What's a good way to include many secondary combatants in a fight?

[Storminator]

In my next session, the party will be starting a fight. In addition to the party vs. main opposition fight, there will many lesser combatants on both sides. What's a good way to include those combatants without bogging the game down brutally?

Obviously they should be minions, but what other ideas have people used?

PS

 

[CM]

1. Group weaker combatants in groups of 5 on the initiative board, and roll all their attacks at once.
2. Rather than making them minions, I've abstracted HP down to "hits" , where a hit is the amount of average damage that one of the weaker combatants deals. So in a large-scale battle in my Dark Sun game recently, mook giants took about 10 hits to kill, while the mook humans took about 2 hits to kill, mook half-giants 4 hits, crodlus 3 hits, inixes 8 hits etc. Giants dealt 2 hits in damage, while humans dealt 1 hit in damage. If I remember right, 2e to battlesystem conversion worked similarly.
3. Ignore all minutiae of weaker auras, immediate actions, and the like. If this is a significant portion of the monster's shtick, bump its damage or endurance instead.
4. Ignore non-armor defenses. Have everything attack AC. Give caster mooks a bump to their attack rolls.
5. While the PCs are resolving their actions, take actions for the next several mooks. I've often had 3 or even 4 parties taking their turns simultaneously and it's seldom an issue if people are on-the-ball about their immediates.

Using the above simplifications I'm in the middle of a battle involving these combatants:

7 PCs
6 named NPCs
about 30 humanoid & half-giant soldier NPCs
20 freed slaves
6 crodlu
3 inixes
2 mekillots
10 giants

People who've played Ashes of Athas might know what fight this is. It's a lot of fun and isn't taking significantly longer than a normal fight (the group ran out of time about halfway through the encounter last session and is due to start up again tomorrow night).

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

You could replace the minions with swarms. Each player could be responsible for up to 1 swarm on their side.

Alternatively, zoom in on the PCs and don't roll for the minions at all. If they win, their minions win. If they lose, their minions lose.

 

[Storminator]

What if the minions had a damage aura instead of attacks? Move next to you, activate aura, 5 damage. Then minions from each side would kill each other in waves, and each would do some small amount of damage to PCs (who are 12th level and shouldn't worry too much about minions) or the serious NPCs.

PS

 

[Warbringer]

Skill challenge, where the outcome of the brawl creates situational modifiers for the party's fight.

 

[S'mon]

I think my most successful attempt at NPC vs NPC group combat was avoiding process-sim entirely and just rolling a d6 for each attacker each round, on a 6 they killed an enemy.

 

[Randomthoughts]

What's a good way to include those combatants without bogging the game down brutally?

Obviously they should be minions, but what other ideas have people used?

I'd first determine two things:

1. What is the scale of fight? Is is army-vs-army or something like a bar room brawl? My impression from your post is it's the later.
2. How much interactivity do you want between the PCs and the secondary combatants?

I've used three approaches so far during my Dark Sun campaign, which have already been mentioned:

1. Minions. This works when I want high interactivity between the two groups (PCs could attack the other combatants and vice versa) but it works best with a smaller scope (like a bar brawl).

2. Swarms. I found this to be very helpful for squad level battles and allows for great interactivity. Besides the damage auras you've mentioned, I've designed these swarms to "spawn" 1d3 minions once destroyed.

3. Skill Challenges. This is my favorite approach for large scale battles, since I like avoiding fiddling with all the moving parts to focus on the important stuff: whatever the PCs are doing! What I did was "wrap" a skill challenge around a combat encounter. It's not as interactive as the above options, but the PCs impact the SC while fighting the encounter. Furthermore, their successes/failures in the SC could affect their encounter.

For example, a success in the SC could be the first team to bloody the other one. A failure could result in adding minions, costing a healing surge or imposing the CA condition on the PCs.

 

[Manbearcat]

Great suggestions in this thread.

This is one of my favorite parts of 4e, to be honest. The versatility of swarms, auras, and minion rules makes running dynamic, large scale combats a cinch. I'm not sure exactly what you're doing but what I've done plenty of times is:

1 - Make Elite Swarms for the enemies of large or huge or gargantuan size depending on what I'm doing. For what I think you're doing, I would probably make up your encounter-specific large swarm for both the good guys and the bad guys.

