Optimization Making mooks a threat (3.P) [Archive]

martixy

2018-09-25, 03:26 PM

The Mob template from DMG2 can help out with this. ~

I'd completely forgotten about mobs (even though I used them recently in the game).
I went to reread the template.

Granted, it is somewhat limited, with very little you can customize or options to use. BUT! It works great for the lowest mooks. Ones who haven't a prayer's chance in touching whatever high-level threat they are facing. Right tool for the right job kinda deal I suppose.

Nanobots are based on the Aid Another. It's very powerful when used appropriately. Of course, reach weapons help here as a much larger number of mooks can threaten a single opponent if using reach weapons and thus get much higher Aid Another bonuses. Of course, Aid Another is much more powerful when there's a higher level one who actually strikes the enemy.

- Iron Guard's Glare and similar abilities make attacking formations in melee an exercise in frustration. Two adjacent Crusader 1s can make each other awfully difficult to hit.
- Body blocking. Sometimes just physically being in the way is enough.
- Using alchemical weapons, items, etc. Touch attacks land much more easily even on high level opponents.
- Spells (Scrolls, Potions, etc. too). They can self-buff to be relevant (Trip doesn't care for BAB notably so that's a good option for any strong mooks), they can use Scrolls offensively (stuff like Grease, Web, etc. doesn't care about saves) and so on. If they can buff others, all the better. Wizard 1 is rarely irrelevant, as is Cleric 1.
- Temporary buffs like Law Devotion [Complete Champion], Chaos Devotion [Complete Champion], buff spells, etc. Just have 'em buff for the combat and be strong enough to be relevant there.
- Feed Potions to others.

Mostly, magic. But also Aid Another and buffing the mooks. One strong Bard with Alphorn can make the whole army ridiculously strong. Similarly, many Cleric/Wizard/etc. buffs are awesome when used en masse. Recitation, Righteous Wrath of the Faithful, Haste, Animal Shapes, etc. depending on the caster level.

Aid Another being uncapped is, of course, eminently suitable for TO.

Body blocking, while nice as a tactical concept... is dubious in practice. At the low end, mooks are likely to be jumped or flown over. For higher-level mooks (almost an oxymoron in itself), creating a body cage requires a lot of bodies (26 for medium sized creatures), though I suppose that is what we're discussing here. But then again, at that point their opponents are likely to have other means of escape, such as dimension door, et al.

Alchemical weapons sound good, but can be foiled by high-touch AC (or rather low attack bonuses). I'd peg them as a mid-tier option (in that they can be used by mooks with a moderate-to-small power gap). And I can see a large army being equipped with tons of these (at first it seemed implausible, but it isn't any more so than modern militaries employing their own hundred-thousand-dollar one use items, generally known as 'missiles').

Iron-guard glare is a neat option. The penalty is untyped, though the general consensus (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?411416-Iron-Guard-s-Glare) is that the effects don't stack. I supposed that puts it mid-tier alone (large power gaps are likely to not care about the -4). However, it can readily be combined with other effects, which makes it versatile.

Devotion feats are also neat. Law at least is particularly fitting to RHoD.

Incidentally trip cares about BAB in Pathfinder. But in 3.5, mooks will likely be at a major disadvantage anyway, but the double roll means you have a much greater range to play with anyway (2-40 rather than 1-20), which is part of the math we're dealing with here. (Tangent: Design wise, for most intents and purposes D&D operates within a 19 number range - if two numbers are greater than 19 apart in value, the elements in the game have difficulty interacting with each other, e.g. hitting 30 AC with less than +11 attack bonus is an exercise in frustration.)

Magic is... well, magic.

~

"Havock"?

But I absolutely adore the way you think! Goblin kamikaze are just brilliant! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me246Gbk83g)

Also, there is no such thing as too many mooks.

Problem is, the enemy is likely to fly. Since we're talking about mooks vs high-levels, the power gap is likely to be at least 3-4 levels, therefore with 1st level mooks, you already talking about opponents who have access to fly.

Now bards and marshals are a general good idea anyway. Eldariel suggested the alphorn, which in the specific context of RHoD makes me imagine THIS (https://youtu.be/sotg3le_EqU?t=3m13s).

There's something else everyone missed and that's mass combat rules. I know Heroes of Battle touches on that subject(though I have not read through them), but Pathfinder explicitly has rules for Mass Combat, which handle armies comprised of anything from a few to 1000s of individual creatures. Maybe I should get into wargaming or something as well.

AnimeTheCat

2018-09-25, 07:42 PM

Simplest solution to the flight issue is to have the goblin Lancers ride giant bats or other thematically accurate flying mounts. I suggest bats as they dont complicate the battlefield with a while host of additional attacks or anything.

Other options include ballistae bolts or catapult payloads that can be used as a net deployment system that is specifically designed to keep flying creatures grounded.

Hmm... what else could goblins and the like do to be nasty and witty... I guess what someone else suggested for wide group grappling to hold down the players after they've been netted...

mabriss lethe

2018-09-26, 07:16 AM

The sand blaster: cheap and disposable aoe weapon with ok damage and a rebuff. Technically exotic but doesn't require an attack roll, so non proficiency isn't an issue.

Efrate

2018-09-26, 12:52 PM

archers with the volley rules, plus aid another can be a threat a lot of the time. add bards and mashalls to help further. heroes of battle or miniatures handbook I forget which. have one better than average mook, a sarge mook, direct the volley.

look at pow and tob for debuff stances and options. I think harbinger has a few static minus 2 or more to stuff stances that are lowish level. mostly untyped so if you get 4 that's minus 8 which is nearly always significant.

Quarian Rex

2018-09-27, 10:21 AM

I'd completely forgotten about mobs (even though I used them recently in the game).
I went to reread the template.

I find that the Mob template creates more problems than it solves. Turning random mooks into an epic level creature (with the BAB, saves, etc. of a 30 HD creature) is asinine. It is a solution to every problem that, once introduced to a campaign, begs the question of why would anyone bother with the expense of hiring and equipping adventurers when any group of 48 commoners can Voltron themselves into a 30HD monstrosity capable of stomping any orc/ogre invasion that might threaten the village.

Someone posted a link to rules for a Unit Template that I copied down many years ago and they are the best option for this sort of thing that I have ever found, so far. Have a look.

Here are some tables that will be necessary to use when creating creatures with these templates.

Die Size Progression
Progression 1:
1d2, 1d3, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d6, 3d6, 4d6, 6d6, 8d6, 12d6
-or-
Progression 2:
1d10, 2d8, 3d8, 4d8, 6d8, 8d8, 12d8
-or-
Progression 3:
1d12, 3d6, 4d6, 6d6, 8d6

Old Size
New Size
Str
Dex
Con
Nat. Armor
AC/Attack

Fine
Dim
Same
-2
Same
Same
-4

Dim
Tiny
+2
-2
Same
Same
-2

Tiny
Small
+4
-2
Same
Same
-1

Small
Medium
+4
-2
+2
Same
-1

Medium
Large
+8
-2
+4
+2
-1

Large
Huge
+8
-2
+4
+3
-1

Huge
Garg
+8
Same
+4
+4
-2

Garg
Colossal
+8
Same
+4
+5
-4

Repeat the adjustment if the creature moves up more than one size.

Unit Template

Across the bland field of grass you see a solid block of men, nearly 20 feet on a side. You marvel for just a moment at the exacting detail of their matched uniforms and equipment, and the precision of their combined movements, until you realize those movements have sent them charging across the field at you.

The Unit Template is an Acquired template that can be applied to any creature that possesses the ability to gain ranks in profession (soldier), whether by nature, or by advancing with character classes. Use the original base creature for making this determination, ignoring other applied templates (specifically undead templates). This creature will be referred to as the base creature.

Special: If the unit will be mounted (cavalry) then the base creature must also have at least one rank in ride.

The Unit Template is designed to be highly adaptable. When applying this template is necessary to assign a value N, which indicates the number of sizes the unit will increase over the base creature. It is also used to determine the effectiveness of much of the creature. N may be any value from 1 to 4. N=1 represents a squad (@16 individuals) N=2 represents a light platoon (@ 36 individuals) N=3 represents a company (@ 128 individuals, using an extra spacing, doubled for each size increase beyond Colossal, as per swarms) and N=4 represents a battalion (@ 432 individuals, using 2 extra spacings, doubled for each size increase beyond Colossal, as per swarms).

Special: The feats of the base creature may be discarded in exchange for unit feats, unless they are bonus feats or specific racial feats that always apply.

By this I mean, a unit of fighters has the same number of feats as a fighter, not necessarily the same feats as a fighter. However a unit of skeletons (who all have improved initiative) cannot discard improved initiative.

Size and Type:
Increase the Base Creature’s size by N steps. Example, if N is 3 a medium creature becomes gargantuan.
The Base Creature gains the Unit sub-type.

Hit Dice and Hit Points:
The Unit retains the Base Creature’s original hit dice. In addition the template grants N bonus hit dice. Determine the size of these bonus hit-dice using the table below. Creatures that possess more than one hit-die Type (whether racial, class, or from some other source) use the largest die size to determine bonus hit-dice. For example, a Lizardfolk fighter would have 2 racial hit-dice (d8s) and 1 class hit-die (d10) and would use the d10 to determine the size of the Bonus Hit Dice from this template. For example, a battalion (size N=4) of Warriors (1d10 HD) would gain 4 HD (N=4) with each of those HD being 6d8 hp (24d8 hp in total).

These bonus hit-dice advance the BAB at 1/2 per HD. A Unit’s good saves are reflexes and will, summarized below. Units have no class skills, and gain no skill points per level.

Original Hit Dice

N
1d4
1d6
1d8
1d10
1d12
BAB
Fort
Ref
Will
CR

1
1d6
1d8
2d6
2d8
3d6
+0
+0
+2
+2
+1

2
1d8
2d6
3d6
3d8
4d6
+1
+0
+3
+3
+3

3
2d6
3d6
4d6
4d8
6d6
+1
+1
+3
+3
+6

4 3d6 4d6 6d6 6d8 8d6 +2 +1 +4 +4 +10

4
3d6
4d6
6d6
6d8
8d6
+2
+1
+4
+4
+10

Initiative:
The Base Creature’s initiative is adjusted for the new dexterity score, based on the size adjustment.

Speed:
The Base Creature's speed is adjusted with a -10' circumstance penalty. This penalty cannot reduce the unit's speed to less than half the base creatures speed.

Armor Class:
The Base Creature’s AC is adjusted based on size, including size adjustment and natural armor modifier.

Base Attack/Grapple:
The Base Creature’s base attack bonus is modified by the bonus hit-dice granted by this template; see above.
Grapple: BAB + Unit Strength + Unit Grapple Modifier

Attack/Full Attack:
The template’s BAB and Strength modifier improves the Base Creature’s to-hit modifier and damage, but does not increase the die size for damage.

Space and Reach:
The Unit takes up space as a creature of its new size, using and extra spacing at N=3 and using 2 extra spacings at N=4, similar to swarms (so a battalion of N=4 medium creatures would take up three 30'x30' contiguous spacings). The Unit’s reach is the same as the Base Creature.

Special Attacks:
Iterative Attack, Envelop, Swirling Melee, Coordinated Assault, Coordinated Grapple

Special Qualities:
Unit Traits, Law of Averages

Base Saves:
The Base Creature’s base saves are used, adjusted for the template’s bonus hit-dice and attribute changes.

Abilities:
The Base Creature’s abilities are adjusted for size increase.

CR:
The CR increase for this template is +1 for N=1, +3 for N=2, +6 for N=3, and +10 for N=4

Description of Abilities

Iterative Attack:
For each attack, or full attack, action a Unit may make N attacks or full attacks. Full attacks must be completely allocated to a single target. Additionally a unit can make up to N attacks of Opportunity per round.

Envelop:
A Unit may move to surround any creature 2 sizes or more smaller than the Unit, and envelop them. This takes place as part of a normal move action, or other action that allows movement (such as charging). The unit does not have to stop to engage any target in can envelop.
Enveloped creatures must use 2 squares of movement for each square they move within the unit. Enveloped creatures are considered threatened and flanked by the unit surrounding them.
A Unit may initiate a grapple against an enveloped creature without provoking an attack of opportunity.

Swirling Melee:
As a swift action, a Unit may make one attack at their highest attack bonus against every enveloped creature.

Coordinated Assault:
A Unit may coordinate its efforts against a target of sufficient size. Rather than making a normal attack, a unit may make a Coordinated Attack. The target of a Coordinated Attack can be no smaller than one size less than the unit. Make an attack, or full attack, against the target, but use the damage dice associated with a creature of the Unit’s increased size. Coordinated assaults are limited to melee attacks.

Coordinated Grapple:
When grappling, the size of the target creature may be advantageous to a Unit. A Unit uses the size modifier of the target creature when grappling, unless the target creature is smaller than the Base Creature, or Larger than the unit, in which case it uses the Base Creature’s size or the Unit’s size respectively.

Law of Averages
A Unit may always choose to take 10 on saving throws, as well as any skill for which taking 10 is normally an option.

Unit Traits:

Units gain Hit Dice based on the Base Creature
A Unit’s good saves are Reflexes and Will
A Unit’s BAB Progression is ½ per Hit Die
A Unit has no class skills, and gains no skill points per Hit Die.
A Unit is immune to sneak attack or critical damage from creatures two or more sizes smaller than the unit. This immunity extends to similar abilities such as a Scout's Skirmish damage.
Only other Units may flank a Unit.
Because of their low individual damage, Units have trouble overcoming DR and Hardness. For targets two or more sizes smaller than the unit increase the DR or Hardness by N, for all other creatures multiply by N.
Because of their nature, Units gain increased effect from abilities which effect HP or damage. Multiply by N any HP or damage modifier. For example, the Toughness feat would grant 3*N bonus hit points. NOTE: Sneak attack, and similar abilities, are bonus damage and not a modifier and are not increased in this fashion.
Because of their nature, Units gain the full effect of bardic music, marshal’s auras, or similar abilities for the entire unit as long as a minimum of N squares of the unit would be affected.
Units are particularly vulnerable to area of effect attacks. Apply 1/4 the base damage to the unit for every square covered by the effect.
Because of their large number of members, Units are effectively invulnerable to individually targeted spells, spell-like abilities, or other special abilities.
Because they are made up of a large number of individuals, Units are affected differently than normal by feats that allow extra attacks per turn. Cleave, great cleave, whirlwind attack, combat reflexes, or other similar feats or class abilities grant 1d6 bonus damage against Units on every attack for each such feat or ability.
Units may make N number of uses of any special ability (spell-like ability, spell, supernatural ability, etc.) of the Base Creature, as an action of the normal type. For example, if a base creature has a gaze attack as a standard action, the Unit may make N gaze attacks per round. A Unit may forgo one or more of these attacks to gain a +2 effective heightening to the ability (see heighten spell, heighten spell like ability, etc). For example, a N3 spell caster unit may cast 3 spells, or cast 2 spells with one spell heightened by 2, or may combine all 3 spells into one spell heightened by 4.
Undead Units are hard to turn. They gain a morale bonus to turn resistance equal to N.
All Units gain a morale bonus to fear effects equal to N.
When a Unit is reduced to 0 or fewer hp it is disbanded into its constituent creatures. Half of those creatures are considered dead/destroyed, one quarter are disabled at 0 hp, and the final quarter is left at half hp.

Unit Feats
Units have access to a special category of feat, Unit Feats.

Trained Movement
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype, Base Creature with Profession (Soldier) 1 rank.
Benefit: The unit ignores the circumstance modifier to speed associated with the Unit Template.
Normal: Units suffer a -10’ circumstance modifier to speed.

Coordinated Fire
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype, Base Creature with Profession (Soldier) 3 ranks.
Benefit: The Unit may make Coordinated Assault attacks using un-hurled ranged weapons (bows, crossbows, etc).
Normal: Unit cannot make Coordinated Assault attacks with ranged weapons.

Coordinated Hurl
As Coordinated Fire above, but applies to hurled weapons.

Ranged Combat Specialization
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype
Benefit: A Unit applies 1/2 of its strength bonus to hit and damage on all attacks, including ranged attacks. Focusing on Ranged Attacks in this manner makes the unit less effective in close combat. This is in addition to normal dexterity modifiers.
Normal: Units normally apply their full strength bonus on melee attacks, and no strength bonus on ranged attacks.
Special: A unit applies its full strength bonus on ranged attacks where it would normally apply (hurled weapons).

