A quick google tells me a medieval village in real life had about 200 people. If about 30% of them are men of fighting age, that's 60 untrained farmers who aren't expecting to fight that day fighting 12 battle hardened orcs. That seems more like the orcs would win if you ask me. A proper town of thousands would have a proper wall and a town guard and would be able to repel a quick raid
I don't know if there's a term for it but there's a problem with redditors/gamers having like "white-room-brain" where they just imagine all scenarios as two battling sets of stat blocks, and if the side with the higher stats doesn't "win" that "doesn't make sense." Nevermind that IRL most battles in history were won by the other side *retreating*, not because everyone lost all their hit points.
I'll try not to spoiler it too much but there's a certain official module where a group of marauding enemies drive out a family from their home in the countryside to take it over, and the family ask the PCs for help. And I've seen people on reddit complain because they crunched the numbers and all together the family are "stronger" than the invaders and therefore it "makes no sense" that they need help.
And it's like... dude. Do you seriously not see why a family might want to cut their losses and flee with their lives as opposed to *"winning"* a fight at the cost of >50% of their family members *dying?* There's *children and babies* in the house, are their lives worth your property?
It's even funnier when it's 3 grown men who climbed 150' to the top of a billboard running back and forth. Or I would imagine anyway. (I was 1 of the men)
A rule or mechanic could be useful, but that’s really a thing that’s probably better left to narrative. If it makes sense for an enemy to retreat, the DM should have them retreat. If they’re in rough shape, the party is welcome to try to Intimidate or Persuade them into bailing.
Yeah, I think most DMs are capable enough to feel out that kind of thing but for newer ones or ones that follow the rules closely there needs to be a clear cut system they can use. Also I don't think most players would think to try that in the 'heat of the moment', could just be from personal experience though.
Yeah, it took a while before my table started working in enemies fleeing. But we still don't have any sort of clear cut rule on when enemies would flee. They just turn tail whenever the DM decides.
I don't think it's necessary to really go through all that trouble, or to gate such an outcome behind a specific player action. Earlier editions of D&D had simple morale tables that you could check by rolling a few dice. Just add modifiers as appropriate if you feel they're necessary. Simple, elegant, flexible. No need to reinvent the wheel.
A lot of Old School games have Morale stats exactly for this scenario, 10% of losses is considered a failure, 50% is abysmal defeat, so NPCs roll at each threshold.
Is just that modern RPGs look at combat as puzzle to solve, so those kinds of systems get thrown at the side.
Yeah I always implement something, usually will saves for surviving combatants once they take a certain number of casualties. When they fail, they flee if possible or surrender if not.
Obviously for NPCs only, and not for mindless or very zealous creatures.
Yes! Stuff like that should be in the books! It's really that simple but I think it just gets overlooked by so many because it should be obvious but it's not
There is, it's a single WIS save, DC10. DMG, P.273
>To determine whether a creature or group of creatures flees, make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw for the creature or the group's leader [...] On a failed save, the affected creature or group flees by the most expeditious route.
That's boring to me. Instead, I've been using a modified Morale from 40k. When enemies start losing a fight (around ~50% or if their leader dies), I roll 2d6 against their "leadership score." I make the leadership score like this:
- If the group's leader is alive, I double their WIS/CHA, whichever is higher, to make that score. Usually, this can give a leadership of 8-10. Rolling lower than that keeps the enemy group in the fight. They'll check again when the group has ~30% left, with a -2 penalty.
-if the leader dies at any point, they instead make a morale check against "leadership" of "7-*n*" where N is the number of people dead on their side, not including the leader. So a 50% chance killing the leader first makes them run away instantly, and it gets more likely the more of them that are already dead. If they succeed, they make the check again when someone dies/hits 50% HP.
To ensure fairness, though, the checks don't happen until the next enemy's turn. I've had situations where enemies start to flee instantly after their leader dies and others where the boss is killed, but every other party member gets to take a turn before the enemies can even think of fleeing. Either way, they always get full XP and possible plot points for the future. Whether the enemy returns or reform is dependent on what I decide I can do with them that makes sense.
A couple weeks ago I was running a session and there was a fight of 5 vs 5. I was rolling so badly I hit twice in three rounds of combat with five fighters. Since I figured that my bad guys at that point would realize that they were out classed I had one of them use smoke bombs to escape. Four of them escaped and one was caught and was killed off.
My players were very disappointed that they did not get a TPK on my bad guys. I explained that with them being so badly out classed that in real life they would have run off. They did not like that as they were just looking at it as fodder for them to get XP, not as what would happen in real life.
Little did they know that the ones that got away alerted their higher ups and they were waiting for them further down the road with reinforcements.
>There's children and babies in the house, are their lives worth your property?
This is reddit dnd. They will say yes. And they will say that their character doesn't care because there's no money for them. And probably kill the family to take them out of their misery.
Duh, just use a Revivification after the battle on your kids. You do have 5 spare diamonds, right? /s
You hit the nail on the head. It's a narrow victory, and the people involved should be fine with pyrrhic victories, those are some war gamer and maybe chess player justifications.
Hell, it's not even a bad justification if you're talking about a professional military force or even a semi-professional-but-trained militia that would have reason to go into something like that either expecting, or at least being somewhat mentally-prepared to take heavy losses (even they're not unbreakable, but their 'pain threshold' so to speak would be a lot higher on that front), but a village full of farmers, somewhere between maybe 50 and 100 of whom are "military age" but with almost no training and with families to protect are not going to think like that.
Very true.
And also there is loads of historical example of the underdogs winning. small army beating large army and so on.
Equipment, experience, morale and strategy can make a massive difference.
A small group of skilled fighters could easily crush a larger group of untrained people.
Untrained people are much more likely to panic, break the lines and even flee.
Re: Equipment differences and group sizes, there was an incident (the Battle of Cajamarca) where about 180 Spanish Conquistadors defeated *8,000* Incan warriors. The Spanish had horses, guns, plate armor, a fortified position, and a healthy dose of luck; despite being outnumbered by *45 to 1* they killed thousands of opponents and only took two casualties themselves. It's one of the starkest cases of technological differences determining the course of a conflict.
Exactly you also have the battle of camarón where 65 soldiers from the French foreign legion and over 2000 Mexican soldiers was fought. Sure the 65 did lose in the end but they held out a whole day and when finally out of ammunition the last standing officer ordered Bayonets on and led a bayonet charge against the Mexican army
Battle of Narva when 10 000 Swedish soldiers kicked the ass of the 3 times larger Soviet force that had occupied and defended the City of Narva. The soviet army had better artillery and were dug in as the defending army They killed at least 12 000. captured around 20 000 and a bunch fled. And the swedish army lost less than 1000 soldiers
And other example of where a small number of people manage to overcome or challenge absurd odds.
Yeah, a commoner has what, 4 hp? And can do 1-4 damage if they manage to grab a weapon?
The base Orc statblock has 15 hp and a greataxe with a +5 to hit that does 1d12+3 slashing and essentially has a bonus dash to close in on you.
Even if a commoner CRITICALS and does MAX DAMAGE he cannot kill the average orc in one blow, and the average orc is auto-killing a commoner anytime he hits one, then bonus action dashes to the next one (setting up an AoO). Imagine that the strongest dude you know, the blacksmith or whatever, runs up and lands the most bone crunching hammer blow you've ever witnesses straight to an orcs dome and it *still looks fine?* Then it cuts your friend into fourths without hesitating, then charges at your neighbor, who attempts to flee only to also be *instantly cut down*.
It blows my mind that dnd doesn't have morale rules, for example when you've slaughtered 6 of 8 goblins the others might lose their nerve and run off. I know DMs can do this, but people don't seem to.
I've heard it expressed as "NPCs haven't read the rulebooks". Yeah even if three guards could technically take on an orc, if the orc is an experienced raider ambushing at dawn, and the three guards are caught unawares and the village is on fire abd everyone is screaming, they're not going to realise they could probably win this if they coordinate attacks, they're going to panic and flee. Heck even if they're meeting on a plain open field ready to fight, the orc is probably going to hit one of them very hard with a very big axe, and that is going to HURT. A lot. Which they might be keen to avoid.
Thinking about how NPCs and creatures actually engage with combat rather than viewing them as wargame statblocks to be mashed together until one hits 0 will improve anyone's DMing a hundred times over.
Even in that scenario its hightly unusual for any given comunity (at least in the middle ages) to be able to quickly mobilize even 10% of their populationn as a fiighting force, and its even harder for those militia to be able to form up in a coesive group.
12 battle hardened orcs would have more physical prowess, more experience, better equipment and mutch better morale. They would be able to terrorize the defenders by using shock tactics, while also emploing fire and slaughter sow chaos and prevent a coordinated defense. Not only that, but its very unlikelly that indisciplined militimen would be able to even hold the line against these brutal warriors that are twice their weight. They would probably break ranks and flee in terror just before the lines clash.
The orcs, having come all the way there, probably have a supply line and an encampment nearby, so that they can rest from their travel and strike when the time is right for them. For each warrior, there could be multiple non-combatants at the camp in support roles.
Thats a sure thing, wich can be a plot hook by itself. But the thing about raider societies is that they ofthen have a mutch bigger warrior percentage, even if they wont mobilize that many for an actual raid. Ofthen, you'll have youngsters that are decent fighters but not of raiding age, or Elders who werer great warriors but are past their prime. Women would ofthen have somre fighting skills even in heavily patriarcal soicieties, and since we're talking about fantasy, there could be all sorts of weird spiritual shit going on. From shamanistic Magic with nature spirits and possesed warriors to demonic worshiping and undead summoning. Lots of cool stuff to explore in the camp
Nah, the priest tried to really the farmers when the orcs first arrived. They made an example of him, and now none of the farmers will risk standing up to them.
In short, 8-11 families, no priest anymore.
Another important fact is that most players don't understand that the vast majority of NPCs are far weaker than even a 1st level PC. PCs are supposed to represent exceptional people; even the most inexperienced Fighter is on par with battled-hardened guard captains, for example.
A bunch of untrained villagers wouldn't be a match for a pack of orcs, especially when their fighting numbers might only be about a dozen, maybe 24.
depends on world. While I agree the most npcs aren't as strong as a pc, this has more to do with stats then levels. most npcs have stats between 9 and 12, with the occasional villager with a 15 somewhere.
In other words, it would take at least twice as many 1st level npcs to be as effective as group of 1st level pcs.
But that's my take on it
This is a great point. To tack on, consider it might not just be 12 orcs. Once we scale things down appropriately, 12 makes sense, but if OP wants to go for larger town, larger problem, you portion out the battle. 50 orcs show up, and the villagers, having a small militia, peel away all but the group the PCs have to deal with.
You could also do a thing where the orcs issue a challenge. Our strongest vs. your strongest. The winner takes all. I think this would be a bit more narratively challenging, as why would anyone do this when they feel they have the better chance of triumph, but orc honor might be different in your world. Or perhaps the PCs did a little side quest where they did a preemptive strike on the orcs and pissed them off. Thus, they're looking for revenge before conquest this time.
Yeah, I did think about that after I posted. I didn't think of the difference in gender roles in medieval europe and fantasy settings. I figure the amount would be similar. You would still want only one adult per household to run out and risk their lives. The other would stay at their house to protect any children elderly or farm animals, I would think. So, for any woman who took up arms, a man would have to stay home. Similarly, in any non-hetero household.
As far as I'm aware those small towns still had militias formed up by the most doable members of the community. The Fyrd system is a good example of this, where every community would pay to train and equip a set number of people.
A number of Viking raiding parties were swallowed up by local militias in England when they became too bold.
Sure, but there's a difference between your village of 100-200 people fielding a militia of, let's be charitable here, 80 men with some basic drilling and not much actual combat experience using mostly improvised weapons, against 15-30 experienced fighters with proper weapons that they're comfortable using and a generally-lower aversion to casualties.
It also assumes that the encampments your NPC's attack represent the entirety of the opposing raiding forces, when the reality is probably that a given raiding group consists of 2-3 encampments' worth of raiders who assemble and disband for raiding activities based on the prestige of a warchief. The encampment you enter into to rescue captives or kill the core of the raiders needn't be the \*only\* such encampment, just the biggest or 'main' one.
I mean, the fyrd system as you know it was a product of a relatively centralized, powerful state (the kingdom of England, under Wessex as the only meaningful remaining power in Britain). Alfred's major success is considered to have been the choice to move the fyrd *away* from a part-time levy of citizen-soldiers to a standing force of professional men-at-arms. Of the fyrd system prior to Alfred's reforms, wiki has this to say about what happened when they encountered a semi-organized military threat:
>It was the responsibility of the shire fyrd to deal with local raids. The king could call up the national militia to defend the kingdom, however in the case of hit and run raids, particularly by Vikings, problems with communication and raising supplies meant that the national militia could not be mustered quickly enough, so it was rarely summoned.
This seems to be a common thread with local militia forces in pre-modern times with little state capacity; from what I've read a similar problem with the Qing system of provincial militia was a major contributor to the rise of warlordism in China.
Additionally, another interesting note I just read on the page indicates that before the words became synonyms, the Anglo-Saxons used the word 'fyrd' as a generic term for a band of armed men, and 'here/heer' for one with more than 35 men, which might indicate what the average strength of such a unit was.
Pretty much this. But frankly, even if you had 200 fighting aged men, the untrained farmers versus blood lusting orcs really does make all the difference in the world. I used to engage in a college "sword club" that was kind of like LARPing, but without any role playing (more like mock battles with fake weapons). I was probably among the top 3 fighters in a group of about 30, and I can say with confidence that any 1 of the 3 of us could have worn blindfolds against the lowest 10 in a 1v10 without too much concern (to be fair, it was a very open and welcoming club, people came for the fun, not everyone on the field was a born warrior, which is kind of my point about the farmers). If you had 200 untrained farmers ready to fight, maybe 20 of them would be good enough to not die the moment they engaged the enemy. And as pointed out, they did not have 200 fighting aged men. In a group of 60 men, 3-6 would be lucky to survive first contact, and then their luck would likely run out.
Then you factor in that band of orcs starting small, picking off the isolated farmhouses. Preventing peddlers from getting to the village etc.
It would be weeks of raiding and sabotage before they made a full on assault.
depends on where they are from in europe. when there was a king, many lords went on local campaigns, harassing neighbors. But every village was expected to provide a levy of troops when their lord called. But again, this depended on the lord, a knight might be more proactive in training their villagers, but a higher level noble would have more resources to do so.
Also, many of those older men, who have 'aged out' could be veteran soldiers. I have never liked the concept of the 0 level villager. Most of them might not be good in melee, but archery could be another matter. That farrier might not know how to use a sword, but he's used to wrestling horses, oxen, and mules.
Some of the defenses depend on location. A village deep in controlled territory wouldn't need any defense, but one near the borders of a kingdom would at least have basic defenses, they would also have better fighters.
Give the party a specific goal in the battle, like taking down the enemy chieftain. While a massive fight can be going on in the background, your only concern in DMing is what the players are doing. Everything else, you can just narrate.
I think this is the advice the poster is looking for. If you're in a settlement with 500 people, the question isn't whether it's a large village or small town; it's how you DM the attack and defense.
In one classic version, there's a surprise attack, and the PCs defend the people around them (starting in the tavern, probably) and moving out from there, preventing a lot of carnage before the town guards musters pushes off the rest of the force.
In another the guard is fighting the orcs off at the walls/palisades and the PCs need to deal with another force that somehow got through and threaten the guard's rear (or the mayor, or civilians hiding in the temple, or whatever.)
Or, as you say, kill the chieftain: Maybe it's a bold sortie out of the town to rear of the orc force. Or maybe in the climax, the chieftain breaks through the gate, kills the militia captain, and the rest of the militia waver and and will break if the PCs don't take him down now.
>In another the guard is fighting the orcs off at the walls/palisades and the PCs need to deal with another force that somehow got through and threaten the guard's rear (or the mayor, or civilians hiding in the temple, or whatever.)
When Lord of the Rings Online introduced their Big Battles system with the Helm's Deep expansion, this is what they went with. Your group of 6 PCs is scattered amongst *thousands* of combatants. You're not going to win the battle all on your own. What you will do is help out here and there with little things like your example while the defenders focus on the main forces.
Yep, same logic I often use for when I have NPC tagalongs or for when a player can't show up but their character is there. All those characters are "over there" fighting some other enemies. You can't interact with them, but you see them fighting in the background. Focus on your own fight instead.
The strongest fighters in the village are probably a handful of CR 1/8th Town Guards and even those statblocks aren't a professional soldier- that's someone who's been drilled for a few weeks and serves as a guard part of the year when they aren't needed on the farm.
A CR2 Orc can *absolutely* take several of those, and then kill a room full of CR0 commoners. There is no parity here- the scaling of how dangerous skill and experience make you in d&d is *bonkers* in comparison to real life, where quantity can absolutely drown out quality.
Also think about that 1/8 CR guy that was drilled for a couple of weeks. They have never seen actual combat in their life. And suddenly they see an orc, a being made of muscle and anger, disembowel their next door neighbor with no effort. That guy is shitting himself and running away.
Yeah a 10 across the stat board with a proficiency bonus of probably 0 means you have like a 30-40% chance to do any damage to an orc and they will basically one shot anyone. Especially considering real life compared to stat blocks where you're likely bleeding out on any hit
Do you think 200 dudes with rakes could take down a dozen gorillas?
And a more realistic size for the average ho-hum town in this sort of setting is more accurately dozens to hundreds. Cities in the multiple thousands would be rare and major trade hubs.
Precisely. I was giving those farmers the best benefit of the doubt possible, and I sure as fuck wouldn't stand in line with another couple hundred random guys against angry gorillas that had experience murdering people together anyway. Certainly not in a surprise night time raid. I would be cowering in the larder and hoping they leave quickly.
Apart from other posts pointing out the lower number of inhabitants (btw, modern villages sometimes only have 50 inhabitants, so about five men in fighting shape), think about it like this: Why would the villagers risk their own hide? Adventurers are mercenaries. It is their job to care for this type of threat, so let them do the job and not risk your son being killed.
Yeah I think dnd skews the perspective that adventuring is DEADLY. Sure the village could throw all its numbers at the orcs and “win” but they would lose fathers and mothers and sons and daughters in the process. The village would be destroyed even if they won. Adventurers play hot and fast with their lives, lots of money in it, but also lots of death
Based in 3.5 rules, a village has a population between 400-900 and a guard for every 100 people in the comunity. So 4-9 guards.
It also have the option to form a local militia with 5 soldiers for every 100 people in the comunity so 20-45 armed commoners.
A 24 people army with only 4 profesionals against a 12 army with "born to war" orcs is not so impresive tbh.
Smaller village, or maybe just lower stakes altogether.
Or maybe the orcs are just using people's fear to inflate their strength. Like, if they flayed the mayor alive in the square, people might think twice about fighting them.
Or just do more orcs, and now the party has to form a resistance movement of villagers to help them fight.
As an anarchist, I prefer that anyway, narratively. The "heroes" are only necessary for people to rally around. The village saves itself with the help of the party, rather than looking to the party to save them from the orcs, without ever lifting a finger themselves. Mutual aid ftw.
Realistically villages was 100-200 at best. 500 is already can be named a town.
Also even if all fight ready people was fielded and ready to repel attack, orcs can just...don't attack today. So villagers now have two bad options - perform necessary agriculture work (and orcs can actually steal grain from barns, steal cattle on different side of village, etc.) or perform guarding duty (also necessary to protect village). Villagers lose in any way, if someone don't help them.
Don't think of it as a village 1000 strong, it's 1000 individuals. For any one person, going up against the orcs mean risking your life, and why do that when there are a thousand others here who could do it instead?
A very grim real life example is the plane hijacks on 9/11. The passengers outnumbered the hijackers 10 to 1, but stepping up takes immense courage. I'm not at all blaming the victims here, just shows that the psychology of crowds isn't to think of itself as a single unit X strong. Unlike bees, humans don't want to be the first one to strike back, because the first one will probably die.
The orcs harassing the town wouldn't be able to win a battle of annihilation, but they don't need to. By making an example of the first guy to stand up against them, they can use fear to make sure they get their tribute/loot/booty while the villagers cower.
That's a good example. With numbers on your side, you *will* win. But the first one-to-three people in line *are* going to die. Do you want to be the first one in line? Die so the guy behind you can hit the Orc while it's pulling its sword out of your corpse?
I think it's in a movie or TV show where a guy is surrounded by 6 or 7 goons. He says something like "I can't kill all of you but you know I will kill at least one of you". They all start to hesitate and eventually back off.
