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C-Moon
2020-09-24, 11:29 AM
With Dragon Con 2020 not long finished, I was reading through/watching several game sessions and seeing all the awesome fights and adventures people went through. It made me remember the big events of past TTRPG sessions I’ve played/GM’d.

Question: What’s the biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered? (but not necessarily won!)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gIgqgB_FQaDpJ4k8r-JJHOG8U7cVYY3m/view?usp=sharing

Xervous
2020-09-24, 12:41 PM
Does death by gravity make the planet count?

Jay R
2020-09-24, 01:43 PM
1. The biggest single enemy I’ve faced? In the first D&D tournament I entered (Tacticon I, in 1976), they had a room with a 134-hit die monster.

No, that's not a typo. The hydra had one hundred thirty four heads. The tournament organizers had set it as a trap for any group stupid enough to try to fight a 134-hd monster.

And we killed it.

We opened the door, saw it, and closed the door. Then we made plans. It was in a 10x20 room, just the size of a Web spell. And an area effect attack will hit all the heads.

Player 1: I open the door.
Player 2: I cast Web.
Players 3 & 4: I throw in a flask of oil.
Player 5: I throw in a torch:
Player 1: I close the door.

The DM decided that each head took 1-6 points of damage. After doing it twice, all the heads were dead.


2. The biggest force I’ve ever faced? That would be six PCs stopping an invading army of 2,000, in a game with no magic.

Jean-Louis was my rogue PC. Vivienne was Ruth's actress PC.

In a previous adventure, we had captured bills of lading for supplies to feed an army coming to France next spring. The bills of lading implied an army of roughly 2,000 soldiers and camp followers and 500 horses, led by the General Don Miguel ----, whose last name is a moot point, as shown below. All winter, we had horses staked out to attract two wolf packs to the forest between Luneville and Drouville. We wanted numerous wolves used to feeding on horseflesh to greet the Spanish army.

The first delivery was at St. Die. We arranged that the food would arrive two days early, to allow spoilage. Then there was a heavy rain that delayed the troops. The wine was (very mildly) spiked with bad water. There were 20 pistoles baked into the bread. [We wanted soldiers pawing through the bread before passing it out.] We spread a rumor in the local towns that the rich soldiers have been throwing coins to the peasants, to encourage peasants along the road to get in the army's way.

Vivienne and Jean-Louis joined the army as camp followers, Vivienne concentrating her attentions on the officers. Jean-Louis started to become a common face, performing, spreading rumors, asking questions. "What's this I hear about a missing pay-wagon?" The next day was Baccarat. 20 more pistoles and 2 Louis d'Or (gold coins) were baked in the bread. The wine was slightly more spiked. Deliveries of the food arrived mid-morning the next day, further delaying the troops. Vivienne had two officers fighting a duel over her. (Jean-Louis did some juggling that morning, leading a crowd of soldiers to the dueling field, so they would all see their officers fighting each other.) We spread rumors among the soldiers about the “missing” pay-wagon, and bad blood between officers. Then after the troops left, we started a fire in town.

Some cavalry units left early, and so were not fed. Near the town of Luneville, we burned a bridge and planted stakes. The cavalry units tried to cross first, and one horse was lamed. So they waited for the rest of the army to arrive to build the bridge. More unrest, more rumors, more bad food. We incited some guttersnipes to throw rocks across the river at them. The bridge was finished mid-morning the next day, so late the next night, a bedraggled, tired, dispirited army arrived at Drouville. The army was forced to detour through the wolf forest by a road block. We spread rumors that the army had been torching villages behind them. The food was strongly poisoned, and the rye bread was tainted with ergot. The army was not going to be in shape to deal with the situation. Vivienne lured Don Miguel (the general) to her room at an inn, and murdered him in his sleep. We spread poisoned oats out in the woods. Then we torched the town, stampeding the horses. We started several fires on the upwind side of town. While cutting horses loose, Jean-Louis was spotted. He yelled, "Release the horses – don’t let them burn!" And he convinced the sentries to help him release and stampede the horses that they were there to guard. [Reminder: we had spent the previous winter leaving out horses for the wolf packs we were luring there.]

