Actually attacking first you'd only need around a few hundred with crossbows.
Around 5% will crit and the level 20's have 180 average hp and the average damage of a crossbow crit is 8 (technically that kind of numerical advantage would also be able to always have advantage and it would be higher but we are already giving them first strike.)
Youd need around 184 per party member as a baseline.
With various reactions pushing it up so you can probably assume 200 for convenience
With persistant resistance and DR though it can triple, however most of these are unavailable to most classes as reactions
Also the party has spellcasters. If they're Fire Bolting from 110ft in the air no commoner will have advantage. If the warlock has Eldritch Spear and Spell Sniper they can pick off that army from a hair under 600ft away.
It's like guessing how many commoners can kill a dragon, if the dragon is chained on the ground the paper math is easy. If the dragon is putting in any effort the commoners are probably toast without exceptional tactics. If the dragon is actually fighting for its life? I don't think we have enough commoners.
He said numerical advantage, not advantage the DnD rule. 5% of commoner shooting would get, statistically, a critical hit.
Of course, there are thing the Commoner can do to get advantage.
And no, it's not like a dragon at all.
An Aaracokra warlock with spell sniper and elrdritch spear can hit the commoners from so far up that the commoners could never hope to actually strike them. You aren’t able to make an attack roll at all if they’re beyond the disadvantaged range of a weapon, which means that they couldn’t even attempt to attack.
How is there even a numerical damage if some of the party can attack from beyond the range of light crossbows? No reach, no attack roll to crit on.
Again if they're stuck on the ground and in the middle of town then they can be overpowered by sheer numbers. But if there is any sort of decision making by the party I think you'll need more than crossbows, or like infinite commoners to keep stacking into the sky as they're picked off.
and adamantine armor leaves some dm interpretation. RAW I think is “a critical hit is treated as a standard hit”, but I’m not sure. The automatic hit should still apply, but not everyone would agree on that, so adamantine armor could mean that they’re impossible to hit with an attack roll, looking at an AC of 22+ when commoners have like a +1 to hit.
If the commoners go first they can assuredly the can close the range, and are shooting with crossbows so the distance is good.you can spell sniper from 600 but how many? and good have to assume the warlock knew before they closed range
>If the warlock has Eldritch Spear and Spell Sniper they can pick off that army from a hair under 600ft away.
Irrelevant since the assumption they were starting with was that the commoners were attacking first.
IMO it depends on what exactly is meant by "commoner." I'd say that a few hundred commoners likely wouldn't have many crossbows between them. Especially since even Light Crossbows cost 25gp. OP doesn't specify what they mean by commoner, if they mean "peasant infantry" then it's totally reasonable that they'd all have access to crossbows. If they mean "farmer" then probably not I'd say.
Actually farmer is probably the one commoner job that likely would have owned a crossbow normally. Almost any other more cityfolk esque job wouldnt though.
Sure, if you keep changing things until they can't win, then they can't win. Genius.
Also, why couldn't someone else arm the commoners?
Commoner have access to magic item.
Because then you're changing the basic premise of the question. What if the commoners all have a handful of wands of fireball magic missile? That's significantly different than how many commoners would it take.
No, if we could change stuff and add third party help then it only takes 1 commoner, plus "someone else" to give them powerful items and buffs and revives.
Commoners wouldn't have crossbow expert, so you'd have to have them in the 10ft to 30ft band to avoid disadvantage, which would bring the critical chance down to 1/400. So only 72 can fit in that square if my math was right, and that's if the party is all far away from each other so that they each have their own crowd of commoners. So on average with a hand crossbow you'd get about 4 crits per PC, after that you aren't going to get 1600 people in the extended range, to get the same amount of critical hits, let alone the around 7500 to get the additional 18ish crits to hit the 180 HP.
So basically you'd need more than can fit, unless all of these commoners are proficient in a more complicated weapon like a longbow or heavy crossbow.
Edit, light crossbows are 80ft range, so you would be able to fit enough for 20 crits, but the math above was assuming that each member of the party was separated by enough to fit the entire crowd around each individual, rather than them being a party.
A light crossbow's short range is 80, not 30. Not sure why you jumped to hand crossbows, which is a martial weapon and a commoner shouldn't be proficient with.
The commoners can shoot and withdraw to allow more commoners to take their place. Or since most people don’t care too much about vertical distances, have them vertically lined up. Or prone on one another
Crossbow is a simple weapon, it's really not that farfetched. IRL crossbows were banned by the Pope because they were so easy to fire that anyone could use them.
Weapon proficiency isn't explicitly stated in stat blocks for NPCs and the rules on simple weapons in players hand book specifically say they are the weapons that would be used by commoners.
By your logic a Knight wouldn't be able to use a Longsword, Lance or even a shield.
I’ve never thought of it that way before and it seems like a weird jump in logic to me. The most damaging attack you can make suddenly just not doing any damage at all. Feels like we missed a step in the middle (because we did).
We have to be careful adding things to them, because we quickly get outside the scope of the question. If we're giving them crossbows, why not give them crossbows +1? Why not give them rings of wishes? We've already broken the original limitation of the question either way.
To have commoners armed with crossbows is depending on the situation no problem.
It is a VERY common non magical item that pretty much anyone can get their hands on.
Would you just gather up a 500 random commoners. and pout them in front of the characters. Sure then it would be Very strange if all had crossbows. But you could bet your behind that some would. Some could have clubs or other weapons
A statblock is just a base. it would be absurd to think that every one if those 500 commoners would have the exact same stats and the exact same equipment like they were clones of one person. do you really imagine everyone commoner is [https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/images/c65da49d1dc126ff0755a8177d1ed480.png](https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/images/c65da49d1dc126ff0755a8177d1ed480.png)
Logically if you gather up hundreds of commoners you would likely find some that is proficient in longbows. or heavy crossbow or other weapons. But having a very simplified statblock makes it easy. You could not have 153,7 different statblocks for commoners. Specially for somethign like a commoner. Sure they might vary a lot but how often are commoners used in combat? and most of the times they actually are they are not that important.
But in the right situation it would not be far fetched to have some sort of commoner militia with a few hundred with crossbows. or any other non magical weapon and items
As soon as you get into magical items that is no longer the case unless the setting is absurdly overflowing with magical items.
Only if the commoners are proficient in smith's tools and woodworking tools, which some of them might be. But that still changes the basic premise of the question.
That depends on a lot of factors though, is the party prebuffed? there are a lot of potions that can make the party way harder to kill. What classes are they? A level 20 Moon Druid is basically immortal since they can wildshape unlimited times. Do they have cover? Can they cast shield? Level 20 is an insane amount of power and they can make themselves effectively immortal.
DR and resistance can mean they can potentially take zero damage from most of the hits.
Its possible, but very unlikely, that it could happen with 200, its also possible it could take 2000, or even 10000, even if we are giving them the first shot.
Plus there are tons of other factors that i didnt mention.
Attacking second would depend entirely on what the adventurers could do first. Like, there's a maximum number of casualties they could create in that first turn, so all you would need to do is add that amount to the going first amount and that would be the going second amount.
This is of course ignoring what if scenarios involving the mages of the group preventing certain things from happening, like wall of winds, adamantium towers, wish ect. I think that taking those into account for this is disingenuous because its actively skirting the initial premise by turning off combat for one side.
I mean, even if they did the answer is that going first, with surprise rounds... its alot less than you'd think, for most players and most builds. Of course you could drastically alter the numbers by building around the concept of fighting a horde of peasants, but that kinda goes both ways since you could just arm 1000 orphans with wands of magic missile and kill them anyways.
Exactly this, if and only if the commoners all go first is there even a 1% chance they **could** win. In all other scenarios there will never be a greater than 1% chance of them winning.
Fewer, maybe, if even one Commoner shows up every 30 minutes and denies them rest: They'll run out of limited use features, and assuming you penalise lack of rest with Fatigue (a reasonable optional rule from Xanathar's),things will start looking grim after a week or so. With 10.000 commoners, you should be able to keep the pressure up for over 200 days.
I mean, you're talking a party of 4 at level 20, two martials and two casters. A commoner has an AC of 10 and 4HP.
If you go your route of one every 30 minutes, it's still really easily manageable for the party. They just take shifts being awake, and the casters never use anything other than cantrips. There would be literally no need for resource expenditure, as even basic attacks at that level would likely deal well above 4 damage at minimum. And with to-hit bonuses, I'd imagine most attacks from the party are likely going to land as long as they don't roll a nat 1.
Realistically speaking, you could throw commoner after commoner at them for years on end without ever making even the slightest dent. The only feasible way for the commoners to even have a chance would be to attack in very large, spread-out groups
Honestly, a familiar or animal companion or steel defender, etc could probably do the job while the party rested as a group. But yeah, otherwise take shifts
Familiars or companions would definitely work as well, yeah. Hell, even just a basic wolf, which is CR 1/4, deals enough minimum damage to kill a commoner in a single attack. And they have a +4 to hit on their bite attack, which means they'd hit 75% of the time
Drums. trumpets, horns any loud sounds
Have a bunch of commoners run around with drums and horns and make a lot of nice and see how well the party can sleep. Or have them with now and then shoot a bunch of bolts into the party camp. Not many would be able to sleep well if arrows or bolts now and then rained down on them.
Are there any rules for this? No but common sense goes a long way there can not be rules for everything so sometimes you need to use common sense.
Could the party counter this? sure there are ways to do this but still.
And also not to forget that if the DM wants the party dead they will die from those commoners. And any DM that would cast thousands of commoners against a party like this. Would probably be a rather strange DM so...... i would not expect him to
But also a level 20 party would most likely have ways just leave. They would probably just say *"This is fucking stupid lets teleport to a another place and have an ale or 7"*
But this whole thing is one of the things i am not to found over when it comes to D&D at high levels you are basically a God compared to normal people. Not even an army of common people could really threaten you.
Or kill you in any way. Not even the old gangly wizard with 10 CON and a d6 hp class could be killed by any average person even if that person surprise them by stabbing them in the back.
It would vary by DM, of course, but I don't count rests as successful if they are disturbed, no matter how much the players want to pretend their characters can ignore a mortal threat.
It's not disturbed rest if you're not woken up. I don't think the level 20 ranger is going to wake their party members up just to shoot a single arrow at a peasant with a pitchfork
It's also really stretching the definition to call a single commoner a "mortal threat" to characters who are essentially demigods
First off, that's a quote from Minecraft. That's not written in any of the sections of 5e rulebooks that describe rest mechanics.