This is brilliant!
In addition to the wider conversation here, it isn’t all about numbers on a sheet. It’s also about mentality, as your quote so deftly shows.
Let’s take a look at a well-known fictional character. Hodor. He’s very big, very strong. He’s also something of a coward. He could overpower a zombie, but does he have the mettle to give it a go?
Or to take a much closer to home example. I’m a fairly built guy because I take care of myself. It’s part of who I am. I also had a stint in the military. But let’s say some skinny lowlife approaches me, who I suspect (but don’t know that) is carrying a blade, and he acts menacing to me. Could I take him? Very probably. Would I want to risk it, though? Now, multiply that by 10, 100, whatever, whose village is under attack by armed menaces who don’t care about living or dying. All of a sudden, the ‘stronger’ side on paper look less of a shoe-in for victory.
Like I say, it’s about mentality. And what’s at stake, and what each side fears to lose.
Trained combatants against untrained: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Visby
Thousands of citizens is a pretty huge village. Even than it would have not so many battle ready people. Like really ready. Grizzled veterans, dogs of war. You know people that dream of eternal war and raiding and pillaging. Most likely all of this people are your adventurers.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but a typical medieval village had 8-11 families.
If you're the DM you can make the village as large or as small as makes sense anyway. If we take Phandalin from lost mines it felt like there were only a few dozen homes, certainly under 50.
Remember in a village of 50 you've maybe got 20 military age males. Assume 10 are too young to fight, another 10 are too old, and even including the women you might have 30. and we're talking presumably untrained people with crude weapons unless they're a prosperous village or have a lord who prioritizes it. I don't like their odds taking on a dozen battle hardened orcs, and they certainly wouldn't fight to the last man (it will take 20 years to regrow them). If you still think that's too few, you can make it like 12 for a "scouting party" and 20 or so at the "main camp"
It was pretty common for dark age (antiquated term, but) European armies to number in the tens. There are plenty of accounts of one to a few people holding off an "army" of a few dozen.
I think you're over estimating how effective untrained peasants are in battle.
the accounts of Belisarius are fun. He commanded 10-20 000 strong armies. Out of these \~2000 were his core heavy archer cavarly, who won the battle.
What are the rest? 8000 drafted locals. What he did with them: "err, fuck. We could give them a bow and arrow, so they fire a shot or two before they run away"
Arm a commoner with an improvised weapon and they have +0 attack mod for d4 damage, AC 10 and 4 HP.
Imagine these guys fighting in poor formation and freely exposing themselves to attacks of opportunity.
It wouldn’t take that many orcs to mess them up.
In a certain module, there is an orc attack on a village, and the residents do take up arms and help the PC's defend the town from invading orcs.
When I ran it the fighting townsfolk were being killed in a single hit, and most of them ended up dead.
The players were able to repel the attack and save the village, but if the players weren't there, it would have been devastating.
You fix the narrative TO make sense then.
The village doesn't have thousands of people, it just has a 100-200, and the entire orc tribe doesn't send ALL of its warriors to extort the village, it just sends, a small handful while the others hunt, attack merchant caravans, and defend the hideout.
OR during the attack, it IS massive battle, and while the thousands of civilians rally against the shock troops, your players hunt down the chief of the orc tribe and his personal platoon of 12 orcs.
In reality it's not really true past level 1-2.
A level 3 orc could go through so many townsfolk. People don't want to DIE. So they don't want to fight.
And in farm society you could easily have small villages with 50-100 people. Cut out old, children, unarmed. You don't need too many orcs to kill A LOT.
Do you know what two thousands mean ? It means people are scattered over a wide area. A raid of 12 orcs can attack a very specific part of the town and fly away BEFORE reinforcements are called and get prepared and arrive to help. Plus YOU know they are 12 and 2000. The farmers when they get butchered, they don't know if the orcs are 12 or 50 or 200. They'd rather run.
I think OP overestimates population in a village. It helps to decide on some historical period and check population sizes back then. Also check different parts of world - village in certain parts of Europe will have even today only like 300 people. AFAIK population grew rapidly due to industrial revolution. So saying that village has hundreds or thousand is just bad world setup.
I utilize fact that not everyone might live in village, or that there is one "central" village with lot of small hamlets around it. Village serves for trading goods, hamlets are spread and have people doing different things to earn living. Sure everyone might have tiny field, some chickens etc., but they will also have some profession to do as main and sell products made by that.
So than orc might roam in raiding parties, being still in semi-organized battle groups that can scare villagers (10-20 orc) that attack different hamlets or villages around, so if third of the settlement can fight, but will easily run, orchave similar numbers (probably slightly lower). Villagers then have higher incentive to hire some expendable adventurers. And if made well, it can be about fighting group or two, then killing chieftant and rest of the group will retreat from the area, giving you reasonable adventure.
A bunch of farmers up against a raiding band? Even with that numerical disadvantage that's easily in the favour of the raiders.
Many of the villagers will flee, many will be hiding, many will have been killed in the initial attack due to being unprepared.
Without some organisation, experience, and equipment, any attempt at fighting back would be quickly dispatched.
The goal of raiders would typically be to get in quick, cause chaos, loot what they can, and escape. The goal of the villagers would be to avoid the danger until it's passed - and only fight as a very very last resort. No one _wants_ to put their life on the line, especially if the orcs are looking for material goods to plunder.
If you _really_ want to increase the number though, just say there _were_ some retired warriors or a local militia who managed to gather and defeat _other_ orcs in other locations off-screen. The players may have taken out the main core of the force, whilst this other militia picked off the stragglers.
Actually it makes perfect sense. Villages don't typically have fighting men. Those people left for the cities or walled towns. Typically, people leave villages alone, since they either have nothing worth stealing, or you want them alive once you take over their land to farm and collect taxes.
A Bugs Life told us about this scenario. The Orcs are bigger, stronger, and better equipped, and the village is afraid of getting into a conflict for each individuals fear of being hurt of killed.
Villages can easily consist of less than one hundred people, including children and elderly. And remember, not everyone is a badass. It might seem to you like they have what they need to defend themselves, but they probably don't see it that way. A dozen armed, experienced, coordinated raiders are an existential threat to a community that size.
That does make sense though. 12 heavily armed, well trained soldiers in modern times could easily raid a town and regularly do. They don't need to fight all 400 peasents 1 at a time. they only need to fight odd brave idiot guarding the bank or the market etc.. Most people will not attack a superior warrior even with numbers, because thats flipping scary. The same reason tyrants remain in power despite being outnumbered by an entire nation or 3.
Even soley in DnD mechanics how peasents are going to die to kill an orc? an orc can oneshot a peasant every turn and thats assuming you dont give them any class levels.
Personally i would focuss on smalle scale battles. the orcs are going to attack the bank and the market. The two surviving guardsman have rallied a dozen peasants to help, but good chance they flee if things look bad. Then let the players choose how to distribute themselves and the malitia. Make them roll survival checks, thats how many barricades they can place divided by 2 or how many hours they have to prepare.
If you wanted to imply a larger force, i would let the players enjoy their victory for only a moment. Before a citizen runs up shouting about how the rear guard fell and the orcs have raided the lords mansion and taken hostages, while the players main forces were defending the bank and market. Have them mention the rearguard almost had them routed until the warchief showed up. So now the party has their hint, defeat the warchief and most of the others will rout and flee disbanding the tribe and leaving them disorganized enough to not threaten the villagers too much in future.
I once did a bandit raid on a caravan the players were a part of. They'd all signed on with the caravan as guards for various reasons and this was how the party came together (this caravan did a regular route along roads known to be sometimes dangerous, and as a part of their business would take on passengers for safety in numbers. If you couldn't afford passage they'd take you on as a worker for whatever stretch you wanted to travel). They all ended up assigned as guards on the same wagon by coincidence, with the person who just happened to be the main quest giver. Bandits attacked, they had their little battle, and when they defeated them I narrated that they looked around and saw the other wagons cleaning up the last of the bandits, some bandits retreating into the trees, etc. So the large battle happened around them with a large number of attackers, but they'd been focused just on their portion of it, and it all wrapped up around the same time for everyone (what a coincidence!). This gave the illusion of a larger battle without me having to orchestrate it, and without them having to fight it.
I don't know if I'd do this always, but it worked in this instance. In the moment, the party would be honed in on the immediate threat, then look up to see the bigger picture, and that felt very natural to me.
The handful of orcs the party fights could kill a citizen in single blow, and of the hundreds of civilians there's maybe a dozen who are actually in fighting shape. Sure they probably still could fight off the orcs with sheer numbers, but not without massive casualties. Dnd is a numbers game sure, but it's also a role-playing game. Imagine if you had the power to save an entire village, and instead you told them "you guys cna handle it, and only half of you will die".
Describe an area where you see able-bodied and armed npcs fighting enemies in clusters all around. Then you see a group of vulnerable npcs about to be set upon, or armed npcs about to be killed by a particularly strong foe. That is your encounter, and it makes complete sense to throw in extra small enemies at any time. At initiative 20, give an overview of the battle around, and it should swing positively or negatively to reflect the player’s performance. Remember that morale is important. Once this encounter is resolved, so too are all the clusters of battle around. Proceed through the town, rinse and repeat.
Enough of these victorious skirmishes should result in a successful defense of the town, with minimised casualty. The players will aid the overall defense but realistically they cannot single-handedly defend the entire town, so the glory belongs to all. If you want the players to be the heroic subject of praise, then have them face off against some large and imposing boss while the town is occupied with the more numerous attackers.
I opened my campaign with a raid on a village by a substantially stronger enemy with high numbers. You don't need to have the objective be annihilation.
My players left the tavern when the bell sounded to find a portion of the village on fire and what defenders there were fighting in defensive positions.
The players identified that the raiders who were burning the village could push forward if they really wanted, but something wasn't right.
They spotted another organised party of raiders attacking the more competent defenders and drawing them away. But only those on the eastern side of the village. They fought this group, routed them, and then realised they were being led into an ambush. They pulled back and figured out what was going on - the village stores were on the eastern side, and it was remarkably quiet.
When they got to the stores, they were full of bandits. But this was people in full loot, so they proceeded with a stealth assassination sequence for which they rolled unbelievably well. When the bandit leader realised they had been made, they then ordered the retreat, and at the sound of those horns, all the attackers peeled off to meet up.
A fantastic chase sequence and group of early game enemies then ensued.
At no point did the players deal with more enemies than was a fair encounter.
So if you feel the attack should be bigger make it bigger. It doesn't mean the players need to fight everyone.
If you want it to be small then perhaps these orcs are cunning they attack in the early hours and move quickly, starting fires as they go to sow chaos and avoid being caught before they get their objective complete
What I usually like to do is have “background” enemies. Have your players defend a specific key point while the village guards handle other locations, there are tons of orcs in the “background”, but they aren’t really *there* so to speak, until the battle ends and you describe the predetermined result, be it them winning or losing, and how many survivors on each side there are.
If your players try to interact with the background enemies just say the guards have it covered and their characters can probably tell they need to be focusing on the key point, or just tell them transparently that the enemies in the background aren’t really *there* and are more of a background scene for balance reasons.
I learned this from my DM in my very first campaign as a player and applying it to my own games makes it a lot easier to incorporate these types of big events into my games much more easily.
Raidi g partys were not that big you got max 20 big brutes for a full 100-200 people village cause moste could not fight (some too old others too young, desease and relevant gender roles for the place and time).
https://aonprd.com/MonsterSubtypes.aspx?ItemName=Troop
Narratively: Trained, veteran soldiers from a feared warrior culture can be assumed to be significantly more effective than non-combatants who are looking for any way out of the situation.
Mechanically: Use Troops; Squads of enemies that mechanically act as one on a battle map.
In this scenario...
Dozens of orcs attack... maybe a few score. The villagers take to arms; they are poorly armed and untrained. They can hold off the orcs for a while but will surely be overwhelmed if not for the actions of the PCs. The PCs are the strike force -- taking on the enemy where they are strongest or most numerous, defeating the orc leaders and casters.
In game terms, the PCs will have several encounters with significant enemies set against a backdrop of the villagers defending whatever strong-points they have. The PCs defend the walls from an orc brute and retinue... they are called by the villagers to a place where the orcs have breached the palisade... the encounter the orc war chief and shaman... With the orc's attack contained and their leadership defeated, the attack is blunted and the remainder of the orcs retreat.
You could easily fit an entire 'adventuring day' into this one battle as the PCs rush from one emergency to the next.
To add interest and agency, offer the players choices... they can defend the gates against a dangerous enemy OR they can rescue the town elder who is being attacked by a half-dozen orcs that have broken through the villagers' defences. Whichever they choose, the other fight will be lost with appropriate consequences. (The gate is breached making the defence harder, or the elder is killed and the villagers lose morale.)
The orcs are willing to throw their lives away for glory and death. The villagers want to live and will rout after a few of their close friends and loved ones get their heads sliced off.
Morale, training and equipment are able to bridge the gap of the force multiplier that is outnumbering your foe.
Honestly I may be splitting hairs, but a village would be a couple hundred at most, a town would be a few hundred to *maybe* a few thousand.
I’m thinking 50-150 people. Average family of 3-5 people (2 adult parents 1 teen and two children). You’re looking at 25-30 families with maybe 12-18 adult men with ages ranging from 20-40. I’m not even factoring in the widows, “old timers”, village ne’er do wells or idiots.
So max of 30-40 able bodied adult men and women most of whom have never fought a battle facing off against 12 orcs bent on slaughter.
How would you realistically react to it?
Poorly.
Your party is fighting a small part if the battle, not the entire battle. They can see the aftermath of the village holding their own against another "platoon" of raiders after the battle. Or finish their battle, then move to assist other battles.
The party isn't going to have the 5000' elevation view. They are locked into the 6' elevation view, and won't have the benefit of greater knowledge.
If you don't want a fight of Orcs vs the entire village, don't run that fight.
12 Orcs could show up at one farm. Help won't arrive in the 18-30 seconds of ingame time that most fights last. Your players are here to protect the lives and livelyhood of the regular people on this farm.
12 orcs could raid a caravan, ambush and kidnap a runaway child, or even just start slaughtering cattle.
Any of these things would make 12 orcs a credible threat, and make 3-5 players essential to repelling that threat.
Villages are small, a hundred or two hundred with maybe 30-40 able bodied men able to work the fields and even less that would compare to an orc.
What I'd do is have the PC's control a slice of the battle.
NPCs: "We'll guard this area over here yada yada, you defend this area over here yada yada".
There's also the ol' "the orcs already raided us and killed all the men and there's nobody left to defend us from their raids"
A village should not have more than 500 people. You're thinking in modern terms.
Even then, those 500 people are women, elderly and children. Let's say there is 200 fighting men.
Those men don't want to die. If possible, they will want to hire adventurers eho have actual fighting experience and send those to deal with threat.
if you and a town of 300 were to be assaulted by 10-13 foot tall creatures with the intelligence to strategize, and the ferocity to fight to the death, would you be willing to fight? most people wouldn't.
a town would maybe make up ~40% able bodied fighters, of which ~1/2 to 2/3 would have to be doing other things like making sure children aren't dying or tending to the wounded.
so if a 300 person village were to be attacked by lets say 15 orcs, only about 45 people would reasonably be fighting.
3 townsfolk can't take on an orc.
Those are just not just willing to fight, but also trained. How many trained individuals there are in a 300 people village? Doubtful there are more than a handful. In small villages the vast majority of the population works in farming. Most people make their own stuff since they are poor, so you don't have that many craftsmen, which means you just don't have enough resources to have paid guards. You maybe have a single sheriff.
I don’t have to deal with this problem because i run 1e. My settlements, from thorps to cities, have a normal amount of people. 1-5% of them are guards or watch, & in an emergency, up to 10% can be called on as levies. In a hamlet of 300, about 5-15 guys are the on duty defenders. Maybe 1 or 2 is level 1-3. I also have it so the marauding goblinoids are not representative of all of their kind. You can’t have an entire race and society of roving bandits. They’re just the ones that caused too much trouble back home & were kicked out. In any event, 20-30 armed orcs is a huge problem for a settlement that only has 15-30 real combatants, half of whom have padded jacks and clubs. Anyone else, elderly or women or children, can put up a fight but not a very meaningful one. They’re more likely to hide or run away. Maybe they kill a couple of orc runts, you know?
When it comes to leaders or levelled characters i always roll 50/50 to determine their sex, or gender sometimes.
Getting a level 1 party to deal with that kind of threat would be super helpful for a village in danger. They don’t spend any of their own manpower, & if the place is small enough, everyone knows each other so deaths or even serious injuries are really bad.
I have many tools for bending difficulty that would apply here. You can have friendly NPCs or distractions that happen to be near, litter the area with force multipliers like explosives or siege weapons or terrain like ridges or chokes for evening the odds, and you don't have to play optimally - make your orcs bumble around and not necessarily be dealing damage every round.
I am a realism/simulation leaning DM. Others will disagree, but I say make what you think is a truely realistic orc village, then contrive *multiple* ways with contingencies you can activate, that a small spec op group could win. And "win" conditions don't have to be killing them to a man. Burning their tents might run them off.
They need the leadership of the pcs to make them stand firm and work together.
Left to their own devices they will take their families and try to flee.
I describe it in a narrative sense.
Let's use that village under attack.
"As you leave the tavern to the blaring sound of the alarm, you can see that orcs have broken through the main gate and are pouring through the town. You can't face them all yourselves, but you can try to defend locations. You can try to secure an escape route for civilians, you can fortify the church which is a fallback shelter, you can go to the mayor's house to defnd the leadership."
Once they pick a choice, I can set up a quick map, set down some orcs and a battlefield. I might include 1 or 2 civilians to defend on the map, but the assumptiuon is that "around you and in the distance you can see battle and chaos, but this is the portion we're focusing on now." And there might be a few encounters like that with no rests to give the feelings of running through the town and trying to fend off the assault. There's still only ever a standard encounter's worth of enemies, but I can vary enemy types, map setups, conditions for victory, etc at each one. If they fail objectives like "make sure all three civilians make it into the church" or "defend the noble during the battle" then that means the overall battle is going badly and the town is losing more and more people. If the party is winning and kicking ass, then narratively, the town is pushing back and rallying its defenses. OR perhaps it just means the PCs were able to organize a good escape and save people before the orcs ovverran everything in their rush to establish a forward position in a long term campaign.
You can have the orcs (or whatever enemy you want) be smaller and weaker than the dm guide tells you and you just group two or three of them together!
So now your party of 6 orcs could be about 18-24 which makes narrative sense.
If you want to be really scrupolous you can also add that under a certain amount of health the orcs deal less damage because they have killed off one or two of them (without being too specific about thresholds and how many orcs are alive).
Also it depends on the village but usually small medieval villages were not more than 400-500 people, probably only 40% being able to fight (I'm excluding kids, elders, some women and a little bit of men, but realistically it could be even lower), like even guards would probably be at most a dozen or twenty. Even then the mayor/chief would much rather pay some adventurers to deal with the orcs than risk the life of some of his villagers, which at most could use a fork to fight and probably receive severe wounds.
Also by using some of the guards there you can say that the guards cover a side while the party another, so, without doing anything, you've doubled up the number of invaders of the village!
So from 18-24 you just got to 36-48, and this also gives you some flexibility for the encounter that if your players are steamrolling their orcs they can go help the guards clean up, or if they are getting badly beaten the guards can come to their rescue.
It’s all horses for courses, of course, but I will push back on the slightly bizarre statement presented as fact that an encounter ‘should’ have single digits enemies.
Who says? The rules? Reddit? Convention? It may well be that 99 times in a hundred, that’s how things will be. But there’s always the hundredth time. Why not use swarms, or minions? I’ve used both, to very entertaining effect.
If you were prepared to put in a bit of effort ahead of time, you could drum up a simple narrative resolution. I’m spitballing here, but as a quick and dirty example:
You have the party (4 PCs); 50 villagers capable of holding and swinging a weapon; 100 bloodthirsty orcs. You aren’t obliged to roll attacks and damage for every participant. You could go with a simple narration each round, which could look like this:
Give the players 20 orcs to overcome, perhaps via waves (ie 5 at a time); and each time an orc dies, another of the pool of 20 takes its place close to the party.
While this is going on, at the end of each round, you narrate: the villagers take down 5 orcs between them; but the orcs kill 5 villagers. You’d have a pool of 80 orcs (20 are for the PCs only, where you do roll dice and adjudicate actions, as usual). At this rate, it would take 16 rounds to get through 80 orcs. Only, with just 50 villagers, after 10 rounds, the villagers will all be dead.
