How can I speed up combat with a large number of enemies?

Question

I'm DMing for a campaign where the player characters will sometimes face small squads of creatures, most recently six ground troops and two archers helping out. In this setting, these creatures dominate the land the PCs are in and have an organised military, hence squads of enemies.

Combat tends to go quite slowly, however. Eight enemies and three players means the players spend a lot of time waiting between their turns!

Without reducing the number of enemies in the encounter, how can I speed up combat when the players are fighting many enemies?

Answer 1

I've had similar issues, and been experimenting. Here are some of my findings:

• ALWAYS have strategies in mind. Your squad has two, maybe three pre-determined strategies and the ever-available "every man for himself" panicking. They engage with one strat, move to the other if the situation calls for it, and break ranks when appropriate. This keeps you active instead of trying to think of their actions each round. It's the middle of a battle, your soldiers don't have time to make the optimal choices; they'll stick to their training.

• Surrender. Soldiers don't want to die. PCs can force a bloodied NPC to surrender with Intimidate, but a soldier who's just seen three of his buddies get fried by divine fire probably doesn't need to be explicitly told to give up. It's possible to cut fight time in half this way, though it still doesn't make the wait between turns any shorter each round.

• Giving NPCs immediate actions and "start of PC's turn" effects instead of a lot to do on the NPC's own turn helps speed things up considerably.

• The more NPCs I have, the simpler I make them. If I'm going to have more than three copies of a given NPC, I don't want that stat block to have more than three or four actions or things to keep track of.

• In line with the above, minions. I use them very rarely because they encourage metagaming, but they remove damage calculation entirely which speeds up combat a lot. Conscripted soldiers are likely to drop and play dead the first time they're hit, so that's a justification for minions in your scenario. Give your minions an on-death effect like grab or difficult terrain; it makes minion-popping require more strategy than "bust out your AoEs."

• Or you could cheat and make your non-minion NPCs deal set average damage without die rolls.

Answer 2

I've had this issue before playing Shadowrun. A party of six runners tried, foolishly, to intimidate a gang of forty armed bikers.

I ended up splitting the bikers into squads that performed a single action. Each squad always moved together and fired at the same target. This essentially translated to pistols and shotguns becoming fully automatic weapons. My method to speed things up was:

1. "Kyuzo, this squad shoots at you. What's your armour?"
2. Quickly roll one attack per individual in the squad, counting hits.
3. "Kyuzo, you were hit 6 times. What's your damage resistance?"
4. Quickly roll damage for every hit, counting damage that exceeds the damage resistance.
5. "Kyuzo, you take 18 damage."

By GM ruling, rather than red-misting the entire party, the heroes were left unconcious (1hp each) by the side of the road.

Answer 3

I was inspired by the Feng Shui approach to this, where you always have huge numbers of low threat enemies ("mooks") attacking the players. In Feng Shui a common solution was to break mooks up into "wads" and just roll once for each wad but with a +1 to hit/damage for each additional mook in the group. (+1 is more of a boost in FS's +/-d6 system than it is in d20).

I needed to write a mass combat system for my pirate game because the players have whole groups of pirates with them and are often fighting other large-ish opposing forces. I don't like most "break out of the action into a wargame" approaches because they tend to minimize the PCs and also lack insight into who all got killed (they know all their pirates by name!). Hence my Quickie Mass Combat Rules, for Pathfinder but work for anything d20-compatible and in concept port to many other systems.

How it works is you break forces up into semi-homogeneous groups as desired, and for each additional member the group attacks as one but gets +1/2 to hit and +1 to damage (so a group of 5 pirates gets +5/+10 above their usual stats). They can attack other groups or even attack/be attacked by PCs. For each hp worth of damage done, someone dies and the group size gets smaller. I've used it a lot and it meets our needs for a) not a dissociated mechanic from the rest of the game b) decently realistic results and c) fast fast fast to use.

Answer 4

Roll your dice ahead of time and know when they hit or when they crit. You don't need to roll seventy times ahead of time, either, but just be sure to give randomness it's own fair chance. I tried this with a 3.5 game and it worked out quite well.

You might also check out the book Heroes of Battle. Even though it is 3.5, it details out precisely the issue you're having. I believe they include things like prerolling, but also making judgment calls much quicker when facing conditional modifiers. If I'm not mistaken it recommends a standard +2/-2 for most situations.

Ultimately though, it stems to just knowing what the enemies will do and when they will hit or miss. If you can streamline that, then 'your turn' (with the NPCs) becomes just narration instead of eight other actions.

Answer 5

Here's how I keep combats very fast. Mind you, we play a very un-crunchy, variant of 3E.