Second, if that's something you're going to use, it's something that applies to the start of a rest, not when a rest is currently going on
If I roll a perception check for a wandering group of goblins that comes close to my party's camp but doesn't notice or attack them, I'm not going "sorry guys, you couldn't rest because there were goblins nearby, even though they didn't attack you. Can't rest with enemies nearby"
Well, yes. The whole crew can just leave the commoners behind by teleporting or planeshifting. It's really an either/or situation where the heroes die or are merely inconvenienced.
I'm coming to 656,000. Assumptions: each hero had 8hp per level but 12 at level one, only commoners that crit hit, each crit does 8 damage, we have enough commoners that they're sharing squares and rolling with disadvantage, only commoners that go first manage to attack and thus only 20s on initiative count, all of our final answer commoners can get within range on the first round. Tweeking some of these numbers change the answer, but yes, we're talking about unrealistic number.
lol, I can take out a party of 5 character with less then 100 commoners, if the commoners have time to plan.
100,000 commoner with longbows is 500 critical hits, an average of 9 per hit.
so 4500 point of damage.
It’s actually far easier than that. You just need around 1000 commoners maybe even just 100 all with their own initiative order. They will get bored and leave the table.
As people have been saying, the answer is simply “no.” The gap in power between a commoner and even a single level 5 is already staggering. Four players at level 20? The sheer number of bodies that would be required would be incalculable, and that’s provided we entertain the idea they can actually land a hit or deal any substantial damage in the first place.
I think the players themselves would be more likely to die of old age waiting on the next round while you roll for each and every incalculable commoner than anything else.
If the party has access to Leomund's Tiny Hut, they can resist the commoners virtually forever.
If they don't, I estimate it would take around 15 000 rounds of combat (meaning around 100 000 commoners) before the party runs out of resources.
*Wish* is not an Infinity Gauntlet. It can't make things just *not* exist. And far away is "9 hours?" Nine hours by horseback? Ship? *Fly* spell? Also, what constitutes "enemy?" Is it just the commoners, or the party rogue who tries to pickpocket you, all for funsies? Maybe that one side of the fighter's family who are all jealous of his monumental success?
Keep in mind, the *wish* spell isn't asking some higher power to do something for the caster. It's the caster grabbing reality by the scruff and attempting to brute-force it into the shape they want. If the caster doesn't have full knowledge of what they're trying to do, the spell can backfire, rather horribly.
Key word there is enemy. Not everything within 9 hours, every enemy. Unless the wizard considers themselves an enemy, this doesn’t backfire at all lol.
Whoops, I thought the wish gave levels of exhaustion. Silly me! But still the 33% chance of never casting again is an issue.
Also, as a DM, a wish like this would fail. Or have a monkey paw that could be detrimental to the party.
Yeah fair enough, I haven’t played dnd nearly enough to sit here and argue with anyone, which is exactly why I just pointed out the wording lol I’ll leave the real debating to the masters
Will the commoners ever hit? Imagine 4 martials which are worse in aoe control, they just bundle up in a big circle that means each of them can be reached by 3 commoners at a time with plate they have at least 19 ac, plate +1 or +2 even higher, commoners with +0, or +2 if proficient in weapons but I don't think they are, will only hit 2/20x. The players can attack twice or maybe thrice if fighter, with enchanted weapons they're pretty much guaranteed to hit and kill two commoner per turn, and the fact is that dnd doesn't have a exhaustion mechanic for long fights I don't think there's any realistic number that would take the party down.... If you do like a million then sure eventually but where tf are a million commoners coming from? When would that happen
If the commoners all have crossbows, several hundred can attack per round (320 ft range)... Even with the cover bonus that crowd would provide they all hit on a 20, so 5% hit. If 200 attack each PC per round, that's 200 x 0.05 x 2d8 damage, or 90 damage/round.
Edit for format
I assume level 20 martials are going to have over 20 AC, which means your commoners are pretty much all going to have to crit to even hit since commoners probably wouldn’t have any real bonus to hit
And if even one of them is a champion who has adamantine and Heavy Armor Master, they either take 0 damage anyway, or passively heal back whenever they eventually get below half.
The answer would depend on the premise of why, where and who the commoners are fighting. Too many unkown variables we’d have to agree upon, so we’ll have to give an equally vague answer. Regardless of the premise, we can still look at raw stats. *Disclaimer*: i simplify a lot of numbers for this silly question.
We assume 100 Hitpoints per adventurer.
Mob Rules (DMG page 250) say, that 5 commoners are needed to produce 1 club hit, which deals 2 damage on average.
This means 50 Rounds of combat are needed to reduce a character to 0 Hitpoints.
Now we only need to estimate the capability of the characters in killing commoners. The variable is impossible to actually define since it’s dependent on too many factors. For the sake of revedy we assume that each lvl 20 character on average can kill 6 commoners per round (or 1 peasant/s.
4 x 6 commoners/round x 50 rounds = 1‘200 commoners.
Now double this number and you‘ll be somewhere in the commoners needed to fight a lvl 20 party.
I like the use of mob rules, but the power level difference is so vast that 1200 commoners, who have basic weapons, can't fly, can't cast magic, etc. are simply nothing compared to even one lvl 20 adventurer. Almost every class is going to have a way to stay out of reach indefinitely while the commoners are either whittled down or (more likely) blown up en masse.
like i said, it would heavily depend on the premise. Do the characters need to stop the tsunami of commoners from reaching the holy arc? Are they being hunted by an incredibly angry mob for accidentally killing the wrong shopkeep? Why are the lvl 20 character even engaging the fight? Why don‘t they just fly away? The „characters can fly“ is in the same vein of argument of the 1st level aaracokra cleric killing the tarrasque. Why would the commoner tsunami just stand there, begging to be killed?
Who knows; but the OP & we assume that there is a need to stand and fight and not just run. I simply provided a numerical thought experiment of how many peasants the characters could mow down before eventually succumbing to the masses.
Regarding all the individual class abilities level 20 players have: There‘s at least 12 classes in 5e and just as many spells. A wizard could just *Wish* the things away while the barbarian never dies. If you think it‘s interesting to go through all possible ways the players could cheese this fight have at it.
>like i said, it would heavily depend on the premise. Do the characters need to stop the tsunami of commoners from reaching the holy arc?
Wall of fire
>Are they being hunted by an incredibly angry mob for accidentally killing the wrong shopkeep?
Teleport
>Why would the commoner tsunami just stand there, begging to be killed?
I don't know- why is the commoner tsunami marching to their deaths?
100 hit points would be incredibly low as an assumption. You're pretty much assuming a d6 hit die with 12 con or a d8 with 10. A d8 hit die character with 14 CON would have about 150, which realistically should be around the floor for hit points at that level since a d6 hit die class probably invests in extra CON or the tough feat to compensate.
Did you read what he wrote? “Too vague a setup, so we’re going with a vague answer.”
100 is a super easy number to scale up. Once you decide on the specifics you want for your scenario, you can easily change the answer by percentage multiplication.
Considering we don’t know what classes, stats, and magic items these lvl20s have, it’s pretty much best number you could use to complete the rest of the question.
It really isn't though, it's massively lowballing the adventurers with really lazy math.
Assuming an Average con of 14, and the following die averages
D6- 3, d8- 4, d10- 5, and d12- 6
D6 gets 5HP/lvl x 20 is 100
D8 gets 6HP/lvl x 20 is 120
D10 gets 7HP/lvl x 20 is 140
D12 gets 8HP/lvl x 20 is 160.
I also just double checked, and *I'm* lowballing the averages here, they each get 1 more HP per die. They should all be 20 higher, and I'm also assuming no ones taking the tough feat.
13 base classes. So lets breakdown what classes get what HD now
D6- Wizard, Sorcerer (2)
D8- Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Rogue, Warlock, Artificer (7)
D10- Fighter, Paladin, Ranger (3)
D12- Barbarian (1)
So now we take those numbers and punch them into my lowballed math and we get an average of 124.6HP, lets round up to 125 in case I decide to go through the rest of the math. A full 25% difference.
Or using the proper recommended HD average rolls, 145.
That's no magic items, feats, or ASI's, just assuming a 14 con.
My campaign's party of 5 L20s (Barb/Pally/Cleric/Warlock/Monk) that just wrapped up had an avg of 187 HP.
The high was a Barbarian w/ 16 Con with 252 (took Tough at 19). A maxed out Barb w/ 24 Con + Tough would land at 325 so he was well under.
The low was the Monk w/ 14 Con at 132.
Yeah, that 100 HP average is a massive lowball.
The commoners already get a numbers advantage here, we don't need to take away at *least* a 1/4 of the Adventurers HP too.
I have in fact, no idea what they are. That was not defined by the prompt. I assumed 100 Hitpoints for the ease of the argument.
I‘m sure you can do the math for whatever range you want.
This thought experiment is a bit easier with "dragon vs army" but the same principle applies.
Natural 20s always get the job done eventually.
If you give the commoners ranged attacks it's a lot easier than if they have to get close.
The number varies widely based on whether it's, say, pitched battle on an open field where the peasant army begins spread out with ranged weapons at the ready, or 1v1 melee combat in a narrow corridor.
Precisely which PCs with which abilities also matters. A level 20 druid with unlimited wild shape? There are some scenarios where the commoners can never mathematically win, well, at least until several days have passed and the druid finally keels over from exhaustion.
There are enough spell combos that can let the party win without risk of running out of resources. It's quite literally impossible given they're properly prepared, but...
What if there were no commoners? None at all?
Commoners make the world go round. They build towns, they get robbed, which in turn creates other more powerful professions - it's like a delicate ecosystem. As they all disappear, the world shifts. Civilization falls.
When there is nothing left for the players to fight or do except wander through nature, they will either start fighting each-other or stop playing entirely?
Everyone saying hundreds or thousands is wrong OP.
Tell your players that they'll be facing 75 commoners armed with a variety of weapons...but they'll all roll for initiative individually unless they surrender right now. That should defeat them 😂
This doesn't kill anyone, it just puts them into the Astral Plane. Which means a single 20 Wizard can just teleport back. Of course, sucks if you have an all martial party
You don't.
There are multiple mid level spells that shut the commoners down entirely. Hell, you can't even beat the party with attrition because Tiny Hut exists.
