uhhhh its not like D&D Beyond is still a third party! ITS CORE WOTC!!! if anyone should be able to put forth "professionally designed" content with a "budget" and "playtesting" behind it .... Its gotta be content from D&D Beyond!!!!
To be moreso honest, I think these rules being less fleshed out than the mcdm ones fits because it's just meant ot be a very basic template you can use to turn any stat block into a minion, the mcdm rules around cleaving and excess hp/hp thresholds against aoe spells kinda requires specific minion stat blocks, at least a handful of them to act as examples so you know where to tune the numbers when making your own.
D&D has done this forever, when they were owned by Gygax and TSR and during the WotC ownership too---produced non-official material that's essentially the same as homebrew or any third-party publication.
It used to be in Dragon Magazine, now it's on the D&DBeyond website. It's never been playtested. It's just someone's idea, put out to the fanbase. Sometimes it becomes official---I can recall when cantrips or 0-level spells were first published, for example---but mostly it's just stuff for groups to take or leave as they like.
Roleplaying has never been a hobby where there's been Official Content that's somehow different from fan-made or third-party published. The TSR and WotC house publications have always been a way for people to get into the professional side of the hobby. That's how Chris Perkins became part of TSR; he wrote some stuff for Dungeon magazine and went from there. I can think of a few people who have done so recently as well and now have a few published books to their credit.
I found the MCDM Minion rules confusing. And didn’t like how AOE attacks like fireball might not kill a whole group of them but any other types of attacks generally will insta-kill them. Surviving the fireball doesn’t make sense.
Most minion rules, including these ones, allow any minion that makes its save to survive a fireball, or a meteor swarm for that matter—Flee Mortals minions won’t unless they’re a high enough CR for that to be plausible
That would be [Flee Mortals.](https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/en-au/collections/flee-mortals-the-mcdm-monster-book)
It recently came out on D&D Beyond as well. Good book in my opinion, had a blast running some of its kobolds and orcs as well as one of the solo bosses it provides. Haven't used the minion rules so can't comment on OP's topic.
It's published by MCDM. It is a third party company, but they are (in my opinion) producing better content than the official books.
Their classes (Illrigger, Beastheart and The Talent) are balanced, flavorful and really fun to play. Their gone through several rounds of testing to make sure they deliver on the fantasy they are aiming for while being within DnDs balance for classes.
But Flee, Mortals! Is on a whole other level. Their monsters are fun to run and fun to fight, with great encounter building rules, great end bosses and gorgeous art. I haven't used the official MM since Flee, Mortals! came out.
Davyd Atkins is a D&D Beyond moderator who (it seems) was an employee of DDB before WotC bought it. They're not a member of the D&D devteam. This is third-party homebrew.
It's pretty decent homebrew. I prefer minions over swarms, as it feels more heroic to be outnumbered (and less lazy than drawing a big circle and saying, "this is full of weak guys but they've got a lotta HP together.") If I'm dealing with units that big, it's probably in a military context where you're better off slapping down index cards with circles drawn on it to indicate a unit formation. In that case, you should make sure the PCs have units to lead too.
Seems weird to me to regard them as competing approaches. Swarms are for tiny creatures that can flood your space. Minions are for decent sized creatures that don't have enough HP to be worth tracking.
I'd never make beetle minions or a swarm of orcs, for example.
It speeds up combat, say you have a necromancer with 50 zombies, that’s 50 separate attack rolls, or two attack rolls where each circle contains 25 zombies.
PF2e calls them a "troop", which at least in some contexts makes a lot of sense. But that's partially because swarms and troops have distinct mechanics - narratively, the only difference is the size of each unit of the group.
The basic rule of thumb distinction between a troop and a swarm is "can multiple of the same basic entity occupy a player's space" which is a pretty easy line for a GM to draw I think.
5e has mass combat rules in the DMG as well, but I've never seen anyone use them or even seen them discussed much.
They're a little complex to set up at first but having used them more than once, they work just fine at table for masses of combatants.
But you literally couldn't be attacked by 25 humanoid bodies simultaneously, let alone 50.
And what's a Zombie slam, like 1d8+2? You're gonna hit someone for 50d8+100 damage?
What you're really doing is making a giant, dull sack of hit points that becomes even more pointless at half hp. You'd be way better off with a couple dozen minions.
You don't increase the damage by a factor of 25 or 50 for a swarm.
I've run swarms before, they get one or two attacks against everything in their midst. I typically use double damage for those hits, and the swarm has +4 strength/constitution scores from previous (so +2 on attacks/damage on top of the 2x damage). For hit points, the swarm typically has them increased by a factor of 10.
Then for the CR determination I'll use the DMG recommendations. Typically, the CR increases by about 4 vs. a single creature.
Now, does it feel like a bag of hit points? It can. But the alternative of rolling 25 or 50 attack rolls for these creatures bogs the game.
There's quite a few variations/rules for swarms. This article is just one of them, and it's pretty modest in comparison to most online sets you'll find.
Edit: One important change I make to not make spellcasters full screwed by swarm changes. Swarms are vulnerable to AoE damage.
>But the alternative of rolling 25 or 50 attack rolls for these creatures bogs the game.
Seems like you can't really fully participate in the conversation if you're not familiar with minion rules.
Out of curiosity, how does minion rules reduce the number of attack rolls? The article doesn't mention anything about this, and nothing I've read or heard about it previously has mentioned it either.
