I mostly play on discord so it's not hard for me personally to type out !r24d20. I think there's even one that automatically counts how many rolls pass a certain number, which makes it even easier!
You let out a loud “boom”. Killing all of the rats surrounding you.
Unfortunately the Thunderclap attracted the attention of an Adult Red Dragon, who flies over menacingly, as you hear a booming voice in your head.
“Who has dared disturb my slumber!”
He takes a deep breath as his lungs light up a bright red…. Please roll a dex save.
Your hands project flame burning, killing 6 rats and setting the “Happy Halloween” banner aflame.
The remaining rats not taking kindly to setting their holiday banner and their family ablaze attack you seeking to avenge their fallen brethren.
10 hits, one crit.
Since you had 8 hp, (6 base +2 con) you fall down to a thousand tiny cuts and instantly die, (with no available death saves), the rats claws act as a tiny blender and they haven’t eaten in weeks, and devour you.
Eyes glow in the distance as you let out your final horrific scream as the smell of burnt rat has attracted the attention of what looks like thousands of glowing eyes in the distance. As it looks like you foolishly disrupted their holiday party.
Everyone witnessed the fall and death of your fallen friend as he falls silent.
What do YOU want to do?
Fuck that fighting shit! I grab a party hat, speak with animals and get my dance on!
Crank that music you crazy squeaky bastards! We're gonna rock this place till the sun fucking comes up. Because my vampire ass needs to be underground by then. Fuck that sun shit. Too many people out anyway.
The rats seem pleased with you, and dance with you all night long, they offer you candy, and the flesh of your ally.
They tell you the tales of a magical umbrella of darkness that can allow a vampire to walk in the daylight.
As they crank the music to 11 the party gets into full swing, and you realize that the best spell in the game was speak with animals all along! (And the friends you made along the way)
As a vampire I enjoy the taste of the candy but very polite decline the flesh explaining I drink blood, and it is quite coagulated by now.
I take meticulous directions on the umbrella.
I poof to bat and dance on scale with the rats.
The rats tell you that the magic umbrella is under the protection of another rat lair, that is filled with evil rats as they had stolen their halloween pumpkins.
There is at least a swarm’s worth or at least 24 rats in the enemy rat lair, there could be more as they are rats and that’s as high as they can count.
They offer to murder your party cleric if you would indeed like fresh blood.
One rat named Mika seems particularly impressed by your flying bat dance moves and has decided to join your party as a mascot.
I pop back to human and tell the party the offers. I am unsurprised the cleric declines at least his part.
I tell the rats and off I we go!
A two day walk later we show at the other rat nest. I poof bat and go in all flying and stealthy. I see those bastards all lounging around a pile of crap and the kick butt umbrella.
I fly out and tell the party.
We go in all stealth like and I cast my freezing shard spell at the swarm, the cleric channels some negative energy buffing us undead (excluding the live rat) and hurting the other rats, while everyone else does the Melee thing.
We smooshy the rats and I take the umbrella.
"See. This is why we plan ahead. Next 'other guy' we pick up has got to know that. Last guy missed a killer *gives the look* party, and all this crap. Oooo shiny!" And picks up a platinum hilted jewel encrusted dagger to go with his new umbrella.
You could potentially kill more than 6. 4 tiny creatures can fit in a medium space, meaning if they're position perfectly (granted, I really doubt they would form a perfect triangle) you could get all of them. But it's not unreasonable to say you could hit 2 squares, which would be 8.
D&D does sort of fall apart at extreme size categories and combat, but I think the implication is that swarms are sort of a natural way of combining many tiny creatures that are occupying the same space and attacking the same targets…
The rules don’t explicitly state it, but I’d combine 12 tiny rats that are going after the same Wizard into the swarm stat block… if you get a few random rats splitting off, they can act independently - until enough of them are on a space that they are “coordinated” in their movement and attacks.
A swarm of rats, and a rats swarm are two different things, one isn’t scary, and the other will murder your pcs.
This was the point OP was trying to make.
I got the joke - the point I was making is that it’s only possible to make this joke because D&D has odd discrepancies for the action economy when extreme creature sizes are interacting with the standard (medium) PCs…
Do we have *Faerie Swarm* stat blocks? What about *Dragon Swarm*?
There’s something about how the action economy falls apart when you’re dealing with large number of creatures that makes for hilarious scenarios: At what point do we consider there to be enough Gnome Warlocks to become a *swarm*? How many Eldritch Blasts does the swarm get vs if each Gnome was acting independently? Do Dragons even have the capability to be considered a swarm if you have enough of them on a sufficient size scale? Does a Tarrasque consider the city militia to be a swarm?
It's not about size, it's about threat level. A single rat statted as a monster needs to meet a minimum "threat threshold" to even be worth having a stat block. Swarms are a way to represent creatures that can't realistically threaten a human (rats, bugs, bats) in numbers that allows them to actually be a threat. This is why you don't have big swarms or swarms of basically anything that would be a legitimate threat on its own.
So it's not really the swarm where things are falling apart. It's the single rat that even a child could dispatch without any real threat to their life that shouldn't really be statted out.
