Massive Attack; how to handle?

[Djibriel]

In an upcoming Eberron campaign, my PCs will be defending a small town in the jungle from a hostile force of many low-level adversaries and a few creatures with a higher CR. The PCs are level 7 (three melee-ish types and a Telepath), the many Poison Dusk Lizardmen are all normal ECL 1 and the assorted creature henchmen range from CR 1 to CR 3.

The town itself is surrounded by an electric fence with a significantly lethal current running through it (the PCs won't want to touch it, lethal to most NPCs from the get-go). The assorted creature henchmen are therefor designed to fly and/or burrow and thus allow Poison Dusks entry. Not all civilians live within the fence; a big part of the commotion will be the commoners outside trying to get inside while the local LE law enforcers will try to keep them out as per the law. The area within the fence is sold at a high price by an oppressive member of House Kundarak.

The above is just to give you a bit of a feel of the situation. The thing is, neither I nor my group have any experience with such a big situation. There will be many variables, many fights that don't involve the PCs and a lot of units running around. The PCs could simply focus on fighting and defending from the Lizardmen, or they could oppose the local law and help the commoners outside get inside, I have no idea.

What I came here to ask is: do you guys have any tips of how to handle a thing like this? Some experiences you could share from large situations such as this one? I've come up with:


Make the entire attack last an entire session as to not split it up
Calculate 'average' damage from units on eachother so I don't have to roll the dice when NPCs clash with NPCs
Prepare a special battle grid just this once (we hardly ever use one anymore)
Roll a 1d# to see how many arrows the PCs have to protect against (as so very many, obviously, won't be directed at them in the first place).

[Riffington]

Divide it into multiple encounters. They aren't really encountering an entire battlefield all at once, and if they were - it still wouldn't fit in your or their heads. Have a few fights offscreen, a few that you describe a bit of and they can ignore or get involved, and a few that inevitably occur if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Jalor]

Divide it into multiple encounters. They aren't really encountering an entire battlefield all at once, and if they were - it still wouldn't fit in your or their heads. Have a few fights offscreen, a few that you describe a bit of and they can ignore or get involved, and a few that inevitably occur if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Definitely the right way to do it. Also, plan out the outcome via a flowchart. I need to do the same thing for my Planescape campaign, and I just made a chart of encounters. Like "If the players beat Encounter X with the siege troll, then they do Encounter Y where they secure the breach. If they fail, they do Encounter Z where they try to stop the advance" or something like that.

[bosssmiley]

Require that the party save vs early 90s trip-hop band (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_Attack). :smallbiggrin:

Srsly: Intersperse waves of murderous "Tharsands of 'um!" green hell with moments of relative calm and character by-play. Watch "The Alamo" and the almighty "Zulu", and make careful notes on the pacing. Pace your game accordingly.

♪ Men of Karrnath, stand ye steady,
Though your army's dead already;
Afflict the foe-man with sheer dread(y),
And then eat their brains ♫

[kemmotar]

Read silverclaw****f's campaign journal for the horror campaign where they have to face an army of kythons and a few undead...that should give you a good idea.

The PCs can't handle the whole battleground and you can't be expected to roll for every single NPC archer.

so go for averages. You have 100 lizardmen approaching, each lizardman has 10 hp. If the NPC archers miss half the time and deal average damage with a bow that does d6 damage. Just say that they deal 2 damage a round.

thus each archer deals 2 damage a round, say you have 10 archers. Each round 2 lizardmen are dead...etc etc

That way, depending on the decisions of the PCs and their preparation you will easily know what is going on in the general battlefield because it works on averages. That way, the only variable is in fact the PCs.

Whether you call it a single encounter or multiple would only make a difference if you have ToB classes or are playing 4e. If that is the case, I suggest you take it as different encounters to allow them to actually contribute with powers. If not, it won't matter and nobody will really notice.

They will just run around where they are needed to kill or defend...

[Irreverent Fool]

Even moderately-sized battles can become a headache in D&D. The guys over at Penny Arcade have posted some pictures of their games. One of the things they've done -- and been kind enough to post pictures (http://penny-arcade.com/2009/4/29/) of is use little stickers to mark monsters who have certain effects running. The post I linked there mentions that they were working on a way to make the stickers publicly available but I don't remember seeing any follow-up on that. They would be fairly easy to mock up on your own, however.

Damage is probably going to become an issue as well. With many different creatures in a battle, even if you're only focusing on small parts, it can be troublesome to keep track of which creature is damaged, especially if they are the same type (lizardmen for example). My group uses quarters.

We've painted a number of quarters (normal miniature paint available from your local hobby store is ideal as it is designed to be used on metal, though priming may help if you're really serious about it) white, blue, red, and black. Much like poker chips, we use these to represent varying amounts of damage. Quarters are the same size as a medium-sized D&D miniatures creature base, so they're ideal for this. It can get expensive, though (I think we have a good fifty dollars worth of the things rolling around). Map pins with multicolored heads can work quite well too if you're not concerned about some minor damage to your plastic miniatures.

I'm sure you're aware of them, but I feel I should mention that there are some mass combat rules available in both Heroes of Battle and the Miniatures Handbook, assuming you are using 3.5. I don't know how well they work out.

Edit: Another idea for tracking monster damage I've seen is from http://arsludi.lamemage.com/. The idea is to use 'stacks' of damage for units of monsters. If there is a unit of 20 goblins, for example, any attack against one of those goblins applies to the stack. When enough damage has accrued to slay a goblin, one goblin dies. You'll have to read the relevant article for full details. I don't remember how it works with things such as area damage.


Srsly: Intersperse waves of murderous "Tharsands of 'um!" green hell with moments of relative calm and character by-play. Watch "The Alamo" and the almighty "Zulu", and make careful notes on the pacing. Pace your game accordingly.

The battle of Helm's Deep in the Lord of the Rings film has its moments as well.

obnoxious
sig