2 - Big passive damage aura with CA for any enemies that end their turn in it. Swarm Trait. MBA * 2 = Low-damage expression weapon attack that targets AC and slides the target into the Swarm; here you are creating the catch-22 of making the PCs want to get out of the aura to not suffer the damage and CA while they risk a low damage OA (so not too punitive such that they deem it not worthwhile to attempt to get out and the fight becomes a slog) in the attempt to use a move action to get out of the Swarm (and its difficult terrain)...but the swarm wants to keep them there, hence the slide effect. Move Action Encounter Power that is a Shift + Trample effect.

3 - Bloodied condition = break out the swarm into 2 (bloodied) standards and 2 minions of the same encounter budget. Obviously you'll need to stat those out. This creates a great opportunity for one of the standards to be a leader (or the leader if that is part of your trope) that generously force-multiplies the other 3 bad guys and a climactic finish for the PCs with a notable antagonist.

4 - Give the PCs their own Swarm (statted again for ease of use; minimal mental overhead) on a card with the breakout of their standards/minions and let them control it.

I'm not sure exactly what you're doing but perhaps its 2 Elite bad guy swarms versus your PCs and their single swarm. Just narrate (or let the players narrate) each successful attack as taking out a swath of bad guys (or good guys) in some fashion consistent with your genre expectations. The guys broken out after bloodied are always the tough, plot-relevant guys (with a couple mooks of course!).

** Almost forgot. As always, give them plenty of clear, explicated terrain features and hazards for the PCs to interact with (stat them up pre-fight or just adlib with 4e on a business card/p42) that change the battlefield afterward (creating encounter-long difficult terrain or worse). With Swarm fights, its especially fun to invoke AoE attacks that Swarms are vulnerable to and that are narratively provocative against mass groups of creatures; eg falling chandeliers, stalactites, loose joists/rafters, large braziers or cauldrons of caustic liquid/acid to upend, pools of lava or necrotic ichor, firepits, etc.

 

[Will Doyle]

One of my worst ever 4E battles had two groups of minions fighting, with the PCs caught in the middle. Rolling multiple attacks versus myself (no matter how simple the system) quickly got boring for my players.

This said, some of my best battles have featured the same setup, but with the PCs allied with one group. In these cases, I let each PC control a portion of the allied minion group at the end of each of their turns.

What if the minions had a damage aura instead of attacks? Move next to you, activate aura, 5 damage. Then minions from each side would kill each other in waves, and each would do some small amount of damage to PCs (who are 12th level and shouldn't worry too much about minions) or the serious NPCs.

This is a pretty cool idea. I'd modify it slightly: Aura 1: Any creature starting its turn in the aura takes 5 damage if they have more than one enemy adjacent (meaning minions have to mob other minions). I'd still keep a minion attack, but only use it versus PCs.

Even this may be a bit of a drag though. In practice I'd possibly just handwave the other enemies, as (Psi)SeveredHead suggests above.

 

[Storminator]

Detailed description:

The PCs are trying to start a war. They've been pushing on the Silver Flame folks that live in Breland (Eberron, obviously). Due to various successes, a bunch of Silver Flame folks are hiding in the church, with the menfolk outside on the steps, protecting the church. In addition to the menfolk minions, there is Inquisitor Dorn and his high level pals from the Last War. So 4 powerful NPCs, and as many minions as I want.

The PCs, having engineered an atrocity and pinned it on the Silver Flame, are being swept up in the mob and headed for the church. So when they get there it will be the 7 PCs and as many NPC minions as I want. This batch of minions will ultimately be controlled by my players.

The real key here, is that PCs really only care how many townsfolk die. The goal is to create carnage, lots of it, and probably egg on the minions on either side to kill each other. If Inquisitor Dorn ends up killing a bunch of Brelish townsfolk, even better.

I'm thinking Bluff or Diplomacy as a minor action (don't want minion attacks to be all a PC gets to do) goads minions on the PC side to attack as the player directs, an Intimidate check vs a specific enemy makes a handful of minions attack that one enemy, and no rolling for minions (there's enough rolling already!) just auto damage. I suppose I don't need an aura for that, just a auto hit.

As this is a fairly climactic battle I could stat up some swarms and use those for crowds too. Hmmm, perhaps the right skill checks can turn a batch of minions into a swarm . . .

Also, the previous 2 sessions were both entirely skill challenges, so I don't want to go there again. We've pretty much already set the stage with those, now it's time for the big finale.

PS