Challenging a large group

[Nymrohd]

I am soon starting a campaign with a rather massive group of 8. The group has a great distribution of roles, and the players balance for optimization and some flavor. For reference:

Dwarf guardian fighter (I banned battleragers for this campaign)
Eladrin shielding swordmage (Though the player hopes to try the new build in AP and I'll probably let him retool his character if the built seems to work well)
Dwarf battle cleric
Half-elf valorous bard
Elf archer/beastmaster ranger (archer built with a beast)
Halfling wild sorcerer
Human guardian druid
Human control (orb) wizard

5 of the players have played 4E before and 3 of those love tactics, the other 3 have not played D&D for some time but will likely catch up to the strategies fast.

So what kind of advise does everyone have for challenging such a group in combat?

What I can think of is:
Include a mix of creatures in encounters, often having both elites and several minions.
Make sure the battlefields are appropriately big. I expect to use either big rooms or open fields, or encounters that take place in multiple rooms since the party can split up easily.
Make good use of class templates and NPC monsters. Most monsters have some synergies but those are limited compared to what a big group can manage. Giving them a few class powers can even the field (GIVE PHB2 CLASS TEMPLATES!).

Anything else you guys can come up with?

 

[Mengu]

I completely ignore the existance of NPC's with classes and templates. That's entirely too much work for a monster that's going to die in 6 rounds or so.

I'd definitely resort to splitting the party in tighter quarters, attacking from multiple sides so they have to defend against 2-3 flanks, etc. Some massive fights in open fields with lots of weaker monsters can be fun.

Expect your combats to take time with 8 PC's, and 8 PC's worth of monsters, a hard fight lasting 4 or 5 hours will not be unusual.

If you every want to use a solo, you'll want to either redesign the solo to have a lot more actions, or you'll want to accompany them with non-solo creatures. A pair of solos can maybe make a good encounter too.

Elites will be taken down very fast, especially if the PC's ideantify them as the major threat. So you might want to modify your elites to be 3x instead of 2x monsters. Give them triple hit points, 2 action points, double attacks as well as immediate actions (or triple attacks), increased recharges (maybe when bloodied, and a deathburst), and triple experience.

As you mentioned, large battle grounds will be very important. A fight in a 5 foot hallway is going to be extremely boring.

On a party composition note, a warlord would be incredible in a party this size, I'm surprized no one chose to play one.

 

[Nymrohd]

One thing I was considering is convincing my roomate it'd be better if he helped me DM instead of playing the wizard (heck I could probably find another player but 10 people would be a lot even for my playroom). I'm still not sure though on whether 2 DMs decrease combat time or not.

 

[Paul Strack]

I've found that the XP budget rules scale nicely. I've used the XP budgeting rules from the DMG for party sizes of 4-7 and they work well. A bigger group just needs to face more monsters. PC synergies are nice, but not as big a factor as you might thing.

As Mengu said, length of combats is going to be your real problem, though I think his 4-5 hour estimate is on the high side. My group has 7 players. When all of them show up, our combats last 90 - 100 minutes. Your first few combats could take a couple hours while the players learn the rules and how to fight well together.

Make sure all the math is done for all the PCs in advance. Character Builder will help with that. Encourage players to be ready to act quickly when it is their turn. Put together a good system for managing initiative. Have all the monster notes prepped for each encounter and ready to go.

Another thing you want to plan for is encounter scaling. Unless you have 8 extremely reliable players, you group size during a given session will likely vary from 5-8. Again, I find the XP budget rules work well for this. For my group, I calculate the enemy group size for 4, 5, 6 and 7 PCs.

 

[Nail]

I am soon starting a campaign with a rather massive group of 8....

(I, too, wouldn't worry about class templates too much.)

In one of the groups I play in, we also had 8 players ....although one has now dropped and one often skips. The thing that all of us noticed is:

Combats take Forever!

