How to handle large battles?

[Shadowbane13]

Hey, so in my campaign my party is coming up to a quest where they need to defend a town against a small army pillaging neighboring towns. The guards are helping them fight off the invaders. Thing is there's probably going to be close to 30 or more people involved in this fight. How do you guys handle large battles to see who dies?

My idea was anyone not engaged with the party itself I roll a d20 twice and the first is ally second is enemy and whoever is higher lives and the lower dies off. Even if it's caster vs fighter. Any other ideas that may make it easier?

[Unoriginal]

Before going further: have you read the UAs on mass combat and the DMG advice on having large groups of combatants? If yes, what do you think of them?

[GlenSmash!]

I handle them by ignoring most of the big battle. I think even using mass combat rules is boring.

What I do is give the PCs a reason to act like Special Forces or Commandos like Stop the Enemy Magic user from summoning a demon army to aid the invaders in battle, or steal the amulet that keeps the army under the Warlords control, infiltrate the enemy camp and assassinate the General.

How they perform in this will turn the tide (or not) in the big battle.

[Vogie]

If you don't like the When Armies Clash UA, you can use a blend of Skill Challenges and encounters to represent your crew fighting through the battle

The skill challenges, a 4e mechanic, allow you to set a DC, and the PCs roleplay whatever they'd like with a single skill check. There's no tracking of damage, spells used, ammo spent, or any of the crunchy stuff that is normally in combat, and they either fail or succeed. Then, depending on how well they succeed, that impacts the actual encounter afterwards.

For example, if I was having a small enemy army attacking the town with 4 PCs, I would visualize it in a sort of 4 fold battle, in a "Magnificent 7" style of fight.
Challenge - Encounter - Challenge - Encounter

Challenge
Keep the army off of the walls and outside the gates - Get 8 Successes before 4 fails.
If they fail the challenge, the enemies breach the gates and swarm the walls, and the encounter has 50-75% more melee characters, but no ranged characters, although there is the occasional arrow that flies over the wall, triggered by, and hitting, anyone rolling a 1.

Encounter
The party gets off the walls and faces off against a section of the invading army. This is an encounter with a handful of melee characters and a couple ranged ones.

Challenge
After dispatching that section that they jump into above, they have to break through the ranks to get to the commander of the invading army. Another 8 successes before 4 fails.
If they fail the challenge, the final encounter will have an additional 2 melee meat shields and an archer.

Final Encounter
The party faces off with the Commander and their Bondmage Bodyguard.

[Demonslayer666]

With Narration.

Like Glensmash! said, give them specific battle goals, but have the general outcome predetermined. You can have the players actions and successes sway that to make a better story.

[BobZan]

The way I did on an army clash was to ponder before some plots that the PCs could do proactively to assure advantage. Like "convincing neighbor army to join the fight", "finding the master of explosives dwarf that went hermit", etc.

Before army vs army clash you already define which side is in advantage. If the players are inside, put them against some waves of enemies, to feel the heat of battle. And narrate what's going on in the adjacencies.

[N810]

https://i2.wp.com/hammered.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/whfb-logo.png?resize=620%2C264&ssl=1
https://wastingtimegaming.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/m1090013a_p1mb1.jpg



... Just kidding, the other guys ideas are great.

[Flashy]

What I’ve done in the past for stuff on this scale (20-100 combatants).

1. Break any allied NPCs down into squads and let the players divide up command. Hand them the statblocks and let them play that whole side of the battle. This is (in my experience) IMMENSELY popular.

2. Have a plan for rapidly resolving large numbers of dice rolls. Pre-generate a list of d20 rolls, only use average damage rolls, just get reeeally good at quickly rolling a fistful of dice, do whatever works for you. You really want to avoid letting your half of the action drag on longer than it has to.

3. Use side initiative because it’s just way easier to manage. You go -> they go -> you go -> they go is a lot easier to handle compared to trying to remember which specific orc acts on a 16, a 12, a 7, etc. It also lets players resolve the actions of all the characters they’re responsible for simultaneously, which hopefully means there’s way less time spent sitting around waiting for That Guy to finish his turn.

4. If the players are winning let the battle end when the outcome is obviously decided rather than forcing everyone to play through to the bitter conclusion. It’ll feel nicely real and help stop the combat from dragging on long enough to get tedious. If they want to chase down the fleeing survivors handle it outside of initiative.

EDIT:

5. Don’t sweat the details too much. Let players move their squads as essentially a group and don’t worry if one or two characters move a little too far as long as it makes sense. Don’t make them bother with targeting specific individual attacks onto faceless mooks, let them decide for themselves how much they want to focus stuff. If people have good ideas let them pay off at least a little.