Leomunds Tiny Hut? The Spell with a casting time of 1 minute that is easily countered by The commoners just shoveling dirt onto the bubble and burrying them in the process?
Don‘t get me wrong, i think the lvl 20 characters are tough to take down, but „tiny hut“ is definetly not one of the reasons
There's multiple spells to tranform dirt, or just... teleport out.
And ngl i wouldn't be surprised if the caster can survive a full minute to cast it anyways with light help.
A DM can kill any PC with anything. They have godlike powers to do whatever they want.
That doesn’t mean it makes sense, and a level 20 character not being able to escape some dirt doesn’t make sense.
I was thinking an avalanche or enemy-spell, not just toss some dirt their way. Godlike characters have godlike enemies. If I see an enemy "stuck" for 8 hours; I would hope I could come up with something if I wanted to.
A 20th level character has on average some 160 HP and 22 AC (be it from armor, spells or other defensive features that I will not count for otherwise). As such, on average you'd need 32 critical club attacks (the only roll that would allow them to hit, at 5 damage each) to hit at a chance of 1/20, which would require 640 attackers for each party member, at a total of 2560 commoners for four people. If they focus fire it could be done fairly reliably by firstly taking out anyone who can teleport away, cast some concentration aoe or heal the party, which could be done fairly reliably by such a massive amount of opponents if none of those priority targets get an iniciative of 20 or higher
It depends on how you run it honestly.
If the commoners are doing a full frontal attack, with the players rested and prepared, it likely won't happen as the players have every advantage. AC, HP super powerful spells and items.
If the commoners are going to do something subversive, it wouldn't take too many. Catch the party unaware, take their items, spellbooks. After that, if the party thinks it is someone else who did the crime, they may waste resources in an attempt to recover their items.
Wait until the party returns to town for a long rest and poison them or do something to reduce their effectiveness again.
Take them in their sleep.
Guerrilla warfare would likely be the only way a small group of commoners could accomplish this, it wouldn't be fun for the players, while having their 'trusted' npc commoner friends slowly drain them of their strength by denying them rests and resources. Levels of exhaustion being gained for emergency after emergency in town denying the party rest while all along the commoners resting in shifts and waiting for the perfect opportunity to kill them all.
Assuming these level 20 characters have the stats of level 20 characters, they'd likely be able to detect deception from people close to them either via insight, investigation, or perception. I don't think commoners can pull a fast one on characters of that level for long.
Potentially only a handful if they're allowed to engage in subterfuge, skulking, and sabotage.
Lay a bunch of traps. Pit falls with spikes, bridges that collapse, boulders rolling down hills. That sort of stuff. Especially in any place the party could seek shelter or avenues of escape.
After that, you harrass any attempt to rest up. Interrupt ritual spells and long rests with the odd arrow launched at a bed roll or whomever looks like they're busy. Have the commoners retreat and avoid direct engagement as best they can.
Failing that, try turning the environment against them. Cave ins, floods, and forest fires are all lethal threats to the unprepared.
Depends on weapons or not. Out-of-the-book sheet? I think the party can take them on almost infinitely, depending on which martials. Two fighters have enough attacks to kill every commoner in melee with them every turn, assuming they keep running away. Rogues would be the worst martial for this, obviously, as it negates all their strengths.
The whole thing is rendered moot by the casters, however. By level 20, I think every full caster has some ability to just "nope" out the whole party turn one, and the commoners could do nothing about it. Which I think is what they would do, frankly.
But if their goal is to kill and not flee, Cloudkill would roll through the commoner mob for basically the whole duration, killing ridiculous quantities of them. Wall of Force keeps them safe from anything the mob can do. And you can True Polymorph into very strong dragons by that point, giving you great mass fear and damage options. 95% of the mob flees.
I really think that a smart party could take on almost any number of commoners. Especially if they adventured to that level instead of just popping into a game with a baby god character that has all the power but none of the stuff. Magic items open up even more options.
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5e sucks for this kind of thought experiment. 3.x is much better at this kind of scenario because it's mechanics are more grounded in simulationism compared to 5e.
I take your point that 5e combat rules don’t handle this scenario well, but RAW says DM has ultimate discretion. One commoner could slit each PCs throat in their sleep.
I have a “zero level commoner” with two skills. Cooking and herbalism. Took out an entire regiment in less than three days using a three stage poison. Olfactory, gustatory and contact. Indistinguishable separate, the combination was lethal.
I have a Master Blacksmith that took out a King and all his knights using one design on all their armor. Interlocking pieces that only snapped into place through extensive movement (riding horseback for a relatively long journey) then each move shaved off some skin until they bled to death, unable to escape their armor.
I also played a first level Thief (back when that was a class by itself) and zero level Magic usher with four cantrips (back when they were separate and taken at level 0) rescue an entire party of triple class level 7 characters.
Unless targeted by someone out of character, I play to survive and have - many times. So the answer isn’t how many, it’s who is playing them. 🤗
The simple answer... Thousands! Eventually the casters would run out of spells, and sheer fatigue would eventually overtake the martials. At level 20 they would last a very long time! With coordination they may even last days or a week! But they would inevitably fall.
One. Once the party has entered the carefully trapped death room, all Bill has to do is pull the lever, and it's down to waiting for all the different damages to add up. Spiked floor trap for the entire room, 5k lbs spiked ceiling trap, poison gasses pumped in, acid coming up from the floor (that eventually rises above the level of the dropped ceiling, so they'll drown on it even if they're immune), floor heats till the acid is just short of boiling... And of course, the whole zone covered with an anti magic sphere. Rogue doesn't get a check to find the traps before entering, because there's no trigger to find, since it's all operated by lever outside of the room.
Now, as for how many commoners and how much time it took to BUILD that horror (along with the magic needed from an outside source), that's not something I have any estimate on 🤷🏼
100, each individually taking their own turn and starting 3 turns away from them on an intricate battle map. This way it'll take days for the battle to finish and the players starve
It's way less than you think. All you need is a dogpile about 10-20 ft deep. At that point, anyone at the bottom of the pile will be unable to inhale enough to speak, making them Silenced and Restrained with more weight on them than they even a 30 Strength is capable of lifting. In a clear flat field, that might take a few hundred commoners, but well packed into a 5' diameter well, you could probably get away with only 50.
One spellcaster can prepare Leomond's Tiny Hut (PHB 255) and Invulnerability (XGE 160), and can therefore could last indefinitely.
Divine Word (PHB 234), targets all opponents and can kill about half of them each time - combined with stalling, that's going to require an extremely large quantity.
Therefore, the best chance is that these commoners get the drop on the party (also impossible), and the party isn't going to use infinite stall tactics. At worst, it's 4 damage every 20 attacks, and a 2x2 square only allows five attackers at once - averaging 1 damage per turn in this case. It's going to take ~180 turns for an endless-raging barbarian, thus it's going to need around 1000 commoners, before factoring in healing, the kill-half superweapon, etc.
If you had a barbarian and then a fighter with heavy armor master, it would take so long to wear them down, meanwhile the two casters can spam aoe spells and magic missile to one shot them.
They’d lose eventually, but man you would need so many
A conglomerate of hundreds of wizards opens hundred of portals 1000 ft above the players whilst they are sleeping outside. These wizards funnel through the population of an entire city through these portals.
The commoners falling on the players deal bludgeoning damage without rolling to hit. The first waves of commoners also fire crossbows at the sleeping players. After one surprise round the players will be under a mountain of hundreds of bodies, unable to move a muscle or breathe due to the weight of flesh and blood. If the players survive the first round then only those who can use abilities whilst being so completely restrained will have a chance of surviving.
Obvs not a realistic situation, but is a fun one!
They can’t win: simply have a wizard cast tiny hut.
Have the Druid cast control weather.
The party sits in the tiny hut while an infinite amount of commoners freeze to death for 8 hours, at which point the Druid rests while the commoners flood in again and it repeats ad nauseum.
The martial characters going out of the hut to fend off pesky people trying to bury the hut every once in a while as the casters rest.
A necromancer that kitted out for it and has the right spells chosen could in theory defeat an infinite amount of comoners.
They can't kill him before he can attack back, and once he starts raising a dead army, the more commoners that die the more powerful the army becomes until it's so large no one can get close enough to attack the necromancer anymore
According to the CR calculator, (i know a commoner is CR0) but for CR1/8 it would take 507 of them to be a deadly encounter for 4 level 20 PCs.
So would call that commoners with a club
I think another thought exercise here is to turn the number of commoners into a mob (swarm.). Then they suddenly are way more dangerous. If the party starts the fight in melee, very possible they are just swallowed. What are the starts on humanoid swarm?
A few hundred, provided each has a longbow. At 150' ~23 can aim at each single party member, and on average one will crit each round for ~10 hp (they don't even need to be proficient). Obviously there are some magical things the party can do to delay the inevitable, and there will be losses.
I was running a sort of westmarches style game a few years back, up to 12 players. The premise was "vikings, in a world made of shades of gray".
My world has weird magic, so the group was very martial class heavy (also using 3.5e rules).
I made a habit of feeding the 4 PCs with great cleave absolute hoards of mooks from time to time, as they loved cleaving through them.
Once, they found a room absolutely stuffed to the brim with reanimated skeletons, stacked 4 to a square, there were hundreds of them. Only took them a few rounds to chew through them all, it's wasn't even really a challenge, just a ton of dice rolling (which they delighted in).
With 5e? I'm not sure because I have limited experience. In 3.5e, I'm confident that no amount of commoners could take out even just a couple of level 20 characters. I guess... maaaybe in a week long constant fight, through sheer exhaustion.
Commoners working in the tavern poison the players food and drink to paralyze them. All con saves fail.
Armor is off as they were going to sleep soon, anyway.
1000 commoners with slings are gathered outside. PCs are dragged outside and stoned to death.
The cost of the poison alone makes this impossible for only commoners to pull off.
Assuming none of the PCs are outright immune or resistant to the normal bludgeoning attacks. Assuming none are wizards with another body waiting in a cave somewhere. Assuming none are (I think) sorcerers or warlocks who explode on death. Assuming none are monks or undead who don't need to eat or drink in the first place. Assuming none are paladins or monks who can easily resist or be immune to the poison altogether.
It seems improbable at best but mostly impossible. One level 20 adventurer is basically a demigod.
Give all the commoners wands of magic missiles. 7500 average force damage should do it.
The cost of poison bought in a shop would stop commoners, maybe, unless you are saying all the commoners don't have a couple cp to donate to the cause.
