D&D 4E Ran a 4e combat last night... with over 200 combatants.

[the Jester]

I'm very happy with our game the other night.

I was concerned because the pcs have recruited a small army of about 160 people, and I really wanted to have a mass battle, but 4e combats tend to slowness. However, it worked! It was a bit long- probably 3 to 4 hours, all told- but we had a battle between the pcs' 160 (+ pcs themselves) and a force of about 50 or 60 npcs, many significantly tougher than the pcs.

One of the players owns the game Zombicide and several of its expansions, so he used those figures for their troops. The pics show the forces as the bad guys moved to engage, then later, after the pcs had won a stunning victory.

I used straight 4e with only a few small tweaks to the rules- 1. Formations of troops couldn't move through allies; and 2. Formations of troops had to act together and, when targeting an enemy formation, every hit was on a randomly determined member of the group that was within range. (The pcs had their forces in squads of 10, so there were a lot of "roll 20d20 and keep track of how many hits" moments [note that the pcs' javelin-throwing forces could throw two javelins as a standard action].)

The pcs attacked from surprise, sneaking into the escape tunnel into the location of the battle (which they had previously discovered), then using reverse portal to bring their armies through; they used a combination of a mass resist spell to make the majority of their forces immune to the basic damage of the enemy's mass of magic missile force damage, then chain lightning to clear out tons of enemy minions, along with a bloom ritual to slow the enemy advance to a crawl.

All in all, I'm very happy of how things went- the pcs used a surprise attack, made excellent use of their rituals (the wizard didn't even have time to take a short rest in the prep time, going from ritual to ritual without a break instead) and using great tactics. They won a smashing one-sided victory- at least in the initial moment- and earned it. Go team pc!

 

[MerricB]

Fantastic!

There's not much tabletop left for the players, is there?

Cheers!

 

[pemerton]

Cool!

When I've done mass combats, it's always been just the PCs vs enemy units, whom I've treated as Huge or Gargantuan swarms.

 

[Celebrim]

Excellent. Way to step up to the challenge.

IMO, every sufficiently long campaign needs at least one mass combat run in tactical detail. There is something epic about the clash of armies that you can't really get any other way, and although its a bit counter intuitive, I don't know of a better way to create the memory of 'being there' and making it 'real'. Certainly, if the sort of story you are going for is inspired by things like 'The Lord of the Rings' or just about any other fantasy epic, your going to need to create epic battles.

Anything over about 40 figures I tend to prefer to run using some sort of mass combat rules just to cut down on the dice rolling. The largest such combat I've been in involved playing out a seige/assult of a fortified city with over 8000 tokens each representing a unit of 10. In retrospect, we should have used tokens represting units of 100, but we were young and had time and I guarantee everyone was there remembers how epic it was. It's also so epic that I'm sure it will never be topped. There is just no way I'll ever have the time to go there again.

Tabletops rapidly become insufficient. Think '2 car garage'. Good and grand memories.

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

 

[Hedonismbot]

Very cool! My PCs are currently a few sessions from wrapping up their dungeon crawl and I'm planning some kind of mass combat later in the campaign. Great to hear that this would work - I wouldn't have even considered trying running this on a 1-to-1 scale, but it seems like it was run a little more like a tt wargame, which makes perfect sense!

Thanks for sharing.

 

[the Jester]

On the subject of scale, I would normally have done a 10:1 or something, except for two factors.

1. The number of troops that arrived was limited due to the fact that they all had to go through a teleport circle. In addition to the normal limitations of movement per round, they were barely trained and not well disciplined, so each group made what was essentially a discipline check to see how well they did and how quickly they moved through the circle. It was important to know how many actual figures got through, given the vagaries of terrain, ritual duration, etc.

2. The map we were using was of a place that the pcs had visited previously. It thus already existed at 1" = 5' scale.

 

[TerraDave]

I did some of these in the recent campaign, but I did have special rules for a squad of minions to attack as a single entity. We still ended up rolling big handfuls of d20s--the wizard had a field day--and I probably could have done that with the troops as well.

Used counters on cards, 1:1 scale, and could do up to 200 on each side at a time, with the bigger battle structured as a of these series of smaller battles.

Of course, I now look forward to using the 5E rules.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

The jealousy...there are no words!

 

[eternalsandwyrm]

sagas

i did this once in my star wars sagas games a few years back,
it was called the Battle of Onderon. It was a six month siege. The sith used Fredon Nadd tomb as a strong hold and it went on for 3 months REAL time.
it was a pretty epic game, dreadnaughts crashing , battle mediation, the works.
i used squads with minions like rules back then ( before i played 4th)
each peice was a full squad ( usually about 12)

 

[CM]

I think the biggest thing I've run under 4e was a battle last summer in the Ashes of Athas campaign. Made some custom mekillot and inix tokens, and both levels of the argosy are shown.

I'll spoiler the rest since it has info relevant to that adventure series:

Spoiler

Three members of the party find themselves captured and sold to slavers, and were imprisoned in the argosy. The other three and a couple of Veiled Alliance friends hire on as caravan guards (with their own crodlu, the druid). The NPC Veiled Alliance member in the caravan (also a slave) with assistance from the players manages to use a ritual to contact a tribe of brohgs, hoping to get them to attack the caravan. At this point the players' force consists of 8 PCs (wizard, ardent, warlord, druid, rogue, weaponmaster, warden, and slayer), 4 veiled alliance NPCs, and about a dozen slaves. The caravan guards were roughly 40, including the commanders and several half-giants.

The plan worked all too well, and the tribe of a dozen brohgs assaults the caravan. After the majority of the guards have committed to engaging the brohgs, the players launch their surprise attack. They are split into two smaller forces: The group outside the argosy (weaponmaster, druid, warlord, and slayer) attempt to steal a pair of inixes and break open the argosy. Those inside (wizard, ardent, rogue, and warden) lead a slave revolt, recover their gear from the quartermaster, and deal with the guards posted in the argosy as well as the mekillot wrangler, the guard captain, and the caravan master himself.

This first image shows the camp just before the attack (which was the end of that session). Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the battle in progress, but there were a dozen large-sized figures out there for the attacking brohgs (after a couple of initial volleys of boulders).

The slaver camp, just before the attack begins.

Initiative:


One of the players (in the group wrangling inixes) just about got himself eaten by a berserk mekillot, but ultimately both mekillots were killed by giants. The fight in the caravan master's quarters was intense, and one unconscious party member had to be dropped down to a "getaway inix" below. After the death of the caravan master the mekillot wrangler agreed to a cease-fire, and got the hell out of dodge on a loose crodlu.

Endgame, kind of a mess. Really cramped battle in the 2nd level of the argosy. Also, a mekillot eating a player's crodlu.


Shortly thereafter the mercs broke ranks and fled, although they didn't have much hope on foot in the middle of the desert with no support from the argosy. I think 8 of the brohg were killed, and the remainder pillaged the argosy and set fire to it, content to let the survivors flee.

For the regular guards I organized them in groups of about 4 and attacked with them as a unit simultaneously with 4d20. They had greatly simplified stats--just a defense and a basic attack. The brohgs were similar, with a boulder attack and one special attack (most had a multi-creature sweep). Rather than roll actual damage each NPC and monster was divided into a number of hits to kill, each hit being worth roughly 10 HP. So a common L1 guard was 3 hits, half-giant guards were 5 hits, while a brohg was something like 8-10. Guards dealt 1 hit per attack (2 for half-giants), brohgs dealt 2 with boulders and 3 with melee.

And in case you're wondering, the map board is raised about 8" off the table surface, and has a fluorescent light and power strip below. It really adds to the available gaming space!