Just ran some Stonehell dungeon for @phf and @frotz.
I don’t know how I maneuvered myself into this, but suddenly I had the party consisting of six people, thirteen orcs, and the orc captain, against 9 hobgoblins, 3 giant ferrets, and a giant ape. I wasn’t prepared! Yikes. What would have helped? My one page mass combat rules?
Let’s see.
Players win initiative. I don’t remember them doing a lot of damage.
Let’s focus on the orcs. They need to roll 13 to hit but rolled an 11; the captain needs to roll an 11 but rolled a 10. The hobgoblins need a 12 to hit but roll a 2. Misses all around.
Second round, the hobgoblins win initiative and miss; ferrets miss; giant ape misses; the orcs hit and deal 5 × 5 = 25 damage and the captain hits and deals another 5 damage, reducing the hobgoblins to 20 hp → 4 of them are still alive, combat scale reduced to ×3. Their morale is 8 and they make the check.
Third round, the hobgoblins win initiative again and hit for 8 × 3 = 24 damage, reducing the orcs to 35 hp and combat scale ×4; ferrets hit and deal 1 × 3 damage, reducing the orcs to 33 hp → 8 of them are still alive, combat scale reduced to ×4; the giant ape misses. The orcs miss; the orc captain misses. Their morale is 8 and they roll an 11, missing their check!
Result:
This is not a bad result.
What actually happened: I started doing lots of d20 rolls but hadn’t prepared hit points and was out of practice, time was running out, I had decided that the orcs weren’t covering the player characters, a bit more of the hobgoblins were attacking the orcs, the other half the player characters, but there was only one fighter, a thief, two magic users, and a shield bearer… and so Xavier got mauled. He had already been bitten by a spitting cobra and was about to die in the next hour anyway, so we skipped rolling on the injury table for him. He was going down in a blaze of glory. In the second round, the players legged it up the stairs towards the light.
Also not a bad result… but I don’t know. I need to get back into practice of many people fighting each other, or have the mass combat rules out there in the open.
But how did we get here?
The players searched through some rubbish where the adventure said: if you disturb the piles of rubbish, the spitting cobras attack. Players roll for surprised and are surprised. The cobras spit and miss. We roll for initiative and the snakes win, and one attack succeeds, with a bite, and Xavier fails the save. He was going to die in seven turns…
In a later room, where the party expected a ghost to appear, a ghost did appear, and the adventure said: anybody seeing the ghost must save vs. spells or flee for 1d4 rounds. The first one who failed ran for 2 rounds, the other one for 4 rounds. I rolled some dice to pick random choices for all intersections and one of them made it to the orc barricades. They banged the alarm gong and prepared to fight the intruder… then we went back and figured out what everybody else was doing, and it turns out that the dwarf had been following the thief after all and managed another lucky reaction roll: friendly!
The orcs immediately suggested banding together and attacking the hobgoblins. Which is how we got into the mess at the beginning of this page. Tragically, they had just befriended the hobgoblins and the giant ape commander on the way in, even getting a pass of safe passage from the giant ape!
Oh, and in that fight Xavier didn’t charm a hobgoblin but the orc commander instead.
What a glorious mess.
#RPG #Mass Combat
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
In hindsight, I think an animal that isn’t a pouncer (Traveller jargon for animals that attack from hiding) should never attack in the surprise round. They are trying to scare you away!
I felt that the players weren’t all that circumspect when they looked at stuff, using swords and daggers (which aren’t going to help against spitting cobras), but perhaps picking weapons instead of their bare hands should have been enought pause to have them find the bones of rats and mice. Do snakes poop or choke out bones like owls do? I don’t know.
– Alex 2022-04-29 13:30 UTC