How do you handle big combats?

[Trask]

Some PCs are potentially going to engage in some big battles, with upwards of 30+ orcs at one time. They're fairly high level so theyre confident they can put up a fight and at least not get crushed, and they even have troops of their potentially willing join the fight.


How do you run big combats like these? They seem fun, and they seem like something D&D should have an easy solution for since fighing hordes of stinking subhuman monsters is such a heroic fantasy staple but I find that its utterly unsuited to combats larger than 10 participants at a time. It grinds to a halt and feels like a boring slog.


Anyone have any good solutions for large scale battles, not quite battlefield, total war level but just light skirmishes between war parties, brawls between two large groups, or a few players against 30+ enemies?

[Ronnocius]

Some PCs are potentially going to engage in some big battles, with upwards of 30+ orcs at one time. They're fairly high level so theyre confident they can put up a fight and at least not get crushed, and they even have troops of their potentially willing join the fight.


How do you run big combats like these? They seem fun, and they seem like something D&D should have an easy solution for since fighing hordes of stinking subhuman monsters is such a heroic fantasy staple but I find that its utterly unsuited to combats larger than 10 participants at a time. It grinds to a halt and feels like a boring slog.


Anyone have any good solutions for large scale battles, not quite battlefield, total war level but just light skirmishes between war parties, brawls between two large groups, or a few players against 30+ enemies?

I have had sessions where the party was hiding and watching 2 opposing groups of ~12 individuals fight each other. I used only very basic tactics for the monsters and while it was a bit of a slog it did not take that long to resolve, especially once the party jumped into the fray. However if it just the party facing off against 30+ monsters I can see how it would be rather boring.

I believe there was an optional rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide called 'cleaving through creatures' or something similar that allowed melee players to take enemies out more efficiently when fighting mobs, but other than that I am not sure what one could do.

[LordEntrails]

Fantasy Grounds. One of my parties took on 45 orcs. With FG their is no book keeping, just target, roll and if you hit roll damage. Makes large combats easy.

Now, if I had to run on the table top with no digital tools.... I would at least use standard damage and standard hit points for the NPCs. Might even go so far to use minis and decide to go with "blocks" of 5 hit points. Each attack (of the PCs) does a number of blocks of HP, then just mark on the base with chalk or a sticker etc for each block, and then remove them when they get so many "blocks".

[MaxWilson]

Some PCs are potentially going to engage in some big battles, with upwards of 30+ orcs at one time. They're fairly high level so theyre confident they can put up a fight and at least not get crushed, and they even have troops of their potentially willing join the fight.

How do you run big combats like these? They seem fun, and they seem like something D&D should have an easy solution for since fighing hordes of stinking subhuman monsters is such a heroic fantasy staple but I find that its utterly unsuited to combats larger than 10 participants at a time. It grinds to a halt and feels like a boring slog.

Anyone have any good solutions for large scale battles, not quite battlefield, total war level but just light skirmishes between war parties, brawls between two large groups, or a few players against 30+ enemies?

The most important thing is to use a better initiative system that doesn't force players to sit around doing nothing all the time like the PHB system does. If you use an old-style "everybody declares, then everybody acts, rolling initiative to resolve important time dependencies" system, then big battles become fundamentally simple: roll a whole pile of dice for orc attacks while players roll their whole bunch of dice for their own attacks, then apply all the results, then do it again until all the orcs are dead.

HP tracking and condition tracking can still be a bit messy and needs an additional fix: players usually don't mind simplifying HP ("I'll just mark off another orc every time you do 15 damage"). For battles where conditions are important ("which orcs are hypnotized by Hypnotic Pattern?") you can either TotM it just like with HP, or switch to using visual indications: e.g. if you're using d6s to represent orcs, make healthy orcs 6s and stunned/incapacitated orcs 1s.

Another tip: if you're rolling attacks for 30 orcs against AC X, instead of rolling 30 dice and adding +5 to all of them and comparing them to X, just roll 30 dice and count how many of them are (X-5) or higher. Orcs attacking an AC 15 Lore Bard? Roll dice, count how many 10s there are. If advantage or disadvantage is involved, gather up all the hits and reroll them to get your final number of hits.

