the super hero genre, I play Marvel Super Heroes and I agree; there's something SOOO satisfying about wailing on mooks! We had a game back in High Scool and my character had lightning speed. I could use the speed in place of strength to do damage, but even then only a small amount. But our GM had a thing for goon squads. So I asked him "instead of doing 30 pts to a single guy, could I split it up and do 5 pts each to 6 guys?" He let me pull it off and Rush and his Shotgun Punch made headlines! We'd bust into a lair, our big heavy Polarity Guy would sheath himself in magnetic energy, boost his strength, and nova on the BBEG while Rush and Phantasm (a guy with a watered down version of the green lantern schtick using Force Field Generation and Mental Illusions) would rock the minions. Our final hero, Hurricane would use weather effects where needed either inflicting energy on the BBEG or mass hinderances on the mooks. SO MUCH FUN!
Ok, that tears it; this weekend I'm breaking out the old speedster (who eventually got close to a combination of Flash and Batman) for some Mach-3 justice!
Martin Ralya suggested a great idea on his blog. Total up the hit points of the smaller guys. When the total loses an amount equal to one guy, someone dies. Don't worry about who has what damage, it will even out.
Ex) players run into 20 goblins with 8 hit points each,
Total is 160 HP, and 20 will kill a goblin.
Wizard fireballs the group, and does 42 points of damage. Two are killed, and the third has 2 damage. Which one is that? You don't care, its the same as the next one who gets killed.
Martin Ralya suggested a great idea on his blog. Total up the hit points of the smaller guys. When the total loses an amount equal to one guy, someone dies. Don't worry about who has what damage, it will even out.
That is a good trick and I have used it before but only in regards to single target attacks.
Fighter hits one goblin for 5 damage and then the mage magic missiles another for 3 damage then the last one damaged dies and all the rest are still at full HPs.
I have to handle area effects like a fireball differently. If my mage throw a 42 point fireball that hit 20 goblins with 8 HPs each he expects them all to die even if they save for half.
A better example is if the Mage cast Burning Hands on 4 goblins and 2 take 3 damage and 2 take 6 damage. That is 18 damage total damage dealt so 2 goblins drop and you got 2 points of damage going toward the next goblin that gets hurt.
I think they are fun but with orcs ferocity at really low levels makes it a problem. I actually do not like the swarm rules and have more fun tracking each individually.
PF rules start to break down when you get more than a dozen PCs and NPCs in play. It's just too much accounting work to keep everything straight.
I have done large battles in many different ways. At one point I had my own battle system I had designed specifically to work with the 2e rules so that large battles could be run as seamlessly as possible with the normal rules. But I never updated those into 3.0, 3.5 or PF. Too lazy in my old age I suppose.
The last time I did anything with an attacking horde, I used a modified form of the Axis & Allies rules to work the battle out. I allowed the hordlings to stack in squares and rolled multiple d10s to determine if they "hit" and I had each hit do the same damage. Attacks on that square by a PC did damage to multiple targets more or less arbitrarily applied so that in some cases it was spread evenly among the hordlings and in some cases all damage was applied to individuals until all the damage was used up.
It worked OK. Was definitely a lot faster than rolling each attack or working out every AC.
Did you mess up your reference to your earlier sentence and mean to say "8 will kill a goblin" and therefore, the 42 point fireball kills (40/8) 5 goblins, plus a wounded one?Martin Ralya suggested a great idea on his blog. Total up the hit points of the smaller guys. When the total loses an amount equal to one guy, someone dies. Don't worry about who has what damage, it will even out.
Ex) players run into 20 goblins with 8 hit points each,
Total is 160 HP, and 20 will kill a goblin.
Wizard fireballs the group, and does 42 points of damage. Two are killed, and the third has 2 damage. Which one is that? You don't care, its the same as the next one who gets killed.
Yep, sorry. And it's actually beneficial to the wizard to kill five then to wound ten.
PF rules start to break down when you get more than a dozen PCs and NPCs in play. It's just too much accounting work to keep everything straight.
It worked OK. Was definitely a lot faster than rolling each attack or working out every AC.
I once had an OLD dragon magazine article that worked out the math behind this idea and made it a chart.
So, with a group of twenty goblins, you could roll once for the group, and compare that to the target AC. The chart would tell you how many goblins hit.
I'd love to see that again, if anyone knows where it would be.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
|
I love big, multiple-monster encounters. I've run the gamut of them. In one, the PCs had to defend a bridge to prevent the withdrawal of an enemy army while friendly archers destroyed it. That was a series-of-waves kind of fight, with small pauses in between for healing. They could get small advantages by conducting spoiling attacks on the enemy massing on the far side of the bridge, but they had to be careful doing so or else the enemy would flank around them and either rush the bridge or surround the PCs.
In another, the PCs stormed a githyanki fortress. The githyanki knew they were in the area, but were not suspecting a direct frontal assault. It was a 6-hour session, but by the end of it, about 60 githyanki were dead and the fortress was in the hands of the PCs.
In STAP, my party of high-level PCs fought a group of about a dozen hezrous. Large fights like that get real ugly when the enemy has spell-like abilities and can teleport at will. A couple of PCs died due to the hezrous' unholy blights. On the other hand, when they stormed a pirate base, they accidentally the whole base without retreating to heal or regroup. It was a massacre for the poor pirates.