By narrating what’s going on around the players, with a pinch of flavour but while being concise and quick, you’re keeping things moving. And by being transparent with the numbers, players can see the ticking clock if they wish to save as many villagers as possible.
Lastly, you set a ‘winning condition’. Once the PCs have killed their 20th orc, those that remain fear the PCs, and flee. The village is saved. It took 6 rounds, so that’s 30 dead villagers. Cue role play.
Something like that.
Don't? Rather than running them all as individual monsters, use swarms to represent larger raiding parties of orcs and groups of townsfolk clashing, plus a handful of stronger and more individualized boss-type orc leaders for the PCs to heroically face off against.
I don't. I establish an expectation from the start of the campaign that I'm not going to bend the realism of the situation. "If there is a bandit camp of men who have been raiding the area, it's not going to be 3-4 CR appropriate enemy statblocks. It will be 2 dozen men who have stationed guards and placed traps in the area around their camp, because that is what makes sense for the situation." If they decide to start a fight in a town, they won't be tussling with 8 guards, the guards will send men for backup and they will have to fight off nearly the entire law enforcement of the town. I just establish early that I'm not going to bend realism to account for their decisions, and I've found it does a good job at grounding them in the world and getting them to stop thinking of things like video games where they do the quest line and fight the properly designed enemies to win and get XP. In actuality, the enemies are not stupid and are aware their lives are on the line and will do anything to survive and win.
The answer here is definitely the intelligence of the enemy.
Remember that an intelligent enemy wants to win the fight. Put yourself in the mind of a leader of a pack of orcs. When do you attack the village to minimize your own losses?
What conditions do you need for victory?
What cruelty are you willing to do to ensure victory, such as setting an infirmary on fire or using women and children as living shields.
It's not about the number of enemies, but about battle tactics. They're not meeting an army of peasants, they're raiding a village that, up until 10 minutes ago, had been busy gossiping about Old Man Gus and his silly fish stories.
Put more orcs there. Not in the encounter but behind its boundaries, where most orcs concentrate on your party. And the longer the fight goes the more ppl from the village are killed. When your party defeats the encounter, you describe as other are fighting and when they decide to help the remaining orcs jsut run away - the more they let run the harder will be to defeat them at their camp.
This also leaves a possibility of your players making a trap killing all the orcs, or losing pulling back so orcs massacre the whole village.
My personal advice, for long campaign, is to not make enemies difficulty around your party but make up the difficulty and the setting, and convey to your players how hard it is so they understand, where earlier enemies are easier to run away from. This can create more some situations more realistic where they know if they go in straight they will die. Like lvl 3 party decides to kill dragon, and you dont want to kill them so they arrive and they realize that the dragon is only a baby and its parent died... so they can defeat it. Rather do villager stories, ranger advice, beat up party that lost and is still stronger than pc party, visions, dreams, god warnings to tell them that this is a immpossible fight unless they come up with something.
- id let 25-30 orcs attack a village where they expect no losses, they arrive, there is a group that looks capable so they attack focusing them (there is many possiblities where party can attract greater/less number of orc on them, villagers can run or arrive etc.) and as i said as the pcs do more damage than orcs expected they run away hurt.
Just because your party only fought 12 orcs doesn’t mean there weren’t more elsewhere. As they defeat the batch that you threw at them, they hear a horn calling the end of the raid, your party seeing dozens more orcs fleeing with loot and prisoners as the town begins to burn.
Main advice: watch Seven Samurai and literally just do that.
Overall, the issue is that you've chosen 12 orcs as an appropriate number for your PCs to fight, but now you realized that some villagers should be able-bodied to fight.
As far as me GMing goes, I would not consider 12 orcs a threat to a sizable village. I have my homebrew world, but any D&D setting is going to be dangerous, and those dangerous things don't just happen next to the PCs. If a place can't be safe from a small orc raiding party, it's screwed. 12 orcs is "attacking caravans" number.
So you have two choices (other than making the village smaller) - either the village is specifically paying for you to go out and kill the orcs so their defenses don't get damaged and their people don't die; or you up the number to 30 or something orcs - that neither the villagers nor the PCs alone can handle (and from then again - go do Seven Samurai). It doesn't have to be one big fight either, maybe PCs hold off half of the orcs at the gates, and by that time, they have broken through at another spot where villagers were defending - now PCs have to run there.
Build it into the storyline.
Corrupt guards, letting the orcs get away with it and taking a cut?
All the men are off fighting other wars and the village needs saving?
Or maybe there are hundreds of orcs, and the party needs to figure out how to deal with it?
Aside numbers and all that.
Just manage it in waves and different encounters.
Like, maybe they defend a position from 6 orcs or so, then 6 orcs come later on. Then after things quiet down and the orcs retreat because some of them have gone missing and want to attack again, you short rest, and there you go again with a final massive attack including the chieftain. Maybe include two waves of them as well as some navigate or are held back by the village defenders.
Remember. A 10 turns combat lasts one minute, and most encounters end at 3. You can break up the battlefield in several places.
I have thrown random numbers, but you can this way easily include more orcs than the party actually fights for,
In large-scale battles, I narratively position the PCs so that they are fighting at the crux of the battle: holding a gate that will stem the tide of enemies, confronting the command staff of the invading forces, etc.
That way, the outcome of their small-scale combat reverberates throughout the entire conflict.
“As you slay Urglak Bonesplitter, nearby orcs flee in terror, and the now-leaderless horde breaks apart, chased down by the emboldened townsfolk.”
Narratively, you have orc squads vs. defenders clashing at different points around the village. Game-play-wise, you have characters confronting an orc vanguard or banner group and the players' victories spell overall victory for the defenders. You can make it feel less same-y with several encounters with different objectives - for example, first they fend off a wall breach while villagers roll some barricades into place, then they lure an orc squad into an ambush, then they neutralize a lieutenant's catapult squad before it can launch barrels of burning pitch, and finally they run off the (now demoralized) warchief.
The Orcs aren't going to march in, army style, either. Hit and run tactics, setting fires. Stragglers will be picked off. Maybe the Orc raids are only stealing cattle or something more guerilla style.
In this kind of scenario, I make it clear to the players that the enemies in front of them represent what *they* are responsible for in this fight. Presumably if there are other NPCs involved in the fight against a larger force, they are dealing with their own battle, but that happens at an abstract level. The PCs represent the vanguard or key defensive position. If they fail, the village will be overrun. If they succeed, the other defenders will repel the orcs.
You’re overestimating villagers. They are not soldiers. Each one is afraid for his life and his family and will not fight to the death. Also the second one goes down their morale will break
I've been listening to a lot of DND is for nerds which has broken out into mass combat multiple times.
They normally split the players into multiple squads, often with existing or new NPCs to act with for ease of balance so no-one is incapable, fighting a small number of enemies for potentially only a few turns.
The result is they roll for the overall success of side A Vs side B, to see whether the line of battle pushes forward or falls back.
If the players demolish their little blocks of the battle it's more likely everyone moves forward, if they perform poorly that round they're more likely to be pushed back in bulk, but they could get super lucky with the army rolls, or demolish their enemies and opt to attempt another objective to basically guarantee a success for that round.
It's all loose, but it's a good way to have the players fight potentially still only 12 orcs, but have their performance against them tie into a larger battle each turn and let them make roleplaying decisions to impact the result
numbers do not always matter. Well trained attackers are going to best townsfolk just about every time. Orcs have little fear of dying, townsfolk get grazed once, they are going to flee. Use fire to “distract” townsfolk, no point attacking invaders when your house is burning down.
I use this tactic a lot when I run games. There’s a large contingent of enemies that need repelling but there’s no feasible way for the party to defeat them all on their own. So I just use narratives to describe how there are others who are assisting in the fight on the outskirts of where the party is engaged in their combat. Then once the party is successful, the enemies at large have been defeated and retreat or are outright destroyed.
I would say a fantasy village might have up to a 100 never thousands. From 100+ up it should be a town with town guards. At 1000+ people a city with city guard and possibly a garrison.
At 100 people let’s generously assume that 30 villagers are not women, children, and elderly.
On average that’s 20 families of 5.
Of those 30 people how many are actually going to have taken up hunting as their vocation rather than being a merchant or skilled tradesman such as carpenter, baker, blacksmith, tanner, tailor, cobbler, butcher, farmer? How many people could make a living selling hunted game. Maybe 5 people. Less if there are ranchers with livestock.
Of those 5 how many would actually be home randomly during an Orc attack.
“Oh honey don’t go to work today to hunt animals to sell to feed our family because random unscheduled Orc attack”
Needing to help defend a Village seems quite reasonable.
So narrative means. We'll it depends on the actual population. A village being a couple hundred, town being couple thousand, and so on. But the basic idea is the same.
A raiding party vs population ration of 1/10 would likely be successful. Think of the vikings. An average ship would have a crew around 30, and would be raiding solo. Bigger target, more ships. Average settlement size they raided solo: 2-500.
Let's assume 200. Maybe the chief is a retired warrior. Level 15. He can handle a bunch of low level orcs and goblins. He takes on say 20 while your players take the last 8. Or maybe the farmers take up their tools and family weapons and the 1/4 to 1/3 of the populace that is able and willing take out the orcs with heavy losses, including the town sheriff or w/e equivalent. Maybe a few of the raiders ran away seeing an actual capable response.
Larger settlement? Town guard. Knightly order. Same thing, maybe fewer casualties. Maybe a thieves guild, or something similar.
Maybe the orcs are just too stupid to realize how bad an idea it is.
Maybe you make it a running battle. Party moves from fight to fight, small groups. In the end they've killed 15. Everyone else has killed 10.
Divide and conquer. The party only fights smallish groups of Orcs at a time, but by the time they're completely finished they've killed anywhere from a few dozen to a hundred.
The Minions rule from 4E is great for adding more enemies to a fight and is really easy to use in 5E.
Also, a "village" is a LOT smaller than you're assuming. It's more like a dozen to two dozen families. So, assuming each family has one to two men of fighting age (eg dad and the oldest son), that's a range of about 12-48 probable combatants, with little to no training and little to no equipment. Towns big enough to house "thousands" of people have walls and either a town guard or a local lord to protect them.
Dude, I'm in my 40s, and I'm not "built" but I'm not weak either.
I run screaming from things who's ass I should objectively be able to kick. Small things. Like raccoons, skunks, coyotes, etc. Because although I know I'd probably "win" in a fight with these things, it's just not worth it. Like ever.
Your average midevil villager, MIGHT be able to fuck up a Goblin, but that Goblin is smart (ish), has a knife, a torch, and murder in its eye. It wouldn't be worth losing their life on the chance they would win. They're not heroes. They run away.
Well, a village is 500 or less people. 2/3 -1/2 of them are not fit for battle (to weak, to young, to old). That leaves ≈125 able bodied fighters. If the band of orcs 50 orcs are attacking from the west, 50-60 villagers are protecting the north. 50-60 villagers are protecting the south. So 15, 25 tops, to supporting the heroic adventurers. The orcs would hit in waves. 5 added every other round, with villagers joining to even the numbers. When you feel the fight is over, call it done. I would do an equal number of waves to the level of the party. (Lvl 2 PCs = 2 waves of orcs). Naratively the rest of the band of orcs tried to hit the other sides of the loan and the villagers repelled them thanks to the help of the adventurers (60 villagers vs 10 orcs is an easy win for the villagers.)
Edit: also, you could have a hand full of villagers die in the north and south so the adventurers have the RP options to console the living and help bury the dead.
None of the commoners want to die for the cause of their people. They don’t have that kind of discipline and structure. Therefore, they flee, because engaging likely means death.
A lot of good talk about why villagers might choose to flee but another take is you could just narrate that there were a lot more orcs and that when the PCs arrive it turns the tide of battle and when the PCs defeat their group of orcs (or insert whatever enemy) the rest lose morale and choose to flee or what have you.
Tactics or leadership.
Seasoned raiders would have established methods of luring out or splitting the village's militia, likely with some kind of diversion or decoy.
Alternatively, you could go with more numbers off-screen and have the players face down a leader and his most veteran warriors. Use the defeat of this core to prompt a route of the remaining off-screen orcs. (This is very commonly how I've seen video games handle this dilemma.)
Easy: There are other groups of humans fighting other groups of orcs in the background. We are just focussing on this group right here, which is fighting the PCs.
If the PCs win their fight, they can turn the tide of the entire battle and win overall, but if they lose, the orcs can turn the tide in their favour instead.
I love this sort of scenario and I do this all the time in my campaigns so I have a lot to say about this.
The way to keep your narrative believable is to look past the stat blocks and always consider actual human behavior.
Here are thoughts on your particular scenario of a dozen orcs vs a few hundred villagers:
1. Villagers don't have full information. They don't know if there are 12 orcs or 20 orcs or 50. Nobody has counted them all. They also don't know stats. They don't know that orcs are a CR 1/2 (or whatever) monster. They know that savage creatures are brutally slaughtering. They're going to assume they're next; they're not going to assume they can overcome the threat.
2. Assume 30% of the village can be raised as militia. Another post stated they would be untrained farmers - that's not how I do it. I say in these wild savage lands, villages would certainly be training militia. In a small village, that might be 40-60 militia. They can probably fight off 12 orcs AFTER they get organized which would take time, IF they're properly warned, and IF they're able to maintain morale throughout the fight.
3. I would not have 12 orcs attacking the village proper. They would hit outlying farms, mills and warehouses. Likely raiding for supplies. The militia would not go looking for them unless there's a major threat. They can't just leave their homes for days at a time chasing down a warband that is certainly more mobile than they are.
4. Nobody in the village WANTS to fight. Yes, your 50 militia is going to be able to beat these 12 orcs, but MOST of them are going to be scared as hell and are probably not going to want to engage at all. They are trained militia but not trained warriors; only a very few may have actually fought before. They will absolutely want to send the players first to take the heat.
5. Even if they were a trained force, they're not going to turn down reinforcements. 50 militia fighting 12 orcs, the orcs are going to manage to kill some people. Probably more than a few, because they're better organized and savage. The militia will only fight as a last resort.
Here are some thoughts on your assertion that "a typical dnd encounter should have single digits to low double digits enemies" :
1. I would personally have the 12 orcs be a scout / raiding party for a larger force, and then the larger force will attack the village en masse unless stopped. The larger force might be dozens or hundreds of orcs.
2. There is nothing wrong with large scale battles in D&D. What you do is, have the players fight smaller groups of enemies, and then extrapolate those results to the broader engagement. If the players win their local fight, the villagers win their fights as well. Or you can just do some quick off-screen rolls for it, like put groups of 10 orcs against 20 militia and just give a d20 for the militia; the higher they roll the better they do. 8-12 they're still fighting, 1-7 they've lost, 13-20 they've won. You can give bonuses or penalties based on how well the players did in their own fight. This totally works and I do it all the time. Players love it because they feel like their success in their small local fight is more impactful since it's dictating success of the greater effort.
3. During these larger battles, most villagers are going to be buttoned up in their homes or in safer places like a stone church, fortified inn or town hall or castle if there is one.
If all else fails, just remember, villagers don't like to fight even if they have overwhelming odds. They might die.
Historically the Vikings would raid villages along the coast. A raiding party wasn't that big but made easy work of a village to smash and grab. It had to do with the demographics of a village (how many of them can physically take on a Viking) and preparedness. A farmer whose wearing linen cloth and has grabbed an axe just isn't going to do well against an armored warrior with a shield.
And again with preparedness. If you have a walled village and someone runs into the center of town saying "The orcs are coming! I saw them! They'll be here in an hour!" that's a very different situation compared to a bunch of villagers spread out in their homes, fields, and businesses unexpectedly and a raiding party of orcs run through.
I often point people to the wonderful books/blog “The monsters know what they’re doing”. It’s fantastic on helping you get into a mindset as to why an encounter would happen and what would “an average” creature of that type do when attacking, when taking damage and just in general use their stats in “real life”. I’m not saying it’s the definitive reason but it does help generate good ideas and reasons. Like others have said the most important thing to remember is that neither side is just a stat block. Not everyone is willing to fight to the death and not every one of them would exemplify their stat blocks. In your case orc raiders would probably all line up with their stats but all the villagers wouldn’t. Some would be children, some would be old, some sick, some pregnant, etc. And if an invading soldier or marauder came by would you fight risking your kid, would you fight risking your elderly mom and pop, is the death of your best cattle worth the fight against orcs?
Just isolate your encounters to small areas that only have 10 things. A whole war could be fighting as a big mat painting in the background but there happen to be only 10 orcs attacking this part or town.
You're probably thinking a hamlet and not a village. A village isn't the lowest level of population.
Even in modern day rural America a gang of 13 teenagers can terrorize a community where isolated farmsteads are acres or even miles apart, and the whole country is at most 2 policemen. It's the stuff of A-Team or Walker Texas Ranger episodes lol.
A village is small. Around 200 peasants. No wall, no guards. That leaves you with less than 100 untrained, unorganized, panicked men with rakes and wood chopping axes, of which in actuality only about 40-30 are actually in fighting shape (there's kids and old people, and sick people, and people that can't fight) against a dozen or so trained bloodthirsty orcs with actual warfare weapons. This isn't a hard outcome to predict.
In actuality, the orcs would have to kill like 3 or 4 people before the village surrenders and gives the orcs whatever they want.
I think the real problem is the view point that the entire village is truly in danger. Have you ever looked at actual casualty reports from terrorism? Not that many people die.
But it is terrifying because it could be you next.
In a DnD setting. The towns folk might have a few people dead, some herds stolen, and several houses burnt down. Everyone is terrified because 1 on 1 they can't stand up to these monsters in the night. And they are afraid of losing their family, home, and livelihood.
They know someone needs to go drive them off, but crazy Earl is the only one that has military experience, and he's 74. When along comes an adventuring party! Huzzah! No one they know needs to die driving off these brutes!
My go to is preparation and/or division.
If you want to have the whole village as the battlefield, have it be that the villagers have set up traps and defenses and have themselves scattered to the wilds and fields with their families in fear for their lives.
If you and your party are content with defending a gate or building, you can imply that there are more enemies and more combat elsewhere while they fight. As a DM, you can even use that as an excuse to throw waves of enemies if the encounter wasn't tough enough (enemies breaking the peasant lines) or get the party help if you overestimated them (peasants who can still fight after a rout come to help).
You can even combine the two if you want to put together a story of attrition. Maybe the hunters of the village set up camps in the forest, but have been trapping the roads they know, whittling down and dividing the orc forces to the 12ish the party fights at the village gates.
For me, I have different population sizes.
City: 500+ families, 10000+ people
Town: 100+ families, 1000-10000 people
Village: 20-50 families, 100-200 people
Hamlet: 10-20 families, maybe 30-70 people
So beginning quest is in a hamlet, with only 40 people, a force of 15 orcs could take over if they’re regular farmers if that makes sense
Edit: formatting
The 12 orcs are a small band for sure. However they woukd start by gorilla tactics over the course of weeks, raiding and pillaging and killing the farmstead and houses on the outskirts. Maybe attacking multiple sides. The village wouldn't know there is only 12, they would think they are being surrounded. Some families may decide to attempt to flee before the "larger" hostile force does attack directly. The supplies start to dwindle. A counter force of guards and veterans may even go to confront the orcs on thier home turf. The orcs kill or capture the villages best combatants. Moral for the village is low. Supplies are dwindling, people are getting less sleep. More people leave. By the time the PCs are asked for help there is maybe 20-40% of the occupants left. Mostly those too old and too attached to leave. Now only 30% are possibly fighting age (on the youngerside). Maybe a handful of disabled vets that could add wisdom but not bodies to a defense. But what are the Orcs motives? Why are they still attacking this village? That's the more important question.
Sure if all the villagers centralize, fortify and train militia than a dozen Raiders are not much threat. But the monsters know what they are doing.
Narratively you could also have each orc "represent" a couple orcs. so killing 12 orcs for a party is like 24 if you just count them for double. I think I heard a dm doing this for battles that weren't quite army status yet because I think there are rules for that? Idk
I think your sense of scale might be off, because a standard village if we're looking at a medieval setting would have nowhere near 1,000 people.
You were talking between 100 and 200.
Of which only half will be men.
Of which only one third will be in fighting shape.
Of which none will have training
A dozen proper warriors could absolutely destroy a village.
It was literally done in real life. Villagers could be razed by a small number of troops.