6. Be sure to introduce the same sort of character, with squad leaders and unit subgroups, into the enemy army. You can get a lot of emergent storytelling mileage out of interesting unit composition.

[willdaBEAST]

I recently ran a massive encounter between:

5 lvl 10 PCs, a flesh golem, a gladiator, 3 berserkers, a dire wolf, Van Richten, Ezmerelda and a shield guardian

vs

Strahd, a nightmare, 3 barovian witches, 3 brooms of animated attack, 5 dire wolves, 4 vampire spawn, an assassin and an Arcanaloth waiting for the right opportunity to strike.

Due to the different stat blocks and abilities, it was a lot of work. What helped tremendously is I built a spreadsheet with all the pertinent information for each non PC (displaying things like AC, HP, condition, concentration, spell slots, attack mod, average attack dmg, etc), used average damage for all attacks and roll20's built in roller for spells requiring a lot of die rolling.

It went smoothly and combat managed to flow well. It's more mental gymnastics than I would normally care for, but I wanted to escalate the size of the conflict for story reasons. Were I to do it again, I would create a spreadsheet with built in fields to handle things like damage, I was doing that by hand and that slowed me down. I would also prep ahead of time what kind of spells casters might use. You bog down combat by overly thinking about what to cast when you aren't prepared.

My last piece of advice is figure out a system to track initiative. It can be a challenge to stay on top of that, especially if combat lasts multiple sessions.

As far as the OP's specific situation, I'd go with the squad recommendation from Flashy and maybe couple that with the skill tests or objectives that others mentioned.

[Unoriginal]

Even if it's caster vs fighter.

Must say I'm confused about this part.

[Ronnocius]

Must say I'm confused about this part.

It means that even if a caster is facing off against a fighter he will use the same method (rolling 2 d20's). At least, I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

[Shadowbane13]

All great advice guys, much appreciated. I did look into UA and DMG and was just thinking of other ways to may be do it. The squad thing seems like the best idea. It could definitely keep the players more involved and give them a bigger role in the fight. I may use that.

And yes the 2d20s would just determine the outcome, not necessarily the action during the combat itself. Whether it's melee v melee or caster v melee or caster v caster. Just whoever's d20 is high lives. But we'll see. I'm still working out kinks and stuff and it'll be interesting to see how it goes.

Thanks again

[rooneg]

The Adventurers League module Parnast Under Siege has a bunch of mechanics for fortifying a town and then applying the results to the eventual combat. Basically there are a bunch of skill checks and mini quests you can accomplish that will give the PCs points, which they can spend to remove enemies from the eventual assault on the town (the removed enemies represent the townsfolk you trained being able to kill them, or traps taking them out, allies you obtained dealing with them, etc). Basically though it comes down to not trying to actually run the entire fight, because most of it isn't interesting to the PCs. Nobody cares if Guard number 12 kills Goblin number 32. Keep the focus on what the PCs are doing and you'll do fine.

[N810]

^ oh my group actually did this, it was a lot of fun.
I think we had like 3 days to prepare for the invasion,
After that we defended the walls we built with our allies,
and we fought off waves of enemies followed by a commander.

[Vaern]

When I first managed to convince my DM to let me take Leadership in a 3.5 game, he started making jokes about how we'd eventually have to scrap the combat grid and start using a Risk board.

Flashy's suggestion of breaking down the soldiers into squads is good, especially if each unit has similar/identical stat blocks. If the players have their own specific big bad guys to worry about, though, probably just run the larger portion of the battle in the background while allowing them to focus on their own fight.
Let's say each group is 4 units. Say the group as a whole has 32 HP, 14 AC, +4 to hit, and deals 1d6+2 damage. Every 8 points of damage the group takes results in one of the combatants dropping. If one group is larger than the other, it gains advantage on its attacks. If the smaller group is half the size or less of the larger group, it also suffers disadvantage on its own attacks. If you're planning on treating casters and fighters the same on the large scale anyway, you don't need to worry about keeping track of which specific NPCs are casting what spells at which target.
If you do have PCs controlling squads, perhaps allow them to basically fight normally using their own stats to represent the squad as a whole. They still lose a combatant for every quarter of their health, resulting in advantage or disadvantage against different sized squads.

[Flashy]

Lots of good advice.

I just want to chime in with my support for what Vaern said. It’s a great way to abstract the number of people involved in big fights when you don’t want to be managing individual NPCs.

Also, N810 was sort of on the money with the warhammer joke since both Vaern’s suggestion and my earlier one boil down to kinda sorta hacking 5e D&D back into a (cooperative) tabletop wargame.