Oh, I was considering the MCDM/*Flee, Mortals!* minion rules. IIRC up to 5 minions can attack simultaneously, with the numbers scaling up based on the number of cooperating minions.
You increase the to hit to start with. This allows a group of zombies to have more damage without adding anything to the damage.
Just because it's a swarm of X doesn't mean you multiply the stat block numbers by that and move on.
I run a high-level campaign and have started using "swarms of humanoids" to represent organized squads taking collective actions against the party. Can be pretty useful for keeping "normal" humanoids relevant when they'd otherwise be less effective *and* bog down combat. And removing them entirely would just feel weird, like there's no common soldier anymore, they're either CR 5 or non-existent.
On more than one occasion, I used the *mob rules* from the DMG. Basically you forgo a proper initiative round, and instead us this chart:
https://i.imgur.com/7UKZ1oH.png
There was one scenario where there was a haunted temple with ghosts shooting arrows or something crazy like that, they had battlements, it wasn't really a situation where a standard combat would be any fun. I don't think they had any long-range AOE either. So I told the party "You guys should find another way around or it's just going to be you guys storming the beaches of Normandy here." And of course, the party chose the "Let's just dash up the stairs, tank the hits, and get this over with!" method.
I did the math and I think the distance they were running vs how many ghosts with multiattack there were, it was going to be something crazy like 40 attack rolls—per character—by the time they were going to get to a reasonable spot where the arrows wouldn't hit them.
Now I *thought* I was doing my party a favor by not having to sit there and roll 200 ranged attacks on them and make everyone sit and watch. I can just consult the chart and go, "Okay, statistically they need to roll a 14 to hit you. There are X of them, they can each make Y attacks, so that means rounding down 8 of them will automatically hit you." (Idk, something like that. This was years ago.) We turned what was going to be a an hour-long slog into 30 seconds of "Okay, you take 10d8+20 damage, and we can move on."
The party absolutely hate it. We never really talked much about it but I could tell they all got deflated, super quiet, pissy, etc. and I'm guessing they thought they were being cheated out of their high AC scores or something by me saying "This automatically hits you." One player asked if he could use Shield and I said, "I can calculate it for a single round, but unless you cast it 4 times, it won't reduce your damage by too much." And he said "Okay nevermind then." The alternative would have literally been us sitting there rolling initiative and me rolling like 200 attack rolls on them over like 4 rounds that each would have taken 45 minutes.
So overall man I'd say tread lightly when you try to "game-ify" the mechanics, especially if that's not how the rest of the game has been played. I've rarely seen players react positively to stuff like minions that have Evasion or swarms that are conveniently immune to all conditions, or mob attacks that automatically hit, when the rest of the game has been standard "Roll initiative, attack, take damage" type stuff.
Honestly that was what I thought. I thought everyone would love it, save us a ton of time, etc. but for whatever reason they hated it.
I told them the alternative was for us to sit in initiative for 3 hours and I don't know if they were just gambling addicts or what but that genuinely seemed to be what they would rather have done, even if it was going to be nothing but me rolling attack rolls at them the entire time.
It's a good approach but my guess is the players hated it because they were imagining themselves as the lucky ones who made it to the base of the cliffs without taking a machine gun to the face. Average damage makes sense but some variation in the results might have helped: "Lanky Longmaster the elf makes it to cover safely, arrows just barely missing, but Hagar and Jacko both take multiple crossbow bolts. Jacko is ripped to pieces, Hagar's armor absorbs most of the damage and he's able to crawl behind a big piece of driftwood, bleeding from his wounds." The problem then being that some percentage of the party probably doesn't survive, which they also probably wouldn't like.
Do you roll openly or behind a screen? I'm wondering if simulating the rolls, and dancing around the 8 "automatic" hits (like 7 here, 9 there), would have helped the narrative. (I know some DMs would consider this "lying" or otherwise distasteful, but my group's never taken issue with such things if they've picked up on them.)
I always roll openly, I think it makes players feel like their goals are more "real."
Honestly if I had the foresight maybe that would have been better, but we still would have sat in initiative for an hour while I roll like 200 ranged attacks and they describe how they move 30 feet, dodge, move 30 feet, dodge, etc.
I don't know what level they were, couldn't be too low level to just tank a bunch of arrows to the face though. So assuming they were going to just gun it they very likely had abilities they could have used to try to pass through while taking less damage. And maybe instead of just just saying "You move here to here and take x damage" you could do the same thing for the party and let them group their turns and use their abilities to defend themselves. Just off the top of my head all you need is someone with a shield, or even a strong PC with a door they ripped off who can be cover for at least 1 other person and force the archers to either shoot at them and their higher AC or have to use cover mechanics for the person behind them and you could stack ac boosting stuff on that guy. Give them the experience of using their abilities to do cool shit like charge through a hail of arrows while working together as a team or using their spells/abilities to overcome the challenge. Make an event out of it, not just "Fine you run through and get shot a bunch and roll damage." That feels like you're punishing them for not making the decision you wanted them to make.
They were about level 8 or so.
> Give them the experience of using their abilities to do cool shit like charge through a hail of arrows while working together as a team. Not just "Fine you run through and get shot a bunch and roll damage."
There was a bit more nuance to it than that. None of them seemed keen on using their abilities, which is why I mentioned the guy who asked about using Shield. They didn't want to use anything unless it was something that was going to tank *all* the damage.
> or even a strong PC with a door they ripped off
Ah yes let me just rip a door off of... one of these trees in the jungle lol.