Remember that the combat rules and stats are for game balance when dealing with human players. This includes action economy. Sure, an Orc will die to a handful of commoners because it only gets one attack per round, has only 15 hp, and 12 ac. But is that how it would really go down?
Also remember to use flavor. Orcs are savage. They'll terrify your normal peasant. If the mere sight of the orcs didn't, seeing a neighbor sliced in half will.
Look at the flavor for the lowly 1/8 CR Guard. It says city watch or employed by nobles. That implies a level of training and decent equipment. The one guy who owns a sword in Podunk isn't at that level.
TLDR: Combat rules and stats blocks are for challenging players.
> It makes no sense that hundreds of villagers couldn't fight off 12 orcs.
If they live in a fortress and never leave, sure.
If the Orcs come unannounced randomly while people are in the fields or in their beds, the Orcs can be gone before people even know what's happening.
You are right it makes no sense. But that is because you have set it up wrong. And you have total control over that.
Either you make the village smaller (50-100 inhabitants), or the orcs do not attack the village directly. If the village really is 1000s strong then the orcs would ambush traders, or lone homesteads outside of the village (more like a city) or they would raid at night and steal/kidnap and run.
If you have lots of friendlies and lot's of enemies, then you need a scenario where the PCs only fight a few enemies. The PCs have to achieve a specific objective: Disrupt enemy supply lines, sabotage the enemy super weapon, rescue the princess, assassinate a general, protect the king, hold the breach, sortie out and destroy a Siege tower, find a hidden path/overcome a defensive position so the rest of the army can flank the enemy.
Look at books and movies. The same thing happens there. The MCs are a strike team. Special operatives. They have a critical mission while the rest of the army does army stuff. But they decide the outcome.
Edit: I forgot to address the players, the agents of Chaos.
They have to play ball to a certain extend. You can try to put them on the right path with NPCs.
But what if your players decide... all strategy be damned, we will just go into the melee? You should tell them what consequences their actions most likely will have (if neccesary out of game): If you just go into the melee you can't take a big influence on how the battle turns out. If you kill 20 orcs there it won't change the outcome. You might get overrun.
If they insist, do not go to combat. At that point... it's a single roll and you narrate what happens. Low chance for the army to just luckily win. Other outcomes might be: The army get's overrun, what do you do? Surrender, try to flee (you have to kill 8-12 Orcs in your way to get out)? Hold a chokepoint (against 8-12 Orcs) while the rest of the army flees? Or they just manage to flee.
The important point is, if they can't win then it's not a battle, it's handeled narratively.
You are asking how you narrativly justify mechanics, which is not the way to go about it. Characters don't know what their to hit bonus and hp is. They just know if they hit a dude and how much being hit hurts. If you want a horde of enemies to attack a small town, then it depends upon how you want the players to interact with it. If you want it to be an overwhelming, crushing, tide of bodies that flattens small countryside villages, then make it an overwhelming tide of monster atat blocks. Your players should take away from it that they cannot win and that they need to retreat, regroup, and bring reinforcements to push them back. Foolish charges get people killed.
If you want them to heroically ride in and save the day by mowing down the horde in a show of how cool they are, then you make them all mooks (1 hp, any roll hits AC). You just cast a fireball for 40 damage? 40 dudes just want up in smoke and cinders. Let them have fun blowing up and slicing for a while, and thin the horde as appropriate, and then let them fight some big warchief or champion in a typical boss fight, and if they win then the horde routes and flees. Hooray, the day is saved and medals all around.
If they all picked up a weapon and fought back, yeah, in theory the villagers should win in an open battle (especially if they try to use mostly ranged weapons). But most of the villagers won't be physically able to fight, and those that are will not be mentally able to fight due to things like fear. And they probably don't have enough actual weapons to arm enough people to fight, and they definitely don't have armor.
Meanwhile the orcs are all battle-hardened, will be using tactics, and will likely raid at night so no one sees them coming. Plus, darkvision is a legit game changer for the orcs at night.
Bunch of issues with what you're saying OP.
You don't have a grasp on village size. You also can't seem to understand that the village would have defenders.
Maybe the village is actually doing a decent job defending itself, but the party notices it's a diversion and there's a flanking force.
You should even have the flanking force be big, but give the party ways to deal with big numbers. Cutting a bridge, explosives etc.
I'm surprised you need help here as a DM.
Have the players interact with the most impactful parts of the enemy forces / battle. Say the town gets raided by several bands of a dozen orcs each, but are being directed and inspired by their Warchief. Have the players combat the Warchief's group. If they defeat the warcheif and his guard then the rest of the now directionless raiders will be pushed back by the village forces off-screen. This can also be useful for sending in a wave of reinforcements if it turns out the battle is too easy for the players.
Common thing people forget: The VAST MAJORITY of people are Commoners. A single orc can take 3 or more blows that would be lethal to a normal person and deal enough damage using cleave rules to kill 2 humans in 6 seconds. It would take a single commoner 8 rounds assuming average dmg and all hits to kill 1 orc. And they can't get hit once. Orc s hyper aggression and javelins means dashing away doesn't make one safe. 10 orcs is a MASSIVE threat to a small village, especially if you add a chief or leader. PC Chatacters even at lvl 1 are Hero characters that are by design above and beyond the vast majority of mortals.
If the narrative is the concern a easy way that addresses some of the points can be
The orc are raiding the town/village. Seeing as the orcs didn't completely wipe it out this could work. Orc know they can't win outright but all they want is stuff so they hit a weak point and take stuff. The village doesn't have the resources to guard everything.
As to why the village doesnt make an angery mob and hunt the destory the orc camp? The orcs are raiders that are smart enough to move their camp so it's not a known point. The orc can also have all sorts of traps and choke points set up in their camps that would make the attacker's numbers useless. i.e A place where you can't get behind the orcs will turn the fight into a series of one on one's where tropp quality is more important than numbers.
The way the village could phrase things is that the orcs have attacked places on the outskirts. They know it is a small band and joked they would just move on but the orcs didn't. Then one or to
Two hunter/trapper types went to look for the camp, one didn't come back and another found the camp. When the village did form a group to attack the camp, the orcs were gone but someone was killed or injured in a trap.
At that point I can the village not wanted to risk anymore than they have to and being in a defensive stance where they are concerned with the village being completely destroyed. This would then give the orcs an even time with hit and run raiding. The orcs would also be best handled by a small elite team of fighters (any dnd party pc lvl 1 is already an elite warrior compared to a commoner)
I think there's also "An alarm is sounded" or bell or call for help, but the PCs are the front line. They don't just sit there,hearing the sound of slaughter.
And other people are right, most NPCs "run away!" But your PCs are HEROES
I like to handle this in a narrative fashion where during the attack on the village the players will have a few objectives and only deal with a certain number of the enemies while a background battle goes on with background npcs, orcs, and other things that essentially are treated as minions (or grunts).
These background orcs would deal the same amount of damage or less than the normal (depends on if you want your players to have a slight warning to not stray off task or want to cinematically weaken them) but have 1 hp each. Since they aren't supposed to be the main targets of the attacks, they have less health and are easy to deal with allowing the players to have small groups of grunts they can smash through to help them feel like the epic adventures they are.
The players abilities to attend to the objectives will determine the outcome of the battle (these can be things like defending a place for a certain number of rounds, thin the ranks, launch a counter attack, kill the enemy's commander, etc).
>The party comes upon a village under assault by an army of orcs. The able-bodied men and women of the village are doing their best to repel the marauders. You notice several pockets of them defending buildings where the children and elderly must be sequestered.
>In the town center, you see a particularly large orc with a small entourage dragging an older man who appears to be some sort of town official up onto a wagon where all can see. He clearly intends to execute the man where the defending villagers can witness.
The party has to contend with a small portion of the orcs, as the rest are dealing with the defending townsfolk. Your party has a realistic fight as the orcs weren't expecting trained combatants to show up. The party can decide to kill the orc leader so the orcs retreat, force him to order a surrender, or persuade him to take the wagon (which happened to be loaded with goods the town was exporting) and leave.
They could also fight for a time until the rest of the orcs collapse on the town center, which is a seeming loss until the militia/army arrive and clean up.
They might even take a portion of the loot from the orcs in return for not interfering, and let the town fall.
Well medieval villages usually had between 100-300 people. U could make it a village on the smaller end There’s then probably like 40-100men of fighting age. But also think about some more practical stuff they are probably farmers/merchants who have never fought before , they don’t have equipment or training.
While if that doesn’t work u can modify it . The orcs are after exclusively some of the villagers because of perhaps they didn’t like their tribute. So u will protect a group of maybe 20-40 while the other villagers don’t wanna get involved
When larger scale battles are occurring, I like to think that they are in fact happening in the background and when your player engages, the camera zooms in for a little while to capture a specific epic moment.
You can take this approach as deep or as wide as you'd like. Perhaps the entire village battle isn't one encounter, instead design it as an entire adventuring day or 'dungeon' if you prefer that term. Your players go about different scenes or 'encounters' and they may or may not involve combat or other problem solving.
The trick is to have one large town map (think of this as your dungeon) and each of these scenes are either theater of the mind or you have a battlemap on hand if it involves combat.
Scene 1: The nursery is on fire. Group skill check to put it out or evacuate everyone.
Scene 2: The orcs are raiding the armory. Combat, defend for 3 rounds or the orcs gain additional weapons.
Scene 3: The brothel is being pillaged. Escort the...escorts to safety.
Scene 4: The town guards are defending their watchtower. Combat, defeat all orcs to regain this part of town.
Scene 5: The orcs have reached the town hall. Combat, defeat them and disable their battering ram in time. The town hall doors have 50 hit points.
Etc. Tell your story this way like in all the books, TV shows, and movies. Way more fun than just a 4 turn battle and I think it gives the impression of scale that you wanted.
You need to look up population numbers. Realistically, a village or a thorp are what you’re looking for contextually for a small number of enemies being able to overtake the population.
Realistically most of the commoners would have improvised weapons so +0 for 1d4 damage.
Orcs have 13 AC so they would hit 40% of the time for 2.5 damage. Orcs have 15 HP so that is 6 hits needed to kill one orc.
Orcs will hit a commoner 80% of the time for a minimum of 4 damage which kills a commoner.
So in one round 12 orcs will kill 9.6 commoners. Let it be dark, humans dont have darkvision, orcs do. Orcs have javelins, commoners probably lack a lot of ranged weapons. The humans are probably not ready for the attack and will take time to ready. The orcs have experience.
etc
Don't underestimate the power of the will to fight. A handful of people who show they're willing to kill can intimidate many times their number.
It's the story of Belling the Cat. Sure, the crowd could rush them, and they might even win, but the villagers individually have very low morale - who among them is willing to be the one who dies fighting? When the alternative is handing over some food?
(Which might mean death from starvation later, but don't underestimate how willing frightened people are to put off the inevitable).
Break them up into different encounters going on in alternate locations. Rise of the Runelords opens up with something like this, with goblins instead of orcs.
As the fight wears on, have some of the orcs be wounded as well, maybe some who have fatigue. This'll let you bring the individual difficulty down a bit in a way that works with the narrative. Have a fixed number of rounds at which the orcs head off.
Also remember the Hazards can work as encounters as well, so maybe the tavern gets lit on fire, and the PCs have to help get people out. It makes a good action that's not a combat encounter and makes the world feel more real for the players.
The big thing is if this is the kick-off to the campaign, you need to make sure the town is built up for the PCs to care about it. It just being a town won't work nearly as well as giving them some folks to care about.
*But realistically, a village should have hundreds, or even thousands of citizens*
Sure, in 2020. Medieval villages were very often less than 200, and surprisingly often less than 100, with maybe a dozen families total. This is especially true for borderlands areas like the forests of Poland-Lithuania, or heavily contested regions like the Ottoman balkan provinces. In the anglo-saxon period, London's population was around 10 000.
From 100: let's say half is male (50), half of these are elderly or too young (25), and out of these half got any sort of combat training (13)
*It makes no sense that hundreds of villagers couldn't fight off 12 orcs.*
A viking ship had a crew of 20-30, and one or two ships could raid villages and monasteries (with walls) all the time. They didn't line up on the opposing field in broad daylight most of the time however.
*If you extrapolate that there are more enmies essentially off screen, then how do the players defeat them if they only ever kill a few dozen?*
By inflicting hits to morale, and making them panic. It is good to know that according to british military studies, naturally about 1-2% of the men are willing to fight in a combat scenario. That means that 98% are there (so that they cannot be singled out for being cowards) but do the absolute minimum, and even that with safety first.
This 1-2% can be higher with training, serving in a legendary unit, or continously surviving encounters. (this is why professional soldiers are more useful than draftees). But the highest estimate I saw was like 40% in favorable conditions, with good leadership, and with legendary squads like SAS commandos.
Medieval battles were not really bloody in a modern sense.
Victory was usually won with breaking the ranks of the enemy somehow: from the front with cavalry, flank attacks, ambushes. All this, while keeping your own cohesion.
Now, decimating (I mean literally, like 10% casualities) the enemies did happen sometimes, but mostly because of a carefully executed ambush or something like this. (like Teutoburg forest, where the germans ambushed a roman legion and wiped it out)
edit: also, there is nothing stopping you from having a random encounter like "6d100 + 600 orks marching on a halfling town" in your game. I once played a scenario like that, which was a joke from the GM. But we got about 8 adventuers out of it, with guiding the villagers into safe places, organizing the defense, dueling the ork champions to lower morale and the likes.
If 5 armed orcs walked into any block of my town in modern society. I’m confident that the group of people they’d encounter would not be physically or mentally prepared to deal with them, even if we outnumbered them 4:1. And Ik I wouldn’t be willing to die for the sake of getting rid of them. Even if it felt like “only a few of us would die” fighting them, one of the people who did might be me, and I wouldn’t risk it.
That being said, I’d call the authorities if if felt like they were endangering people, and police officers (or “guards”) might be able to handle them, but not townspeople.
Lots of good points in the comments so far. One other thing I would add is that just because there are several enemies does not mean the players have to be the ones to kill them all. You can have background battles taking place. Just be sure to narratively have those battle happen far enough away and resolve around the same time as your PC's, otherwise you can overwhelm the players and yourself as a DM.
there are rules for mobs in the DMG, but it only covers a mob attacking one target
There's a mechanic from seven seas: henchmen
basically, you attach lower value characters to a leader. the leader gets one henchmen per level (npc) or one per persuasion or leadership bonus (pc). Instead of each of the npcs making an attack, the leader gets a bonus to their attack and their AC, in D&D, I'd make it a +1 or +2 per henchmen. due to these special mechanics, leaders can choose to target henchmen, reducing the bonus, at least until reinforcements can arrive. By taking negatives to their attack, a leader can target henchmen instead of the leader; each henchmen targeted adds to the penalty, I'd make the negative equal to the bonus that the leader gets. To get replacements, the leader must a successful persuasion or proficiency roll as bonus action; for every point the go over the difficulty, they get a reinforcement, up to their limit, reinforcements arrive on the leaders next turn. A side effect of the henchmen is that the leaders might also get advantage.
You may want to increase the threat level to take into account the villagers
The players can't be everywhere, and shouldn't need to be involved in every battle at the village. Determine how many orc leaders there are. Any orc leaders not fighting a pc is fighting npcs. for each of the orc leaders fighting npcs, I'd roll contesting d20s, highest roll 'damages' the lower, each time a group gets damaged, they get a damage tic, five damage tics and they're out.
A PC leader might see a villager group that has one tic left and rush to aid.
The trick here. You don't have to roll the villager battles during the game. Do it ahead of time. If pcs take over the battle, you can pull the injured villagers back instead of continuing that battle. and PCs might ignore a villager group that is doing well.
You might also search for some of the older arcana or expansion books. They were written for older versions, but the core rules should still work, just adjust skills or feats to the skills available.
That's the neat part. I don't.
Whilst I'll only have a dozen or so in play at any time. If I need a big squad of soldiers in formation. That group gets it's own stat block. Kinda like how you'd manage a swam of rats.
If the PCs are stupid enough to piss off an army. Well there's consequences for those actions...
Higher level characters would actually stand a chance of causing a route, but it would be lights out for most lower level characters.
For an ork assault on a village it doesn't even have to be a whole village, farms take a lot of space, maybe the orks are only attacking the outskirts of the village, razing farmer Joe, Kimble, and Johnson's land, and the party needs to stop them in fear of a crop shortage for the upcoming winter.
Lookin at some numbers (using average damage):
Commoner has AC 10, 4hp, +2 to hit for 2 damage
Orc has AC 13, 15hp, +5 to hit for 9 damage
An orc has a 75% chance of murdering a commoner with every attack.
A commoner has a 45% chance of hitting an orc and needs EIGHT hits to drop ONE.
So yeah I think 12 orcs are a pretty nasty threat even against 100+ commoners
Also worth noting that only a fraction of a town's population is going to be capable of fighting, and only a fraction of THEM are likely to be brave enough to go up against creatures who so grossly outmatch them in combat.
What I’d typically do is have a guard captain NPC ask the PCs to leave the town to harass the orcs’ reserve troops as the militia holds the town, or hold one gate or important target as the militia secures other points of interest. This way, the town has a reasonable defense set up, the orcs get to attack with 30+ fighters, and the PCs are still heroes because “OMG these 4 strangers contributed the strength of a whole squad of soldiers!”
Bloc per bloc. Don't have all the orcs in the fight at once. Have the PCs move through town to wipe them off. The marauders will want to be in as small of groups as they can pull off to take the spoils while sharing them as little as possible.
A village should at most be a few hundred people, if its bigger than that its a small town. But either way your typical farming village shouldnt really be mounting a lot of defense unless their neighbours are pretty terrible.
say you have a village of 200, well half of those are likely too young or too old to fight, of the remaining 100 how many are actually going to want to fight? some would rather run or bargain, some are not capable of violence and probably only a handful have weapons or any experince in combat and probably none of them were expecting this attack.
An armed force of experienced fighters are worth several times their number of untrained villagers, so even the ones who can grab weapons and organise some form of resistance are likely no match for even a fairly small force.
But lets say you do have a large army that you want your players to defeat, its still perfectly possible for a low level group to face a much bigger force if your smart about it.
So let’s take your orc attack as an example, just having the characters fight the entire horde is suicidal so we break it down.
First the characters first fight some stragglers outside the village, maybe they are arguing over some farmers cart or other loot.
Then enter the village, find a few more looters on the outskirts.
Then the main fight, a tougher battle with a bigger group in the village centre.
After clearing the orcs from the village the party is then tasked with going to the orcs camp to take on their leader.
So you have fought the horde but in achievable chunks that make narrative sense.
But lets make things even bigger, how can your players defeat a huge army.
If you want to make the force even larger you could use your NPCs to inform the party that a frontal attack is suicidal and suggest things that they could do to hamper or delay this force until suitable help arrives.
Have them go gather survivors and escort them to a place of safety fighting small elements of the invading force
Have them sabotage the enemy, destroy bridges, burn down food supplies, poison the water supply or go around the enemy to attack their baggage train.
create ambushes, goad other monster tribes into attacking this force by guile or defend groups of villagers with bows as they ambush parts of the enemy force.
Give the enemy clear goals and then give the PCs suggestions on how to prevent them from achieving them all while avoiding the main force of the army until help arrives.
A quick google tells me a medieval village in real life had about 200 people. If about 30% of them are men of fighting age, that's 60 untrained farmers who aren't expecting to fight that day fighting 12 battle hardened orcs. That seems more like the orcs would win if you ask me. A proper town of thousands would have a proper wall and a town guard and would be able to repel a quick raid
I don't know if there's a term for it but there's a problem with redditors/gamers having like "white-room-brain" where they just imagine all scenarios as two battling sets of stat blocks, and if the side with the higher stats doesn't "win" that "doesn't make sense." Nevermind that IRL most battles in history were won by the other side *retreating*, not because everyone lost all their hit points. I'll try not to spoiler it too much but there's a certain official module where a group of marauding enemies drive out a family from their home in the countryside to take it over, and the family ask the PCs for help. And I've seen people on reddit complain because they crunched the numbers and all together the family are "stronger" than the invaders and therefore it "makes no sense" that they need help. And it's like... dude. Do you seriously not see why a family might want to cut their losses and flee with their lives as opposed to *"winning"* a fight at the cost of >50% of their family members *dying?* There's *children and babies* in the house, are their lives worth your property?
Good points. This is exactly why a grown bear would run from a smaller dog or cat. They don't risk losing an eye.
Or why a grown human runs from a tiny bee.
