It takes an army

No action movie would be complete without the hero mowing down scores of mooks, a wuxia master cutting his way through an army to get to the villain, or a superhero fighting his way through impossible odds to come face to face with his nemesis.  In certain types of fiction it is a standard trope for the hero(es) to face impossible odds and come out victorious.  However when the dice hit the mat and you throw dozens of miniatures onto the table it means the GM is going to be rolling for hours to resolve the action.  This requires abstracting group combat out in such a way that challenges the protagonists without bogging down the gameplay and ruining the fun and excitement of an epic encounter.  

For the first step in my system I take a page from White Wolf’s Adventure and make mooks fragile.  The goal is to give mooks just enough health so that it takes a fairly strong hit to knock them down, but not so much health that a hero needs to beat on a single mook for an hour long fight.  Which leads to the second part of designing the proper mook; they are hired not for skill but for masses.  Their defense, attacks, and skills are fairly low for the setting.  Better than an average person, but not by much.

Finally I give the mooks an advantage by giving them numbers.  I tend to group mooks in groups of 5, for each mook over one they get a bonus to attack and a bonus to damage, representing the group concentrating its fire.  I make a single attack roll for the group of mooks, and if they hit a make single damage roll.

For harming the mooks I do tend to look at the nature of the attack for how it is applied to my vast army of minions.  A single shot from a pistol, or attack from a hand-to-hand weapon will only injure a single mook.  For more area of effect weapons (sustained automatic fire, grenades, area-of-affect melee attacks) the group of mooks takes the damage, starting with one mook, and if the first mook is knocked out, the damage continues onto the second mook.

Playing hordes of henchman can be fun, but in order to keep it interesting don’t forget to treat the mooks, even groups of mooks, like NPCs.  They should make use of tactics and take cover when they can.  One group may provide cover fire so another team can advance.  Once the tides have obviously turned, unless the mooks are truly fanatic, then it is time to have them run away and hide to fight another day.

This does have the danger of making all of the mooks cookie cutters.  I only lump together mooks that are armed the same and armed with a standard weapon.  Some of my minions will be armed with more powerful weapons, and they will be handled separately.  I will also make more elite squads which can fight a bit better or deal a little more damage.  Finally there is the matter of the actual threats to the PCs.  These NPCs will also be harassing the PCs and trying to do their best to harm them.

The system has to be tested out for your system of preference and play style, but the goal is to develop a method to ease the GM’s workload and keep the action moving when the PCs are faced with long odds.  In addition to tailoring the mook rules for game system and play style, there are other variations that can be used to help the rules match the tenor of the game.  In a superhero game, a powerful hero may automatically hit the mooks, and the to-hit roll is used to determine how many mooks are hit in a single round (imitating Superman swatting a number of henchmen out of his way).  It can be assumed that an attack automatically hits, and degrees of success (such as in M&M3) or certain thresholds indicate more mooks hit by the attack.  In lower power setting, such as agents, mooks can be used as the main challenge.  In an agents game, a character like 007 has to fight through the mooks and has to be concerned about the threat they pose to him.