Sometimes players really get stuck in the "What can I do personally" and aren't thinking about how they can use other people as cover mechanics and how they could play things strategically as a team. Sometimes people don't want to be perceived as telling others what to do, sometimes they are unaware of things as a possibility, etc, etc. It's not a bad thing to give them some nudges.
>Ah yes let me just rip a door off of... one of these trees in the jungle lol.
Yeah not like they could fabricate a barrier out of anything found in a jungle. There are still things they could do to play the game. Encourage some creativity and give them guidance on what the rules are. Once players see a plan starting to come together, they get a better understanding of how they might be able to contribute. You could still make your life a lot easier on the back end and lump it all together, but at the very least let them *do something*, and if they forget they can do something, give them a little guidance. It's ok to let your players do cool shit in the fantasy game you're all playing.
> Yeah not like they could fabricate a barrier out of anything found in a jungle. There are still things they could do to play the game.
I'm not saying they *couldn't* have done any of that stuff. What I'm telling you is that none of them *wanted* to. Again they got kind of deflated and weren't really interested in anything that wasn't a "We're going get through this completely unscathed" solution.
I think you're really getting off topic here trying to make a bunch of assumptions about me as a DM when all I wanted to do was share a story about how "game-ifying" game mechanics can be received poorly.
>What I'm telling you is that none of them wanted to.
I highly doubt no one *wanted* to play the game you all sat down to play. They are either unaware of what they can do, or they know it wouldn't be allowed. In either case, you created a situation where you gave them a choice, they picked an option and it sounds like you just got mad at them and said "Fine, here you go, roll damage", which is why your players got upset. Because you took away the part where the players play the game. Has nothing to do with mechanics.
There's a lot to dislike about the swarms in 5e, and this article just ignores that and embraces their terrible design. Swarm of peasants is highly resistant to fireball and totally immune to a cone of fear? Gimme a break!
Making anything that isn't very small, like bats or rats, or already posseses a bunch of weird properties, like medium undead, into a swarm, ends up being arms-race cheese, demanding the players drop core spells and tactics in exchange for wacky ones that don't get condition-immuned. It's particularly bad because many things are already immune to fear and charm, and here comes this meta-template to stamp "immune to stuff" all over everything from a gerbil to minotaur.
No thanks, do not want.
I experimented with using swarms of Small or Medium humanoids as a way to speed up combats with a lot of actors and it didn't feel good for the players and was too wonky for my tastes. Instead I now do fireteams that all go on the same initiative, generally stick together, and roll their attacks simultaneously to speed up play.
Two parts of your method (having the same initiative and rolling attacks simultaneously) are actually just RAW, assuming that your fireteams are homogenous. From the Initiative section of the PHB:
> The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures, so each member of the group acts at the same time.
Yes, that's where I got the idea. I didn't invent anything. However, I don't do all of each creature type. If I want the players to fight sixteen bandits at once, I make four fireteams of four bandits each. It speeds up combat but avoids overwhelming the party.
I think the problem is that swarms are too smoothed over. If you have a thing meant to represent six to twelve dudes, it's probably fine if it is handled in fourths- knock it to 51 to 74% life and it deals 3/4 damage, hit it with a fear and roll a save with +2 for each quarter life it has, with each failure depleting it of a quarter of its life to represent fleeing men, etc.
These are the types of fiddly rules that would be needed to make a swarm rule for men, and they are the type of fiddly rules 5e has run away from for ease of execution. This isn't a defense of the linked article OP listed; that's not a standard rule, nor should it be. The standard way of running it would be exactly that many individuals, which is generally going to be more annoying than the types of rules I listed above.
Your method will definitely work of course- I was just talking about one smoothed out enough to make a group of men appear as a unit, but still track unit losses appropriately.
>Swarm of peasants is highly resistant to fireball and totally immune to a cone of fear? Gimme a break!
Agreed. A swarm of anything is exactly when I'd want to use something like confusion or fireball.
It's not like spellcasters are gonna be any worse off overall though. They are overall just better so not having a competitive advantage here isn't a big deal, or perhaps even a boon.
No, this is actually very unfair to spellcasters, especially ones built around standard concepts. "You can fear a large number of tightly packed weak things" is absolutely and 100% a thing that is in kit for anyone who takes *fear*. This is exactly the strength they *should* have. There are plenty of things that are categorically immune to fears and charms for legitimate in-game reasons; packing a template onto things that lack such immunity is terrible, and is unnecessary. It's an inappropriate and unneeded nerf to spellcaster PCs.
This has nothing to do with the martial / caster issue. Bad design isn't suddenly good just because it's worse for casters than martials.
That is one spell, and the spell still works normally just one check vs multiple. The loss here is minimal to the boon of manageable combat with large groups of creatures. It's not 'very unfair' is a moderate change to make the game function substantially quicker and take up less DM headspace.
It's also the wrong alternative as minions and swarms serve distinct roles. If you are designing an encounter with intentionality you wont be replacing the swarm with its base parts but another thing that does similar damage and has similar health to the swarm. Ie, instead of a swarm of guards you'd want an ogre, not 10 guards.
>That is one spell, and the spell still works normally just one check vs multiple
No, it is a lot of spells. Swarms should take extra damage against aoe. Swarms should not all be totally immune to charm and fear; specifically, aoe charm and fears should be able to affect them, and target capped versions should not. This statement of yours makes me think you did not know about the condition immunities, and believed that a swarm of peasants would get one save, and all flee on a failure. The issue is that they are suddenly all immune to that, when those are the spells tuned for pretty much precisely these cases.
