D&D does not do mass combat very well. The better option is to give the PCs some kind of side objective. A common one is to sneak behind the lines and kill the leader of the enemy troops. Others are to secure strategic points on the battlefield, face off against the enemy shock troops that everyone is afraid of, help someone escape, etc.
What you don’t want is 5 PCs and 100 soldiers facing off against 100 enemy soldiers. For one, it would be really boring for everyone to try and run it. For 2, that number of dice being rolled will inevitably swamp the players.
Keep in mind that neither magic nor melee scale well to army size combat in D&D. A fireball is only a 20' radius area and although it is devastating in a small area, most armies would know to spread out or keep under cover until an enemy spellcaster is cut down by long bow men or similar. A long bow is up to 600' - a fireball is 150'.
In addition, what combat would look like really depends on the kind of society you choose to build in the game world. How common is magic? How common are characters/NPCs with enhanced skills and magical abilities. Are there a handful of level 10 NPCs in a realm or are there hundreds? How common are clerics, healing and resurrection magics?
The fewer powerful characters/NPCs - the less impact they will have on large scale combat. Against 10,000 troops - a wizard with several fireballs or even a Meteor Swarm is pretty negligible.
Consider one side putting their seige engines behind a wall of force and firing over the wall at a beseiged city. If you use the new Circle casting rules from Heroes of Faerun (a broken idea that shouldn't have been published IMHO :) ) then the wall of force can be used for a much longer time for a negligible cost.
So, the first step in coming up with a climactic large scale battle is to figure out how you think it would actually work - how big are the opposing forces - 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k troops? What types of troops? Do they have summoned auxilliaries like demons/devils/elementals/beasts? Do both sides have similar capabilities? Which side has the upper hand and how do you (as DM) see the battle shaping up? ... Then come up with a specific role for the characters to play in the battle. Typically, this often involves eliminating either opposing leadership or strategic objectives (eg seige engines, enemy magic support etc) since going out and fighting a few hundred commoners is not a good use of the force available to PCs.
Once you have an idea of how the battle will look, evaluate how the PC actions impact the balance in the battle, narrate the results and then see what the players choose to do next to try to tip the battle in the favor of their side.
Playing historical war games the last few decades, large scale does not really work well. Either your figures are just a small snapshot of the battle, or you scale it so each of your "men/pieces" represents a company or a battalion etc.
As a party of PCs are a bit more heroic than the average solider, I think that the major battle is not what the PCs are fighting, as they as mentioned wight for a key purpose, go after teh Mages or capture the opposing leader etc.
Depending how the PCs do depends on how the entire battle is going. If they are fighting the royal security team to capture the general, if the PCs are inning, the general is getting nervous and might do some riskier tactics, and that influences the overall battle rolls. Realizing the general's guard is folding he might need to end this quicker and gambles by activating his reserves or exploitation forces too early, in an attempt to end the battle before he is captured. And if you understand the issue with releasing reserves to early, that might result in an outcome that is either favorable or detrimental to the PCs, the PCs have a part, but you don't need to actually do big scale combat.
DnD is not built for large-scale combats. What I recommend is having two random encounter tables with events on one (Arrows, Siege Weapon, Cavalry Charge) and another with creature encounters (Soldiers, panicked Horse). Roll on creature encounters to start a conflict and events to spice things up a little. Then give them a series of objectives to accomplish and have a battle timeline of predetermined events. Narrate the battle based on how well the PCs are doing on their assignments/missions.
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He doesn't have much besides the skin on his bones. Me: I'll take the skin on his bones, then.
"You see a gigantic, monstrous praying mantis burst from out of the ground. It sprays a stream of acid from it's mouth at one soldier, dissolving him instantly, then it turns and chomps another soldier in half with it's- "
A lot of people have mentioned that DND isn't good at large scale, but that doesn't mean that what you want to do is impossible. Rather, I think the takeaway should be more that you should ensure you have small-scale goals for your players to do throughout the battle.
