Hi,
So next session my players are going to help defend a Svirfneblin city against a Drow attack. My background story is that the Drow found a way to use the Svirfneblin as "batteries" of magic. The Svirfneblin city is protected from teleportation in and out.
The drow plan to try and conquer the city while minimizing the losses of svirfneblin lives (they need them alive). They harness a few purple worms to burrow underneath the walls.Once inside the drow army will split up, some of them will try to conquer the city and others to kidnap as many svirfneblin as possible, and use them break the magical shield to open a portal to transport them quickly to the drow camp.
The svirfneblin don't know of this part of the plan (the party failed to gather that information), but they do know of the purple worms and the drow mages, so they prepare some earth elementals to mitigate the worms and some golems to defend against the drow mages.
My questions are:
1. How do I incorporate all of this into an interesting, narrative battle using the mass combat rules?
2. How can I use the PCs (level 14 party of alchemist, monk, witch and archer magus) to effect the fight? I want their actions to actually mean stuff. Specifically the monk is a svirfneblin and has a "drow bane metal hand", I want him to be the one tipping the balance.
3. Mechanically, how to I add up the worms on the drow side and the elementals and golems on the svirfneblin?
Thanks!
I wouldn't use the mass combat rules here. It's too far outside the relatively simple situations they can handle. Rather I'd set up a number of encounters the party can participate in and let those determine the course of the overall battle.
e.g. step 1 is probably the worms breaching the floors/tunnels of the city. Elementals dying is the first warning the party might get that they're approaching (purple worms w/drow mage backup >> elementals). The party can't block all the breaches, but how fast can they reach one (just one, for simplicity) and close it?
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I'll go over ways I have done this-
1. If its a "smaller" scale combat, you can make use of "troop" units. I first encountered these in the Ironfang AP I ran. It is good for smaller scale battles that are much larger than the normal skirmishes PCs usually take part in. You could easily run about 100 vs 100 battles easily.
2. Simply have the players roll a d20 vs your d20 to determine who "wins" a round of mass combat. Have certain modifiers in place, and add subtract modifiers based on PC actions. (such as building barricades, training, planning, killing/removing enemy leaders etc)
3. my least favorite to date, Ignore it entirely, and base the outcome on how quickly the PCs can remove key threats or generals. Just describing the ebb and flow of the battle as you see fit.
Now, if you want to have actual rolls for the mass combat,
here are a few ways you can have the PCs affect this is,
1- Have them run around partaking in "special Ops" skirmishes where they combat officers/leaders of the enemy army. This would involve them being used as a scalpel to surgically remove the largest threats/coordinators of the enemy army/group. The combat would more or less be "background", and depending on how long it takes you can add more and more "reinforcements" to the enemy as their strike team is responded to and gets encircled. If they blow through key positions swiftly, you can describe how they are leaving chaos in the enemy ranks as they try to respond to threats too late and how information and chain of command is breaking down.
2- Have them act as generals/leaders and as a "reserve" force, responding to enemy threats (say, a drider or three, or something far and above the "generic soldier" the enemy is using. Such as a giant during an orc raid) when needed. They could make rolls vs enemy leaders to add bonuses or subtract bonuses to the army vs army roll(s).
3- Have them battle "troop" units of enemies, this would represent them just taking a general part in the melee, they may encounter larger threats, but likely would have a hard time getting to said threats without cutting a path through the "chod" of the enemy army/group.
As for "adding up", you could always look at CR and numbers. Add the CR of the creatures together and base it on that. CRxamount of creature= "total modifier" so, 100 CR 1s, would more or less = 1 CR 100 in this scenario.