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Old 09-24-2020, 10:21 AM   #1
C-Moon
 
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Default Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

With Dragon Con 2020 not long finished, I was reading through/watching several game sessions and seeing all the awesome fights and adventures people went through. It made me remember the big events of past TTRPG sessions I’ve played/GM’d.

Question: What’s the biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered? (but not necessarily won!)
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Old 09-25-2020, 03:01 PM   #2
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

Biggest enemy probably goes to an exalted campaign fighting continent sized old gods is kinda of where your going to end up eventually. We've done it in some different variants, as well as some slightly more reasonable enemies such as a few hundred meter high giants steel and flesh zombie giant god. Not that unusualy to be fighting what is basically mobile scenery in any exalted campaign.

Biggest actual battle thought is likely a recent Star Wars campaign which faced most of the New Republics forces including thousands of fighters against a significant remnant Imperial faction with allies certainly hundreds of thousands of people on each side and likely closer to millions. A pair of Dreadnoughts duking it out, several dozen star destroyers and hundreds of smaller ships mixing it up. It also kinda of wrecked an entire inhabited star system and nearly when obligatory imperial superweapons got involved some of the nearby star star systems in the happily prevented supernova.
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Old 09-25-2020, 08:51 PM   #3
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

The Low Tech Award goes to Errol Flynnbuck, Lost Prince of the Halflings who roused about a hundred of his subjects to repel a goblin invasion of a thousand or more.

A master of halfling motivation he once proclaimed "We shall attack the goblin camp at suppertime!"<beat> "We shall eat early." <crowd cheers>

The key engagement was an ambush in a pass with halfling slingers on the slopes and Errol's biggish friends blocking the roadway. The golblins charged thinking they could get through before the slingers did too much damage. Alas for them one of Errol's friends named Sigrid had a Horn of Mass Panic. This was in addition to the horns on her helmet. She waited until just before the goblins would be in melee range and blew the Horn.

Saves were handled on a percentage basis and very few goblins saved. Half of the ones who did save failed regular morale checks when everyone else ran away and the few remaing barely gave Sigrid a good workout.

The Ground Combatant Award goes to a group in a Space Opera I ran where some aliens known as the Ribbitish were trying to break into this forerunner instalation my players had discovered the location of in a very old issue of Scientific Forerunner.

The Ribbitish had a from 2 TLs ago Continental Siege Unit but my room-mate who introduced me to rpgs and got all this started had a small state of the art nuclear weapon in his backpack. He'd acquired it during chargen and kept his mouth shut about it and even in the 40 years since then I have never seen a PC group freak out like that one did he used it.

The Award for the Unlimited Weight Class category goes to the same group a little later who had built an _extremely_ dubious ship they called a "Merchant Escort Cruiser" and named The Sweet Transvestite. It was armed to about 2 notches past the legal limit for civilians. It massed 225,000 tons and it did indeed blow up some stuff with its' disguised and oversized main batteries.

For some reason it's all been much smaller spaceships since then. :)
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Old 09-26-2020, 04:03 AM   #4
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

Biggest battle? about 50 on a side.

Oh, wait, you mean in a game? I've run upwards of 40 ships on a side in WEG Star Wars, and 10 on a side in FFG SW. Groundside, up to about 300 - two companies, one per side, in WEG, and similar in FFG.
I've run battles with 10,000+ in Pendragon
1000 or so (Bn vs Bn) in MegaTraveller.
I've also had battles of up to about 150 demons vs 50 elite troops lead by PCs using the 5E D&D preview mass combat rules.
In WFRP 1E, I used about 1000 skaven and the PC's forces numbered about 70. It went poorly for the skaven.
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Old 09-26-2020, 04:00 PM   #5
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

Actually not faced him yet: but one of the three Dark Gods may have 'occupied' a Sassaryd (Persian equivalent) General with Princely backing who is about to go full Saladin on my Novgorod-equivalent city and surrounding lands.