Think of it like this: your party is not the rank and file of the army, they're the infiltration specialists, the sharp point of the spear or the crowbar when needed. They're a highly specialized and highly mobile squad, and should be treated as such an asset by their commanders. The fights they get in shouldn't look like a flat killing field with hundreds locked in battle. The players should be given missions like "we think the enemy might've set up shop in that abandoned church outside the city walls with the intent to tunnel past our wall, we need you to go check it out!" or "the enemy has captive a hydra they've been using to decimate our troops. We've tracked it to a cave nearby and we want you to take it out."
Occasionally you might give them a mission like "oh no! Someone blew a hole in the outer wall and we need you to defend it until it can be repaired!" to see how long they can last defending a narrow opening against a large number of low level baddies, but space and numbers are still restricted for the party in such instances.
It's best not to attempt massive battle scenes by rolling dice. With thousands of people on each side, each round of combat would take several hours. D&D is simply not WH40K. Instead, use the massive battle as a backdrop. The war is just scenery. Give the party a specific and defined mission to complete within the battle. Maybe they have to find the McGuffin before the enemy's reinforcements arrive. Maybe if they find and kill the BBEG, the remaining enemy forces will be demoralized and disperse or surrender. The party is essentially Luke flying down the trench toward the exhaust port while everyone else is fighting tie fighters.
But if you really want the players to feel a deeper connection between the characters' actions and the outcome of the battle, fine. Let's say each side's army starts with 2,500 people. Both sides are fairly evenly matched, so they are killing each other off at the same rate, let's say 5 per round. But while the party is on their Special Quest, each hit point of damage they do also represents 1 casualty in the enemy's larger army. The party aren't actually the ones killing those people, it's just representative of how well the Good Guys are doing in the battle. BUT, each hit point of damage that the characters take represents one person from the Good Guy Army who is killed in the battle. So by the time the party completes their quest and returns to the scene of the main battle, they should see just the remnants of the two armies reaching the inevitable limits of attrition combat.
Actually dice-rolling big battles is, unfortunately, not that much fun. That's pretty well covered already in this thread.
Since your battle is in a city, you *could* actually think of it as a sort of open-air dungeon, with different areas of the city as "rooms" in it. Then, instead of walking into a room and seeing a monster there, your group comes around a corner to see that the enemy force has released some armored ogres, or a group of enemies is going down the street setting fire to the buildings and killing anybody who comes out, or an enemy champion is using walls of fire to isolate small groups of your allies and slaughter them. You can use the battle as the setting for whatever interesting encounters you can think of.
And on that topic, if you give the battle some obvious "champion" enemies like this, it's almost better than giving the party instructions from a commander. When the party sees an interesting enemy, they'll know what to do, and it feels less like you're leading them around on a leash.
That also gives you the option of running the battle with only a handful of enemies that have actual stat blocks: individual "champion" enemies, and then a few types of "soldier" for the others who are with them. You could even go as far as to treat the "generic crowd of enemies" outside of the encounters, more like an environmental hazard rather than actual enemies with stat blocks. Enemy archers on a rooftop causing problems, and the wizard fireballs it? Any survivors will be running for safety to regroup, the hazard is dealt with, and the party can more on to something more interesting than bayonetting the wounded.
Another benefit of this approach is that it's fairly easy to work out circumstances where "if you accomplish X, Y, and Z, you could turn the tide of the battle." Or, if the battle is scripted to be lost for dramatic story purposes, the party's "victory" could be something like keeping an important NPC alive, or discovering a weakness in the enemy's war machines, or learning the identity of the spy who's been sabotaging them. Basically, the obvious goal for the party might be "win the battle," but from a storyteller/DM perspective, there's a lot of other things you can do too.
Anyway, that's some of the things that have worked for me in the past. Hopefully you can get some inspiration from it.
D&D works fine for mass combat, its just a matter of scaling. There are plenty of systems available for this kind of thing.
The main objective is to see a group of something as a single combatant. So saying you have a fight of 500 soldiers vs. 500 Orcs. Break that down into 5 enemies on each side... you move, you attack... hit points are people... armies should have a morale of some sort.
It's pretty doable, there are even some decent rules out there from the old school days (BECMI) has a pretty elaborate ruleset, there is the stuff MCDM put out.