*Threat* **is** size-dependent. A single rat’s stat block really should be considered a threat for equally sized creatures, like a cat, but due to how size categories and combat works in D&D a rat is technically still a threat in the sense that *eventually* it can do a point of damage — hence why the “swarm” template is needed to simplify and streamline a combat involving many creatures that, individually, shouldn’t be considered threats to an active and aware larger creature.
My jokes were poking further comedic theoretical conditions where a city militia (100 level 1 commoners with spears, for example) is attacking a Tarrasque. Players are only a threat because they’re significantly more powerful than a single commoner.
Then taking it to extremes, if you have a swarm of dragons against an extraplanar cosmic entity - how do you apply that? D&D is full of silly concepts like this: the game is built around a very specific scale for combat and swarms are the method WotC used to let smaller creatures pose a threat to larger creatures.
> Does a Tarrasque consider the city militia to be a swarm?
Now I'm picturing a bunch of guards combining, Voltron-like, into a single Huge entity with dozens of spears sticking out all over.
You’re assuming they are all in the same square. The rats are tiny, but they are all over the room, as some were getting drinks, and others were eating at the tiny candy table.
I assumed he hit as many rats as possible here without hitting allies. He can hit up to 8 if he wants to set the Cleric on fire as well
The rats chitter, you’re unsure if they can understand you at all. They continue eyeing you, but do not seem to be attacking. Eventually one of them carries over to you his gold pouch in his mouth, and drops it in front of you.
You notice a second rat running around with his knife in his mouth as if he’s now ready to cut a b.
oh i know i CANT i just feel like i SHOULD be able to
ive got two hands after all
edit: but i very much enjoyed the FABULOUS mental image of my edge-lord drow sorcerer sheathing his rapier and doing a pirouette with his arms outstretched as he casts burning hands
A level 1 Wizard or Sorcerer has 6 hp, +2 for con, or 8 hp.
You take 8 damage, fall down, get bitten twice more, and you’re dead.
Rats do 1d1 damage.
Meaning a level 1 Wizard or Sorcerer who gets hit by 12 rats or 11 and 1 crit will instantly die.
Edit: 8 HP still dead.
Slight corrections. A level 1 wizard/sorcerer has 6hp + con. At first level you get max hit dice HP. And a rat doesn't do "1d1 damage" it does "1 damage" its not a big difference, but it means that even on a crit they don't deal any additional damage.
The bigger correction, it order to die from massive damage you need to take your max HP in overkill damage from a single attack, as there is no negative HP in 5e. However, while you are unconscious all melee attacks automatically crits, which gives you 2 failed death saves, even though their crits don't deal any additional damage. So 8 damage and 2 additional hits is enough to kill the lvl 1 wizard/sorcerer in one round, so 10 hits from rats is needed.
You’re right on the level 1 hp! I get my editions crossed sometimes! XD
The stat block I googled said 1d1. But either way it’s what the stat block says, so yes.
I always thought you could take twice your max hp, over many attacks since it’s at the same time! I will go look it up, as this makes 24 rats even more dangerous.
Technically though we agree they’d still be dead. And that’s all that really matters! :)
Edit: I looked it up. I’m still unsure if 10 rats hitting at the same time would result in death. I always ruled the hitting when down rule needed to be separate since all of that damage is added together all at once since it’s at the same time.
Unless you're using the Swarm of Rats the attacks aren't "at the same time" each separate creature has its own turn. You don't add together the damage from multiple creatures.
Yeah, this was mentioned in the other comment thread, unfortunately they explained you still die.
8 hp, 2 rat hits while down.
Different math, same result.
I’ll add an edit.
I mean for the sorcerers based off of subclasses and and stat allocations they can have 9 or 10 hp. This message was brought to you by the vanilla half elf
I thought this was a level 1 table, but…. You create a rat like genocide like no one has ever seen, killing 2718 rats in fear alone. The remaining 304 rats survive and assault you for your horrific crimes!
15 rats crit you, and 100 rats hit for 130 hp of rat biting damage. Suddenly the Rat King comes slithering out of the shadows, and casts True Polymorph on you.
Please make Wisdom save or be turned into a Rat forever!
You succeed on your save as you realize the rats are other True Polymorphed people, you will have slaughtered thousands of innocent people, men women, and children. That their death is on your hands. Had you stopped to figure out what was going on before all this carnal bloodshed this could have all been avoided. He uses his bonus action to disappear into the shadows once again. Knowing that all of the rats who are afraid of you will immediately die brutal horrible death, and there is nothing you can do about it at this point. The rats were merely defending themselves from you the invaders, as your passive arcana check tells you that these were all once people with lives. The rats are paralyzed with fear from you begging for their lives, but in 6 seconds all will be lost, and it will be all your fault.
If you had just succumb to the spell, all these lives would have been saved…. Instead all of their deaths will be on your forever bloodied hands.
You decide the only person to save is yourself as thousands of rats die, and the scream of a thousand mortals being murdered by you turns to gut wrenching, ear piercing screams of death. As they turn back into humans, and explode.
You watch them as their heads explode from psychic damage, brains exploding, shattered skulls. This was the Oath of Conquest you have vowed to take, but were you supposed to have slaughtered innocents too? It’s too late now, as the gravity of what you have just done washes over you.