An article about CR and encounter design on the Alexandrian says that encounters with multiple low-CR creatures are an often-overlooked assumption of the CR encounter design system.
I like swarm fighting and also creating a group of enemy well done that work togheter. This become a very cunny threat to players, but needs more preparation and a big table and many minis ;)
bomber alchemists make them pointless typically.
If they are too easy to kill, hordes just get boring. At least in my experience. Every once in a while to emphasise how powerful the PC's are is ok. But some adventures put them in way too often. Then it's just, "oh, more of those. just wipe them out and move on..."
Yeah, enemies should be not too easy to kill.
Bashing througth swarms of enemys gave the players the feel of "I'm a hero" and that is one of the main part of P&P RPG (we all want to play the heroantihero or?^^)
Of course if you only doing this it's boring.
Make a good mix of weak and strong monsters, this haven't to be "one low CR encounter, the next high CR ..." but mix them in one encounter, even if this brings you above the "CR XP CAP"
Adding some "Minor Minions"-Meat shield to a fight agaisnt the BBEG is more intressting then a "Player vs Boss" fight.
Of course such a fight (especially with high numbers of mobs) needs some preperation and some flexibility from the DM and the players.
I always have some preprinted "Mass Monster Sheets" prepared, with free space for Att, Dmg, AC, HP (a swarm don't really need more^^)
Our party was sent to negotiate with a village of orcs. We tried to parley from a position of strength, but soon found ourselves in a fight surrounded by the entire fighting force of the village.
At first we tried to focus on their chieftain, hoping that his death would route the others. He however was so tough that by the time he fell, his followers were enraged by his death and encouraged by his great display of orcish prowess against a party of adventurers. Much orcish blood flowed as they attempted to annihilate the small party of invaders. Fortunately they had only one shaman to harass us with spells.
Finally we somehow managed to retreat back up the road without any deaths. Later we came back with a squadron of Goliaths to clear the road, but the orcs had wisely moved camp far away.
I would love some type of horde mechanic like in the Deathwatch 40K RPG
Yes, if this thread is still alive, mechanics please?
I have used the idea of minions from 4e. I had the players walk into a room w/3 layers of monsters: a Danse Macabre skeleton (3PP created skelie variant, kind of the bard of the undead - CR 2 or 3), then peppered in 2 large skeletons and 6 skeletal minions, and finally added illusions of spectral figures.
The setup was a fortress which had sunk underground. The party comes down a side passage and hears a ball in progress in the Grand Hall. They enter to find this whole scene of a marble hall, beautiful music, and a horde of undead. The Danse Macabre has the ability to compell you to dance, and as you do the minions slowly kill you - in their twisted undead view they're stripping away your flesh so that you can forever join the party...
Anyway, the mechanics for the CR were as follows: the lg skellies were CR 1/2, so they totaled 1, and for minions I take whatever base creature I'm gimping and drop it back 1 CR, so for base skellies they drop from CR 1/3 to CR 1/4.
The actual fight was interesting. The barbarian failed his save and danced for a bit while the paladin waded in w/longsword going straight for the lg skellies, so the minions actually did more damage than the elites. The rogue hung back and fired flaming crosbow bolts, destroying 1/minion a round while the wiz/cleric (necromancer type) was actually AFRAID of an undead he COULDN'T identify (botched his roll on the Danse Macabre) so he sent his own skel champ minion in and spent the entire fight buffing it and keeping it alive.
What I figured would be an interesting fluff piece took an hour of real time and my players were very upset w/me when they figured out the 6 minion types had: 1 HP ea, same base stats/abilities of base skellies, and for mass effect spells have an encompassing, pass/fail save type as one creature (but still with cruddy saves).
Please post your mass swarm mechanics.
I agree with Set. It's fun to let the characters show how powerful they're getting by plowing through a horde of lesser creatures now and then.
Defending a keep or whatever, a la LOTR, can be very heroic and make the ladies like you. You can average things if it gets tedious. If it isn't tiresome for your players, kill some friggin' orcs!
Once ina while, a swarm game can be fun. But I wouldn't do it every adventure.
As for the lower CR thing, as much as I love the APs, one of thethings that furstrates me is that, in a level 8 adventure, all of the foes seem to be equal in challenge to the players. They never get to go to town on a bunch of level 1-2 goblins or whatever. Once in a while, its funt o be able to show how heroic the heroes are by just laying waste to a bunch of crunchy monsters.
As for a good swarm adventure, the old Man to Man Adventure: Orcslayer, had an awesome swarm battle involving the heroes rushing to defend a castle under siege. (MtM became GURPS later on).
Worth picking up for the adventure and the miniature-scale maps alone...
I love the occasional swarm battle. Once in a while, on video games, its fun to go back and one shot your way through things that gave you trouble. I does as someone wrote earlier give the players a sense of how far they've come and how powerful they are now.
I am actually trying to create an all out war for an adventure I am working on where the PCs are lower level and in the ranks/front lines. Surrounded by npc meat that they hack their way through. And basic coin flips decide the direction the battle swings in swarm vs swarm. And it will be up to them to decide to tactically retreat or fight on.