Intro: Mike's Favorite Horde Rules

• Our heroes stand atop a hill next to a ruined tower while fifty skeletons ascend towards them.
• The heroes pull a strange skull-capped lever and two hundred crawling claws pour down atop them.
• Our epic heroes stand at a shattered monastery in the undead world of Thanatos surrounded by a thousand ghouls.

In order to share stories like these, we need a system to handle running dozens to hundreds of monsters. That's what we're talking about today.

Up front I want to give you my favorite horde rules. I'll get into the details and offer alternatives later in the video but if you watch nothing else, here's my best take on horde rules:

• Tracking Damage. Track the number of monsters in the horde, the individual hit points of each monster, and track the damage inflicted to the whole horde in one tally. Every time the horde takes enough damage to kill one or more monsters, remove the last monsters struck. Round individual monster hit points down to the nearest 5 or 10 to make the math easier. Let weapon damage roll over to new monsters when characters inflict lots of damage. Use DMG's cleave option (chapter 9, pg 272 of the DMG). It's awesome to behead three skeletons at once.
• Tracking Attacks and Saving Throws. When rolling attacks and saving throws becomes a burden, abstract hits and misses. When members of the horde attack or make saving throws, assume one in four succeed. Round this up or down depending on circumstances (heavily armored opponents, very high DCs, etc). If the horde has advantage, one in two succeed. If they have disadvantage, one in ten succeeds. Slide the scale up or down depending on circumstances. Use the monster's average damage value.
• Adjudicate Positioning and Areas of Effect. Use your judgement to determine how many monsters can practically attack characters or fall within an area of effect from a character's spell or ability. Lean in favor of the characters and choose targets randomly among those who can be attacked by the hoard. Since hordes are often tightly packed, its probably double what it would normally be:
  • Small (5 foot radius): 4 creatures
  • Medium (15 foot area): 8 creatures
  • Large (20 foot radius): 16 creatures
  • Huge (30 foot radius+): 32 or all of them

Why Run Hordes?

We don't want to limit our stories in D&D. While D&D often focuses on small squad combat, our stories may take us into situations where our heroes face dozens to hundreds of monsters. Instead of getting bogged down in mechanics, we want a system that lets us run as many monsters as we want and makes the characters feel like heroes as they hew through them.

D&D's mechanics shouldn't get in the way of our story. They should serve it.

There's no perfect solution. Likely DMs will find the one they like the best (or the least worst) and stick to that.

Good Horde Rules...

• Shouldn't limit how many monsters we use.
• Should be easy and fast to adjudicate regardless of size.
• Should make the most sense given the mechanics of D&D.
• Should make the players feel like heroes, not tired and cranky.

Other Horde Rule Options