Can it be done? Truly, can it be done?

I’m largely done designing products for 5th edition. The junk has seriously gotten to me, playing 5e feels like sewage is clogging my brain and has for awhile. I can deal with that, provided I’m hanging out with friends, but it’s even begun to affect my design work. Every roadblock I run into generated by this corporate garbage designed to keep you playing it and only it takes my mind off whatever I’m trying to design at this point. I still design free content though, so I continually tinker with the 5e rule set.

When I stumbled on this idea though, hoooooooooooooooooooo boy I legitimately considered making a product out of it. I may still do that, whenever 5.5 or whatever comes out. For now though, I’d like to hand you the tools I developed across the past week or so, which are robust enough for you to rapidly adapt encounters accordingly.

What I’ve stumbled into creating is a template by which several, maybe even dozens of monsters can have their actions adjudicated within a single statblock, and without the use of a grid. That’s not its only use, but that’s the output of solving a very specific problem 5th edition has.

What got me started on this?

Imagine for a moment you tell the players “there’s a horde of zombies coming down the corridor.” You draw a map, the players are going to get tactical after all. Then you spend about 3-5 minutes in total putting 50 minis or tokens down and adjusting the map all the while, answering questions the players have about their situation. In the best case scenario, the combat ends in 10 minutes. The party lobs a ton of fireballs or other AOE effects, and half of your zombies are done for within the first three turns. You spend a few minutes clearing tokens off the board as players take their turns. At the end of the situation, the zombies are dead within two rounds, and the players aren’t even scratched. They’re just down some spells, maybe. In the worst case scenario? The exact same combat plays out, but the players deal damage that’s just low enough to prevent the zombies from dying outright. You now have to roll saving throws for the zombies. Some of them don’t die to the fireball. Some of them get knocked down by melee weapons. Those have a chance to come back to life, and however did the designers of 5e decide this would be adjudicated, but by a saving throw? The zombies don’t hit, they don’t do damage, the end result is practically identical. It just happened to take a stupidly long period of time.

Funnily enough, this GM/Player interaction actually causes the GM to adjust, typically. They begin changing the types of encounters they throw at the party, in their set of linear combat encounters. Instead of engaging in 5 or 6 combat encounters, which is surprisingly far more healthy for the game, the GM grows dissatisfied with their collection of trash mobs. They begin consolidating encounters. They throw fewer of them in a day, with fewer monsters that are more highly leveled to compensate. You can’t really blame them; running tons of monsters is inefficient at face value. They’re not hurting the party, after all. But three or four encounters with a decent number of enemies (not a ton) can help wear down the party in preparation for larger encounters. As the shorter number of encounters fails to prove more effective, but becomes far easier to run, the GM doubles down on following the path of least resistance, bringing out statblocks two pages long for monsters that die in 3 rounds anyways.

Already we can see problems with this structure, even in the context of a combat-centric game. Why do the linear set of combat encounter need to end with the largest encounter? Why can’t the big encounter be number 2 or 3, with the remainder showing off how deadly minor encounters can be when the party doesn’t have all of their resources? The ineffectiveness of low-level monsters and the frankly stupid amount of time it takes to resolve using a horde of them combined leads to degenerate play. I used stupid given D&D has been around for almost 50 years or whatever, WOTC’s had control of it for something like 20 years, and no one bothered to fix this. The only “solution” was keeping player hitpoints low, and that literally never lasts.

Stupid.

Solution?

Alright, enough screwing around. What we’re going to do is develop a system of group-vs-party combat. It’s not mass combat, and it’s not completely individuated. The party is partially individuated in their actions, the monsters are (by default) something of an amorphous blob. We don’t say how many monsters there are. We don’t worry about monsters making individual attacks, or even against individual party members.

Step 1: Scenarios

First thing’s first, this combat scenario is theater of the mind. We need to know what conditions make this system work. Spoiler: none of them are really tactical.

If you have a map functioning as a visual reference or piece of art, that’s fine. Frankly though, you shouldn’t. Not unless there’s some visual detail you want to convey beyond your description of the room players can spot. The players don’t need a piece of art to know the room is 20x40. If the piece of art has a barrel next to a torch sconce, that could be important to someone. If you can manage providing the piece without a grid on it, great. I understand if you can’t though, whether the room had a group combat, individual combat, or no combat at all might’ve been up in the air.

Step 2: Initiative

I promise this is important to do before the encounter statblock.

