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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5045024" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, obviously TOO many monsters will slow things down, but I find as long as I restrict it to say 3 types of monster its not a problem. There is a bit of time involved in each monster, but unless they are all complex monsters it shouldn't be that much. If you have say an encounter with 8 minions, 3 skirmishers, and 2 artillery monsters, all of the PCs level that makes a pretty good encounter. You could up it to 5 skirmishers of level - 1 and it will still be fine. That's 15 figures but most of the minions will be dead in 2 rounds, the artillery should be simple to run, and most skirmishers aren't too complex either.Honestly I think the more classic case where DMs toss in a higher level boss monster aren't that much faster for the DM, if at all. The boss is complex and you'd commonly see Elite boss (leader), 1 soldier, 2 skirmishers, 1 artillery or lurker. Assuming they're all level + 2 or the boss is level + 3 its going to be a tough encounter, but the DM's turn is not likely to be faster than the previous example.To keep things down to more reasonable numbers of figures yes, you can use even say an under leveled elite or even solo. You can use waves too. A trap or two is also simple to run and gives you more oomph without actually larger numbers.Of course I may be biased too. We play using maptool and things like init and condition tracking are just not issues, so it actually makes running 15 monsters fairly straightforward in most cases.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5045024, member: 82106"] Well, obviously TOO many monsters will slow things down, but I find as long as I restrict it to say 3 types of monster its not a problem. There is a bit of time involved in each monster, but unless they are all complex monsters it shouldn't be that much. If you have say an encounter with 8 minions, 3 skirmishers, and 2 artillery monsters, all of the PCs level that makes a pretty good encounter. You could up it to 5 skirmishers of level - 1 and it will still be fine. That's 15 figures but most of the minions will be dead in 2 rounds, the artillery should be simple to run, and most skirmishers aren't too complex either. Honestly I think the more classic case where DMs toss in a higher level boss monster aren't that much faster for the DM, if at all. The boss is complex and you'd commonly see Elite boss (leader), 1 soldier, 2 skirmishers, 1 artillery or lurker. Assuming they're all level + 2 or the boss is level + 3 its going to be a tough encounter, but the DM's turn is not likely to be faster than the previous example. To keep things down to more reasonable numbers of figures yes, you can use even say an under leveled elite or even solo. You can use waves too. A trap or two is also simple to run and gives you more oomph without actually larger numbers. Of course I may be biased too. We play using maptool and things like init and condition tracking are just not issues, so it actually makes running 15 monsters fairly straightforward in most cases. [/QUOTE]

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