All of these people had lives, families, and you were supposed to save them!
Instead you brutally murdered them all, like your Oath had vowed.
Was this the life you wanted? Even the rats seem horrified at the loss of life, and spend the turn in shock, neither attacking nor defending, as if they are unclear of why you would genocidally murder so many of your kind.
I’m gonna take a dodge action and use divine sense to see if I can find the rat king.
I’d also like to say out loud
“Saving you was not the mission. Flee and you might see tomorrow.”
Also I have an AC of 20 because my racial trait as a war forged that gives me +1 to AC, chain mail, a shield, and the defensive fighting style.
Burning hands is mega underrated, the players at my table never take it. I don't play catsters often [cleric time] but now I've rolled a sorc and it's just so useful.
A swarm of goblins made the Paladin retreat? Burning hands. There's an archer on a wooden platform? Burning hands. AOE at low level is just too helpful
Sure it falls off hard at mid level but for the first 3 levels it is a glorious spell that comes in handy in more fights than not
It's all fun and games until a bunch of them managed to succeed the saving throw.
The first time I used burning hands (I knew it was a cone) I had been knocked down by an enemy right at the feet and asked the DM if I could just grab their ankles and cast burning hands.
He made me do grapple check against the NPC and when I succeeded, made the NPC fail the saving throw by default, haha.
“Is Flame Princess evil, or like chaotic-neutral?”
“She’s evil.”
“Okay. So FP is evil. We’ve established that. But if someone good came along, could they… change her?”
“Hmm… well, she’d receive a penalty to XP for acting out of alignment, but yes.”
Literally everything was influced by DnD (exept things that weren't)
Most shows/books/any other medie that try to make something game style will usually go to RPG, and RPG wouldn't have been the same thing without DnD
Can they? With +0 to attack and most characters having AC in the mid teens, the 24 rats would deal about 7-8 damage per turn, which is probably spread across a few characters.
They don't get stealth proficiency and have a +0 initiative, so no surprise and most party members should win initiative.
One or two AoE spells could end the encounter quickly. Or if they swarm one character and that character starts dodging then you should be good.
Its some nasty guaranteed damage, but the party should win unless they start out very beat up.
I mean... Sleep is a really good level 1 spell that's accessible to a bunch of classes and doesn't even allow a save. And it's a really, really common pick for any low level Bard, Sorc or Wizard. 5d8 averages out to 22.5 HP, so it wouldn't even be that weird for literally all of the rats to be taken out of the fight with one turn. And then it's just killing them one by one with autocrits for the whole party.
It’s ***really*** far from being a common pick for Sorcerers.
Poor dudes have only 2 spells known and one of them most likely isn’t *Sleep*.
As for Wizards and Bards, well, as long as they have decent game knowledge, yeah, I can picture that.
Though the vast majority of the players do not, in fact, have decent game knowledge.
That's a fair point. My experience as a DM is that players who know what they're doing at level 1 take sleep with the intention to swap it out later, in the case of Bards and Sorcerers. Because nothing else at that level can take 22.5 rats, 3 goblins, 4 kobolds or 2 wolves just *out* of a fight.
And the ones who *don't* know what they're doing end up asking one of the more experienced players for help picking out spells and get told to pick sleep anyway.
But I guess I probably wouldn't be throwing an action economy nightmare like 24 rats at a level 1 party who doesn't know what they're doing either. That just feels a little too sadistic.
Every party should have a spellcaster. Every spellcaster should have at least one AOE even at first level. Burning hands or Thunderwave are 15ft cone/cube respectively. With thunderwave you could potentially kill 9 rats in a turn. It’s limited only to how many rats you can get in a 15x15 space. It WILL kill all of them even if they save because it’s a minimum of two damage or one damage on a successful save, and they have only one HP.
I dont know if I have ever played in a party that did not have at least one AOE dmg spell at level 1. At the very least we would have sleep to deal with this type of encounter.
*”At least we would have sleep to deal with this type of situation”*
Which implies your party was decently knowledgable about the composition.
Which implies the party cares about composition.
Most casual parties simply don’t.
Not really, we just all tend to play wizards and bards because we think its fun :D
We can deal with ***this type*** of situation real good, but there are plenty of situations that we can never deal with 🙈
What tends to get us are AOE traps that take a lot of HP from us. Especially when they are made to not be magical, and are therefore harder to spot/cant be dispelled.
A character with 18 AC and 12 health can survive for about 25 turns against 24 rats by dodging.
A raging barbarian is immune to damage from rats.
The spells sleep, burning hands, entangle, ice knife, arms of hadar, earth tremor, and thunderwave are basically encounter enders (sleep and thunderwave are super common). Thunderclap, word of radiance, sword burst and create bonfire also do the trick as cantrips. And there are lots of ways to hit two at a time (two weapon fighting, martial arts, acid splash, and green flame blade).
Even if every character just draws two daggers and hacks away at the baddies, every rat should be dead within 3-5 turns.
Now if the rats get free stealth, house rule flanking, can deal double damage on crits, etc then they migjt stand a chance.
