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So recently (after a fight agianst a mid level mind mage and high level raksasha) my player group asked,

"What ever happened to the days of fighting goblins and orcs?"

another then commented about how he liked big battles (like the ones in LOTR) where the characters are set up against a much larger force of goblins/orcs.

So my question is, How do you guys play this out. I have come up with a scenerio where the characters will get ambushed at be outnumbered 20 to 5. Or 4 on one. There will be several up front melee attackers but most will be ranged attackers with bows. Do you guys actually roll up int for all 25 combatents? That could take hours to roll out, if not what do you use in your game. When 10 goblins let thier arrows fly in the face of the characters how do you roll that out.

Thanks

The way I do it is I have all the players roll Init. And I take the monster in the fight with the highest bonus for Init and roll. Whomever wins goes first. Play then proceeds around the table clockwise. On my turn I take all the actions for all the monsters.

It works out far easier then rolling it for each monster and player involved.

In large mobs of attackers, I tend to do single init for players, and group init for the foes. Something like all the archers get the same, all the melee get the same, all the casters get the same, and perhaps the leader has his own. Also, I'm not averse to holding combat order for an entire encounter, rather than doing it over each melee, but that depends on the situation. I do resolve the attacks individually, unless it's truly a massive undertaking with hundreds firing at hundreds, or something.

Using a stack of cheap minis, different colored dice, or hole punchings with numbers/markings on them, you can readily lay out the combat in a way everybody can see and understand, and you can very rapidly get in to the groove of who goes in what order. Any large combat at my table is pretty much handled like this, eyeballing the movement, and blazing through it with swords swinging.

Remarkably, both the above post, are very close to how I run it too. Espicailly, "Any large combat at my table is pretty much handled like this, eyeballing the movement, and blazing through it with swords swinging." Absolutely! That's the way to do it.

For very large battles (say anything on company scale or bigger. I've done a battle over a few days of in-game time where regiments were the maneuver units) I usually let one player roll for the group, and I roll of the enemy. For other large engadgements of the size you're talking about, I usually let everyone roll and then go clockwise. All the enemy are on one roll, unless there are officers, captains, or some sort of bad-ass sergeant type. Officers, special NPCs and large monsters get their own initiative roll.

In our first big encounter, which we played out over a week ago, our group was outnumbered 16-4 and our GM had every PC roll for initiative and one initiative roll for the whole group of enemy attackers. Thank goodness they came in two waves (9-7), but woe to the PC who rolls under the enemy group initiative roll Thank goodness our GM kept rolling 1's and 2's for enemy initiative, or we might have been rolling a new character or two.