I have a slight problem for GMing my group's next session.
There is going to be a huge battle that the PCs are going to be involved in. They will be fighting alongside men against armies of orcs and undead. Now the thing is that the PCs are all level 9 and they've fought these monsters before when they were in the early levels.
The intention of mine is to have them slaughter tons of dudes that used to give them trouble in the past. This is of course to show them how powerful they have become over time.
What I have planned here is thus:
Each round lasts a minute instead of 6 seconds. And when a PC acts, the total damage he delivers is how many orcs/undead he has slain in that minute. For example let's say it is the fighter's turn. He rolls to hit and then rolls for damage. He does say, 30 damage. In this situation, that means he killed 30 orcs/undead in one minute. Same thing will be done for the spellcasters. They roll for damage or their area of effect attack to see how many they killed in one minute.
The enemies are rather weak compared to the PCs now and the PCs have nice AC at this point. So I rolled percentiles to see how much times the PCs were hit when it was the armys' turn. For every 10 in the percentiles I rolled, that's how many times the PCs were hit. But I divided that number by 2 for PCs that have more than 20 AC.
For example, let's say I rolled a 76 percentiles for the armies. That means that every PC got hit 7 times in that minute. (Sure it seems unrealistic, but I'm going for a 300 Spartans kind of vibe here.) But the Fighter would only take 3 hits that minute because he has awesome AC. I then would roll for damage for every hit on them.
Now I beta tested this system last session in a big skirmish encounter the PCs took part in. The problem however is that this system is wildly imbalanced in the PCs favor.
The Fighter actually kills way more guys than the spellcasters in this system. Even though the area of affect spells are powerful in a normal fight, they were only rolling around 15-45 damage/kills with their fireball spells and black tentacles. But the fighter has a STR mod of 7, so he rolls for about 25-45 damage a round, getting that many kills. Logically this doesn't make much sense seeing as the area of effect spells should be killing way more guys.
I think an easy fix for nerfing the fighter would be to just halve his damage rolls. I don't think he'd be too mad about that, so we should be good. However there are a few other problems I need to work on.
There are gonna be around 20,000 baddies and around 9,000 good guys. The good guys are all holding up in a capital city. I will be keeping a tally of how many dudes are being killed on both sides. Percentiles will be rolled to see how many peeps die on both sides per minute.
Over time, I plan on having the baddies break into the city itself and begin to force everyone to retreat. I plan on doing this after a good amount of good guys die. Like say, when there's 6,000 good dudes left then the city's walls are breached or something.
Thing is this won't be the entirety of the battle. The PCs will be fighting various Trolls and other big threats using a grid system as well. After all, it would be pretty boring if they simply just rolled dice without strategy. And alleyways/shop tiles will be added when they fall back into the city.
So now you know the plan, now for the questions. I still think the system for how many dudes they kill each round needs some editing. If you guys can help me balance that system, I'd appreciate it. I guess what I could do is keep throwing tough big enemies at the PCs until they have to retreat. And that could just be when the entire army falls back. But I don't think they know when to run. They haven't ever run from a fight this game in any case.
All in all, I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to do this. I'd be happy if anyone proposes a different system than this one or simply edit mine. After all mine is rather imbalanced right now.
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I do this kind of thing quite a lot in a Kingmaker Play-By-Post. I tend to just use the mass combat system while simultaneously providing an especially deadly group of foes for the PC's to home in on. The last time this happened their army of 50 Hellknights held a bridge against an Undead horde while they flew overhead to engage the undead cyclops' at the centre of the formation. Naturally, the PC's who landed were also subject to many attack rolls and got to slay dozens of foe's with iterative attacks, AOO's and spells if they wished; but the focus was on removing the "elites" that could potentially decimate the regular army in conjunction with a large force.
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I don't see any problem here. The goal of this battle is to make the PCs feel like badasses, which it accomplishes. I think it's fine that the fighter is doing just as well as the wizard as the battlefield should really be the perfect environment for the fighter. In fact I think the fighter could even be doing a bit better. Sure the wizard can nuke a crowd of them but spells take time whereas every swish of the fighter's arm is a death sentence for a swath of foes.
I think you did a really good job here already.
Ah so it's good now it is? Wow, alright thanks! I guess now I've just got to work on the "elites" as Alexander calls them. Yeah I guess when on the battlefield the Fighter is in his Forte environment. Didn't really think of that.
Time to design the fight then!
You can make a simple stripped down character sheet and call it a unit. Give it hit points equal to the number of men in the unit.
Or you can use the swarm template and give them ranged and melee attacks. Then call them archers, spear men, cavalry ect.
Basically you can describe what is happening. Give a simple attack and defend rolls for background units. The only thing that needs stats are what players encounter.