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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6348395" data-attributes="member: 996">Ever tried using a swarm or 'mob' to represent troops on both sides of a larger battle?  It can work.  It makes the most sense if there's a large level disparity between the PCs, main villains, and the individuals making up the mob.  Another option is to define the common soldiers on each side as a terrain power, rather than churn through their individual turns. [sblock] It's an abstraction, but while the PCs are fighting the bad-guys that their allies can't handle, the allies are occupying the annoyance-level bad-guys, but the PCs (and maybe the main bad guys) can use an action to get their minions to do something that impacts the fight with their betters.  (You can tell I've been DMing too much lately, because the thing that springs to mind is a Villain mook-terrain power:  "Seize Him!" Villains spends an action, makes a CHA attack vs the REF of a PC to restrain him save ends.  He's got guards hanging off him, but he can still fight at -2, and doesn't even need an action - just a 10+ at the end of his turn - to toss them away or kill them.)Again, great for incorporating otherwise too-numerous and too-low level creatures into an encounter.  [/sblock]For fewer, closer to PC level allies, yeah, companions work fine.  Another trick I've done in every edition is to have any NPCs recruited just pair off with enemies and effectively remove eachother the from the combat.   Oh, any version of D&D will slow to crawl if you go from the usual handful of combatants to 'bunches' without pulling in some attendant wargame construct, like battlesystem or Chainmail 'figures' in the olden days or mobs/swarms/throngs in 3e or 4e. In 3e, yes, you could stack up pre-buffs until you ran out of named bonuses to stack (and there were a lot more bonus names), and, yes, that was wildly overpowered exploitation of the system, no question.In 4e, there are relatively few buffs that aren't riders on attacks or minor actions, so pre-buffing isn't often necessary.  Neither is pre-buffing in games broken by it a wildly strategic thing, it's just exploiting weaknesses in the system (excessive stacking, LFQW, 5MWD).In genre, when the heroes get 'pre-buffed,' which isn't that often, really (except maybe for training montages), it's usually to give them a chance against an enemy they otherwise couldn't face at all, not to erase the Big Bad without a hitch.Really, I think there's a different style or 'creative agenda' at work here than just strategic focus or exploiting systems.  There's a perverse counter-genre impulse among nerds who love a genre.  You see it a lot among comics fans, for instance: "why didn't Hero X use power Y in issue 123, he woulda totally owned villain Z" (and I point this out as someone who's engaged in plenty of it, myself).  And RPG, providing stats for everyone involved, is an ideal tool for playing out those anticlimactic, counter-genre, 'what ifs.'  It can be a fun/interesting (even hilarious) exercise, really so I'm not disparaging it.  OK, that I will  certainly agree with.  But, really, that's kind of the point.  Strategic focus doesn't require you break or exploit or reach beyond the system - if the system can handle it.  And the strategic-planning/prep 'scene' is one framed primarily by the PCs, no?Using strategic focus /as an excuse to break or exploit or reach beyond the system/ may not work as well in 4e, but you can have strategic focus if you want it. OK.  Doesn't sound like CaW anymore, though, because CaW wants to quickly blow through the foregone conclusion at the end of the planning and prep, rather than 'methodically implement'/execute the plan in detail.  And, 4e's handling of detailed tactical set-piece battles would be ideal for tactical execution portion of that 'skilled play.'</blockquote>

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