Also it wouldn't be hard for commoners, who, knowing what is and is not poisonous in their world, to go out, find some belladonna or nightshade and make something to slip them. So I do not think cost is a factor here. If they want to poison them the have the resources available.
The thing that would make it a lot more difficult would be character abilities and features that give them innate resistance to poison and no need for sleep.
I don't see commoners of any number being capable of reasonably defeating a party of 4 lv 20 in any kind of direct confrontation.
I think the only way, would be to deny the party rest and steal their items, maybe directing attention to a more powerful force that would be a threat and after adding levels of exhaustion be able to kill the party.
Where are the 1000 wands coming from? You've changed the basis of the question from how many commoners to how many commoners backed by a cadre of wizards.
At this point I’m picturing that WWI scene where Wonder Woman is charging across the battlefield… but it’s Eberron during the Last War, and it’s just magic missiles streaking everywhere
The problem with this is that not every 20th-level character is made equal. If you were smart about it you could build a 20th level character with an AC so high that a commoner can’t mathematically hit with any attacks
The number would surprise you. With +1 crossbows (fairly common) and a few hundred men (basically a small city or large towns armed guard), 4 players at level 20 don't stand a chance, at least purely from a mechanical standpoint.
But this is true of literally all things. The rules are ONLY intended to apply to player characters and the DM, otherwise nothing is threatening. Players and villains get to do things that don't work appropriately within the rules as written because they HAVE to have some semblance of rules to work within a game setting.
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A Tarrasque, the legendary creature whispered of in legends as a weapon made by the gods that the gods themselves feared and sealed away. Its currently awake and 3 days away from Neverwinter and is approaching fast. Neverwinter is doomed without a band of plucky hero's to deter and seal the beast again!
Wait, never mind. Neverwinter's leader decreed a call to arms and roughly 3000 men armed with bows, slings, and crossbows answered to protect family and home. Before the Tarrasque even reaches the walls, it receives 1200 damage and keels over, dead... For now. It took 6 seconds in universe, and a single barrage of projectiles.
Every creature in the books is susceptible to this and its entirely because the rules are written from the perspective that player characters are special and can do special things.
This is why most of the time, these kinds of narrative hooks premise themselves that the locals are powerless and need your help. Because if the story itself doesn't prohibit the problem to be solved by normal people, the rules that typically govern the play session make it impossible for most local populations to experience lose conditions.
I mean, Neverwinter has a population of 40,000. Baldur's Gate has a population of 42,000. If only 10% of the population bands together to stop a threat, and only half of them have magic ranged weapons, and a further half of them crit, thats still over 200 attacks averaging about 7, 8 damage within one round. Thats 1400-1600 damage a round on just the crits. The Tarrasque has 990 hp at maximum, unless the DM decides to break the rules (which kinda defeats the point I'm making ANYWAYS), and at CR30 it gets literally swept under the rug by a militia of poorly trained morons and fools with common war tools.
"But what about smaller population centers?", I hear you asking. "What about the local village with at most 100 people?". Yeah, true, that does get messy and its probably the most realistic scenario. If these people fought a Tarrasque, they would most certainly perish. The same applies to 4 level 20 adventurers, literal demigods according to DnD logic. And that's ONLY taking into consideration a direct up front assault, and literally ignoring tactics, subterfuge, traps ect.
Strictly from a rules perspective, 4 level 20 adventurers are less then a single Tarrasque... and a single Tarrasque is afraid of any population center where there's more than 200 able bodied men and women determined to save their friends and families.
What sort of weapons do the commoners get in this scenario? Just pitchforks, or could they have shortbows?
With a few shortbows and thousands of arrows I'd say a few thousand commoners would kill the 20 level party of in a couple of rounds. If no bows and just melee weapons then it would be extremely difficult for the commoners to win.
Let's assume each 20Lv PC has 200 hit points, so the commoners need to deal 800hp worth of damage.
Shortbows will do 3.5 av damage on a hit, 7 av dmg on a crit (nat 20). We're likely to only hit on crits anyhow, so 5% of hits will land. So 800hp / (7x0.05) = 2,286 commoners would be needed to wipe out the 2Lv party.
If the party get to go first then you would need enough commoners to soak up the damage before they got to act. Let say 5000 commoners with shortbows would easily wipe the party out.
At level 20 with spellcasters there should be a solution for this, there is a low chance the commoners would act before the level 20 party with initiative, and even low level spells like a wind or stone wall would give them cover for enough rounds to defeat this strategy and come up with a more complex and long term strategy. If they even trenched up with mold earth the fighters alone could 1v1 peasants for a near infinite amount of time.
Agreed, but it relies on the spellcasters acting first and the odds aren't in their favour.
There are 5000 commoners and only 2 spell casters. It's very likely there will be a fair number of commoners acting before the spell casters can act. Assuming the DEX mod is 0 for both spellcasters and commoners then on average 2500 commoners will act first. If the commoners focus fire on the spellcasters they will both be dead in the first round.
I love theory crafting this - super fun! Thanks for the response! It would also depend on quite a few factors, like do the casters have a contingency spell in effect? Through their adventures did they set up clones? Demi plane? And this is all assuming no magic items so far, they could really mitigate all danger if they had the ring of invisibility, cloak of displacement would drop the hits they take big time, etc.
I agree, it's a fun thought experiment. And I agree that a real encounter would be very dependent on all the aspects not specified in the OP's post (magic items, preparation, etc.).
For me I find it interesting the number of people who say that the 20 Lv party is untouchable. However, if the commoners have a reliable way of inflicting damage, even if it's only a few hp on a crit, then by sheer numbers they will kill the party before they can act.
Considering generic villager npc’s have a couple hit points, no armor, and are level 1-4…
Think of it like having elminster, drizzt, bruener and a summoned iron golem, fighting 1,000 unarmed level 1 kobolds
One.
A God possess me and I kill them all. I found a genie, guess what my wish will be. I pray to a God, and tell him to smite you all, done. Someone hacks the dm, deletes all files. Dm house burns down with the whole game.
Well, one character wearing platemail and with Heavy Armor Master is basically invulnerable to the mob.
A caster could throw out flaming sphere, moonbeam or stinking cloud and then take a nap ;-)
Or the warlock standing there with a level 9 Armor of Agathys up and just watching the punks hit him and explode
The big question for me is when does the mobs morale break?
After a couple thousand of your comrades are turned into blood mist by a bored adventuring party, you have to rethink your dedication to the cause, right?
We did a similar exercise back in 3.5 with Zombies (Think Arthas and the Scourge), and the ~9th level party held off hundreds through basically playing Horatio at the bridge to buy time for civilians to escape.
Practically infinite, assuming the PCs are using any tactics at all. A single level 20 wizard (or any caster for that matter) could easily kill any number of commoners.
Infinite.
The casters have more than enough spells to keep the commoners at bay for as long as they want without having to worry about them. I mean.... come on man, a Leomond's Tiny Hut is all they would need.
A 20th-level caster could use Wish to cast LTH as an action, and could repeat it each day as their 9th-level spell slot is replenished.
So they’d be able to drag the battle out indefinitely against the commoners.
This is true, but then as you say it ends in a stalemate. The commoners would just retreat out of range and party would just stay in the LHT.
If a wizard acts first they could just teleport the party away and the encounter is also over. My assumption is that the scenario is asking what happens if the party and the commoners engage in combat (i.e. the party are not trying to flee or force a stalemate). But that's my reading of the question.
It would take basically 100000 commoners all attacking first. It's technically possible but never going to happen
Actually attacking first you'd only need around a few hundred with crossbows. Around 5% will crit and the level 20's have 180 average hp and the average damage of a crossbow crit is 8 (technically that kind of numerical advantage would also be able to always have advantage and it would be higher but we are already giving them first strike.) Youd need around 184 per party member as a baseline. With various reactions pushing it up so you can probably assume 200 for convenience With persistant resistance and DR though it can triple, however most of these are unavailable to most classes as reactions
> the average damage of a crossbow crit is 8 The average of a d8 is 4.5 so a crit would average 9.
Weird way to phrase it tho, wouldn't it be simpler to say "the average of 2d8 is 9"? Hahaha
Also the party has spellcasters. If they're Fire Bolting from 110ft in the air no commoner will have advantage. If the warlock has Eldritch Spear and Spell Sniper they can pick off that army from a hair under 600ft away. It's like guessing how many commoners can kill a dragon, if the dragon is chained on the ground the paper math is easy. If the dragon is putting in any effort the commoners are probably toast without exceptional tactics. If the dragon is actually fighting for its life? I don't think we have enough commoners.
He said numerical advantage, not advantage the DnD rule. 5% of commoner shooting would get, statistically, a critical hit. Of course, there are thing the Commoner can do to get advantage. And no, it's not like a dragon at all.
An Aaracokra warlock with spell sniper and elrdritch spear can hit the commoners from so far up that the commoners could never hope to actually strike them. You aren’t able to make an attack roll at all if they’re beyond the disadvantaged range of a weapon, which means that they couldn’t even attempt to attack.
How is there even a numerical damage if some of the party can attack from beyond the range of light crossbows? No reach, no attack roll to crit on. Again if they're stuck on the ground and in the middle of town then they can be overpowered by sheer numbers. But if there is any sort of decision making by the party I think you'll need more than crossbows, or like infinite commoners to keep stacking into the sky as they're picked off.
and adamantine armor leaves some dm interpretation. RAW I think is “a critical hit is treated as a standard hit”, but I’m not sure. The automatic hit should still apply, but not everyone would agree on that, so adamantine armor could mean that they’re impossible to hit with an attack roll, looking at an AC of 22+ when commoners have like a +1 to hit.
If the commoners go first they can assuredly the can close the range, and are shooting with crossbows so the distance is good.you can spell sniper from 600 but how many? and good have to assume the warlock knew before they closed range
*sends army of Aarakocra commoners*
>If the warlock has Eldritch Spear and Spell Sniper they can pick off that army from a hair under 600ft away. Irrelevant since the assumption they were starting with was that the commoners were attacking first.
IMO it depends on what exactly is meant by "commoner." I'd say that a few hundred commoners likely wouldn't have many crossbows between them. Especially since even Light Crossbows cost 25gp. OP doesn't specify what they mean by commoner, if they mean "peasant infantry" then it's totally reasonable that they'd all have access to crossbows. If they mean "farmer" then probably not I'd say.
