Many 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons players dream of the epic feats their characters might achieve if they manage to reach the highest levels of the game. While defeating tyrant overlords like ancient dragons, vampire barons, and mind flayer colonies is one part of these fantasies, going toe-to-toe with small armies is ano🍷the✨r common scenario.

Unfortunately, the RAW (Rules As Written) given to us in the Dungeon Master's G𒈔uide and Monster Manual make running this kind of battle an absolute nightmare. However, there are ways to implement the rules that allow for challenging encounters with low-level monsters in hi꧒gh-level games.

Why Use Low-Level Monsters?

Firstly, it's important to establish why we should even bother using low-level monsters against our high-level PCs (Player Characters). The single biggest reason is to give your games verisimilitude: a quality that ꦯlends a sense of reality to storytelling.

Think about it. Your PCs might be high-level characters, but how does that explain the sudden disappearance of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:low-level enemies?

The party has faced off against monsters below Challenge Rating Five for most of their career. Now that they have reached eleventh level, those enemies shouldn't🌺 just mysteriously evaporate from your encounters. There are certainly ways to explain away the fact that you're no longer using these monsters, but all of them subtract from the verisimilitude of your game and you♒r world.

Second, players like it when their characters feel powerful, especially if they've been playing those characters for many months or even years! There's no better way to let your players know how much their characters have grown than putting them up against enemies their characters previously struggled against and letting them wipe th✃e floor with the opposition.

Finally, access to a slew of low-level monsters lets you do so much more with your encounter building. If the players are in the midst of a war against an orc horde, you can throw 50 or even 100 orcs at th⛦em along with a couple of powerful commanders. After all, that's the kind of battle they would be facing iꦿf they truly took part in a war effort.

Furthermore, including low-level monsters in your boss battles is a great way to crank up the difficulty. Properly making use of the action econom🍃y is a huge part of high-level D&D. No matter how you try to fix it, a single monster simply doesn't have enough actions to keep up with a party of four to six PCs. The monster and a ton of its minions is an entirely different story though.

Swarms And How To Make Them

Thankfully, there's already a monster stat block for hordes of tiny enemies: swarms. Usually, a swarm consists of tens or hundreds of small creatures like bats, spiders, rats, and so on. Nothing is stopping us from making a swarm of orcs, zombies, pirates, or the like though.

That being said, the swarms you make out of these monsters might function a bit differently. It's ultimately up to you which method to use. Let's make some swarms of zombies as an example of each possible b⭕uild.

How To Make A Regular Swarm

Let's take a look at the important numbers from the zombie stat bl꧅ock that we'll need to modify it🍒 into a swarm.

Say we wanted a swarm of five zombies. All you need to do is multiply the creature's hit points and attacks by the number of creatures in the swarm. So a swarm of five zombies has 110 hit points and makes five slam attackꦑs on its turn. Instead of tracking five separate monsters for your encounter, now you only need to track one!

An important thing to note about swarms is that once they are reduced to half their hit points, they only deal half as much damage. This allows your play♚ers to make an impact on the creature's effectiveness without killing it outright while also 🐼making a lot of sense. After all, a swarm of half as many zombies shouldn't hit as hard.

Keep in mind that a swarm keeps the same immunities, senses, and extra abilities that its singular monster has. In the case of the zombie, this means the swarm retains immunity to poison damage as well as access to the undead fortitude feaꦦture.

How To Make A Modified Swarm

Alternatively, you can make a swarm stat block that functions a bit differently than the swarms presented in the Monster Manual. These swarms will be a little more difficult to run, but they also do a better job of accurately representing a fight against a horde of monsters.

Just as before, multiply the swarm's hit points and number of attacks by the number of creatures that compose the swarm. This time though, you'll also need to keep in mind that each zombie has a total of 22 hit points. Every time the swarm takes 22 or more damage, one zombie in the swarm dies and the swarm loses an attack.

A zombie swarm would a🔯lso roll for undead fortitude when one of its members is supposed to die from an instance of damage. Special abilities like this can make running a swarm even more complicated.

This might seem like a hassle to track on a map, but it's easier than you think if you have some extra dice lying around. In this instance, a d6 with its face turned to five makes for the perfect miniature fo🌞r a swarm of five zombies. Every time a zombie dies, simply tick the die down to the number of zombies remain☂ing in the swarm.

When using swarms in this manner, you can also multiply the damage of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:area-of-effect attacks by the number of creatures in the swarmꦆ. This maintains the power of area-of-effect spells and abilities while still keeping things easy for you to run.

Martial attack damag🧔e should carry over to the next monster in a swarm instead of maxing out when a creature in the swarm is slain. Spellcasters have enough of a leg up on martials as it is.

All this being said, you might still be thinking that this hasn't solved the biggest issue with running lots of enemies in combat: too many attack rolls slowing down the game. As it just so happens, the Dungeon Master's Guide has a nifty table ꦑthat solves exactly this issue.

Mob Attacks And How To Use Them

Found on page 250 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, the mob attacks table is made specifically to keep the game running smoothlyꦦ when using lots of monsters. The table reads as follows🎀.

Here's how to use it. Looking back at our zombie stat block, the zombie has a +3 to hit. Say your five zombies attack a Paladin with an AC of 18. The zombies need a 15 or 16 on the d🅺ie to hit an AC of 18. Their attack bonus of +3 gets them to 18. Thus, one zombie from the swarm hits the Paladin and you can either roll damage once or use the average damage of four.

Congratulations, you just went through five creatures' turns without rolling a single die. There are some complications when it comes to using this table though. If a swarm is made up of monsters with multiple attacks, assume a single hit from a creature counts all of that creature's attacks. In other words, multiply the damage the creature deals by the number of attacks it has.

Sometimes, creatures have access to multiple kinds of attacks. In cases such as these, it's easiest and fastest to use the creature's most powerful attack for calculating damage. Your PCs a🐼re high-level: they can manage a few extra points of daꦑmage.

Keep in mind, some character builds like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:bladesingers are capable of ratcheting up their AC to astronomical values. In most cases, the mob attacks table wasn't made for going up against an AC higher than 22. When attacking these PCs, it'🙈s better to roll 5d20 in place of mob attacks and count each natural 20 as a critical hit from ♓the mob.

For mobs made up of more than five creatures, online dice rollers are❀ a godsend. Typing "roll 10d20" into Google is a lot faster than rolling 10d20 in person.

Hopefully, these tactics encourage you to use more low-level monsters in your games. Your world will feel more real, your players will love taking down droves of monsters, and you and your table's experience playing Dungeons & Dragons𒁃 will be all the better for it.