Holding Back the Flood (mass combat?)

[dbcowboy]

I'd like to pit my 6 players against a large hoard of opponents; something reminiscent of the Avengers holding back wave after wave of Ultrons in their last movie.

 

Are there any mass combat rules I can look to to help manage such a large-scale battle?

 

Anyone else ever ran this kind of scenario?  What worked and what didn't?

[Christopher]

My idea for mass combat was always to write up groups of enemies as one sheet. That way you keep it to a manageable number of sheets, while each sheet still has a impact (only so much a 50 point police officer can do).
At the same time stuff like "defeating a dozen foes with a single attack" do not need excessive amounts of AoE or Multiple attack.

 

There are afaik rules for Swarms in the 6E Monster Book (what was it's name again?).

 

My approach to formless blobs and zombies might be recycleable:

Give them high resistance to stun, but not so good defense against body damage. While stunning the mass is still possible, it is easier to just go in with Killing Attacks. In particular Penetrating Killing Attacks will just take off Body (and thus enemies) en masse.

 

The Deathwatch Intro Adventure "Final Sanction" introduces Horde Mechanics to the diceroll system starting with page 16:

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/deathwatch/minisite/support/final-sanction-web-quality.pdf

Maybe you can get some good ideas out of it. However, that is integral part of the game system. The above "high stun def, medium body" might be well suited to simulate this in Hero.

[Doc Democracy]

It is possible to build the horde as a single character that covers a large area and has lots of attacks, low defences but high damage resistance, susceptibility to area effect attacks etc.

I think having huge numbers of low power opponents works hugely well as the bureaucratic logistics begin to overwhelm the narrative...

 

PS: Christopher got in there before me - with a more detailed response as well! 

[Hyper-Man]

There are rules for attacking multiple times per Phase with OCV penalties. However, tThere is something to be said about a 'target rich environment' as well. At some point it comes down to how much END and/or CHARGES can the heroes expend in a continuous fashion.

 

HM

[akrippler]

Play em like mooks: dont worry so much about their stun/body and treat the lot of them as 1 hit and down.  Once hit most mooks fall in a single punch, the fight becomes about the action economy instead of attrition.  

 

If the mooks were built for a fight like this its safe to assume they'd have all kinds of teamwork bonuses and the like to make sure their actually still a threat even though they have low defenses.  NND's and other special attacks are good for chipping away at heroes even from a low point cost mook.

[Lord Liaden]

I didn't pick up the 6E version of Fantasy Hero -- did that book reprint the official Hero Mass Combat rules? Those might work for a "horde" of opponents, if they don't have too many exotic attacks, like Flashes or Drains.

[BoloOfEarth]

The attached PDF contains some mass combat rules I wrote way back in the day (early 2004, for 5th edition).  Basically as Christopher notes, I combine sets of enemies into one unit.  At full strength, the group has higher OCV, lower DCV, and does more damage en masse.  As the group takes damage, I mention to the players that individual members are falling unconscious until they're either all out or down to one unfortunate soul.

 

This has worked very well for me for years.  One thing I don't think I covered was mental powers vs. groups, though.  Not quite sure how I'd handle that.

 

 

MassCombat.pdf

[Scott Baker]

I didn't pick up the 6E version of Fantasy Hero -- did that book reprint the official Hero Mass Combat rules? Those might work for a "horde" of opponents, if they don't have too many exotic attacks, like Flashes or Drains.

Yes it did. It starts on page 227.

[Netzilla]

My approach to this kind of thing is the following:

The horde's component individuals should be as identical (stat-wise) as possible.

Each individual member should drop in no more than a hit or two.  I like to avoid tracking individual Stun and Body and tend to do it as: X Damage Classes = Stunned; Y DC = KOed; Stunned twice = KOed.  Anything below X DC is no effect.

I divide them up as evenly as possible into groups of 3-5 and have each group act as a single unit (they all move at the same time and in the same manner, they all attack the same target, etc).  When they attack, I use the attached chart to determine how many hit with a single attack roll.

For example:  I have a group of 5 minions with a 6 OCV attacking a PC with an 8 DCV.  6 OCV - 8 DCV = -2.  I look on the -2 row of the chart until I reach the "FIVE" block.  From that, I can see that if I roll a 3, all 5 will hit; if I roll a 4 or 5, 4 will hit; if I roll a 6 or 7, 3 will hit; if I roll an 8-10, 2 will hit; if I roll an 11-13, only 1 will hit and if I roll a 14+ the whole group will miss.  The chart isn't really compatable with Autofire attacks, but then mooks probably shouldn't be hitting with more than one shot out of an AF anyway.
    
 

Agent_Group_Hits.pdf

[bigdamnhero]

We had a thread on this a couple years ago:
http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/90075-and-thongor-did-wade-through-the-army-like-fecal-matter-through-waterfowl%E2%80%A6/

 

Tldr: the Mass Combat rules in Fantasy Hero are pretty good. There are also some "Swarm" rules on p488 of the Bestiary that are much simpler but the same basic idea. Essentially you're lumping a group of characters together and treating them as one unit or meta-character. As each unit takes BODY Damage, you narrate that as the unit losing members until they're all down.

 

To build them, take the basic character's stats and bump up those stats to make them appropriately tougher. FH has some specific guidelines you can follow. Or you can just think it through in terms of how tough you want the fight to be:

 

"I want them to fight around 100 mooks, but I don't want to handle more than maybe 12 minis, so call it 12 squads of 10 each. I want each squad to be roughly this challenging, so I'll take the individual mook's stats and raise some of their stats to that level of toughness compared to the PCs' attacks & defenses. Maybe throw on some Autofire to reflect multiple attacks. Or maybe Penetrating so at least a little damage gets through..."

[bigdamnhero]

Here's a simple example from a recent Champions game I ran where Our Heroes were fighting the Alien Hordes. To cut down the number of minis on the table, I grouped the low-level alien warriors into groups of 4 each. Each unit then got the following bumps from their individual stats:

 

+5 STR

+2 OCV

+5 BODY

+10 STUN

Added Autofire to each of their attacks, # of shots = # of aliens currently per unit (ie if they started with 4 bu have lost 1/2 their BODY or STUN, then they can get up to 2 hits.)

 

Also I handwaved the time scale so that each Turn was described as lasting 24 seconds instead of 12 seconds, but this was a narrative thing only - mechanically, the turn sequence was unchanged.

[Greywind]

Flood?