[RPG] What’s the maximum number of minions for an encounter

If you want them to experience combat as a individuals first I would say that running through the character creation scenario that is published in the new Red Box would be a good idea. If you would rather introduce them as a group there are several solid L1 adventures already published by Wizards. Either the Red Box (goes through L1) or the Keep on the Shadowfell (probably not the published one, but the one that is free online) is a good place to start. Also, there are several very good L1 adventures in the Chaos Scar adventure path that provide good introductions and are much shorter than KotS.

If you do not want to run a published adventures you might try looking at the first encounter in each of those scenarios and some other L1 adventures and see what kinds of elements are there.

Some things I would keep in mind:

• Tailor the first encounters so that everyone can play with their strengths. If you have a wizard with area bursts a group or two of tight minions. If you have mostly melee have the opponents be mostly melee. If you have some ranged characters have some areas where they can go run and hide and shoot from those.

• Highlight any of the game rules that you feel are going to be important to the campaign (stealth, traps, difficult terrain, making sure PCs are paying attention to their surroundings, etc). If you are going to hit your PCs with traps then make sure there is at trap in the example encounter (hidden pit traps seem to be classic for opening encounters). Difficult terrain may be useful as well. However, don't over do stuff like this because it does make the encounter harder. You can always introduce some of these concepts as they come up later. Things that are gotchas (like traps) might be good to get in earlier rather than later though.

• Make it fairly easy, if you are starting at L1 then make it an easy L1 or lower encounter. But don't make it too easy, you want the party to get knocked around a bit so that the healer has something to do and so that they get a sense of the danger they are dealing with.

• Start with both a combat encounter and a skill challenge. 4e works well with both of these and they should get a feel for both methods so that they do not resort to combat every single time they encounter a new situation.

Hopefully this will give you a jumping off point to get your group started with 4e. We started with the Red Box and played through the DM Kit and Monster Vault adventures, and now are going back through a leveled up Keep on the Shadowfell. The Red Box provided a pretty darn good introduction to the mechanics, even if some of the character creation stuff in there should be discarded.

Are Large Scale battles feasable? Absolutely.

The largest I have run is 65 monsters, 4 different kinds and a huge block of minions, against 6 characters and the players were sweating. The battle area has over 100 by 100 squares in size and there was hindering terrain.

Since minions have a fixed damage amount for the most part, I did the following:
1. Non-minion creatures & characters all roll normal initiative.
2. Minions roll one initiative roll and all go at the same time.
3. During combat I would move and roll attacks for each minion, but would do all the minion movement and attacks that involved a single character. This allowed the characters to respond to the minions much as they would a single creature attack.
3a. To speed rolling I used 3 d20s at a time for attacks and saves and would indicate the 3 minions fopr each roll.

The biggest key I found that kept the combat moving was having minion stats and a simple goal ready when it was the minions turn. I also did not spend a lot of time on intricate movement for the minions. They just waded in and attacked and the other creatures did the special stuff. The whole combat took less than an hour.

As for adding character side minion units, I would just do the same thing in reverse. I would give the players the stat sheet or sheets for the friendly minions and have 1 or 2 players run them. Have them all act on the same initiative just like the monsters.

My players all agreed that there is nothing scarier than have 50+ plus monsters all move,and attack at once.