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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6629169" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I tried out another technique for large-scale enemies today and it worked pretty well, so I'll share it.The PCs are trying to clear all the threats off a 25-square-mile rock island floating in the atmosphere of an air planet, so they can bring colonists in 4X-style. They used Commune With Nature to assess the local ecology, and learned that major predators include ropers, rocs, and phase spiders. This particular island had 90-odd ropers and 80-odd phase spiders scattered across various parts of its surface.Now, I don't particularly want to have to play through 20-40 battles with phase spiders (I ruled that they come in groups of 1-6 spiders), so I made the players a deal: if you can fight a battle with disadvantage on every roll while the enemy gets advantage on every roll, we'll just call that your unluckiest battle of the day and say you won 9 other similar combats the same way. In other words, kill 2 phase spiders on hard mode and it will count for 20 spiders.So we did, and it was a blast. First they located a smallish web in the forest canopy with two spiders in it and hovered the ship 120' over it, intending to blast them to death with catapults from above. They hit one spider and killed it, but the other spider won initiative next turn and vanished before anyone could hit it... and nothing happened for the next thirty seconds... when suddenly a phase spider materialized out of midair and bit the helmsman. Anyway, to make a long story short, they killed both spiders (20 spiders down! 14,000 XP!) and then went for their next in-game nest, which turned out to be 5 phase spiders. Now, I want to point out that 5 phase spiders is actually already a Deadly threat for an 11th level PC, a 5th level PC, and a 4th level PC (7000 XP, Deadly threshold is 5200) even before you factor in "disadvantage on every roll, and double-disadvantage on normally-disadvantaged rolls, and advantage for all your enemies". Before the encounter was over, the pilot had been knocked out and the whole ship was one initiative roll away from a 120' fall causing 12d6 damage to everybody aboard (undoubtedly would have killed the whole crew and probably all the PCs who were still up, and who by the way were still facing 4 phase spiders at this point), and there were multiple other close calls almost as bad. I had a blast and so did the players, and at the end we declared it the "worst battle of the day" and I handwaved another 45 spiders, so they killed 70 phase spiders today (in game time, I ruled that it took about two days of hunting) and earned 49,000 XP.And then in the middle of their long rest, I spent some of my hoarded karma to open an interdimensional portal in the ship's cargo hold. The first thing that came out was a Nycaloth, and the second thing out was a Fireball which roasted the Nycaloth and all of the PCs' remaining cows that they use to fuel the spelljamming ship, so they're now stranded until they can find more lifeforms to put in the lifejammer. The third thing out was a Grey Slaad who was fighting with the Nycaloth for inscrutable Slaad reasons ("Slay evil!").Forgive the digression. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Anyway, the "fight battle at penalty and I'll handwave X number of similar encounters" was successful IMO and I will probably use it again in the future. If you can kill 5 vampires on your worst day, you can probably kill arbitrary numbers of vampires on an average day.</blockquote>

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