I tend to agree that the stats should be close enough to all use at once, with the proviso that for the more common races I might want to have both goblin warrior standard-1s and goblin guard min-6s, either of which can be used with the elite-5 goblin chief. For bullywugs it's fine if everything is in a 2-3 level range.
Humanoid Monster Demographics & Use
- Thread starter S'mon
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I tend to agree that the stats should be close enough to all use at once, with the proviso that for the more common races I might want to have both goblin warrior standard-1s and goblin guard min-6s, either of which can be used with the elite-5 goblin chief. For bullywugs it's fine if everything is in a 2-3 level range.
I found the MM worg brute-9 worked fine vs ca 3rd level PCs, so you could put goblin skullcleaver brute-3s on them. They're prob best vs ca 5th level PCs with a goblin wolfrider skirmisher-5, and min-5 infantry.
Interesting, thanks. If a higher level PC group (say 8th) faces a tribe of hobgoblins, do they face a horde of 3rd level standards, as you don't use high level minions? Or does this not come up?
LostSoul
Adventurer
The way I do it, it depends on the level of the tribe, not the level of the PCs. An 8th-level party may come across a small tribe of 15 hobgoblins* - a level 1 "Lair" - and a 1st-level party may come across a large tribe of 200 hobgoblins - a level 10 "Lair".
I don't know how well this would work in standard 4E, but in my game it's been pretty successful.
*15 hobgoblins isn't exactly correct. A 1st-level lair has 6 battle guards, 9 spear soldiers, 1 beast master with 2 guard drakes, 1 warmonger with 2 archers, 1d8 goblin cutthroats, 1d8 goblin beast riders on grey wolves, 68 non-combatants (hobgoblin grunts), led by a Fleshcarver. There's a 20% chance they live in a walled village (ditch, rampart, palisade) with 2 gates and 1d4+2 watchtowers; an 80% chance they live in a cave. If they do have a village, if there are 50+ of them they will have some siege weapons.
So you do use ca 3rd-4th level standards as the hobgoblin fighters, no matter what? I've had trouble with using large numbers of standards as their designs are rather complex to run en masse.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
If I understand you correctly then you're doing basically the old 1e MM sort of thing, except instead of "Orc #Appearing: 30-300" you assign a 'level' to the lair. I guess the question is how is the level assigned and how do you avoid the 2 related issues I always seemed to have with that concept.
1) You end up with a low level party running into 200 orcs. While this is 'exciting' and can be played out in a fun way it is generally not going to work too well for the low level PCs...
2) Higher level PCs don't really care too much. If they run into a small group of orcs then the 'fight' is trivial. If it is a LARGE group of orcs then it might be non-trivial depending on the group. Most 1e 8th or 9th level groups will laugh at orcs, even if there are 3000 of them.
It just always seemed like there was never a case where the PCs would run into a few orcs and fight them. Obviously depending on how you are distributing the various levels of lairs this could be more or less the case, but still from the PCs standpoint it works out about the same, vast numbers of low level foes won't challenge higher level PCs much, and anything beyond a very modest disparity in the other direction for the low level PCs certainly means they won't be coming out on top in any fight.
The other thing that always bothered me about the whole 1e MM 'tribes' write ups was that none of them actually made sense, lol. The demographics were always pretty much nonsensical. I always thought that if you were going for realism why not really go for actual realism, and if you're going for playable, then why stop halfway between?
In any case it is an interesting concept and worth thinking about some more, but I don't think I'm going to try to use 4e as an orc tribe simulator, hehe.
LostSoul
Adventurer
Yeah, a lot of it is based on Kellri's Encounter Reference guide, which is based on the MM from AD&D(?).
In the scope of the game, those Lairs are important because they define NPCs who have goals, motivations, and the resources to achieve them; this puts pressure on the amount of time the PCs take to do things, making it a valuable resource. Lairs grow over time. (They can shrink, but it's unlikely without PC intervention.)
Usually the PCs will hear about a nearby Lair from rumours - orcs raiding the road, gnolls taking slaves for sacrifice, bandits robbing anyone who comes by. This allows PCs to engage with the lair a little at a time - one encounter here and there, gaining information if lucky and/or smart.
Even if the PCs don't know a lair is nearby - they're exploring new territory and either no one lives nearby or they haven't had the opportunity to ask - lairs have a pretty big environmental footprint. There are patrols in nearby hexes and the creatures from the lair wandering about - 50% of all wandering monsters are with creatures from the lair. Since they house many creatures, they will have a big environmental footprint - chopped down trees, smoke from cooking fires, even farms and gardens.
What this means is that the PCs generally won't just wander across 200 orcs all at once, and if they do it's probably because they weren't keeping a good eye out. This means that players are given a choice about how they want to approach the lair. They can handle this any way they can think of - head-on charge, sneaking in, guerilla raids, hiring some men-at-arms to harass them, diverting the flow of a river to flood them, assassinating their leaders, making deals and trade, etc.
That's how I deal with 1).
In regards to 2), I find that 4E has a pretty mild power curve. An 8th-level party facing a 1st-level hobgoblin lair all at once will probably get wiped out; they may be able to succeed by expending limited resources, but those are a lot harder to come by in my game.
These "Orc Tribe Generation" rules that I use aren't meant to provide a simulation. These lairs exist in order to put pressure on the resources of the PCs and the decisions the players make, in an attempt to give their choices meaning.
LostSoul
Adventurer
Yeah, but I use a different system for combat resolution that makes it easier to deal with large numbers of combatants. I would not recommend doing it my way with standard 4E, especially if you don't make any changes to Extended Rests.
Havrik Stoneskimmer
Adventurer
I try to keep in mind that minions don't necessarily have to be untrained incompetents. They could just be the unlucky ones who get an arrow in the throat when the PCs charge into the room. So high-level minions make sense to me.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I don't know about the flatter power curve. I suppose a party of 8th level PCs would have trouble with a mass of 200 level 1 monsters, at least in a worse case scenario. I doubt they'd have any trouble at all in a case where they exercised even modest strategy.
In any case it all goes to show that the details of how you handle it make all the difference. I'd personally still prefer to build up a threat like that more as an adventure, with the figures selected in a fashion that reflected my judgment of the kind of evolving threat that was present, vs the old fashioned "there will be X special figures present for each Y orcs" fashion of the old 1e days. I did one of these 'clear out the tribe' kind of adventures a while back. It worked pretty well, and I could have taken it in various directions depending on at what point in their careers the PCs took that job on. I think I would have minionized the low level guys however had the party say done that adventure at level 8 vs doing at level 4, and made some other nastier monsters which actually stayed in the background into the significant badguys in that case.
Either way can work I suppose. I'm just far less of a purist when it comes to sandboxing things.
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