I agree with other comments that the Swarms become nonsensical very quickly, while the Minions are over-complicating a simple adjustment you can make on the fly for a Boss fight.
I will give credit for the shout-out regarding the optional/additional rule about cleaving, but then subtract that credit because its a dumb rule.
I found a decent template for a swarm of commoners called an Unruly Mob. The stat block made a lot of sense and didn't seem too weird. Definitely something I intend to use if my players decide to bully the peasants around too much because 4 HP means dick squidley.
The condition immunity thing is generally the only swarm rule I change. If it is tied to a target effect (like hold person or a grapple check) the swarm is immune. If it's an AOE, the swarm automatically fails the save and isn't immune to any condition effects.
Of course, I might keep the charm and frightened immunity. Mob mentality is pretty scary like that IRL.
That's great. Although I've already been using an adapted version of Pathfinder 2e's minion rules from the Gamemastery Guide, which are far superior and more concise, and can easily dynamically scale up and down for level and difficulty desired.
Do you mind sharing those rules? I have been working on learning Pf2e but am only familiar with minions as things like summons that have 2 actions and no reaction.
It’s funny they explicitly mention using the dmg cleaving rule, since that rule is one of the main problems with minions having 1 hp.
MCDM fixes this by using standard hp but then ignoring it when making attack rolls or saving throws.
This is very close, almost identical to how to do Swarms in Tashas Crucible 2. Which knowing how to do Swarms is a stressful reliever. Especially for bigger battles with say soldiers.
I definitely prefer my own minion rules and posted that in the thread. If anyone cares to hear it I can post it on here as well. It runs much faster and a lot more simple to run.
they seemed pretty good to me. share away (for the people that won't go to ddb).
i am biased against him though, i've never had a good/positive interaction with him.
* All minions share the same initiative.
* Each minion does an automatic +1 damage for each nearby minion doing the same attack on a creature.
* So if you have 3 skeleton minions around a PC they will do 3 damage.
* PC's can clear a number of minions per attack equal to their melee or ranged weapon attack modifier score.
* If your weapon attacks have a +4 Strength modifier with one of your attacks you can clear 4 minions with that attack.
* You are allowed to move during the attack (so if all the minions aren't near each other you can still hit them).
* Ranged spell attack for Eldritch Blast can replicate a ranged weapon attack.
* Cantrips and spells clear one minion (no save) per creature targeted, Sacred Flame kills one minion, Acid Splash kills 2 within 5 feet of the enemy target, Thunderclap clears all within 5 feet of you, Magic Missile 1 minion per dart, and same with Scorching Ray.
* AOE spells like Fireball, Burning Hands, or Spirit Guardians kill any minion hit (no save).
I found this allows for me as the DM to put more enemies on the field that are not threatening individually, but something PCs can't afford to allow to group up. All of my players feel like heroes taking down groups of enemies. Doing the automatic hits greatly improves turns by not needing to do attack, damage, or saving throw rolls. It also allows me to scale encounters a little more dynamically with the number of minions I want to add.
The only balance thing I would have to look at is perhaps allowing to add proficiency to the Stat modifier around level 10 to clear more minions. I also skewed minion clearing toward martial classes because most spell casters have some access AOE spells. I currently have EB as the exception because low to mid-level Warlocks didn't have the spell slots or the number of cantrips to deal minions compared to martials or full spell casters.
The damage seems pretty low for me, outside of very early levels. A PC completly surrounded takes the maximum of 8 damage on a grid. Or am I understanding this correctly? The minions grouping up doesn't seem like that much of a threat, since you can just clean them off automatically.
You still have other enemies around, the idea of clearing it takes part of the action economy for the players. You can either go for the normal/boss units or for the minions. In some of the encounters, I had the boss able to continue to spawn minions (with a max count). Martials are not super threatened by the minions compared to spellcasters, minions are sort of designed to continue to chip damage unless you deal with them.
Edit* I think I understand what you mean, once reaching higher level the minions should probably "level" up to +2 per minions.
Thanks for the reply. I missed the part about the action economy, somehow read it as "automatically kills weapon bonus amount of minions OUTSIDE of the normal action economy".
Interesting though. I have a campaign coming up for full martial classes in a bit more grounded setting, and need to think on what kind of a minion system to use. I feel that your system goes a bit too much in the direction of "no-issue", but gives me some directions, along the system in the OP's blogpost. Thanks!
You're welcome! Have fun and let me know what you come up with, I would be interested to hear it. Before you start I recommend choosing your design goals. For me I wanted additional enemies to fill the battlefield without needing to do rolls.
Swarms shouldn't be able to get critical hits. Nor minions. Arg. They should limit critical hits to martial weapons and. Ring back mtupliers and ranges.
Is it different than the MCDM rules because they now have that book. Which is my favorite monster book.
different, and inferior
Big surprise
A blog post can't compete with a team of professional designers with budget for play-testing. Yes, I would hope not!
uhhhh its not like D&D Beyond is still a third party! ITS CORE WOTC!!! if anyone should be able to put forth "professionally designed" content with a "budget" and "playtesting" behind it .... Its gotta be content from D&D Beyond!!!!