Ranged Combat Mastery
Prerequisites: Ranged Combat Specialization, Profession (Soldier) 2 ranks
Benefit: The unit adds its full strength bonus on ranged attacks, and 1/2 its strength bonus for melee attacks.
Normal: Units normally apply their full strength bonus on melee attacks, and no strength bonus on ranged attacks.

Formation Fighting
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype, N=2, Profession (Soldier) 2
Benefits: The unit has learned to use the advantages of numbers and formation, granting a +5’ bonus to reach. This is similar to natural reach, and does not prevent a unit from attacking adjacent targets.

Synchronized Strike
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype
Benefit: The unit has learned to synchronize their attacks, to overcome some of their inability to deal with damage reduction. Reduce N by 1 before increasing or multiplying the value of DR or Hardness.
Special: This feat may be chosen multiple times, its effects stack.

Marshal Commander
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype
Benefit: The Unit is lead in battle by a Marshall. Although not individually represented on the field, the unit may benefit from one or more Marshall Aura’s. The Marshall’s effective level is equal to N, and his Charisma Modifier is N/2 (minimum 1). Choose Marshall Auras as appropriate for a Marshall of this level.

Bardic Accompaniment
Prerequisites: Unit Subtype
Benefit: A level N bard has joined the unit. The Bard’s perform skill is equal to N+3, and the bard has access to all bardic music effects for a character of this level. The unit does not benefit from the bards spell casting or other abilities.

The Unit template solves just about every complaint I had with the Mob template. HD isn't drastically inflated to deific levels (though hps are increased to usable amounts), maintaining vulnerability to level appropriate countermeasures (most spells, etc.). Traditional counters to mooks (like DR and such) are no longer trivialized, and the extra feats provided by the 1-4 extra HD of the template can be used to reflect group training and specialties.

It basically streamlines mook combat in a way that I'm happy with both as a player and as a DM.

Edit: Found the original thread that I copied this from here (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hjp8?Military-Unit-by-template). My post is an edited version of the original, mostly clarifying unit sizes, effects of dissolution, and clarifying feat options.

Telonius

2018-09-27, 10:33 AM

Quarian Rex

2018-09-27, 10:49 AM

I think the "mob" template is best used in a "many vs few" situation, such as a small team of adventurers fighting a crowd of mooks (or an angry mob, or an army of orcs, or whatever) would be.

Handling large-scale, army vs. army combats is not something 3.x D&D does particularly well otherwise, since everything is so granular. I mean, yeah, you could do it, but you'd need a computer to resolve all the attacks. In that sense, yes, it does make more sense for the mooks to "voltron up" - treating each division (or company, or however you want to divide it) as a single unit. The town defenders would, and so would the orcs, so it balances out to one unit versus another. That's kind of how D&D evolved into existence to begin with: wargaming simulation, treating units as single actors.

That's kind of the point, finding a way to make that numbers advantage usable in game without grinding everything to a halt. The key here, I think, is to maintain some of the vulnerabilities that the individual base creatures have so that it feels like the same battle, just done more efficiently. That is where I feel the Mob template fails so incredible hard (and where the Unit template succeeds). It takes a rather small number of commoners and morphs them into an epic level HD blob, resulting in a fight that bears absolutely no mechanical resemblance to the original.

Also, ACKS has some of the best mass combat rules that I've seen, and I've adapted them for use in my 3.P games.

Resileaf

2018-09-27, 10:52 AM

Archers dedicated to locking down casters. Hold actions until the mage starts casting, then shoot an arrow in his face to force a concentration check.

Telonius

2018-09-27, 11:48 AM

That's kind of the point, finding a way to make that numbers advantage usable in game without grinding everything to a halt. The key here, I think, is to maintain some of the vulnerabilities that the individual base creatures have so that it feels like the same battle, just done more efficiently. That is where I feel the Mob template fails so incredible hard (and where the Unit template succeeds). It takes a rather small number of commoners and morphs them into an epic level HD blob, resulting in a fight that bears absolutely no mechanical resemblance to the original.

I'm not seeing how that's a problem. Mobs don't get feats for having Hit Dice, just the same feat as the base creature plus Improved Bull Rush and Improved Overrun; so no getting Epic feats that way. Just the number of hit dice has very little to do with whether or not something is an Epic-level threat. Colossal Animated Objects have 32HD, and they're only CR 10. If you're concerned about the enemy having a pile of hit points, Mob will actually help you out there. The total number of hit points available is going to be less after you apply the template. 48 Human commoners (at 10 Con and a d4) would have 192 HP total, if you maxed out the HD and added them all up; while a 30-HD Human (d8) Mob would be average out to 138.5 HP.

Zsaber0

2018-09-27, 12:40 PM

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, as I didn't read every post I depth. But I've run RHoD several times in the past and let me say it's always been fun and handles modification REALLY well.

So far my favorite thing to do is change basically every single enemy in the adventure and swap they out for the Spawn of Tiamat. These Spawn really change up the game and there are enough of a variety of them to keep things fresh for a good while. From the redspawn arcanist who specialize in aoe fire spells to the bluespawn godslayer who I one time added Warhulk levels too when the party was optimized in much the same way yours is. It fits the adventure thematically and will hopefully provide a good challenge for your powerful group.

Boggartbae

2018-09-27, 01:02 PM

I'm not seeing how that's a problem. Mobs don't get feats for having Hit Dice, just the same feat as the base creature plus Improved Bull Rush and Improved Overrun; so no getting Epic feats that way. Just the number of hit dice has very little to do with whether or not something is an Epic-level threat. Colossal Animated Objects have 32HD, and they're only CR 10. If you're concerned about the enemy having a pile of hit points, Mob will actually help you out there. The total number of hit points available is going to be less after you apply the template. 48 Human commoners (at 10 Con and a d4) would have 192 HP total, if you maxed out the HD and added them all up; while a 30-HD Human (d8) Mob would be average out to 138.5 HP.

I thought that NPC's didn't get max hitpoints at first level? Although, overkill damage is wasted when fighting 48 human commoners, while against a mob all of your damage gets used. I know that there are alternate rules in the Monster Manual that help with this, but RAW I think that 48 human commoners have more effective HP.

OgresAreCute

2018-09-27, 01:25 PM

I thought that NPC's didn't get max hitpoints at first level? Although, overkill damage is wasted when fighting 48 human commoners, while against a mob all of your damage gets used. I know that there are alternate rules in the Monster Manual that help with this, but RAW I think that 48 human commoners have more effective HP.

Until you start using AoE attacks

martixy

2018-09-27, 02:08 PM

Archers dedicated to locking down casters. Hold actions until the mage starts casting, then shoot an arrow in his face to force a concentration check.

This is normal D&D talk, and we're not talking normal D&D here. Caster is likely to: 1. Not get hit. 2. Ignore the damage. 3. Be unable to fail his conc check on whatever damage gets through.

~

While RHoD is kind of tangential to the topic, but it does serve as a good staging ground for these concepts.

Like... how do you do something to a character with 30 AC and DR 10 with a hundred Warrior 2 mooks?

~

You mention problems of the mob template but fail to elaborate.

Like, what problems does it have and why are they problems? How does that template you linked to solve them?

As for the unit template, it's super weird.
It has potential, but there's some issues. I don't like it inventing its own "special HD". Why not use racial HD? It butchers some of the basic D&D mechanics with a slew of its own special exceptions. And many of the traits make it rather hard to use, because of all the exceptions and math they introduce. Like, there's some obtuse provision dealing with DR and hardness, which seems its dealing with the resulting increased damage from str increases which come from the size increase. So, an exception to deal with a problem introduced by another change it makes. The whole text is like that. It seems kind of a bad template overall.

Zsaber0

2018-09-27, 02:50 PM

While RHoD is kind of tangential to the topic, but it does serve as a good staging ground for these concepts.

Like... how do you do something to a character with 30 AC and DR 10 with a hundred Warrior 2 mooks?

I am personally quite fond of the Troop template/subtype from pathfinder when it comes to such things. They have a "Troop Attack" that is an automatic hit/damage for a respectable amount with some having the option for a ranged volley attack that does damage in an area for a reflex save for half.

Boggartbae

2018-09-27, 04:55 PM

Until you start using AoE attacks

yeah that's true. Also just for the record I would use the mob template 100% of the time, because who has time for that many attacks?

martixy

2018-09-27, 05:18 PM

I am personally quite fond of the Troop template/subtype from pathfinder when it comes to such things. They have a "Troop Attack" that is an automatic hit/damage for a respectable amount with some having the option for a ranged volley attack that does damage in an area for a reflex save for half.

Oh, that's extra neat. Should have started with that.

More flexible than the Mob template and does not mess with basic mechanics of the game.

If I were to make my own I'd start with the Troop subtype, borrow expert grappler and trample from the Mob template and most feats from the homebrew Unit template Quarian linked. Also the idea that only other troops may flank a troop.

Quarian Rex

2018-09-28, 03:54 PM

You mention problems of the mob template but fail to elaborate.

Like, what problems does it have and why are they problems? How does that template you linked to solve them?

As for the unit template, it's super weird.
It has potential, but there's some issues. I don't like it inventing its own "special HD". Why not use racial HD? It butchers some of the basic D&D mechanics with a slew of its own special exceptions. And many of the traits make it rather hard to use, because of all the exceptions and math they introduce. Like, there's some obtuse provision dealing with DR and hardness, which seems its dealing with the resulting increased damage from str increases which come from the size increase. So, an exception to deal with a problem introduced by another change it makes. The whole text is like that. It seems kind of a bad template overall.

The problems with the Mob template are many. It is an attempt to abstract the effect of a large number of low level creatures in combat, and to do that it removes almost all of the capabilities of the base creature and replaces it with a bloated bag of numbers that bears no resemblance to the original. HD are always set to 30, regardless of the capabilities of the original creature, and this comes with all the benefits of epic scale HD, things like a BAB of +22 or+30, base saves of +9 to +17+stat mod, and a base save DC of 25+stat mod on any savable effect it has. This completely changes the encounter in all of the wrong ways. Almost every spell/effect/tactic that would have worked on the un-templated group is now effectively useless on the Mob. Any save you have to make against the Mob is effectively unsavable at most levels (up to a +15 to save DC is no joke).

Another issue is the homogenization of any creatures using the template. A mob of pitchfork wielding 1st level commoners and a mob of 3rd level fully equipped Paladins of the Kingsguard are functionally identical, even having the improvised weapons of the commoners and the minorly enchanted greatblades of the Paladins doing the exact same unmodified auto-hit 5d6 blunt damage. The only difference would be the Paladins having a possible armor bonus. That's it, and that is a waste. You are no longer fighting an army of mooks, you are now just bashing on an inflated blob/swarm. I see that as a problem.

How does the Unit template fix this? First, it limits HD bloat. At no time should a group of creatures get 30 HD of chassis progression because they are hanging out together. Even a battalion (of over 400+ people) only has 4 additional HD, limiting immunity to offensive effects and preventing its own effects from becoming arbitrarily powerful. Such a limited number of HD doesn't usually provide enough hp to represent that many creatures so what do? The solution is to scale HD in the same manner that you scale damage with size increase (as opposed to just being "special HD"). This preserves important distinctions between the combat capabilities of of the base creatures. A battalion (size 4) of commoners (d4 HD) would give an extra 3d6 hp per HD (d4 with 4 size increases is 3d6), for a total of an extra 12d6+[4xCon bonus] hp from the template, while a battalion of battle hardened orc Barbarians (d12 HD) would give an extra 8d6 hp per HD (d12 with 4 size increases is 8d6), for a total of an extra 32d6+[4xCon bonus] hp from the template. Combat training makes a difference. The HD of the template add set bonuses (low BAB, high Will, extra feats reflecting group training, etc.) showing the benefits of group combat training without overshadowing the capabilities of the base creatures. As to why it doesn't use racial HD, it does, it just doesn't ignore training. The HD modified for size are the highest that the creature has. If all it has are racial HD then they are modified but if a weak creature type has training in a tougher class then that is reflected in the template.

Units also preserve the attacks of the base creature, so feat/class training and equipment are actually relevant (what a concept!). Iterative Attack, Envelop, and Swirling Melee (allowing up to 5 full attacks on a character in a round) all build off of and enhance the capabilities of the base creature instead of replacing them, with the size modifiers to stats being not a bad hand-wave/approximation for aid-other bonuses and such. Coordinated Assault is a good reflection of being able to take better advantage of mook action economy against larger opponents/other units.

As to the Unit traits, they actually do a really good job of making a functionally single big creature act and react like the group of individuals that it is. Have some options been tweaked in ways that you don't usually see? Yup. That's because this is for a situation that you don't usually see. Most things are pretty standard immunities that you would see on swarms/things that make the individuals less relevant but there are some things that are fairly different that you pointed out, but I think that they do a great job at what they are trying to do. The area of effect vulnerability, doing 1/4 spell damage per square covered by the effect, beautifully preserves the lethality of a spell/effect that would normally wipe out the individual creatures.

The DR modifications, which for reference are here...

Because of their low individual damage, Units have trouble overcoming DR and Hardness. For targets two or more sizes smaller than the unit increase the DR or Hardness by N, for all other creatures multiply by N.

... preserves one of the most effective defenses against mooks, arbitrarily magnifying the resistance at the same point that the template gets an arbitrarily magnified boost to damage (via Coordinated Assault). This preserves the elegant efficiency of the template (versus trying to actually play dozens/hundreds of mooks) without trivializing one of its best counters. That is actually pretty commendable.

The last thing that would be considered out of the ordinary would be the change to how feats/abilities that normally deal with groups affect the Unit. For reference...

Because they are made up of a large number of individuals, Units are affected differently than normal by feats that allow extra attacks per turn. Cleave, great cleave, whirlwind attack, combat reflexes, or other similar feats or class abilities grant 1d6 bonus damage against Units on every attack for each such feat or ability.

This is just a great way to preserve the effectiveness of of feats that would be incredibly effective against the component creatures but virtually useless against a single creature. Again, an elegant solution to a sticky problem.

I think that mooks/armies/lowbies have a place in the campaign world at all levels of play. With intelligent play (positioning/aid-other/etc.) this can be a reality. The downside is that such things take an asinine amount of time and grind the game to a halt. I'm looking for something that can replicate the potential utility of of an organized combat force in a playable manner without changing the encounter into something unrecognizable (if I wanted the players to fight a gargantuan swarm, I would have them fight a gargantuan swarm, not an army). I think that I've shown how the Unit succeeds at that while the Mob fails.

That's how I see it anyway.

ericgrau

2018-09-28, 06:26 PM

Other options are large (or larger) non-combat creatures as mounts that small (or medium I guess) creatures are shooting from, throwing alchemist's flame from, and otherwise just causing Havock. If Goblins are in play (I think they are in RHoD), have what equate to Goblin Gliders jumping off the back of some Huge creature (Elephant or some such) dropping Alchemist's Flame and the like as they go, then landing behind the lines and exploding (explosive runes written on a piece of paper that they take out and read or something). 1 goblin for 8 potential casualties, If I'm evil I say yes please.

For the Lace Formation, Think of it like the "Image" below where M=Marshal, B=Bard, and C=Cavalry:

MCB
CCC
CCC
CCC
CCC
CCC

Even if those are only level 2 each, with the Marshal and Bard being Marshal 1/Fighter 1 and Bard 1/Fighter 1 and the rest being Fighter 2, you can create a cell of creatures that mostly have Mounted Combat, Ride-By-Attack, and Spirited Charge (only the Marshal and Bard not having Spirited Charge) that can seriously hurt a party. Then, play them smart. If the party flies, they run to cover. If the party splits up, each column splits up and targets a character individually. Simply give them each a Lance, Heavy Shield, and a side arm (in case they can no longer charge). If that's too many mooks, take a row off, but keep 3 columns (so 15, 12, and 9 creatures respectively).

All of this, of course, is assuming you're not gestalting the enemy.

FIR
EBA
LLM
EPL
EAS

That's all I can see when I look at that. Or any of the other 15 area spells since RHoD encourages making sure the PCs have one. Heck, web, entangle. At least you remembered a ranged weapon. Seriously I'm not allowed to cluster weak monsters anymore, or why did I even bother putting time into preparing the fight? Otherwise nice ideas. Except don't use any strategy that takes longer than a round or two to set up. Or you'll find that the baddies are dead or greatly diminished before the strategy even starts. Whatever it is, blitz in and do it or die trying. Or they'll be dead before you can say "run to".

Readied actions to disrupt casting can help prevent mass death. Especially with multiple foes trying to disrupt the same mage. Dividing or slowing down the PCs with area effects and disabling effects of their own can also keep the baddies alive slightly longer. Maybe they don't have solid fog, but they do have entangle, trip, tanglefoot bags, etc.