The Spanish lost supplies, horses, and lots of time trying to round up the horses that survived the night. Note that spooked horses aren't too bright, and that they were downwind of the flames. Many horses were lost (or eaten). Jean-Louis slipped into the General's headquarters. He fought and killed two sentries, leaving them in a pose indicating that they had slain each other. He then made off with the general's orders, dispatches, and 70 escudo (4200 L.!).

In nearby towns the next day we spread rumors that the army was berserk, looting and burning. That wasn’t too hard for people to believe, with smoke on the horizon. We spread rumors in the army that the general was seen running off with a courtesan. Henri went north and bought their next shipment of food (with their money), which we dumped in the river. After spreading a few more rumors in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, we returned to Paris, where we delivered the orders and dispatches to Richelieu.

The army split up, some becoming bandits until captured by the Duke of Lorraine; some continuing on, ravaging the countryside as they went. But they never reached the French border where they were intending to invade.

comicshorse
2020-09-24, 05:21 PM
Does running like hell away from it count ?

SimonMoon6
2020-09-24, 09:01 PM
Back in the 80's, when TSR's Marvel Superheroes RPG (the one with FASERIP) was relatively new, a friend of mine wanted to try playing a variant of Secret Wars but more of a "what if every superhero and villain was there" kind of battle. So, we had a huge fight with "miniatures" made of little squares of paper with people's names on them for every character of note that the game had statistics for.

I think one round took a couple of hours. We played until about 2 AM.

I'm pretty sure we decided not to finish the battle.

Corvus
2020-09-24, 10:46 PM
Back in 2e ad&d days, I threw a living wall at my group.

For those that don't know, the living wall absorbed all the abilities of anything it killed. Kill 2 10th level fighters? it now attacks as 2 10th level fighters. Kill a bunch of mages? It now has all the spells those mages knew and cast cast each spell once a day without needing components. Kill a dragon? It is now attacking and breathing as a dragon. And each of those component parts can attack separately. But they all share one pile of HPs and AC so you can't whittle it down.

It was one major fight.

VoxRationis
2020-09-25, 03:21 AM
My group fought an avatar of Yig in a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Differences in games make that a little difficult to compare to other things, but that was a fairly significant encounter.

In a D&D game, holding my character's ancestral castle against a besieging army of around 1000, plus summoned monsters and war animals, was probably the largest number of enemy combatants we've ever dealt with at once on our own.* We've participated in larger battles, but only as part of a larger army.

@Jay R: That was a great work of sabotage! It must be nice to have a DM whose villains obey the strictures of logistics.

That was a hoot and a half. Our party had arrived and convinced the castle's present inhabitants to join our side in rebellion against the empire when we were suddenly assaulted by an imperial army which had force-marched to catch this pack of spies and traitors all at once. The enemy had superior numbers, superior technology, war elephants, and various imperial deviltry, including things like trebuchet ammunition that released oozes into the castle bailey, but were weary after their rapid march, had little in the way of fortifications. We had magic, a level advantage, and a castle, but a large number of noncombatants and limited supplies, and started the siege with our spells somewhat depleted. For days, the back-and-forth of the siege carried on, with our party trying to rotate our to man the walls just enough to prevent the attackers from storming the castle while allowing the spellcasters to rest and regain spells. The enemy tried to prevent us from resting using catapulted oozes and other such tricks of alchemy and demonology, all the while sending their siege engines creeping towards the castle gates. We delayed that advance with every means we could think of, including using a tree feather token to erect an obstacle in front of the main gate and summoning monsters inside the battering rams, only to fall back as the first gate and portcullis fell... and then summoned Wall of Stone, folded back on itself many times (given the narrow gap it had to block) to become more of a solid cube, between the enemy vanguard and their advancing reinforcements. This proved the climax of the siege, for at this moment, the army rushed the walls, hoping to storm the sally port or get against the walls enough to sap them with powder... But our preparations had finished just in time. My character unleashed her mightiest spell, whose components the noncombatants had been preparing all this time, blanketing the battlefield with eerie, disorienting fog, into which the party demonologist summoned a fiend with a large damaging aura, one whose radius drastically exceeded the visibility within the fog. The ensuing bloodbath, fortunately, was hidden from us, but the weary survivors ran, exhausted and demoralized, from the fog, and Swethmore stood proud and untaken.