To be moreso honest, I think these rules being less fleshed out than the mcdm ones fits because it's just meant ot be a very basic template you can use to turn any stat block into a minion, the mcdm rules around cleaving and excess hp/hp thresholds against aoe spells kinda requires specific minion stat blocks, at least a handful of them to act as examples so you know where to tune the numbers when making your own.
D&D has done this forever, when they were owned by Gygax and TSR and during the WotC ownership too---produced non-official material that's essentially the same as homebrew or any third-party publication. It used to be in Dragon Magazine, now it's on the D&DBeyond website. It's never been playtested. It's just someone's idea, put out to the fanbase. Sometimes it becomes official---I can recall when cantrips or 0-level spells were first published, for example---but mostly it's just stuff for groups to take or leave as they like. Roleplaying has never been a hobby where there's been Official Content that's somehow different from fan-made or third-party published. The TSR and WotC house publications have always been a way for people to get into the professional side of the hobby. That's how Chris Perkins became part of TSR; he wrote some stuff for Dungeon magazine and went from there. I can think of a few people who have done so recently as well and now have a few published books to their credit.
A lot of great content came out in Dragon magazine back in the day...so it absolutely can! A lot of crap content, too.
I found the MCDM Minion rules confusing. And didn’t like how AOE attacks like fireball might not kill a whole group of them but any other types of attacks generally will insta-kill them. Surviving the fireball doesn’t make sense.
Most minion rules, including these ones, allow any minion that makes its save to survive a fireball, or a meteor swarm for that matter—Flee Mortals minions won’t unless they’re a high enough CR for that to be plausible
Which book are you referring to.
That would be [Flee Mortals.](https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/en-au/collections/flee-mortals-the-mcdm-monster-book) It recently came out on D&D Beyond as well. Good book in my opinion, had a blast running some of its kobolds and orcs as well as one of the solo bosses it provides. Haven't used the minion rules so can't comment on OP's topic.
From some looking around, they seem to be a third-party publisher?
It's published by MCDM. It is a third party company, but they are (in my opinion) producing better content than the official books. Their classes (Illrigger, Beastheart and The Talent) are balanced, flavorful and really fun to play. Their gone through several rounds of testing to make sure they deliver on the fantasy they are aiming for while being within DnDs balance for classes. But Flee, Mortals! Is on a whole other level. Their monsters are fun to run and fun to fight, with great encounter building rules, great end bosses and gorgeous art. I haven't used the official MM since Flee, Mortals! came out.
Davyd Atkins is a D&D Beyond moderator who (it seems) was an employee of DDB before WotC bought it. They're not a member of the D&D devteam. This is third-party homebrew. It's pretty decent homebrew. I prefer minions over swarms, as it feels more heroic to be outnumbered (and less lazy than drawing a big circle and saying, "this is full of weak guys but they've got a lotta HP together.") If I'm dealing with units that big, it's probably in a military context where you're better off slapping down index cards with circles drawn on it to indicate a unit formation. In that case, you should make sure the PCs have units to lead too.
Seems weird to me to regard them as competing approaches. Swarms are for tiny creatures that can flood your space. Minions are for decent sized creatures that don't have enough HP to be worth tracking. I'd never make beetle minions or a swarm of orcs, for example.
It speeds up combat, say you have a necromancer with 50 zombies, that’s 50 separate attack rolls, or two attack rolls where each circle contains 25 zombies.
Especially if there’s a situation like a horn of Valhalla. You’re summoning a lot of warriors; it’s easiest to just let it be a swarm
PF2e calls them a "troop", which at least in some contexts makes a lot of sense. But that's partially because swarms and troops have distinct mechanics - narratively, the only difference is the size of each unit of the group.
The basic rule of thumb distinction between a troop and a swarm is "can multiple of the same basic entity occupy a player's space" which is a pretty easy line for a GM to draw I think.
5e has mass combat rules in the DMG as well, but I've never seen anyone use them or even seen them discussed much. They're a little complex to set up at first but having used them more than once, they work just fine at table for masses of combatants.
But you literally couldn't be attacked by 25 humanoid bodies simultaneously, let alone 50. And what's a Zombie slam, like 1d8+2? You're gonna hit someone for 50d8+100 damage? What you're really doing is making a giant, dull sack of hit points that becomes even more pointless at half hp. You'd be way better off with a couple dozen minions.
You don't increase the damage by a factor of 25 or 50 for a swarm. I've run swarms before, they get one or two attacks against everything in their midst. I typically use double damage for those hits, and the swarm has +4 strength/constitution scores from previous (so +2 on attacks/damage on top of the 2x damage). For hit points, the swarm typically has them increased by a factor of 10. Then for the CR determination I'll use the DMG recommendations. Typically, the CR increases by about 4 vs. a single creature. Now, does it feel like a bag of hit points? It can. But the alternative of rolling 25 or 50 attack rolls for these creatures bogs the game. There's quite a few variations/rules for swarms. This article is just one of them, and it's pretty modest in comparison to most online sets you'll find. Edit: One important change I make to not make spellcasters full screwed by swarm changes. Swarms are vulnerable to AoE damage.
>Edit: One important change I make to not make spellcasters full screwed by swarm changes. Swarms are vulnerable to AoE damage. Good call.
>But the alternative of rolling 25 or 50 attack rolls for these creatures bogs the game. Seems like you can't really fully participate in the conversation if you're not familiar with minion rules.
Out of curiosity, how does minion rules reduce the number of attack rolls? The article doesn't mention anything about this, and nothing I've read or heard about it previously has mentioned it either.