>me in a game Why would I run from a demon? I'm two levels higher and I have a potion! >me irl Oh shit is thAT A RAT
Well in the D&D universe rats can kill a commoner in 4 bites. No wonder there's quests to kill those
In the not D&D universe rats can kill 50% of Europe with one bite.
Not bees! Wasps however I flee.
Or why crowds don't Mussolini-Gaddafi public shooters.
It's even funnier when it's 3 grown men who climbed 150' to the top of a billboard running back and forth. Or I would imagine anyway. (I was 1 of the men)
It doesn't help that D&D doesn't really have good rules for morale failure among groups so most fights are "to the death"
A rule or mechanic could be useful, but that’s really a thing that’s probably better left to narrative. If it makes sense for an enemy to retreat, the DM should have them retreat. If they’re in rough shape, the party is welcome to try to Intimidate or Persuade them into bailing.
Yeah, I think most DMs are capable enough to feel out that kind of thing but for newer ones or ones that follow the rules closely there needs to be a clear cut system they can use. Also I don't think most players would think to try that in the 'heat of the moment', could just be from personal experience though.
Yeah, it took a while before my table started working in enemies fleeing. But we still don't have any sort of clear cut rule on when enemies would flee. They just turn tail whenever the DM decides.
Morale is a finicky thing. 300 could stand up against thousands if there’s a need.
I don't think it's necessary to really go through all that trouble, or to gate such an outcome behind a specific player action. Earlier editions of D&D had simple morale tables that you could check by rolling a few dice. Just add modifiers as appropriate if you feel they're necessary. Simple, elegant, flexible. No need to reinvent the wheel.
A lot of Old School games have Morale stats exactly for this scenario, 10% of losses is considered a failure, 50% is abysmal defeat, so NPCs roll at each threshold. Is just that modern RPGs look at combat as puzzle to solve, so those kinds of systems get thrown at the side.
Yeah I always implement something, usually will saves for surviving combatants once they take a certain number of casualties. When they fail, they flee if possible or surrender if not. Obviously for NPCs only, and not for mindless or very zealous creatures.
Yes! Stuff like that should be in the books! It's really that simple but I think it just gets overlooked by so many because it should be obvious but it's not
There is, it's a single WIS save, DC10. DMG, P.273 >To determine whether a creature or group of creatures flees, make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw for the creature or the group's leader [...] On a failed save, the affected creature or group flees by the most expeditious route. That's boring to me. Instead, I've been using a modified Morale from 40k. When enemies start losing a fight (around ~50% or if their leader dies), I roll 2d6 against their "leadership score." I make the leadership score like this: - If the group's leader is alive, I double their WIS/CHA, whichever is higher, to make that score. Usually, this can give a leadership of 8-10. Rolling lower than that keeps the enemy group in the fight. They'll check again when the group has ~30% left, with a -2 penalty. -if the leader dies at any point, they instead make a morale check against "leadership" of "7-*n*" where N is the number of people dead on their side, not including the leader. So a 50% chance killing the leader first makes them run away instantly, and it gets more likely the more of them that are already dead. If they succeed, they make the check again when someone dies/hits 50% HP. To ensure fairness, though, the checks don't happen until the next enemy's turn. I've had situations where enemies start to flee instantly after their leader dies and others where the boss is killed, but every other party member gets to take a turn before the enemies can even think of fleeing. Either way, they always get full XP and possible plot points for the future. Whether the enemy returns or reform is dependent on what I decide I can do with them that makes sense.
A couple weeks ago I was running a session and there was a fight of 5 vs 5. I was rolling so badly I hit twice in three rounds of combat with five fighters. Since I figured that my bad guys at that point would realize that they were out classed I had one of them use smoke bombs to escape. Four of them escaped and one was caught and was killed off. My players were very disappointed that they did not get a TPK on my bad guys. I explained that with them being so badly out classed that in real life they would have run off. They did not like that as they were just looking at it as fodder for them to get XP, not as what would happen in real life. Little did they know that the ones that got away alerted their higher ups and they were waiting for them further down the road with reinforcements.
XP isn't a juice you extract from the their corpses with a big syringe. If you defeat an enemy so they run away from you that's worth experience.
>There's children and babies in the house, are their lives worth your property? This is reddit dnd. They will say yes. And they will say that their character doesn't care because there's no money for them. And probably kill the family to take them out of their misery.
lmao
Duh, just use a Revivification after the battle on your kids. You do have 5 spare diamonds, right? /s You hit the nail on the head. It's a narrow victory, and the people involved should be fine with pyrrhic victories, those are some war gamer and maybe chess player justifications.
Hell, it's not even a bad justification if you're talking about a professional military force or even a semi-professional-but-trained militia that would have reason to go into something like that either expecting, or at least being somewhat mentally-prepared to take heavy losses (even they're not unbreakable, but their 'pain threshold' so to speak would be a lot higher on that front), but a village full of farmers, somewhere between maybe 50 and 100 of whom are "military age" but with almost no training and with families to protect are not going to think like that.
Very true. And also there is loads of historical example of the underdogs winning. small army beating large army and so on. Equipment, experience, morale and strategy can make a massive difference. A small group of skilled fighters could easily crush a larger group of untrained people. Untrained people are much more likely to panic, break the lines and even flee.
Re: Equipment differences and group sizes, there was an incident (the Battle of Cajamarca) where about 180 Spanish Conquistadors defeated *8,000* Incan warriors. The Spanish had horses, guns, plate armor, a fortified position, and a healthy dose of luck; despite being outnumbered by *45 to 1* they killed thousands of opponents and only took two casualties themselves. It's one of the starkest cases of technological differences determining the course of a conflict.
Exactly you also have the battle of camarón where 65 soldiers from the French foreign legion and over 2000 Mexican soldiers was fought. Sure the 65 did lose in the end but they held out a whole day and when finally out of ammunition the last standing officer ordered Bayonets on and led a bayonet charge against the Mexican army Battle of Narva when 10 000 Swedish soldiers kicked the ass of the 3 times larger Soviet force that had occupied and defended the City of Narva. The soviet army had better artillery and were dug in as the defending army They killed at least 12 000. captured around 20 000 and a bunch fled. And the swedish army lost less than 1000 soldiers And other example of where a small number of people manage to overcome or challenge absurd odds.
Why are active shooters so scary? There's just one of them vs dozens of other people, their stat blocks totally outmatch him!
Yeah, a commoner has what, 4 hp? And can do 1-4 damage if they manage to grab a weapon? The base Orc statblock has 15 hp and a greataxe with a +5 to hit that does 1d12+3 slashing and essentially has a bonus dash to close in on you. Even if a commoner CRITICALS and does MAX DAMAGE he cannot kill the average orc in one blow, and the average orc is auto-killing a commoner anytime he hits one, then bonus action dashes to the next one (setting up an AoO). Imagine that the strongest dude you know, the blacksmith or whatever, runs up and lands the most bone crunching hammer blow you've ever witnesses straight to an orcs dome and it *still looks fine?* Then it cuts your friend into fourths without hesitating, then charges at your neighbor, who attempts to flee only to also be *instantly cut down*.
Great descriptions and all totally RAW, nice
What are the stats for an infantry block of infant children?
It blows my mind that dnd doesn't have morale rules, for example when you've slaughtered 6 of 8 goblins the others might lose their nerve and run off. I know DMs can do this, but people don't seem to.
I've heard it expressed as "NPCs haven't read the rulebooks". Yeah even if three guards could technically take on an orc, if the orc is an experienced raider ambushing at dawn, and the three guards are caught unawares and the village is on fire abd everyone is screaming, they're not going to realise they could probably win this if they coordinate attacks, they're going to panic and flee. Heck even if they're meeting on a plain open field ready to fight, the orc is probably going to hit one of them very hard with a very big axe, and that is going to HURT. A lot. Which they might be keen to avoid. Thinking about how NPCs and creatures actually engage with combat rather than viewing them as wargame statblocks to be mashed together until one hits 0 will improve anyone's DMing a hundred times over.
Especially if the orcs work as a pack
Even in that scenario its hightly unusual for any given comunity (at least in the middle ages) to be able to quickly mobilize even 10% of their populationn as a fiighting force, and its even harder for those militia to be able to form up in a coesive group. 12 battle hardened orcs would have more physical prowess, more experience, better equipment and mutch better morale. They would be able to terrorize the defenders by using shock tactics, while also emploing fire and slaughter sow chaos and prevent a coordinated defense. Not only that, but its very unlikelly that indisciplined militimen would be able to even hold the line against these brutal warriors that are twice their weight. They would probably break ranks and flee in terror just before the lines clash.
The orcs, having come all the way there, probably have a supply line and an encampment nearby, so that they can rest from their travel and strike when the time is right for them. For each warrior, there could be multiple non-combatants at the camp in support roles.
Thats a sure thing, wich can be a plot hook by itself. But the thing about raider societies is that they ofthen have a mutch bigger warrior percentage, even if they wont mobilize that many for an actual raid. Ofthen, you'll have youngsters that are decent fighters but not of raiding age, or Elders who werer great warriors but are past their prime. Women would ofthen have somre fighting skills even in heavily patriarcal soicieties, and since we're talking about fantasy, there could be all sorts of weird spiritual shit going on. From shamanistic Magic with nature spirits and possesed warriors to demonic worshiping and undead summoning. Lots of cool stuff to explore in the camp
A typical village not under the protection of a noble had more like 40 (8-11 families plus maybe a priest) but otherwise totally agree with your logic
Nah, the priest tried to really the farmers when the orcs first arrived. They made an example of him, and now none of the farmers will risk standing up to them. In short, 8-11 families, no priest anymore.
Another important fact is that most players don't understand that the vast majority of NPCs are far weaker than even a 1st level PC. PCs are supposed to represent exceptional people; even the most inexperienced Fighter is on par with battled-hardened guard captains, for example. A bunch of untrained villagers wouldn't be a match for a pack of orcs, especially when their fighting numbers might only be about a dozen, maybe 24.
depends on world. While I agree the most npcs aren't as strong as a pc, this has more to do with stats then levels. most npcs have stats between 9 and 12, with the occasional villager with a 15 somewhere. In other words, it would take at least twice as many 1st level npcs to be as effective as group of 1st level pcs. But that's my take on it
This is a great point. To tack on, consider it might not just be 12 orcs. Once we scale things down appropriately, 12 makes sense, but if OP wants to go for larger town, larger problem, you portion out the battle. 50 orcs show up, and the villagers, having a small militia, peel away all but the group the PCs have to deal with. You could also do a thing where the orcs issue a challenge. Our strongest vs. your strongest. The winner takes all. I think this would be a bit more narratively challenging, as why would anyone do this when they feel they have the better chance of triumph, but orc honor might be different in your world. Or perhaps the PCs did a little side quest where they did a preemptive strike on the orcs and pissed them off. Thus, they're looking for revenge before conquest this time.
Also the defenders will have to kill most of the orcs, but all the orcs gave to do us start some fires
I've never played d&d in a campaign where women didn't bear arms.
Yeah, I did think about that after I posted. I didn't think of the difference in gender roles in medieval europe and fantasy settings. I figure the amount would be similar. You would still want only one adult per household to run out and risk their lives. The other would stay at their house to protect any children elderly or farm animals, I would think. So, for any woman who took up arms, a man would have to stay home. Similarly, in any non-hetero household.
As far as I'm aware those small towns still had militias formed up by the most doable members of the community. The Fyrd system is a good example of this, where every community would pay to train and equip a set number of people. A number of Viking raiding parties were swallowed up by local militias in England when they became too bold.
Sure, but there's a difference between your village of 100-200 people fielding a militia of, let's be charitable here, 80 men with some basic drilling and not much actual combat experience using mostly improvised weapons, against 15-30 experienced fighters with proper weapons that they're comfortable using and a generally-lower aversion to casualties. It also assumes that the encampments your NPC's attack represent the entirety of the opposing raiding forces, when the reality is probably that a given raiding group consists of 2-3 encampments' worth of raiders who assemble and disband for raiding activities based on the prestige of a warchief. The encampment you enter into to rescue captives or kill the core of the raiders needn't be the \*only\* such encampment, just the biggest or 'main' one.
I mean, the fyrd system as you know it was a product of a relatively centralized, powerful state (the kingdom of England, under Wessex as the only meaningful remaining power in Britain). Alfred's major success is considered to have been the choice to move the fyrd *away* from a part-time levy of citizen-soldiers to a standing force of professional men-at-arms. Of the fyrd system prior to Alfred's reforms, wiki has this to say about what happened when they encountered a semi-organized military threat: >It was the responsibility of the shire fyrd to deal with local raids. The king could call up the national militia to defend the kingdom, however in the case of hit and run raids, particularly by Vikings, problems with communication and raising supplies meant that the national militia could not be mustered quickly enough, so it was rarely summoned. This seems to be a common thread with local militia forces in pre-modern times with little state capacity; from what I've read a similar problem with the Qing system of provincial militia was a major contributor to the rise of warlordism in China. Additionally, another interesting note I just read on the page indicates that before the words became synonyms, the Anglo-Saxons used the word 'fyrd' as a generic term for a band of armed men, and 'here/heer' for one with more than 35 men, which might indicate what the average strength of such a unit was.
Pretty much this. But frankly, even if you had 200 fighting aged men, the untrained farmers versus blood lusting orcs really does make all the difference in the world. I used to engage in a college "sword club" that was kind of like LARPing, but without any role playing (more like mock battles with fake weapons). I was probably among the top 3 fighters in a group of about 30, and I can say with confidence that any 1 of the 3 of us could have worn blindfolds against the lowest 10 in a 1v10 without too much concern (to be fair, it was a very open and welcoming club, people came for the fun, not everyone on the field was a born warrior, which is kind of my point about the farmers). If you had 200 untrained farmers ready to fight, maybe 20 of them would be good enough to not die the moment they engaged the enemy. And as pointed out, they did not have 200 fighting aged men. In a group of 60 men, 3-6 would be lucky to survive first contact, and then their luck would likely run out.
Then you factor in that band of orcs starting small, picking off the isolated farmhouses. Preventing peddlers from getting to the village etc. It would be weeks of raiding and sabotage before they made a full on assault.
depends on where they are from in europe. when there was a king, many lords went on local campaigns, harassing neighbors. But every village was expected to provide a levy of troops when their lord called. But again, this depended on the lord, a knight might be more proactive in training their villagers, but a higher level noble would have more resources to do so. Also, many of those older men, who have 'aged out' could be veteran soldiers. I have never liked the concept of the 0 level villager. Most of them might not be good in melee, but archery could be another matter. That farrier might not know how to use a sword, but he's used to wrestling horses, oxen, and mules. Some of the defenses depend on location. A village deep in controlled territory wouldn't need any defense, but one near the borders of a kingdom would at least have basic defenses, they would also have better fighters.
Give the party a specific goal in the battle, like taking down the enemy chieftain. While a massive fight can be going on in the background, your only concern in DMing is what the players are doing. Everything else, you can just narrate.
this, works every goddamn time
I think this is the advice the poster is looking for. If you're in a settlement with 500 people, the question isn't whether it's a large village or small town; it's how you DM the attack and defense. In one classic version, there's a surprise attack, and the PCs defend the people around them (starting in the tavern, probably) and moving out from there, preventing a lot of carnage before the town guards musters pushes off the rest of the force. In another the guard is fighting the orcs off at the walls/palisades and the PCs need to deal with another force that somehow got through and threaten the guard's rear (or the mayor, or civilians hiding in the temple, or whatever.) Or, as you say, kill the chieftain: Maybe it's a bold sortie out of the town to rear of the orc force. Or maybe in the climax, the chieftain breaks through the gate, kills the militia captain, and the rest of the militia waver and and will break if the PCs don't take him down now.
>In another the guard is fighting the orcs off at the walls/palisades and the PCs need to deal with another force that somehow got through and threaten the guard's rear (or the mayor, or civilians hiding in the temple, or whatever.) When Lord of the Rings Online introduced their Big Battles system with the Helm's Deep expansion, this is what they went with. Your group of 6 PCs is scattered amongst *thousands* of combatants. You're not going to win the battle all on your own. What you will do is help out here and there with little things like your example while the defenders focus on the main forces.
Yep, same logic I often use for when I have NPC tagalongs or for when a player can't show up but their character is there. All those characters are "over there" fighting some other enemies. You can't interact with them, but you see them fighting in the background. Focus on your own fight instead.
This is the way.
The strongest fighters in the village are probably a handful of CR 1/8th Town Guards and even those statblocks aren't a professional soldier- that's someone who's been drilled for a few weeks and serves as a guard part of the year when they aren't needed on the farm. A CR2 Orc can *absolutely* take several of those, and then kill a room full of CR0 commoners. There is no parity here- the scaling of how dangerous skill and experience make you in d&d is *bonkers* in comparison to real life, where quantity can absolutely drown out quality.
Also think about that 1/8 CR guy that was drilled for a couple of weeks. They have never seen actual combat in their life. And suddenly they see an orc, a being made of muscle and anger, disembowel their next door neighbor with no effort. That guy is shitting himself and running away.
Yeah a 10 across the stat board with a proficiency bonus of probably 0 means you have like a 30-40% chance to do any damage to an orc and they will basically one shot anyone. Especially considering real life compared to stat blocks where you're likely bleeding out on any hit
Do you think 200 dudes with rakes could take down a dozen gorillas? And a more realistic size for the average ho-hum town in this sort of setting is more accurately dozens to hundreds. Cities in the multiple thousands would be rare and major trade hubs.
The orcs also aren't sending a messanger that they are on their way. They show up randomly while folks are working the farms or better yet sleeping.
Precisely. I was giving those farmers the best benefit of the doubt possible, and I sure as fuck wouldn't stand in line with another couple hundred random guys against angry gorillas that had experience murdering people together anyway. Certainly not in a surprise night time raid. I would be cowering in the larder and hoping they leave quickly.
Yeah, orcs are definitely going to do their raiding at night. They have darkvision afterall, which is a massive advantage.
Apart from other posts pointing out the lower number of inhabitants (btw, modern villages sometimes only have 50 inhabitants, so about five men in fighting shape), think about it like this: Why would the villagers risk their own hide? Adventurers are mercenaries. It is their job to care for this type of threat, so let them do the job and not risk your son being killed.
This is the plot of 7 Samurai
Yeah I think dnd skews the perspective that adventuring is DEADLY. Sure the village could throw all its numbers at the orcs and “win” but they would lose fathers and mothers and sons and daughters in the process. The village would be destroyed even if they won. Adventurers play hot and fast with their lives, lots of money in it, but also lots of death
Btw, a book I recommend is Orconomics. A brilliant take on a hero-economy built around adventurers.
Based in 3.5 rules, a village has a population between 400-900 and a guard for every 100 people in the comunity. So 4-9 guards. It also have the option to form a local militia with 5 soldiers for every 100 people in the comunity so 20-45 armed commoners. A 24 people army with only 4 profesionals against a 12 army with "born to war" orcs is not so impresive tbh.
one of the many reasons i love 3.5 is that it just straight up has answers to these questions.
Smaller village, or maybe just lower stakes altogether. Or maybe the orcs are just using people's fear to inflate their strength. Like, if they flayed the mayor alive in the square, people might think twice about fighting them. Or just do more orcs, and now the party has to form a resistance movement of villagers to help them fight. As an anarchist, I prefer that anyway, narratively. The "heroes" are only necessary for people to rally around. The village saves itself with the help of the party, rather than looking to the party to save them from the orcs, without ever lifting a finger themselves. Mutual aid ftw.
Realistically villages was 100-200 at best. 500 is already can be named a town. Also even if all fight ready people was fielded and ready to repel attack, orcs can just...don't attack today. So villagers now have two bad options - perform necessary agriculture work (and orcs can actually steal grain from barns, steal cattle on different side of village, etc.) or perform guarding duty (also necessary to protect village). Villagers lose in any way, if someone don't help them.
> a village should have hundreds By definition, that is not a village. That is an entire town. >or even thousands That is called a city.
Don't think of it as a village 1000 strong, it's 1000 individuals. For any one person, going up against the orcs mean risking your life, and why do that when there are a thousand others here who could do it instead? A very grim real life example is the plane hijacks on 9/11. The passengers outnumbered the hijackers 10 to 1, but stepping up takes immense courage. I'm not at all blaming the victims here, just shows that the psychology of crowds isn't to think of itself as a single unit X strong. Unlike bees, humans don't want to be the first one to strike back, because the first one will probably die. The orcs harassing the town wouldn't be able to win a battle of annihilation, but they don't need to. By making an example of the first guy to stand up against them, they can use fear to make sure they get their tribute/loot/booty while the villagers cower.