Lvl 2 Expert
2020-09-25, 03:36 AM
1. The biggest single enemy I’ve faced? In the first D&D tournament I entered (Tacticon I, in 1976), they had a room with a 134-hit die monster.

No, that's not a typo. The hydra had one hundred thirty four heads. The tournament organizers had set it as a trap for any group stupid enough to try to fight a 134-hd monster.

And we killed it.

We opened the door, saw it, and closed the door. Then we made plans. It was in a 10x20 room, just the size of a Web spell. And an area effect attack will hit all the heads.

Player 1: I open the door.
Player 2: I cast Web.
Players 3 & 4: I throw in a flask of oil.
Player 5: I throw in a torch:
Player 1: I close the door.

The DM decided that each head took 1-6 points of damage. After doing it twice, all the heads were dead.

So it was a 1-hd monster, presuming you figured out its crippling weakness to aoe attacks? (And not being able to get or reach through door openings.)

(Also, that's kind of a small room for a supposedly way over epically challenging 134 headed dragon. But certainly good of you to not back down from a supposedly unwinnable scenario that hadn't had enough thought put into it.)

Stattick
2020-09-25, 05:37 AM
GM had a plan to bring in a new PC with a splash. We were all at around 8th level, iirc, playing DnD.

So, Superman falls through a rift and starts SEVERELY hurting the party, and we were just barely able to scratch him. In the second round, I realized that there was NO WAY we could win through standard tactics. It comes around to my turn. I cast polymorph. Superman saved. I burned a luck point, telling the GM to reroll. Superman failed. Superman was now a turtle. At the top of the third round, the new PC shows up, with his kryptonite sword. I totally stole his thunder.

Jay R
2020-09-25, 12:47 PM
So it was a 1-hd monster, presuming you figured out its crippling weakness to aoe attacks? (And not being able to get or reach through door openings.)

I think it's a little more accurate to call it 134 1-hd monsters, all tethered together, since each one can attack individually. And we had no damage-dealing Area of Effect attacks except Fireball or Lightning Bolt, which we couldn't use in that small a room. We had to invent one.


(Also, that's kind of a small room for a supposedly way over epically challenging 134 headed dragon. But certainly good of you to not back down from a supposedly unwinnable scenario that hadn't had enough thought put into it.)

It's worth noting that in 1976, nobody had even two years of experience in D&D, including the DMs. I doubt if anyone in the tourney had been playing for even one year. No other group in the tourney came up with a way to defeat it.

TeChameleon
2020-09-25, 06:26 PM
Huh. My story feels oddly out of place compared to the more grounded awesome that's been recounted so far. But oh well, here we go. There are two stories, linked together by being many of the same combatants, albeit separated a fair bit in both real- and game-time.

The first story happened at the climax of my long-time group's first campaign; in the DM's homebrew world, Orcus had been building up to an invasion of the Prime Material since our very first session. The party had been working rather feverishly trying everything they could think of to delay or circumvent Orcus' return, with the Rogue setting up a secret society to work against Orcus' machinations, the Cleric actually managing to get Bahamut to intervene directly on one or two occasions, the Warlord trying to re-unite an ancient empire out of a bunch of fragmented and bickering clans, and my Wizard setting up a college of magic/griffin riding, and so forth.