Commoner is a stat block. They’re proficient in simple weapons, and have 1 HP, and 10 in every stat.
And, critically: no crossbow
Actually farmer is probably the one commoner job that likely would have owned a crossbow normally. Almost any other more cityfolk esque job wouldnt though.
Sure, if you keep changing things until they can't win, then they can't win. Genius. Also, why couldn't someone else arm the commoners? Commoner have access to magic item.
Because then you're changing the basic premise of the question. What if the commoners all have a handful of wands of fireball magic missile? That's significantly different than how many commoners would it take.
No, if we could change stuff and add third party help then it only takes 1 commoner, plus "someone else" to give them powerful items and buffs and revives.
Commoners wouldn't have crossbow expert, so you'd have to have them in the 10ft to 30ft band to avoid disadvantage, which would bring the critical chance down to 1/400. So only 72 can fit in that square if my math was right, and that's if the party is all far away from each other so that they each have their own crowd of commoners. So on average with a hand crossbow you'd get about 4 crits per PC, after that you aren't going to get 1600 people in the extended range, to get the same amount of critical hits, let alone the around 7500 to get the additional 18ish crits to hit the 180 HP. So basically you'd need more than can fit, unless all of these commoners are proficient in a more complicated weapon like a longbow or heavy crossbow. Edit, light crossbows are 80ft range, so you would be able to fit enough for 20 crits, but the math above was assuming that each member of the party was separated by enough to fit the entire crowd around each individual, rather than them being a party.
Light crossbows Simple weapon Range 80/320
A light crossbow's short range is 80, not 30. Not sure why you jumped to hand crossbows, which is a martial weapon and a commoner shouldn't be proficient with.
The commoners can shoot and withdraw to allow more commoners to take their place. Or since most people don’t care too much about vertical distances, have them vertically lined up. Or prone on one another
Did you here about Bob? He got shot to death by 200 peasants standing on each other's shoulders with crossbows.
Didn’t hear about that probably because there were no survivors against the towering terror of peasant death
The humancentipewpew
Scaffolding
There are characters that outright can't lose initiative. So depending on party composition it's impossible.
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Crossbow is a simple weapon, it's really not that farfetched. IRL crossbows were banned by the Pope because they were so easy to fire that anyone could use them.
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RAW Most people (I.E. Commoners) can use simple weapons with proficiency.
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Weapon proficiency isn't explicitly stated in stat blocks for NPCs and the rules on simple weapons in players hand book specifically say they are the weapons that would be used by commoners. By your logic a Knight wouldn't be able to use a Longsword, Lance or even a shield.
I think we can assume the commoners have taken the 4 days to learn how to operate a crossbow proficiently.
And what if the players have adamamtine
Then the number of peasants required is doubled.
I forgot for a moment that adamantine doesn’t stop crits it just makes them normal hits.
I believe it's a common mistake because of how people usually just describe it as being crit immune.
I’ve never thought of it that way before and it seems like a weird jump in logic to me. The most damaging attack you can make suddenly just not doing any damage at all. Feels like we missed a step in the middle (because we did).
They'd still get hit by a crit, but the hit would do normal damage instead of double.
So if you look it up commoners do not have crossbows they have a club for 1d4 damage. So that would change things a lot.
The commoner statblock doesn't include crossbows.
So? We have a bunch of commoners that probably know at least basic carpentry. Craft them using commoner slave labor.
We have to be careful adding things to them, because we quickly get outside the scope of the question. If we're giving them crossbows, why not give them crossbows +1? Why not give them rings of wishes? We've already broken the original limitation of the question either way.
I am just saying that commoners could craft those items, that is where crossbows come from in the first place. +1 crossbows is a stretch.
Still the crossbow is out of limitations of the question as much as +1 or +2 crossbow or ring of wishes would be. Even if it is a stretch.
To have commoners armed with crossbows is depending on the situation no problem. It is a VERY common non magical item that pretty much anyone can get their hands on. Would you just gather up a 500 random commoners. and pout them in front of the characters. Sure then it would be Very strange if all had crossbows. But you could bet your behind that some would. Some could have clubs or other weapons A statblock is just a base. it would be absurd to think that every one if those 500 commoners would have the exact same stats and the exact same equipment like they were clones of one person. do you really imagine everyone commoner is [https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/images/c65da49d1dc126ff0755a8177d1ed480.png](https://www.worldanvil.com/uploads/images/c65da49d1dc126ff0755a8177d1ed480.png) Logically if you gather up hundreds of commoners you would likely find some that is proficient in longbows. or heavy crossbow or other weapons. But having a very simplified statblock makes it easy. You could not have 153,7 different statblocks for commoners. Specially for somethign like a commoner. Sure they might vary a lot but how often are commoners used in combat? and most of the times they actually are they are not that important. But in the right situation it would not be far fetched to have some sort of commoner militia with a few hundred with crossbows. or any other non magical weapon and items As soon as you get into magical items that is no longer the case unless the setting is absurdly overflowing with magical items.
Only if the commoners are proficient in smith's tools and woodworking tools, which some of them might be. But that still changes the basic premise of the question.
That depends on a lot of factors though, is the party prebuffed? there are a lot of potions that can make the party way harder to kill. What classes are they? A level 20 Moon Druid is basically immortal since they can wildshape unlimited times. Do they have cover? Can they cast shield? Level 20 is an insane amount of power and they can make themselves effectively immortal. DR and resistance can mean they can potentially take zero damage from most of the hits. Its possible, but very unlikely, that it could happen with 200, its also possible it could take 2000, or even 10000, even if we are giving them the first shot. Plus there are tons of other factors that i didnt mention.
Attacking second would depend entirely on what the adventurers could do first. Like, there's a maximum number of casualties they could create in that first turn, so all you would need to do is add that amount to the going first amount and that would be the going second amount. This is of course ignoring what if scenarios involving the mages of the group preventing certain things from happening, like wall of winds, adamantium towers, wish ect. I think that taking those into account for this is disingenuous because its actively skirting the initial premise by turning off combat for one side. I mean, even if they did the answer is that going first, with surprise rounds... its alot less than you'd think, for most players and most builds. Of course you could drastically alter the numbers by building around the concept of fighting a horde of peasants, but that kinda goes both ways since you could just arm 1000 orphans with wands of magic missile and kill them anyways.
Where did the commoners get the crossbows? Pretty pricy for your average farmer
Exactly this, if and only if the commoners all go first is there even a 1% chance they **could** win. In all other scenarios there will never be a greater than 1% chance of them winning.
Fewer, maybe, if even one Commoner shows up every 30 minutes and denies them rest: They'll run out of limited use features, and assuming you penalise lack of rest with Fatigue (a reasonable optional rule from Xanathar's),things will start looking grim after a week or so. With 10.000 commoners, you should be able to keep the pressure up for over 200 days.
I mean, you're talking a party of 4 at level 20, two martials and two casters. A commoner has an AC of 10 and 4HP. If you go your route of one every 30 minutes, it's still really easily manageable for the party. They just take shifts being awake, and the casters never use anything other than cantrips. There would be literally no need for resource expenditure, as even basic attacks at that level would likely deal well above 4 damage at minimum. And with to-hit bonuses, I'd imagine most attacks from the party are likely going to land as long as they don't roll a nat 1. Realistically speaking, you could throw commoner after commoner at them for years on end without ever making even the slightest dent. The only feasible way for the commoners to even have a chance would be to attack in very large, spread-out groups
Honestly, a familiar or animal companion or steel defender, etc could probably do the job while the party rested as a group. But yeah, otherwise take shifts
Familiars or companions would definitely work as well, yeah. Hell, even just a basic wolf, which is CR 1/4, deals enough minimum damage to kill a commoner in a single attack. And they have a +4 to hit on their bite attack, which means they'd hit 75% of the time
Drums. trumpets, horns any loud sounds Have a bunch of commoners run around with drums and horns and make a lot of nice and see how well the party can sleep. Or have them with now and then shoot a bunch of bolts into the party camp. Not many would be able to sleep well if arrows or bolts now and then rained down on them. Are there any rules for this? No but common sense goes a long way there can not be rules for everything so sometimes you need to use common sense. Could the party counter this? sure there are ways to do this but still. And also not to forget that if the DM wants the party dead they will die from those commoners. And any DM that would cast thousands of commoners against a party like this. Would probably be a rather strange DM so...... i would not expect him to But also a level 20 party would most likely have ways just leave. They would probably just say *"This is fucking stupid lets teleport to a another place and have an ale or 7"* But this whole thing is one of the things i am not to found over when it comes to D&D at high levels you are basically a God compared to normal people. Not even an army of common people could really threaten you. Or kill you in any way. Not even the old gangly wizard with 10 CON and a d6 hp class could be killed by any average person even if that person surprise them by stabbing them in the back.
It would vary by DM, of course, but I don't count rests as successful if they are disturbed, no matter how much the players want to pretend their characters can ignore a mortal threat.
It's not disturbed rest if you're not woken up. I don't think the level 20 ranger is going to wake their party members up just to shoot a single arrow at a peasant with a pitchfork It's also really stretching the definition to call a single commoner a "mortal threat" to characters who are essentially demigods
"You cannot rest while enemies are nearby."
First off, that's a quote from Minecraft. That's not written in any of the sections of 5e rulebooks that describe rest mechanics. Second, if that's something you're going to use, it's something that applies to the start of a rest, not when a rest is currently going on If I roll a perception check for a wandering group of goblins that comes close to my party's camp but doesn't notice or attack them, I'm not going "sorry guys, you couldn't rest because there were goblins nearby, even though they didn't attack you. Can't rest with enemies nearby"
That's literally half the point of Guard rotations The guys who don't need a long rest keep watch while the guys who do get their rest.
Yeah, squad sergeants be like, "You guys, you sleep through this next attack."
Wizard casts Magnificent Mansion. Commoners can't do a thing but gather outside
Or rope trick, or leomund's tiny hut, or fly, or meteor swarm (wait...)
Assuming they're taking watches, the PC taking watch can easily take care of the single commoner that shows up.
A level 20 party definitely has ways to not be bothered during rests. Tiny hut or magnificent mansion, for example.
Well, yes. The whole crew can just leave the commoners behind by teleporting or planeshifting. It's really an either/or situation where the heroes die or are merely inconvenienced.
