[DF] Druid Allies as Swarms and Individuals

[VariousRen]

I play a druid in a DF game who specializes in snakes, and in particular has a bunch of snake allies. I am planning on buying a large ally group of vipers with somewhere between 30 and 100 snakes in it. The purpose of the ally group is to overwhelm creatures with sheer numbers, but handling dozens of individual creatures sounds like a pain for both myself and the DM.

When talking about it with the DM we had the idea of stating up a snake swarm that would be made up of some number of snakes. This leads me to the two questions I'm looking for help answering:

1) What is the best way to take a single creature and turn it into a swarm? What should the damage, HP, etc. look like for a viper swarm (We're using the viper familiar in DF Allies minus the famliar specific stuff)?

2) Should we cost the ally advantage based on the swarm point cost, or use the base creature cost and treat the swarm form as a bonus feature of having so many creatures?

I have a bonus question about how swarms are fought while I'm on the topic. Basic Pg.461 says "Any attack against a swarm hits automatically". How would this interact with rapid attacks? Would a person be able to make rapid attacks down to skill 3 and have them all hit?

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by VariousRen

1) What is the best way to take a single creature and turn it into a swarm? What should the damage, HP, etc. look like for a viper swarm (We're using the viper familiar in DF Allies minus the famliar specific stuff)?

I would find a swarm example that fits your needs and not get too hung up on the individual members. DFRPG, for example, includes a swarm of small snakes (Monsters, p. 54) that does 1d-3 cutting. A footnotes suggests adding a 1d-1 toxic follow-up for vipers.

2) Should we cost the ally advantage based on the swarm point cost, or use the base creature cost and treat the swarm form as a bonus feature of having so many creatures?

Not sure about this one.

I have a bonus question about how swarms are fought while I'm on the topic. Basic Pg.461 says "Any attack against a swarm hits automatically". How would this interact with rapid attacks? Would a person be able to make rapid attacks down to skill 3 and have them all hit?

The swarm combat rules seem fairly generous about multiple attacks, allowing shield bashes and stomps along with weapon attacks. The fact that the line you quoted says "Any attack..." suggests to me that you could apply rapid strikes or AoA double to get multiple attacks. Since most attacks are only doing 1 or 2 HP, this may be reasonable: a person is basically flailing as fast as they can.

If the skill of 3 thing seems off (and it does, a bit, to me), you could require rolls if adjusted skill is <7 just to check for critical failures (crit of <7 is where critical failure odds go up). With a skill 3, you critically fail on a 13+, which is likely to happen in a few turns. This passes the sniff test for me. An unskilled person with a sword at default trying to AoA and rapid strike is much more likely to accidentally hit themself or fling the sword off into the sunset. A skill 20+ knight can wade through the snakes, snake bits flying as the sword whistles through the air.

For your druid, a key tactic would be to make sure targets need to maintain their defenses so that you at least prevent the extra attack from AoA. Peppering them with missile fire or keeping the melee brutes on them while the snakes swarm their hex would make it harder for them to disperse the swarm rapidly.

[Donny Brook]

I thought this thread would be about how to create a swarm of druids.

[VariousRen]

Originally Posted by Dalin

I would find a swarm example that fits your needs and not get too hung up on the individual members. DFRPG, for example, includes a swarm of small snakes (Monsters, p. 54) that does 1d-3 cutting. A footnotes suggests adding a 1d-1 toxic follow-up for vipers.




Not sure about this one.



The swarm combat rules seem fairly generous about multiple attacks, allowing shield bashes and stomps along with weapon attacks. The fact that the line you quoted says "Any attack..." suggests to me that you could apply rapid strikes or AoA double to get multiple attacks. Since most attacks are only doing 1 or 2 HP, this may be reasonable: a person is basically flailing as fast as they can.

If the skill of 3 thing seems off (and it does, a bit, to me), you could require rolls if adjusted skill is <7 just to check for critical failures (crit of <7 is where critical failure odds go up). With a skill 3, you critically fail on a 13+, which is likely to happen in a few turns. This passes the sniff test for me. An unskilled person with a sword at default trying to AoA and rapid strike is much more likely to accidentally hit themself or fling the sword off into the sunset. A skill 20+ knight can wade through the snakes, snake bits flying as the sword whistles through the air.

For your druid, a key tactic would be to make sure targets need to maintain their defenses so that you at least prevent the extra attack from AoA. Peppering them with missile fire or keeping the melee brutes on them while the snakes swarm their hex would make it harder for them to disperse the swarm rapidly.

Good advice, I think the DM has a copy of DFRPG so we'll take a look at that next time we meet up.

I did some further reading looking for advice about this and spotted that DF 5 Allies has an insect swarm ally on PG.9. Of note is that it treats the entire swarm as a single entity for calculating ally cost and seems to ignore the swarm rules in basic because the swarm has a listed dodge score and no disadvantage that removes defences. I've got two ideas for how to model swarms of large creatures for druids now. Both require us costing out a swarm first:

A swarm has some large number of creatures in it. We create an ally called "snake swarm". Assign DR, DX, HT, etc. based on the underlying snake template. Give the swarm diffuse to represent the fact that there are a mass of snakes and it's hard to injure them all. Give the swarm HP proportional to some measure of how hard it is to render the swarm incapacitated with physical blows. HP equal to that of a single snake (so 10 for vipers) seems reasonable. The swarm has the same skills as it's individual members, plus some number of extra attacks since there are multiple snakes in the swarm.

The first idea is to take the points spent on the viper ally group and then see how many viper swarm allies you could buy for the same price. If 100 vipers costs 24 points and each viper swarm ends up being a 4 point ally you get 6 viper swarms with each swarm being comprised of 15 or so vipers. This treats the "viper swarm" as a gameplay abstraction of a whole pile of snakes, who otherwise would be a pain in the butt to manage. The druid would be able to draw off snakes from one of the swarms by doing HP "damage" to it, making it more likely for all of the snakes left in that swarm to be injured.

The second idea is to buy the viper swarm ally as an alternate ability ally. If an 100 viper ally group costs 24 points and each viper swarm cost 4 points you pay 5 extra points to have the ability to turn your mass of vipers into 6 coordinated viper swarms. This treats the use of swarms as an advantage worth paying points for. The druid would have to decide if they are summoning a bunch of individual snakes or their swarms when they call on their ally.

I'll have to stat out a viper swarm with the approach and see if the results are reasonable, but it seems like it's at least a good place to start!