Running A Fight: Horde vs. PCs and Allies

[Palanan]

I’m planning a fight for an upcoming session, in which the second-level party will join with several NPC allies against a small horde of creatures. I’m trying to work out how to keep it edge-of-your-seat without getting bogged down in all the rolls.

My one thought was to let each player run an ally as well as their own PC. However, this would mean effectively dropping a new character on everyone, which might take up time as the players try to run both characters simultaneously. Apart from the logistics, I have a couple of players who aren’t very familiar with all the other classes, and the in-game learning curve might take up even more time.

I also thought about pre-rolling for the NPCs, but that could end up being a nightmare to track and would take away from the spontaneity, especially that sense that everything hangs in the balance. I will be pre-rolling initiatives (because otherwise that really would take forever) but apart from that I’m not sure how to approach this. I’m open to all constructive suggestions on how I can make this work.

[Eldariel]

Abstract the horde into groups as appropriate, preplan the NPC turns and run them on the fly and have them lean towards the PCs for leadership to make it feel like their decisions matter outside their turns.

[wookietek]

There's some good ideas in Heroes of Battle that I am thinking of using for something similar, especially the volley rules.

[SirNibbles]

Roll up a bunch of d20s in advance and have those as your NPC rolls. Any time you need to roll for an NPC, just go down the list. and cross them out 1 by 1.

[Elder_Basilisk]

How many total combatants are you talking about? My experience is that D&D 3.x can handle up to 24 or so with full rules in play and another 12-20 with old school D&D minis shortcuts.

For my part, I don't think a battle with ten combatants on one side is enough to justify the heroes of battle approach where most of the battle is storyboarded and only the PCs small corner is actually played out. In this case, the PCs corner is most of the battle.

The first thing to do is to make sure that you can keep track of the initiative and quickly identify which character is going when.

There are a variety of tools that can help with this. At the simplest level, you can write every character and NPC's name on a separate index card and put them in initiative order. Something like paizo's magnetic initiative tracker board is a step up from that, however I recommend a phone or tablet initiative tracker app as in my experience the best way.

In conjunction with this, you want to have information readily visible on the table. With seven to ten total combatants you can be a little sloppy but with lots of them you need to be on your game. There are several strategies you can use to help with this. First, you want some form of visual representation on the battlemap that directly conveys as much information as possible. I think the ideal is what you see is what you get miniatures that look like the monsters as much as possible (ideally down to weaponry, but in my opinion monster type is essential). That said, colored and numbered chits, pawns, coins, or poker chips can all work as long as both you and players can clearly tell the difference between different monster groups at a glance and can clearly identify individual monsters. (I recommend putting small colored stickers on miniature bases, so you can have them tagged in your initiative order as yellow orc warrior or red howling orc).

The next most important thing is to have an easy way of keeping track of hit points, conditions, and abilities. I recommend keeping limited use abilities to a minimum in order to mitigate this kind of record keeping. The way I do this is a sheet of paper with the monster name (and miniature designation) and check boxes for limited use abilities.

You need to keep things moving. Make players declare and resolve their actions quickly. Don't allow group input on every five foot step. Don't allow retroactive "wait, I forgot about the bonus from bless" recalculations. Do the same on your turns. Be prepared to move each of your monsters immediately, have your rolls ready and roll attack and damage at the same time (or skip damage rolls and just use average damage for monsters and npcs which is one good way to achieve some marginal streamlining). Be decisive and don't worry if you don't make an optimal decision every time. Your 30 orcs would be acting from habit training and instinct too rather than being perfect tacticians.

Finally, institute some morale rules. You could steal them from first edition, improvise based on D&D minis rules (it was a DC 20 roll with d20+level+commander rating (from 1 to 7)), or just make it completely arbitrary (orcs flee when reduced to 50% numbers and leader is slain). This will make the encounter seem more believable and will also keep it from bogging down into a dull dice rolling exercise when the outcome is no longer in doubt.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Eldariel
Abstract the horde into groups as appropriate, preplan the NPC turns and run them on the fly and have them lean towards the PCs for leadership to make it feel like their decisions matter outside their turns.

PC leadership will definitely be a factor.

What do you mean by “abstract” the horde? This will be a small horde, really more of a gang.


