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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 8179344" data-attributes="member: 6796661">I'm running an adventure in which there are a number of places where you can run into just huge numbers of monsters that will continue to stream.For example, there is a subterranean river where these evil Tsathoggua frog-men abominations will keep coming at 2d6 per round up to 500 of them. In this case you have to keep fighting them off until you get the McGuffin and then get out. They won't chase you out of the area. I suppost the writers gave a figure as some players may want to cleanse the area of the evil. In another situation, there was a cursed crypt where a Tsathoggua priest gave his life by imbibing an elixer of all-seeing doom and he was buries and a hermetically sealed vault.  If the players break into it, this bubbly mass of liquid flesh with eyes bubbling out of it which hatch into killer frogs is seen.  The killer frogs keep coming and unless you find a way to stop them, they will overrun the country side. There are 666 of them. In this case the players used a mixture of a cube of force to block the entrance and protect themselves, fireballs, and spirit guardians to destroy all the frog.  In this situation, I went with average damage and did some simple on the fly math to determine how many rounds and spell slots were needed. I know that this is a what swarm stat blocks are for, but swarms don't capture the continual streaming of monsters.   I'd be interested in ideas on less grindy, more fun ways of handling these situations.  The basic requirements for a mechanic for this would be that it would have to resolve over-all length of time, how much of a parties resources are used, give players agency in determining how they will handle the situation, and handle damage output to characters who don't have anything protecting them from attacks (e.g. using something like mob rules). My thought is to use something like 4e skill challenges.  First, determine the worst case scenario, second the best case scenario, and third the overall challenge. Let each player describe how they are contributing. Each makes a roll and determine the outcome based on the rolls.  I worry that if loss of HP or even death is possible, that players would not be satisfied with that being handled by one or a couple skill checks.   At the same time, spending half an hour or more grinding through a stream of monsters is boring.</blockquote>

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