Work on ways to speed up combat. Seriously. For example, have a player track initiative on some kind of board (magnetic init tracker boards are available). Another example: standardize ways to track conditions. With 9 people around th' table, you might have some very long combats. (..and role-playing? 4 hours of jabbering, minimum.)

 

[Nymrohd]

Well my current plans for running combat are:
Use my rather large whiteboard to track initiative and conditions/zones
Use Dungeon Tiles or draw the battlefields beforehand
Keep good encounter notes (like in the official modules), have a strategy in mind
I have a pretty dependable group (I can confidently say there will always be 6 of them there and very often all of them) so I was thinking of making encounters for 6/8 people. If for some reason I have 5 they'll try the 6-man version, if I have 7 I will alternate between 6 and 8 according to encounter and who is there.

We plan to use tokens instead of miniatures, and I plan to prepare some tokens for whatever zone powers my players choose.

Also we will be using rather comprehensive character sheets as well as power cards of some sort.

Mengu's point on elites seems to be spot on, with a group of this size they can probably be focus fired so fast there will never be grindspace but they may also not have enough time to show off their moves. I do wonder if giving them access to their healing surges will change that. I am not at all worried about solos, other than the fact that I never plan on using them solo but most likely as part of a group (though I really want to do a double dragon fight with some Draconomicon help to make the dragons distinct). A group this size can probably kill a solo reasonably fast without modifications.

 

[themilkman]

Mengu made a good point about elites and solos earlier, but I think that it might benefit you to try to use more of them, rather than fewer. (He made some very good points about how to tweak them to give them some survivability.) Generally, combat moves quicker with fewer monsters, and I can imagine that trying to play 8+ monsters on your side per encounter is going to take a really long time. I'm getting a bit of a headache just thinking about it.

Also, I would encourage you to put as much pressure on the back line as it can take. If the entire party is able to operate at peak offense, your mobs are going to go down fast. Making some of the PCs move to the back line and defend the ranged peeps is going to help to keep them from triple-teaming your monsters and cutting them down one at a time, round after round.

 

[burntgerbil]

I run a 7 player campaign. I have found that they are usually all willing to throw in for Group Mini Donations ( with the caveat that the mini's belong to the DM) D&D Insider subscription and a Subscription to Obsidian Portal (even though you can use it for free). I tend to throw challenges at them that are constantly 4 levels above them - and some are easy and some are very hard.


I can say from experience that dynamic terrain, traps and all of the custom monsters in the encounter builder make my job pretty easy and quick building the (generally) 2 combat encounters + 1 non-combat encounter we manage to cover on our 7-hour weekend sessions. We have a magnetic dry erase init board and little flat sheet magnets that are different colors for each player and yellow for monsters. I also tend to throw a few elites, 2 solos along with some good terrain, traps or (rarely) minions to shake things up. Too many critters will muck up the battlefield, so I tend to let them run into the bigger stuff.

 

[MrMyth]

Artillery, artillery, artillery. And skirmishers.

The biggest issue at hand will be that combats will take long, due to both sides being larger. The best way to handle that, from what I've seen, is to have monsters that are fragile but hard-hitting. Especially against such a large group, it is also valuable to have monsters with area-effect or multi-target effects.

What you don't want is an encounter filled with soldiers. Having maybe one or two tanks (soldiers or brutes) each fight might be reasonable, but for the average encounter, I'd include a lot of glass cannons. Combats will be quick, but still take out a good bit of party resources.

Now, that can well change for boss fights and such. But the presence of high-damage monsters should serve to both use up the party's resources (even when they have multiple defenders and leaders) without bogging them down.

I wouldn't worry too much about modifying things outside the norm, unless you are actually having trouble challenging them.

 

[KidSnide]

This may go without saying, but I find the most important thing in handling my group of 7 is to use multiple types of the same monster and have them go at once. For example, I might put 3 soldiers into a fight, but those soldiers all go on the same initiative count.

Not only does it cut down the number of initiative counts, but it is also easier to run because I can resolve all of the similar powers at the same time.

-KS