Wether its fun or not, that part of I agree is the big question. Most people engaging in an RPG are looking to play their characters from the character's perspective, not manage abstract concepts like running kingdoms or doing mass army combat in some sort of side game. Even the new Bastion system is pretty much dead on arrival. Its a cool idea, its just not really something that is conducive to an adventure game.
It can work with some groups who see the RPG experience as something more than "what would my character do".. but I think if you were to run a survey, "What would my character do" is kind of the perspective from which people prefer to play the game.
I have personally done it before; it wasn't a complete disaster but it wasn't exactly particularly memorable. It was.. meh..
I tend to agree with the consensus here that doing a big battle like this in an RPG is more about "what are the characters doing during the battle" and perhaps answering the question "How does what the players do, effect the outcome".
For example, the players have to sneak in the castle and fight there way to the drawbridge to open it from the inside. If they succeed in time, their army storms the castle and wins the battle, if not, the battle is lost.
One suggestion I haven't seen here, if you want your group to go against large number of foes, you can use the swarm rules. Creating higher level swarms of low level creatures is a fun way of allowing your powerful players to cut through multiple enemies every round, while only having to keep track of one or 2 stat blocks. Here are some resources:
Just be sure to describe the battle in an epic way and your players will think they have just cut through 100s of bad guys, while you only had to track 2-3 stat blocks.
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when my campaign ends the final fight is a siege on the city (rebellion attacking). So there are 4 ways to do this that I’ve found squads, have low hp enemies so the they cleave through the troops, long monologue and something like key battles like in Skyrim (battle for whitefell i think) so if they kill these 6 people the city’s defences crumble more if not they have to defend the last objective and so on until the BBEG joins the fight at the end. Some videos and links for some help for others https://www.cottageofeverything.com/blog/world-weavers-guide-to-combat-large-scale-battles-in-5th-edition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_xFj5rs5Vk https://slyflourish.com/running_wars.html https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=FoP9FRLkCkokdY-c https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/dungeon-masters-only/19277-large-scale-battles-and-how-to-handle-them?srsltid=AfmBOorPZB9VKghyBwCgS136ln2M_svGaiIeEOyav5wpFYrM_JQw2AgO
can I get some advice thank you
Sure! I have another link to add to this. https://gamenightblog.com/2021/01/31/fantasy-siege-roleplay-combat-resource-how-to-run/
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D&D does not do mass combat very well. The better option is to give the PCs some kind of side objective. A common one is to sneak behind the lines and kill the leader of the enemy troops. Others are to secure strategic points on the battlefield, face off against the enemy shock troops that everyone is afraid of, help someone escape, etc.
What you don’t want is 5 PCs and 100 soldiers facing off against 100 enemy soldiers. For one, it would be really boring for everyone to try and run it. For 2, that number of dice being rolled will inevitably swamp the players.
Keep in mind that neither magic nor melee scale well to army size combat in D&D. A fireball is only a 20' radius area and although it is devastating in a small area, most armies would know to spread out or keep under cover until an enemy spellcaster is cut down by long bow men or similar. A long bow is up to 600' - a fireball is 150'.
In addition, what combat would look like really depends on the kind of society you choose to build in the game world. How common is magic? How common are characters/NPCs with enhanced skills and magical abilities. Are there a handful of level 10 NPCs in a realm or are there hundreds? How common are clerics, healing and resurrection magics?
The fewer powerful characters/NPCs - the less impact they will have on large scale combat. Against 10,000 troops - a wizard with several fireballs or even a Meteor Swarm is pretty negligible.
Consider one side putting their seige engines behind a wall of force and firing over the wall at a beseiged city. If you use the new Circle casting rules from Heroes of Faerun (a broken idea that shouldn't have been published IMHO :) ) then the wall of force can be used for a much longer time for a negligible cost.