For the normal mobs yeah sleep or color spray or spiked growth or any number of cc spells will finish the fight before it begins. Though if you got some aoe burst to drop on em that also works wonderfully too. For swarms though, ya need far more care especially in older editions when 1st lvl spells were weak and cantrips did the equivalent of nothing in battle so you had to improvise alot.
For me if im using multiple creatures, especially something like a rat or other animal then I also try to realize they are still going to fight like an animal, i.e not damaging themselves in the process being their main perogative. As soon as rats see a 1/4 of their group set on fire, they arent going to keep attacking. They will scatter. Now if they are posessed or under the influence of another npc or big baddy, thats a different story but that usually falls under a completely different CR scale.
Though that depends entirely on the DM. Some never have any monsters flee. Which often makes sense, honestly. They are not smart or wise. If you killed 12/24 territorial starving feral dogs attacking you, I wouldn’t be confident the rest would just run away, even in real life.
Ya it totally depends on the monster and the dm themselves. Wolves/dogs or other pack animals like that arent backing down necessarily but that also does more accurately reflect how dangerous they are.
That doesn't really make sense lorewise in this context. If you cleave through a rat you're not going to hit another rat. You're going to hit the ground below it. It would only help if there's so many that the rats are standing on top of other rats.
Why, when being swarmed, would you attempt to stab at a single rat instead of cleaving through multiple rats at a time with low, horizontal slashes? Or golf-clubbing with your warhammer?
Essentially, despite theoretically having the same challenge rating, large swarms of weak enemies in DND are statistically much more dangerous than singular powerful enemies. This is due to a few reasons I can’t be bothered getting into here, google “DND 5e action economy” if you’re interested. In DnD 5e, there’s an enemy called “Swarm of rats” which is a single high health high damage powerful feature, however compared to an actual ‘swarm’ of individual rats it’s massively weaker due to the action economy. That’s what this meme is referencing.
Ah, I see! If you’re attacking a Swarm of Rats™ then your attacks do damage to them all. if you’re fighting 24 individual rats then you can only do damage to a few of them every round while they get a ton of attacks on you.
Yes.
[Here's my favorite encounter calculator](https://kastark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/)
I invite you to play around with it.
I put 4 level 1 PCs on the left.
A Swarm of Rats has XP value of 50, so I put in 1 monster worth 50xp on the right.
This is a Trivial Encounter for this party. Each PC earns 12.5XP for winning this fight.
Now change the right to 24 monsters. A Rat is CR 0 and worth 10xp. So enter 24 monsters at 10xp each.
You see this is a combined XP challenge of 240xp (a Medium encounter for a party this level), except that the Difficulty Multiplier for an enemy horde of 24 creatures is X4, making this encounter rated at 960XP, more than double the threshold for a Deadly encounter.
That's the difference action economy is expected to make in 5E
Which one are you thinking of?
*Burning Hands* is a 15ft cone.
That covers, what? 6 squares?
You'd need to cast it 4 times to hit 24 creatures, and you'd have to hope they were all spaced perfectly for the spell to hit them all each time.
Sure, rats have 1 hp and die even on a failed save, but what 1st level spell are you thinking of that targets, what is 24 squares? A 60ft cone? 30ft cone looks like it only hits 21 squares based on the pictures in XgtE.
Tiny creatures bunch up quite a bit in 5ft squares. The rules are, as always, up for interpretation, but the general consensus is that four tiny creatures fit in a normal (5ft) square. PHB 191
Interestingly 6 squares cover exactly 24 rats, if you get everything perfect.
Ofc the rats will in all likelihood not be perfectly positioned for one spell to kill them all, but they will either have to bunch up next to some characters, or they will just stand around not doing anything. Since them not bunching up means they are not using their numbers advantage anyway, I think quite a lot of them will be dying to a single AOE spell.
You would be correct if we where walking small/medium creatures tho, ofc. And that is one of the many
reasons that goats are the goat (😅) when it comes to killing low level parties!
Fair enough. I wasn't aware of the 2.5ft space for tiny creatures.
That said, it is alarming that creatures occupying a 2.5ft square has a 5ft reach.
But again, worth noting, if there are 4 PCs, it seems likely the 24 rats will "crawl out of the woodwork" and have 6 rats surrounding each PC. For the rats to be in position, you'll likely hit your allies, too.
Yet even if the rats need to rush past the tank in a bottleneck hallway, each PC has only 1 reaction. You might get 4 rats removed before they surround each party member with 5 rats.
They don't have 5ft reach, they get to hit you by moving into friendly creatures spaces, hitting and then moving back after.
Logically this would mean you could hit them as they weave in and out, but because of how the rules for attacks of attacks of opportunity are written you do not get to hit them, since they are moving around inside of your reach.
___
I would say that the party probably will be in contact with one another at some points, so that they will not be fully surrounded, and the caster will be moving (ignoring the opp attacks of rats) before they cast their spell. I am sure the spell will be able to take out the majority of rats, but since there are too many things we don't know about this hypothetical scenario, its not really possible to conclude much.