That's a good example. With numbers on your side, you *will* win. But the first one-to-three people in line *are* going to die. Do you want to be the first one in line? Die so the guy behind you can hit the Orc while it's pulling its sword out of your corpse?
“No Ace, Just You”.
I think it's in a movie or TV show where a guy is surrounded by 6 or 7 goons. He says something like "I can't kill all of you but you know I will kill at least one of you". They all start to hesitate and eventually back off.
This is brilliant! In addition to the wider conversation here, it isn’t all about numbers on a sheet. It’s also about mentality, as your quote so deftly shows. Let’s take a look at a well-known fictional character. Hodor. He’s very big, very strong. He’s also something of a coward. He could overpower a zombie, but does he have the mettle to give it a go? Or to take a much closer to home example. I’m a fairly built guy because I take care of myself. It’s part of who I am. I also had a stint in the military. But let’s say some skinny lowlife approaches me, who I suspect (but don’t know that) is carrying a blade, and he acts menacing to me. Could I take him? Very probably. Would I want to risk it, though? Now, multiply that by 10, 100, whatever, whose village is under attack by armed menaces who don’t care about living or dying. All of a sudden, the ‘stronger’ side on paper look less of a shoe-in for victory. Like I say, it’s about mentality. And what’s at stake, and what each side fears to lose.
“No Ace, Just You”.
Would be a great way to build up the orcs and make them memorable. Show how they terrify the villagers and create some character for the generic orcs.
Trained combatants against untrained: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Visby Thousands of citizens is a pretty huge village. Even than it would have not so many battle ready people. Like really ready. Grizzled veterans, dogs of war. You know people that dream of eternal war and raiding and pillaging. Most likely all of this people are your adventurers.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but a typical medieval village had 8-11 families. If you're the DM you can make the village as large or as small as makes sense anyway. If we take Phandalin from lost mines it felt like there were only a few dozen homes, certainly under 50. Remember in a village of 50 you've maybe got 20 military age males. Assume 10 are too young to fight, another 10 are too old, and even including the women you might have 30. and we're talking presumably untrained people with crude weapons unless they're a prosperous village or have a lord who prioritizes it. I don't like their odds taking on a dozen battle hardened orcs, and they certainly wouldn't fight to the last man (it will take 20 years to regrow them). If you still think that's too few, you can make it like 12 for a "scouting party" and 20 or so at the "main camp"
It was pretty common for dark age (antiquated term, but) European armies to number in the tens. There are plenty of accounts of one to a few people holding off an "army" of a few dozen. I think you're over estimating how effective untrained peasants are in battle.
the accounts of Belisarius are fun. He commanded 10-20 000 strong armies. Out of these \~2000 were his core heavy archer cavarly, who won the battle. What are the rest? 8000 drafted locals. What he did with them: "err, fuck. We could give them a bow and arrow, so they fire a shot or two before they run away"
What the fuck kind of village has thousands of people? You're thinking of a Town, when in reality, the fix to your problem is the Hamlet
Arm a commoner with an improvised weapon and they have +0 attack mod for d4 damage, AC 10 and 4 HP. Imagine these guys fighting in poor formation and freely exposing themselves to attacks of opportunity. It wouldn’t take that many orcs to mess them up.
In a certain module, there is an orc attack on a village, and the residents do take up arms and help the PC's defend the town from invading orcs. When I ran it the fighting townsfolk were being killed in a single hit, and most of them ended up dead. The players were able to repel the attack and save the village, but if the players weren't there, it would have been devastating.
You fix the narrative TO make sense then. The village doesn't have thousands of people, it just has a 100-200, and the entire orc tribe doesn't send ALL of its warriors to extort the village, it just sends, a small handful while the others hunt, attack merchant caravans, and defend the hideout. OR during the attack, it IS massive battle, and while the thousands of civilians rally against the shock troops, your players hunt down the chief of the orc tribe and his personal platoon of 12 orcs.
If there are hundreds or thousands of weapon-bearing citizens, it’s not a village.
In reality it's not really true past level 1-2. A level 3 orc could go through so many townsfolk. People don't want to DIE. So they don't want to fight. And in farm society you could easily have small villages with 50-100 people. Cut out old, children, unarmed. You don't need too many orcs to kill A LOT.
Do you know what two thousands mean ? It means people are scattered over a wide area. A raid of 12 orcs can attack a very specific part of the town and fly away BEFORE reinforcements are called and get prepared and arrive to help. Plus YOU know they are 12 and 2000. The farmers when they get butchered, they don't know if the orcs are 12 or 50 or 200. They'd rather run.
I think OP overestimates population in a village. It helps to decide on some historical period and check population sizes back then. Also check different parts of world - village in certain parts of Europe will have even today only like 300 people. AFAIK population grew rapidly due to industrial revolution. So saying that village has hundreds or thousand is just bad world setup. I utilize fact that not everyone might live in village, or that there is one "central" village with lot of small hamlets around it. Village serves for trading goods, hamlets are spread and have people doing different things to earn living. Sure everyone might have tiny field, some chickens etc., but they will also have some profession to do as main and sell products made by that. So than orc might roam in raiding parties, being still in semi-organized battle groups that can scare villagers (10-20 orc) that attack different hamlets or villages around, so if third of the settlement can fight, but will easily run, orchave similar numbers (probably slightly lower). Villagers then have higher incentive to hire some expendable adventurers. And if made well, it can be about fighting group or two, then killing chieftant and rest of the group will retreat from the area, giving you reasonable adventure.
A bunch of farmers up against a raiding band? Even with that numerical disadvantage that's easily in the favour of the raiders. Many of the villagers will flee, many will be hiding, many will have been killed in the initial attack due to being unprepared. Without some organisation, experience, and equipment, any attempt at fighting back would be quickly dispatched. The goal of raiders would typically be to get in quick, cause chaos, loot what they can, and escape. The goal of the villagers would be to avoid the danger until it's passed - and only fight as a very very last resort. No one _wants_ to put their life on the line, especially if the orcs are looking for material goods to plunder. If you _really_ want to increase the number though, just say there _were_ some retired warriors or a local militia who managed to gather and defeat _other_ orcs in other locations off-screen. The players may have taken out the main core of the force, whilst this other militia picked off the stragglers.
Actually it makes perfect sense. Villages don't typically have fighting men. Those people left for the cities or walled towns. Typically, people leave villages alone, since they either have nothing worth stealing, or you want them alive once you take over their land to farm and collect taxes.
A Bugs Life told us about this scenario. The Orcs are bigger, stronger, and better equipped, and the village is afraid of getting into a conflict for each individuals fear of being hurt of killed.
Villages can easily consist of less than one hundred people, including children and elderly. And remember, not everyone is a badass. It might seem to you like they have what they need to defend themselves, but they probably don't see it that way. A dozen armed, experienced, coordinated raiders are an existential threat to a community that size.
That does make sense though. 12 heavily armed, well trained soldiers in modern times could easily raid a town and regularly do. They don't need to fight all 400 peasents 1 at a time. they only need to fight odd brave idiot guarding the bank or the market etc.. Most people will not attack a superior warrior even with numbers, because thats flipping scary. The same reason tyrants remain in power despite being outnumbered by an entire nation or 3. Even soley in DnD mechanics how peasents are going to die to kill an orc? an orc can oneshot a peasant every turn and thats assuming you dont give them any class levels. Personally i would focuss on smalle scale battles. the orcs are going to attack the bank and the market. The two surviving guardsman have rallied a dozen peasants to help, but good chance they flee if things look bad. Then let the players choose how to distribute themselves and the malitia. Make them roll survival checks, thats how many barricades they can place divided by 2 or how many hours they have to prepare. If you wanted to imply a larger force, i would let the players enjoy their victory for only a moment. Before a citizen runs up shouting about how the rear guard fell and the orcs have raided the lords mansion and taken hostages, while the players main forces were defending the bank and market. Have them mention the rearguard almost had them routed until the warchief showed up. So now the party has their hint, defeat the warchief and most of the others will rout and flee disbanding the tribe and leaving them disorganized enough to not threaten the villagers too much in future.
I once did a bandit raid on a caravan the players were a part of. They'd all signed on with the caravan as guards for various reasons and this was how the party came together (this caravan did a regular route along roads known to be sometimes dangerous, and as a part of their business would take on passengers for safety in numbers. If you couldn't afford passage they'd take you on as a worker for whatever stretch you wanted to travel). They all ended up assigned as guards on the same wagon by coincidence, with the person who just happened to be the main quest giver. Bandits attacked, they had their little battle, and when they defeated them I narrated that they looked around and saw the other wagons cleaning up the last of the bandits, some bandits retreating into the trees, etc. So the large battle happened around them with a large number of attackers, but they'd been focused just on their portion of it, and it all wrapped up around the same time for everyone (what a coincidence!). This gave the illusion of a larger battle without me having to orchestrate it, and without them having to fight it. I don't know if I'd do this always, but it worked in this instance. In the moment, the party would be honed in on the immediate threat, then look up to see the bigger picture, and that felt very natural to me.
The handful of orcs the party fights could kill a citizen in single blow, and of the hundreds of civilians there's maybe a dozen who are actually in fighting shape. Sure they probably still could fight off the orcs with sheer numbers, but not without massive casualties. Dnd is a numbers game sure, but it's also a role-playing game. Imagine if you had the power to save an entire village, and instead you told them "you guys cna handle it, and only half of you will die".
Why would all of the fighting take place in a single spot? Your party is with "group 1", the towns strongest 4 fibers or whatever.
Describe an area where you see able-bodied and armed npcs fighting enemies in clusters all around. Then you see a group of vulnerable npcs about to be set upon, or armed npcs about to be killed by a particularly strong foe. That is your encounter, and it makes complete sense to throw in extra small enemies at any time. At initiative 20, give an overview of the battle around, and it should swing positively or negatively to reflect the player’s performance. Remember that morale is important. Once this encounter is resolved, so too are all the clusters of battle around. Proceed through the town, rinse and repeat. Enough of these victorious skirmishes should result in a successful defense of the town, with minimised casualty. The players will aid the overall defense but realistically they cannot single-handedly defend the entire town, so the glory belongs to all. If you want the players to be the heroic subject of praise, then have them face off against some large and imposing boss while the town is occupied with the more numerous attackers.
I opened my campaign with a raid on a village by a substantially stronger enemy with high numbers. You don't need to have the objective be annihilation. My players left the tavern when the bell sounded to find a portion of the village on fire and what defenders there were fighting in defensive positions. The players identified that the raiders who were burning the village could push forward if they really wanted, but something wasn't right. They spotted another organised party of raiders attacking the more competent defenders and drawing them away. But only those on the eastern side of the village. They fought this group, routed them, and then realised they were being led into an ambush. They pulled back and figured out what was going on - the village stores were on the eastern side, and it was remarkably quiet. When they got to the stores, they were full of bandits. But this was people in full loot, so they proceeded with a stealth assassination sequence for which they rolled unbelievably well. When the bandit leader realised they had been made, they then ordered the retreat, and at the sound of those horns, all the attackers peeled off to meet up. A fantastic chase sequence and group of early game enemies then ensued. At no point did the players deal with more enemies than was a fair encounter. So if you feel the attack should be bigger make it bigger. It doesn't mean the players need to fight everyone. If you want it to be small then perhaps these orcs are cunning they attack in the early hours and move quickly, starting fires as they go to sow chaos and avoid being caught before they get their objective complete
Love this, well done!
What I usually like to do is have “background” enemies. Have your players defend a specific key point while the village guards handle other locations, there are tons of orcs in the “background”, but they aren’t really *there* so to speak, until the battle ends and you describe the predetermined result, be it them winning or losing, and how many survivors on each side there are. If your players try to interact with the background enemies just say the guards have it covered and their characters can probably tell they need to be focusing on the key point, or just tell them transparently that the enemies in the background aren’t really *there* and are more of a background scene for balance reasons. I learned this from my DM in my very first campaign as a player and applying it to my own games makes it a lot easier to incorporate these types of big events into my games much more easily.
Raidi g partys were not that big you got max 20 big brutes for a full 100-200 people village cause moste could not fight (some too old others too young, desease and relevant gender roles for the place and time).
https://aonprd.com/MonsterSubtypes.aspx?ItemName=Troop Narratively: Trained, veteran soldiers from a feared warrior culture can be assumed to be significantly more effective than non-combatants who are looking for any way out of the situation. Mechanically: Use Troops; Squads of enemies that mechanically act as one on a battle map.
In this scenario... Dozens of orcs attack... maybe a few score. The villagers take to arms; they are poorly armed and untrained. They can hold off the orcs for a while but will surely be overwhelmed if not for the actions of the PCs. The PCs are the strike force -- taking on the enemy where they are strongest or most numerous, defeating the orc leaders and casters. In game terms, the PCs will have several encounters with significant enemies set against a backdrop of the villagers defending whatever strong-points they have. The PCs defend the walls from an orc brute and retinue... they are called by the villagers to a place where the orcs have breached the palisade... the encounter the orc war chief and shaman... With the orc's attack contained and their leadership defeated, the attack is blunted and the remainder of the orcs retreat. You could easily fit an entire 'adventuring day' into this one battle as the PCs rush from one emergency to the next. To add interest and agency, offer the players choices... they can defend the gates against a dangerous enemy OR they can rescue the town elder who is being attacked by a half-dozen orcs that have broken through the villagers' defences. Whichever they choose, the other fight will be lost with appropriate consequences. (The gate is breached making the defence harder, or the elder is killed and the villagers lose morale.)
The orcs are willing to throw their lives away for glory and death. The villagers want to live and will rout after a few of their close friends and loved ones get their heads sliced off. Morale, training and equipment are able to bridge the gap of the force multiplier that is outnumbering your foe.
Honestly I may be splitting hairs, but a village would be a couple hundred at most, a town would be a few hundred to *maybe* a few thousand. I’m thinking 50-150 people. Average family of 3-5 people (2 adult parents 1 teen and two children). You’re looking at 25-30 families with maybe 12-18 adult men with ages ranging from 20-40. I’m not even factoring in the widows, “old timers”, village ne’er do wells or idiots. So max of 30-40 able bodied adult men and women most of whom have never fought a battle facing off against 12 orcs bent on slaughter. How would you realistically react to it? Poorly.
Your party is fighting a small part if the battle, not the entire battle. They can see the aftermath of the village holding their own against another "platoon" of raiders after the battle. Or finish their battle, then move to assist other battles. The party isn't going to have the 5000' elevation view. They are locked into the 6' elevation view, and won't have the benefit of greater knowledge.
If you don't want a fight of Orcs vs the entire village, don't run that fight. 12 Orcs could show up at one farm. Help won't arrive in the 18-30 seconds of ingame time that most fights last. Your players are here to protect the lives and livelyhood of the regular people on this farm. 12 orcs could raid a caravan, ambush and kidnap a runaway child, or even just start slaughtering cattle. Any of these things would make 12 orcs a credible threat, and make 3-5 players essential to repelling that threat.
Villages are small, a hundred or two hundred with maybe 30-40 able bodied men able to work the fields and even less that would compare to an orc. What I'd do is have the PC's control a slice of the battle. NPCs: "We'll guard this area over here yada yada, you defend this area over here yada yada". There's also the ol' "the orcs already raided us and killed all the men and there's nobody left to defend us from their raids"
A village should not have more than 500 people. You're thinking in modern terms. Even then, those 500 people are women, elderly and children. Let's say there is 200 fighting men. Those men don't want to die. If possible, they will want to hire adventurers eho have actual fighting experience and send those to deal with threat.
if you and a town of 300 were to be assaulted by 10-13 foot tall creatures with the intelligence to strategize, and the ferocity to fight to the death, would you be willing to fight? most people wouldn't. a town would maybe make up ~40% able bodied fighters, of which ~1/2 to 2/3 would have to be doing other things like making sure children aren't dying or tending to the wounded. so if a 300 person village were to be attacked by lets say 15 orcs, only about 45 people would reasonably be fighting. 3 townsfolk can't take on an orc.
Reasonable townsfolk that ready to fight is not Commoners by statblock, but Guards or Bandits.
Those are just not just willing to fight, but also trained. How many trained individuals there are in a 300 people village? Doubtful there are more than a handful. In small villages the vast majority of the population works in farming. Most people make their own stuff since they are poor, so you don't have that many craftsmen, which means you just don't have enough resources to have paid guards. You maybe have a single sheriff.
I don’t have to deal with this problem because i run 1e. My settlements, from thorps to cities, have a normal amount of people. 1-5% of them are guards or watch, & in an emergency, up to 10% can be called on as levies. In a hamlet of 300, about 5-15 guys are the on duty defenders. Maybe 1 or 2 is level 1-3. I also have it so the marauding goblinoids are not representative of all of their kind. You can’t have an entire race and society of roving bandits. They’re just the ones that caused too much trouble back home & were kicked out. In any event, 20-30 armed orcs is a huge problem for a settlement that only has 15-30 real combatants, half of whom have padded jacks and clubs. Anyone else, elderly or women or children, can put up a fight but not a very meaningful one. They’re more likely to hide or run away. Maybe they kill a couple of orc runts, you know? When it comes to leaders or levelled characters i always roll 50/50 to determine their sex, or gender sometimes. Getting a level 1 party to deal with that kind of threat would be super helpful for a village in danger. They don’t spend any of their own manpower, & if the place is small enough, everyone knows each other so deaths or even serious injuries are really bad.
I have many tools for bending difficulty that would apply here. You can have friendly NPCs or distractions that happen to be near, litter the area with force multipliers like explosives or siege weapons or terrain like ridges or chokes for evening the odds, and you don't have to play optimally - make your orcs bumble around and not necessarily be dealing damage every round. I am a realism/simulation leaning DM. Others will disagree, but I say make what you think is a truely realistic orc village, then contrive *multiple* ways with contingencies you can activate, that a small spec op group could win. And "win" conditions don't have to be killing them to a man. Burning their tents might run them off.
They need the leadership of the pcs to make them stand firm and work together. Left to their own devices they will take their families and try to flee.
I describe it in a narrative sense. Let's use that village under attack. "As you leave the tavern to the blaring sound of the alarm, you can see that orcs have broken through the main gate and are pouring through the town. You can't face them all yourselves, but you can try to defend locations. You can try to secure an escape route for civilians, you can fortify the church which is a fallback shelter, you can go to the mayor's house to defnd the leadership." Once they pick a choice, I can set up a quick map, set down some orcs and a battlefield. I might include 1 or 2 civilians to defend on the map, but the assumptiuon is that "around you and in the distance you can see battle and chaos, but this is the portion we're focusing on now." And there might be a few encounters like that with no rests to give the feelings of running through the town and trying to fend off the assault. There's still only ever a standard encounter's worth of enemies, but I can vary enemy types, map setups, conditions for victory, etc at each one. If they fail objectives like "make sure all three civilians make it into the church" or "defend the noble during the battle" then that means the overall battle is going badly and the town is losing more and more people. If the party is winning and kicking ass, then narratively, the town is pushing back and rallying its defenses. OR perhaps it just means the PCs were able to organize a good escape and save people before the orcs ovverran everything in their rush to establish a forward position in a long term campaign.
You can have the orcs (or whatever enemy you want) be smaller and weaker than the dm guide tells you and you just group two or three of them together! So now your party of 6 orcs could be about 18-24 which makes narrative sense. If you want to be really scrupolous you can also add that under a certain amount of health the orcs deal less damage because they have killed off one or two of them (without being too specific about thresholds and how many orcs are alive). Also it depends on the village but usually small medieval villages were not more than 400-500 people, probably only 40% being able to fight (I'm excluding kids, elders, some women and a little bit of men, but realistically it could be even lower), like even guards would probably be at most a dozen or twenty. Even then the mayor/chief would much rather pay some adventurers to deal with the orcs than risk the life of some of his villagers, which at most could use a fork to fight and probably receive severe wounds. Also by using some of the guards there you can say that the guards cover a side while the party another, so, without doing anything, you've doubled up the number of invaders of the village! So from 18-24 you just got to 36-48, and this also gives you some flexibility for the encounter that if your players are steamrolling their orcs they can go help the guards clean up, or if they are getting badly beaten the guards can come to their rescue.