I.e. when battles are big, switch to using THAC0-style computations to save time.

[AvatarVecna]

One thing I like doing that makes things feel more real is splitting large groups of enemies up into manageable squads, with each squad at its own initiative (this also lets me just roll them into a "monster that's just a group" if I want to, although it's not necessary). While in smaller fights, I'd probably do all the enemies on one initiative roll so that I only have to have one turn of "orcs attacking while PCs do nothing" instead of like 6 or whatever, in large combats the PCs expect to be outnumbered and it helps add to that feeling without the orcs getting 40+ attacks on their one turn (plus, that way if the orcs roll well for initiative it's not necessarily such a gigantic change in the action economy, since one squad rolling well doesn't mean the rest do).

The end result is that player turns tend to be sandwiched in enemy squad turns, giving both sides lots of opportunities to react to each other's tactics/strategies.

[Trask]

I have had sessions where the party was hiding and watching 2 opposing groups of ~12 individuals fight each other. I used only very basic tactics for the monsters and while it was a bit of a slog it did not take that long to resolve, especially once the party jumped into the fray. However if it just the party facing off against 30+ monsters I can see how it would be rather boring.

I believe there was an optional rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide called 'cleaving through creatures' or something similar that allowed melee players to take enemies out more efficiently when fighting mobs, but other than that I am not sure what one could do.

A good cleave rule would help, especially in a campaign where the combats are large.


The most important thing is to use a better initiative system that doesn't force players to sit around doing nothing all the time like the PHB system does. If you use an old-style "everybody declares, then everybody acts, rolling initiative to resolve important time dependencies" system, then big battles become fundamentally simple: roll a whole pile of dice for orc attacks while players roll their whole bunch of dice for their own attacks, then apply all the results, then do it again until all the orcs are dead.

HP tracking and condition tracking can still be a bit messy and needs an additional fix: players usually don't mind simplifying HP ("I'll just mark off another orc every time you do 15 damage"). For battles where conditions are important ("which orcs are hypnotized by Hypnotic Pattern?") you can either TotM it just like with HP, or switch to using visual indications: e.g. if you're using d6s to represent orcs, make healthy orcs 6s and stunned/incapacitated orcs 1s.

Another tip: if you're rolling attacks for 30 orcs against AC X, instead of rolling 30 dice and adding +5 to all of them and comparing them to X, just roll 30 dice and count how many of them are (X-5) or higher. Orcs attacking an AC 15 Lore Bard? Roll dice, count how many 10s there are. If advantage or disadvantage is involved, gather up all the hits and reroll them to get your final number of hits.

I.e. when battles are big, switch to using THAC0-style computations to save time.

So THACO does have a reason to exist :smallbiggrin:

That's a good idea, also the "mark off another orc every time you deal 15 damage is good too" rather than keeping track of every single orc and where and all that.


One thing I like doing that makes things feel more real is splitting large groups of enemies up into manageable squads, with each squad at its own initiative (this also lets me just roll them into a "monster that's just a group" if I want to, although it's not necessary). While in smaller fights, I'd probably do all the enemies on one initiative roll so that I only have to have one turn of "orcs attacking while PCs do nothing" instead of like 6 or whatever, in large combats the PCs expect to be outnumbered and it helps add to that feeling without the orcs getting 40+ attacks on their one turn (plus, that way if the orcs roll well for initiative it's not necessarily such a gigantic change in the action economy, since one squad rolling well doesn't mean the rest do).

The end result is that player turns tend to be sandwiched in enemy squad turns, giving both sides lots of opportunities to react to each other's tactics/strategies.

Squads work well in my experience, but I've found that also give a bit more of an advantage to the monsters than if you just had the monsters go as one big group. Not necessarily a bad thing though and worth considering. You can also incorporate squad leaders as monster bosses that if defeated might cause that squad to break and flee, adding another dimension to the combat.

