Note: The NPC fighter/magic-users are going to be split to form two squads.
The idea is that each squad will take on their own Fire Elemental while the players will take on their own. Overall I think this might be a fair fight but I wanted some feedback for those who have used Mob rules or can look at this and see any problems I may run into. One idea is that squads are more for flavor combat to give the three fire elements some sense of severe danger so I may reduce their fire element HP by half depending on how things start looking but the overall goal is that the players are fighting out their Elemental to the fullest around what I hope will be an epic battle.
In these cases, I usually hand wave the other fights. For one, it’s awkward if I’m sitting there rolling against myself. For two, I don’t want bad die luck to mean the wrong side wins, or either side wins too quickly or slowly. I just throw in a sentence now and then about how things are going in the other fights, and let the players decide if/when they want to intervene.
Also, if it’s in close proximity, I’d count on the PCs flitting between fights to help protect the red shirts, because that’s what heroes do. Like the wizard saying, I’ll help the group on the left if it looks like things are going badly for them.
if you haven't figured it out yet this is not a fair fight. i suggest starting with the encounter builder and you'll realize that 3x fire elementals vs just the 5 player characters isn't even a difficult fight.
3 fire elementals is 10800 adjusted xp. Deadly threshold for 5 level 4 PCs is 5,500 xp. Sub-deadly would be 2 fire elementals.
On the original issue, my usual solution to large numbers of NPC allies is "there's a fight going on over there off-screen, which we won't bother rolling for".
My original intention was to give the combat some more depth to the encounter but as the party ended the game being chased by Fire Elementals out of a cathedral where the awaiting forces were placed that depth started to take a little more meaning of what the mod rules would put in front of me. We never got to the main fight in the last session but it does give me the chance to do the handwave of multiple battles without the dice rolls to me seems like a much more appealing alternative.
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Tonight I'm running a game where I plan on using the Mob Rules from DMG.
Setup:
3x Fire Elementals
vs.
5x 4th Level Player Characters
2x Captains
x18 Guards
x4 Acolytes
x2 Apprentice Wizards
Note: The NPC fighter/magic-users are going to be split to form two squads.
The idea is that each squad will take on their own Fire Elemental while the players will take on their own. Overall I think this might be a fair fight but I wanted some feedback for those who have used Mob rules or can look at this and see any problems I may run into. One idea is that squads are more for flavor combat to give the three fire elements some sense of severe danger so I may reduce their fire element HP by half depending on how things start looking but the overall goal is that the players are fighting out their Elemental to the fullest around what I hope will be an epic battle.
In these cases, I usually hand wave the other fights. For one, it’s awkward if I’m sitting there rolling against myself. For two, I don’t want bad die luck to mean the wrong side wins, or either side wins too quickly or slowly. I just throw in a sentence now and then about how things are going in the other fights, and let the players decide if/when they want to intervene.
Also, if it’s in close proximity, I’d count on the PCs flitting between fights to help protect the red shirts, because that’s what heroes do. Like the wizard saying, I’ll help the group on the left if it looks like things are going badly for them.
3 fire elementals is 10800 adjusted xp. Deadly threshold for 5 level 4 PCs is 5,500 xp. Sub-deadly would be 2 fire elementals.
On the original issue, my usual solution to large numbers of NPC allies is "there's a fight going on over there off-screen, which we won't bother rolling for".
My original intention was to give the combat some more depth to the encounter but as the party ended the game being chased by Fire Elementals out of a cathedral where the awaiting forces were placed that depth started to take a little more meaning of what the mod rules would put in front of me. We never got to the main fight in the last session but it does give me the chance to do the handwave of multiple battles without the dice rolls to me seems like a much more appealing alternative.