Eventually, we ran up against rumours of a lost ancient superweapon, and the party's focus shifted to that. While we were searching, Orcus manifested on the Prime Material and started rolling over the (thankfully mostly uninhabited) landscape with an unstoppably huge army of undead. The Elven kingdoms just noped straight out of his way with some sort of mass planeshift, with their entire populace, buildings and all blinking out of existence rather than sit in the path of this monster army.

However, by that point, we had found the artifact, which turned out to be a collection of statues with a command stone that had been absorbing raw magic for millennia, and turned out to essentially be a single-shot Unlimited Wish spell, explicitly without DM screwover.

As a huge magic doodad, it fell to my Wizard to use the Wish. Among the suggestions were a giant unclimbable wall around the good-aligned kingdoms, teleporting Orcus into deep space, or straight-up blowing up the undead army.

I... kinda went a different route.

And turned the good-aligned kingdoms in their entirety into a flying continent.

Needless to say, this took a while, and the rest of the party was fighting off the various flying creatures Orcus was throwing at us, while the Cleric frantically diplomatized the various gods that turned up wanting to know what all the noise was, I was making a string of (thankfully improbably good) rolls to make sure that the new airborne landmass didn't break up, and that the air remained breathable, and so forth.

Meanwhile, at ground level, the undead army got fairly thoroughly obliterated by a half-dozen mile-high tidal waves, with enough force that even the avatar of Orcus got slapped out of existence. Happy endings all around, and my Wizard got sucked into a planar portal to emerge five hundred game-years later for the next campaign (I was the only one who chose to keep their character from the first campaign).

So, by the end of the second campaign, the party was epic level, and had transitioned from 4e D&D to 5th Edition. The players, for the most part, wanted to transition to lower-level stuff, so the second campaign honestly sorta fizzled while we shifted to a third one, but before it did, some fairly serious shenanigans ensued, including time-travel... lots and lots of time-travel :smallconfused:, inadvertently creating most of the local pantheon, near-deification of the PCs, at least one of them becoming their own (great x whoevenknows) grandfather, and so on and so forth.

Anyways, after all this nonsense, we started a low-level party, who after a surprisingly short length of time, got captured by Orcus (because he's a petty ****, as far as I can tell) and yoinked off to a private demiplane. And we, the players, were told to bring our epic-level character sheets to the next session, as they were going to be the rescue party. Along with Bahamut, Moridin, and the Raven Queen, along with their various archons and celestial whatsits, given that this was Orcus' home plane, with a guest appearance by Tiamat, who apparently sometimes hangs out with Orcus in this homebrew.

Cue the triumphant return of my flying-continent-making Wizard. While the rest of the party went to rescue our new characters, I decided that he was going to be the distraction (and I've told this story before, in the 'Things I am no Longer Allowed to Do' thread, so apologies if you've already seen it). It takes some doing to be even slightly distracting while a godwar is going on, but I made a fairly spirited attempt at it, opening with polymorphing Orcus' eyeballs into Chlorine Trifuoride (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4l56AfUTnQ) (yay, exploding safety equipment!).

Then Mazed Orcus (it only lasted a round, but it annoyed him, so I called it a win :smalltongue:), time-travelled some more to give Orcus a crippling fear of housecats (and introduced a bunch of housecats onto the battlefield, of course), portalled in a bunch of semi-relativistic rods-from-god (thankfully, neither I nor the DM realized at the time that anything moving that fast in-atmosphere = planet-sterilizing levels of gamma radiation), and a few other things that I can't recall offhand. It was a fun fight, and felt like a suitably catastrophic farewell to our epic-level characters.

Illogictree
2020-09-28, 12:25 AM
Hmm... biggest enemy and biggest battle I've encountered happened in the same campaign, oddly enough.

The campaign was based on the idea we were prisoners in a massive network of demiplanes (based on various TV shows, movies, and video games) that acted as a sort of prison, with a bizarre respawn mechanic that let our DM throw ridiculous encounters at us without having to worry if we survived or not.