Let’s talk about how the initiative normally works. Every creature (sometimes a class of creature, if you’re keeping things simple like me) has a spot on the initiative order, and as the phrase suggests, turns are taken in that order. This is the optimal solution for tactical, individuated combat scenarios. We on the other hand are taking care of party vs large number of creatures.

Not only does this pose challenges foreign to the current initiative system, a focus on theater of the mind also permits us to reinforce certain themes through a more complimentary initiative system. Spoiler for the monster statblocks, they don’t take turns so much as they take reactions. Said reactions are specific to when the PCs fail whatever it is they’re attempting to do.

What this nonsense translates to is as follows: players need to make decisions as a group. The actions they take impact one another, and as such, they take their turns together. The players are going roll initiative, as they generally do. The players will huddle up, discuss their plan of action, and detail (in order) what it is they’re going to do. Only one person tells the GM, and this person will be referred to as a Caller going forward. Because the monsters are purely reacting to player actions, players have a distinct advantage in combat scenarios. To compensate for this, we’re going to force players to commit to the actions their Caller relays to the GM. Because these scenarios don’t consider positioning, committing to actions is far less onerous. Furthermore, this teamwok-focused initiative is (I think) more engaging than sitting around and waiting for your turn to come up. Everyone has some part of their turn dedicated to thinking about what they’re doing (even if they’re already fairly certain) before they move on to adjudicating those actions. In this system, that segment of everyone’s turn is compressed into one collaborative segment at the start of each round. Not only do individual turns go by faster, the amount of time each player is guaranteed to spend engaging with the combat is increased.

Step 3: Group Statblocks

That’s enough teasing for one essay. In reality, you can probably run this type of encounter without the first two sections. But of course, it would be worse, and would probably interfere with the point of developing this system in the first place.

Group statblocks don’t have hitpoints. They rely on a “harm” system which determines the DCs for player actions. When a player succeeds on some harmful action against the monster, the monster takes one Harm. When the players accrue Harm equal to the number of players (we could also say number of friendly combatants), the enemy group is defeated.

On the flip side, group statblocks don’t have actions they take either. Group statblocks instead react to the party accruing a certain number of failures. If a party of 5 were fighting a horde of zombies, and they accrued 5 failures, the GM would slap them with…6d6 bludgeoning damage. Some group statblocks have a different number of reactions that occur on different numbers of failures. All statblocks have at least one for a number of failures equal to the number of combatants, and it’s usually going to be the most punishing.

Let’s make the zombie fight a little tougher, shall we? Now, zombies are constantly grabbing and groping at whatever drifts nearby. That includes swords and other weapons, which is super inconvenient for the wielder. The zombies apparently don’t know these weapons are bad for your health, so they go on annoying the intrepid paladin or beserker, putting their hands all over your melee weapons in a rude and non-consensual fashion. So, we’re going to give our zombies a reaction to a specific event. When a combatant misses a melee weapon attack, they have disadvantage on their next attack. See how this goes?

This is also how we begin evaluating the difficulty of group statblocks. Here’s a rough guide for difficulty, and actions taken.

The easiest group encounter would feature a DC of 10-12, and only a reaction upon a number of failures equal to the number of player combatants. I doubt I’d use this for anything other than a first level party, truth be told. A medium encounter would include a DC of 12-16, and have either a halfway-point reaction or a minor reaction to a single type of player failure, in addition to the end-point reaction.

A hard encounter is going to have a DC of 16-20, and will have both a minor reaction to specific player actions, and a halfway-point reaction (again, in addition to the end-point reaction). Finally, a deadly encounter will feature a DC of 20+. It will feature a reaction to specific player actions, a reaction for every 1-2 player failures, a halfway-point reaction, and an end-point reaction.

Step 4: Player Actions

Player actions can be broadly grouped into things done to hurt the enemy, things done to assist their friends (directly or indirectly), and things done to avoid suffering attacks and other harmful effects from the group enemy. So, whenever your players take an action, they’ll fall under one of these three categories, each of which have their own effect.

Harm
The player attempts to damage or substantially impair the group of enemies. If the player makes an attack, treat the Harm DC as the creature’s armor class. On a hit, the player must deal damage exceeding the group enemy’s Harm DC to inflict Harm.
If the player attempts to inflict Harm by using magic or a psionic manifestation, it must be able to significantly impact multiple enemies (whether directly or indirectly) to succeed. If the spell accomplishes this by dealing damage, the damage must exceed the group enemy’s Harm DC.
Finally, any attempt to harm the group enemy which forces them to make a saving throw or otherwise forces them to make some check considers the result to equal the group enemy’s Harm DC. For instance, instead of a group enemy rolling a Dexterity saving throw upon suffering a fireball, simply consider their saving throw to be (for instance) a 16, if that was their Harm DC.

