Aug 10, 2017 Hirelings in D&D 5e According to the DMG Last night I was contemplating the uselessness of the hireling in Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. In this Edition, more so than in any previous edition, they're the faceless drones of our fantasy worlds carrying out the mundane tasks that our players find too trivial to do themselves. D or d is the fourth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.Its name in English is dee (pronounced / ˈ d iː /), plural dees.
The 5e DMG has a short section on “handling mobs:” it has a chart for approximating, out of a group of attacking monsters, how many monsters hit.
It’s pretty simple: subtract attacker’s hit bonus from the target’s AC. Cross-index that number on the chart. If the number is 1-5, all the attackers hit; if it’s 6-12, 1/2 of them hit; etc., up to 1 in 20 of the attackers hitting on a 20.
I ran a big set-piece battle yesterday: 8 mid-level PCs and 10 gnomes against 20+ drow and other assorted creatures, including a drow spider chariot and a sinister angel. With a wizard and a sorcerer PC and two drow wizards, all slinging fireballs, the mob attacks weren’t much of a factor. With all those fireballs, what I COULD have used was rules for mob saving throws.
If I’d thought about it, I’d have realized that the same chart can be used for saving throws. Instead of subtracting attack bonus from AC, subtract saving throw bonus from DC, and use the chart as normal. For instance, a fireball save DC of 15, minus the drow dex save (+2) is 13, which, according to the chart, means that 1/3 of the drow succeed on their saving throw (and probably survive with 1 or 2 HP left).
In fact, this same chart can be used for ability/skill checks (how many orcs managed to climb the wall? DC minus skill bonus) or any other d20 roll.
D'angelo Russell
To me, it seems this is all you need to run fairly simple battles with dozens or hundreds of creatures per side. The amount of HP tracking is not excessive: for instance, in this unit of 50 ogres, 24 have 15 damage and the other 25 have 30 damage. (For ease of bookkeeping, assume that melee attacks always target the most-damaged creature.)
You might also care about the base size of big units. I assumed that a close-packed formation of 10 Medium troops took up the size of one Large creature. I’d say that 25 troops are Huge and 50 are Gargantuan.
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If we do any bigger-scale battles, I might find other rules that I need (after all, the Chain Mail rules are much longer than this blog post) but right now, this is looking pretty good for running big D&D skirmishes.
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Morale checks for monsters and NPCs were a part of D&D from the beginning, when the default rules for combat were to be found in Chainmail, all the way through AD&D 2e and BECMI. For some reason morale checks were dropped from 3e onward, but for those of us who would like to retain the old-school mechanism of having randomly determined morale, 5e comes with some optional rules. I was very interested as soon as I heard that the new DMG had such options, and once I had read them I found them to be very good but also noticed the lack of a relationship between Morale and Loyalty such as was present in those early editions. I also noticed the lack of differentiation between the ability of monsters to succeed on a morale check except by their Wisdom scores or whether they have proficiency with Wisdom saves, which very few of them do. Many of the factors that would account for the differentiation found in early editions, I have found, are best summed up in the Loyalty Base Modifiers found on pages 36 to 37 of the AD&D DMG (1979), and it is to the adaptation of these modifiers to 5e that the rest of this post will be devoted.
Optional Loyalty gives each NPC party member a Loyalty Score. I would give such a score to any monster or NPC which is part of a group, calculated in the same way, but also I would add or subtract the above referenced modifiers to all Loyalty Scores in the following way:
First of all, the modifiers, originally applied to a percentile roll, and thus expressed as a percentage, must be converted to the economy of bounded accuracy by dividing the numbers by ten and rounding to the nearest whole number. Thus modifiers are produced on the scale of 1d4/2d4 as given in the optional rules. All relevant modifiers are then applied to the Loyalty Score taking care not to use multiple modifiers which derive from what is essentially the same factor. The following considerations are dealt with by category as they are presented in the AD&D DMG:
Enlistment or Association
Slave status assumes no pay andcruel and domineering treatment from a liege who is not present.
Captured and enlisted status is equivalent to the penalty for little training, levied troops.
The penalty for associated npc assumes no discipline.
The penalty for hired mercenary, short term assumes less than 1 month enlistment.
Training or Status Level (These modifiers do not apply to Encounter Reactions as will be discussed in a subsequent post.)
The newly recruited regulars penalty assumes less than 1 month enlistment.
Guard status assumes elite status along with above average pay.
Other considerations involve removing the racial preference penalty for tolerance of an associated group member's race, which seems to be an obvious mistake, and perhaps rationalizing the modifiers relating to the alignment of the liege so that they are more evenly distributed. The liege referred to is always the character or monster in the group with the highest Charisma score, not necessarily the group's actual leader. I would include a full list of the modifiers but I'm not sure if that would violate the rule against reproducing the text of a rule set.
Once the full Loyalty Score has been calculated, however, it can be used to check the loyalty of the NPC or monster in question. The conditions for and consequences of failing Loyalty Check are found on page 36 of the AD&D DMG under Typical Loyalty, Obedience, and Morale Check Situations. As it says in the 5e DMG, if Loyalty is 10 or above, then the creature is loyal in such situations. But if loyalty is 'tenuous' then a check can be made by the DM with a d10. Rolling over the creature's Loyalty Score indicates a failure result. The table, Loyalty of Henchmen and Allied Creatures, also on page 36 of the AD&D DMG, can be used as a guide for roleplaying Loyalty if the percentile results (01-00) are assumed to represent Loyalty Scores 1 through 9.
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