Mike Shea

What if I told you you could run 200 monsters in combat encounter?

I had a situation in my game last Wednesday where I ran my 13th level characters, a group of 13th level characters, against 200 ghouls, including a handful of giant ghouls, in one battle.

And it was awesome.

It was fast.

It was fun.

It gave players a really feeling of those scenes from our favorite movies where you're surrounded by monsters and you're

Blowing them away with giant fireballs that are exploding and people are flying through the air on fire and waves of radiant energy tearing the skin off of the ghouls down to the bone like they got hit with a nuclear bomb.

It was fantastic.

And it wasn't just narrative.

It actually had clear mechanics for people to run it.

They understood what they could do.

There was actual things being tracked.

And yet still, it was not much harder to run 200 ghouls than it is to run five or 10 ghouls.

Today, I'm gonna offer a couple of tips and tricks for running massive numbers of monsters against your characters.

And we're gonna use it through the lens of this battle against running 200 ghouls.

So what are the kind of things that I did to make this run really well?

And what did I not do?

So a common approach for running 200 ghouls is to group them up into large groups and then use what is essentially one big monster to represent a bunch of little monsters.

I've never been a big fan of that style because you always have questions about things like areas of effect, whether or not you can paralyze or stun some of them.

You know, how do you handle it when the effects that the characters are doing matter when they're hitting individual creatures versus hitting one big creature?