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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nevvur" data-source="post: 6744209" data-attributes="member: 6783882">Well, you said you thought you could wing it. Preparing will solve most of your problems. Beyond that...Hand wave/narrate anything the players aren't directly involved in doing. Don't start rolling dice against yourself. Not sure if you actually did that in your scenario, but thought I'd bring it up. There's already plenty of chance involved in PC activities, I can't think of any good reason to leave the peripheral stuff to randomness.Don't use too many creatures that can take more than one or two hits, and take care about exposing the lieutenants/generals to PC fire until "it's their time" (dramatically appropriate). Speaking from experience, my players like to focus down the big guy before dealing with his minions. Sometimes this works in their favor, but since we started playing 5e and analyzed this notion of bounded accuracy, I've given them frequent reason to reconsider that strategy. Large scale fights aren't about damage per round, they're about kills per round. It's a subtle but important distinction. Also, it doesn't have to about KPR either, and victory/defeat conditions that don't involve killing stuff can liven up a long battle as well.Big battles are AE characters' times to shine. Let them. A single fireball shouldn't solve the entire fight, but provide opportunities for them to have a major impact. The players don't need to know another wave is just around the corner, but let them bask in the glory of a well placed AE for a moment.If any single piece in the setup is dragging things out to the point of being more a hassle than a dramatic effect, consider eliminating it prematurely. This needs to be handled on a case by case basis to make sense, so there's no formula on how to handle it. In your example, maybe the weight of the golems causes them to fall through the floor and get buried under rubble, or the ceiling above collapses on them when their pounding shakes the local structural integrity of the building. Be organized, which kind of goes along with being prepared. This really goes for any scale of battle, but figure out ahead of time how you're going to track initiative, hit points, progression through the scenario, etc. I recently went through a 10-round, 40 monster scenario with my table. It lasted about an hour. It wasn't quite as complex as the scenario you describe, but rounds went fast despite the large number of moving parts.</blockquote>

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