(One of our party killed a V-Rex (yes from King Kong) by being eaten by it. It was that kind of campaign)

Anyway, at one point we teleported into the opening cutscene of one of the Warcraft games, so we were caught in the middle of a huge battle between an army of orcs and an army of humans. One of our number died like 5 times in that encounter alone. Fortunately we didn't have to actually fight, just escape.

Another time (I forget if this was at some point before or after the above occurrence) we fought a haunted house. And I don't mean we fought the haunts and ghosts and things inside (although we did do that). I mean once we escaped from the house, the thing stood up and came after us. For an idea of the scale, the house was the head of this thing, on top of a humanoid body made of gnarled trees and distorted masonry and such. It took up most of the battlemat. And if you ask my dwarf character, he slew the thing single-handed by hacking at its toes while his fellow party members crawled uselessly back into it to try to find its heart. They thought they'd succeeded, but of course we know who was really the hero here.

Kaptin Keen
2020-09-28, 03:58 AM
Well - there's always the Tarrasque, right? Anyone who isn't still wet behind the ears has fought the Tarrasque (and won, too).

Otherwise, I suppose the largest enemy would have to be one of those flying citadels in Dragonlance. We kinda won, by exploding it - while we were on it. Does that count as a draw?

Quertus
2020-09-28, 07:05 AM
Biggest enemy?

The planet

Not just falling damage (for which, the planet has killed many an adventurer / runner / whatever varied names they go by), no, once, we counted a sentient planet among our adversaries. … parley?

The Planet Killer

Yeah. There was this thing what blue up whole planets. And we done did that mind whammy, what said it be ours now.

So, if *that* group should ever have a sentient planet adversary, well, they'd be negotiating from a position of strength.

The gods

Yeah, that's the general goal; several characters have reached that goal.

Biggest battle?

Humanity

Think "Captain Planet", but murdering everyone who uses a car.

Most of Humanity

So, *after* the planet exploded, most of what was left of humanity rallied against us. And we waded through them like they were human… oops, wrong party :smalltongue:

The Armada

One character destroyed over 300 ships as their contribution to a battle. Math says that the opposition had, all told (not in that fight) around 200k ships.

The Armada II

You know, the Armada felt big. But I double checked, and found an even bigger one that hadn't felt as big. The party once took out a fleet of 10,000 shops singlehandedly. Well, OK, they had some help from the enemy's stupidity. :smalltongue:

Volcanic Genocide

IIRC, on the order of a million goblins doors to one party-initiated volcanic eruption.


And we had no damage-dealing Area of Effect attacks except Fireball or Lightning Bolt, which we couldn't use in that small a room. We had to invent one.

And why couldn't you use Lightning Bolt in a 20x10(x10?) room? :smallconfused:

Jay R
2020-09-28, 02:12 PM
And why couldn't you use Lightning Bolt in a 20x10(x10?) room? :smallconfused:

Because it would double back and strike us, according to the description of the spell. [The first version of D&D was an extension of miniatures rules, and distances are described based on the actual distance on the table. 1" on the table meant ten feet in the dungeon.]


Lightning Bolt: Utterance of this spell generates a lightning bolt 6" long and up to 3/4" wide. If the space is not long enough to allow its full extension, the missile will double back to attain 6", possible striking its creator. It is otherwise similar to a Fire Ball, but as stated in CHAINMAIL the head of the missile may never extend beyond the 24" range.

Since the room wasn't 60 feet long, the magic-user casting the Lightning Bolt would have been caught in it himself.

Drascin
2020-09-29, 04:22 PM
One campaign I was in was basically Kamen Rider Evangelion. Teenagers with transforming suits fighting giant eldritch abominations. So pretty much everything we fought started at "building-sized" and went from there.

I couldn't really tell you the exact size. After the 50m mark you kind of substitute the given figures in your head for "way too ****ing big". I just know we were getting tanks thrown at us like they were baseballs.