A successful Harm check inflicts one Harm against the enemy group. A character can only inflict one Harm against the enemy group per turn.
Help
The player assists themselves or another combatant directly, or does so by impeding the enemy.
A successful Help check allows the targeted combatant advantage on their next saving throw or check, or to change initiative with the player which helped them after their next turn. Attempts at healing or providing similar benefits to other players through magic and other means falls under this category, as do spells meant to “buff” the combatant. Failing the check wastes any resource spent to accomplish it, without any benefit.
Fortify
The player attempts to avoid the damage dealt by the enemy group’s next reaction. On a successful Fortify check, the player ignores the next negative effect inflicted on them by the group enemy.

Now, 5e has lots of actions players can take on turns other than their own. Just kidding, I think there’s only 10 at base, then maybe 15 or so counting supplements. Any given player can only make use of 1-4 of them, usually. That’s okay, and you shouldn’t nuke these reactions from the player’s toolbox. In fact, in some cases I’d recommend letting your players use these reactions proactively. We’ll get to other considerations on action economy in a second, but again, resolving actions in this system is fairly easy provided you stay within the general bounds of these following principles":

Things that give you a free attack or spell on a reaction: Attempt to Harm.
Things that allow you to avoid damage, or attempt to avoid damage: automatically succeed on a Fortify check, or attempt a Fortify check, respectively.
Things that allow you to diminish or potentially negate damage dealt to another creature: attempt or automatically succeed on a Help check.

Some of your players are able to use things like bonus actions, or are able to swing their weapon multiple times in a round. That’s fine, let them! Remember, a combatant can only deal one Harm to the group enemy per round. If the fighter has already managed to do this, and wants to use his remaining two attacks to Help his buddies, or even himself! That’s totally fine. It’s more opportunities for them to accumulate failures after all, potentially dooming his brothers in arms.

Okay, so we’ve been through at least one or two sections of this article where you might notice I’m getting tired of it. You can probably intuit I’ve been writing about a sentence to a paragraph per day pas whatever the initial burst was (about 1200 words I nailed out before I had to go do something else and never got back to it). So, I’m going to attempt to wrap this up quickly, so I can get tired of writing other articles. I think there are two questions people are going to have when it comes to working within this system:

(Player) Why do I need to make checks for things I can usually do for free?
A: This is easy. You’re using a different combat system! But seriously, the system is meant to properly represent how much more deadly, fast, intense, and likely interesting an encounter with a large group of enemies ought to be. Narratively speaking, if there were zombies swarming all around you, and you wanted to heal your pal on the ground, there would be some difficulty in reaching him, casting the spell properly, avoiding damage along the way, etc. This system condenses all of that time consuming nonsense into a single check, the results of which you know the second the dice come to a halt.
(GM) What do I do about characters who can avoid damage reliably?
A: This is easy too! So if your archer player is 600 feet away, they can still hurt things, and the group monster can’t hurt them. Fine! Usually, when people can’t be harmed by the group enemy, it’s due to some circumstance under which the character can’t reasonably contribute in some ways. Taking our archer player, let’s say they probably can’t take actions to Help their party. Additionally, we can reduce the number of failures needed for the group enemy to take a reaction! After all, the reactions only consider those they can actually harm. If the archer is missing from their 6 person party, I think it’s reasonable for the group enemy to only need 5 failures in order to respond with their end-reaction or whatever. Oh, and the archer missing still contributes to that failures.
Besides all of that, it’s fine! We’re not actually looking to punish the archer here. The point of group enemies is to make combats with groups as fast and deadly as they ought to be. If we weren’t using this system, the archer player could do the exact same thing, with some pros and cons to their long distance firing just like in this system.

I’ll get to other questions later, as well as some additional thoughts on the article later this week (I think). Truth be told, there are plenty of thoughts I have on these subjects that don’t fit into a long-form structure, and aren’t worth interjecting my own train of thought with across the course of the article. Far better to spend them on a “Notes on ___” article. In fact, that’s what we’ll call it. In fact in fact, I bet I can do that to other articles. Hm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

See you later.