So, the first step in coming up with a climactic large scale battle is to figure out how you think it would actually work - how big are the opposing forces - 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k troops? What types of troops? Do they have summoned auxilliaries like demons/devils/elementals/beasts? Do both sides have similar capabilities? Which side has the upper hand and how do you (as DM) see the battle shaping up? ... Then come up with a specific role for the characters to play in the battle. Typically, this often involves eliminating either opposing leadership or strategic objectives (eg seige engines, enemy magic support etc) since going out and fighting a few hundred commoners is not a good use of the force available to PCs.
Once you have an idea of how the battle will look, evaluate how the PC actions impact the balance in the battle, narrate the results and then see what the players choose to do next to try to tip the battle in the favor of their side.
Good luck!
Playing historical war games the last few decades, large scale does not really work well. Either your figures are just a small snapshot of the battle, or you scale it so each of your "men/pieces" represents a company or a battalion etc.
As a party of PCs are a bit more heroic than the average solider, I think that the major battle is not what the PCs are fighting, as they as mentioned wight for a key purpose, go after teh Mages or capture the opposing leader etc.
Depending how the PCs do depends on how the entire battle is going. If they are fighting the royal security team to capture the general, if the PCs are inning, the general is getting nervous and might do some riskier tactics, and that influences the overall battle rolls. Realizing the general's guard is folding he might need to end this quicker and gambles by activating his reserves or exploitation forces too early, in an attempt to end the battle before he is captured. And if you understand the issue with releasing reserves to early, that might result in an outcome that is either favorable or detrimental to the PCs, the PCs have a part, but you don't need to actually do big scale combat.
DnD is not built for large-scale combats. What I recommend is having two random encounter tables with events on one (Arrows, Siege Weapon, Cavalry Charge) and another with creature encounters (Soldiers, panicked Horse). Roll on creature encounters to start a conflict and events to spice things up a little. Then give them a series of objectives to accomplish and have a battle timeline of predetermined events. Narrate the battle based on how well the PCs are doing on their assignments/missions.
He doesn't have much besides the skin on his bones. Me: I'll take the skin on his bones, then.
"You see a gigantic, monstrous praying mantis burst from out of the ground. It sprays a stream of acid from it's mouth at one soldier, dissolving him instantly, then it turns and chomps another soldier in half with it's- "
"When are we gonna take a snack break?"
A lot of people have mentioned that DND isn't good at large scale, but that doesn't mean that what you want to do is impossible. Rather, I think the takeaway should be more that you should ensure you have small-scale goals for your players to do throughout the battle.
Think of it like this: your party is not the rank and file of the army, they're the infiltration specialists, the sharp point of the spear or the crowbar when needed. They're a highly specialized and highly mobile squad, and should be treated as such an asset by their commanders. The fights they get in shouldn't look like a flat killing field with hundreds locked in battle. The players should be given missions like "we think the enemy might've set up shop in that abandoned church outside the city walls with the intent to tunnel past our wall, we need you to go check it out!" or "the enemy has captive a hydra they've been using to decimate our troops. We've tracked it to a cave nearby and we want you to take it out."
Occasionally you might give them a mission like "oh no! Someone blew a hole in the outer wall and we need you to defend it until it can be repaired!" to see how long they can last defending a narrow opening against a large number of low level baddies, but space and numbers are still restricted for the party in such instances.
Happy sieging!
It's best not to attempt massive battle scenes by rolling dice. With thousands of people on each side, each round of combat would take several hours. D&D is simply not WH40K. Instead, use the massive battle as a backdrop. The war is just scenery. Give the party a specific and defined mission to complete within the battle. Maybe they have to find the McGuffin before the enemy's reinforcements arrive. Maybe if they find and kill the BBEG, the remaining enemy forces will be demoralized and disperse or surrender. The party is essentially Luke flying down the trench toward the exhaust port while everyone else is fighting tie fighters.
But if you really want the players to feel a deeper connection between the characters' actions and the outcome of the battle, fine. Let's say each side's army starts with 2,500 people. Both sides are fairly evenly matched, so they are killing each other off at the same rate, let's say 5 per round. But while the party is on their Special Quest, each hit point of damage they do also represents 1 casualty in the enemy's larger army. The party aren't actually the ones killing those people, it's just representative of how well the Good Guys are doing in the battle. BUT, each hit point of damage that the characters take represents one person from the Good Guy Army who is killed in the battle. So by the time the party completes their quest and returns to the scene of the main battle, they should see just the remnants of the two armies reaching the inevitable limits of attrition combat.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Actually dice-rolling big battles is, unfortunately, not that much fun. That's pretty well covered already in this thread.
