The party is composed of a Half-Orc Assassin, a Half-Orc Monk, and a Gnome Wizard (levels 5, 4, and 4 respectively). We're running a sandbox style game with some of the areas on the main map being homemade and some of the areas being jumping off points for published adventures. The night started with the party in the middle of the kobold and gnoll encampment from Goodman Games DCC Legends of the Savage Kings. And when I say "in the middle of" I mean they were inside the fort and there were 24 foes they could see plus another 10 in the various buildings. I had changed them from kobolds and gnolls to lizard men of two different breeds for continuity purposes with the rest of the campaign.
So 30 3hd creatures, plus an ogre.
Highlights from their victory:
- The Assassin successfully disguised herself as one of the orcs the lizard men were trafficking weapons with, bringing the other two in as her prisoners.
- The Monk, having been thrown in the slave pit, asked me about the possibility of some of the other prisoners being skilled fighters. After some amazing percentage rolls (93%, 94%, and 97%) it was revealed that two of the four orcs were elites and one of them was a shaman. The shaman would later take out 14 baddies in one go with a fireball.
- The Wizard used detect magic judiciously to locate the shaman's totem, sent a magic message to the assassin informing her of the whereabouts of the totem so she could sneak it, and downed a lizard man with an acid arrow to the back when he got suspicious of the assassin's disguise.
- The Assassin and Wizard worked in tandem to create compelling evidence that the fort was under attack by a black dragon (acid arrow damage, ghost sound, and an "ally" claiming to have seen the beast), which got all the lizards looking outward and allowed the monk and his fair weather frieds to escape the pit and set up the attack.
- The wizard levitated the Ogre every turn for the entire fight, completely removing him from the battle and only dropping him when the spell's duration expired.
- Best of all, for me at least, the orc shaman escaped the fight before the party won the day. I let them
All in all the group really surprised me and I ended up pulling a lot of rulings out of thin air, but everyone had a great time and no ridiculous precedents were set. The only issue that I ran into is that I've always let my players roll on the random treasure tables for their loot. 34 baddies, 4 base rolls per baddie, most of those roll lead to at least one more roll
The only time PHB was opened was when I needed it because I hadn't planned on running a spellcaster and the monster manual only opened because that's where all the treasure is.
