Dungeons & Dragons has always been plagued by the “Conan-effect” where a barbarian can down foes at every turn, but each goblin is a singular accounting task, requiring a unique hit point tally and an individual initiative roll. By the time we got to 4th Edition, there were minions made specifically to be cut down en masse. They’re gone now, but I can’t resist sending hordes of monsters to terrorize my players.
The Dawn of the Paper Tiger
The concept of battling large number of foes has always been a part of D&D.
- In Original D&D (OD&D), fighters could attack a number of times equal to their level against any foes with 1 Hit Die (HD) or less, a legacy from the Chainmail system where heroes were literal force multipliers on the battlefield.
- AD&D 1st Edition slightly nerfed this by restricting it to creatures with less than 1 HD (such as kobolds or 0-level humans), effectively making the “one attack per level” rule a specific tool for clearing crowds of the weakest enemies.
- AD&D 2nd Edition largely moved away from this as a core mechanic, instead introducing Weapon Specialization to provide a fixed increase in attacks per round regardless of the enemy’s strength.
- By 3rd Edition, this sweep was reimagined as the Cleave and Great Cleave feats, which allowed extra attacks upon dropping an opponent, shifting the power from an automatic class feature to a chosen tactical build.
- In D&D 3.5, the mechanic for a swarm of Medium humanoids was formally introduced as the Mob template in the Dungeon Master’s Guide II (2005). While the Monster Manual already had rules for Tiny swarms, the Mob template scaled this up to treat a crowd of roughly 48 to 60 Medium creatures as a single Gargantuan entity with a massive pool of 30 Hit Dice. This shifted the fighter vs. crowd dynamic into a boss-style encounter, where the mob functioned as a single resilient foe that was vulnerable to area-of-effect spells but nearly impossible to disperse with single-target weapon attacks.
- This evolution culminated in 4th Edition’s Minion rules, which simplified the math by giving weak enemies only 1 HP, allowing any class to feel heroic by cleaving through hordes. You can see the appeal: it allows for the replication of high-fantasy tropes seen in films where a single sweep of a sword drops three orcs. However, this led to the “paper tiger” critique: 1-HP monsters felt artificial, as a legendary dragon minion can theoretically be slain by a single housecat’s scratch.
- 5th Edition continues this trend by moving the burden of large-scale combat onto the DM through Mob Combat Rules, which replace individual d20 rolls with a probability table to determine how many automatic hits a group scores, and the use of Swarms, which condense hundreds of small creatures into a single high-HP stat block. 5E fighters now fulfill the crowd control fantasy through a combination of an Extra Attack feature that scales up with multiple strikes and an optional Cleave rule in the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide that allows excess damage from a killing blow to carry over to adjacent targets. While these tables speed up the attack phase, they do not alleviate the burden of tracking individual HP, which remains the primary source of combat overhead.
The Physics of the Phalanx
One of the most persistent complaints regarding 1-HP minions is wasted damage potential. If a Paladin uses a high-level Divine Smite to deal 50 damage to a creature with 1 HP, the player often feels their resource has been squandered. Players want their “overkill” to matter.
This has led to the adoption of house rules like the 13th Age’s Mook system. In this system, enemies of the same type share a communal hit point pool. If five goblins have 7 HP each, they share a pool of 35 HP. A single strike dealing 22 damage kills three goblins outright and leaves the fourth wounded. This spillover damage ensures that no resource is wasted and provides a satisfying narrative explanation: the hero’s blow was so powerful it cleaved through multiple targets.
Another alternative is Fifth Edition’s swarms. The Swarm mechanic offers a different solution by treating the thirty ravens as a single Large entity with a single HP bar. I’ve applied this to Humanoid crowds in my own campaign, to conduct large battles but keeping troops as an entity that rolls damage (and when Bloodied, halves its damage).
That said, I found that using large numbers of normal creatures — in this case, ravens — can be just as effective as special rules to manage them.
The Library Lab
In one of my encounters for my weekly library sessions, I wanted to replicate the feel of Alfred Hitchcok’s The Birds: many lowl-level monsters stalking the 2nd-level PCs before finally attacking a farmhouse. The problem is that the narrative description does most of the heavy lifting: a swarm is just another Large creature on the battlemap. Instead, I put out 30 tokens along the perimeter of the map… and took not action. I just let the players see how many ravens there were. The tension was unbearable.
The party vacillated between trying to disperse them and fearful that if they struck first, all of them would attack. And of course, they weren’t sure the statistics of all these birds (they were just ravens with 2 hit points each). They took up positions around the house to defend the farmer’s family within — only to have a Large swarm burst through the chimney and attack, even as the individual minions struck from outside. For obvious reasons, the monsters all went on the same initiative.
There was a lot of rolling on my side, with the ravens occasionally critting (more rolls = more chance of a critical hit) inflicting 2 points of damage instead. One of the six PCs went down in the flurry of attacks while the party’s resident dragonborn roasted groups of them with breath weapons and the other PCs flailed away. It was a desperate battle. They succeeded in warding them off long enough to fight the Big Bad, who crashed through the ceiling and was finally taken out by the paladin and war cleric.
Were the extra tokens and dice rolls worth it? I think so. At lower levels, this kind of combat feels gritty and rewarding as minions go down in waves, each token removed with a succesful hit vs. a swarm that gets less effective when it’s Bloodied (though I used swarms too). At higher levels, these types of minions become tiresome, not the least of which being high levels PCs end up wasting massive damage on minions. But since the PCs were only 2nd level, the battle against so many minions felt desperate and hard-won.
I do love me some zombie swarms. But there’s a time and place, and from my experience, minions work well to keep low level characters feeling both threatened by being overwhelmed and powerful when they defeat them.
Your Turn: How do you handle large groups of monsters in combat at your table?
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