Since your battle is in a city, you *could* actually think of it as a sort of open-air dungeon, with different areas of the city as "rooms" in it. Then, instead of walking into a room and seeing a monster there, your group comes around a corner to see that the enemy force has released some armored ogres, or a group of enemies is going down the street setting fire to the buildings and killing anybody who comes out, or an enemy champion is using walls of fire to isolate small groups of your allies and slaughter them. You can use the battle as the setting for whatever interesting encounters you can think of.
And on that topic, if you give the battle some obvious "champion" enemies like this, it's almost better than giving the party instructions from a commander. When the party sees an interesting enemy, they'll know what to do, and it feels less like you're leading them around on a leash.
That also gives you the option of running the battle with only a handful of enemies that have actual stat blocks: individual "champion" enemies, and then a few types of "soldier" for the others who are with them. You could even go as far as to treat the "generic crowd of enemies" outside of the encounters, more like an environmental hazard rather than actual enemies with stat blocks. Enemy archers on a rooftop causing problems, and the wizard fireballs it? Any survivors will be running for safety to regroup, the hazard is dealt with, and the party can more on to something more interesting than bayonetting the wounded.
Another benefit of this approach is that it's fairly easy to work out circumstances where "if you accomplish X, Y, and Z, you could turn the tide of the battle." Or, if the battle is scripted to be lost for dramatic story purposes, the party's "victory" could be something like keeping an important NPC alive, or discovering a weakness in the enemy's war machines, or learning the identity of the spy who's been sabotaging them. Basically, the obvious goal for the party might be "win the battle," but from a storyteller/DM perspective, there's a lot of other things you can do too.
Anyway, that's some of the things that have worked for me in the past. Hopefully you can get some inspiration from it.
D&D works fine for mass combat, its just a matter of scaling. There are plenty of systems available for this kind of thing.
The main objective is to see a group of something as a single combatant. So saying you have a fight of 500 soldiers vs. 500 Orcs. Break that down into 5 enemies on each side... you move, you attack... hit points are people... armies should have a morale of some sort.
It's pretty doable, there are even some decent rules out there from the old school days (BECMI) has a pretty elaborate ruleset, there is the stuff MCDM put out.
Wether its fun or not, that part of I agree is the big question. Most people engaging in an RPG are looking to play their characters from the character's perspective, not manage abstract concepts like running kingdoms or doing mass army combat in some sort of side game. Even the new Bastion system is pretty much dead on arrival. Its a cool idea, its just not really something that is conducive to an adventure game.
It can work with some groups who see the RPG experience as something more than "what would my character do".. but I think if you were to run a survey, "What would my character do" is kind of the perspective from which people prefer to play the game.
I have personally done it before; it wasn't a complete disaster but it wasn't exactly particularly memorable. It was.. meh..
I tend to agree with the consensus here that doing a big battle like this in an RPG is more about "what are the characters doing during the battle" and perhaps answering the question "How does what the players do, effect the outcome".
For example, the players have to sneak in the castle and fight there way to the drawbridge to open it from the inside. If they succeed in time, their army storms the castle and wins the battle, if not, the battle is lost.
Stuff like that.
One suggestion I haven't seen here, if you want your group to go against large number of foes, you can use the swarm rules. Creating higher level swarms of low level creatures is a fun way of allowing your powerful players to cut through multiple enemies every round, while only having to keep track of one or 2 stat blocks. Here are some resources:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1728-running-hordes-of-monsters-without-lots-of-fuss?srsltid=AfmBOop9kajOjWfa9WuOfWITarC6OOn2rVUr-3tmuNA0DyXTyKHG1yey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpdpeWtO28o&t=311s
Just be sure to describe the battle in an epic way and your players will think they have just cut through 100s of bad guys, while you only had to track 2-3 stat blocks.