Running Hordes: Guidelines for D&D Battles with Hundreds of Monsters

[@zenovkayos5811]

This needs to be added to 5e officially

[@SlyFlourish]

I wish it would!

[@fartymcbutterpants7063]

Frazetta was such an awesome artist. I love that picture

[@Corvus-fw2hr]

Runehammer (the guy that did 5e Hardcore) is a monster of design. Hankerin' Foranale, Drunkens and Dragons and about 500 other names. Super good dude.

[@SlyFlourish]

I’ll have to learn more about him.

[@NegatveSpace]

For the system of adding +1 for each skeleton attacking maybe the max could be +5 as maybe only 5 could get into a melee with a character unless they're out in the open then it could be more. Then track hit points the way you were saying. Then there could still be 100 skeletons but only 5 are in melee with a character at a time but the horde would get knocked down by 1 per 15 damage dealt still. What I think would be also interesting is trying to figure out a ranged system for the same thing. I could imagine 20 skeletons having bows and trying to hit the characters. Maybe it could be treated similar to an aoe spell and could also hit some skeletons... if the arrows don't pass between their bones harmlessly.

[@herryoung]

The game mechanics we needed, before we even realized we needed em!

[@SlyFlourish]

I knew we needed them 😀

[@chrishousenick6105]

This is perfect timing!! My players decided to attack a force of Yuan-Ti laying siege to a wizard's tower. They are grossly outnumbered, but now I can work the battle better tomorrow night when we play!

[@samuelbroad11]

hey, years ago, but how did the heroic horde battle run and turn out? positive player feedback and any similar hordes since?

[@nathanaelthomas9243]

Thanks for the video! I think I will try this one the next time it becomes relevant in my game.

[@mwooding42]

This is brilliant and exactly what I was looking for. Bless you sir!!

[@Cxdfc]

I use a Tiered Swarm system. Similar to when you saiD Swarm of Gobs = hill giant, but with a few extra steps to help the mental gap. Swarms(5e) get smaller as you wade into them and grow larger as they combine. Example Zombie Swarm Single Zombie +3 ATK, 1d6 dam Large swarm: +6 ATK, 3d6 dam Huge Swarm, +9 ATK, 6d6 dam Garg. Swarm, +12 ATK, 12d6 dam Swarms need a threshold to reduce their size. 10, 20, 30 etc. they have resistance to BPS and vulnerability to some AOES They make an attack for each creature in that swarm’s space, or if swarm ranged attacks we treat it like Conjure Volley or barrage and make the PCs save against similar damage. If the PCs AOE the monsters with pure damage (grenade, fireball), I don’t roll any saves. If it’s some status effect I might roll a d20 per size greater than large (no more than 3 dice) ignoring adv/disadv. or just one save, really depends. Mindless swarms like zombies tend to clump into each other to make the largest forces (Garg). Where as Intelligent Armies will spread into squads as that’s safer and more efficient (3 larges) WAR DICE SWARM VS SWARM: mainly for war campaigns. The characters have an army backing them agains an opponent army while they take center stage to do some mission objective there’s all this impactful carnage in the background. I just have both sides roll 1-3 d100s against each other (WAR DICE) each round and adjudicate based off the difference. It’s loose and narrative! if PCs are in the crossfire of WARDICE they are in danger of taking swarm damage. But otherwise the swarms are removing from both sides from the board based on the story and dice rolls and keep it engaging by having artillery bombard the players and devestate their forces with a 100 VS 14.

[@jeanlucdupuis]

This is awesome mechanic tips. Gonna try it with hordes of Crawling claws, gonna be gruesome fun!

[@100idb2]

Epic timing on this. I am running a homebrew for the first time and wanted to one of these! Thank you!!

[@SlyFlourish]

Good luck!

[@jasonrandell385]

Thanks Mike! This is so timely for me. I am running my PCs through the Forbidden City of Omu and they are abut to go into an epic 4 way battle between the Red Wizards, who have a hoard of skeletons. the Yuan Ti and I'm throwing in The King of Feathers along the edges of the combat to cause absolute chaos. I'm going to try to also implement the Zone rules you have previously presented to give the flavor of a very dynamic battle waging across parts of Omu

[@SlyFlourish]

Good luck! One warning I'll give is that trying to run TWO hordes in one battle can be really hard, especially if they ever get physically mixed up together.