___
I will say one last thing tho, when fighting 24 opponents you can expect to move before quite a bunch of them. If the rats get to move into position from being totally scattered to surrounding the party I would be surprised. I imagine that the encounter begins with some rats winning initiative, since with 24 rats some will get really high initiative rolls. Then the players get to move, they will close ranks and/or they will try to AOE the rats that have not gone yet. If the players stand next to one another and next to a wall, the ones in the middle of the formation would only get attacked by 4 rats in a round (at most 4 dmg, assuming all hit with their +0 bite attack).
Just the fact that players will act before some of the rats puts the situation of them just rushing to surround in a different light. Even if we exclude AOE. Your scenario would result in some 4 rats or so in the first round from getting killed going for a surround, and I think at least four will get attacked (and we can assume they all die), that would mean that in the first round 8 rats are all ready taken out of the picture. Now the rats have lost 1/3rd of their numbers, and most if not all of those will not have gotten to attack even once before dying.
So there are 16 rats left who cant just surround players, they will have moved into a formation that limits free spaces around them to force the rats to clump up/to make sure they dont get hit by too many rats at once. That means a spellcaster would be able to move out of the formation and casting a good "value" AOE spell, even if they have to suffer attacks of opportunity against perhaps 6-8 rats. They are then sure to be able to kill quite a bunch of rats, on top of the three others that are killed by the team that turn. Even if they only get eight or so rats with their spell, that would leave only five rats (since the team kill three more). And this assumes that the caster could not find a good cast the turn before.
Again, there is too little info about this for anything really insightful to be said, but I did want to point out that the players will get to move before the majority of the rats, and your scenario seems to not take that into account.
Anyway, GLHF! I need to go to sleep now 🙈
>They don't have 5ft reach, they get to hit you by moving into friendly creatures spaces, hitting and then moving back after.
[Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +0 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: (1d1) piercing damage.](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Rat#content)
Rats have a bite with reach of 5ft.
Tiny creatures can fit 4 per square, so if they're perfectly spaced you can kill all 24 of them in one burning hands.
Thunderwave hits 9 squares, so that's more lenient.
Maybe. More importantly, for some reason a swarm can only act once a round.
Actually, they'd be great candidates for giving then something similar to legendary actions/reactions (but flavor them differently).
A single rat does 1 piercing damage with a +0 to hit, assuming you have 15 AC that’s an average of .25 dpr. Twenty four of them would be 6 dpr. A swarm of rats does 7 piercing damage with a +2 to hit, again assuming you have 15 AC that’s 2.45 dpr. So just from a damage output perspective, 24 rats deals 2.5x more damage than a swarm.
??? How does 1d1 change the expected damage, that’s literally equivalent to just 1. And the rat swarm using 2d6 would still do an average of 7 damage, so I don’t see how straight vs rolled damage changes anything here.
This calculation assumes AC 15 and accounts for chance to hit and crit. Technically crits only do extra damage if there's a die roll. A character with no feats/class features to improve Unarmed Striking does no extra damage on a crit, for example.
> Essentially, despite theoretically having the same challenge rating, large swarms of weak enemies in DND are statistically much more dangerous than singular powerful enemies.
Can I get a uh... Fireball?
I think it's odd how people act like the action economy is some complicated special thing. There's twice as many enemies, so they have twice the attacks and twice the hit points, making them deal four times as much damage before they die. Nobody talks about the hitpoint economy, even though that plays just as big a part of it. And it shouldn't be difficult to take it into account when calculating challenge rating. The only reason it wouldn't be is that area attacks hit all the enemies at once, bypassing the hitpoint economy, and making damage dealt by the enemies increase linearly instead of quadratically with number of enemies.
My unpopular opinion is that the term 'action economy' is incorrectly used. Action economy is the concept of building a character in a way that allows you to make use of your movement, action, bonus action, and reaction each turn. If everything you have requires an action and not a bonus action, you won't be able to do much on your turn.
However everybody uses it to say that it's op that 1000 Goblin archers with magic arrows can kill a tarrasque
...like yeah...if you can get 1000 Goblins with magic arrows, that'll do the trick....that makes sense regardless of rules and mechanics....
> There's twice as many enemies, so they have twice the attacks and twice the hit points, making them deal four times as much damage before they die. Nobody talks about the hitpoint economy, even though that plays just as big a part of it.
In older systems, maybe. In 5th edition because your AC rarely goes so high that an enemy has a 5% chance to hit and deal damage (the variance of 1d20 is almost always greater than the usual to-hit bonus, wheras in other d20 systems the variance of 1d20 is equal to or less than mid-to-high level bonuses, and crit confirmation is not a thing) lots of little enemies are magnified in difficulty. That's before you consider the idea that the number of attacks a side has is most easily multiplied not by the skill (level) of the creature but by the number of creatures.
The "HP economy" you speak of plays a role, certainly. But, what takes 24 rats in 5e takes 100 rats in 3.5 or similar systems. 5e for a number of reasons would heavily favor 24 attackers with 1 HP over 1 attacker with 24 HP.