As for mass attacks, I've estimated damage via #attackers * (attack bonus + 21 - AC) * avg damage/20. And "avg damage/20" you write down ahead of time. Also have the mooks all act at the same time. If it's a large enough group attacking the same PC so that it really matters and you want some randomness: Roll damage 1-2 times and subtract 1-2 times average damage from the total damage. That adds about as much variation as rolling for the entire group.

Zaq

2018-09-28, 11:29 PM

I mean, it'd take some hammering and some finagling to make it be fully elegant in the 3.5 paradigm, but I'm actually a big fan of 4e's minion mechanic, with some caveats that are mostly outside the scope of the current discussion.

For the uninitiated, a minion is a critter with 1 HP, the equivalent of Evasion/Mettle (you can't "miss" them and still kill them—you've gotta hit them or otherwise do damage without trying and failing to connect), defenses (AC/Fort/Ref/Will) on par with any other monster of its level, and expected damage that is exactly half of that of a standard equal-level monster (their chance to hit should be even with that of another at-level monster, but their damage expressions are lowered and should end up as half of what a standard monster's DPR should be). Five minions is worth one standard monster in terms of XP. They're intended to be simple; almost no minions have anything that would be treated as, like, full spells or level-appropriate SLAs (they usually just have one attack, or one melee attack and one ranged attack, possibly plus a final swing when they pop). Importantly, they're not just "low-level" versions of other monsters. A level X minion is still a level X monster that needs to show up in a level X encounter; in a level X encounter, a minion of level X - 4 (or whatever) is effectively pointless and can probably be safely ignored.

Minions are really fun because you can clog up a battlefield with them and still keep things running pretty well. The key factor of minions is that they actually are dangerous enough that you can't ignore them—they're every bit as likely to hit you as the standard monsters are, and they do half as much damage but with five times the presence on the field (making them technically the most dangerous monsters per XP when doing pure "whiteroom"/"tofu" calculations). The purpose of the minion is not to be hard to kill (a PC who tries to pop a minion should usually succeed), but minions can and should absorb PC actions. You have to find an efficient way to devoting the minimum number of actions necessary to kill the maximum number of minions possible. You don't have to (and usually shouldn't) waste big guns on them (unless doing so lets you target a whole bunch at once!), but you have to do something to keep their numbers down. It fits nicely with 4e's tactical focus, and it definitely makes them into "mooks that matter" when used well. Sure, some parties and classes are innately better-suited for dealing with minions than others, but still, they're a fun concept.

The challenge with implementing minions in 3.5 is mostly that minions are, as you saw above, very math-based. They work well because they're equivalent to standard monsters in the really important d20-based ways (to-hit and defenses), and they have a fair damage expression because we know what the standard amount of damage a 4e monster of a given level should do in a turn is. This is, well, extremely not the case in standard 3.5. Monster defenses/to-hit/DPR is all over the friggin' place even when just comparing off-the-shelf monsters of a single CR (even from the same monster book!), so you need to do some fudging to determine what a "fair" baseline of numbers should be. Also, you might need to account for iterative attacks when it comes to "how many PC actions should be spent to clear one encounter's worth of minions?" calculations. Most 4e characters only get one d20 roll or one swing per attack (unless making an AoE attack), so relatively few PCs who don't invest in the concept will have the ability to casually swat a minion while still directing their big/main attacks at standard targets. That's different in 3.5. You could make that a feature rather than a bug, but you should still consider it.

Anyway, it's worth thinking about in general, even if it's not a trivial matter to port the concept over. I like 4e's minions better than 5e's (seriously flawed) "all monsters of all levels should show up in an encounter!" philosophy or even Legend's Mook and Myriad rules (which aren't awful but which still feel a little janky to me), so I encourage using what works when solving a known problem!

Biffoniacus_Furiou

2018-09-29, 01:45 AM

The 3rd level clerics can actually be extremely useful for disrupting characters of any level with some slight adjustments:

The feat Earth Devotion (CC) allows a creature to make difficult terrain as an immediate action 1/day, more with spending Turn Undead uses. This will cause a charge to automatically fail, since you can't charge over difficult terrain, and the charging character will also need to make a balance check to avoid tripping. Replace the clerics' default weapon focus feat with this.

The spell Silence will automatically stop spellcasting with verbal components in its area. An action readied to cast it if an opponent casts a spell with a verbal component, provided it's cast on a point in space so there's no saving throw, will automatically interrupt that spell and cause it to fail. Have the clerics each prepare this once.

Vizzerdrix

2018-09-29, 04:12 AM

Well, you can change the mooks attacks from normal ones to something else. Try giving them cabers, bolas, gnome calculus, aspergeliums, lassos, and sand blasters. Most pf those target touch, or reflex. Then add poisons.

Eggshell grenades, caltrops, shapesand, tower shields, and blacksand can also be used by mooks to help even a fight.

SangoProduction

2018-09-29, 05:20 AM

What I like to do with minions, or "mooks", is actually to set their hp to 1, have about 2-3 times as many of them, and keep their stats otherwise the same.

4e had the right idea when it came to this. It does quite feel like slaughtering through the oncoming tide of nameless mooks, all to approach the commander of the army. Kinda like in action flicks.

Fizban

2018-09-29, 06:43 AM

At no time should a group of creatures get 30 HD of chassis progression because they are hanging out together. Even a battalion (of over 400+ people) only has 4 additional HD,
Well technically it shouldn't have any additional HD. The weird mashup of mechanics here seems pretty dang arbitrary, but it does reach some results that look a bit similar to what you might get averaging things out, plus benefits.

Coordinated Assault is a good reflection of being able to take better advantage of mook action economy against larger opponents/other units.
No, it's really not. A unit of 400 people gets four attacks? Ridiculous. It can be rationalized on the smaller unit scales, but you need to supply your own reasoning for why size 3 and 4 get so few attacks.

the template gets an arbitrarily magnified boost to damage (via Coordinated Assault).
The arbitrary boost to damage isn't Coordinated Assault, not by a long shot, unless all you're looking at is vs giant monsters. It's the str bonus from size increases, which are also the most weirdly arbitrary part of the thing.

So let's take a look at what actually happens with medium creature unit offense:

A size 1 unit of medium creatures is 16 bodies in a 10'x10' space, counting as a large creature. This means there are four on a side. They can make one attack per round, with a net +3 attack and +4 damage from strength (ignoring two handed), and against medium or larger targets their melee die goes up a step (worth anything from +1 to +4.5 damage), and they have a net AC change of zero. They can only envelop small creatures.

Four creatures on a side making one attack would normally be one creature with three aid another tries, worth +6 to hit or AC (assuming they always succeed). The unit is getting half that on hit, but also a bunch of extra damage they could normally never get without rolling, and said damage is likely around double. The unit is apparently incapable of harming targets on more than one side at a time- one must assume that the unit is actually locked in a facing formation and anyone not at the current front is defending with AoOs only.

A size 2 unit of medium creatures is 36 bodies in a 15'x15' space counting as huge, six on a side. They can now make two glorious attacks per round, with net +7/+8 atk/dmg and a net -1 AC, but can no longer use Coordinated Assault against foes of their constituent size of medium- however they have gained the ability to Envelop them, for one glorious attack per round. Compared to the +8 aid total they'd normally have (which would not fully usable against mediums without reach, those six on the one attacking side are getting a pretty sweet deal- at the cost of 34 potential other attacks. The unit makes sense mostly because it limits the incoming dps of a foe via AoOs while concentrating damage without requiring a surround. An Enveloped medium foe is super cramped and subject to 50% more attacks if they're the main target, but it's still going to take a while unless the Enveloped creature is foolish enough to move and trigger the AoOs.

A size 3 unit of medium creatures is getting ridiculous, 128 in a 20'x40' space counting as gargantuan, eight on the short side but 16 on the long side, making all of three glorious attacks and three AoOs and Enveloping up to large creatures. Net +9 attack, damage goes up to +12 and net -2 AC. At this point the only excuse for how few attacks they can make is that the unit is automatically functioning on true medieval battle time scale, but instead of brief line clashes many minutes apart, it's a few guys attacking and rotating out every 6 seconds.

And the size 4 unit of mediums, 432 in a 30'x90', attacking side with 12, 24, or 36 creatures making 4 attacks and AoOs, net +10 attack, +16 damage, -3 AC.

So what do these units do? They make groups of mooks much better at fighting monsters and/or PCs with AC and hp high enough that individual attacks would be inaccurate scratches, but mostly help against individuals of the same weight class by obfuscating and preventing casualties- the unit gains a bunch of extra "hp," but actually *loses* AC as it gets bigger, while constituents are only marked as dead if the unit is dispersed, as there is no attrition mechanic. If what you want is units of dudes fighting monsters/PCs more effectively, yeah this is probably reasonable. I'm not personally sold on the idea that a bunch of 1HD soldiers should be able to increase their damage for these purposes, but it's a thing.

I'd have to analyze the full hp and damage changes to see if it's any good for unit v unit combat to see if it really preserves enough of the constituent effects- the fact that attack bonus goes up and AC goes down means that I'm guessing I'd rate that as a no.

Regarding the topic of minions- I hate the them. I don't want narrative mechanics meddling in that sort of thing. Better to invent a boss template that boosts the power of their mid-tierminions to something appropriate, rather than have a bunch of otherwise level appropriate monsters that mysteriously drop in one hit.

Quarian Rex

2018-09-29, 05:43 PM

The weird mashup of mechanics here seems pretty dang arbitrary, but it does reach some results that look a bit similar to what you might get averaging things out, plus benefits.

Yup, that's what you get from just about any streamlining mechanic, arbitrary changes to get a job done. If you're lucky those arbitrary changes will get the job done well.

No, it's really not. A unit of 400 people gets four attacks? Ridiculous. It can be rationalized on the smaller unit scales, but you need to supply your own reasoning for why size 3 and 4 get so few attacks.

You're right, it is a ridiculous abstraction, but that it the point. If you want to roll hundreds of attacks then go ahead, this is an attempt to make things actually playable. Instead of micro-managing dozens/hundreds of aid-other checks, compensating for individual reach and line-of-effect, you reduce it to an easily managed number of attacks while boosting to-hit to represent aid-other and damage to represent multiple hits. That seems not only pretty reasonable but, more importantly, playable.

Also, remember the utility of Swirling Melee. A size 4 Unit could functionally make a theoretical maximum of 108 additional attacks (on similarly sized medium creatures) as a swift action, so long as all those attacks are made on separate creatures who have been enveloped. Iterative Attack and Coordinated Assault represent the Unit applying extra attention to given targets, not the sole source of damage output.

The arbitrary boost to damage isn't Coordinated Assault, not by a long shot, unless all you're looking at is vs giant monsters.

Coordinated Assault is designed almost exclusively for giant monsters (with the exception of size 1 Units, where the bonus provided is less significant and more needed due to lower overall bonuses). Also note that calling it out as an arbitrary damage boost was in reference to the increase in enemy DR for the same applicable size ranges.

It's the str bonus from size increases, which are also the most weirdly arbitrary part of the thing.

As I mentioned above, the Str. boosts don't seem that arbitrary to me. They seem like a functional (and meaningful) way to represent aid-other and multiple hits without having to actually roll all those extra attacks. Remember, this isn't going for 1:1 simulation here, this is going for functional representation.

So let's take a look at what actually happens with medium creature unit offense:

A size 1 unit of medium creatures is 16 bodies in a 10'x10' space, counting as a large creature. This means there are four on a side. They can make one attack per round, with a net +3 attack and +4 damage from strength (ignoring two handed), and against medium or larger targets their melee die goes up a step (worth anything from +1 to +4.5 damage), and they have a net AC change of zero. They can only envelop small creatures.

Four creatures on a side making one attack would normally be one creature with three aid another tries, worth +6 to hit or AC (assuming they always succeed). The unit is getting half that on hit, but also a bunch of extra damage they could normally never get without rolling, and said damage is likely around double. The unit is apparently incapable of harming targets on more than one side at a time- one must assume that the unit is actually locked in a facing formation and anyone not at the current front is defending with AoOs only.

If comparing this to an untemplated combat then remember that a similar group in formation would only be able to have two people aiding without using reach weapons, so the max aid-other bonus would be +4, and that is only of they made their check, so the usual bonus would more likely be +2.

While the benefits of such a small Unit may seem minimal, remember that the template does provide a number of other benefits, such as a bonus to Will saves, immunity to flanking (except by other Units), immunity to individually targeted spells, and a morale bonus vs. fear effects. Very much a defensive option but one with high utility and makes much sense in the context of group combat.

A size 2 unit of medium creatures is 36 bodies in a 15'x15' space counting as huge, six on a side. They can now make two glorious attacks per round, with net +7/+8 atk/dmg and a net -1 AC, but can no longer use Coordinated Assault against foes of their constituent size of medium- however they have gained the ability to Envelop them, for one glorious attack per round. Compared to the +8 aid total they'd normally have (which would not fully usable against mediums without reach, those six on the one attacking side are getting a pretty sweet deal- at the cost of 34 potential other attacks. The unit makes sense mostly because it limits the incoming dps of a foe via AoOs while concentrating damage without requiring a surround.

Remember that Swirling Melee applies to everyone Enveloped, greatly magnifying the effectiveness of a Unit against multiple opponents, much as you would expect in an actual combat. I'm not sure why you think that you would be sacrificing 34 potential attacks, you seem to be thinking that you would actually be able to apply those attacks to a given target. I don't really see many situations where that would be the case.

An Enveloped medium foe is super cramped and subject to 50% more attacks if they're the main target, but it's still going to take a while unless the Enveloped creature is foolish enough to move and trigger the AoOs.

Yes? It would similarly take a while to take down a mid-level PC surrounded by standard mooks. That really is the entire point of this template. Not to make mooks a threat on par with the BBEG, but to offer a similar experience without making the DM roll enough dice to choke a Warhammer player. There is also a psychological component to this as well (from a DM/player perspective). A player taking 5 hits of 4 damage may be irked at having to adjust his HP total so many times yet still dismissive, yet getting hit for 20 damage may be enough to get their attention, and perhaps a smidge of respect. That is a useful component as well even though the mechanical result is identical.

A size 3 unit of medium creatures is getting ridiculous, 128 in a 20'x40' space counting as gargantuan, eight on the short side but 16 on the long side, making all of three glorious attacks and three AoOs and Enveloping up to large creatures. Net +9 attack, damage goes up to +12 and net -2 AC. At this point the only excuse for how few attacks they can make is that the unit is automatically functioning on true medieval battle time scale, but instead of brief line clashes many minutes apart, it's a few guys attacking and rotating out every 6 seconds.

Again, I feel like you are ignoring the abstractions here and just focusing on the number of attack rolls. The abstractions that the Str boosts represent need to be accounted for when looking at the situation. That +12 to damage can easily be equivalent to a x4 or x5 damage multiplier on average damage (depending on weapon, etc.,etc.) and so representing 4 to 5 attacks each. That +9 to attack can represent 4 to 5 successful aid-other attempts (so 6-10 actual attempts) per attack. From that perspective you are looking at 24-50 people being able to focus additional effort on a specific target per attack. This is all in addition to all of the aid-other checks and multiple attacks that would be going on every time you used Swirling Melee. Like I said, this isn't a 1:1 simulation, but it does seem to be a very functional abstraction, one that is far more usable in a game compared to a similar encounter without the template.

And the size 4 unit of mediums, 432 in a 30'x90', attacking side with 12, 24, or 36 creatures making 4 attacks and AoOs, net +10 attack, +16 damage, -3 AC.

See above, same thoughts applied to different numbers, you get the idea.

So what do these units do? They make groups of mooks much better at fighting monsters and/or PCs with AC and hp high enough that individual attacks would be inaccurate scratches, but mostly help against individuals of the same weight class by obfuscating and preventing casualties- the unit gains a bunch of extra "hp," but actually *loses* AC as it gets bigger, while constituents are only marked as dead if the unit is dispersed, as there is no attrition mechanic. If what you want is units of dudes fighting monsters/PCs more effectively, yeah this is probably reasonable. I'm not personally sold on the idea that a bunch of 1HD soldiers should be able to increase their damage for these purposes, but it's a thing.

