D&D 5E Have you thrown 88 opponents at your party?

[MichaelSomething]

I may not have much experience with 5E but it seems the most suitable edition for having a PC party fight 88 opponents at the same time. Bounded Accuracy means lower level foes are still usable. A combat system designed for speedy turns is great for playing all those enemies in a timely manner. And if you're the type to say that 5E is too easy on PCs, fighting a whole army should fix that. Looks like a great idea to me!

 

[Iry]

I threw 144 minions at a party in 4E.
It was a hoot.

 

[Delazar]

In 2e we played a Dark Sun campaign, where the PCs fought the Jura Dai, a tribe of 200 desert elves, and killed them to the last one. The Half-giant gladiator was standing on this little hill made of elves bodies, then he looked around, and he said "that was fun"

In 5e I had a level 20 party fights 200+ orcs, most of them died obliterated by the Devotion Paladin's Holy Nimbus.

Good times

 

[Lanefan]

Voted "no but I plan to" but really mean "no but I'd like to".

Then had to change my vote as I remembered one (1) instance where in fact the party met 100 (non-swarm) foes at once; all skeletons*. Party - averaging around 7th level in a 1e-style game - carved through them like butter without, if memory serves, taking much damage at all.

* - serious props if anyone remembers where this as-written published encounter comes from.

 

[Zardnaar]

2E I ran a battle like that. Took two hours.

 

[Nebulous]

I may not have much experience with 5E but it seems the most suitable edition for having a PC party fight 88 opponents at the same time. Bounded Accuracy means lower level foes are still usable. A combat system designed for speedy turns is great for playing all those enemies in a timely manner. And if you're the type to say that 5E is too easy on PCs, fighting a whole army should fix that. Looks like a great idea to me!

With a couple fireballs you could kill that many low level enemies in a round or two easily. If you're throwing them up against pre-fireball level, that would be a much, much tougher fight.

 

[Imaculata]

I've ran massive naval battles in 3E, where each ship contained hundreds of people. The players didn't fight that many opponents individually, and they had allied ships to aid in the battle. The fights that the players actually had to do one-on-one, were of a smaller more reasonable scale. Because who wants to make that many dice rolls?

Instead we had miniature ships on a massive topdown grid and each ship had a defense rating based on their crew size, the average level of the crew and the ship type. We then had all of these ships fight each other as single units (representing a ship with hundreds of crew members). It worked pretty well, but the down side is that individual player powers are kind of side lined.

 

[Morrus]

1-hp minions. Let the heroes cut them down like bowling pins. Blow up a dozen at once with fireballs. It's fun to do once in a while -- let' them really feel like mighty heroes.

 

[Shiroiken]

I've done huge swarms of enemies before in 5E, but never quite that high (I think 4 dozen was the highest). In AD&D parties could run across hundreds of enemies from random tables, but the usual result was in stealth or fleeing. I'm curious about the specific value of 88 though.

 

[Horwath]

100 or so lizardfolks in 3.5e