Staggered Arrival of Combatants

[Lord Zardoz]

How often do you start fights where the enemies come in waves throughout the fight? As in, rather then starting a fight with all 12 Orcs in play, you start with 4, then have the rest arrive by 2's once every round?

I am considering the approach for running fights with larger numbers of combatants. What sort of unanticipated results / considerations do you have to deal with?

Based on what I can think of:

Expected Advantages:
- Shorter combat rounds
- Spread out arrival reduces the risk of a single blast spell wiping out all the enemies.
- Staggered arrival means that the PC's will probably have to move into combat more than once, meaning they will use less Full Attacks
- It discourages the players from unloading the heavy guns all in the first round

Expected Disadvantages:
- More chances for the players to Buff / Recover mid fight
- Harder to swarm players and obtain Flanking bonuses.
- Allows players to more easily dogpile opponents.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[MarauderX]

Also consider charging on both sides. If a barbarian has no one in melee, he'll charge the approaching foes or delay until they are in range.

I've used the technique on occasion, mostly to screw around with the direction opponents are approaching from. I tried to do it to a 19th level party, bringing in a hoard of orcs to chew up attacks, slow movement, and make ranged attacks impossible, but the druid brought down a Control Winds tornado before they could all arrive.

I think you're on the right track in considering the rest.

 

[Aeric]

In the few occassions where I've done this, it was when the party was fairly powerful and facing waves of mooks. There was no real time to rest or re-buff between waves (they got a round at most).

In my experience, players tend to go all out in every battle, with the unfortunate side-effect of having to rest and regain spells fairly early in the day (my RttToEE would get up at 7am and be back in the bedroll by 10am). Throwing waves of harder opponents at them could very easily cause a TPK. In fact, the last campaign I was in ended in a TPK for this exact reason. We were low on hit points and out of spells, and in comes a full-strength erinyes with class levels using multishot to decimate our beleagured party. Not fun.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

The fantastic adventures mods all worked out to something like this approach. Here are some of my takes:

1. When it works, it can work very well. Allowing the combat to develop slows it down and allows for it to be a story of its own with the dramatic elements of introduction, rising action, and climax.

The mushroom cavern fight in Hellspike prison is a good example of this. The fight begins with an introduction. You fight a WHOLE bunch of weaker creatures. Initially, they seem almost laughably weak, but they all have a spell like ability that is almost guaranteed to do SOMETHING and there are enough of them that they will take their toll. So, from the player's perspective, it is the introduction to the fight. It, itself progresses from "surprise! oh no!" to "this is easy!" to "That's an awful lot of them" to "This is really starting to add up; we'd better finish this quickly." At about that last point, it is usually when the players have gone far enough into the cavern to trigger the elementals and to notice the monster in the central cavern. That is the rising action where the players realize it's serious and they start getting a bit worried. Then, Vereorax appears and, both times it's happened, players figuratively dump their pants. At that point, the fight has reached the pull out all the stops climax.

2. Fights where opponents arrive in a kind of staggered order also tend to feature larger numbers of weaker combatants. This allows different kinds of characters to thrive than ordinarily do. (The fighter I just ran through Hellspike Prison said afterward, "This kind of mod reminds me why I have Cleave.") Similarly, they give fireballs and other area effect spells the opportunity to be the kinds of show-stoppers they were in earlier editions without actually stopping the show. If the arc of lightning kills 7 out of 8 derro, that's pretty dramatic, but when you also have a roper, a beholder, and a pair of elementals, it's not like the show actually has to stop.

 

[phindar]

(my RttToEE would get up at 7am and be back in the bedroll by 10am).

Reading this, I had to glance over and see if this was someone from my group.

 

[S'mon]

I do this sometimes; works particularly well in mass battle situations where combatants are roaming a chaotic battlefield; enemy forces can enter the PC's vision from any side. It can end up like the final Battle of Camlann in 'Excalibur'.

 

[Gold Roger]

I do this all the time.

Most of the pro's have already been stated and I'd actually put your first disadvantage in with them if you don't do this with pure mook fights, but use fights with harder oponents mixed in with the waves.

It defenitely makes battles harder to predict and thus more exiting and challenging.

 

[Quartz]

In my experience, players tend to go all out in every battle, with the unfortunate side-effect of having to rest and regain spells fairly early in the day (my RttToEE would get up at 7am and be back in the bedroll by 10am). Throwing waves of harder opponents at them could very easily cause a TPK.

Then perhaps the spellcasters should have burned some XP creating scrolls and potions?

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

I do it as well for all the reasons above plus: it's a good way to design encounters when you don't know how difficult the encounter will be. You can send in a bigger boss with the first wave of foes and add, or not add, extra mooks depending on how well the PCs are doing.