Big armies

In my DnD session lat night we had a gigantic battle.  The scenario was us defending a small fortified keep against a swarm of zombies.  I think the people designing the scenario thought we would try to defend each entrance separately and prepare elaborate traps and such, but we decided on a simpler plan.  We sat in the highest room in the tallest tower that had a single trapdoor as an entrance and waited for the zombies to come up the ladder one at a time.  That seemed like the easiest possible way to smash a mindless swarm.

Of course this would be a terribly boring battle to run.  It is an excellent plan in terms of winning, but not much of a plan in terms of being entertaining.

Thankfully even though my character is excellent at coming up with tight plans, he has a tendency to throw away the plan to PEWPEW some enemies.  I flew away through the air and chased down some zombies with fire spells, and the combat became the chaotic flowing mess through the keep that the designers had surely intended.

One issue with this sort of combat is that it can involve way too many combatants and have a lot of boring math.  Our side summoned eight giant owls, and we could have spent hours rolling attacks for the owls and the zombies as they slowly clawed each other to death.  While this would have been correct by the rules, it would have been a tragic waste of our time.  Sometimes Naked Man has run fights on a big scale like this and we have gotten bogged down in endless slogs between summons and enemies that simply aren't fun or interesting.  This time though he nailed it because we refused to roll and came up with a decent approximation.

We decided that given the stats on the owls they would do about 45 damage a round, which is enough to kill 2 zombies.  The owls flew over a pile of zombies and every round 2 zombies were removed.  This solution is quick and accurate enough to preserve the flow of advantage in the battle.

Shoving this sort of thing off to the side is quite useful.  Some of the zombies were fast and deadly, with weapons and special powers.  Rolling out the combats between those zombies and us is worth it, because each attack is meaningful.  Naked Man managed to set up the fight so that the owls and slow zombies had a huge battle off screen (helped by a fireball or two), and the real fight against the tough, interesting opponents got to take centre stage.

This sort of thing is not the easiest to manage.  The game doesn't provide aproximations for these sorts of things, but they are a key component in having a big battle and not having it be a chore.

In the end it was an enjoyable time.  Still, if I were building the game, I would find more ways to make enemy turns quicker.  Fixed damage and singular attacks would definitely figure into the list.  If only somebody had made a game like that... oh wait.