Enemies as "groups"

[Ferretz]

So this came up in the main forum, but I figured it should go on the house rules section.

The problem:
In TOR, a character, regardless of his skills as a warrior, can only attack one enemy once per round (with some few exceptions from virtues and weapon qualities). This means that even Elven warrior Glorfindel, facing a group of 5 Goblins would be attacked 4 times after taking down one of them.

The solution:
Rather than changing the rules and letting characters have the ability to attack more than once (making Rewards like Spear of the Last Alliance basically worthless), we create a new type of enemey. These are enemies that is a group of foes that attack, and can be attacked as if they were a single enemy. This can then be described as if the character attacking is fighting several enemies at once, hitting more of them, even though in the rules, he is rolling for attack once.

The rules:
An enemy can be made have the new Group special ability. This comes in three "tiers" Gang (3-10 individuals), Band (11-20 individuals) and Horde (21-30 individuals). A Gang multiplies the Endurance by 3 and adds 3 Hate. A Band multiplies Endurance by 6 and adds 6 Hate and a Horde multiplies Endurance by 9 and adds 9 Hate.
In addition, enemies with the Group special ability can ignore 1 Wound per Hate spent, and add one Success dice on attacks per Hate spent.

Hate spent to ignore Wounds represent individuals of the Group falling, but the group still fights on. Hate spent to increase success dice on attacks represent the fact that more than one enemy attacks the character.

This is, of course, and abstraction to handle larger groups of enemies. As a LM, I'm more of the "cinematic" type, but this might not be equally suitable for other groups.

-E.

[Yepesnopes]

It is elegant and simple, but it reduces combat lethality (if this matters to you) by a big amount.

I have some questions regarding the subject, I would like to hear your opinion on it.

-When do you plan to group enemies, at any time in the characters development, or only when they have earned some amount of experience?

-How will you describe it to your players? Will they be able to differentiate before hand if the 15 orcs approaching them are individual orcs or a band?

-Will the same sort of enemy, let say Mordor orcs, be presented in the campaign some times as individuals and sometimes as a group? If so, based on what which criteria? and how you foresee then to keep the setting consistency in the players mind? I mean, if affirmative, sometimes 10 Mordor orcs are going to be quite a challenge for the PCs, while other times the same number of the same type of enemies are going to be way easier to defeat.

[Ferretz]

Good questions.

When to use it? It would be good for "background" enemies like Goblin Archers firing on the characters, for example. Or for instance if a character needs to defend a choke point like a corridor or gate.

Groups can be used whenever, depending on what enemies the LM chooses to group together. A couple of bands of goblin archers is not a huge threat to beginning characters, but a horde of Orc Soldiers, along with some individual leaders, would make an epic battle, especially if that leader has Commanding Voice.

I would describe it as a big pile of enemies charging the characters, and not get into numbers. When a wound is inflicted on the group, I would let the player describe how his character kills one or two of the enemies in the group.

The type of enemies in a group could appear as individuals and as part of a larger group, depending on the strength of the characters, the judgement of the LM and the needs of the story.

Again, there should maybe be some sort of guidelines about what kind of enemies that could be grouped together depending on the experience of of the player characters, but I feel it might complicate things.

E.

[Glorelendil]

I'll re-post my solution in the other thread: introduce a mechanic that results in only a portion of weak adversaries from getting their attack against a strong hero. So that if Glorfindel is fighting a bunch of Snaga Trackers, each round a bunch of the goblins will lose their attack due to cowardice and/or inability to find an opening. The end result is identical to Glorfindel getting more attacks per round. You can even just think of each round as consuming less time.

I'm picturing something where each adversary rolls a single die, either Success or Feat, that determines whether or not they get their attack. The target number could be based on a formula using some or all of:
- Hero's Valour, Battle, weapon skill, and/or Awe (or Song in the case of Rohirrim)
- Adversary's Attribute Level

I prefer this over multiple attacks a round simply because it feels less cinematic and D&Dish, even if the result is the same.

If you combine it with engagement rules (the number of opponents who can engage with a single target in close combat) you could have a single hero fighting off hordes of weak adversaries. If the bad guys have to roll a 5 or 6 to attack that is roughly equivalent to the hero getting 3 attacks per round, which conveniently is the same number as the maximum adversaries that can engage with an opponent of the same size.

[Ferretz]

The problem with that solution (while it works for making it epic and to stage larger battles) is that the amount of rounds (and therefore the amount of real time the encounter takes) is still the same. So what we want here is to have less real time spent on combat encounters by grouping some enemies into single entities on the battlefield.

But I see the point of having less attacks go against the character.

E.

[Glorelendil]

The problem with that solution (while it works for making it epic and to stage larger battles) is that the amount of rounds (and therefore the amount of real time the encounter takes) is still the same. So what we want here is to have less real time spent on combat encounters by grouping some enemies into single entities on the battlefield.

But I see the point of having less attacks go against the character.

E.

Well, it would be somewhere in between. If a bunch (possibly even most) adversary attacks are effectively a one-die miss then those attacks will go must faster (quicker to read the dice, no endurance changes to track, no protection rolls).

But, yeah, it won't be as speedy as abstracting away the masses.

[atgxtg]

This is similar to how games like Prive Valiant handles groups of "mooks", and how several RPGs handle swarms of insects and vermin.



You could also simplify this by:
1) Instead of increasing the Endurance score for the group, you keep it the same as for one creature and whenever a hero does enough damage to beat the endurance, one of the opponent's drops.

2) Apply the hindered modifiers (+2 for moderate, +4 for severe, or better yet a +1 per 10 in the group ) to the group's skill dice and hate scores to reflect the larger groups. You can lower this as the group drops in size.

3) Any wounds scored against the group would mean the loss on an individual (no need to have a special ability to ignore wounds).

4) You should probably give the heroes a free intimate test every time they reduce the group size by a significant amount (say 10-25%). A horde of orcs might have 25 members, but if the hero cuts down 5 or 6 in as many rounds, the rest might decide that this hero is too tough for them.

[Glorelendil]

4) You should probably give the heroes a free intimate test every time they reduce the group size by a significant amount (say 10-25%). A horde of orcs might have 25 members, but if the hero cuts down 5 or 6 in as many rounds, the rest might decide that this hero is too tough for them.

In general most games...including TOR...could use better rules for enemy morale and flight.

[atgxtg]

Yeah. Or at least some notes for the LM/DM/GM.

The number of times I've seen wimpy NPCs used as cannon fodder by GMs who viewed them as "disposable".