I'm PC 'Kniaz Velikiy', sworn to defend the city and it's people, bearer of the five favours (won from the spirits of the land and city in my early adventuring days), and in way over my head.
Fortunately the Bibliotekh had a copy of the Manual of War, the Red Guard has a capable leader, the mercenary White Guard are most skilled (individually), and we are rich in horses.

Armies in the several thousands, but not tens of thousands, mostly horse-tribe derived, Vs. the successor state (Sassarya) to Great Narsilan, a fallen 'Persian Empire' with fanatics and assassins, a long way up a river from their home.

Ridley Scott has a lot to answer for: my GM saw 'Kingdom of Heaven' recently. - and probably 'Thirteenth Warrior' as well.
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Old 09-27-2020, 12:53 PM   #6
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

I believe that would have to a Star Wars games where the Rebel Alliance and the Empire both attempted to grab a Precursor mothball fleet that the characters had discovered orbiting a star outside the known hyperspace lanes. While everyone knew that the Precursor mothball fleet existed, it was fifty light-years from the nearest hyperspace channel, meaning that no one could get to it, at least not until the PCs stumbled upon a minor hyperspace channel that led to the system.

After a discussion between the players, they decided to sell the information to the Empire after grabbing one of the spacecraft as evidence of their claims. Little did they know that activating one of the spacecraft started up a long dormant defensive system that would be active when they returned.

The evidence of their ship, and the connections of a couple of players to the Imperial Fleet had one of the Grand Moffs launch a recovery fleet of 100 star destroyers and associated support ships. One of the characters was secretly an agent for the Rebel Alliance and managed to get a message to them about the hyperspace channel and the waiting prize.

The Imperial Fleet was ambushed by the Rebel Fleet at the entrance of the hyperspace channel, but the Imperial Fleet retreated down the channel, hoping to prevent the Rebel Fleet from taking the prize, and the Rebel Fleet followed. When the Imperial Fleet existed into normal space, it found itself facing 1,000 automated Precursor ships.

The Imperial Fleet and the Rebel Fleet did not fight, they just attempted to run, but they were utterly annihilated by the Precursor Fleet, though they ignored the spacecraft that the players had taken, since it was a Precursor ship. A few ships on both sides managed to flee, taking the news of the players treachery throughout the known Galaxy.
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Old 09-27-2020, 01:58 PM   #7
Anders
 
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

Probably in Scion, where the son of Chinese war god faced off against 50,000 mongolian invaders... and won.
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Old 10-02-2020, 10:48 PM   #8
Mark Skarr
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

Well, let's see, how out-there did some of those battles get:

There's all the stuff from Core Command, but that was fairly small-potatoes in comparison.

Dr. Jillian Taylor out-smarted, then stared down an ancient, unknowable god (think gnarlyhotep, but with less charm and a less-friendly streak), and basically told him if he ever tried to show his face-analog in any reality she was in, she'd whup him again.

In our Fringeworthy game, we smashed the moon into the Earth to destroy a godling that was merging with the planet.

Gabe, The Phoenix and the Crusader faced down a galactic invasion force.

Sera, presented with a puzzle she was couldn't figure out, came up with her own solution. A solution that broke time and space.
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Old 10-06-2020, 03:13 PM   #9
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

We fought a town. We were facing a sorceress who could control people with coins so she got a few of them into our town and those who were affected pressed coins against the skin of others until they were all under her spell. It was only about 200 people and most of them weren't capable fighters but we don't want to seriously injure any of them and we couldn't touch the coins they were carrying with our skin. It was a long tough fight.
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Old 11-01-2020, 10:57 AM   #10
Alden Loveshade
 
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Default Re: Biggest enemy and/or battle you’ve encountered?

Second biggest battle I've run was probably the Caithness Civil War, ran more-or-less as a war game with a co-GM. Just like what was printed later in GURPS Banestorm, it was a draw.

The biggest was an enemy/battle in a rather odd sense. It happened in a futuristic science fiction campaign I ran in a galaxy I created. Galactic civilization was left in virtual chaos all because the PCs upgraded a single computer program....
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