Group Size Does Not Matter

There is an issue that I’ve run into from time to time, and I think it comes from two places: Simulationism and video games. Imagine this: A party of D&D adventurers is traveling and runs into a random encounter. There is some randomized number of enemies: 1d6, 2d4, perhaps 2d10 if they’re very unlucky. In computer RPGs, the enemies you see on the screen are the enemies that exist in the fiction. We fight 5 skeletons because there are 5 skeletons to fight.

Now imagine that we are playing D&D 5th edition. This modern game does not expect or require hirelings in the party’s employ, but let us imagine a scenario where each hero has their own squire. In the fiction, we roleplay with our squires, and they are, in every meaningful way, NPCs that exist in the fiction. But then, a fight breaks out.

So now either the players must control two characters, or worse, the DM must now control friendly NPCs fighting against unfriendly NPCs. Combat, which is already slow in this game, has now slowed further due to the added complications of more creatures on the battlefield.

I see two ways to handle this problem, one of which is my favorite.

The Matchup

In combat, we can match up squires 2-for-1 with enemies. This entirely removes the enemy combatant from combat, as if they were defeated. Any injuries are described in a dramatic post-battle scene. We can make their fate fall to a dice roll. Hell, we can make the entire outcome of the skirmish of two squires on one enemy come down to a dice roll. The point is, the fight becomes a bit easier for the party because they brought friends.

The upside to this is that players can make their lives easier by spending their gold on hirelings. Playing combat in such detail means that every little decision has more weight and impact. You get to play to find out what happens.

The downside of this ruling is that combats that were once designed to be balanced for the party are likely to be made boring. The combat encounter rules are designed to provide meaningful and (usually) challenging fights for the players. In a sense, this rule makes combats less exciting, because it will impact the monster math. Or more realistically, I (the longsuffering dungeon master) must now tweak each and every encounter to be a bit more challenging to help bring “balance” back to the game.

Heroes Only

Option two (my favorite) is to simply use the fiction to explain that any combat, of any size, will only ever involve the heroes; whether it be a small skirmish with skeletons in a tomb, a large mass combat ala Helm’s Deep, or a skirmish with a dragon atop a mountain. The fight will always be perfectly tuned for the heroes. The rest of the combatants are described in the fiction, but have absolutely zero impact on the gameplay.

Imagine the great, sweeping battles we enjoy in movies and television shows: They center on the heroes in a thick swirl of enemy combatants. Some of them are slain with a single sword stroke, while other (meaningful) enemies get their own dramatic beats. Those dramatic beats are the combat scenarios we play out. We can add the 1 HP chaff to make the heroes feel truly heroic.

I have used this option already in two campaigns: Shadowdark and the Tomb of Annihilation game. There are many occasions where friendly NPCs travel with the party. Instead of letting them participate in combats, I simply narrate that they’re handling their own skirmish slightly out of frame while the party does the heroic thing. I have found this solution to be scalable, and most importantly, acceptable for the players. No longer do I need to fuss and fiddle with NPC stat blocks, which only serves to add to my already substantial cognitive load and waste table time. No longer do I need to worry about rebalancing encounters to account for extra friendly NPCs. No, now I simply run the combats that I have designed (or the module has described) as written.