Glorthindel
2020-09-30, 03:54 AM
Biggest battle I have fought in was when running through the Temple of Existential Evil (Hackmaster spoof version of the Temple of Elemental Evil).

Our party were rocking through the Temple levels fairly comfortably, and our DM decided to really test us. I am not sure what level we were by this point, but my Wizard dropped a couple of fourth level spells during the fight, so had to be at least 7. Coming on to a new floor, he unloaded the entire floor on us in one giant fight. I have quite a warhammer collection, but the amount of models reguired really tested my collection. We won, but it was a really tough fight, my wizard alone used several scrolls, charges from multiple wands, and a one-use magic item on top of all his normal spells, it was glorious.

In all the fight included at least a dozen trolls and ogres, half a dozen gargoyles, a Wizard and a Fighter enemy hero, a Purple Worm (!) and enough orcs and undead to choke corridors in multiple directions.

Some highlights:

- After our party ate two Lightning Bolts from the Wizard, I started chain casting Summon Animal Spells on his location, burying him in enough Dire Elks that his casting was interrupted for the remainder of the battle until he finally died.
- The DM outflanked us with a dozen ogres led by the Fighter NPC, who dropped a Dearn's instant Fortress in the corridor, blocking off our retreat route and locking the Ogres in with us. I threw an entire Necklace of Beads of Force at the pack, instantly disintegrating the entire flanking force.
- The neutering of the Purple Worm. The DM forgot its swallow ability had a maximum number of uses before it couldn't swallow any more. Due to bad positioning, the DM had got the Worm thoroughly roadblocked behind all the orcs and Trolls (although i suspect he did this deliberately to build the suspense of its arrival on the front line). Stuck at the back near the Wizard that I had buried in Dire Elks, the DM had it spending a few rounds swallowing all the stray Elks, and by the time the Worm got to the fight, it had used up all its uses of Swallow. The party Fighter was more than a little relieved.

RedMage125
2020-09-30, 05:26 PM
So...had a 3.5e DM who usually ran pre-published modules, preferred Forgotten Realms. This DM had 2 groups of 4-5 people that he was running games for. They were assumed to both be doing things in the same world at the same time (had some players' work schedule change and they switch which group they were in). Both of them wrapped up their respective storylines. Most players were 17th/18th level at the conclusion of their respective storylines.

So the DM decided he wanted to run a Tarrasque fight, since he'd never run it before. He had both groups combine for this. So there were 8 or 9 of us.

I was playing a Sun Elf Generalist Wizard5/Incantatrix 10/Archmage 2. The arcane spellcaster for the other group was a Blood Magus, and so could not cast 9th level spells. So the Wish part was on me.

Combat was fun, most of my contribution was to cast Shapechange to change myself (and my familiar) into a Solar and beat on it with my (our) fists, which could bypass its DR, also that form left me with the full ability to cast spells. It did swallow me once, but since I could change my form every round, I just changed into a wraith and walked out.

At any rate, what makes the story interesting is the way I went about "killing" the Tarrasque. My character, not wanting to simply kill a unique creature-which was, after all, created by the gods for some specific purpose-came up with an alternative. I used Fabricate to fashion a staff of crystal from the desert sand. Then, when Big T was at "nonlethal -10", I cast Wish.

But not to kill it.

I really wish I could recite my exact wording of the Wish right now, but I made it pretty foolproof. The basic gist of it is that I bound a portion of the Tarrasque's life essence-specifically the part that controls its waking/sleep cycle-into the staff, under the guidelines that the Tarrasque could not wake again until the staff was intentionally shattered.

Now, my character had a good rapport with the headmaster of Myth Drannor's school of magic (Myth Drannor was in the process of being reclaimed by the elves), who's consciousness had been merged with the school itself. Reasoning that an ancient archmage would have knowledge of magic practices that have been forgotten in modern times, I went to him for assistance in crafting a Staff of the Magi, with the crystal staff as the core. My reasoning being this: even if I were to be killed and the staff taken, most mages would prefer to USE the staff, and not shatter it. The DM was gracious enough to allow it (especially since the campaign was over anyway, and that was more of an epilogue).

