We played my Conan campaign yesterday and after the game we discussed limitations of different game systems, inspired by the upcoming 4th Ed. D&D announcement. One cool REH-like story element hard to do with d20 Conan that came up was a situation where player characters are face to face with gazillion mooks. Think of a situation where they are bravely fighting of a wave after wave of ghouls or Kushian savages.
There are several problems with this kind of scene. If you handle the combat by the rules, it becomes very long-winded and boring fight. Even if the enemies outnumber the player characters enough to always get to use maximum effect of multiple attacker rule, most of their attacks are just futile dicerolling without any good effect. Likewise, without Whirlwind Attack or similar options the players will take a long time to bring down many mooks. Furious combat against large odds with blood soaking the ground red is watered down in to rollplaying.
If you don't handle the combat by the rules, the situation can be handled with narrative means. "In a furious battle lasting from dawn to dusk, you kill a thousand angry D&D nerds armed with sharpened d20's, everyone takes total of 8d6 damage from combat of the day." The bad side is that the result is by necessity arbitary, narrative mass battles like this don't really work as climax or a session and players don't really feel like their characters were in mortal danger, unlike in rollplaying combat.
A combination of rules and narrative combat is one possibility. Mainly, having a few rounds of combat abstract larger part of it or handle hordes of mooks in a narrative way while fighting "big bosses" or the like according to the rules. Yet still, this way fails to bring in the excitement of being facing a horde of enemies.
Last option coming to mind is the mob template from some D&D book, don't remember where. It allows combining large amount of medium and larger creatures in to a mob where they act like a mass instead of individuals. Think of a swarm of commoners for example, when they come to get the evil wizard as an angry lynching mob. A mob template allows large number of ordinary people, for example, grapple and trample a single opponent quite easily. However, this is again in its fluff and feeling entirely different thing than facing a large amount of individual enemies.
How would you handle such situations? I've just elected to keep such scenes out of my campaign. They simply don't work out, instead turning in to anticlimaxes. Massed combat with many fighters on both sides is a whole another matter of course.
There are several problems with this kind of scene. If you handle the combat by the rules, it becomes very long-winded and boring fight. Even if the enemies outnumber the player characters enough to always get to use maximum effect of multiple attacker rule, most of their attacks are just futile dicerolling without any good effect. Likewise, without Whirlwind Attack or similar options the players will take a long time to bring down many mooks. Furious combat against large odds with blood soaking the ground red is watered down in to rollplaying.
If you don't handle the combat by the rules, the situation can be handled with narrative means. "In a furious battle lasting from dawn to dusk, you kill a thousand angry D&D nerds armed with sharpened d20's, everyone takes total of 8d6 damage from combat of the day." The bad side is that the result is by necessity arbitary, narrative mass battles like this don't really work as climax or a session and players don't really feel like their characters were in mortal danger, unlike in rollplaying combat.
A combination of rules and narrative combat is one possibility. Mainly, having a few rounds of combat abstract larger part of it or handle hordes of mooks in a narrative way while fighting "big bosses" or the like according to the rules. Yet still, this way fails to bring in the excitement of being facing a horde of enemies.
Last option coming to mind is the mob template from some D&D book, don't remember where. It allows combining large amount of medium and larger creatures in to a mob where they act like a mass instead of individuals. Think of a swarm of commoners for example, when they come to get the evil wizard as an angry lynching mob. A mob template allows large number of ordinary people, for example, grapple and trample a single opponent quite easily. However, this is again in its fluff and feeling entirely different thing than facing a large amount of individual enemies.
How would you handle such situations? I've just elected to keep such scenes out of my campaign. They simply don't work out, instead turning in to anticlimaxes. Massed combat with many fighters on both sides is a whole another matter of course.
