Planning a long battle of attrition in the streets of a possessed city.

[sCZot]

Hi everyone, this is my first post.

I have some experience as a GM, but I'm new to Pathfinder. The players mentioned below are my first Pathfinder group. We started at first level and are learning the rules as we play.

We recently completed an adventure with my group of four players at third level. I may have set the difficulty too high, but the players loved it. They specifically mentioned how great it felt to be low on resources and holding on for dear life. This gave me the idea for a long battle in the streets of the city, where ordinary citizens were turned into mindless creatures by a powerful curse. It's a consequence of the players' choices from the previous session, because they chose a different quest.

I want to keep my players in suspense for a long time, constantly fighting or running away to get a better position before the next horde of former citizens catches up with them.

Is that even a good idea? Won't it degenerate into slug? I've got a few ideas on how to spice it up. The survivors are hiding underground with little to no food or water supplies. Some subquests involve building or finding fortified structures to rest in. Based on my knowledge, characters may prefer to acquire valuable items, even if it means risking unnecessary danger.

I don't want to wipe out characters because of poor adventure design, but I also don't want to save them through obvious deus ex machina mechanics. I'm thinking of an event on timer. If they can't find their way out of the walled city by a certain time, or break the curse, the royal cavalry arrives to clean up the city and investigate the source of the curse. This isn't the first occurrence of such an event in the area, so the arrival of the cavalry is for a reason.

What do you think? Do you have any advice? Even if your advice is to avoid this whole idea, I'd like to hear the opinion of an experienced GMs.
Of course, any other ideas on how to keep the tension up while throwing hordes of enemies at my players would be appreciated.

Thank you

[Finoan]

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to use the Chase subsystem. Specifically this would be a combination of 'Run Away' and 'Beat the Clock'.

Various places where they could make a skill check to get some sort of resource or item at the cost of their normal skill check to make progress in the chase scene would handle that risk/reward feel of "do I just keep running, or do I try to get this thing that we may need later".

You can also intermix a combat or two into the chase. Pause the chase mechanics during the combat and/or award chase progress depending on how quickly the combat went.

[Cintra Bristol]

I created and ran an adventure with low-level characters once where they got transported into a city that had suffered a zombie apocalypse. (It was the start of a Ravenloft thing.) The PCs had to:
- escape a building as it was being overrun by zombies,
- figure out how to clamber up to the rooftops (my zombies couldn't climb),
- discover some old rope bridges that had been rigged by prior survivors,
- make their way across rooftops,
- break into a bank starting from a skylight (because it was the most fortified building in the area and had been used as shelter by prior survivors), and
- get the supplies they needed to try and make it to the edges of town and escape.

All that to say, chop it up into specific goals they can go after. What supplies do they need, and how can you help them see where to look for them? What kinds of places will offer shelter? Don't make it just a running battle, give them options they can use to escape the immediate battle, to try and sneak and evade the cursed citizenry, to find clues that help them locate the other survivors you mention.