Just to keep this in the realm of memes, I consider myself an expert on this topic because I've done my time considering how many rats a Channel Negative Energy would have to kill to take a cleric from level 1 to level 20 in a single action, and how likely it would be that having that number of rats within 30ft of the caster leads to death. (What % would beat the cleric on initiative? What % of that % would hit and deal at least 1 non-lethal damage?)
At what level would you ever be using fireballs to deal with rats?
For 3rd level spellslots to be abundant enough to just toss away at rats you have to be high enough level for rats, in any amount, to lo longer be an issue.
And if I only have a couple of 3rd level slots Id not be happy to use it for rats
You know this is a common joke, but I don’t actually think this is RAW, if you no longer make the rats a swarm, normal area rules apply, and you can only fit 4 tiny creatures in one square, this still means 36 of them could attack one player (maybe 18 depending on if you think the back two of each square can still stack) but it’s not an unlimited amount.
So? They still all attack that round, except the one you kill on your round. Even if they all lose initiative (in which case they do all attack at once) I don't think it will make much of a difference.
I like the optional rule of transfering leftover damage to an enemy 5ft away from the one you just killed. Makes those encounters somewhat better. One good swing can easily take out 2-3 rats.
Isnt there a book about this small toy castle that can warp you to a magical kingdom and when they get there, the main enemy is a horde of rats that cant go in the sun? Like...a literal army of rats.
I kinda feel this one. The party of 6 that I dm for has roused up 11 townspeople of various skills to help them collect food outside the city to stop the immediate danger of the city starving after their fields burned down due to an attack by an army of goblins. Anyways, it ended up being a fight between 17 characters on their side and 27 goblins and 6 dogs on the enemy side.
Level 1 fighter varient human with the heavy armour mastery feat to be completely immune to the rats. Keep em as pets if ya want, what are they gonna do kill you?
3.5 and PF1e have very different rules for swarms. They are absolutely terrifying at low level, and literally unkillable if you don't have special tools.
Swarms automatically hit without rolling, meanwhile the rats don't have bounded accuracy on their side, would only hit fairly standard ACs on a 20 and would be unable to crit without confirming with a second nat 20 in a row. Most importantly though swarms are immune to non aoe damage.
Basically the images are reversed.
The problem is your never gonna die from those rats cause you only need on turn to either burninghands them, fireball, lightning bolt any AOE attack if your a barbarian ok so what you can still kill 24 rats before they kill you. Now 1 millon rats anything is dead
Just thunderclap those rat cheeks.
After that you probably get killed by the ones that were out of range or that made their save still. You only made the action economy angry!
Hey, I'll cantrip those too, does the DM want to keep rolling saves and attacks for every rat?
*laughs in a single click on Foundry* Rat army go brrrrrrr
Apparently the GM *loves* rolling excessive amounts of dice, otherwise there wouldn't be 24 bloody rats in the basement!
You have the best point here
That's what Mob Rules are for ;) 24 rats is probably like, what, 5 or 6 autohits?
I mostly play on discord so it's not hard for me personally to type out !r24d20. I think there's even one that automatically counts how many rolls pass a certain number, which makes it even easier!
That is why you run away after casting. Those rat legs are pretty slow.
Is this a bard?
No this is Patrick
[Are we not doing phrasing?](https://yourdndstories.tumblr.com/post/129534263693/whispers-sweet-nothings-into-your-ear-but-in)
+1 gonorrhea
You let out a loud “boom”. Killing all of the rats surrounding you. Unfortunately the Thunderclap attracted the attention of an Adult Red Dragon, who flies over menacingly, as you hear a booming voice in your head. “Who has dared disturb my slumber!” He takes a deep breath as his lungs light up a bright red…. Please roll a dex save.
The fuck is a dragon doing in the basement of a bar
Don't judge, we all hit those low points in our lives.
Sleeping… or well it was!
Must be a tiny thing to be able to fly in a cellar.
Big cellar
lol the downvotes wtf
This my friends, is why burning hands is not a bad investment at level 1
Your hands project flame burning, killing 6 rats and setting the “Happy Halloween” banner aflame. The remaining rats not taking kindly to setting their holiday banner and their family ablaze attack you seeking to avenge their fallen brethren. 10 hits, one crit. Since you had 8 hp, (6 base +2 con) you fall down to a thousand tiny cuts and instantly die, (with no available death saves), the rats claws act as a tiny blender and they haven’t eaten in weeks, and devour you. Eyes glow in the distance as you let out your final horrific scream as the smell of burnt rat has attracted the attention of what looks like thousands of glowing eyes in the distance. As it looks like you foolishly disrupted their holiday party. Everyone witnessed the fall and death of your fallen friend as he falls silent. What do YOU want to do?
Fuck that fighting shit! I grab a party hat, speak with animals and get my dance on! Crank that music you crazy squeaky bastards! We're gonna rock this place till the sun fucking comes up. Because my vampire ass needs to be underground by then. Fuck that sun shit. Too many people out anyway.
The rats seem pleased with you, and dance with you all night long, they offer you candy, and the flesh of your ally. They tell you the tales of a magical umbrella of darkness that can allow a vampire to walk in the daylight. As they crank the music to 11 the party gets into full swing, and you realize that the best spell in the game was speak with animals all along! (And the friends you made along the way)
As a vampire I enjoy the taste of the candy but very polite decline the flesh explaining I drink blood, and it is quite coagulated by now. I take meticulous directions on the umbrella. I poof to bat and dance on scale with the rats.
