Hordes and Hordes of Monsters for your Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Game – Muahaha

Now that I’m on my Heroism kick I continue to think about how to bring the heroism to life. I once heard, "Heroism and heroic action are not always about fighting and slaughtering the enemy…" But my grandmother never played D&D. In the games I run the encounters are telling much of the story. The fighting and slaughtering does represent much of the heroic action.

So, I’ve been thinking about monster design. D&D 4e has captured the sense of epic fights between epic entities with Elite and Solo creatures. But what I've found lacking is a true feeling of epic battles involving many lesser creatures overpowering a group. I’ve found that with the proper controller build minions do not represent enough of a threat to the group. They simply aren’t around long enough inflict the damage they need to. For a group of six, minions just don’t have the staying power.
However, swarms do. The party is down right afraid of swarms. Swarms represent that sense of overwhelming numbers. A horde of rats, snakes, drakes, or even humans can have that feeling over overwhelm that a group of minions just can’t convey.

In the campaign I run the party has positioned them selves as resistance to an invading army. So I’m looking to put together some encounters with units of troops. Early on in the campaign these units were represented by collections of minions and non-minions. That was enough of a challenge for the party but the game really punishes staying in tight formations and the units just fell apart with Area and Close attacks.

This led me to evolve into using swarms but what I didn’t yet grasp was the use of swarms for medium size creatures. At some point I became aware of larger swarms and their use for medium sized creatures. Since this idea had been used by others I think it’s a natural evolution to evolve into using swarms for military units. In fact with a quick Google search I found a thread on it in enworld.org.

So what follows is a review of the crunch at using a swarm as a unit of troops. In my next article I will create some samples and provide some ideas and guidance on power creation for the monsters themselves.

Using the swarm template
Swarms have three main features that differentiate them from other monsters:

1. They have an aura, either damage or an attack at the start of the enemies turn. This is to reflect the swarms ability to make many attacks.
2. The are resistant to ranged and melee attacks. This is reflect that they are not a single entity so a single stab has less effect on them.
3. They are vulnerable to area and close attacks. This reflects that they are multiple targets for the attack.

As a base template the swarm template will serve our military unit nicely since:

1. As a small unit they should be able to attack multiple targets at once. This gives some realism to the Aura.
2. Injuring a single squad member doesn’t have the same impact on the group as injuring a single monster. This gives the realism to resistance vs single target attacks.
3. Blasting a squad of troops will to the contrary be blasting all the individuals. Thus they’d all be effected. This gives realism to the vulnerability to area attacks.

So in review the swarm will work great as a template for creating units of troops. However, using the straight swarm template I’m not quite satisfied. It seems that some modifications that capture the effect of the swarm but also, a little more realism of a unit of troops are in order.

Modifying the swarm template as a combat unit
While its just fine to make our units based on the other published swarm monsters there three elements of realism I want to capture in my “unit” design:

1. The unit should get weaker as it takes damage which reflects the decreasing number of troops.
2. The unit should get extra attacks or gain automatic assist advantages based on the number of troops working together in the unit.
3. The unit should represent a tough group but we need to maintain game balance.

So here are some guidelines I’ve developed for how to modify the standard swarm mechanics:

1. Aura effect ends when the unit is bloodied.
2. Add a minor action attack power that goes they can use when the unit is bloodied.
3. Add a +2 to hit with all melee attacks until the unit is bloodied.

Since an aura is representing an unlimited number of extra attacks against adjacent units having it go away after the unit is bloodied represents the loss of troopers in the unit. However, since we still want the feel of a unit of troops we should add a minor attack power to offset the loss.

Also, when the unit is at full strength we can assert that the troops are working together in coordinating their attacks effectively “aiding another” and thus grant them a +2 to hit.

Balancing
Using swarms it is easy to unbalance a fight. Swarms should be limited to effects that are manageable. Here are a few rules I apply when building swarms:

• Keep the number of hit points for one of these units in the average range so they don’t become too hard to kill.
• Keep their size to large or huge depending on level and number of troops you envision them having so that they are easier to flank and hit.