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Combat in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons is based around small skirmishes, usually with no more than a dozen or so combatants at a time. Despite the game's origins as a modified tabletop wargame, it can be tricky to portray the large-scale battles that make epic fantasy so exciting. With some rules tweaks or creative storytelling, however, you can put your players into the midst of a fight just as enormous and desperate as Helm's Deep.
If you're planning to bring warfare and mass battles to your campaign, try these methods for adding scope and scale without getting bogged down in numbers.
Make The Battle Bigger Than The Party
As heroic as they are, the player characters can't stand alone against the armies of whichever arch-lich or conquering emperor is threatening them - if they could, there wouldn't be a reason to bring an army of their own! The adventurers can't be everywhere at once, so they'll only be able to affect the battlefield in small but important ways.
To simulate this, plan ahead of time how the battle will play out if the PCs do nothing at all. In most cases, this will mean a victory for the enemy, since it falls to the heroes to turn the tide at critical points. This will not only establish the stakes of the fight, but give you a clear set of objectives for the players; defending a barricade that would otherwise have fallen or eliminating an enemy commander make for great encounters that fit within the scale of D&D's main rules, and gives the players a chance to affect the outcome of the battle.
Treat The Battle Like A Dungeon
As the player characters move from fight to fight while the battle rages around them, you'll be able to run encounters that perfectly fit familiar D&D gameplay. Treat each major engagement of the battle like a room in a dungeon, with traps and hazards to add unique flavor and excitement. During the enemy's opening barrage, for example, the PCs might have to face worg-mounted scouts while dodging catapult and arrow-fire; later skirmishes could include fire, gas, or other environmental effects.
This structure also makes it easier to break the battle down into story beats, each with their own encounter. Best of all, the players might not be able to tell how the overall battle is going, adding tension and encouragi🔥ng them to fight their hardest!
Taking Command
If the player characters find themselves commanding units in the field, or even leading an entire army, their role in the battle changes significantly. The PCs will be a priority target for the enem꧟y, and mistakes will be much costlier. The PCs might not see any action in the early phases of the battle if this is the case, but Skill Checks to effectively prepare and command their troops give them plenty to do while the fight unfolds.
When the heroes do enter the fray, it will likely be with NPC soldiers at their side facing off against elite enemies. For situations like this, it's best to have the PCs battle the enemy commanders while their soldiers fight all around, possibly granting advantage or disadvantage to the characters based on relative troop quality 🐭or num☂bers.
Simulating Casualties
The sheer number of species, creatures, spells, and other considerations in the D&D universe make it difficult to have a hard-and-fast system for simulating losses in large-scale combat. While the easiest strategy is simply to have casualties be part of the battle's story - for example, saying that the allied vanguard will be overrun after one hour of fighting if the PCs don't intervene - if you want to add a little uncertainty into the mix all it takes is a little math.
For simplicity, assume that evꦜery unit consists of troops who have identical stat blocks. Multiply the hit point total of a single soldier by the total number of troops in the unit currently able to fight to create a hit point total for the unit as a whole. When two units fight, have them each make a damage roll (hitting automatically) and multiply the result by the number of soldiers fighting; the resulting damage will reduce the hit point total of the units and cause soldiers to fall accordingly.
Area effe🏅cts will have a greater impact on closely-gathered troop formations - consider giving such attacks a damage bonus when calculating how many soldiers they kill.
If the♕re is a significant ဣdifference in troop quality - say, elite drow veterans with centuries of experience battling a hastily-formed peasant militia - you can have the units make a single attack roll against one another. If a unit misses, they still inflict damage, but roll twice and take the lower result. This allows lower-quality troops to still get some damage in while still reflecting the difference in ability.
Victory And Defeat
In general, the only mass battle in a campaign that results in a decisive victory for the players and their allies should be the last one. The PCs might be able to eke out a narrow victory against overwhelming odds, or prevent a defeat from turning into a massacre, but for story purposes it's always best if the enemy has the upper hand until the very end.
Losing a large-scale battle stings, but it provides a huge amount of opportunity for future adventures. The player characters might spend the next few sessions leading the resistance in an occupied city, waging a guerrilla war against the enemy army, or even find themselves taken straight to the villain's lair as prisoners! Don't be afraid to make an enemy army unbeatable, as long as the pꦡlayer characters survive. That way, their eventual victory will be all the sweeter.