Originally Posted by SirNibbles
Roll up a bunch of d20s in advance and have those as your NPC rolls. Any time you need to roll for an NPC, just go down the list. and cross them out 1 by 1.

Good idea, thanks.

I have player who is uncannily good at counting dice, so this will help obscure how many opponents are involved.


Originally Posted by Elder_Basilisk
*snip*

All good advice, thank you.


Originally Posted by Elder_Basilisk
How many total combatants are you talking about?

There are four PCs, plus several NPC allies, so about ten-ish on their side.

Not sure how many opponents to send yet, since I don’t want to accidentally annihilate the party—they’re only second level and they have a knack for running low on hit points.


Originally Posted by Elder_Basilisk
You need to keep things moving. Make players declare and resolve their actions quickly. Don't allow group input on every five foot step. Don't allow retroactive "wait, I forgot about the bonus from bless" recalculations. Do the same on your turns. Be prepared to move each of your monsters immediately, have your rolls ready and roll attack and damage at the same time….

The DM of my last group had a technique of reminding each player when they were “on deck,” meaning their turn was coming up immediately after the current turn. That was helpful with a large group who often tended to forget who was where in the initiative order. This group is smaller (and sharper) but it might be worth trying out.


Originally Posted by Elder_Basilisk
Finally, institute some morale rules. You could steal them from first edition, improvise based on D&D minis rules (it was a DC 20 roll with d20+level+commander rating (from 1 to 7))….

Ahh, the good ol’ morale check, from back in the day.

I usually wing morale based on the state of play, but the D&D minis option seems interesting. Is that in the Miniatures Handbook?

[dascarletm]

PC leadership will definitely be a factor.

What do you mean by “abstract” the horde? This will be a small horde, really more of a gang.



How many people we talking here? If much more than double the PCs I'd turn groups into a single creature.

If you had 100 cultists attacking your 4 PCs for example, I'd break them down into 10 groups of 10 cultists. Abstract them into one roll and damage for the 10 gaining up on one player.

[Mars Ultor]

I divide the allies by the number of players and hand them off. The Druid rolls for the four archers assigned to her, the Cleric rolls for the four he gets. They all go on the initiative of the person they're with. Those allies get one combined roll. A hit for one is a hit for all, a miss for one is a miss for all.

Each member of the horde only has 1 HP. One hit kills a monster, nothing to track, he's gone. You can assign them all initiative based on who they're fighting. If the horde divides to attack the party, all of them attacking one member share the same initiative. Another option is a two to one thing. If the allies hit the same group twice, they're gone. Again, no tracking hit points. They get a diagonal line for the first hit, the second hit completes the X.

The danger comes from the sheer number of the horde, they all get attacks, but the players can heroically wade through them and take out many at a time.

[flappeercraft]

In DMG2 there is the Mob template, that would help manage the combat better.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by flappeercraft
In DMG2 there is the Mob template, that would help manage the combat better.

Excellent. I’ll make ‘em a horde they can’t refuse.

[Elder_Basilisk]

A lot of people like mob templates. I detest them and their mechanical equivalents like troop templates in Pathfinder. They do make large combats simpler but they make a mess of all of the rules. Things that should be effective against large numbers of foes: suddenly ineffective or counterproductive.

For martials, the classic crowd control feats are combat reflexes, cleave, great cleave, and whirlwind attack. Ordinarily if a martial is fighting a bunch of enemies these should all be effective and should work together. But as soon as you apply the mob template, none of those feats do anything against the mob.

Spell casters are another matter because cheating blasters of their effectiveness in the situation where they should be most useful is one of the explicit design goals of the mob mechanic. (And then the internet platoons proclaim that blasters suck and blasting is ineffective. Apparently it's not just martials who can't have nice things). A high level fireball should generally clear out a 20 spread of mooks. (It is possible to make your mooks fireball resistant but it's not the general scheme of things). Destroying first level orc barbarians is what fireball is for. The mob template takes that partially away. Fireball is still one of the better spells against mobs but it's not as effective as it would be against all the individual creatures in the mob. Other spells that should be effective against mobs-greater command, color spray, mass daze, mass hold person, mass charm, etc suddenly become ineffective when you apply the mob template.

Mob templates are an immersion breaking example of lazy and incompetent game design and should never be used.