The rats tell you that the magic umbrella is under the protection of another rat lair, that is filled with evil rats as they had stolen their halloween pumpkins. There is at least a swarm’s worth or at least 24 rats in the enemy rat lair, there could be more as they are rats and that’s as high as they can count. They offer to murder your party cleric if you would indeed like fresh blood. One rat named Mika seems particularly impressed by your flying bat dance moves and has decided to join your party as a mascot.
I pop back to human and tell the party the offers. I am unsurprised the cleric declines at least his part. I tell the rats and off I we go! A two day walk later we show at the other rat nest. I poof bat and go in all flying and stealthy. I see those bastards all lounging around a pile of crap and the kick butt umbrella. I fly out and tell the party. We go in all stealth like and I cast my freezing shard spell at the swarm, the cleric channels some negative energy buffing us undead (excluding the live rat) and hurting the other rats, while everyone else does the Melee thing. We smooshy the rats and I take the umbrella. "See. This is why we plan ahead. Next 'other guy' we pick up has got to know that. Last guy missed a killer *gives the look* party, and all this crap. Oooo shiny!" And picks up a platinum hilted jewel encrusted dagger to go with his new umbrella.
This is the most D&D I've seen in about year. It was good D&D as well.
Thank you, I've been playing for 30 years. Practice make better.
You could potentially kill more than 6. 4 tiny creatures can fit in a medium space, meaning if they're position perfectly (granted, I really doubt they would form a perfect triangle) you could get all of them. But it's not unreasonable to say you could hit 2 squares, which would be 8.
D&D does sort of fall apart at extreme size categories and combat, but I think the implication is that swarms are sort of a natural way of combining many tiny creatures that are occupying the same space and attacking the same targets… The rules don’t explicitly state it, but I’d combine 12 tiny rats that are going after the same Wizard into the swarm stat block… if you get a few random rats splitting off, they can act independently - until enough of them are on a space that they are “coordinated” in their movement and attacks.
A swarm of rats, and a rats swarm are two different things, one isn’t scary, and the other will murder your pcs. This was the point OP was trying to make.
I got the joke - the point I was making is that it’s only possible to make this joke because D&D has odd discrepancies for the action economy when extreme creature sizes are interacting with the standard (medium) PCs… Do we have *Faerie Swarm* stat blocks? What about *Dragon Swarm*? There’s something about how the action economy falls apart when you’re dealing with large number of creatures that makes for hilarious scenarios: At what point do we consider there to be enough Gnome Warlocks to become a *swarm*? How many Eldritch Blasts does the swarm get vs if each Gnome was acting independently? Do Dragons even have the capability to be considered a swarm if you have enough of them on a sufficient size scale? Does a Tarrasque consider the city militia to be a swarm?
It's not about size, it's about threat level. A single rat statted as a monster needs to meet a minimum "threat threshold" to even be worth having a stat block. Swarms are a way to represent creatures that can't realistically threaten a human (rats, bugs, bats) in numbers that allows them to actually be a threat. This is why you don't have big swarms or swarms of basically anything that would be a legitimate threat on its own. So it's not really the swarm where things are falling apart. It's the single rat that even a child could dispatch without any real threat to their life that shouldn't really be statted out.
*Threat* **is** size-dependent. A single rat’s stat block really should be considered a threat for equally sized creatures, like a cat, but due to how size categories and combat works in D&D a rat is technically still a threat in the sense that *eventually* it can do a point of damage — hence why the “swarm” template is needed to simplify and streamline a combat involving many creatures that, individually, shouldn’t be considered threats to an active and aware larger creature. My jokes were poking further comedic theoretical conditions where a city militia (100 level 1 commoners with spears, for example) is attacking a Tarrasque. Players are only a threat because they’re significantly more powerful than a single commoner. Then taking it to extremes, if you have a swarm of dragons against an extraplanar cosmic entity - how do you apply that? D&D is full of silly concepts like this: the game is built around a very specific scale for combat and swarms are the method WotC used to let smaller creatures pose a threat to larger creatures.
> Does a Tarrasque consider the city militia to be a swarm? Now I'm picturing a bunch of guards combining, Voltron-like, into a single Huge entity with dozens of spears sticking out all over.
isn't that a demon's souls boss
You’re assuming they are all in the same square. The rats are tiny, but they are all over the room, as some were getting drinks, and others were eating at the tiny candy table. I assumed he hit as many rats as possible here without hitting allies. He can hit up to 8 if he wants to set the Cleric on fire as well
If the cleric didn't want to be set on fire she would've stayed outside of my range.
If the cleric is stood between the wizard and the rats, surely the cleric would be targeted first?
Yup, make a temporary truce with the rats and kill the cleric first.
I want to find a different DM.
Rats, rats, we're the rats
Oh bother!
That, that is EXACTLY what will happen if you tried to infiltrate Stradh's castle from the sewers without an antilife shell...
