Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4709147" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, that's basically what I would do. Don't try to adjudicate NPC on monster combat, just describe what happens. Let the vast bulk of the monsters be minions, so if the PCs need to cut their way through to a certain area or stop the enemy from 'going over the wall' or whatever they can wade in and do it. The REAL opposition can then be the various non-minion elements of the attackers, which can be kept down to a fairly small number of appropriately tough monsters.Try to make the critical turning point of the battle a small engagement which happens in a specific place. Maybe a few orcs try to blow a hole in a key wall or sneak into the fort by some kind of back door, or there is a traitor in the fort that will open the sally port and let some orcs in at a critical moment. Then the PCs can pretty much spend the battle dealing with THAT and you can rule that the rest of the battle is successful if they manage to pull off their part.You could even work in a skill challenge aspect for that critical part. If the PCs succeed in the skill challenge, they figure out the orc plan or realize there is a traitor in time to try to foil his plan. If not then maybe the defense is breached and the PCs have to pull back into the tower and abandon the walls, at which point they can either become 'beseiged' and have to figure out how to escape, or there can be a climactic final assault at the entrance to the redoubt. At that point all the enemy minions just become spectators and the party has to beat this final (now very hard) encounter. If they do, then the rest of the orcs can be driven off fairly easily (all being minions anyway).The various scenes in The Two Towers where Aragorn and co defend Helm's Deep makes a pretty good model for this kind of thing.</blockquote>

Verification