Mike Shea

When running encounters with higher level parties using this set of monsters, I am unsure how to easily track the eight minions, especially when they have multi-attack.

For example, an 11th level party with five characters would face eight CR2 minions, which might account for 16 attacks plus the boss and two lieutenants.

Besides the tricks that you share in the minion section of Forge of Foes, are there any other advice that worked best for you in practice in such cases?

Thank you for the help and useful content.

So obviously take a look at the thing I just talked about with running 200 ghouls because it's exactly that same way.

But, you know, kind of reiterating some of the ideas in here.

One, you can pool damage done to the monsters so you don't have to track individual monster hit points.

If you're running monsters and eight is right at that threshold where you don't want to track them all individually, you could, but you don't have to.

And when you get to that number where you have more than you're going to want to track the individual hit points, instead, what I do and what I recommend is you keep a damage threshold.

You keep a damage tally.

for all of those monsters, all of that type.

So again, in your situation here, you have, what did you say?

CR2 minions, which might, they might face, eight CR2 minions.

Let's say they're like, I think veterans is a good example, but cult fanatic, I think is a CR2 or, yeah.

So instead of tracking the individual damage for each of your cult fanatics, you instead track the damage done to all the cult fanatics.

And every time that that amount of damage that you've tracked crosses over the amount of damage a single cult fanatic would take, you remove one of the cult fanatics.

And that way, the damage is pooled.

And you tell your players how that works so they understand, ah, so we're hitting different guys, but all the damage is being tallied in one place.

Then they don't really care about which one they're hitting because they know that the damage is hitting this general pool.

And you pull them out.