It sounds like you've come around to the point of the template but you're just not comfortable with the abstractions. That's fair. Use of anything like this in a game is always a toss-up of the value of simulationist accuracy vs. gameplay viability and each GM will have a different point on that spectrum where they are comfortable. The Unit template just so happens to be right in my sweet spot on that continuum (and I do tend to lean heavily towards simulation). When considering the damage portion, see what I said above on how I see the abstraction and why I think it fits. As for the attrition aspect... I think that is reflected pretty well actually. While the Unit template can add a hefty amount of HP it is nowhere near the total HP of the constituent creatures, and I view this as a functional 'break' mechanic. A group of soldiers will only maintain formation for so long before the hellfire and damnation heading their way convinces them to GTFO. That break point will vary with training and that is pretty well reflected with the difference in additional HD based on the original creatures HD. Though you have got me thinking.

The results of disbandment were added by me but you've made me second guess it. What would you (or anyone) think would be a better disbandment option; half of the creatures considered dead/destroyed, one quarter disabled at 0 hp, and the final quarter left at half hp (as it is now); 30% slain, 30% reduced to 0 hit points, and the rest at full (as per Mobs), or something else?

I'd have to analyze the full hp and damage changes to see if it's any good for unit v unit combat to see if it really preserves enough of the constituent effects- the fact that attack bonus goes up and AC goes down means that I'm guessing I'd rate that as a no.

The AC reduction is something that I see as more of a feature than a bug. A shield wall is easier to hit than a nimble combatant dancing across the battlefield. The trade-off for being easier to target would be all of the other benefits of being in a Unit (which I don't think that you have been taking into account yet), things like a bonus to saves, immunity to flanking (except by other Units), immunity to individually targeted spells, and a morale bonus vs. fear effects, sort of like an alternate Combat Expertise trading AC for a bunch of utility bonuses. It's one of those abstractions that actually make sense to me in the context fighting in formation and such.

BTW, I do appreciate the detailed feedback on the idea. Fizban and I seem to approach many ideas from different directions and it's interesting to see things broken down by someone who may not agree. It does allow me to consider things from new angles as well.

~4E Style minion chat~

4E style minions are something that I've considered (I like the idea and the game-flow effects) but it grates on my simulationist tendencies. Whatever is used for the NPCs applies to the PCs as well (and vice versa), this just tends to remove a lot of problematic shenanigans on both sides of the table, and I haven't found a way to work such a thing into a game in a way that I'm satisfied with. Although it might fit into a new campaign... I'll have to give it some thought.

Fizban

2018-09-30, 02:44 AM

Yup, that's what you get from just about any streamlining mechanic, arbitrary changes to get a job done. . . .If you want to roll hundreds of attacks then go ahead, this is an attempt to make things actually playable.
The arbitrary part is where the number and damage of the attacks have nothing to do with the number of creatures.

Also, remember the utility of Swirling Melee. A size 4 Unit could functionally make a theoretical maximum of 108 additional attacks (on similarly sized medium creatures) as a swift action, so long as all those attacks are made on separate creatures who have been enveloped.
Sure, except for one small problem: why would they be fighting 108 medium creatures not also in a unit? If the whole point of the unit system is to reduce the number of individual actors, being able to hit lots of them doesn't actually matter.

As I mentioned above, the Str. boosts don't seem that arbitrary to me. They seem like a functional (and meaningful) way to represent aid-other and multiple hits without having to actually roll all those extra attacks. Remember, this isn't going for 1:1 simulation here, this is going for functional representation.
I think you're using arbitrary differently than I am. The str boost has nothing to do with the actual output of the creatures, it's just an arbitrary use of the size increase rules, hoping that they'll come out to a reasonable result. Turns out they kinda do, but they just as easily could have not.

If comparing this to an untemplated combat then remember that a similar group in formation would only be able to have two people aiding without using reach weapons, so the max aid-other bonus would be +4, and that is only of they made their check, so the usual bonus would more likely be +2.
I mentioned it myself further down.

While the benefits of such a small Unit may seem minimal,
The smaller units are gaining the greatest effect. It's the massive 100's units that are getting shortchanged.

I'm not sure why you think that you would be sacrificing 34 potential attacks, you seem to be thinking that you would actually be able to apply those attacks to a given target.
Yes, that's why they're potential attacks. I suppose I could have listed all the different situations where the concentrated attacks would be beneficial/inferior, but they're not hard to imagine.

That really is the entire point of this template. Not to make mooks a threat on par with the BBEG, but to offer a similar experience without making the DM roll enough dice to choke a Warhammer player. There is also a psychological component to this as well (from a DM/player perspective).
It could use a better statement of such at the beginning then, as I believe the default assumption for something organizing hundreds of soldiers into military units is that it will make sense for mass battles (yes, I do notice that this thread is calling for mooks vs PCs). If it is unequivocally not expected to work for unit v unit combat and only for units v monsters and PC-types, then it should probably say so. If the unit v unit combat is explicitly intended to provide different combat results than what you might expect if you actually rolled/averaged everything out with normal mechanics, then likewise that should be noted. Instead it is presented mostly without commentary.

There is also a psychological component to this as well (from a DM/player perspective). A player taking 5 hits of 4 damage may be irked at having to adjust his HP total so many times yet still dismissive, yet getting hit for 20 damage may be enough to get their attention, and perhaps a smidge of respect.
Personally I would find it more intimidating to see the DM punch a button on a calculator for a bunch of random number results and then just read off ton of hits, but that's more of a ranged thing. In melee I'd actually prefer the opposite: I don't particularly think that units of 1HD mooks should ever have a chance against monsters and PCs. Once you're tough enough that they're fishing for 20s and need dozens of hits to kill you, there are only two results: you kill enough to break their will, or there are so many with such will that they can and will wear you down anyway.

Again, I feel like you are ignoring the abstractions here and just focusing on the number of attack rolls. The abstractions that the Str boosts represent need to be accounted for when looking at the situation. That +12 to damage can easily be equivalent to a x4 or x5 damage multiplier on average damage (depending on weapon, etc.,etc.) and so representing 4 to 5 attacks each. That +9 to attack can represent 4 to 5 successful aid-other attempts (so 6-10 actual attempts) per attack. From that perspective you are looking at 24-50 people being able to focus additional effort on a specific target per attack. This is all in addition to all of the aid-other checks and multiple attacks that would be going on every time you used Swirling Melee. Like I said, this isn't a 1:1 simulation, but it does seem to be a very functional abstraction, one that is far more usable in a game compared to a similar encounter without the template.
Indeed, I was focusing on the attacks per side ratio- but now you're telling me I should like the fact that they can focus more damage than should be physically possible onto a smaller area, which just swings the other way.

It sounds like you've come around to the point of the template but you're just not comfortable with the abstractions. That's fair. Use of anything like this in a game is always a toss-up of the value of simulationist accuracy vs. gameplay viability and each GM will have a different point on that spectrum where they are comfortable. The Unit template just so happens to be right in my sweet spot on that continuum (and I do tend to lean heavily towards simulation).
What I would like is merely a perfect unit system that functions for both unit v unit mass combat and unit v individual PC/dungeon/tactical combat, is that so much to ask?

One could also simply use two different unit systems, but I feel that leans too far in the "just use a different game for the mass combat" direction. The mass combat must reflect and respond to the proper 3.whatever rules, else the PC's mechanical participation is rendered into "whatever the DM feels like assigning your effort."

As for the attrition aspect... The results of disbandment were added by me but you've made me second guess it. What would you (or anyone) think would be a better disbandment option; half of the creatures considered dead/destroyed, one quarter disabled at 0 hp, and the final quarter left at half hp (as it is now); 30% slain, 30% reduced to 0 hit points, and the rest at full (as per Mobs), or something else?
By attrition I mean the fact that the attacks hitting a unit ought to be killing people outright but, no one dies until the unit is disbanded. To remedy that you'd have to track incoming damage vs member hp. You could then take that number of "maximum" kills and reduce it based on whatever ratios seem right.

The AC reduction is something that I see as more of a feature than a bug. A shield wall is easier to hit than a nimble combatant dancing across the battlefield. . .It's one of those abstractions that actually make sense to me in the context fighting in formation and such.
Except when you hit the shield wall nothing happens, because it's a shield wall. Meanwhile using a shield with these units is for once about as bad as it sounds, since you're getting the str and die increases of a higher level character/monster, but no access to the innate scaling AC of a PC's magic shield or a higher CR monster's greater natural armor. -*record scratch*

Wait a second, I've got my AC wrong. Example from the paizo thread has much more NA, and reminds me that those values should be cumulative. So AC is actually going up with CR, good.

BTW, I do appreciate the detailed feedback on the idea. Fizban and I seem to approach many ideas from different directions and it's interesting to see things broken down by someone who may not agree. It does allow me to consider things from new angles as well.
Of all the unit rules I've read it's definitely the most unique. I too rather hate the mob template variants.

TheCount

2018-09-30, 05:39 AM

Tucker's kobolds are great inpiration.

i have some questions about this army:

1. How prepared are they?
Did they planned an attack for weeks/months? Do they have a steady supply line or just what they scavenged last week? Do they have offensive magic/magical support? Did they thought about how to counter hostil offensive magic/magical support?

2. whats thier compossition?
just in big lines, (like, 40% infantry, 20% cavalry 30% ranged(mundane and magic) and 10% support, change it as you want)

3. Are they a know local power, a secret organization or outsiders in the place the battle will unfold?

Aside from these, i have few advice:

-AoE attacks are good, blanket the whole battlefield with them before your infantry!!!!

-have some necromancers, they could swim in resurces!!!

-use the terrain. what does it matter if the enemy can fly if they are in a a tight corridor or abudant forest (unless they are fairies, small flying creatures have the advantage in forest)?

traps. lots and lots of traps. like, trap the door, the doorbell and the doormatt as well, just dont forget to trap the door knob too. and, im sure you could rig a cannon to fire when the door is opened.... and the floor behind the door is a concealed pitfall.... you get the idea.

-dont forget the old, tried and true methods: douse them in oil then burn them, choke them in water.....or acid or flaming acid, etc

-battlefield controll: make walls, pits, difficult terrain, could combine them with traps, the old methods and AoE attacks as well.

Zaq

2018-09-30, 11:47 AM

4E style minions are something that I've considered (I like the idea and the game-flow effects) but it grates on my simulationist tendencies. Whatever is used for the NPCs applies to the PCs as well (and vice versa), this just tends to remove a lot of problematic shenanigans on both sides of the table, and I haven't found a way to work such a thing into a game in a way that I'm satisfied with. Although it might fit into a new campaign... I'll have to give it some thought.

I don’t feel like diving into the weeds of how well 3.5 in general supports simulationism (other than to note that I personally feel like the system isn’t particularly well-suited for it), but if you just want to address the “both sides of the GM screen should have fundamentally similar mechanics” issues, PCs can sometimes have minions too. I’ve had great fun setting up encounters wherein some minions that spawn/appear midway through the fight can be either allied with Team Hero or with Team Monster depending on who triggers them to appear. Used well, minions do matter, but an individual minion matters way less than a full-strength combatant, so it’s not unbalancing most of the time to add one to EITHER side of the field if it makes the story and/or the game interesting.

Also, while this is situational and not one-size-fits-all, minion-style mechanics are sometimes a fun way to represent presences on the battlefield who simply aren’t intended to have the staying power of a full combatant but who still have the potential to be interacted with in some way. Hirelings, for example, or prisoners you’re rescuing from a dungeon, or something like that. They can’t absorb a full-on hit and need to be protected in some way, but they also can’t just be accidentally/casually removed from play by looking at them funny the way someone who’s just super low level could be. Or if the PCs have some help from NPCs in some way, that help can be represented with minions with much less effect on balance than with fully-statted allies—for example, if a town or outpost is under attack, the PCs may be the most powerful folks on their side of the field, but adding in a handful of allied minions to represent the town guard or the military resources of the outpost can be an interesting way of giving the feel of “the party isn’t completely alone and has meaningful assistance that is noticeable, but it’s still a very good thing that the PCs are here to be big damn heroes.” And it’s both much faster and much less likely to skew the balance of the encounter than if the doughty dwarves defending their domiciles from droves of demons were given complete statblocks (either level-appropriate or way lower level).

Heck, by default, 4e handles familiars as basically being minions (with the explicit rule in place that a familiar who is destroyed in an encounter will be magically restored after a short rest, because the important part is the magical essence bound to the arcanist in question rather than the small body that said essence is inhabiting), which in practice means that it’s much less terrifying/obnoxious to have them be present on the battlefield than was the case in 3.x. There’s even a kind of low-cost version of an “animate dead” power that lets a PC bring back a defeated enemy as what is effectively an undead minion for a limited period of time, which is neat because it’s less abusable than a full “this thing is my permanent skeletal servant now” ability but still lets the PC access some of the defeated enemy’s tricks in a limited way. But the ultimate point is that it’s far from unheard-of to put minions in PC hands.

Of course, the initial concerns that I raised in my first post (i.e., the system math isn’t rigid enough to allow for trivial calculation of what a minion of level X should have for numbers) still matter, so I do recognize that this is still a solution that requires some work. But given that the majority of the other solutions that have mentioned either require arguably more work or might not give quite as effective of an end result, I still feel like the conversation is worth having.

ShurikVch

2018-09-30, 12:35 PM

Some more "teamwork" feats:
Formation Expert (Complete Warrior)
Improved Aid Other (Dragon #339)
Pack Feint (Dragon #313)
Pack Tactics (Dragon #313)
Swarm Fighting (Complete Warrior)
Wolfpack (Races of the Wild)

Axiomatic Creature template - Linked Minds SQ: No axiomatic creature in the group is considered fl anked unless all of them are.

Soldier Skeleton - Cooperation: gains a +1 Circumstance bonus on attacks & AC for each Soldier Skeleton adjacent to it; if it flanks an opponent, it gains a +1 Circumstance bonus on attacks against that opponent.

Legion Devil - Legion's Strength (hp of all Legion Devils within 100' pooled together, and until at least 1 is left, they're all alive), Legion's Defenses (communal saving throw vs AoE; highest roll result is shared by the whole group), Legion's Mind (saving throw vs targeted mind-affecting spell or SA is also rolled by the other Legion Devils within 60'), and Legion's Battle Skill (+4 to attack for every other Legion Devil within 60')

Schattenbach

2018-09-30, 01:28 PM

Simply using Pathfinder 1e’s CR scaling: 16 CR2 Skeletons are a CR10 threat. 256 CR2 Skeletons are a CR18 threat, 4,096 CR2 Skeletons are a CR26 threat. 65,536 CR2 Skeletons
are a CR34 threat. 1,048,575 CR2 Skeletons are a CR42 threat.

So, assuming the PCs (or whatever creature it is this is about) actually choose to engage in battle instead of simply flying away (likely because they have to) or decide to not simply
create some large barrier/hazard/whatever to screw the army over ... Do the skeletons (or any other equivalent of creatures) manage to keep up against CR-equivalent threats? Likely not, at
least not if the stamina and other resources of their opponent is basically limitless (assuming they don’t need food/somehow manage to get some time to eat). Casters are likely to run out of spells before long if they’re just blasting and/or otherwise lack
good area control spells (that, in this case, also work on undeads), fighters are likely to keep going forever (or at least until their HP are grinded down).

Sure, casters can fly and bomb/nuke the undeads/mooks/whatever a while, but they will run out of spells eventually. Martial classes will run out of per day abilities eventually and while they can shoot from the air, so can the mooks from shot at them from the ground.

Some suggestion to fix at least this stamina issue (that shouldn’t affect regular encounters) directly from one of the rules I wrote a while ago:

#PHYSICAL STAMINA IN COMBAT

Physical Stamina in Combat:
##Light combat (evaluation is based on the creature’s physical capabilities) uses up stamina as if the creature is moving at Hustling pace and, as far as getting fatigued is concerned, the effects of those two effect categories stack with each other.
##Taxing Combat (evaluation is based on the creature’s physical capabilities): uses up stamina as if the creature is moving at Running pace and, as far as getting fatigued is concerned, the effects of those two effect categories stack with each other.

Still doesn’t change the fact that fighting that many enemies (i.e. 200+) still likely turns into some extremely boring endurance game.

Using DnD3.5 rules for Damage Conversion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/damageConversion.htm) while getting ride of the AC-bonus part to make everything involved (PCs in particular) easier to hit while also sapping some resources would also help quite a bit as long as the PCs don’t have extremely high touch AC. Somewhat questionable because it goes into homebrew territory, More direct options to make things easier to hit would be the DnD3.5 version of Armor to damage reduction (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/armorAsDamageReduction.htm) or Pathfinder’s Armor to Damage reduction (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/armor-as-damage-reduction/) rules might also work.

Edit: Added some things.