Jay R
2020-09-30, 09:48 PM
Then, when Big T was at "nonlethal -10", I cast Wish.

But not to kill it.

I really wish I could recite my exact wording of the Wish right now, but I made it pretty foolproof. The basic gist of it is that I bound a portion of the Tarrasque's life essence-specifically the part that controls its waking/sleep cycle-into the staff, under the guidelines that the Tarrasque could not wake again until the staff was intentionally shattered.

Now, my character had a good rapport with the headmaster of Myth Drannor's school of magic (Myth Drannor was in the process of being reclaimed by the elves), who's consciousness had been merged with the school itself. Reasoning that an ancient archmage would have knowledge of magic practices that have been forgotten in modern times, I went to him for assistance in crafting a Staff of the Magi, with the crystal staff as the core. My reasoning being this: even if I were to be killed and the staff taken, most mages would prefer to USE the staff, and not shatter it. The DM was gracious enough to allow it (especially since the campaign was over anyway, and that was more of an epilogue).

Somewhere, there is a Staff of the Magi for which the retributive strike includes all the usual damage plus the awakening of a tarrasque.

Quertus
2020-09-30, 10:01 PM
Somewhere, there is a Staff of the Magi for which the retributive strike includes all the usual damage plus the awakening of a tarrasque.

Now that's what I call going out with a bang!(Or one really loud explosion)

Stattick
2020-10-01, 01:35 AM
Somewhere, there is a Staff of the Magi for which the retributive strike includes all the usual damage plus the awakening of a tarrasque.

For when you've hit the Godzilla Threshold.

Hellpyre
2020-10-02, 04:27 PM
Largest battle I've ever been a part of was some 20-ish elite soldiers and 5 (martial) PCs vs 3000 assorted goblinoids. In a non-abstracted combat. We volunteered for running it as a normal combat, but boy did things take a while (and we still ended up having to flee. Turns out even high-level warriors have trouble at that level of enemy numbers).

Largest enemy I've ever had the pleasure of fighting was when me and a fellow DM ran a gauntlet of published 3.5 creatures for each other. He ran the Hundred-Headed Tarrasque. I was running the arenas as a level 20 gish of some sort or another. The thing was downed, but wish wasn't working for some reason. Foolishly, I flew closer to examine it, and I...did not survive it playing dead...

LibraryOgre
2020-10-02, 05:04 PM
Had a Shifter once fight the Demon Lord who gave him power (for those who don't know Palladium, picture a Conjuration Wizard with a Warlock dip), in order to let King Arthur escape through a portal and lead the fight for Atlantis.

Subsequently, with the next character (i.e. one who wasn't dead), played a part in the retaking of the continent of Atlantis from the cthuloid tentacle monster and his millions of minions who inhabited it.

VoxRationis
2020-10-03, 01:09 AM
Largest battle I've ever been a part of was some 20-ish elite soldiers and 5 (martial) PCs vs 3000 assorted goblinoids. In a non-abstracted combat. We volunteered for running it as a normal combat, but boy did things take a while (and we still ended up having to flee. Turns out even high-level warriors have trouble at that level of enemy numbers).

Did you use magic or something to flee? In my experience, flight by foot is rarely practical, particularly if the character in question is of a martial bent and thus likely weighed down with heavy armor.

Hellpyre
2020-10-04, 09:09 AM
Did you use magic or something to flee? In my experience, flight by foot is rarely practical, particularly if the character in question is of a martial bent and thus likely weighed down with heavy armor.

Fighting retreat into a nearby cave system that we knew connected (eventually) to a dwarven city we had a relationship with. They stopped pursuing us once they couldn't throw superior numbers at us, but did go on to destroy the towns we had been trying to save from them :(

Lesson learned: gumption only gets you so far.