[@rutger5000]

I'm going to experiment with this: Horde attacks with an AoE. DC 8 + attack proficiencies + number / 4 (last number somewhat random) Save: Armor class treated as attribute Damage: 2 standard + number of enemies / 4, (halved on successful saves)

[@thereisn0m0re]

I know this wasn't your main intention, but I hadn't heard of the optional CLEAVE rule before you mentioned it here. I like the general idea of hordes and this cleave mechanic will do well to help the melee PCs kick some ass.

[@SlyFlourish]

So many things get lost in the DMG!

[@reubensandwichthe1st]

Very nice video, will be using a lot of what was said, thanks!

[@petemcsorley]

I’ll use this, thank you

[@peterdavey7350]

With the Ultimate games master app you could do all the hoardes in app with out any hassle, but I think this is the most sense I have heard on the topic in a video that is easy to follow and understand.

[@razorboy251]

Fantastic video and very timely as my players will be facing some hordes very soon! :) It's also very easy to port to Dungeon World. Godbound (by Kevin Crawford) has something very similar so you can throw entire armies at the deity-level player characters.

[@austinholmes123]

I'm currently running hoardes in my campaign, my players are defending a city from an oncoming, multi-hundred soldier invasion from the empire, I had a few questions and hopefully useful points for people: When tracking damage done to the hoard, only do so for single melee attacks from Fighters/Paladins etc... My wizard and Sorcerer started laying down fireballs and I tracked that damage to the hoard, even though I also did the 1 in 4 succeed rule for their saving throws presented in this video. Don't do that. Keep AoE spells totally separate from hoard damage, as the addition of that AoE spell damage isn't killing single enemies at a time, it kills upwards of 30-50 in a single blow.

[@SomoneTookMyName]

I tend to use the minion rule from 4e. So what I do with that is have the player roll to hit and then on a successful hit I have them roll a d4/d6 to see how many they do hit. Thats how many they take out. Same for the monsters attacking a player. Have them roll to hit then use a die depending on how surround the player may be. Then I use the damage die without the bonus times how many hit. Thats the damage done. Its very fast and works great with large numbers of baddies. One thing to keep in mind it the monster's damage die. You may want to lower it by one die or two. Or even half the result.

[@fieldengineer4692]

Great info!

[@Daknor]

This was very helpful! Tons of skeletons next session and I was struggling to plan

[@SlyFlourish]

Let me know how it works!

[@Daknor]

@@SlyFlourish worked pretty well. It was waaaay faster for me and as a result we got 6 encounters in a 3ish hour session. I definitely should have rounded up rather than down for a tougher challenge but the group seemed to have fun weed whacking their way through and finally using some big AoE abilities

[@SlyFlourish]

@@Daknor Awesome!

[@FrostSpike]

12:10 In Aftermath (FGU 1981), it had "Extras", which essentially had 1 HP - any hit would take them out of the fight, and "Rabble" which had 50% of the HP and were capped in other ways. Complicated rules system so needed to make some things simpler where possible!

[@SlyFlourish]

Interesting! What is FGU?

[@FrostSpike]

@@SlyFlourish Fantasy Games Unlimited, one of the early FRPG houses founded back in 1975 and shuttered (as a company) in 1991. As well as Aftermath, amongst a bunch of other things, they published Starships & Spacemen (a Star Trek-like game), Space Opera, Chivalry & Sorcery, Bushido, Villains & Vigilantes (Superhero game) and, of course, who can ever forget Bunnies and Burrows.

[@realdragon]

I was thinking something similar. With vtts it's easier to roll at the same time so I was thinking that you ask player for their AC, roll d20 and the number of successes are the number of attacks horde does and then just roll attacks With roll20 and scripitng all this can be done with 2 or 1 buttons but I also want to make smaller groups of about 5 enemies

[@TangooseCarmike8205]