Quarian Rex

2018-09-30, 04:36 PM

The arbitrary part is where the number and damage of the attacks have nothing to do with the number of creatures.

As I pointed out in my last post, I think that the changing modifiers from a squad to battalion do represent the number of creatures engaged pretty well.

Sure, except for one small problem: why would they be fighting 108 medium creatures not also in a unit? If the whole point of the unit system is to reduce the number of individual actors, being able to hit lots of them doesn't actually matter.

When fighting another unit then the same abstractions would apply on both sides and the point would be moot. Mentioning the 108 was strictly in response to what seemed like a critique that the Unit could only deal with up to 4 opponents at a time. Just showing the potential to deal with even a large number of single creatures of cumbersome proportions.

I think you're using arbitrary differently than I am. The str boost has nothing to do with the actual output of the creatures, it's just an arbitrary use of the size increase rules, hoping that they'll come out to a reasonable result. Turns out they kinda do, but they just as easily could have not.

Here I just think that you are failing to give the creators of the template the credit they deserve. Meeting ones homebrew goals with existing base game elements/mechanics (so things can be more innately understandable) is far more difficult than it sounds, and doing so in a way that actually works is borderline inspired. Credit where it is due my friend.

I mentioned it myself further down.

Your thoughts seemed to be evolving throughout the post but I felt that this element wasn't fully addressed, hence the comment.

The smaller units are gaining the greatest effect. It's the massive 100's units that are getting shortchanged.

I think that I addressed this pretty well in my last post, illustrating how the bonuses equate to the participation of a significant portion of the Unit, so even the larger Units aren't getting shortchanged upon closer inspection.

Yes, that's why they're potential attacks. I suppose I could have listed all the different situations where the concentrated attacks would be beneficial/inferior, but they're not hard to imagine.

My issue was your seeming implication that those potential attacks could be functionally used as attacks, and so should be reflected in the number of attacks by the unit. I do think that most of those potential actions can be accounted for in the attack and damage bonuses as I've mentioned before.

It could use a better statement of such at the beginning then, as I believe the default assumption for something organizing hundreds of soldiers into military units is that it will make sense for mass battles (yes, I do notice that this thread is calling for mooks vs PCs). If it is unequivocally not expected to work for unit v unit combat and only for units v monsters and PC-types, then it should probably say so. If the unit v unit combat is explicitly intended to provide different combat results than what you might expect if you actually rolled/averaged everything out with normal mechanics, then likewise that should be noted. Instead it is presented mostly without commentary.

This is D&D, I don't think that I've ever seen a thesis statement provided with any new content, official or homebrew. Options are provided to players/DMs, make of it what you will. I actually think that this works pretty well for Unit vs. Unit combat as well. Granted, this does need some extensive playtesting, but the math does seem to add up and (perhaps more importantly) it looks like something fun and satisfying to use at the table (especially compared to any other options I've seen so far). Like any option it does have its limits though. I think that this works best with low HD base creatures (as it was intended) and breaks down once you start trying to do this with higher level characters, but that is the nature of 3.P.

Personally I would find it more intimidating to see the DM punch a button on a calculator for a bunch of random number results and then just read off ton of hits

Different strokes for different folks, but the number crunching on the calculator and recitation of the laundry list of hits is a game-haltingly slow process. Not something that you would want to preserve when streamlining a mass combat template.

I don't particularly think that units of 1HD mooks should ever have a chance against monsters and PCs. Once you're tough enough that they're fishing for 20s and need dozens of hits to kill you, there are only two results: you kill enough to break their will, or there are so many with such will that they can and will wear you down anyway.

You are preaching to the choir here but, as you yourself pointed out in your earlier posts, aid-other is a thing that should be taken into account in a trained combat formation, and the lowered number of attacks (one of your chief criticisms of the template) go a long way to preserve the idea of massed effort being required to have any effect. As for the two results...

you kill enough to break their will, or there are so many with such will that they can and will wear you down anyway.

I feel like the template gets this across pretty well.

Indeed, I was focusing on the attacks per side ratio- but now you're telling me I should like the fact that they can focus more damage than should be physically possible onto a smaller area, which just swings the other way.

Micro-managing options for mooks have been a favourite TO discussion topic since ancient times (you and I have even had one in other threads) so we are both quite aware of what kind craziness can be accomplished with enough held/delayed actions if you want to optimize the action economy of every single pleb on the battlefield. I think that the Unit sits in a happy middle ground that takes such things into account (in the most playable way that I've seen so far) yet doesn't assume that they are maximized to their fullest extent.

What I would like is merely a perfect unit system that functions for both unit v unit mass combat and unit v individual PC/dungeon/tactical combat, is that so much to ask?

I too would like all my dreams to come true :)

One could also simply use two different unit systems, but I feel that leans too far in the "just use a different game for the mass combat" direction. The mass combat must reflect and respond to the proper 3.whatever rules, else the PC's mechanical participation is rendered into "whatever the DM feels like assigning your effort."

I think that is something that is somewhat unavoidable. Trying to play out a war of tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers at the scale of single characters is going to be an exercise in futility. If you want to play it out in game then different systems will have to be used. I'm personally partial to ACKS (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/130926/ACKS-Domains-at-War--Campaigns?manufacturers_id=4277). The system itself seems pretty flexible and accommodating to new content. The one aspect that really sold me on it was the idea of the Heroic Foray. On each Battle Turn (where each army is given a Battle Rating and battle is based on that) heroes can declare a heroic foray as they race out to take on a chunk of the enemy themselves.

The PCs can 'stake' 0-3 BR (0 being just 'Entering the foray' while 3 would be 'Seeking glorious death!'), and this can be done as a group (adding the stakes together) or as separate forays depending on the situation. The enemy then selects that much BR of his army (each unit is a company of @120 medium creatures, half that number for large/mounted, etc., with a unit of human conscripts being 0.5 BR and dwarven heavy infantry being 3 as a sense of scale) and you do a character level combat with those units. If the PCs win and the enemies are destroyed/routed then that amount of BR is removed from the enemy army.

If the enemy army has heroes who also want to foray then both sides set a stake, the highest is used for both, and combat is done with BR support on each side. Should the heroes on one side be defeated/withdraw then their staked BR is removed from their army and the victors remove their loses in BR as well.

I think something like this, where character scale action can have a direct influence on the greater battle as a whole is the only real way to do it. In that regard, I'm looking for something to help me resolve those character scale encounters rather that something that effectively bridges the gap seamlessly between the two, as it seems you were hoping for (and, for the record, that is not something that I'm sure is possible).

By attrition I mean the fact that the attacks hitting a unit ought to be killing people outright but, no one dies until the unit is disbanded. To remedy that you'd have to track incoming damage vs member hp. You could then take that number of "maximum" kills and reduce it based on whatever ratios seem right.

I get ya, but this is something that D&D has always been weak on. A character is as effective at 1 hp as he is at full and all that. The only problem that I have with tracking hp of the unit and reducing size, etc., is that the hp of the Unit is not the total hp of the constituent creatures (nor do I think that it should be, that would raise a lot of problems) so I don't really see a way to get a more granular approach to Unit capability that I would be happy with. Looking at the hp of the Unit as the damage threshold for unit stability before it breaks is about the best option that I can see without introducing the ball-ache of adding negative levels based on the amount of damage received or some other such kluge.

Except when you hit the shield wall nothing happens, because it's a shield wall.

Except shield walls aren't actual walls. Things slip past them/break through/etc., especially in a D&D context.

Wait a second, I've got my AC wrong. Example from the paizo thread has much more NA, and reminds me that those values should be cumulative. So AC is actually going up with CR, good.

o.O

... good catch. I use the monster size changes so little (it's usually baked into the monsters or using a heavily nerfed version like with Enlarge Person) that NA being cumulative completely escaped me. Nice.

Of all the unit rules I've read it's definitely the most unique. I too rather hate the mob template variants.

That's why I try to share what I find when I can. If anyone knows of a better option I would like to hear of it, but I like this one for now.

I don’t feel like diving into the weeds of how well 3.5 in general supports simulationism (other than to note that I personally feel like the system isn’t particularly well-suited for it)

I'm not going to say that you're wrong but, for me at least, it has always been a suspension of disbelief thing. I can accept the conceits/constraints of any given system, from there I seek internal consistency. I don't really seek full simulation of our reality within the setting, just a consistent simulation of the setting within the campaign. For a character (PC or NPC) to be believable they have to be capable of making decisions that make sense within the game world, even a world that has a very idiosyncratic view of what is real. If mechanical changes are made purely for narrative purpose, without some justification in the setting itself, then character choice becomes somewhat meaningless as the basis of those choices can be changed on a whim. At that point it feels less like exploring an alternate world and more like semi-interactive DM story-time. Some people really like the later, I enjoy it less so.

Also, while this is situational and not one-size-fits-all, minion-style mechanics are sometimes a fun way to represent presences on the battlefield who simply aren’t intended to have the staying power of a full combatant but who still have the potential to be interacted with in some way.

Hey, you're preaching to the choir as to the gameplay utility of the idea. I just need to find some way to internally justify the existence of such glass cannons within the world. What could possibly justify that creation of a character who has 8th (or whatever) level capability but can be dropped in a single hit? Why would you ever apply this process to a melee character? Does this mean that the only minion characters would be ranged and/or spellcasters? These are the kinds of questions that I would have to answer before I could actually used them in a game.

I still feel like the conversation is worth having.

Oh, most definitely. Hell, I'm even trying to cook up some concepts where this would be in my game but the implications will have to be pondered some more.

Quarian Rex

2018-09-30, 04:43 PM

Using DnD3.5 rules for Damage Conversion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/damageConversion.htm) while getting ride of the AC-bonus part to make everything involved (PCs in particular) easier to hit while also sapping some resources would also help quite a bit as long as the PCs don’t have extremely high touch AC.

I'm actually more a fan of using the Damage Conversion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/damageConversion.htm) rules as is. It really emphasizes the importance of armor as a key component to survivability and makes low level combat something other than nuclear rocket tag,

martixy

2018-09-30, 07:32 PM

I actually use the Damage Conversion rules in my games.
They're one of my favourite Variant rules.

@Rex, Fizban
Your whole exchange is way too impenetrable to parse and join in.

In have a suggestion, if you will indulge me.
Instead of this (mostly pointless) arguing, how about we do something constructive?

Let's disregard the unit template and start from the beginning. Let's create our own.

There are two places we can do this: Here, as that is pretty much on topic for the thread, or we can take it to another thread, probably in the homebrew forum. I'm okay either way.

So... let's take it from the top then!

What is our stated design goal and what are our design constraints?
The answer to these questions will frame the whole discussion and effort.

On my end the answers are as follows:
a) Be able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).
b) The solution should be usable within a d20 system, more specifically D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, allowing expedient play for the user. Minor computational support is acceptable. It should subvert as little of the system's basic mechanics as possible, instead, seek to use whatever tools and facilities the system offers to achieve its goal.

@Rex This is where the unit template fails miserably.
Let me teach you some game design here.

The basic point of any system, and more granularity of any game mechanic is to model a given event or situation in a fun or satisfactory manner. This is done through simplification and abstraction, dumbing down things and preserving only aspects that serve the end goal. Because you can't exactly model reality(unless you invented TOE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything), in which case the Nobel committee has a dozen or so prizes for you), and frequently that's not the point anyway.

There are 2 basic concepts at play here and they are antithetical to each other: Depth and complexity.
Depth is the desirable quantity. Complexity is what you strive to minimize.
You essentially buy depth with with complexity.
It is a mighty fine balancing act, and what distinguishes a bad game mechanic from a great one.

This is why the unit template is bad. It blew it's complexity budget way past Mars and straight into Saturn's moons. It may or may not have achieved the desired depth of successfully modelling army combat in the process(I have not playtested it yet to offer that assessment), but even if it did, it's a moot point given what took to get there.

If you take me up on this offer, we can start expanding on the above questions with relevant specifics and begin design process proper.

Fizban

2018-09-30, 09:27 PM

This is D&D, I don't think that I've ever seen a thesis statement provided with any new content, official or homebrew.
Then they need to up their game (and I have read plenty of homebrew/tweaks that explained themselves). 1st party content likes to get by on blind faith and sure they set the starting point, but the best non-core content is that which can and does explain what it's doing and why, so you actually know whether you want or should be using it. The smaller the chunk, the less excuse there is for not explaining it- if I present my entire 90 page tweaks and brew doc then sure that's a questions later thing, but a single feat probably has more planning text than feat text, and the template in question here is not nearly so long it doesn't deserve at least a mission statement.

Different strokes for different folks, but the number crunching on the calculator and recitation of the laundry list of hits is a game-haltingly slow process. Not something that you would want to preserve when streamlining a mass combat template.
It's really not. A standard graphing calculator has a function where you just tell it to give you some number of numbers within a range and it does it. You know the target number, and anything up to say 100 results is going to be quick enough to scroll through. I find most complaints about rolling too much usually come down to people that refuse to roll faster. It's excruciating watching say, dnd streams, where one character making two attack rolls takes a full 30 seconds or a minute per attack every single time. As long as you're not doing it multiple times per round or something.

Which does bring up another point- lots of people seem to start stressing about mass combat/unit combat rules before they've even checked if they need them. Many episodes of a bunch of dudes being involved with an adventure I would bet pass by fast enough that a prepared DM would only have a few things they'd need to prepare for "mass" use. Which could even be prepared beforehand, turning the pre-rolls into an event script.

I was also going to say something earlier about the fact that a lot of classic DnD was straight up about mid-high level PCs chopping through tons of mooks that could barely fight back, it was actually a feature, part of the fun. Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil has a bunch of this when you get to the main temple complex. I think a big problem with a lot of people's problems with 3.5 is due to basically cutting a leg out from under the stool and then frantically trying to make a new one (usually without measuring first). In any case, the desire for a knot of low HD guys to voltron their way into fighting higher level PCs and monsters/getting blown away by giant melee swings is kindof an entire different genre. One which your preferred template seems to do a pretty god job of, so there you go.

I get ya, but this is something that D&D has always been weak on. A character is as effective at 1 hp as he is at full and all that. The only problem that I have with tracking hp of the unit and reducing size, etc., is that the hp of the Unit is not the total hp of the constituent creatures (nor do I think that it should be, that would raise a lot of problems) so I don't really see a way to get a more granular approach to Unit capability that I would be happy with. Looking at the hp of the Unit as the damage threshold for unit stability before it breaks is about the best option that I can see without introducing the ball-ache of adding negative levels based on the amount of damage received or some other such kluge.
A character is completely fine at 1hp, but a unit is not a character, even if you want to make as much of their unit functionality character-like as possible. I'm not actually advocating a reduction in power as members drop either, that is too fiddly. But if the combat ends without a unit being disbanded (and there are plenty of reasons), then there absolutely needs to be something tracking how many of their members died during that fighting.

Except shield walls aren't actual walls. Things slip past them/break through/etc., especially in a D&D context.
A single entity swinging at a shield wall is going to have approximately zero effect, unless they're large enough to actually crash through it, and even then it's formations that beat cavalry (not sure if I already said that this thread of if it was a different one). Whoever is holding the shield that is hit is just going to hold onto their shield, braced by the rest of the formation.

One amusing effect of every unit combat system is that it changes every melee attack into a foe-tossing sweep. Which is basically the point, but DnD already has mechanics for sweeping through mooks, which are only further devalued when they're unneccesary. And yes I noticed that there's a bonus for such attacks, but +1d6 damage hardly compares to the actual power of those effects when a unit system is not in use. If spells get an area based recalculation for tons more damage it's hardly fair that weapon users who actually specialize in crushing formations just get a couple dice.

What could possibly justify that creation of a character who has 8th (or whatever) level capability but can be dropped in a single hit?
My thoughts exactly. Minions are a purely narrative/gameplay motivated device, that cannot be made sense of within the world the way most people use them without drastically rewriting a lot of how the world works. There is actually one monster that takes a stab at it though: the Scouring Constructs in MM5 attack by throwing little bots with +32 attack and 5hp at you.

Though if Zaq is reading this: have you tried looking up Demonac's variant? He uses minions in the 3.5 game that his Tales From My DnD Campaign series is based on. I think they had something like 1 or 2 hp per HD, Evasion/Mettle, and possibly just fiat immunity to auto-damage. Been long time since I read them.

