Quote from: Benoist;431518It's not like the stormtroopers would be able to hit anything with their blasters, mind you.

Statistically they should...just like those 400 goblins are going to bring pain to even a very high level party.

I remember during the over-land march in a G1-2-3 campaign the party ran into a war band of 180 or so orcs on the move from the Hellfurnace Mts. These are cats who were able to take on G1 and G2, high level, mind, and after a couple of turns of combat (20 or so rounds) they rightly decided to get the fuck out of there.  The orcs were spread out enough that the M-U's fireball and other big gun spells weren't mowing them down quickly enough, and the orcs had enough bows that they were really, really bringing the pain down on this group of 9 characters.

Statistics in combat in AD&D will fuck you up.

Quote from: Benoist;431515LOL I was just telling myself it'd be cool to ACTUALLY do that and just let the game unfold from there.

Like Kazad-dum, with less plot armor for the PCs?  

I wrote an adventure once based on this theme... there were actually two tribes of goblins on the first dungeon level.  (Total number of goblins is about 320.)  Dragonsfoot published it here.

Assumed party was level 2-3, and in playtesting, the party tended to win, provided they used the right tactics.  (This meant hiring mercenaries and henchmen to help fight, battling the goblins in a narrow corridor or other place where the party couldn't be outflanked, keeping a retreat-route open, and using flaming oil and sleep spells to cover the retreat when necessary.  Taking goblin prisoners was a good idea--"no quarter" meant the goblins fighting to the death and the party getting bogged down in sheer numbers.  Making the captives draw a map of the dungeon in return for their freedom also helped tactical planning.)

It was certainly a war of attrition, though.

Yeah, I always assume that if you have 400 goblins or whatnot, that it represents a group that occupy an entire area of the dungeon or local region in the outdoors.  Its possible that a group of PCs, acting stupidly, could end up having to face the entire warband at once, but they're usually spread out in different groups (possibly with one large central group in a core area) and the PCs could use sneakiness to move around and deal with the problem (be it by evasion or a slow and careful process of culling).

RPGPundit

Quote from: thedungeondelver;431512I'm a bad DM sometimes; I make a dice roll in that range and populate dungeon levels accordingly.

It's actually hysterical fun to do this with OD&D.  I ran a mini-campaign with this rule (the players knew in advance) and it certainly altered the game world and encounters.   40D10 goblins!  

The big issue was actually dragons which tended to show in pairs.   Fighting two dragons is waaay more exciting than one.

I recommend giving it a try! (but let your players know)

Quote from: Spinachcat;431695It's actually hysterical fun to do this with OD&D.  I ran a mini-campaign with this rule (the players knew in advance) and it certainly altered the game world and encounters.   40D10 goblins!  

The big issue was actually dragons which tended to show in pairs.   Fighting two dragons is waaay more exciting than one.

I recommend giving it a try! (but let your players know)

I've usually done it this way; just fitting the results in an area appropriate to maintaining emulation.  Of course, I use the RC, which has two types of "number appearing", one for a random encounter and the other for a "lair".

RPGPundit

I have also used the "No App" stat to determine the basic population for a land area or dungeon and go from there - it is a good way to stimulate creativity to roll a few times and then imagine what those monsters could be doing together in the same location. This has lead to things like Strabonus, where you have a dungeon complex populated by a minotaur lording over 80 gnolls living one level over a lot undead, a scary-scary scenario created from the 1e DMG encounter tables (the characters took two expeditions to make the gnolls run, but suffered heavy losses and never saw the rest of the place) (another group I've read about simply negotiated with the gnolls to let them pillage the lower dungeons and remove the undead threat the gnolls themselves were suffering from).

These numbers can make for a very rewarding approach to gaming, in that random encounters can easily become campaign fixtures. If you roll for 300 orcs, or 4 gorgons, or a demon (numbers off the top of my head), they are not going to just sit there and disappear into the wilderness once the PCs meet them, but they will start shaping their environment. This creates complications for the party and complexity/context through interaction -- the orcs may raid the nearby viking village where the characters have contacts/visit the local shop; they may turn out to have an item they need to find, or they may strike an alliance with a local warlord to guard the slaves in his mines - that sort of thing.

With anemic No App stats, that doesn't happen so often. Of course, you can plan things, but you are missing out on the unexpected, weird results of the random roll. (Not to mention combat with dozens of low-level opponents is cool as hell, too.)

One question I ask right after I know the number appearing is "WHY are they here"?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;431922One question I ask right after I know the number appearing is "WHY are they here"?

THIS is why I enjoy running OD&D sandbox games.

Its great fun to create chunks of the world, then let these random bits show up and add unexpected life.

When I DMed 1e, I would use that "number appearing" range in various ways. I assumed the large ranges, 40-400 and the like, were the total for an entire settlement or war band. If the PCs encountered them randomly, I always gave them the chance to detect and avoid such a large group if it was an outdoor encounter.

My own general rule of thumb was if they did encounter such a group and couldn't avoid it for one reason or another, there would only be a small, maybe squad-sized group that could get at the PCs immediately. This "squad-sized" group varied in numbers according to how tough the individual critters were - there might be a dozen/dozen-and-a-half goblins or kobolds, or just six or eight hobgoblins (I usually ran a game for 3 or 4 PCs). If the PCs stood and fought, or didn't take out this initial group quickly enough, they risked getting overwhelmed as the rest of the group showed up.

Quote from: RPGPundit;431922One question I ask right after I know the number appearing is "WHY are they here"?

RPGPundit

Yep. If I didn't ask it while doing the pre-game grunt-work, or if it was the result of a "wandering monster" and I didn't come up with something on the fly, then my players definitely would be asking, which often led to some interesting encounters.

Thanks guys.  This is really good food for thought.  

Currently I'm getting a Burning Wheel campaign underway for a few friends (Boo! Hiss! I know. ), but I may be running OD&D soon for another group of people if life allows it, so I'm trying to digest different takes on the minutiae of the rules.