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

[anthr]

If you take a look at the encounter building chapter in DMG, you'll see that the difficulty increase isn't linear when you increase the number of monsters. i.e. if you double the number of monsters the encounter becomes more than twice as hard.
As long as you are aware of this it shouldn't be a problem.

A year ago I was DMing Curse of Stradh.
One of the characters was a revised ranger from unearthed aracana.
When the party became level 3 he used his Primeval Awareness ability to find all undead within a 5 mile radius
I used some old school house rules from earlier Ravenloft-versions and decided that not only did he know where all undeads were - but all undeads within a 5 mile radius knew where he was - and they were coming.
So the party of level 3 characters took stand in the burgomasters house aginst all zombies in the whole village of Barovia. I don't remember how many undeads I throwed at them, but it was certainly in the vicinity of 88.
It was quite epic.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I have not, although I played in more than one 3.x game where we fought those kinds of numbers. (One time we were literally surrounded by an army of ogres that had been hiding under the snow... That one was rough.)

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

Jura Dai... You're 'a Die... You're gonna die. For a tribe that was cut down entirely... Tell me that was intentional.

 

[atanakar]

Characters are going to the front of a war in a few sessions, unless they find another way to end it. They will face lots of minions.

 

[Horwath]

If you take a look at the encounter building chapter in DMG, you'll see that the difficulty increase isn't linear when you increase the number of monsters. i.e. if you double the number of monsters the encounter becomes more than twice as hard.
As long as you are aware of this it shouldn't be a problem.

A year ago I was DMing Curse of Stradh.
One of the characters was a revised ranger from unearthed aracana.
When the party became level 3 he used his Primeval Awareness ability to find all undead within a 5 mile radius
I used some old school house rules from earlier Ravenloft-versions and decided that not only did he know where all undeads were - but all undeads within a 5 mile radius knew where he was - and they were coming.
So the party of level 3 characters took stand in the burgomasters house aginst all zombies in the whole village of Barovia. I don't remember how many undeads I throwed at them, but it was certainly in the vicinity of 88.
It was quite epic.

sometimes when you double the numbers it is less then twice the difficulty.

depending on terrain there is a limit on how much can be in the melee combat.

We will funnel them into the mountain pass we call the Hot Gates. Now in that narrow corridor, their numbers will count for nothing.

 

[Chaosmancer]

One issue that should be noted on this, is that if the enemy has ranged attacks (and a lot of lower level minions have spears, javelins, or shortbows) then the party might also be facing 80 attacks in the first round.

If the enemy chooses to focus on just half the party, that is twenty attacks, that can be a significant amount of damage, even to higher level characters. If even half hit for, lets say 1d6+3, that is 10d6+30 which I think averages to 65 damage.

I've run large fights before, if not this big, and sometimes it is shocking how much damage those low level enemies can dish out.

 

[Oofta]

I've thrown entire armies at PCs. The goal simply wasn't to kill all enemies, that wasn't practical. In other cases I've used the mob rule and treated large groups kind of like swarms.

 

[Delazar]

Jura Dai... You're 'a Die... You're gonna die. For a tribe that was cut down entirely... Tell me that was intentional.

It was actually a pre-written scenario, it's in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting box. So it was not intentional...

 

[jayoungr]

I didn't count them exactly, but the storming of Castle Naerytar in Hoard of the Dragon Queen was about that many. I did a lot of it with abstraction and narrative, though.

 

[S'mon]

Had a 5e fight with ca 50 Draugr on an ice berg that was a lot of fun.

 

[S'mon]

Last Princes of the Apocalypse session the PCs took Rivergard Keep. Huge single session battle with around 40 cultists.