Let's disregard the unit template and start from the beginning. Let's create our own.
I'm a fiddler, not a whole-clother. If I were to write a mass combat "system," It would actually be about how to figure out the results of a mass combat and PC actions upon it, without ever directly using anything but normal mook soldiers. Which I'm pretty sure is not what you want, and not something I'm interested in writing any time soon.

a) Be able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).
b) The solution should be usable within a d20 system, more specifically D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, allowing expedient play for the user. Minor computational support is acceptable. It should subvert as little of the system's basic mechanics as possible, instead, seek to use whatever tools and facilities the system offers to achieve its goal.
You might be interested in checking out the one I've been meaning to check out, Cry Havok from Malhavoc Press, here (http://drivethrurpg.com/product/678/Cry-Havoc?manufacturers_id=9&language=es&it=1), part of which is used (missing critical information) in the Warcraft setting books as I've mentioned. In particular, it uses a big table to tell you how many hits a unit got- so if a unit rolls low it still gets some hits from the fewer members whose rolls where high. That's what I find most exciting, a proper attempt at converting the array you'd get from a bunch of rolls into a single roll. The part I'm not sure about is how independent individual actions interact, since that part was missing from the Warcraft book, and units operate on 1 minute rounds (a unit attacking an individual just works as you'd expect).

To be clear, there really is no single system that will handle both actual mass army combat and tactical round based combat. They're just different things. I actually would have recommended the template Quarian Rex is suggesting, but apparently you don't like it, heh. If anything the most effective solution to mass combat would be to do a stricter write up of linking DnD characters to a mass combat model (such one for DnD that doesn't already include PC effects well). But formations of troops do not function on a 6 second time scale.

This is why the unit template is bad. It blew it's complexity budget way past Mars and straight into Saturn's moons. It may or may not have achieved the desired depth of successfully modelling army combat in the process(I have not playtested it yet to offer that assessment), but even if it did, it's a moot point given what took to get there.
Uh. . . no it didn't? That unit template is the second simplest I've read (the first simplest being Mob variants), and the main problem I've been saying it has is what you're referring to as lack of depth.

Schattenbach

2018-10-01, 02:28 AM

Creating some kind of Unit Template, hm?

Is this really necessary? Most of those things could be accomplished through circumstances bonuses. i.e. quasi-moral based circumstance bonuses or some combination of circumstances bonuses and moral bonuses; boosting AC, to-Hit, Damage and Saving Throws. With things like previous victory/good rations/equipment/large numbers/good leadership/"just cause"/"need to win this battle at all costs"/"being forced into a desperate struggle that makes one even more dangerous"/etc. boosting the confidence of the Army while factors that are bad for army moral (typically large causality) do the opposite.

This should be enough to create a significant threat for a basic army against only somewhat stronger opponents. Mixing lots of low level mooks with a few mid-level and one or a few higher-leveled ones might also be helpful when it comes to boosting the overall combat capabilities of some kind of army. With the defeat of "their glorious commander"/"invincible commander"/"whatever" being quite bad for their moral (even more so than simply taking out the general generally is).

One could also allow sufficiently unified and trained armies to create some kinds of "combination attacks" (like a coordinated shower of arrows or a advancing spear formation for rather basic things ... or a hail of bullets for somewhat more advanced settings that is still rather basic) that are more difficult to avoid. Not to mention defensive maneuvers (i.e. with the most basic being some shield wall formation or changes in the formation, etc.).

Quarian Rex

2018-10-01, 04:15 AM

Instead of this (mostly pointless) arguing, how about we do something constructive?

Hmm, discussing the viability of a template that meets the request in the original post was constructive. I'm sorry you couldn't see that.

This is why the unit template is bad. It blew it's complexity budget way past Mars and straight into Saturn's moons. It may or may not have achieved the desired depth of successfully modelling army combat in the process(I have not playtested it yet to offer that assessment), but even if it did, it's a moot point given what took to get there.

This is a surprising statement. Anyone who is generally familiar with size increases and the swarm rules (so, anyone who is familiar with the game at all or who has access to the core books/SRD) would be familiar with the basis of the template. The only truly novel things it does are apply the dice increases due to size (normally reserved for damage) to HD, and adapt swarm options to the broader array of actions available to standard characters. One of the things that attracted me to the Unit template was it's inherent simplicity.

a) Be able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).
b) The solution should be usable within a d20 system, more specifically D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, allowing expedient play for the user. Minor computational support is acceptable. It should subvert as little of the system's basic mechanics as possible, instead, seek to use whatever tools and facilities the system offers to achieve its goal.

Both of these requirements seem to be met, in full, by the Unit template. If you don't like the template that's fine, but to suggest that it doesn't meet the criteria is just... disingenuous.

Let's disregard the unit template and start from the beginning. Let's create our own.

I suggested the Unit template in the first place because it is the best option that I've found so far. Any attempts that I could make would use the Unit as the basis and that is apparently not something that you are interested in. Besides, it you thought that...

@Rex, Fizban
Your whole exchange is way too impenetrable to parse and join in.

... then I suspect that we may not be speaking the same language. Critical assessment of a work, discussing the pros and cons of both its strengths and weaknesses (mechanically and narratively) is how I go about things. If you find that, "too impenetrable to parse and join in", then I would seriously reconsider how much I had to teach about game design if I were you.

Quarian Rex

2018-10-01, 01:47 PM

But if the combat ends without a unit being disbanded (and there are plenty of reasons), then there absolutely needs to be something tracking how many of their members died during that fighting.

This got me thinking. How about a Unit making a Fort save at the end of combat (DC modified by the Highest HD of the opposition +Cha, due to leadership or somesuch) to avoid casualties? Have a failed save resulting in disbandment losses proportional to the Unit's lost hp (or set fractions, like for every lost 1/4); so a Unit that lost half hp would have a 1/4 of it's number dead, i/8 disabled, and the rest at half hp, based on current disbandment rules (though those are subject to change). Say that a successful save halves the casualties, or upgrades them a rank, dead->disabled->half hp->full hp?

This is a really rough idea but I think there might be something there.

Fizban

2018-10-01, 08:45 PM

Why not? Sounds interesting. Proportional casualties, fort save for half. I'd just use the same filter as the disbandment penalty for the status of those casualties.

Adghar

2018-10-02, 06:33 PM

The results of disbandment were added by me but you've made me second guess it. What would you (or anyone) think would be a better disbandment option; half of the creatures considered dead/destroyed, one quarter disabled at 0 hp, and the final quarter left at half hp (as it is now); 30% slain, 30% reduced to 0 hit points, and the rest at full (as per Mobs), or something else?

The simulationist and mathematician within me combine to want to say you should do some form of direct accounting. Each time you remove 1 HD worth of N-sized Unit's HP, give it the "Dispersing..." debuff, reroll HD for N-1-sized Unit (until equal to or lower than current HP total), then when the Unit is reduced to that threshold, the Unit's stats are set to the N-1-sized Unit's. The logical result is that once you Disperse a N=1 Unit, only 1 surviving full-HP enemy of the base type remains, and the other 15 individuals are between 0 HP and dead, or have fled the battle (the transition between depleting the N=1 bonus HD and an untemplated enemy's HD, if positive, would represent defeating up to 15 of the remaining individuals).

For example, start with N=2 Warriors who have 1d10 + 3d8 + 3d8 HP =, let's say, 5 + 20 + 24 = 49 HP. They fight a group of PCs who end up dealing 25 damage, reducing the Unit to 24 HP. The Unit is Dispersing and we roll 1d10 + 2d8 to figure what the target N=1 group will have for HP, and we get 4 + 14 = 18 HP. The PCs deal another 7 damage, reducing the Unit to a N=1 unit and adjusting all stats accordingly (-1 size category / -1 BAB / -1 Ref / -1 Will / grants partial XP for defeating CR differential if you'd like, or to simplify matters, just leave CR the same so end of encounter XP is handled as usual).

Although now that I think about it, it would probably make better sense to pre-roll the HP thresholds, especially to prevent excessive rerolls on inequality errors (suppose the first roll was 1 + 3 + 3 and the second was 10 + 16!).

Bonus advantage of this methodology is that routing a mass of mooks would be unpredictable if you roll HD, such that "You notice the enemy begin to disperse!" will give a sense of reaching a milestone, but players won't actually know when the next threshold that actually provides them with a reward (weakening the enemy - "The enemy disperses into a squadron! The remainder of the light platoon is dead, dying, or has fled the battle.") will occur. I believe that's what they call a Skinner Box, resulting in cultivating highly addictive behaviors.

Disadvantage of course is that it may cause too much recalculating for your tastes.

EDIT:

Another disadvantage is that it might make Units too "easy" to defeat. You might combine my idea with the Fort save idea, so that at certain thresholds (0 HP to swing it in the other difficulty direction), the Unit must make a Fort save, and upon success, downgrades to N-1 or N-(1d4) Unit, and upon failure, completely disperses into a desired mix (30% dead, 30% unconscious, 60% fleeing, 10% healthy individuals?)

Quarian Rex

2018-10-03, 03:24 AM

Disadvantage of course is that it may cause too much recalculating for your tastes.

This is a big factor for me. Switching templates according to damage is not the streamlined experience that I was looking for. That, and it doesn't jive with the crunch style of D&D (at least for me). In D&D you hit something till it goes down, not hit it till it shrinks down to nothing upon hitting hp thresholds. This may be a personal preference though.

The logical result is that once you Disperse a N=1 Unit, only 1 surviving full-HP enemy of the base type remains, and the other 15 individuals are between 0 HP and dead...

The problem that I have with that line of thinking would be that it would only make sense if the hp of the Unit was roughly equivalent to the total hp of the constituent creatures, and it is nowhere near that. If it was then your example group of N=2 Warriors would have 198 hp, not 49 (and a N=4 group would have 2,376 hp without a Con bonus), the hp of the Unit template just isn't a good enough analogue to the hp of the members for it to be used as a direct measure of the casualty rate (nor do I think that it should be). Even worse, adjusting the template at 50% hp can result in up to a 3/4 casualty rate as the numbers adjust to the smaller template (you would be killing more people per hp on the larger templates than the smaller and all that). I'm also not sure that would be a satisfying gaming experience. It would be like fighting a russian nesting doll, each one less of a threat than the one before, refusing to die but continually reducing the challenge. I think that I would prefer a decisive battle. Do you think that a shrinking template would actually add to the encounter or is it just the need to scratch the simulationist itch (which I get btw)?

That was the main reason that I was thinking of the Unit hp as the break limit of the soldiers before they flee/disperse, instead of a more direct kill-count. When the Unit breaks they may get run down and may get away (hence the Fort save) but either way that will happen long, long before you reach a single man standing. Granted, having officers make Charisma/Profession (Soldier/General) checks to rally the troops into a smaller Unit is assumed to be an option as well, hence trying to figure out the survivors, but that would effectively be a separate combat.

Assuming the hp of the Unit to be a morale break limit as much as damage taken what do you (or anyone) think would be fair casualty rates on a passed/failed Fort save?

Fizban

2018-10-03, 10:58 PM

In D&D you hit something till it goes down, not hit it till it shrinks down to nothing upon hitting hp thresholds. This may be a personal preference though.
Sure you do! Ooze! Well a couple of them anyway. Assuming the players don't already know how to avoid splitting them and weapons hit before magic.

Assuming the hp of the Unit to be a morale break limit as much as damage taken what do you (or anyone) think would be fair casualty rates on a passed/failed Fort save?
Might try looking up historical casualty rates if there's any sources, since as easy as it was to die, deaths still weren't as common on the field as some think. And/or any casualty ratios where units were known to break.

martixy

2018-10-04, 11:29 PM

I'm getting off my high horse. I was sick and not very lucid this week. :)

I still don't like the Unit Template very much however.

I'd cut the size increases, which leads to a whole slew of problems, which the template then goes on to try and fix by adding even more exceptions to the exceptions. Also dispense with the exceptions to the exceptions(e.g. that absolutely horrid DR rule).

You start by choosing the size of your unit - e.g. N.

Increase Hit Dice by 2*N, using Racial HD.

For attacks, simply combine them. Instead of making N full attacks or casting N spells, allow the unit to simply affect everything in its reach (maybe up to N, in case of casting spells). 1 attack and damage roll, things are expedient.

Any numbers that don't quite match up to what you want can be moderated by existing mechanisms (e.g. give the unit power attack or combat experise).

martixy

2018-10-05, 12:28 AM

Here's a basic writeup of my version:

Probably needs some polish and tuning, but look how much frickin simpler everything is.

The Unit Template is an Acquired template that can be applied to any creature capable of working together in a group. This creature will be referred to as the base creature.

Choose the size of the unit, from 1 to 4. This number will be N and is used to determine the unit's abilities. N=1 represents a squad N=2 represents a light platoon N=3 represents a battalion and N=4 represents a regiment.

Size and Type: The creature's size or type does not change. It gains the Unit subtype.

Hit Dice: The creature's Hit Dice increase by 2*N. The type of Hit Dice rolled is set by the unit's racial Hit Dice, not any class levels the mob might have.

Initiative: As the base creature.

Speed: A unit's speed is 10 feet slower than that of the base creature.

Armor Class: As the base creature.

Space and Reach: A unit has the same reach as the base creature. It takes up space as a creature N sizes larger. This area is shapeable, but must be contiguous. It can occupy the same space as a creature, since it tramples over and moves around its victim. A unit can move through squares occupied by enemies, and vice
versa, without impediment, although a unit provokes an attack of opportunity if it does so. A unit can move through openings large enough for its component creatures.

Special Attacks: Expert grappler, Trample, Unit attack, Coordinate assault

Special Qualities: Unit traits

Base Saves: Same as base creature

Abilities: Same as base creature

Feats: Units gain N bonus Unit feats (new feat category).

Abilities:
Expert grappler(Ex): A unit can maintain a grapple without penalty and still make attacks against other targets (normally, attacking other targets while grappling imposes a –20 penalty on grapple checks). A unit is never considered flat-footed while grappling.

Trample (Ex): A unit that simply moves over a creature and doesn't end its movement with that creature in one of its occupied squares can trample the creature. A trampled creature takes damage equal to 2d6 points + 1-1/2 times the unit's Strength modifier. The victim can either make an attack of opportunity against the unit or make a Reflex save (DC 10 + 1/2 unit's HD + the unit's Str modifier) to take half damage.

Coordinated Assault:
A Unit may coordinate its efforts against a target of sufficient size. Rather than making a normal attack, a unit may make a Coordinated Assault. The target of a Coordinated Attack must be of size equal to or larger than the size of the unit+N. When making a coordinated assault a unit uses its ability to affect all creatures it threatens with its attack. In return the unit gains +N to attack and +Nd6 damage against its target.

Unit traits:
A unit can only be flanked by other units.
Unit attack: When a unit makes a melee attack, it can affect all creatures it threatens with the same attack. Roll attack and damage once per attack and apply the damage to each threatened creature. A unit can ranged attack up to its HD creatures. Attacks of opportunity are resolved only against the provoking creature. Units are still limited to making one such attack per round unless the text states otherwise.
Unless stated otherwise, a unit’s attacks are nonmagical. Damage reduction sufficient to reduce a unit attack’s damage to 0 or other special abilities can give a creature immunity (or at least resistance) to the unit’s attacks. Some units also have other special attacks in addition to normal damage or deal more damage than their Hit Dice would normally suggest.
It is subject to critical hits and sneak attacks if its component creatures are subject to such attacks. Reducing a unit to 0 hit points or fewer causes it to break up, effectively destroying the unit. Until that point, however, any damage taken by the unit does not degrade its ability to attack or resist attacks. A unit is never staggered or reduced to a dying state by damage. Also, a unit cannot be subject to a bull rush, dirty trick, disarm, drag, grapple, reposition, or trip combat maneuver, unless it’s affected by area effects that include such effects. A unit can grapple an opponent.
A unit is immune to any spell or effect that targets a specific number of creatures (including single-target spells such as disintegrate and multiple-target spells such as haste), though it is affected by spells or effects that target an area or a nonspecific number of creatures (such as fireball). A unit takes half again as much damage (+50%) from spells or effects that affect an area. If a unit is rendered unconscious by means of nonlethal damage, it disperses and does not reform until its hit points exceed the nonlethal damage it has taken.
Unit spellcasting: A unit capable of casting spells can cast N+1 spells per round. Units receive a +10 bonus on Concentration when casting spells.
Spellcasting in a unit: Because of the chaos of combat, spellcasting or concentrating on spells within the area of a unit or within its reach requires a successful caster level check (DC = 20 + spell level). Using skills that involve patience and concentration requires a successful DC 20 Will save.
Looting units: Although units are composed of a number of individual creatures, the chaos and destruction of battle means that not all of these creatures’ equipment survives the rigors of combat. As a result, parties who wish to claim usable gear or treasure from slain foes treat a unit as a single creature for the purposes of looting, and should be able to recover gear worth a total value equal to the unit’s expected treasure value (as determined by the unit’s CR).
Undead Units are hard to turn. They gain a morale bonus to turn resistance equal to N.
All Units gain a morale bonus to fear effects equal to N.

