Best way to handle A LOT of opponents with advantage?

[77IM]

The problem with rolling the dice in a big batch is: Surely you're not having all 10 kobolds attack the same guy? When they target different PCs you need to differentiate the dice, usually by rolling in multiple batches, and it gets kind of cumbersome.

I think for creatures like rats that have Swarm Attack, instead of giving them individual rolls with advantage, they should be able to combine forces to make a SINGLE attack against a target. On a hit, they deal combined damage. On a miss, half damage.

• For example, if 5 rats are attacking you for 1 damage, they roll once. On a hit, you get 5 damage. On a miss, you get 2 damage.

This makes swarms much more dangerous while also being faster to resolve.

-- 77IM

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

For mass rolling, if you really care about speed, an electronic rolling tool can be faster. Something like dicelog.com or Tabletop Forge or whatever. You can often specify the success number, too, so you could do it in like three rolls.

For example, on dicelog.com, if you have 20 kobolds attacking, at +3 to hit each, with advantage, against AC 15, that's 1d20+3, success if >= 15, 20 times--a single command. Less than a second later, you get the result--I just ran that and got 7 success, of which 3 were crits. So reroll the 13 failures--same roll but only 13 times. 4 successes, none crits. Then reroll the non crit original successes (4 in this case), this time as 1d20, success=20. No crits, so the total is 8 normal hits, 3 crits. Whole thing, maybe 5 or 10 seconds. If that's too slow for you, 20 combatants is too many.

In practice, even if I had 20 kobolds, I'd rarely be rolling twenty attacks at a time--first I'd break them up into a couple of initiative counts, second they probably wouldn't all be attacking the same foe. If you imagine that as 20 kobolds, 4 PCs, going 5 kobolds-PC-5 kobolds-PC2-etc., running through each group of 5 kobolds would be moderately fast. But if I really wanted a big fight (maybe it's 80 kobolds and a dragon against 6th or 8th level PCs), and I was worried about speed, I'd use an electronic dice roller.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I'd just limit the number of opponents who attack a single target.

40 to 1 just seems meta-gamey to me, as if they know that it may takes 40+ daggers/javelins to kill a medium sized target.

The play test suggests limits of 8 per medium target when surrounding and that's chose enough for ranged opponents too.

If your going to throw away your weapon, I think it would be because you think it could kill/stop your opponent on a good hit.

8 per target and the rest go defensive while waiting to see what happens.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I always let the players roll the attacks against themselves in situations like this. It's faster. And back in the day when I still tolerated players that weren't above using biased dice, it gave them pause. Plus, "using up a 20" on an attack against yourself is cruelty incarnate for a player that thinks that way.

You could also be nice, and let one of the players make a check to determine that bright light would give the kobolds disadvantage, thus cancelling out the double dice ...

 

[Piratecat]

The easiest solution is to attack normally, rolling 10 dice (one for each kobold.) Then reroll any misses once.