Area-effect damage (and many other issues)
"Can't sleep, Pit Fiend will eat me" is awesome.
I was thinking about the issue of area effect spells doing (seemingly) reduced damage to a mob. The reasoning is that it will hit each member of the mob and do plenty of damage to kill all of them. While a fireball will do plenty of damage to each of these individuals to kill them, how about the shielding effect of that mass of individuals? Normally having a creature of your size between you and the source of a spell (center of the fireball) provides you with cover, but couldn't you postulate that the individuals of the mob are packed so densely that the spell cannot penetrate more than a rank or two into the mob?
In the most basic example, the mob is in a big square with ~8 individuals (lvl 1 commoners) on a side. If you shoot a fireball at the mass, it will detonate when it hits the nearest individual, which places the center of the blast on a side of the mob(probably in the center of a side). If the first rank of individuals is hit normally, they all die, dealing approximately their HP in damage, or 8d4 (20HP). That's pretty low for a fireball (avg 35 for a 10d6) so it seems resonable for it to penetrate to the second rank for another 20 dam and to partially (half damage) hit the third rank for another 10 damage, which brings the total up to 50, or about damage-and-a-half for a fireball.
With a lightning bolt of course the example is different, but you could say it has an easier time penetrating through the mob, with what would probably be a similar result. Of course there is always the mage that will want to "airburst" a fireball so that it *does* hit everyone in the Mob equally, but to them I would say that the Mob "Hits the deck" (if the character can use modern concepts then so can the mob, so
) and piles on top of each other, which shields them equivalently. I really think it ends up being resonable to just day Damage-and-a-half for area effect attacks, especially since the idea is to make a large group of individuals both easier to run and more dangerous.
On to melee damage!
When I first looked at this concept, the "glancing blow to many targets" thing bothered me, it seemed to me that it would be resonable to cap the damage of a melee attack to the HP (or max HP, if you are generous) of an individual within the mob. Also just adding together the HD of the members bothered me, because when you "kill" the mob, the average member has half of their HP remaining (1/3 dead, 1/3 wounded, 1/3 unharmed) But then I realised that these two concerns basically cancel out since one allows the players to deal more damage than they "should" and the other allows the mob to absorb more damage than it "should".
And a suggestion on melee damage, how about half damage vs normal melee, full damage if attacker has cleave, and double damage if attacker has great cleave? (also double damage for whirlwind attack?) (yea, ranged attackers get the shaft (NPI), but then again, they have a better chance of not getting engulfed).
I like the idea of an attack of opportunity repelling an engulf action, but I think I will require a certain amount of damage (1 - 4 individual's worth) to be dealt for it to happen. Just doesn't seem to make sense for a mob to be thrown back just because someone got knifed.
This comes at a very good time for me, I'm runnning an evil, world conquering campaign, and there is mass combat looming on the horizon for my lvl 11 death knights, weretiger, ghost, kobold psion, and cleric necromancer who will probably be riding a skeletal blue dragon by then. I've been killing myself trying to think of a way to keep the regiments in the regular armies (on both sides) from being killed instantly by magic and let them do something meaningfull in the combat(oh, and not roll hundreds of dice per army per round), and a variant of this does the ticket for my every need *evil cackle* (er, the party is evil, so... (counts on fingers) benevolent cackle? whatever).
One final thing (I promise) I think a template for the Mob type would be appropriate, it would be like:
HD: 30x the HD of an individual that makes up the mob.
bab: Use the bab progression of the creature type and advance it to the number of HD of the mob.
attacks: explain how the attacks work.
if nobody else does it, I'll try to work one up when I get home and have the SRD handy.
I don't recall anything saying a concentration check would be required to cast while engulfed, but it seems extremely resonable to require one. Also, how would one handle AoO while engulfed? My guess is it would be one AoO per action, but give the mob unlimited AoO/round. (basically treating the mob as a single creature with super combat reflexes).
I have one criticism though. In the road bandit entry, you have 30 bandits, which I assume means 30 arrows fired. Your target area has *40* 5'x5' squares in it, making it very unlikely that a medium sized individual will be hit with more than one arrow, yet the damage is 6d6! I understand that this is representing a cr 10+ "creature" and the attacks should be on par with that challenge, but the damage is excessive given the resources available to the mob. Remember that when you see that deadly hail of arrows in a movie, those people getting taken out of action by it are like lvl 1 warriors in DnD. The hail of arrows does not have to do much damage to devastate a typical army, but it falls far short of providing a threat to a PC party. My suggestion is 1d8 (or d6) per arrow placed in a 5' square in the target zone, so a mob can hit something like a 15' spread (24 squares) with a volley doing 1d8 damage per square, and even that assumes that 24/30 of them hit the target area. To do some real saturation of a target, you would need about 200 archers targeting a 15' spread, that would have about 8 arrows landing in each 5' square. Let's treat that area as a gargantuan object, AC 1 (10 - 4(size) -5 (no dex)), which means even lvl 1 warriors only miss on a one, out to 100' (with longbow). You start accumulating some misses if the target zone is further out due to range increments. You need about 150 hits to do 6d6, so with an attack bonus of +1 and a range of say, 300' you need about 200 lvl 1 warriors to get that 6d6. Even then, why are these arrows bypassing armor just because there are a bunch of them and they are NOT aimed at anyone in particular? Long story short (too late) mobs just aren't going to realistically cut it with ranged attacks. They wouldn't benefit from the same crowding/swarming advantages that they get with engulfing.
P.S. first post here, first post on a roleplaying forum, biggest post ever.
P.P.S. yea I lied about the template thing being the last, so sue me.
P.P.P.S. waaay too much time on my hands.
) dice then just divide and role a few attacks in one.
