A 50 pc army vs a large group of zombies.Is this even possible with Pathfinder? How to manage such a beast? If only for a few rounds.
I'm interested in seeing all the classes operate together for a common goal,like cross a map.
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It is technically possible.
Probably not fun though.
Imagine that everyone is on the ball and can get there turn done in 30 seconds. It is still close to half an hour wait between turns without even counting the turns for the zombies.
A good way to go about big helms deep style battles is to say for narrative purposes that a larger battle is occuring while you focus on one element of the battle which covers an important tactical goal. For example, while 20,000 humans fend off 80,000 orcs, focus on an underground narrow pass that simply must be held. The orcs have sent 20 of their most elite warriors plus two ogres. This is a massive battle by pathfinder standards but manageable. If the adventurers win, the humans hold the castle. If they fall, tens of thousands of orcs penetrate the keep and all is lost.
Yeah...this wouldn't be fun to play out.
Combats already can take an hour with just 4 PCs and the enemy. This sounds like agony.
I have heard of such things being done with multiple DMs. Basically each DM controls a sector and can run a group through an encounter or series of encounters. After a preset amount of encounters are done the DMs meet and check to see how the sessions went, who accomplished what, who died, ect. After witch they can move the survivors on to round two, and so on until the final bout or the last party falls. I have honest heard nothing but good things about this format, but then again I havn't played in any so it could just be trickle down from Paizo forums and reviews. I believed Season 5 of the Pathfinder Society had a scenerio like this if you need an example, Seige of something-or-other I think.
I'd probably just use mass combat rules 99 times in 100, and the 100th time is at a convention where you actually have that many people available.
If you do, then what Kuro said is a great idea, split things up and have different GMs run smaller groups through things, and then report back to average out an overall result of the war or seige or whatever.
I have played in a game with a co-DM. You need to keep all actions simple. Summons and pets complicate things. Volume is a problem if you have 50 players all trying to get the GM's attention, especially if there is "free speech" between characters.
My suggestion is to have multiple tables, each with a co-GM, that handles several PCs. They then use a chat app to inform each other of what happens at their table. Then the main GM can proclaim what generally happens.
/cevah
Not so much 50 PC's,more like a large chess game or tournament played with Pathfinder. 50 may be too ambitious, but how would you manage a football/laser tag type/ctf game? Between 2 or 4 Is there a spreadsheet or combat tracker that I can use? Or template on how to format combat?
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Many years ago (playing AD&D) a group of us decided to run a really large scale battle. Something like 6 PCs together with a dozen or so allies attacking a castle with at least a hundred defenders.
We took a long weekend to fight the battle. Started reasonably early (9 or 10ish), lunch and dinner breaks, ended at 10 or 11 pm or so.
Didn't use ANY short cuts except to roll dice in advance wherever possible. Had a program roll lots of things for the mooks on the other side.
It was actually a fair bit of fun. But I never want to do it again :-).
On the flip side more or less the same group of players were later in the dungeon where you're meeting Lolth. In one part of that you got to go to various other worlds quite briefly. One of these was a fort being attacked by a goblinoid army led by Giants. We just calculated how much damage we could expect to do a round, how much damage we could expect to receive a round, and declared victory :-). Took us about 10 or 15 minutes of calculation together with some arguing about assumptions. It was pretty clear that we'd easily win :-).
You could certainly simplify the enemy - eg, using the Troop template (which I don't much like, but I won't get into that now) for their cannon fodder.
Let's say you had four experienced players. They could have, say, five characters each, only using classes they've played before. While a single combat round would take a long time to play out, each player gets to act five times during that round.
It would be a lot like fighting five encounters in terms of overall length.
20 PCs could have a lot of synergy, so making balanced opposition that didn't just collapse after a couple of rounds would be hard.
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eg, using the Troop template (which I don't much like, but I won't get into that now) for their cannon fodder.
The troop template is, IMHO, utterly atrocious especially for a large scale battle. All the resources that characters have spent to increase their AC (which in a battle run by normal rules is EXTREMELY valuable) suddenly become absolutely useless.
The effect is that the fighter in plate mail suddenly becomes very vulnerable. The exact opposite of the way it works if you go by the normal rules.
I have an alternative version that attacks AC. It's more complicated than using the Troop, but a lot quicker than using 20 individual mooks.