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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr_Ruminahui" data-source="post: 4973436" data-attributes="member: 81104">Glad my post was helpful.  Well, I would have 1/2 directed at that faction if they ally - so it may result in fewer attacks overall versus the players if they ally. That said, if players are hammering one of the factions, that faction will focus on the players over other factions or the players' allies.    Well, it may or may not be possible. One way of it is to think of the geography - perhaps its a big room with 4 doors, each faction coming in through a door. At the beginning, just the faction head and a few minions (and maybe their head crony) would be in the room to start. This also allows the factions/players to have some Role Play time time screaming at each other/building tension before everything explodes. It also allows you to keep the size of the factions hidden (and therefore allows NPC bluff/intimidates to up or downplay the size of their force) - which allows you to drop hints/misinformation in the run up to the encounter. Or, if you don't want the size of the sides hidden, you could simply have geography dictate the sides coming in over a number of turns. For example, if it is at the top of the hill/bottom of an ampetheatre, the difficult terrain would have caused the factions to spread out and come in over a few rounds. Additionally, depending on the terrain, it might allow players to use athletics checks, etc. to delay/damage (delay is better from a book keeping perspective - perhaps a successful check means only 1/2 come in the next round, the other 1/2 delayed by 1 round) the reinforcements, by causing a rock slide or whatever might be thematically appropriate. You could also combine the approaches - say one faction came out of a tunnel, the others had to climb there.    I definitely agree - only make rolls versus the player - abstract everything else. Vs. minions, you do need to either make a roll (as DPR would automatically kill them) or simply only kill every other minion DPR is applied to. That said, I would do the DPR on a model-by-model basis - so if a model were attacking another model, you would just automatically apply the DPR. Personally, although it is much simpler, I would avoid any "all NPCs simply take x damage a round" as being a bit too abstract - rather, they should take damage based on how much they are being focused on. Incidentally, if you want the main NPCs to not be overly abraided by the DPR and be in better shape when the players get to them, consider giving them a way to trigger their healing surge - this may be less necessary if you make them elites or solos. I think the important thing is a to have a solid ruleset in place to govern how the NPCs interact, but not make that ruleset be visible to the players, so as to make the encounter seem natural and organic to them but actually have a rigid structure. From my past GMing experience (mostly Shadowrun 2nd ed.), the more chaotic you want the situation to feel for the players, the more rigid it actually needs to be constructed by the GM to avoid things from bogging down.  Anyway, I'm glad this is all helpful - feel free to press the "give XP" button on my profile. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Incidentally, if you are curious as to the encounter I ran and which I developed the DPR method for, it was 2 hated enemies who had killed each other fighting in a war long ago. The party walked into the battlefield with a powerful artifact, and this gave the 2 ghosts enough magical mojo to continue their war, with the party caught in the middle (each side thinking the party belonged to the other side). Each turn each ghost would "raise" a bunch of skeletons to fight on its side (1 minion and 1 non-minion a turn). When the players killed a ghost, that would kill all of its faction and stop the raising of new forces, but also had the remaining ghost and its faction free to all attack the players. Killing the second ghost ended the encounter. Unfortunately, I was a relatively new to DMing D&D at that time (players had just reached 3rd level), and it didn't occur to me to allow the players to use skills to shape the encounter - religion, insight, bluff and diplomacy all could have had interesting effects. Oh well, perhaps I can give it a different spin and try something similar later.  Additionally, were it to happen again, I would have raised fewer non-minions and more minions.</blockquote>

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