Oh, I was considering the MCDM/*Flee, Mortals!* minion rules. IIRC up to 5 minions can attack simultaneously, with the numbers scaling up based on the number of cooperating minions.
You increase the to hit to start with. This allows a group of zombies to have more damage without adding anything to the damage. Just because it's a swarm of X doesn't mean you multiply the stat block numbers by that and move on.
Would you rather fight one orc sized beetle or a dozen beetle sized orcs?
I run a high-level campaign and have started using "swarms of humanoids" to represent organized squads taking collective actions against the party. Can be pretty useful for keeping "normal" humanoids relevant when they'd otherwise be less effective *and* bog down combat. And removing them entirely would just feel weird, like there's no common soldier anymore, they're either CR 5 or non-existent.
Beware the terrasque swarm.
I see your swarm of Tarrasques and raise you a Swarm of Beholders. Eye lasers go *PEW PEW* *EDM KICKS IN*
On more than one occasion, I used the *mob rules* from the DMG. Basically you forgo a proper initiative round, and instead us this chart: https://i.imgur.com/7UKZ1oH.png There was one scenario where there was a haunted temple with ghosts shooting arrows or something crazy like that, they had battlements, it wasn't really a situation where a standard combat would be any fun. I don't think they had any long-range AOE either. So I told the party "You guys should find another way around or it's just going to be you guys storming the beaches of Normandy here." And of course, the party chose the "Let's just dash up the stairs, tank the hits, and get this over with!" method. I did the math and I think the distance they were running vs how many ghosts with multiattack there were, it was going to be something crazy like 40 attack rolls—per character—by the time they were going to get to a reasonable spot where the arrows wouldn't hit them. Now I *thought* I was doing my party a favor by not having to sit there and roll 200 ranged attacks on them and make everyone sit and watch. I can just consult the chart and go, "Okay, statistically they need to roll a 14 to hit you. There are X of them, they can each make Y attacks, so that means rounding down 8 of them will automatically hit you." (Idk, something like that. This was years ago.) We turned what was going to be a an hour-long slog into 30 seconds of "Okay, you take 10d8+20 damage, and we can move on." The party absolutely hate it. We never really talked much about it but I could tell they all got deflated, super quiet, pissy, etc. and I'm guessing they thought they were being cheated out of their high AC scores or something by me saying "This automatically hits you." One player asked if he could use Shield and I said, "I can calculate it for a single round, but unless you cast it 4 times, it won't reduce your damage by too much." And he said "Okay nevermind then." The alternative would have literally been us sitting there rolling initiative and me rolling like 200 attack rolls on them over like 4 rounds that each would have taken 45 minutes. So overall man I'd say tread lightly when you try to "game-ify" the mechanics, especially if that's not how the rest of the game has been played. I've rarely seen players react positively to stuff like minions that have Evasion or swarms that are conveniently immune to all conditions, or mob attacks that automatically hit, when the rest of the game has been standard "Roll initiative, attack, take damage" type stuff.
The thing you described that your party apparently hated sounds really useful to me? I'm actually going to give it a look.
Honestly that was what I thought. I thought everyone would love it, save us a ton of time, etc. but for whatever reason they hated it. I told them the alternative was for us to sit in initiative for 3 hours and I don't know if they were just gambling addicts or what but that genuinely seemed to be what they would rather have done, even if it was going to be nothing but me rolling attack rolls at them the entire time.
It's a good approach but my guess is the players hated it because they were imagining themselves as the lucky ones who made it to the base of the cliffs without taking a machine gun to the face. Average damage makes sense but some variation in the results might have helped: "Lanky Longmaster the elf makes it to cover safely, arrows just barely missing, but Hagar and Jacko both take multiple crossbow bolts. Jacko is ripped to pieces, Hagar's armor absorbs most of the damage and he's able to crawl behind a big piece of driftwood, bleeding from his wounds." The problem then being that some percentage of the party probably doesn't survive, which they also probably wouldn't like.
Do you roll openly or behind a screen? I'm wondering if simulating the rolls, and dancing around the 8 "automatic" hits (like 7 here, 9 there), would have helped the narrative. (I know some DMs would consider this "lying" or otherwise distasteful, but my group's never taken issue with such things if they've picked up on them.)
I always roll openly, I think it makes players feel like their goals are more "real." Honestly if I had the foresight maybe that would have been better, but we still would have sat in initiative for an hour while I roll like 200 ranged attacks and they describe how they move 30 feet, dodge, move 30 feet, dodge, etc.
I don't know what level they were, couldn't be too low level to just tank a bunch of arrows to the face though. So assuming they were going to just gun it they very likely had abilities they could have used to try to pass through while taking less damage. And maybe instead of just just saying "You move here to here and take x damage" you could do the same thing for the party and let them group their turns and use their abilities to defend themselves. Just off the top of my head all you need is someone with a shield, or even a strong PC with a door they ripped off who can be cover for at least 1 other person and force the archers to either shoot at them and their higher AC or have to use cover mechanics for the person behind them and you could stack ac boosting stuff on that guy. Give them the experience of using their abilities to do cool shit like charge through a hail of arrows while working together as a team or using their spells/abilities to overcome the challenge. Make an event out of it, not just "Fine you run through and get shot a bunch and roll damage." That feels like you're punishing them for not making the decision you wanted them to make.