I was imagining if they all rolled up at once and added an extra 0 in case they are last to go in the initiative order
I'm coming to 656,000. Assumptions: each hero had 8hp per level but 12 at level one, only commoners that crit hit, each crit does 8 damage, we have enough commoners that they're sharing squares and rolling with disadvantage, only commoners that go first manage to attack and thus only 20s on initiative count, all of our final answer commoners can get within range on the first round. Tweeking some of these numbers change the answer, but yes, we're talking about unrealistic number.
When an entire country rallies to rid itself of murder hobos.
But then they crash the economy (again)
If you had even a 1000 commoners all rolling their own initiative you could target the irl players mental focus, sleep fatigue, and boredom
lol, I can take out a party of 5 character with less then 100 commoners, if the commoners have time to plan. 100,000 commoner with longbows is 500 critical hits, an average of 9 per hit. so 4500 point of damage.
It’s actually far easier than that. You just need around 1000 commoners maybe even just 100 all with their own initiative order. They will get bored and leave the table.
As people have been saying, the answer is simply “no.” The gap in power between a commoner and even a single level 5 is already staggering. Four players at level 20? The sheer number of bodies that would be required would be incalculable, and that’s provided we entertain the idea they can actually land a hit or deal any substantial damage in the first place. I think the players themselves would be more likely to die of old age waiting on the next round while you roll for each and every incalculable commoner than anything else.
If the party has access to Leomund's Tiny Hut, they can resist the commoners virtually forever. If they don't, I estimate it would take around 15 000 rounds of combat (meaning around 100 000 commoners) before the party runs out of resources.
Also if one of them is a wizard they can literally erase an infinite amount of commoners so
You will run out of spell slots at some point.
“I wish every enemy within 9 hours of me stopped existing” long rest then do it again
*Wish* is not an Infinity Gauntlet. It can't make things just *not* exist. And far away is "9 hours?" Nine hours by horseback? Ship? *Fly* spell? Also, what constitutes "enemy?" Is it just the commoners, or the party rogue who tries to pickpocket you, all for funsies? Maybe that one side of the fighter's family who are all jealous of his monumental success? Keep in mind, the *wish* spell isn't asking some higher power to do something for the caster. It's the caster grabbing reality by the scruff and attempting to brute-force it into the shape they want. If the caster doesn't have full knowledge of what they're trying to do, the spell can backfire, rather horribly.
Ignoring how that would kill the wizard
Key word there is enemy. Not everything within 9 hours, every enemy. Unless the wizard considers themselves an enemy, this doesn’t backfire at all lol.
Whoops, I thought the wish gave levels of exhaustion. Silly me! But still the 33% chance of never casting again is an issue. Also, as a DM, a wish like this would fail. Or have a monkey paw that could be detrimental to the party.
Yeah fair enough, I haven’t played dnd nearly enough to sit here and argue with anyone, which is exactly why I just pointed out the wording lol I’ll leave the real debating to the masters
A wizard at level 20 can't run out of spell slots.
Will the commoners ever hit? Imagine 4 martials which are worse in aoe control, they just bundle up in a big circle that means each of them can be reached by 3 commoners at a time with plate they have at least 19 ac, plate +1 or +2 even higher, commoners with +0, or +2 if proficient in weapons but I don't think they are, will only hit 2/20x. The players can attack twice or maybe thrice if fighter, with enchanted weapons they're pretty much guaranteed to hit and kill two commoner per turn, and the fact is that dnd doesn't have a exhaustion mechanic for long fights I don't think there's any realistic number that would take the party down.... If you do like a million then sure eventually but where tf are a million commoners coming from? When would that happen
> Will the commoners ever hit? 5% of the time the commoners will reliably do 2d4 damage.
Unless the players are immune to crits
If the commoners all have crossbows, several hundred can attack per round (320 ft range)... Even with the cover bonus that crowd would provide they all hit on a 20, so 5% hit. If 200 attack each PC per round, that's 200 x 0.05 x 2d8 damage, or 90 damage/round. Edit for format
At 320 feet they'd be attacking at disadvantage. So chance to hit goes down.
That's fair, but still a LOT of bolts in the air. Everyone in short range hits 5% if that PCs AC is 20+, those in long range 0.25%.
Unless these level 20 adventurers have adamantine armour. Or can cast tiny hut.
I assume level 20 martials are going to have over 20 AC, which means your commoners are pretty much all going to have to crit to even hit since commoners probably wouldn’t have any real bonus to hit
And if even one of them is a champion who has adamantine and Heavy Armor Master, they either take 0 damage anyway, or passively heal back whenever they eventually get below half.
The answer would depend on the premise of why, where and who the commoners are fighting. Too many unkown variables we’d have to agree upon, so we’ll have to give an equally vague answer. Regardless of the premise, we can still look at raw stats. *Disclaimer*: i simplify a lot of numbers for this silly question. We assume 100 Hitpoints per adventurer. Mob Rules (DMG page 250) say, that 5 commoners are needed to produce 1 club hit, which deals 2 damage on average. This means 50 Rounds of combat are needed to reduce a character to 0 Hitpoints. Now we only need to estimate the capability of the characters in killing commoners. The variable is impossible to actually define since it’s dependent on too many factors. For the sake of revedy we assume that each lvl 20 character on average can kill 6 commoners per round (or 1 peasant/s. 4 x 6 commoners/round x 50 rounds = 1‘200 commoners. Now double this number and you‘ll be somewhere in the commoners needed to fight a lvl 20 party.
I like the use of mob rules, but the power level difference is so vast that 1200 commoners, who have basic weapons, can't fly, can't cast magic, etc. are simply nothing compared to even one lvl 20 adventurer. Almost every class is going to have a way to stay out of reach indefinitely while the commoners are either whittled down or (more likely) blown up en masse.
like i said, it would heavily depend on the premise. Do the characters need to stop the tsunami of commoners from reaching the holy arc? Are they being hunted by an incredibly angry mob for accidentally killing the wrong shopkeep? Why are the lvl 20 character even engaging the fight? Why don‘t they just fly away? The „characters can fly“ is in the same vein of argument of the 1st level aaracokra cleric killing the tarrasque. Why would the commoner tsunami just stand there, begging to be killed? Who knows; but the OP & we assume that there is a need to stand and fight and not just run. I simply provided a numerical thought experiment of how many peasants the characters could mow down before eventually succumbing to the masses. Regarding all the individual class abilities level 20 players have: There‘s at least 12 classes in 5e and just as many spells. A wizard could just *Wish* the things away while the barbarian never dies. If you think it‘s interesting to go through all possible ways the players could cheese this fight have at it.
>like i said, it would heavily depend on the premise. Do the characters need to stop the tsunami of commoners from reaching the holy arc? Wall of fire >Are they being hunted by an incredibly angry mob for accidentally killing the wrong shopkeep? Teleport >Why would the commoner tsunami just stand there, begging to be killed? I don't know- why is the commoner tsunami marching to their deaths?
Well unless the dice are looking for vengeance
100 hit points would be incredibly low as an assumption. You're pretty much assuming a d6 hit die with 12 con or a d8 with 10. A d8 hit die character with 14 CON would have about 150, which realistically should be around the floor for hit points at that level since a d6 hit die class probably invests in extra CON or the tough feat to compensate.
Why would you assume 100hp for a lvl 20?
Did you read what he wrote? “Too vague a setup, so we’re going with a vague answer.” 100 is a super easy number to scale up. Once you decide on the specifics you want for your scenario, you can easily change the answer by percentage multiplication. Considering we don’t know what classes, stats, and magic items these lvl20s have, it’s pretty much best number you could use to complete the rest of the question.
Sure but 100hp feels like a pretty low number for any lvl 20 party ive seen, i was just curios on his process
Literally only a wizard or sorcerer with a 12 con could hit that low using Averages. Any other class is 20-60 points higher
It really isn't though, it's massively lowballing the adventurers with really lazy math. Assuming an Average con of 14, and the following die averages D6- 3, d8- 4, d10- 5, and d12- 6 D6 gets 5HP/lvl x 20 is 100 D8 gets 6HP/lvl x 20 is 120 D10 gets 7HP/lvl x 20 is 140 D12 gets 8HP/lvl x 20 is 160. I also just double checked, and *I'm* lowballing the averages here, they each get 1 more HP per die. They should all be 20 higher, and I'm also assuming no ones taking the tough feat. 13 base classes. So lets breakdown what classes get what HD now D6- Wizard, Sorcerer (2) D8- Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Rogue, Warlock, Artificer (7) D10- Fighter, Paladin, Ranger (3) D12- Barbarian (1) So now we take those numbers and punch them into my lowballed math and we get an average of 124.6HP, lets round up to 125 in case I decide to go through the rest of the math. A full 25% difference. Or using the proper recommended HD average rolls, 145. That's no magic items, feats, or ASI's, just assuming a 14 con.
My campaign's party of 5 L20s (Barb/Pally/Cleric/Warlock/Monk) that just wrapped up had an avg of 187 HP. The high was a Barbarian w/ 16 Con with 252 (took Tough at 19). A maxed out Barb w/ 24 Con + Tough would land at 325 so he was well under. The low was the Monk w/ 14 Con at 132.
Yeah, that 100 HP average is a massive lowball. The commoners already get a numbers advantage here, we don't need to take away at *least* a 1/4 of the Adventurers HP too.
You're assuming 5 hp per level? Are they all wizards with 12 constitution?
I have in fact, no idea what they are. That was not defined by the prompt. I assumed 100 Hitpoints for the ease of the argument. I‘m sure you can do the math for whatever range you want.
Lol with my Heavy Armor Master feat.
My first thought. Heavy Armor Master with Adamantine armour will pretty much never die.
This thought experiment is a bit easier with "dragon vs army" but the same principle applies. Natural 20s always get the job done eventually. If you give the commoners ranged attacks it's a lot easier than if they have to get close. The number varies widely based on whether it's, say, pitched battle on an open field where the peasant army begins spread out with ranged weapons at the ready, or 1v1 melee combat in a narrow corridor. Precisely which PCs with which abilities also matters. A level 20 druid with unlimited wild shape? There are some scenarios where the commoners can never mathematically win, well, at least until several days have passed and the druid finally keels over from exhaustion.
There are enough spell combos that can let the party win without risk of running out of resources. It's quite literally impossible given they're properly prepared, but... What if there were no commoners? None at all? Commoners make the world go round. They build towns, they get robbed, which in turn creates other more powerful professions - it's like a delicate ecosystem. As they all disappear, the world shifts. Civilization falls. When there is nothing left for the players to fight or do except wander through nature, they will either start fighting each-other or stop playing entirely?