• Initiative. I've found that trying to maintain a list of who has initiative, who goes next, etc, slows things down dramatically. I just have one side go, and then the other. Left to right, around the table, old school style. The notion of ordered, individual initiative in games is unrealistic to begin with, and after the first round, rarely means anything anyways. In my campaign, I've actually abandoned initiative all together. I just let the players go first, unless they are being ambushed or are otherwise hesitating. Sometimes I switch the order in which players attack, starting at the other end of the table.

• It helps to have a sheet with each of your player's info attached to your GM screen. This way you dont have to ask them their AC and other info each round.

• Roll the dice. Roll the dice and only worry about mods if needed. Orc #1 just rolled a 3 when attacking a Paladin. He missed. Move on.

• Books stay closed. We will literally only crack a rule book a couple of times a session. If the players dont know something about a spell, for example, I'll frequently make an on-the-fly ruling, and we move on. After combat they can look it up, and if its different from the ruling, we apply it to future uses.

If I have 4-5 players and 10 monsters, it will rarely take more than, say, two minutes per entire round, and actually feels like fast-paced combat. It also helps dramatically that the players will often move the NPC's for me ("hey, so-and-so is in range of that bugbear...")

Answer 6

I have recently switched from using individual initiative to group initiative. Having all the players plan and execute their moves together has ensured that they aren't sitting on the sidelines watching the action happen. I know that not all RPG systems accommodate this well, so your mileage may vary.

Answer 7

It seems like you are using a system that emphasizes the skirmish and not the large scale, which can make timing exponentially different with each new member. With that in mind, I recommend breaking large combats into a series of smaller skirmishes and challenges. Quite frankly, unless the troops at these numbers are specifically scaled to be at the party's level, these fights should be relatively quick - one side sinks in their teeth to an advantage and shakes it like a rottweiler with a ragdoll. when they're just even enough, then the tides keep swaying back and forth and that can be the true cause for loss of time in some games.

I recommend the two sided method of combat: Side A acts, Side B acts ... Side [N] finally acts, and roll reach definitive group bonus at once. EG: "All Guards with +3 melee roll... Now all Guards with +4 melee..." So if they all roll at the same bonus, you can just kind of splash it together, and maybe use the "Armor method" where the AC is kind of a flat number, but reduction goes up so you can just randomly dole out hits without too much protest since their evasion is also a damage reducing factor.

For a more narrative gameplay, break the larger combats into smaller scenarios. Use the archers as a conditional modifier, (such as in D&D rolling a Reflex Save against 10+To Hit Mod or take damage, or in L5R making a Defense roll). Increase the damage by the number of archers and decrease by number of players left, but otherwise keep it static. Then remember that not every fight happens on a vast, broad plain with plenty of room. Give the players bottleneck spots so that only a few guards come through at once (which is usually the case in a castle setting anyway). So one or two of the players are holding the pass while the third is taking potshots at the archers.

Answer 8

Two dice tricks I'll use in large groups are rolling multiple attacks at the same time (the red dice are "eyepatch", green dice are "limp", etc). Using this technique, I also roll both the to-hit and damage at the same time. The second trick I do is roll 1 to-hit and damage. I'll also roll 2 dice (luckily I have 4 players, so its a d4). On one d4, I count left to right and add +1 to the roll, whereas the second I -1. If they are the same? I reroll while handling the first attack and if one of the dice comes up with a 1, I just ignore it.

Answer 9

Every time someone rolls a set of dice, it takes on average between 30 and 60 seconds to get a result. So, the more dice rolling you do, the longer the combat will take.

As a side note, there are plenty of videos on the Internet of real life combat. Both sword fighting and gun battles can easily be found. Now, pick a few and try to run those as combat with your $system. How long did that take?

So, you can speed things up by doing a little statistics. A normal distribution can give you a good spread of numbers: Just adjust the variance for more or less edge effects. Once you have this, get a few samples from the distribution. Combine these numbers with the mean (not the average) of the dice that the opposition rolls. Now, you have all your dice rolls results in about a minute.

Once you are going onwards on that path, it becomes easier and easier to just abstract the rules and just do what feels right. Suddenly, you are more a director in a movie than a chess player. You role play the combat instead of roll playing it -- bad pun intended.

Eventually, you can get rid of dice rolls completely and eventually get rid of the system entirely.

Note: Clearly this does not work if you like war game style combat systems.

Note on critical hits: The frequency of critical hits are over exaggerated in nearly all systems. Here's an exercise for the reader. Take a sample of MMA or Judo or boxing completions. Break said fights into "combat rounds" and statistics should tell you how many critical hits should have been scored according to $system. Then compare with how many critical hits were actually scored. But one can still account for critical: Given X samples from a distribution Y, what is the probability that number Z will come up? Now, you can model critical hits easily but I pity your party -- they will feel that pain! Statistics are great.