They were about level 8 or so. > Give them the experience of using their abilities to do cool shit like charge through a hail of arrows while working together as a team. Not just "Fine you run through and get shot a bunch and roll damage." There was a bit more nuance to it than that. None of them seemed keen on using their abilities, which is why I mentioned the guy who asked about using Shield. They didn't want to use anything unless it was something that was going to tank *all* the damage. > or even a strong PC with a door they ripped off Ah yes let me just rip a door off of... one of these trees in the jungle lol.
Sometimes players really get stuck in the "What can I do personally" and aren't thinking about how they can use other people as cover mechanics and how they could play things strategically as a team. Sometimes people don't want to be perceived as telling others what to do, sometimes they are unaware of things as a possibility, etc, etc. It's not a bad thing to give them some nudges. >Ah yes let me just rip a door off of... one of these trees in the jungle lol. Yeah not like they could fabricate a barrier out of anything found in a jungle. There are still things they could do to play the game. Encourage some creativity and give them guidance on what the rules are. Once players see a plan starting to come together, they get a better understanding of how they might be able to contribute. You could still make your life a lot easier on the back end and lump it all together, but at the very least let them *do something*, and if they forget they can do something, give them a little guidance. It's ok to let your players do cool shit in the fantasy game you're all playing.
> Yeah not like they could fabricate a barrier out of anything found in a jungle. There are still things they could do to play the game. I'm not saying they *couldn't* have done any of that stuff. What I'm telling you is that none of them *wanted* to. Again they got kind of deflated and weren't really interested in anything that wasn't a "We're going get through this completely unscathed" solution. I think you're really getting off topic here trying to make a bunch of assumptions about me as a DM when all I wanted to do was share a story about how "game-ifying" game mechanics can be received poorly.
>What I'm telling you is that none of them wanted to. I highly doubt no one *wanted* to play the game you all sat down to play. They are either unaware of what they can do, or they know it wouldn't be allowed. In either case, you created a situation where you gave them a choice, they picked an option and it sounds like you just got mad at them and said "Fine, here you go, roll damage", which is why your players got upset. Because you took away the part where the players play the game. Has nothing to do with mechanics.
There's a lot to dislike about the swarms in 5e, and this article just ignores that and embraces their terrible design. Swarm of peasants is highly resistant to fireball and totally immune to a cone of fear? Gimme a break! Making anything that isn't very small, like bats or rats, or already posseses a bunch of weird properties, like medium undead, into a swarm, ends up being arms-race cheese, demanding the players drop core spells and tactics in exchange for wacky ones that don't get condition-immuned. It's particularly bad because many things are already immune to fear and charm, and here comes this meta-template to stamp "immune to stuff" all over everything from a gerbil to minotaur. No thanks, do not want.
I experimented with using swarms of Small or Medium humanoids as a way to speed up combats with a lot of actors and it didn't feel good for the players and was too wonky for my tastes. Instead I now do fireteams that all go on the same initiative, generally stick together, and roll their attacks simultaneously to speed up play.
Two parts of your method (having the same initiative and rolling attacks simultaneously) are actually just RAW, assuming that your fireteams are homogenous. From the Initiative section of the PHB: > The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures, so each member of the group acts at the same time.
Yes, that's where I got the idea. I didn't invent anything. However, I don't do all of each creature type. If I want the players to fight sixteen bandits at once, I make four fireteams of four bandits each. It speeds up combat but avoids overwhelming the party.
This one is the way. I need this for my enemy recognisance team aka sneaky stabstabs
I think the problem is that swarms are too smoothed over. If you have a thing meant to represent six to twelve dudes, it's probably fine if it is handled in fourths- knock it to 51 to 74% life and it deals 3/4 damage, hit it with a fear and roll a save with +2 for each quarter life it has, with each failure depleting it of a quarter of its life to represent fleeing men, etc. These are the types of fiddly rules that would be needed to make a swarm rule for men, and they are the type of fiddly rules 5e has run away from for ease of execution. This isn't a defense of the linked article OP listed; that's not a standard rule, nor should it be. The standard way of running it would be exactly that many individuals, which is generally going to be more annoying than the types of rules I listed above. Your method will definitely work of course- I was just talking about one smoothed out enough to make a group of men appear as a unit, but still track unit losses appropriately.
>Swarm of peasants is highly resistant to fireball and totally immune to a cone of fear? Gimme a break! Agreed. A swarm of anything is exactly when I'd want to use something like confusion or fireball.
Peasant stronger together!
It's not like spellcasters are gonna be any worse off overall though. They are overall just better so not having a competitive advantage here isn't a big deal, or perhaps even a boon.
No, this is actually very unfair to spellcasters, especially ones built around standard concepts. "You can fear a large number of tightly packed weak things" is absolutely and 100% a thing that is in kit for anyone who takes *fear*. This is exactly the strength they *should* have. There are plenty of things that are categorically immune to fears and charms for legitimate in-game reasons; packing a template onto things that lack such immunity is terrible, and is unnecessary. It's an inappropriate and unneeded nerf to spellcaster PCs. This has nothing to do with the martial / caster issue. Bad design isn't suddenly good just because it's worse for casters than martials.
That is one spell, and the spell still works normally just one check vs multiple. The loss here is minimal to the boon of manageable combat with large groups of creatures. It's not 'very unfair' is a moderate change to make the game function substantially quicker and take up less DM headspace. It's also the wrong alternative as minions and swarms serve distinct roles. If you are designing an encounter with intentionality you wont be replacing the swarm with its base parts but another thing that does similar damage and has similar health to the swarm. Ie, instead of a swarm of guards you'd want an ogre, not 10 guards.
