How do you handle 12 small monsters against the players?

Hi ther, Midgardians!

So in one of the adventures I'm running, at some point the players may fight against 12 twig blights. How do you handle that? Do you attack with all of them, do you use them as a "swarm"?

Thanks in advance.

I actually did a battle with x Twig Blights and y Vine Blights some time ago. The party had a few basic guard NPCs to help them. I will say that navigating through that was a bit of a pain on a battle mat. There were 4 characters and about 25 monsters+NPCs on the mat. If I were to do it again, I would definitely go just for theater of the mind over battle mat. Although it was definitely worth seeing the faces of my players as I just keep adding monster token after token onto the mat. Besides that, it was really troublesome and annoying (for me).

You could use mob rules from the DMG. Instead of individually moving a horde of tokens on the mat, just describe how many are going to attack a specific character and use the mob rules to determine how many hits them.

Twig Blights have 7 Hit points and vulnerability to fire damage, so a wizard can sweep the lot with a Burning Hands or Fireball quite easily. Setting up the token army will take a lot more time than they're worth.

I actually use dice instead of minis for my battles, and have a value facing up and the shape telling which of what kind of monster it is. If you run it in person, you 100% need a way to track each of them. I'd recommend picking up a combat tracking app if you don't have one already for this. I use Improved Initiative, but there are many, many options, so I would check a few before settling.

It depends how difficult the encounter is meant to be. An easy encounter would have all 12 Twig Blights surround and attack the party while an harder one might attack in batch while other half moves around, Dodge or take other actions.

I think the main thing I'd advise is that you probably want to group them in the initiative order, probably three fours or four threes, just to keep the bookkeeping down.

Other than that, there's no inherent problem with doing it. Have their important stats immediately at hand at all times.

The other thing to consider is how smart the enemies are. Do they use tactics, or are they straightforward? If they use tactics, figure out what they're doing in advance, so you're not mulling things over on the fly if you can avoid it.

Also, when they're down to a couple of enemies (which will happen faster than you think), you can (but do not have to) just end the fight. Say they run away, or that the players deal with them, as appropriate. The fun part of the fight is done with, no need to drag things out.

I've relatively recently run fights with fifty constantly-reviving skeletons (plus bosses) and twenty-odd golems with two crossbows each. As long as the enemies are simple, and you keep things moving, it can work. (Though I think a dozen enemies is plenty for less-experienced groups.)

The 24 DMG has rules for running mobs in chapter 3, DM’s toolbox. They can really help streamline the process.

12 isn't that problematic, particularly since twig blights only have 7 hp. When attacking, figure out what they need to hit, then pick up a handful of d20s; any rolls that are high enough hit. If there's advantage, reroll all misses, if there's disadvantage, reroll all hits. Then roll as many damage dice as are needed (or use fixed damage).

For hit points, most of the time the blight will just die when hit, which makes it easy, but if you don't want to track individual hit points, you can get fair results for a monster with N hp by rolling a dN, and if the result exceeds the damage roll they survive, otherwise they die.

Or just steal 4e's minion rules.