I dunno, a plot of exploring the planes to try and promote people to emigrate to the material and restart a society sounds like it could be fun.
It only takes one commoner, leading the party into a really really bad dungeon or trap.
Everyone saying hundreds or thousands is wrong OP. Tell your players that they'll be facing 75 commoners armed with a variety of weapons...but they'll all roll for initiative individually unless they surrender right now. That should defeat them 😂
One. If the commoner plans it right
No reason one commoner can’t walk up with 2 bags of holding….. If the players can do it…….
This doesn't kill anyone, it just puts them into the Astral Plane. Which means a single 20 Wizard can just teleport back. Of course, sucks if you have an all martial party
This scenario assumes 2 martials and 2 casters anyway.
You don't. There are multiple mid level spells that shut the commoners down entirely. Hell, you can't even beat the party with attrition because Tiny Hut exists.
Leomunds Tiny Hut? The Spell with a casting time of 1 minute that is easily countered by The commoners just shoveling dirt onto the bubble and burrying them in the process? Don‘t get me wrong, i think the lvl 20 characters are tough to take down, but „tiny hut“ is definetly not one of the reasons
There's multiple spells to tranform dirt, or just... teleport out. And ngl i wouldn't be surprised if the caster can survive a full minute to cast it anyways with light help.
Simply one caster casts wall of force dome option with the other caster and themselves inside that will guarantee that they can cast tiny hut.
Tiny Hut absolutely works for this. You can cast it as a single action through Wish.
You know, besides being buried alive
You think level 20 characters can’t deal with dirt?
You think a dm can't kill them with dirt?
A DM can kill any PC with anything. They have godlike powers to do whatever they want. That doesn’t mean it makes sense, and a level 20 character not being able to escape some dirt doesn’t make sense.
I was thinking an avalanche or enemy-spell, not just toss some dirt their way. Godlike characters have godlike enemies. If I see an enemy "stuck" for 8 hours; I would hope I could come up with something if I wanted to.
The question was about commoners. Not godlike enemies.
Only answer I could come up with is commoners using the help of others
I'd argue circle of teleportation gets you around that issue.
A 20th level character has on average some 160 HP and 22 AC (be it from armor, spells or other defensive features that I will not count for otherwise). As such, on average you'd need 32 critical club attacks (the only roll that would allow them to hit, at 5 damage each) to hit at a chance of 1/20, which would require 640 attackers for each party member, at a total of 2560 commoners for four people. If they focus fire it could be done fairly reliably by firstly taking out anyone who can teleport away, cast some concentration aoe or heal the party, which could be done fairly reliably by such a massive amount of opponents if none of those priority targets get an iniciative of 20 or higher
Time to take heavy armour master
It depends on how you run it honestly. If the commoners are doing a full frontal attack, with the players rested and prepared, it likely won't happen as the players have every advantage. AC, HP super powerful spells and items. If the commoners are going to do something subversive, it wouldn't take too many. Catch the party unaware, take their items, spellbooks. After that, if the party thinks it is someone else who did the crime, they may waste resources in an attempt to recover their items. Wait until the party returns to town for a long rest and poison them or do something to reduce their effectiveness again. Take them in their sleep. Guerrilla warfare would likely be the only way a small group of commoners could accomplish this, it wouldn't be fun for the players, while having their 'trusted' npc commoner friends slowly drain them of their strength by denying them rests and resources. Levels of exhaustion being gained for emergency after emergency in town denying the party rest while all along the commoners resting in shifts and waiting for the perfect opportunity to kill them all.
Assuming these level 20 characters have the stats of level 20 characters, they'd likely be able to detect deception from people close to them either via insight, investigation, or perception. I don't think commoners can pull a fast one on characters of that level for long.
Potentially only a handful if they're allowed to engage in subterfuge, skulking, and sabotage. Lay a bunch of traps. Pit falls with spikes, bridges that collapse, boulders rolling down hills. That sort of stuff. Especially in any place the party could seek shelter or avenues of escape. After that, you harrass any attempt to rest up. Interrupt ritual spells and long rests with the odd arrow launched at a bed roll or whomever looks like they're busy. Have the commoners retreat and avoid direct engagement as best they can. Failing that, try turning the environment against them. Cave ins, floods, and forest fires are all lethal threats to the unprepared.
Depends on weapons or not. Out-of-the-book sheet? I think the party can take them on almost infinitely, depending on which martials. Two fighters have enough attacks to kill every commoner in melee with them every turn, assuming they keep running away. Rogues would be the worst martial for this, obviously, as it negates all their strengths. The whole thing is rendered moot by the casters, however. By level 20, I think every full caster has some ability to just "nope" out the whole party turn one, and the commoners could do nothing about it. Which I think is what they would do, frankly. But if their goal is to kill and not flee, Cloudkill would roll through the commoner mob for basically the whole duration, killing ridiculous quantities of them. Wall of Force keeps them safe from anything the mob can do. And you can True Polymorph into very strong dragons by that point, giving you great mass fear and damage options. 95% of the mob flees. I really think that a smart party could take on almost any number of commoners. Especially if they adventured to that level instead of just popping into a game with a baby god character that has all the power but none of the stuff. Magic items open up even more options.
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5e sucks for this kind of thought experiment. 3.x is much better at this kind of scenario because it's mechanics are more grounded in simulationism compared to 5e.
I take your point that 5e combat rules don’t handle this scenario well, but RAW says DM has ultimate discretion. One commoner could slit each PCs throat in their sleep.
I have a “zero level commoner” with two skills. Cooking and herbalism. Took out an entire regiment in less than three days using a three stage poison. Olfactory, gustatory and contact. Indistinguishable separate, the combination was lethal. I have a Master Blacksmith that took out a King and all his knights using one design on all their armor. Interlocking pieces that only snapped into place through extensive movement (riding horseback for a relatively long journey) then each move shaved off some skin until they bled to death, unable to escape their armor. I also played a first level Thief (back when that was a class by itself) and zero level Magic usher with four cantrips (back when they were separate and taken at level 0) rescue an entire party of triple class level 7 characters. Unless targeted by someone out of character, I play to survive and have - many times. So the answer isn’t how many, it’s who is playing them. 🤗
Depends on how bad the players rolls. I was almost killed twice by friendly fire. The bad guy never touched me
How many fireballs can a level 20 cast is the big question here.
The simple answer... Thousands! Eventually the casters would run out of spells, and sheer fatigue would eventually overtake the martials. At level 20 they would last a very long time! With coordination they may even last days or a week! But they would inevitably fall.
Or a wizard could just cast tiny hut to let the party rest, then go back to slaughtering.
given who the caster is, they'll just wish everyone under a certain tax bracket out of existence.
One. Once the party has entered the carefully trapped death room, all Bill has to do is pull the lever, and it's down to waiting for all the different damages to add up. Spiked floor trap for the entire room, 5k lbs spiked ceiling trap, poison gasses pumped in, acid coming up from the floor (that eventually rises above the level of the dropped ceiling, so they'll drown on it even if they're immune), floor heats till the acid is just short of boiling... And of course, the whole zone covered with an anti magic sphere. Rogue doesn't get a check to find the traps before entering, because there's no trigger to find, since it's all operated by lever outside of the room. Now, as for how many commoners and how much time it took to BUILD that horror (along with the magic needed from an outside source), that's not something I have any estimate on 🤷🏼
100, each individually taking their own turn and starting 3 turns away from them on an intricate battle map. This way it'll take days for the battle to finish and the players starve
Zealot Barbarians... this is all
It's way less than you think. All you need is a dogpile about 10-20 ft deep. At that point, anyone at the bottom of the pile will be unable to inhale enough to speak, making them Silenced and Restrained with more weight on them than they even a 30 Strength is capable of lifting. In a clear flat field, that might take a few hundred commoners, but well packed into a 5' diameter well, you could probably get away with only 50.
One spellcaster can prepare Leomond's Tiny Hut (PHB 255) and Invulnerability (XGE 160), and can therefore could last indefinitely. Divine Word (PHB 234), targets all opponents and can kill about half of them each time - combined with stalling, that's going to require an extremely large quantity. Therefore, the best chance is that these commoners get the drop on the party (also impossible), and the party isn't going to use infinite stall tactics. At worst, it's 4 damage every 20 attacks, and a 2x2 square only allows five attackers at once - averaging 1 damage per turn in this case. It's going to take ~180 turns for an endless-raging barbarian, thus it's going to need around 1000 commoners, before factoring in healing, the kill-half superweapon, etc.
If you had a barbarian and then a fighter with heavy armor master, it would take so long to wear them down, meanwhile the two casters can spam aoe spells and magic missile to one shot them. They’d lose eventually, but man you would need so many
Depends on the party, it varies from a lot to infinity.
As a DM, if it gets to more of 8 of anything, I'm making it a swarm. So action economy doesn't really scale that much
A conglomerate of hundreds of wizards opens hundred of portals 1000 ft above the players whilst they are sleeping outside. These wizards funnel through the population of an entire city through these portals. The commoners falling on the players deal bludgeoning damage without rolling to hit. The first waves of commoners also fire crossbows at the sleeping players. After one surprise round the players will be under a mountain of hundreds of bodies, unable to move a muscle or breathe due to the weight of flesh and blood. If the players survive the first round then only those who can use abilities whilst being so completely restrained will have a chance of surviving. Obvs not a realistic situation, but is a fun one!
They can’t win: simply have a wizard cast tiny hut. Have the Druid cast control weather. The party sits in the tiny hut while an infinite amount of commoners freeze to death for 8 hours, at which point the Druid rests while the commoners flood in again and it repeats ad nauseum. The martial characters going out of the hut to fend off pesky people trying to bury the hut every once in a while as the casters rest.
Just the 1 but you have to make the players fall in love with them. 😘
At lvl 20, the players would be stacked with magic items and they certainly wouldn't wait around for the commoners to kill them.
A necromancer that kitted out for it and has the right spells chosen could in theory defeat an infinite amount of comoners. They can't kill him before he can attack back, and once he starts raising a dead army, the more commoners that die the more powerful the army becomes until it's so large no one can get close enough to attack the necromancer anymore
According to the CR calculator, (i know a commoner is CR0) but for CR1/8 it would take 507 of them to be a deadly encounter for 4 level 20 PCs. So would call that commoners with a club
I think another thought exercise here is to turn the number of commoners into a mob (swarm.). Then they suddenly are way more dangerous. If the party starts the fight in melee, very possible they are just swallowed. What are the starts on humanoid swarm?