[Bahamut7]

Some PCs are potentially going to engage in some big battles, with upwards of 30+ orcs at one time. They're fairly high level so theyre confident they can put up a fight and at least not get crushed, and they even have troops of their potentially willing join the fight.


How do you run big combats like these? They seem fun, and they seem like something D&D should have an easy solution for since fighing hordes of stinking subhuman monsters is such a heroic fantasy staple but I find that its utterly unsuited to combats larger than 10 participants at a time. It grinds to a halt and feels like a boring slog.


Anyone have any good solutions for large scale battles, not quite battlefield, total war level but just light skirmishes between war parties, brawls between two large groups, or a few players against 30+ enemies?

Let's pull an easy one from 4e first...Minions. All the same stats except 1 HP. This keeps the hoard still a threat but makes the players feel Epic.

Next, we have to account for the biggest resource in 5e, action economy. Depending on the size of the group, I would otherwise make the enemies do minimum damage and allow the players to make reaction attacks after each attack or have the players roll to an attack and damage, then percentiles to see how many enemies they get in that attack.

As for Hoard on Hoard I would use percentiles and give the players a few attack rounds. Typically, in this situation though the party would be treated as the spec ops that the main force is trying to get behind enemy lines.

[MilkmanDanimal]

Let's pull an easy one from 4e first...Minions. All the same stats except 1 HP. This keeps the hoard still a threat but makes the players feel Epic.

Next, we have to account for the biggest resource in 5e, action economy. Depending on the size of the group, I would otherwise make the enemies do minimum damage and allow the players to make reaction attacks after each attack or have the players roll to an attack and damage, then percentiles to see how many enemies they get in that attack.

As for Hoard on Hoard I would use percentiles and give the players a few attack rounds. Typically, in this situation though the party would be treated as the spec ops that the main force is trying to get behind enemy lines.

1 HP minions is what I would suggest; it allows you to drop a load of minis/counters if you're using them, and being able to drop 50+ counters on the board at the start does make it feel like ALL THE EPIC. Every hit, one goes down. Loads of fun, still feels dangerous.

[Gilrad]

Another thing you could do for HP tracking is "two hits and they're dead, unless the hit is a one-shot HP-wise". As long as the players don't wise up and still behave as if HP is being tracked, it should functionally be just like tracking individual HP.

1hp minions is a more extreme solution, though it's a bit more open to being gamed as the players are a bit more likely to catch on when you're literally not marking anything in your notebook.

[redwizard007]

Minions are a big help if an average damage roll would feasably drop an average monster of that type, but it gets a little cheesey if you are fighting larger creatures designed to soak up damage. With that particular caveat in mind, it is my go to.

I also favor making background combat less about rolls.and more about story. Look at the combatants and apply liberal amounts of common sense. Ogrillons or Orogs slaughter city guards but fall to knights. Thin the numbers on each side appropriately each round but only involve dice when the PCs are directly involved.

[Vogie]

If you don't want to use minions, you could also do break up the large combats into skill challenges and normal encounters. It's a very cinematic way of fighting without having to individually stat out a bunch of stuff, roll tons of dice, and track things absurdly.

Skill challenges will allow your players to just roleplay their way through a battle, by combining everything into a single roll. You set the DC, and the players just have figure out what to do without stepping on each other's toes (The group can't reuse per round, nor repeat the same skill turn after turn). That's when you have players rolling athletics to push a wall down on the orcs, a persuasion check to rally the allied troops, Medicine checks to get allies back on their feet, Acrobatics to Parkour over rooftops, use animal handling to release the hounds, Rolling arcana to see if you can save another PC by blinking them out of the way of a falling elephant, and rolling investigation to snipe an infantry commander. You don't have to worry about spell slots or ammunition, you just RP and roll, with successes or failures.

Then the PCs are huddled together in the midst of the battle fighting some actual statted out enemies - the lesser of the named foes, et cetera - while the battle rages around you. You can add battle-esque addons of "Lair actions" to the enemies (such as random arrows flying into the area, random minor enemy soldiers wandering in here or there).

After that "encounter", the skill challenge continues, but with all of the skills refreshed.