...
And then a bunch of feats for units.
E.g.
Disciplined: Units with ranks in Profession (Soldier) can apply half their rank as a bonus to initiative.
...and other similar
...and the others from the unit template.

P.S. I like this idea:

Why not? Sounds interesting. Proportional casualties, fort save for half. I'd just use the same filter as the disbandment penalty for the status of those casualties.

Saintheart

2018-10-05, 02:02 AM

This is probably very late in the piece, but I always got a lot of joy out of reading this optimisation guide on characters working in units (http://bg-archive.minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=4963).

Quarian Rex

2018-10-07, 11:47 PM

Some thoughts on your template. Some of my comments will invariably compare this to the Unit template. This isn't necessarily an attempt to change your mind, but there are issues that I feel are addressed by the Unit template that are not addressed by yours (or any other, really), yet need to be.

As a note, I'll be keeping to your own requirements in mind for this as well, found here...

a) Be able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).
b) The solution should be usable within a d20 system, more specifically D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, allowing expedient play for the user. Minor computational support is acceptable. It should subvert as little of the system's basic mechanics as possible, instead, seek to use whatever tools and facilities the system offers to achieve its goal.

First thing is to think of a new name for your template. Unit is already taken and will be referred to a lot here. No need to confuse things. Until you choose something better, I shall refer to yours as the Gaggle.

The Unit Template is an Acquired template that can be applied to any creature capable of working together in a group. This creature will be referred to as the base creature.

Choose the size of the unit, from 1 to 4. This number will be N and is used to determine the unit's abilities. N=1 represents a squad N=2 represents a light platoon N=3 represents a battalion and N=4 represents a regiment.

Size and Type: The creature's size or type does not change. It gains the Unit subtype.

...

Space and Reach: A unit has the same reach as the base creature. It takes up space as a creature N sizes larger. This area is shapeable, but must be contiguous. It can occupy the same space as a creature, since it tramples over and moves around its victim. A unit can move through squares occupied by enemies, and vice versa, without impediment, although a unit provokes an attack of opportunity if it does so. A unit can move through openings large enough for its component creatures.

Seriously, seriously, consider this and what it actually means. For the two larger sizes (N=3 and N=4) of the Gaggle you massively increased the number of people in them while decreasing the amount of space for them to exist. A regiment has 1,000 to 2,000 people in it (see here (http://secondworldwar.co.uk/index.php/army-sizes-a-ranks/86-army-units-a-sizes)) and you are cramming them into 36 squares (1/3 of what I had for N=4 on the Unit and that was limited to 432 people) that are only 5' by 5'. That is @ 30 people to a square even on the lower end of things. That is ridiculous.

The various sizes of the Unit template and the spacings were chosen to accommodate 4 people per 5' by 5' square, the max I could justify in a tight military formation. Whatever you decide to do, you need to avoid every square being a dimensionally compressed clown car.

Having the entire area be shapeable but contiguous is also a mistake I think. The entire purpose of having a template like this is to reduce micromanagement, not to increase it with a further limitation that everyone must stay adjacent to each other.

Hit Dice: The creature's Hit Dice increase by 2*N. The type of Hit Dice rolled is set by the unit's racial Hit Dice, not any class levels the mob might have.

Looking at your current set-up, do you feel that +2 to BAB and 8d6 hp are a sufficient approximation of the capabilities of 1,000+ characters? Also, why do you think that a mob of 1,000 commoners is almost exactly as capable as 1,000 fully trained soldiers? This is a huge limitation of relying solely on racial HD for advancement. Humanoids almost universally ignore racial HD, being defined by their class instead, replacing even their initial HD. Not reflecting this in a template is a massive disservice to any humanoids it is applied to (the main creature type to be augmented this way).

Also, due to HD inflation you are artificially making the group immune to HD limited counter-measures that should be extremely effective. This is probably a mistake.

Abilities:
Expert grappler(Ex): A unit can maintain a grapple without penalty and still make attacks against other targets (normally, attacking other targets while grappling imposes a –20 penalty on grapple checks). A unit is never considered flat-footed while grappling.

Do you think that being dog-piled by a squad/platoon/battalion/regiment is best modeled by a single member trying to grapple while everyone else does something else? Nope, neither do I. If being grappled by potentially thousands of people is no more effective and no more of a hindrance than with a single individual then you need to make some changes.

Trample (Ex): A unit that simply moves over a creature and doesn't end its movement with that creature in one of its occupied squares can trample the creature. A trampled creature takes damage equal to 2d6 points + 1-1/2 times the unit's Strength modifier. The victim can either make an attack of opportunity against the unit or make a Reflex save (DC 10 + 1/2 unit's HD + the unit's Str modifier) to take half damage.

This is the Gaggle's most effective offensive option (since it is normally only capable of a single, unbonused, attack per round), doing an auto-hit greatsword's worth of damage, completely without regard to the armament or capabilities of the constituent creatures. The problems (besides having an attack that doesn't care what creature is making it)? The most effective tactic is to leapfrog back and forth over a target every round (very realistic and immersive) while taking AoO's (potentially multiple if they try it against more than one character at once) every time, hemorrhaging the Gaggle's disturbingly small number of hp with every jump. It's most effective attack is also, essentially, a suicide attack. Not good.

Coordinated Assault:
A Unit may coordinate its efforts against a target of sufficient size. Rather than making a normal attack, a unit may make a Coordinated Assault. The target of a Coordinated Attack must be of size equal to or larger than the size of the unit+N. When making a coordinated assault a unit uses its ability to affect all creatures it threatens with its attack. In return the unit gains +N to attack and +Nd6 damage against its target.

Here you are trying to ape the Coordinated Assault of the Unit template but have only succeeded in making the Gaggle less effective against most targets. While larger groups get a slight accuracy/damage boost against increasingly bigger creatures, anything smaller (including PCs) goes back to the completely unbonused attack of a single member of the group. This is a massive problem. I hope you can see that.

Unit Gaggle traits:

You essentially just copied the Unit trait list yet managed to cripple your template at the same time. Let me elaborate.

Unit attack: When a unit makes a melee attack, it can affect all creatures it threatens with the same attack. Roll attack and damage once per attack and apply the damage to each threatened creature. A unit can ranged attack up to its HD creatures. Attacks of opportunity are resolved only against the provoking creature. Units are still limited to making one such attack per round unless the text states otherwise.

This effectively makes an arbitrarily large number of mooks no more effective than a single mook. How does this make a group a reasonable threat to a party? It does not.

It is subject to critical hits and sneak attacks if its component creatures are subject to such attacks.

By simultaneously reducing the total hp of the Gaggle (through your HD changes) and making the Gaggle vulnerable to Crits and Sneak Attacks you have completely trivialized the numbers advantage of the Gaggle. Normally an arbitrarily large Crit or Sneak Attack could kill a single individual while the excess damage is effectively wasted. A Gaggle regiment (1,000 to 2,000 people) could effectively lose hundreds of people to a single Crit/SA (since a smaller hp pool is representing a larger pool of individuals) as the attacker somehow simultaneously exploits the weak points on hundreds of people at the same time... with a single target attack.

Like I said, crippling.

Looting units: Although units are composed of a number of individual creatures, the chaos and destruction of battle means that not all of these creatures’ equipment survives the rigors of combat. As a result, parties who wish to claim usable gear or treasure from slain foes treat a unit as a single creature for the purposes of looting, and should be able to recover gear worth a total value equal to the unit’s expected treasure value (as determined by the unit’s CR).

This is a shoe-horned option from the Mob template and yet another reason the Mob is terrible. This sort of thing is just a horrible idea. Disintegrating 90% of the equipment used against the PC's is just a d!ck move no matter how you look at it. Figuring out what you could possibly do with hundreds of morningstars and suits of leather armor is part of the fun of the massive mook fight. If the template isn't worth the generous 'reward' of such trash loot then a re-examination of the template would probably be in order.

The Gaggle seems to fail in it's stated goal of being...

... able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).

Reducing the combined efforts of hundreds (potentially thousands) of mooks to the equivalent of a single attack with one or two aid-other checks helping it out completely fails to make the mooks anything close to effective against even low level PCs, much less high level PCs. Having low total hp and vulnerability to Crit/SA make the Gaggle functionally useless even as a door-stop to buy the BBEG time.

While I may be sounding heavy on the criticism and light on the constructive, these are all issues that are addressed by the Unit template. Things like size modifiers applied to stats and HD effectively simulate multiple hits, co-ordinated actions, and shared defenses in an effective manner. You do not like the way that is handled, I get that, but you still need to address the issues that they solved.

Good luck.

martixy

2018-10-08, 01:29 AM

Unit template discussion post below.
Spoilered so our little side discussion doesn't detract from the rest of the thread.

TL;DR at the end.

Some thoughts on your template. Some of my comments will invariably compare this to the Unit template. This isn't necessarily an attempt to change your mind, but there are issues that I feel are addressed by the Unit template that are not addressed by yours (or any other, really), yet need to be.

As a note, I'll be keeping to your own requirements in mind for this as well, found here...

First thing is to think of a new name for your template. Unit is already taken and will be referred to a lot here. No need to confuse things. Until you choose something better, I shall refer to yours as the Gaggle.
I like Gaggle :smallbiggrin:

Also, keep in mind that this was a basic attempt, e.g. 1 step forward, don't know how many steps back. I'll note the steps I feel go forward below.

Seriously, seriously, consider this and what it actually means. For the two larger sizes (N=3 and N=4) of the Gaggle you massively increased the number of people in them while decreasing the amount of space for them to exist. A regiment has 1,000 to 2,000 people in it (see here (http://secondworldwar.co.uk/index.php/army-sizes-a-ranks/86-army-units-a-sizes)) and you are cramming them into 36 squares (1/3 of what I had for N=4 on the Unit and that was limited to 432 people) that are only 5' by 5'. That is @ 30 people to a square even on the lower end of things. That is ridiculous.

The various sizes of the Unit template and the spacings were chosen to accommodate 4 people per 5' by 5' square, the max I could justify in a tight military formation. Whatever you decide to do, you need to avoid every square being a dimensionally compressed clown car.

Having the entire area be shapeable but contiguous is also a mistake I think. The entire purpose of having a template like this is to reduce micromanagement, not to increase it with a further limitation that everyone must stay adjacent to each other.
I was literally just copy-pasting descriptions, which means the Unit template has the same problem. But you do make a good point.
Probably just edit the fluff descriptions. Or do N+1 sizes. Or both.

Looking at your current set-up, do you feel that +2 to BAB and 8d6 hp are a sufficient approximation of the capabilities of 1,000+ characters? Also, why do you think that a mob of 1,000 commoners is almost exactly as capable as 1,000 fully trained soldiers? This is a huge limitation of relying solely on racial HD for advancement. Humanoids almost universally ignore racial HD, being defined by their class instead, replacing even their initial HD. Not reflecting this in a template is a massive disservice to any humanoids it is applied to (the main creature type to be augmented this way).

Also, due to HD inflation you are artificially making the group immune to HD limited counter-measures that should be extremely effective. This is probably a mistake.
I do actually believe that using RHD is the correct choice here, as the gaggle doesn't magically get more training in its class from being a gaggle(e.g. class features), but its basic statistics do improve, to reflect the number.
Again, numbers subject to change. I'm actually thinking maybe +3 RHD per size, maybe even +4.
HD-based effects is an edge case, and admittedly a weakness in this model. I don't see a better solution than adding an exception here.

Do you think that being dog-piled by a squad/platoon/battalion/regiment is best modeled by a single member trying to grapple while everyone else does something else? Nope, neither do I. If being grappled by potentially thousands of people is no more effective and no more of a hindrance than with a single individual then you need to make some changes.

This feature simply accounts for the nature of the gaggle, as a multitude of individuals.
Being dogpiled is modelled by the increased base statistics, BAB in this case.
This was part of the design goal (not relying on exceptions, but on already established system mechanics).

This is the Gaggle's most effective offensive option (since it is normally only capable of a single, unbonused, attack per round), doing an auto-hit greatsword's worth of damage, completely without regard to the armament or capabilities of the constituent creatures. The problems (besides having an attack that doesn't care what creature is making it)? The most effective tactic is to leapfrog back and forth over a target every round (very realistic and immersive) while taking AoO's (potentially multiple if they try it against more than one character at once) every time, hemorrhaging the Gaggle's disturbingly small number of hp with every jump. It's most effective attack is also, essentially, a suicide attack. Not good.

I feel like it's a good idea to have some form of an auto-hit attack. Though upon second look, it should probably have a size limit, maybe +1 base creature, otherwise it clashes with coordinated assault.
"disturbingly small number of hp" is a matter of perspective in this case. Certainly seems that way if we consider a gaggle(or unit) of 1000+ creatures, but as noted, that's fluff, which is mutable. Mechanics are tunable as well, as I said I'm starting to lean toward 3 RHD per gaggle size.

Here you are trying to ape the Coordinated Assault of the Unit template but have only succeeded in making the Gaggle less effective against most targets. While larger groups get a slight accuracy/damage boost against increasingly bigger creatures, anything smaller (including PCs) goes back to the completely unbonused attack of a single member of the group. This is a massive problem. I hope you can see that.

Not unbonused. Again, working with base mechanics rather than exceptions.

This effectively makes an arbitrarily large number of mooks no more effective than a single mook. How does this make a group a reasonable threat to a party? It does not.

Base mechanics, see above.
Actually here, the specific contrivance was ease of use.
A specific nod towards b) of the design goals.

By simultaneously reducing the total hp of the Gaggle (through your HD changes) and making the Gaggle vulnerable to Crits and Sneak Attacks you have completely trivialized the numbers advantage of the Gaggle. Normally an arbitrarily large Crit or Sneak Attack could kill a single individual while the excess damage is effectively wasted. A Gaggle regiment (1,000 to 2,000 people) could effectively lose hundreds of people to a single Crit/SA (since a smaller hp pool is representing a larger pool of individuals) as the attacker somehow simultaneously exploits the weak points on hundreds of people at the same time... with a single target attack.

Like I said, crippling.

Problem with fluff, see above.
Also, not quite sure how I reduce the total HP? Do you mean the Con bonuses Units get?

This is a shoe-horned option from the Mob template and yet another reason the Mob is terrible. This sort of thing is just a horrible idea. Disintegrating 90% of the equipment used against the PC's is just a d!ck move no matter how you look at it. Figuring out what you could possibly do with hundreds of morningstars and suits of leather armor is part of the fun of the massive mook fight. If the template isn't worth the generous 'reward' of such trash loot then a re-examination of the template would probably be in order.

I admit to that. Also technically, this is from Pathfinder. I was trusting the designers had their reasons, without examining them. It could be nixed.
With a little bit more thought, one idea I have is determining the death toll when a gaggle disperses, and granting loot based on that.

The Gaggle seems to fail in it's stated goal of being...

... able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).

Reducing the combined efforts of hundreds (potentially thousands) of mooks to the equivalent of a single attack with one or two aid-other checks helping it out completely fails to make the mooks anything close to effective against even low level PCs, much less high level PCs. Having low total hp and vulnerability to Crit/SA make the Gaggle functionally useless even as a door-stop to buy the BBEG time.

While I may be sounding heavy on the criticism and light on the constructive, these are all issues that are addressed by the Unit template. Things like size modifiers applied to stats and HD effectively simulate multiple hits, co-ordinated actions, and shared defenses in an effective manner. You do not like the way that is handled, I get that, but you still need to address the issues that they solved.

Good luck.

Fluff problem again, see above.
But apart from that reducing the amount of rolls a gaggle has to make is a conscious decision towards the stated goal.
As already noted(even in the OP gaggle post), the basic statistics which you list are tunable numbers.
And given that most of your criticism lands on exactly the basic stats, and how they line up with the fluff, I'd say that makes this version a resounding success, since fixing it reduces to tuning a single number rather than messing with the unit's gaggle of exceptions. (see what I did there? :smalltongue:)

So, to recap:
1. Fluff problem with what unit describes as regiments and battalions.
2. Mechanical problem with the basic statistics, i.e. BAB/HP, i.e. HD number. We're looking for the proper number of HD per gaggle size and a reasonable fluff description based on that.
3. Criticism on the single-roll (whirlwind-like) attack, which is actually a conscious decision in service of one of the design goals.
4. Crit/SA vulnerability, which I think is okay, given we fix the other problems.
5. Loot, which I admit is a d* move and have no attachment to.