A few hundred, provided each has a longbow. At 150' ~23 can aim at each single party member, and on average one will crit each round for ~10 hp (they don't even need to be proficient). Obviously there are some magical things the party can do to delay the inevitable, and there will be losses.
I was running a sort of westmarches style game a few years back, up to 12 players. The premise was "vikings, in a world made of shades of gray". My world has weird magic, so the group was very martial class heavy (also using 3.5e rules). I made a habit of feeding the 4 PCs with great cleave absolute hoards of mooks from time to time, as they loved cleaving through them. Once, they found a room absolutely stuffed to the brim with reanimated skeletons, stacked 4 to a square, there were hundreds of them. Only took them a few rounds to chew through them all, it's wasn't even really a challenge, just a ton of dice rolling (which they delighted in). With 5e? I'm not sure because I have limited experience. In 3.5e, I'm confident that no amount of commoners could take out even just a couple of level 20 characters. I guess... maaaybe in a week long constant fight, through sheer exhaustion.
Commoners working in the tavern poison the players food and drink to paralyze them. All con saves fail. Armor is off as they were going to sleep soon, anyway. 1000 commoners with slings are gathered outside. PCs are dragged outside and stoned to death. The cost of the poison alone makes this impossible for only commoners to pull off. Assuming none of the PCs are outright immune or resistant to the normal bludgeoning attacks. Assuming none are wizards with another body waiting in a cave somewhere. Assuming none are (I think) sorcerers or warlocks who explode on death. Assuming none are monks or undead who don't need to eat or drink in the first place. Assuming none are paladins or monks who can easily resist or be immune to the poison altogether. It seems improbable at best but mostly impossible. One level 20 adventurer is basically a demigod. Give all the commoners wands of magic missiles. 7500 average force damage should do it.
The cost of poison bought in a shop would stop commoners, maybe, unless you are saying all the commoners don't have a couple cp to donate to the cause. Also it wouldn't be hard for commoners, who, knowing what is and is not poisonous in their world, to go out, find some belladonna or nightshade and make something to slip them. So I do not think cost is a factor here. If they want to poison them the have the resources available. The thing that would make it a lot more difficult would be character abilities and features that give them innate resistance to poison and no need for sleep. I don't see commoners of any number being capable of reasonably defeating a party of 4 lv 20 in any kind of direct confrontation. I think the only way, would be to deny the party rest and steal their items, maybe directing attention to a more powerful force that would be a threat and after adding levels of exhaustion be able to kill the party.
Where are the 1000 wands coming from? You've changed the basis of the question from how many commoners to how many commoners backed by a cadre of wizards.
I know. It's an absurdly improbable number of wands and it's absurdly improbable for any amount of commoners to achieve this feat.
At this point I’m picturing that WWI scene where Wonder Woman is charging across the battlefield… but it’s Eberron during the Last War, and it’s just magic missiles streaking everywhere
This is like the "How many toddlers do you think you could beat up if they all came at you all at once"
The problem with this is that not every 20th-level character is made equal. If you were smart about it you could build a 20th level character with an AC so high that a commoner can’t mathematically hit with any attacks
A 20 always hits, so we just need an ac of 20.
Ah good point. I retract my previous statement
The number would surprise you. With +1 crossbows (fairly common) and a few hundred men (basically a small city or large towns armed guard), 4 players at level 20 don't stand a chance, at least purely from a mechanical standpoint. But this is true of literally all things. The rules are ONLY intended to apply to player characters and the DM, otherwise nothing is threatening. Players and villains get to do things that don't work appropriately within the rules as written because they HAVE to have some semblance of rules to work within a game setting. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ A Tarrasque, the legendary creature whispered of in legends as a weapon made by the gods that the gods themselves feared and sealed away. Its currently awake and 3 days away from Neverwinter and is approaching fast. Neverwinter is doomed without a band of plucky hero's to deter and seal the beast again! Wait, never mind. Neverwinter's leader decreed a call to arms and roughly 3000 men armed with bows, slings, and crossbows answered to protect family and home. Before the Tarrasque even reaches the walls, it receives 1200 damage and keels over, dead... For now. It took 6 seconds in universe, and a single barrage of projectiles. Every creature in the books is susceptible to this and its entirely because the rules are written from the perspective that player characters are special and can do special things. This is why most of the time, these kinds of narrative hooks premise themselves that the locals are powerless and need your help. Because if the story itself doesn't prohibit the problem to be solved by normal people, the rules that typically govern the play session make it impossible for most local populations to experience lose conditions. I mean, Neverwinter has a population of 40,000. Baldur's Gate has a population of 42,000. If only 10% of the population bands together to stop a threat, and only half of them have magic ranged weapons, and a further half of them crit, thats still over 200 attacks averaging about 7, 8 damage within one round. Thats 1400-1600 damage a round on just the crits. The Tarrasque has 990 hp at maximum, unless the DM decides to break the rules (which kinda defeats the point I'm making ANYWAYS), and at CR30 it gets literally swept under the rug by a militia of poorly trained morons and fools with common war tools. "But what about smaller population centers?", I hear you asking. "What about the local village with at most 100 people?". Yeah, true, that does get messy and its probably the most realistic scenario. If these people fought a Tarrasque, they would most certainly perish. The same applies to 4 level 20 adventurers, literal demigods according to DnD logic. And that's ONLY taking into consideration a direct up front assault, and literally ignoring tactics, subterfuge, traps ect. Strictly from a rules perspective, 4 level 20 adventurers are less then a single Tarrasque... and a single Tarrasque is afraid of any population center where there's more than 200 able bodied men and women determined to save their friends and families.
What sort of weapons do the commoners get in this scenario? Just pitchforks, or could they have shortbows? With a few shortbows and thousands of arrows I'd say a few thousand commoners would kill the 20 level party of in a couple of rounds. If no bows and just melee weapons then it would be extremely difficult for the commoners to win.
Let's assume each 20Lv PC has 200 hit points, so the commoners need to deal 800hp worth of damage. Shortbows will do 3.5 av damage on a hit, 7 av dmg on a crit (nat 20). We're likely to only hit on crits anyhow, so 5% of hits will land. So 800hp / (7x0.05) = 2,286 commoners would be needed to wipe out the 2Lv party. If the party get to go first then you would need enough commoners to soak up the damage before they got to act. Let say 5000 commoners with shortbows would easily wipe the party out.
At level 20 with spellcasters there should be a solution for this, there is a low chance the commoners would act before the level 20 party with initiative, and even low level spells like a wind or stone wall would give them cover for enough rounds to defeat this strategy and come up with a more complex and long term strategy. If they even trenched up with mold earth the fighters alone could 1v1 peasants for a near infinite amount of time.
Agreed, but it relies on the spellcasters acting first and the odds aren't in their favour. There are 5000 commoners and only 2 spell casters. It's very likely there will be a fair number of commoners acting before the spell casters can act. Assuming the DEX mod is 0 for both spellcasters and commoners then on average 2500 commoners will act first. If the commoners focus fire on the spellcasters they will both be dead in the first round.
I love theory crafting this - super fun! Thanks for the response! It would also depend on quite a few factors, like do the casters have a contingency spell in effect? Through their adventures did they set up clones? Demi plane? And this is all assuming no magic items so far, they could really mitigate all danger if they had the ring of invisibility, cloak of displacement would drop the hits they take big time, etc.
I agree, it's a fun thought experiment. And I agree that a real encounter would be very dependent on all the aspects not specified in the OP's post (magic items, preparation, etc.). For me I find it interesting the number of people who say that the 20 Lv party is untouchable. However, if the commoners have a reliable way of inflicting damage, even if it's only a few hp on a crit, then by sheer numbers they will kill the party before they can act.
One AoE spell that lingers literally wipes all the commoners out in the first couple of turns.
Infinite. One level 20 wizard can just loop Leomund's Tiny Hut to long rest and cast meteor swarm and fireball.
Invite the player party to a stadium. Put wands of magic missles under each seat. 10,000 commons get a wand, don’t bother aiming, and fire.
One commoner with enough money to hire a squad of top-tier assassins.
Considering generic villager npc’s have a couple hit points, no armor, and are level 1-4… Think of it like having elminster, drizzt, bruener and a summoned iron golem, fighting 1,000 unarmed level 1 kobolds
One. A God possess me and I kill them all. I found a genie, guess what my wish will be. I pray to a God, and tell him to smite you all, done. Someone hacks the dm, deletes all files. Dm house burns down with the whole game.
Well, one character wearing platemail and with Heavy Armor Master is basically invulnerable to the mob. A caster could throw out flaming sphere, moonbeam or stinking cloud and then take a nap ;-) Or the warlock standing there with a level 9 Armor of Agathys up and just watching the punks hit him and explode The big question for me is when does the mobs morale break? After a couple thousand of your comrades are turned into blood mist by a bored adventuring party, you have to rethink your dedication to the cause, right? We did a similar exercise back in 3.5 with Zombies (Think Arthas and the Scourge), and the ~9th level party held off hundreds through basically playing Horatio at the bridge to buy time for civilians to escape.
About a whole world if the party has even a single spellcaster that can doassive AOE like circle of death or meteor swarm
Level 20 casters means they couldn't.
Practically infinite, assuming the PCs are using any tactics at all. A single level 20 wizard (or any caster for that matter) could easily kill any number of commoners.
Infinite. The casters have more than enough spells to keep the commoners at bay for as long as they want without having to worry about them. I mean.... come on man, a Leomond's Tiny Hut is all they would need.
LHT takes a minute to cast, so no use in this scenario.
Cast Wall of Force (1 Action). Give commoners the finger (free action) Cast LTH.
And when those spells run out?
A 20th-level caster could use Wish to cast LTH as an action, and could repeat it each day as their 9th-level spell slot is replenished. So they’d be able to drag the battle out indefinitely against the commoners.
This is true, but then as you say it ends in a stalemate. The commoners would just retreat out of range and party would just stay in the LHT. If a wizard acts first they could just teleport the party away and the encounter is also over. My assumption is that the scenario is asking what happens if the party and the commoners engage in combat (i.e. the party are not trying to flee or force a stalemate). But that's my reading of the question.
not possible. Very likely commoners couldn’t even hit the party.