Going over more notes for the next couple sessions and need some advice on two things.
1: does anyone know of some checks and ruling for disarming traps of various kinds?
2: when doing the sea of moving ice the ship says it has 40 crew members if I recall off the top of my head and if need be they can fight.... I need help with the logistics of that many NPCs fighting at once... would I just roll one initiative for all and they all attack and defend as one to avoid a 10 minute pause while I do 40 attack rolls etc. I was thinking maybe break it into groups of ten and do it that way so its 4 attacks but whatever i roll for damage etc is multiplied by ten what do you nice people think?
DMG page 250 has mob rules for combat. There are sections on traps in both the DMG and XGtE. The check you require will be situational and also depend on what your PCs decide to do to detect, disarm, and otherwise circumvent the trap. It’ll also depend on what the trap is and how it works.
As for running large numbers of NPCs in a combat I use inspiration from movies (yeah, I have a very cinematic game sue me!) moreover I enforce the rules of how many attackers can target a foe. If the PCs place themselves appropriately, they can reduce their attackers to around 3 easily if they simply stand back to back. Ranged NPCs I run as only able to collectively attack one target a round because they are firing into a melee with their friends and mostly waste their turn being cautious about hitting a comrade. So I roll one to hit against every PC each round if possible. Yeah, it is lots of rolls, luckily I have around 20kg of dice so I just roll them at once, sorted by color for each kind of attacker.
Going over more notes for the next couple sessions and need some advice on two things.
1: does anyone know of some checks and ruling for disarming traps of various kinds?
2: when doing the sea of moving ice the ship says it has 40 crew members if I recall off the top of my head and if need be they can fight.... I need help with the logistics of that many NPCs fighting at once... would I just roll one initiative for all and they all attack and defend as one to avoid a 10 minute pause while I do 40 attack rolls etc. I was thinking maybe break it into groups of ten and do it that way so its 4 attacks but whatever i roll for damage etc is multiplied by ten what do you nice people think?
DMG page 250 has mob rules for combat. There are sections on traps in both the DMG and XGtE. The check you require will be situational and also depend on what your PCs decide to do to detect, disarm, and otherwise circumvent the trap. It’ll also depend on what the trap is and how it works.
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As for running large numbers of NPCs in a combat I use inspiration from movies (yeah, I have a very cinematic game sue me!) moreover I enforce the rules of how many attackers can target a foe. If the PCs place themselves appropriately, they can reduce their attackers to around 3 easily if they simply stand back to back. Ranged NPCs I run as only able to collectively attack one target a round because they are firing into a melee with their friends and mostly waste their turn being cautious about hitting a comrade. So I roll one to hit against every PC each round if possible. Yeah, it is lots of rolls, luckily I have around 20kg of dice so I just roll them at once, sorted by color for each kind of attacker.
Ok thanks. Yeah I dont have the dmg quite yet. Low on funds and just starting out. 😔