Did I miss anything? Or misunderstand anything?

And yea, constructive would be doubly as helpful, but criticism is still at least singly helpful.

Quarian Rex

2018-10-08, 06:35 AM

Spoilered it is.

I like Gaggle :smallbiggrin:

I am glad.

Also, keep in mind that this was a basic attempt, e.g. 1 step forward, don't know how many steps back. I'll note the steps I feel go forward below.

I definitely get ya. Grinding the edges off a first draft usually has some hard knocks.

I was literally just copy-pasting descriptions, which means the Unit template has the same problem. But you do make a good point.
Probably just edit the fluff descriptions. Or do N+1 sizes. Or both.

Which is why I resolved that with the revised version of the Unit template that I posted in the beginning of the thread. See a problem, fix a problem and all that.

I do actually believe that using RHD is the correct choice here, as the gaggle doesn't magically get more training in its class from being a gaggle(e.g. class features), but its basic statistics do improve, to reflect the number.

... that's why you don't provide actual class levels? But you do need to have something to reflect actual combat training. Otherwise you are saying that a trained army is no more effective than a mob of commoners. Even just providing an exception that humanoids use the highest HD of their classes for additional HD from the template. I know that you are allergic to exceptions, but humanoids are already an exception to the normal creature HD progression and this really needs to be taken into account. Both to actually provide a challenge (as per goal 'a', commoner HD just don't cut it) and to subvert as little of the systems basic rules as possible (see goal 'b', humanoids work differently, respect it).

Again, numbers subject to change. I'm actually thinking maybe +3 RHD per size, maybe even +4.
HD-based effects is an edge case, and admittedly a weakness in this model. I don't see a better solution than adding an exception here.

Then you get into the same problem that the Mob template suffers from, scaling stats that you don't necessarily want (BAB, saves, etc.) to get what you do want (a big old pile of hp to simulate the giant pile of mooks, and some bonuses to represent co-ordination). Units addressed this by having a standardized progression for everything similar to a commoner [having more of you doesn't make you into Bruce Lee (adding a giant pile of BAB)] but solved the hp issue by applying size modifiers to the largest HD of the base creature (preserving the importance and relevance of an army that is actually trained).

You essentially need to increase the effectiveness of the base creature (to pose an actual challenge to the players) and magnify the hp (which just adding HD does a poor job of since you don't want competence scaling evenly with hp) without actually jacking every stat, so dealing with the template is still similar to dealing with the constituent creatures. Mob fails at this, Unit succeeds. You want something in-between and that is a hard path, one that may not be very satisfying.

Do you think that being dog-piled by a squad/platoon/battalion/regiment is best modeled by a single member trying to grapple while everyone else does something else? Nope, neither do I. If being grappled by potentially thousands of people is no more effective and no more of a hindrance than with a single individual then you need to make some changes.

This feature simply accounts for the nature of the gaggle, as a multitude of individuals.
Being dogpiled is modelled by the increased base statistics, BAB in this case.
This was part of the design goal (not relying on exceptions, but on already established system mechanics).

And relying on BAB boosts to solve everything introduces more problems, not the least of which is uneven BAB progression across the creature types, nor does it reflect multiple people/attacks in any way whatsoever. A group template really shouldn't add competence, "as the gaggle doesn't magically get more training in its class from being a gaggle", but it should be more effective. That was one of the reasons that I liked using size modifiers to reflect a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of massed combat. Str. bonuses nicely reflect a massed group's advantages in melee combat or grappling without turning then into sharpshooters, as would happen with a straight BAB increase.

Again, these are issues that should be addressed to avoid falling into a similar trap to that of the Mob.

I feel like it's a good idea to have some form of an auto-hit attack. Though upon second look, it should probably have a size limit, maybe +1 base creature, otherwise it clashes with coordinated assault.

You are trying to model combat with a large number of mooks, not being inside a churning swarm of hell-beetles, not engulfed in an acid secreting slime, not being digested inside a Purple Worm. Defenses that work on the individual creatures should still work against the group. There is a very good chance that mooks may not be able to actually hit the party tank and that is not something that should be taken away.

"disturbingly small number of hp" is a matter of perspective in this case. Certainly seems that way if we consider a gaggle(or unit) of 1000+ creatures, but as noted, that's fluff, which is mutable. Mechanics are tunable as well, as I said I'm starting to lean toward 3 RHD per gaggle size.

You are trying to model armies here, saying that you are actually trying to represent a very small number of creatures violates the very purpose of the template and is more than a bit of a cop-out. The number of creatures involved in a template like this isn't just fluff, you really need to try to figure what it is you are trying to model here, then look for/make mechanics that can accommodate it.

Ignoring the need to have a big-bag-o'-hp as a key component in this would make me question what you even think fighting a big pile of mooks is even like. While individually they can be dispatched with relative ease/pose little threat, there are just so many of them that there is an actual chance that they just might wear you down with the death of a thousand paper-cuts. You can't get that feeling/effect if the groups hp can be shaved off in a round and a half.

Here you are trying to ape the Coordinated Assault of the Unit template but have only succeeded in making the Gaggle less effective against most targets. While larger groups get a slight accuracy/damage boost against increasingly bigger creatures, anything smaller (including PCs) goes back to the completely unbonused attack of a single member of the group. This is a massive problem. I hope you can see that.

Not unbonused. Again, working with base mechanics rather than exceptions.

Size bonuses are base mechanics as well, even if you don't like recognizing that fact. But you completely failed to address the point that was made. A squad (N=1) Gaggle attacking a Huge dragon does so with a +1 to hit and base damage +1d6 from Coordinated Assault. A platoon (N=2) attacking that dragon does so with a +2 to hit and base damage +2d6. A battalion (N=3 a group with far more manpower regardless of how you want to fluff it) is incapable of using the Gaggle's Coordinated Assault against that very same Huge dragon, and so does less damage to it than a smaller Gaggle because you have no other advantage due to all that manpower. That needs to be addressed.

This effectively makes an arbitrarily large number of mooks no more effective than a single mook. How does this make a group a reasonable threat to a party? It does not.

Base mechanics, see above.
Actually here, the specific contrivance was ease of use.
A specific nod towards b) of the design goals.

Cop-out response. A single mook attack, with a bonus to hit, does not a threat make. It sure is easy to use, unfortunately, it does so at the expense of design goal a) (you know, the important one) and flushing it down the drain. That is not a good trade-off.

By simultaneously reducing the total hp of the Gaggle (through your HD changes) and making the Gaggle vulnerable to Crits and Sneak Attacks you have completely trivialized the numbers advantage of the Gaggle. Normally an arbitrarily large Crit or Sneak Attack could kill a single individual while the excess damage is effectively wasted. A Gaggle regiment (1,000 to 2,000 people) could effectively lose hundreds of people to a single Crit/SA (since a smaller hp pool is representing a larger pool of individuals) as the attacker somehow simultaneously exploits the weak points on hundreds of people at the same time... with a single target attack.

Like I said, crippling.

Problem with fluff, see above.

No, it's a problem with your proposed crunch. Regardless of the number of creatures you decide to model the Gaggle on (make no mistake, this is something that you need to figure out), allowing overflow damage from Crit/SA to effectively be carried to other creatures/the group is a massive mistake, and effectively allows the damage from a weakness exploiting damage multiplier to be carried over to multiple creatures. That is a mistake no matter which way you look at it, one that you need to address.

Also, not quite sure how I reduce the total HP? Do you mean the Con bonuses Units get?

Compared to the Unit template. Max hp increase that I was commenting on from the Gaggle (for N=4) was 8d6, while the Unit (again with N=4) could add up to 32d6 if used on Barbarians or another d12 HD class. Lowered hp total with Crit/SA vulnerability equals a regiment killed in a round by a single martial character. Failing pretty hard at a) don'tcha think?

This is a shoe-horned option from the Mob template and yet another reason the Mob is terrible. This sort of thing is just a horrible idea. Disintegrating 90% of the equipment used against the PC's is just a d!ck move no matter how you look at it. Figuring out what you could possibly do with hundreds of morningstars and suits of leather armor is part of the fun of the massive mook fight. If the template isn't worth the generous 'reward' of such trash loot then a re-examination of the template would probably be in order.

I admit to that. Also technically, this is from Pathfinder. I was trusting the designers had their reasons, without examining them. It could be nixed.

When making you own stuff don't put something in unless you have a reason to do so. Copy/pasting someone else's mistake does no-one any favors.

With a little bit more thought, one idea I have is determining the death toll when a gaggle disperses, and granting loot based on that.

Yup, this was being discussed a bit earlier on this page for the Unit template. For that to have any meaning though you will need to take the nebulous fluff of how many creatures are actually in a Gaggle and forge it into cold, hard crunch.

The Gaggle seems to fail in it's stated goal of being...

... able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner (i.e. there should still be the opportunity for failure).

Reducing the combined efforts of hundreds (potentially thousands) of mooks to the equivalent of a single attack with one or two aid-other checks helping it out completely fails to make the mooks anything close to effective against even low level PCs, much less high level PCs. Having low total hp and vulnerability to Crit/SA make the Gaggle functionally useless even as a door-stop to buy the BBEG time.

While I may be sounding heavy on the criticism and light on the constructive, these are all issues that are addressed by the Unit template. Things like size modifiers applied to stats and HD effectively simulate multiple hits, co-ordinated actions, and shared defenses in an effective manner. You do not like the way that is handled, I get that, but you still need to address the issues that they solved.

Fluff problem again, see above.

You seem to be repeating that like it's a mantra, yet no matter how many times you repeat it you seem to be dragging yourself further from enlightenment. Regardless of the actual number of mooks you try to model with the Gaggle (might I remind you that the entire purpose of this is to make that a "large number"), reducing their efforts to a single normal attack with some extra bonuses to hit is not an effective challenge/threat to a high level party, or a mid-level one, or even most low level ones. This is very much a crunch problem, not a fluff one.

But apart from that reducing the amount of rolls a gaggle has to make is a conscious decision towards the stated goal.

Reducing the number of rolls to only one, that does nothing but base damage, is a huge mistake. Achieving the rock-bottom simplest mechanics at the expense of anything approaching a satisfying play experience should not be a design goal.

As already noted(even in the OP gaggle post), the basic statistics which you list are tunable numbers.

And I'm pointing out that the base stats presented for attacks currently show a complete lack of tuning.

And given that most of your criticism lands on exactly the basic stats, and how they line up with the fluff, I'd say that makes this version a resounding success, since fixing it reduces to tuning a single number rather than messing with the unit's gaggle of exceptions. (see what I did there? :smalltongue:)

Might I remind you...

a) Be able to model combat between a large number of weak opponents vs a small number of strong opponents. This is to facilitate the effective usage of mooks vs high-level PCs and facilitate the heroic fantasy of competent warriors facing the onslaught of entire armies and emerging victorious in a thrilling manner

... that is your stared goal. Claiming that the, "large number of weak opponents', and , "onslaught of entire armies", aspects of your stared design goals are mere fluff is at best disingenuous and at worst self-destructive. If a Rogue can effectively backstab your Gaggle to death with a single hit then you have failed. If the onslaught of an entire army results in 1d8+1 damage then you have failed. If you have made a group of 1st level Warriors functionally immune to Cloudkill because of HD stacking then you have failed.

This is not what a resounding success looks like. This is what deep mechanical flaws that run counter to your stated goals looks like. Deep mechanical flaws that need to be addressed by something more substantial than a handwave and mutterings about fluff.

Remember, I already have a solution to this problem. The Unit is a relatively simple template that effectively models a co-ordinated group of low levels with a nigh-optimal mix of threat, resilience, and vulnerability. Most concerns and niche cases are effectively addressed. I am covered. You are not.

Claiming success while chanting 'fluff' at any concerns only serves to hurt you and your work.

martixy

2018-10-08, 11:08 AM

~

It seems I've completely misunderstood how the Unit template calculates HP, and where half my problems come from (I was actually relying on its math when drafting my own version). Things are starting to make a lot more sense now.

This misunderstanding, in large part, is my problem with it.

This is going to require some major revision.

Sometime before the end of the week, I'll try to actually get some of the math down and run some numbers, to see if I can get away with the inflated saves and BAB or I'd need to resort to the custom HD of the unit template. But if it comes to that, I'll create a new type, rather than the absolute BS wording of the unit template. I'm not sure I can adequately convey how much I hate the advancement wording of that template, regardless of its effectiveness.

On coordinated assault: Good point. Leaning towards "larger than base creature".

Crit/SA: These are the usual sources of high single-instance damage, but not the only ones. You can just pump regular damage to the same effect. But it is a good point. And a weakness of the Unit template as well. Max damage cap, I wonder?

Hopefully working out this gross misunderstanding will resolve the criticisms.

One final thing to note: The aim here is to bridge the gap between lots-of-mooks and a-few-champions, but our operating range is not unlimited. There comes a point where no unit size will be able to effectively harm a godlike individual and a point where more mooks are best modelled as multiple units.
I think a good target to aim for is bridging a gap of 1-1.2 times the game's operating range.
Meaning that a large unit of mooks with +1 to attack should pose a roughly equal threat to something with +20 to attack.

Quarian Rex

2018-10-08, 03:46 PM

It seems I've completely misunderstood how the Unit template calculates HP, and where half my problems come from (I was actually relying on its math when drafting my own version). Things are starting to make a lot more sense now.

This misunderstanding, in large part, is my problem with it.

What was the misunderstanding? Curious as to the cause.

I'm not sure I can adequately convey how much I hate the advancement wording of that template, regardless of its effectiveness.

What text is actually problematic. If it's that much of an irritant to you then it might be for one of my players. I might see about doing a rewrite for clarity.

On coordinated assault: Good point. Leaning towards "larger than base creature".

Just remember to be careful with that since it tends to trivialize DR, a key defense against the trash mobs that this is based on.

Crit/SA: These are the usual sources of high single-instance damage, but not the only ones. You can just pump regular damage to the same effect. But it is a good point. And a weakness of the Unit template as well. Max damage cap, I wonder?

This is one of those places that I have to nod to playability. One of the joys of D&D are big hits and having a combat monster player show his stuff. I don't want to take that away. While the Barbarian swinging his faux-Mjölnir and the Rogue scooping out a carotid with a spoon might do the same damage in game terms, only one of those snaps suspension of disbelief in half when claiming equal effectiveness against an army. That was one of the reasons that I like how the Unit handled multi-attack feats and such (Cleave, Combat Reflexes, etc.) by having each one add 1d6 to damage. Is it the best analog? Nope. Does it preserve effectiveness/relevance of the feat? Yup. Does it help explain why that one big hit effectively killed so many people? Yes, yes it does.

Hopefully working out this gross misunderstanding will resolve the criticisms.

Hopefully? Still curious as to the source of the misunderstanding, in the interest of cleaning up the text to prevent future misunderstandings. Such things are helpful.

One final thing to note: The aim here is to bridge the gap between lots-of-mooks and a-few-champions, but our operating range is not unlimited. There comes a point where no unit size will be able to effectively harm a godlike individual and a point where more mooks are best modelled as multiple units.

Have no fear, I am quite aware of the limitations of this kind of thing. The Unit template is absolutely great to enhance characters with only a couple levels/HD. Applying this to 10th level characters would be nothing but a waste of resources. This is not meant to make the lowest of the low into a challenge for near-epic characters, merely to make them useful. To that end I thought that the Unit's CR adjustments were pretty on-the-nose. A Unit battalion of 1st level Fighters seems like it fits right in at CR 11. Remember, that is with inflated hp, with Crit/SA immunity, with 4 full attacks and Envelop, with size mods to Str. representing coordinated tactics and additional hits, etc.

That hits the sweet spot for me as to the upper limit of pushing the utility of mooks. Even 18th level characters should be wary when they face enough CR 10-12 threats (as most BBEGs learn when facing a party of PCs).

I think a good target to aim for is bridging a gap of 1-1.2 times the game's operating range.

I'm not sure what you actually mean by this.

Meaning that a large unit of mooks with +1 to attack should pose a roughly equal threat to something with +20 to attack.

... no? Not quite sure what you mean here. Like I said above, I think that the upper limit of mook (essentially 1HD enemies) effectiveness with this kind of template should be ~CR11, showing the threat and power of armies but also that individual adventurers will exceed their power. That actually covers a lot of territory, far more than just attack bonus comparison.