Mike Shea

So even though you have 200 ghouls, really only about 30 ghouls are able to actually be effective and hit people.

You're really not gonna be able to get much for that.

And the way I managed it was I grouped the ghouls together and rolled once for every three ghouls.

Right.

So I would roll one attack roll and they would do basically all of the damage that that ghoul could do, because I think ghouls only have one attack anyway.

But even if they had multiple attacks, I would just group all the damage together for each ghoul, group the ghouls together and then roll once for each of them.

One mistake that I made is I rolled once for every three ghouls.

So basically two rolls per character.

And then if they got hit, it got three times the amount of damage that that a ghoul would normally do.

In this case, that's about 30 damage.

It was like some number of slashing damage plus some number of necrotic damage.

and I would offer that up and I would split the damage up into slashing necrotic because some people had resistance to one and not the other and so on I probably should have done three rolls of two instead and I think that would have been fair to the characters because I could just get lucky and hit with one of them and they would take three that half the ghouls would hit so instead grouping it into three rolls and doubling means that they're more likely to not be hit by so many ghouls at a time and really they'd only like get hit by like one

one set, and then one set would be double a normal ghoul's amount.

But the nice thing about this is you can kinda decide how many rolls you wanna make, and then essentially divide the total number of monsters that are attacking by the number of rolls you wanna make, and that's how much damage that you would do.

So that actually worked pretty well.

Another trick that I offer in the Lazy DM's Companion, you can just assume that one quarter of them succeed, and then you can round up or down depending on who they're attacking.

So if you get attacked by eight ghouls, two of them are gonna hit.

But if you'd rather make sure that you're still rolling attacks, and I know that my players actually prefer that I actually roll attacks instead of just telling them how much damage they take based on how many of them hit, then one thing you can do is basically say that one quarter or one half of them will hit and then roll two attack rolls.

If both of them hit, half of the ghouls hit.

If one attack succeeds, a quarter of the ghouls hit.