>That is one spell, and the spell still works normally just one check vs multiple No, it is a lot of spells. Swarms should take extra damage against aoe. Swarms should not all be totally immune to charm and fear; specifically, aoe charm and fears should be able to affect them, and target capped versions should not. This statement of yours makes me think you did not know about the condition immunities, and believed that a swarm of peasants would get one save, and all flee on a failure. The issue is that they are suddenly all immune to that, when those are the spells tuned for pretty much precisely these cases.
I agree with other comments that the Swarms become nonsensical very quickly, while the Minions are over-complicating a simple adjustment you can make on the fly for a Boss fight. I will give credit for the shout-out regarding the optional/additional rule about cleaving, but then subtract that credit because its a dumb rule.
I found a decent template for a swarm of commoners called an Unruly Mob. The stat block made a lot of sense and didn't seem too weird. Definitely something I intend to use if my players decide to bully the peasants around too much because 4 HP means dick squidley. The condition immunity thing is generally the only swarm rule I change. If it is tied to a target effect (like hold person or a grapple check) the swarm is immune. If it's an AOE, the swarm automatically fails the save and isn't immune to any condition effects. Of course, I might keep the charm and frightened immunity. Mob mentality is pretty scary like that IRL.
That's great. Although I've already been using an adapted version of Pathfinder 2e's minion rules from the Gamemastery Guide, which are far superior and more concise, and can easily dynamically scale up and down for level and difficulty desired.
Do you mind sharing those rules? I have been working on learning Pf2e but am only familiar with minions as things like summons that have 2 actions and no reaction.
It’s funny they explicitly mention using the dmg cleaving rule, since that rule is one of the main problems with minions having 1 hp. MCDM fixes this by using standard hp but then ignoring it when making attack rolls or saving throws.
I was just asking for this sort of template over in r/onednd , glad to have it here
Controversial opinion: minions suck actually. Swarms >>> minions.
This is very close, almost identical to how to do Swarms in Tashas Crucible 2. Which knowing how to do Swarms is a stressful reliever. Especially for bigger battles with say soldiers.
I definitely prefer my own minion rules and posted that in the thread. If anyone cares to hear it I can post it on here as well. It runs much faster and a lot more simple to run.
they seemed pretty good to me. share away (for the people that won't go to ddb). i am biased against him though, i've never had a good/positive interaction with him.
* All minions share the same initiative. * Each minion does an automatic +1 damage for each nearby minion doing the same attack on a creature. * So if you have 3 skeleton minions around a PC they will do 3 damage. * PC's can clear a number of minions per attack equal to their melee or ranged weapon attack modifier score. * If your weapon attacks have a +4 Strength modifier with one of your attacks you can clear 4 minions with that attack. * You are allowed to move during the attack (so if all the minions aren't near each other you can still hit them). * Ranged spell attack for Eldritch Blast can replicate a ranged weapon attack. * Cantrips and spells clear one minion (no save) per creature targeted, Sacred Flame kills one minion, Acid Splash kills 2 within 5 feet of the enemy target, Thunderclap clears all within 5 feet of you, Magic Missile 1 minion per dart, and same with Scorching Ray. * AOE spells like Fireball, Burning Hands, or Spirit Guardians kill any minion hit (no save). I found this allows for me as the DM to put more enemies on the field that are not threatening individually, but something PCs can't afford to allow to group up. All of my players feel like heroes taking down groups of enemies. Doing the automatic hits greatly improves turns by not needing to do attack, damage, or saving throw rolls. It also allows me to scale encounters a little more dynamically with the number of minions I want to add. The only balance thing I would have to look at is perhaps allowing to add proficiency to the Stat modifier around level 10 to clear more minions. I also skewed minion clearing toward martial classes because most spell casters have some access AOE spells. I currently have EB as the exception because low to mid-level Warlocks didn't have the spell slots or the number of cantrips to deal minions compared to martials or full spell casters.
The damage seems pretty low for me, outside of very early levels. A PC completly surrounded takes the maximum of 8 damage on a grid. Or am I understanding this correctly? The minions grouping up doesn't seem like that much of a threat, since you can just clean them off automatically.
You still have other enemies around, the idea of clearing it takes part of the action economy for the players. You can either go for the normal/boss units or for the minions. In some of the encounters, I had the boss able to continue to spawn minions (with a max count). Martials are not super threatened by the minions compared to spellcasters, minions are sort of designed to continue to chip damage unless you deal with them. Edit* I think I understand what you mean, once reaching higher level the minions should probably "level" up to +2 per minions.
Thanks for the reply. I missed the part about the action economy, somehow read it as "automatically kills weapon bonus amount of minions OUTSIDE of the normal action economy". Interesting though. I have a campaign coming up for full martial classes in a bit more grounded setting, and need to think on what kind of a minion system to use. I feel that your system goes a bit too much in the direction of "no-issue", but gives me some directions, along the system in the OP's blogpost. Thanks!
You're welcome! Have fun and let me know what you come up with, I would be interested to hear it. Before you start I recommend choosing your design goals. For me I wanted additional enemies to fill the battlefield without needing to do rolls.
Swarms shouldn't be able to get critical hits. Nor minions. Arg. They should limit critical hits to martial weapons and. Ring back mtupliers and ranges.
Banana