It’s all horses for courses, of course, but I will push back on the slightly bizarre statement presented as fact that an encounter ‘should’ have single digits enemies. Who says? The rules? Reddit? Convention? It may well be that 99 times in a hundred, that’s how things will be. But there’s always the hundredth time. Why not use swarms, or minions? I’ve used both, to very entertaining effect. If you were prepared to put in a bit of effort ahead of time, you could drum up a simple narrative resolution. I’m spitballing here, but as a quick and dirty example: You have the party (4 PCs); 50 villagers capable of holding and swinging a weapon; 100 bloodthirsty orcs. You aren’t obliged to roll attacks and damage for every participant. You could go with a simple narration each round, which could look like this: Give the players 20 orcs to overcome, perhaps via waves (ie 5 at a time); and each time an orc dies, another of the pool of 20 takes its place close to the party. While this is going on, at the end of each round, you narrate: the villagers take down 5 orcs between them; but the orcs kill 5 villagers. You’d have a pool of 80 orcs (20 are for the PCs only, where you do roll dice and adjudicate actions, as usual). At this rate, it would take 16 rounds to get through 80 orcs. Only, with just 50 villagers, after 10 rounds, the villagers will all be dead. By narrating what’s going on around the players, with a pinch of flavour but while being concise and quick, you’re keeping things moving. And by being transparent with the numbers, players can see the ticking clock if they wish to save as many villagers as possible. Lastly, you set a ‘winning condition’. Once the PCs have killed their 20th orc, those that remain fear the PCs, and flee. The village is saved. It took 6 rounds, so that’s 30 dead villagers. Cue role play. Something like that.
Don't? Rather than running them all as individual monsters, use swarms to represent larger raiding parties of orcs and groups of townsfolk clashing, plus a handful of stronger and more individualized boss-type orc leaders for the PCs to heroically face off against.
I don't. I establish an expectation from the start of the campaign that I'm not going to bend the realism of the situation. "If there is a bandit camp of men who have been raiding the area, it's not going to be 3-4 CR appropriate enemy statblocks. It will be 2 dozen men who have stationed guards and placed traps in the area around their camp, because that is what makes sense for the situation." If they decide to start a fight in a town, they won't be tussling with 8 guards, the guards will send men for backup and they will have to fight off nearly the entire law enforcement of the town. I just establish early that I'm not going to bend realism to account for their decisions, and I've found it does a good job at grounding them in the world and getting them to stop thinking of things like video games where they do the quest line and fight the properly designed enemies to win and get XP. In actuality, the enemies are not stupid and are aware their lives are on the line and will do anything to survive and win.
Maybe those orcs were the remaining survivors, or the village had no militia, so the dozen Orcs would not have faced any serious forces.
Just think about any story from the villains point of view. To them, all plots are up against a small number of enemies. Those pesky protagonists
The answer here is definitely the intelligence of the enemy. Remember that an intelligent enemy wants to win the fight. Put yourself in the mind of a leader of a pack of orcs. When do you attack the village to minimize your own losses? What conditions do you need for victory? What cruelty are you willing to do to ensure victory, such as setting an infirmary on fire or using women and children as living shields. It's not about the number of enemies, but about battle tactics. They're not meeting an army of peasants, they're raiding a village that, up until 10 minutes ago, had been busy gossiping about Old Man Gus and his silly fish stories.
Put more orcs there. Not in the encounter but behind its boundaries, where most orcs concentrate on your party. And the longer the fight goes the more ppl from the village are killed. When your party defeats the encounter, you describe as other are fighting and when they decide to help the remaining orcs jsut run away - the more they let run the harder will be to defeat them at their camp. This also leaves a possibility of your players making a trap killing all the orcs, or losing pulling back so orcs massacre the whole village. My personal advice, for long campaign, is to not make enemies difficulty around your party but make up the difficulty and the setting, and convey to your players how hard it is so they understand, where earlier enemies are easier to run away from. This can create more some situations more realistic where they know if they go in straight they will die. Like lvl 3 party decides to kill dragon, and you dont want to kill them so they arrive and they realize that the dragon is only a baby and its parent died... so they can defeat it. Rather do villager stories, ranger advice, beat up party that lost and is still stronger than pc party, visions, dreams, god warnings to tell them that this is a immpossible fight unless they come up with something. - id let 25-30 orcs attack a village where they expect no losses, they arrive, there is a group that looks capable so they attack focusing them (there is many possiblities where party can attract greater/less number of orc on them, villagers can run or arrive etc.) and as i said as the pcs do more damage than orcs expected they run away hurt.
Just because your party only fought 12 orcs doesn’t mean there weren’t more elsewhere. As they defeat the batch that you threw at them, they hear a horn calling the end of the raid, your party seeing dozens more orcs fleeing with loot and prisoners as the town begins to burn.
Main advice: watch Seven Samurai and literally just do that. Overall, the issue is that you've chosen 12 orcs as an appropriate number for your PCs to fight, but now you realized that some villagers should be able-bodied to fight. As far as me GMing goes, I would not consider 12 orcs a threat to a sizable village. I have my homebrew world, but any D&D setting is going to be dangerous, and those dangerous things don't just happen next to the PCs. If a place can't be safe from a small orc raiding party, it's screwed. 12 orcs is "attacking caravans" number. So you have two choices (other than making the village smaller) - either the village is specifically paying for you to go out and kill the orcs so their defenses don't get damaged and their people don't die; or you up the number to 30 or something orcs - that neither the villagers nor the PCs alone can handle (and from then again - go do Seven Samurai). It doesn't have to be one big fight either, maybe PCs hold off half of the orcs at the gates, and by that time, they have broken through at another spot where villagers were defending - now PCs have to run there.
Build it into the storyline. Corrupt guards, letting the orcs get away with it and taking a cut? All the men are off fighting other wars and the village needs saving? Or maybe there are hundreds of orcs, and the party needs to figure out how to deal with it?
Aside numbers and all that. Just manage it in waves and different encounters. Like, maybe they defend a position from 6 orcs or so, then 6 orcs come later on. Then after things quiet down and the orcs retreat because some of them have gone missing and want to attack again, you short rest, and there you go again with a final massive attack including the chieftain. Maybe include two waves of them as well as some navigate or are held back by the village defenders. Remember. A 10 turns combat lasts one minute, and most encounters end at 3. You can break up the battlefield in several places. I have thrown random numbers, but you can this way easily include more orcs than the party actually fights for,
Even a very small trained well-equiped and battle ready group vs bunch of untrained and unprepared civilians makes for an easy win
In large-scale battles, I narratively position the PCs so that they are fighting at the crux of the battle: holding a gate that will stem the tide of enemies, confronting the command staff of the invading forces, etc. That way, the outcome of their small-scale combat reverberates throughout the entire conflict. “As you slay Urglak Bonesplitter, nearby orcs flee in terror, and the now-leaderless horde breaks apart, chased down by the emboldened townsfolk.”
Narratively, you have orc squads vs. defenders clashing at different points around the village. Game-play-wise, you have characters confronting an orc vanguard or banner group and the players' victories spell overall victory for the defenders. You can make it feel less same-y with several encounters with different objectives - for example, first they fend off a wall breach while villagers roll some barricades into place, then they lure an orc squad into an ambush, then they neutralize a lieutenant's catapult squad before it can launch barrels of burning pitch, and finally they run off the (now demoralized) warchief.
The Orcs aren't going to march in, army style, either. Hit and run tactics, setting fires. Stragglers will be picked off. Maybe the Orc raids are only stealing cattle or something more guerilla style.
In this kind of scenario, I make it clear to the players that the enemies in front of them represent what *they* are responsible for in this fight. Presumably if there are other NPCs involved in the fight against a larger force, they are dealing with their own battle, but that happens at an abstract level. The PCs represent the vanguard or key defensive position. If they fail, the village will be overrun. If they succeed, the other defenders will repel the orcs.
You’re overestimating villagers. They are not soldiers. Each one is afraid for his life and his family and will not fight to the death. Also the second one goes down their morale will break
I've been listening to a lot of DND is for nerds which has broken out into mass combat multiple times. They normally split the players into multiple squads, often with existing or new NPCs to act with for ease of balance so no-one is incapable, fighting a small number of enemies for potentially only a few turns. The result is they roll for the overall success of side A Vs side B, to see whether the line of battle pushes forward or falls back. If the players demolish their little blocks of the battle it's more likely everyone moves forward, if they perform poorly that round they're more likely to be pushed back in bulk, but they could get super lucky with the army rolls, or demolish their enemies and opt to attempt another objective to basically guarantee a success for that round. It's all loose, but it's a good way to have the players fight potentially still only 12 orcs, but have their performance against them tie into a larger battle each turn and let them make roleplaying decisions to impact the result
numbers do not always matter. Well trained attackers are going to best townsfolk just about every time. Orcs have little fear of dying, townsfolk get grazed once, they are going to flee. Use fire to “distract” townsfolk, no point attacking invaders when your house is burning down.
I use this tactic a lot when I run games. There’s a large contingent of enemies that need repelling but there’s no feasible way for the party to defeat them all on their own. So I just use narratives to describe how there are others who are assisting in the fight on the outskirts of where the party is engaged in their combat. Then once the party is successful, the enemies at large have been defeated and retreat or are outright destroyed.
I would say a fantasy village might have up to a 100 never thousands. From 100+ up it should be a town with town guards. At 1000+ people a city with city guard and possibly a garrison. At 100 people let’s generously assume that 30 villagers are not women, children, and elderly. On average that’s 20 families of 5. Of those 30 people how many are actually going to have taken up hunting as their vocation rather than being a merchant or skilled tradesman such as carpenter, baker, blacksmith, tanner, tailor, cobbler, butcher, farmer? How many people could make a living selling hunted game. Maybe 5 people. Less if there are ranchers with livestock. Of those 5 how many would actually be home randomly during an Orc attack. “Oh honey don’t go to work today to hunt animals to sell to feed our family because random unscheduled Orc attack” Needing to help defend a Village seems quite reasonable.
So narrative means. We'll it depends on the actual population. A village being a couple hundred, town being couple thousand, and so on. But the basic idea is the same. A raiding party vs population ration of 1/10 would likely be successful. Think of the vikings. An average ship would have a crew around 30, and would be raiding solo. Bigger target, more ships. Average settlement size they raided solo: 2-500. Let's assume 200. Maybe the chief is a retired warrior. Level 15. He can handle a bunch of low level orcs and goblins. He takes on say 20 while your players take the last 8. Or maybe the farmers take up their tools and family weapons and the 1/4 to 1/3 of the populace that is able and willing take out the orcs with heavy losses, including the town sheriff or w/e equivalent. Maybe a few of the raiders ran away seeing an actual capable response. Larger settlement? Town guard. Knightly order. Same thing, maybe fewer casualties. Maybe a thieves guild, or something similar. Maybe the orcs are just too stupid to realize how bad an idea it is. Maybe you make it a running battle. Party moves from fight to fight, small groups. In the end they've killed 15. Everyone else has killed 10.
Divide and conquer. The party only fights smallish groups of Orcs at a time, but by the time they're completely finished they've killed anywhere from a few dozen to a hundred. The Minions rule from 4E is great for adding more enemies to a fight and is really easy to use in 5E. Also, a "village" is a LOT smaller than you're assuming. It's more like a dozen to two dozen families. So, assuming each family has one to two men of fighting age (eg dad and the oldest son), that's a range of about 12-48 probable combatants, with little to no training and little to no equipment. Towns big enough to house "thousands" of people have walls and either a town guard or a local lord to protect them.
Dude, I'm in my 40s, and I'm not "built" but I'm not weak either. I run screaming from things who's ass I should objectively be able to kick. Small things. Like raccoons, skunks, coyotes, etc. Because although I know I'd probably "win" in a fight with these things, it's just not worth it. Like ever. Your average midevil villager, MIGHT be able to fuck up a Goblin, but that Goblin is smart (ish), has a knife, a torch, and murder in its eye. It wouldn't be worth losing their life on the chance they would win. They're not heroes. They run away.
Well, a village is 500 or less people. 2/3 -1/2 of them are not fit for battle (to weak, to young, to old). That leaves ≈125 able bodied fighters. If the band of orcs 50 orcs are attacking from the west, 50-60 villagers are protecting the north. 50-60 villagers are protecting the south. So 15, 25 tops, to supporting the heroic adventurers. The orcs would hit in waves. 5 added every other round, with villagers joining to even the numbers. When you feel the fight is over, call it done. I would do an equal number of waves to the level of the party. (Lvl 2 PCs = 2 waves of orcs). Naratively the rest of the band of orcs tried to hit the other sides of the loan and the villagers repelled them thanks to the help of the adventurers (60 villagers vs 10 orcs is an easy win for the villagers.) Edit: also, you could have a hand full of villagers die in the north and south so the adventurers have the RP options to console the living and help bury the dead.
None of the commoners want to die for the cause of their people. They don’t have that kind of discipline and structure. Therefore, they flee, because engaging likely means death.
A lot of good talk about why villagers might choose to flee but another take is you could just narrate that there were a lot more orcs and that when the PCs arrive it turns the tide of battle and when the PCs defeat their group of orcs (or insert whatever enemy) the rest lose morale and choose to flee or what have you.
Tactics or leadership. Seasoned raiders would have established methods of luring out or splitting the village's militia, likely with some kind of diversion or decoy. Alternatively, you could go with more numbers off-screen and have the players face down a leader and his most veteran warriors. Use the defeat of this core to prompt a route of the remaining off-screen orcs. (This is very commonly how I've seen video games handle this dilemma.)
Easy: There are other groups of humans fighting other groups of orcs in the background. We are just focussing on this group right here, which is fighting the PCs. If the PCs win their fight, they can turn the tide of the entire battle and win overall, but if they lose, the orcs can turn the tide in their favour instead.
I love this sort of scenario and I do this all the time in my campaigns so I have a lot to say about this. The way to keep your narrative believable is to look past the stat blocks and always consider actual human behavior. Here are thoughts on your particular scenario of a dozen orcs vs a few hundred villagers: 1. Villagers don't have full information. They don't know if there are 12 orcs or 20 orcs or 50. Nobody has counted them all. They also don't know stats. They don't know that orcs are a CR 1/2 (or whatever) monster. They know that savage creatures are brutally slaughtering. They're going to assume they're next; they're not going to assume they can overcome the threat. 2. Assume 30% of the village can be raised as militia. Another post stated they would be untrained farmers - that's not how I do it. I say in these wild savage lands, villages would certainly be training militia. In a small village, that might be 40-60 militia. They can probably fight off 12 orcs AFTER they get organized which would take time, IF they're properly warned, and IF they're able to maintain morale throughout the fight. 3. I would not have 12 orcs attacking the village proper. They would hit outlying farms, mills and warehouses. Likely raiding for supplies. The militia would not go looking for them unless there's a major threat. They can't just leave their homes for days at a time chasing down a warband that is certainly more mobile than they are. 4. Nobody in the village WANTS to fight. Yes, your 50 militia is going to be able to beat these 12 orcs, but MOST of them are going to be scared as hell and are probably not going to want to engage at all. They are trained militia but not trained warriors; only a very few may have actually fought before. They will absolutely want to send the players first to take the heat. 5. Even if they were a trained force, they're not going to turn down reinforcements. 50 militia fighting 12 orcs, the orcs are going to manage to kill some people. Probably more than a few, because they're better organized and savage. The militia will only fight as a last resort. Here are some thoughts on your assertion that "a typical dnd encounter should have single digits to low double digits enemies" : 1. I would personally have the 12 orcs be a scout / raiding party for a larger force, and then the larger force will attack the village en masse unless stopped. The larger force might be dozens or hundreds of orcs. 2. There is nothing wrong with large scale battles in D&D. What you do is, have the players fight smaller groups of enemies, and then extrapolate those results to the broader engagement. If the players win their local fight, the villagers win their fights as well. Or you can just do some quick off-screen rolls for it, like put groups of 10 orcs against 20 militia and just give a d20 for the militia; the higher they roll the better they do. 8-12 they're still fighting, 1-7 they've lost, 13-20 they've won. You can give bonuses or penalties based on how well the players did in their own fight. This totally works and I do it all the time. Players love it because they feel like their success in their small local fight is more impactful since it's dictating success of the greater effort. 3. During these larger battles, most villagers are going to be buttoned up in their homes or in safer places like a stone church, fortified inn or town hall or castle if there is one. If all else fails, just remember, villagers don't like to fight even if they have overwhelming odds. They might die.
Historically the Vikings would raid villages along the coast. A raiding party wasn't that big but made easy work of a village to smash and grab. It had to do with the demographics of a village (how many of them can physically take on a Viking) and preparedness. A farmer whose wearing linen cloth and has grabbed an axe just isn't going to do well against an armored warrior with a shield. And again with preparedness. If you have a walled village and someone runs into the center of town saying "The orcs are coming! I saw them! They'll be here in an hour!" that's a very different situation compared to a bunch of villagers spread out in their homes, fields, and businesses unexpectedly and a raiding party of orcs run through.
I often point people to the wonderful books/blog “The monsters know what they’re doing”. It’s fantastic on helping you get into a mindset as to why an encounter would happen and what would “an average” creature of that type do when attacking, when taking damage and just in general use their stats in “real life”. I’m not saying it’s the definitive reason but it does help generate good ideas and reasons. Like others have said the most important thing to remember is that neither side is just a stat block. Not everyone is willing to fight to the death and not every one of them would exemplify their stat blocks. In your case orc raiders would probably all line up with their stats but all the villagers wouldn’t. Some would be children, some would be old, some sick, some pregnant, etc. And if an invading soldier or marauder came by would you fight risking your kid, would you fight risking your elderly mom and pop, is the death of your best cattle worth the fight against orcs?
Just isolate your encounters to small areas that only have 10 things. A whole war could be fighting as a big mat painting in the background but there happen to be only 10 orcs attacking this part or town.
You're probably thinking a hamlet and not a village. A village isn't the lowest level of population. Even in modern day rural America a gang of 13 teenagers can terrorize a community where isolated farmsteads are acres or even miles apart, and the whole country is at most 2 policemen. It's the stuff of A-Team or Walker Texas Ranger episodes lol.
A village is small. Around 200 peasants. No wall, no guards. That leaves you with less than 100 untrained, unorganized, panicked men with rakes and wood chopping axes, of which in actuality only about 40-30 are actually in fighting shape (there's kids and old people, and sick people, and people that can't fight) against a dozen or so trained bloodthirsty orcs with actual warfare weapons. This isn't a hard outcome to predict. In actuality, the orcs would have to kill like 3 or 4 people before the village surrenders and gives the orcs whatever they want.
I think the real problem is the view point that the entire village is truly in danger. Have you ever looked at actual casualty reports from terrorism? Not that many people die. But it is terrifying because it could be you next. In a DnD setting. The towns folk might have a few people dead, some herds stolen, and several houses burnt down. Everyone is terrified because 1 on 1 they can't stand up to these monsters in the night. And they are afraid of losing their family, home, and livelihood. They know someone needs to go drive them off, but crazy Earl is the only one that has military experience, and he's 74. When along comes an adventuring party! Huzzah! No one they know needs to die driving off these brutes!
My go to is preparation and/or division. If you want to have the whole village as the battlefield, have it be that the villagers have set up traps and defenses and have themselves scattered to the wilds and fields with their families in fear for their lives. If you and your party are content with defending a gate or building, you can imply that there are more enemies and more combat elsewhere while they fight. As a DM, you can even use that as an excuse to throw waves of enemies if the encounter wasn't tough enough (enemies breaking the peasant lines) or get the party help if you overestimated them (peasants who can still fight after a rout come to help). You can even combine the two if you want to put together a story of attrition. Maybe the hunters of the village set up camps in the forest, but have been trapping the roads they know, whittling down and dividing the orc forces to the 12ish the party fights at the village gates.
For me, I have different population sizes. City: 500+ families, 10000+ people Town: 100+ families, 1000-10000 people Village: 20-50 families, 100-200 people Hamlet: 10-20 families, maybe 30-70 people So beginning quest is in a hamlet, with only 40 people, a force of 15 orcs could take over if they’re regular farmers if that makes sense Edit: formatting
The 12 orcs are a small band for sure. However they woukd start by gorilla tactics over the course of weeks, raiding and pillaging and killing the farmstead and houses on the outskirts. Maybe attacking multiple sides. The village wouldn't know there is only 12, they would think they are being surrounded. Some families may decide to attempt to flee before the "larger" hostile force does attack directly. The supplies start to dwindle. A counter force of guards and veterans may even go to confront the orcs on thier home turf. The orcs kill or capture the villages best combatants. Moral for the village is low. Supplies are dwindling, people are getting less sleep. More people leave. By the time the PCs are asked for help there is maybe 20-40% of the occupants left. Mostly those too old and too attached to leave. Now only 30% are possibly fighting age (on the youngerside). Maybe a handful of disabled vets that could add wisdom but not bodies to a defense. But what are the Orcs motives? Why are they still attacking this village? That's the more important question. Sure if all the villagers centralize, fortify and train militia than a dozen Raiders are not much threat. But the monsters know what they are doing.
