Battle Royale

[NecroRebel]

Players in my Fires in the Mountain game, please read no further.


Background:
So in a campaign I'm running, I eventually plan to give my players incentive to give a particular NPC a great deal of magical energy. Unbeknownst to them, however, this NPC intends to use that energy to perform a ritual that will resurrect all of the relatively recently-killed people in a particular city as undead, and the city in question recently had almost its entire population slaughtered by a large number of elementals that are currently inhabiting it. The NPC in question wants to do this so that the newly-undead populace can destroy the elementals in turn, which, ultimately, is the campaign's end goal.

The problem is that these undead won't actually be controlled in any way, and will consider any and all living creatures, including the elementals and the PCs themselves, as enemies. So, in at least some encounters, there will be undead around who will attempt to kill the closest living thing, elementals who will attempt to destroy undead and kill PCs, and PCs who will attempt to kill elementals and probably won't be OK with the undead trying to kill them either. Trouble is, I'm not sure how to build a 3-way battle like that.

The question:
As a DM, how would I build encounters in which there are multiple factions of enemies who will fight amongst themselves, but who will also attack the PCs? I don't want to treat any of the monsters as PC allies, so just building the monster group bigger wouldn't work, but I also don't want to treat them all as enemies, either, since they will be actively interfering with each other. So, how do I treat the xp-values for building such encounters?

[Zaq]

I believe that neutral creatures don't affect XP at all (while allied creatures count as additional PCs and take a cut of the XP, and enemy creatures of course increase the XP). I can't remember exactly where that's written (and I'm a little bit too lazy to look it up), but I'd guess it's in the DMG.

Might not help depending on the specifics, but it's a start, no?

[NecroRebel]

Yeah, I know the neutral and allied NPC rules (though I, too, don't remember where exactly that's written), but what I'd be adding in wouldn't be neutrals.

My thought was to build appropriate encounters, but give 2/3 the xp-value to both of the monster teams. Overall, there'd be half again as many enemies present, but since they'd be fighting each other as much as the party they'd make up for the artificially-inflated xp-value for the combat. Trouble is, that means I'd have to have the monster-vs.-monster fights always be roughly even, which limits my options :smallannoyed:

[LudiDrizzt]

Easiest way is to balance each faction in strength, and then award exp for just one of them as long as they all fight each other.

I had an encounter once that was the following:

PCs (level 15, 5 of them)
Dragonborn heads of Tiamat (5 of them, 14-17 elites)
Succubus and Demon Minotaur (16 elite and 15 solo)
Chimera Lich Wizard (22 solo)

Of course, I don't award exp, I just level up when the story calls for it, so in this case I'd probably have given them exp for anything they directly fought and defeated, and not the stuff that was mostly beaten by other monsters.

[NecroRebel]

I don't exactly give xp either, but I use the xp budget system to balance encounters. I'm worried that just building 2, say, level 15 encounters for what will probably be a L13 party would be too much (that's the equivalent to a L20 encounter), and still doesn't avoid the other problem of "what do I do if I want one monster group to be clearly stronger than the other?"

[tcrudisi]

I would certainly be ready to include skills. The players want to trick one faction into attacking another? Sounds like skills would work well. If they actually want to fight, I would have both factions attack whoever is closest. If two different factions are actually equidistant, I would choose based on whichever enemy faction hit them last. Eventually I would expect the players to figure out what's going on, so while they may get the brunt of it early on, I would expect it to be easier later.