I am currently running a heavy undead campaign and had to come up with rules for zombie and skeleton hordes (100+ in size). Instead of rolling attacks, I only roll damage. For each monster in the horde a character is in base contact with I roll damage. Example, a medium character is surrounded by 8 zombies in the horde. So I roll 8d6+8 damage and then reduce that damage by the character's AC. This makes it very dangerous to get surrounded and means a character WILL with enough time die. Each monster on the horde contributes hp to the pool. So 100 zombies has a pool of 500hp. YIKES! THIS IS SCARY AND ITS MEANT TO BE SO. This is why you avoid the horde as much as possible. 5hp per monster seems appropriate because you want the melee and ranged PCs to feel like they are making progress. Each attack, if it hits is going to drop a zombie but also those big smites and big rogue hits are going to feel good too. Damaging the horde with an attack works as normal. The AC is the same as a single monster.. A monster is removed for every 5 damage dealt. For AOE effects I assume it's tightly packed and 50% of an AOE is affecting the horde. I also assume 50% of the affected area fails. The then character rolls damage. The damage determines how many additional monsters are killed. So yeah a fireball will get rid of either 13 monsters and then possibly an extra 6 monster if average damage is rolled. Its a ridiculous number of zombies and that's perfectly fine. In fact you really want this to work because kiting and hacking through 500hp is going to take a long time. I learned this the hard way. The purpose of this horde was to instill a sense of fear for anything that comes into range of it, use up party resources and give the party a sense of serious accomplishment when they defeat the horde.

[@stevekirkby6570]

Yes 5e needs definite horde rules ... I have an adventure I'm planning where the heroes have to leave the town and go through the old battlefield cemetery - only to find that the skeletons have been re-animated by a yet to be revealed necromancer. I'm proposing (level 1) that there are 20 skeletons :) I was wondering how to do this....

[@noobztvgaming]

im thinking about doing a horde thats comes across the land through small villages to the castle keep at end and you have to thin them out with small battles and attacks

[@turnermotte9357]

I like the Shadow of the Demon Lord guidelines which you didn't cover as of 14:40, may I recommend looking up the Fray die and the Mob rules for Godbound? I bring in Lesser Foes from Godbound in most of my games from now on!

[@shripnidley101]

@Sly Flourish do these recommendations for running hordes align with the previous CR encounter system you have discussed (0.5 party total level)? Because even the weakest monster in the game would still be lethal in a horde of 100+. Alternatively the hordes could come in waves, so groups of monsters attack over a series of rounds.

[@SlyFlourish]

The guidelines let you *know* it’s lethal. The guidelines aren’t to balance encounters, they’re to warn you if things might be deadly. With a hoard of 100s it’s probably deadly 😀

[@dallinpoulson2176]

This was money!

[@cassiethompson5468]

Is that a zettlekasten system? Using Obsidian? I have been thinking that would be a great way to keep track of campaigns.

[@TenguBE]

Yes, my players are in the middle of a siege. So thnx.

[@m.ferashida7422]

Sorry if I missed this but, its initiative mentioned anywhere?

[@Vancity3]

Hey there, very new to DnD and enjoying your videos! Most of this seems easy to understand, but the one bit I don't get is dealing damage. So say there's 50 skeletons, would that mean the horde has like 500 hit points (if each has 10)? And if this is correct, then how does a party of 4 defeat it? I just had a quick look and a great sword does 2d6 damage right? So how do you kill them fast enough? Or is there something I'm missing/not understanding?

[@SlyFlourish]

This article may help clarify it. slyflourish.com/running_hordes.html

[@Vancity3]

@@SlyFlourish thanks, I believe I understand what you are saying, but I was just looking for an example such as my 50 skeletons. Just seemed crazy to me that it would be 4 players vs 500hp, how would they ever win? And so I was just wondering if I'm misunderstanding. It's also possible I just don't understand how armour/damage works well enough yet and this wouldn't be a problem for the PCs.

[@SlyFlourish]

Depending on the level of the characters and their capabilities, 50 skeletons is going to be rough. If they have turn undead or fireball, however, they'll cut through those skeletons quickly. If they're all just making single attacks, that's going to be a problem. It's less thinking about the total hit points of the skeletons and thinking about how much each one has and how many they are. We count up, not down. Damage wise, only about one in four skeletons is going to hit and they do 5 damage so the total damage the whole horde of 50 skeletons can do is about 60 spread across those four characters depending on the circumstances which is about 15 damage each. A fair bit but not lethal. If the characters *do* cast spells like fireball or shatter or turn undead, they'll cut through a lot of those skeletons very quickly. Hope that helps!

[@Vancity3]

@@SlyFlourish that definitely helps, thanks alot!

[@cruciblegaminggroup5471]

@@Vancity3 I think a big thing is to not use hordes until your party has potential for higher damage or AOE. At least not a larger horde. A group of 4th level characters could maybe handle that horde of 50 skeletons but it's going to be super, super rough. Thunderwave would be pretty clutch as would Turn Undead. At 5th level though? A single fireball is going to take out between 1/3 and 1/2 of them right away.

[@JacobOphir]

I have a horde of over 3,000

[@polartechie]

How do I watch OP's games?