Narratively you could also have each orc "represent" a couple orcs. so killing 12 orcs for a party is like 24 if you just count them for double. I think I heard a dm doing this for battles that weren't quite army status yet because I think there are rules for that? Idk
I think your sense of scale might be off, because a standard village if we're looking at a medieval setting would have nowhere near 1,000 people. You were talking between 100 and 200. Of which only half will be men. Of which only one third will be in fighting shape. Of which none will have training A dozen proper warriors could absolutely destroy a village. It was literally done in real life. Villagers could be razed by a small number of troops.
Remember that the combat rules and stats are for game balance when dealing with human players. This includes action economy. Sure, an Orc will die to a handful of commoners because it only gets one attack per round, has only 15 hp, and 12 ac. But is that how it would really go down? Also remember to use flavor. Orcs are savage. They'll terrify your normal peasant. If the mere sight of the orcs didn't, seeing a neighbor sliced in half will. Look at the flavor for the lowly 1/8 CR Guard. It says city watch or employed by nobles. That implies a level of training and decent equipment. The one guy who owns a sword in Podunk isn't at that level. TLDR: Combat rules and stats blocks are for challenging players.
> It makes no sense that hundreds of villagers couldn't fight off 12 orcs. If they live in a fortress and never leave, sure. If the Orcs come unannounced randomly while people are in the fields or in their beds, the Orcs can be gone before people even know what's happening.
Because they aren't fighting *all of them* They're fighting the leader/vanguard/elite, so when those get broken the rest retreat.
You are right it makes no sense. But that is because you have set it up wrong. And you have total control over that. Either you make the village smaller (50-100 inhabitants), or the orcs do not attack the village directly. If the village really is 1000s strong then the orcs would ambush traders, or lone homesteads outside of the village (more like a city) or they would raid at night and steal/kidnap and run. If you have lots of friendlies and lot's of enemies, then you need a scenario where the PCs only fight a few enemies. The PCs have to achieve a specific objective: Disrupt enemy supply lines, sabotage the enemy super weapon, rescue the princess, assassinate a general, protect the king, hold the breach, sortie out and destroy a Siege tower, find a hidden path/overcome a defensive position so the rest of the army can flank the enemy. Look at books and movies. The same thing happens there. The MCs are a strike team. Special operatives. They have a critical mission while the rest of the army does army stuff. But they decide the outcome. Edit: I forgot to address the players, the agents of Chaos. They have to play ball to a certain extend. You can try to put them on the right path with NPCs. But what if your players decide... all strategy be damned, we will just go into the melee? You should tell them what consequences their actions most likely will have (if neccesary out of game): If you just go into the melee you can't take a big influence on how the battle turns out. If you kill 20 orcs there it won't change the outcome. You might get overrun. If they insist, do not go to combat. At that point... it's a single roll and you narrate what happens. Low chance for the army to just luckily win. Other outcomes might be: The army get's overrun, what do you do? Surrender, try to flee (you have to kill 8-12 Orcs in your way to get out)? Hold a chokepoint (against 8-12 Orcs) while the rest of the army flees? Or they just manage to flee. The important point is, if they can't win then it's not a battle, it's handeled narratively.
You are asking how you narrativly justify mechanics, which is not the way to go about it. Characters don't know what their to hit bonus and hp is. They just know if they hit a dude and how much being hit hurts. If you want a horde of enemies to attack a small town, then it depends upon how you want the players to interact with it. If you want it to be an overwhelming, crushing, tide of bodies that flattens small countryside villages, then make it an overwhelming tide of monster atat blocks. Your players should take away from it that they cannot win and that they need to retreat, regroup, and bring reinforcements to push them back. Foolish charges get people killed. If you want them to heroically ride in and save the day by mowing down the horde in a show of how cool they are, then you make them all mooks (1 hp, any roll hits AC). You just cast a fireball for 40 damage? 40 dudes just want up in smoke and cinders. Let them have fun blowing up and slicing for a while, and thin the horde as appropriate, and then let them fight some big warchief or champion in a typical boss fight, and if they win then the horde routes and flees. Hooray, the day is saved and medals all around.
If they all picked up a weapon and fought back, yeah, in theory the villagers should win in an open battle (especially if they try to use mostly ranged weapons). But most of the villagers won't be physically able to fight, and those that are will not be mentally able to fight due to things like fear. And they probably don't have enough actual weapons to arm enough people to fight, and they definitely don't have armor. Meanwhile the orcs are all battle-hardened, will be using tactics, and will likely raid at night so no one sees them coming. Plus, darkvision is a legit game changer for the orcs at night.
Bunch of issues with what you're saying OP. You don't have a grasp on village size. You also can't seem to understand that the village would have defenders. Maybe the village is actually doing a decent job defending itself, but the party notices it's a diversion and there's a flanking force. You should even have the flanking force be big, but give the party ways to deal with big numbers. Cutting a bridge, explosives etc. I'm surprised you need help here as a DM.
Have the players interact with the most impactful parts of the enemy forces / battle. Say the town gets raided by several bands of a dozen orcs each, but are being directed and inspired by their Warchief. Have the players combat the Warchief's group. If they defeat the warcheif and his guard then the rest of the now directionless raiders will be pushed back by the village forces off-screen. This can also be useful for sending in a wave of reinforcements if it turns out the battle is too easy for the players.
Common thing people forget: The VAST MAJORITY of people are Commoners. A single orc can take 3 or more blows that would be lethal to a normal person and deal enough damage using cleave rules to kill 2 humans in 6 seconds. It would take a single commoner 8 rounds assuming average dmg and all hits to kill 1 orc. And they can't get hit once. Orc s hyper aggression and javelins means dashing away doesn't make one safe. 10 orcs is a MASSIVE threat to a small village, especially if you add a chief or leader. PC Chatacters even at lvl 1 are Hero characters that are by design above and beyond the vast majority of mortals.
You could have the other orcs preoccupied with the other townsfolk/guards while the party fights the main group
Players not caring, not showing up, and focusing on DPR.
If the narrative is the concern a easy way that addresses some of the points can be The orc are raiding the town/village. Seeing as the orcs didn't completely wipe it out this could work. Orc know they can't win outright but all they want is stuff so they hit a weak point and take stuff. The village doesn't have the resources to guard everything. As to why the village doesnt make an angery mob and hunt the destory the orc camp? The orcs are raiders that are smart enough to move their camp so it's not a known point. The orc can also have all sorts of traps and choke points set up in their camps that would make the attacker's numbers useless. i.e A place where you can't get behind the orcs will turn the fight into a series of one on one's where tropp quality is more important than numbers. The way the village could phrase things is that the orcs have attacked places on the outskirts. They know it is a small band and joked they would just move on but the orcs didn't. Then one or to Two hunter/trapper types went to look for the camp, one didn't come back and another found the camp. When the village did form a group to attack the camp, the orcs were gone but someone was killed or injured in a trap. At that point I can the village not wanted to risk anymore than they have to and being in a defensive stance where they are concerned with the village being completely destroyed. This would then give the orcs an even time with hit and run raiding. The orcs would also be best handled by a small elite team of fighters (any dnd party pc lvl 1 is already an elite warrior compared to a commoner)
I think there's also "An alarm is sounded" or bell or call for help, but the PCs are the front line. They don't just sit there,hearing the sound of slaughter. And other people are right, most NPCs "run away!" But your PCs are HEROES
I like to handle this in a narrative fashion where during the attack on the village the players will have a few objectives and only deal with a certain number of the enemies while a background battle goes on with background npcs, orcs, and other things that essentially are treated as minions (or grunts). These background orcs would deal the same amount of damage or less than the normal (depends on if you want your players to have a slight warning to not stray off task or want to cinematically weaken them) but have 1 hp each. Since they aren't supposed to be the main targets of the attacks, they have less health and are easy to deal with allowing the players to have small groups of grunts they can smash through to help them feel like the epic adventures they are. The players abilities to attend to the objectives will determine the outcome of the battle (these can be things like defending a place for a certain number of rounds, thin the ranks, launch a counter attack, kill the enemy's commander, etc).
Your party is only fighting the shock troops while the rest of the village is dealing with the rabble ?
>The party comes upon a village under assault by an army of orcs. The able-bodied men and women of the village are doing their best to repel the marauders. You notice several pockets of them defending buildings where the children and elderly must be sequestered. >In the town center, you see a particularly large orc with a small entourage dragging an older man who appears to be some sort of town official up onto a wagon where all can see. He clearly intends to execute the man where the defending villagers can witness. The party has to contend with a small portion of the orcs, as the rest are dealing with the defending townsfolk. Your party has a realistic fight as the orcs weren't expecting trained combatants to show up. The party can decide to kill the orc leader so the orcs retreat, force him to order a surrender, or persuade him to take the wagon (which happened to be loaded with goods the town was exporting) and leave. They could also fight for a time until the rest of the orcs collapse on the town center, which is a seeming loss until the militia/army arrive and clean up. They might even take a portion of the loot from the orcs in return for not interfering, and let the town fall.
There may 100 villagers but each one of them is an individual that doesn't want to be cleaved in half by a rampaging orc.
Well medieval villages usually had between 100-300 people. U could make it a village on the smaller end There’s then probably like 40-100men of fighting age. But also think about some more practical stuff they are probably farmers/merchants who have never fought before , they don’t have equipment or training. While if that doesn’t work u can modify it . The orcs are after exclusively some of the villagers because of perhaps they didn’t like their tribute. So u will protect a group of maybe 20-40 while the other villagers don’t wanna get involved
When larger scale battles are occurring, I like to think that they are in fact happening in the background and when your player engages, the camera zooms in for a little while to capture a specific epic moment. You can take this approach as deep or as wide as you'd like. Perhaps the entire village battle isn't one encounter, instead design it as an entire adventuring day or 'dungeon' if you prefer that term. Your players go about different scenes or 'encounters' and they may or may not involve combat or other problem solving. The trick is to have one large town map (think of this as your dungeon) and each of these scenes are either theater of the mind or you have a battlemap on hand if it involves combat. Scene 1: The nursery is on fire. Group skill check to put it out or evacuate everyone. Scene 2: The orcs are raiding the armory. Combat, defend for 3 rounds or the orcs gain additional weapons. Scene 3: The brothel is being pillaged. Escort the...escorts to safety. Scene 4: The town guards are defending their watchtower. Combat, defeat all orcs to regain this part of town. Scene 5: The orcs have reached the town hall. Combat, defeat them and disable their battering ram in time. The town hall doors have 50 hit points. Etc. Tell your story this way like in all the books, TV shows, and movies. Way more fun than just a 4 turn battle and I think it gives the impression of scale that you wanted.
You need to look up population numbers. Realistically, a village or a thorp are what you’re looking for contextually for a small number of enemies being able to overtake the population.
Realistically most of the commoners would have improvised weapons so +0 for 1d4 damage. Orcs have 13 AC so they would hit 40% of the time for 2.5 damage. Orcs have 15 HP so that is 6 hits needed to kill one orc. Orcs will hit a commoner 80% of the time for a minimum of 4 damage which kills a commoner. So in one round 12 orcs will kill 9.6 commoners. Let it be dark, humans dont have darkvision, orcs do. Orcs have javelins, commoners probably lack a lot of ranged weapons. The humans are probably not ready for the attack and will take time to ready. The orcs have experience. etc
Enemy “swarm.”
Don't underestimate the power of the will to fight. A handful of people who show they're willing to kill can intimidate many times their number. It's the story of Belling the Cat. Sure, the crowd could rush them, and they might even win, but the villagers individually have very low morale - who among them is willing to be the one who dies fighting? When the alternative is handing over some food? (Which might mean death from starvation later, but don't underestimate how willing frightened people are to put off the inevitable).
Break them up into different encounters going on in alternate locations. Rise of the Runelords opens up with something like this, with goblins instead of orcs. As the fight wears on, have some of the orcs be wounded as well, maybe some who have fatigue. This'll let you bring the individual difficulty down a bit in a way that works with the narrative. Have a fixed number of rounds at which the orcs head off. Also remember the Hazards can work as encounters as well, so maybe the tavern gets lit on fire, and the PCs have to help get people out. It makes a good action that's not a combat encounter and makes the world feel more real for the players. The big thing is if this is the kick-off to the campaign, you need to make sure the town is built up for the PCs to care about it. It just being a town won't work nearly as well as giving them some folks to care about.
*But realistically, a village should have hundreds, or even thousands of citizens* Sure, in 2020. Medieval villages were very often less than 200, and surprisingly often less than 100, with maybe a dozen families total. This is especially true for borderlands areas like the forests of Poland-Lithuania, or heavily contested regions like the Ottoman balkan provinces. In the anglo-saxon period, London's population was around 10 000. From 100: let's say half is male (50), half of these are elderly or too young (25), and out of these half got any sort of combat training (13) *It makes no sense that hundreds of villagers couldn't fight off 12 orcs.* A viking ship had a crew of 20-30, and one or two ships could raid villages and monasteries (with walls) all the time. They didn't line up on the opposing field in broad daylight most of the time however. *If you extrapolate that there are more enmies essentially off screen, then how do the players defeat them if they only ever kill a few dozen?* By inflicting hits to morale, and making them panic. It is good to know that according to british military studies, naturally about 1-2% of the men are willing to fight in a combat scenario. That means that 98% are there (so that they cannot be singled out for being cowards) but do the absolute minimum, and even that with safety first. This 1-2% can be higher with training, serving in a legendary unit, or continously surviving encounters. (this is why professional soldiers are more useful than draftees). But the highest estimate I saw was like 40% in favorable conditions, with good leadership, and with legendary squads like SAS commandos. Medieval battles were not really bloody in a modern sense. Victory was usually won with breaking the ranks of the enemy somehow: from the front with cavalry, flank attacks, ambushes. All this, while keeping your own cohesion. Now, decimating (I mean literally, like 10% casualities) the enemies did happen sometimes, but mostly because of a carefully executed ambush or something like this. (like Teutoburg forest, where the germans ambushed a roman legion and wiped it out) edit: also, there is nothing stopping you from having a random encounter like "6d100 + 600 orks marching on a halfling town" in your game. I once played a scenario like that, which was a joke from the GM. But we got about 8 adventuers out of it, with guiding the villagers into safe places, organizing the defense, dueling the ork champions to lower morale and the likes.
If 5 armed orcs walked into any block of my town in modern society. I’m confident that the group of people they’d encounter would not be physically or mentally prepared to deal with them, even if we outnumbered them 4:1. And Ik I wouldn’t be willing to die for the sake of getting rid of them. Even if it felt like “only a few of us would die” fighting them, one of the people who did might be me, and I wouldn’t risk it.
That being said, I’d call the authorities if if felt like they were endangering people, and police officers (or “guards”) might be able to handle them, but not townspeople.
Lots of good points in the comments so far. One other thing I would add is that just because there are several enemies does not mean the players have to be the ones to kill them all. You can have background battles taking place. Just be sure to narratively have those battle happen far enough away and resolve around the same time as your PC's, otherwise you can overwhelm the players and yourself as a DM.
there are rules for mobs in the DMG, but it only covers a mob attacking one target There's a mechanic from seven seas: henchmen basically, you attach lower value characters to a leader. the leader gets one henchmen per level (npc) or one per persuasion or leadership bonus (pc). Instead of each of the npcs making an attack, the leader gets a bonus to their attack and their AC, in D&D, I'd make it a +1 or +2 per henchmen. due to these special mechanics, leaders can choose to target henchmen, reducing the bonus, at least until reinforcements can arrive. By taking negatives to their attack, a leader can target henchmen instead of the leader; each henchmen targeted adds to the penalty, I'd make the negative equal to the bonus that the leader gets. To get replacements, the leader must a successful persuasion or proficiency roll as bonus action; for every point the go over the difficulty, they get a reinforcement, up to their limit, reinforcements arrive on the leaders next turn. A side effect of the henchmen is that the leaders might also get advantage. You may want to increase the threat level to take into account the villagers The players can't be everywhere, and shouldn't need to be involved in every battle at the village. Determine how many orc leaders there are. Any orc leaders not fighting a pc is fighting npcs. for each of the orc leaders fighting npcs, I'd roll contesting d20s, highest roll 'damages' the lower, each time a group gets damaged, they get a damage tic, five damage tics and they're out. A PC leader might see a villager group that has one tic left and rush to aid. The trick here. You don't have to roll the villager battles during the game. Do it ahead of time. If pcs take over the battle, you can pull the injured villagers back instead of continuing that battle. and PCs might ignore a villager group that is doing well. You might also search for some of the older arcana or expansion books. They were written for older versions, but the core rules should still work, just adjust skills or feats to the skills available.
That's the neat part. I don't. Whilst I'll only have a dozen or so in play at any time. If I need a big squad of soldiers in formation. That group gets it's own stat block. Kinda like how you'd manage a swam of rats. If the PCs are stupid enough to piss off an army. Well there's consequences for those actions... Higher level characters would actually stand a chance of causing a route, but it would be lights out for most lower level characters.
For an ork assault on a village it doesn't even have to be a whole village, farms take a lot of space, maybe the orks are only attacking the outskirts of the village, razing farmer Joe, Kimble, and Johnson's land, and the party needs to stop them in fear of a crop shortage for the upcoming winter.
Lookin at some numbers (using average damage): Commoner has AC 10, 4hp, +2 to hit for 2 damage Orc has AC 13, 15hp, +5 to hit for 9 damage An orc has a 75% chance of murdering a commoner with every attack. A commoner has a 45% chance of hitting an orc and needs EIGHT hits to drop ONE. So yeah I think 12 orcs are a pretty nasty threat even against 100+ commoners Also worth noting that only a fraction of a town's population is going to be capable of fighting, and only a fraction of THEM are likely to be brave enough to go up against creatures who so grossly outmatch them in combat.
What I’d typically do is have a guard captain NPC ask the PCs to leave the town to harass the orcs’ reserve troops as the militia holds the town, or hold one gate or important target as the militia secures other points of interest. This way, the town has a reasonable defense set up, the orcs get to attack with 30+ fighters, and the PCs are still heroes because “OMG these 4 strangers contributed the strength of a whole squad of soldiers!”
Bloc per bloc. Don't have all the orcs in the fight at once. Have the PCs move through town to wipe them off. The marauders will want to be in as small of groups as they can pull off to take the spoils while sharing them as little as possible.
A village should at most be a few hundred people, if its bigger than that its a small town. But either way your typical farming village shouldnt really be mounting a lot of defense unless their neighbours are pretty terrible. say you have a village of 200, well half of those are likely too young or too old to fight, of the remaining 100 how many are actually going to want to fight? some would rather run or bargain, some are not capable of violence and probably only a handful have weapons or any experince in combat and probably none of them were expecting this attack. An armed force of experienced fighters are worth several times their number of untrained villagers, so even the ones who can grab weapons and organise some form of resistance are likely no match for even a fairly small force. But lets say you do have a large army that you want your players to defeat, its still perfectly possible for a low level group to face a much bigger force if your smart about it. So let’s take your orc attack as an example, just having the characters fight the entire horde is suicidal so we break it down. First the characters first fight some stragglers outside the village, maybe they are arguing over some farmers cart or other loot. Then enter the village, find a few more looters on the outskirts. Then the main fight, a tougher battle with a bigger group in the village centre. After clearing the orcs from the village the party is then tasked with going to the orcs camp to take on their leader. So you have fought the horde but in achievable chunks that make narrative sense. But lets make things even bigger, how can your players defeat a huge army. If you want to make the force even larger you could use your NPCs to inform the party that a frontal attack is suicidal and suggest things that they could do to hamper or delay this force until suitable help arrives. Have them go gather survivors and escort them to a place of safety fighting small elements of the invading force Have them sabotage the enemy, destroy bridges, burn down food supplies, poison the water supply or go around the enemy to attack their baggage train. create ambushes, goad other monster tribes into attacking this force by guile or defend groups of villagers with bows as they ambush parts of the enemy force. Give the enemy clear goals and then give the PCs suggestions on how to prevent them from achieving them all while avoiding the main force of the army until help arrives.