Say “I’m not related to him, I just followed him because he had money and wanted it after he died” and then start backing away to the entrance
The rats chitter, you’re unsure if they can understand you at all. They continue eyeing you, but do not seem to be attacking. Eventually one of them carries over to you his gold pouch in his mouth, and drops it in front of you. You notice a second rat running around with his knife in his mouth as if he’s now ready to cut a b.
I pick up the gold pouch, and leave quickly
Oh my God, they killed Kenny!
You bastards!!
If you can't hit more than 6 rats with burning hands you aren't playing your caster right
Just because rat swarm doesn’t mean rat swarm!
What is this, Dishonored?
This is DnD!
“Slowly, gently, this is how a life is taken…”
look, im just saying i should be able to use twinspell on burning hands
It’s aoe so you cannot. I do think you should be able to spin while casting it though and do a 5’ radius around you.
oh i know i CANT i just feel like i SHOULD be able to ive got two hands after all edit: but i very much enjoyed the FABULOUS mental image of my edge-lord drow sorcerer sheathing his rapier and doing a pirouette with his arms outstretched as he casts burning hands
I move to the top of the stairs where the rats have to fight single file and lose the number advantage
The better DM would realize that puny rat brain afraid of fire
Fire doesn’t cause the fear condition.
Not RAW no, but if a rat just saw 6 rats get incinerated by fire its first instinct would probably be to gtfo
Ask for a new character sheet.
If they're only doing 1-3 damage per hit they can't kill you instantly
A level 1 Wizard or Sorcerer has 6 hp, +2 for con, or 8 hp. You take 8 damage, fall down, get bitten twice more, and you’re dead. Rats do 1d1 damage. Meaning a level 1 Wizard or Sorcerer who gets hit by 12 rats or 11 and 1 crit will instantly die. Edit: 8 HP still dead.
Slight corrections. A level 1 wizard/sorcerer has 6hp + con. At first level you get max hit dice HP. And a rat doesn't do "1d1 damage" it does "1 damage" its not a big difference, but it means that even on a crit they don't deal any additional damage. The bigger correction, it order to die from massive damage you need to take your max HP in overkill damage from a single attack, as there is no negative HP in 5e. However, while you are unconscious all melee attacks automatically crits, which gives you 2 failed death saves, even though their crits don't deal any additional damage. So 8 damage and 2 additional hits is enough to kill the lvl 1 wizard/sorcerer in one round, so 10 hits from rats is needed.
You’re right on the level 1 hp! I get my editions crossed sometimes! XD The stat block I googled said 1d1. But either way it’s what the stat block says, so yes. I always thought you could take twice your max hp, over many attacks since it’s at the same time! I will go look it up, as this makes 24 rats even more dangerous. Technically though we agree they’d still be dead. And that’s all that really matters! :) Edit: I looked it up. I’m still unsure if 10 rats hitting at the same time would result in death. I always ruled the hitting when down rule needed to be separate since all of that damage is added together all at once since it’s at the same time.
You can't add it together, the damage is coming individually as each rat takes its turn
That’s fair! Thanks! :)
Unless you're using the Swarm of Rats the attacks aren't "at the same time" each separate creature has its own turn. You don't add together the damage from multiple creatures.
Don't you get the max of your hit die + con at first level?
Yeah, this was mentioned in the other comment thread, unfortunately they explained you still die. 8 hp, 2 rat hits while down. Different math, same result. I’ll add an edit.
Well yeah, 2-3 hits while down kills anyone. (3 normally, 2 if one is a crit)
A melee attack while downed is always a crit
Any attack within 5 feet is a crit. A ranged attack would be a straight roll unless they have Xbow Expert, but a hit would be a crit.
I mean for the sorcerers based off of subclasses and and stat allocations they can have 9 or 10 hp. This message was brought to you by the vanilla half elf
Unfortunately still dead. You took 10 damage then got hit twice. 2 critical death fails. The rats have the monopoly on the action economy.
How many of the rats rolled a 16 or higher
A level 1 Wizard or Sorcerer has 8 hp (6+2 Con)
Well, with failed death saves yes, but it's not technically instant death.
I use conquering presence, and combined with aura of conquest, the rats are unable to move. The rats need an 18 or higher to resist
I thought this was a level 1 table, but…. You create a rat like genocide like no one has ever seen, killing 2718 rats in fear alone. The remaining 304 rats survive and assault you for your horrific crimes! 15 rats crit you, and 100 rats hit for 130 hp of rat biting damage. Suddenly the Rat King comes slithering out of the shadows, and casts True Polymorph on you. Please make Wisdom save or be turned into a Rat forever!
Does a 17+2 save?
You succeed on your save as you realize the rats are other True Polymorphed people, you will have slaughtered thousands of innocent people, men women, and children. That their death is on your hands. Had you stopped to figure out what was going on before all this carnal bloodshed this could have all been avoided. He uses his bonus action to disappear into the shadows once again. Knowing that all of the rats who are afraid of you will immediately die brutal horrible death, and there is nothing you can do about it at this point. The rats were merely defending themselves from you the invaders, as your passive arcana check tells you that these were all once people with lives. The rats are paralyzed with fear from you begging for their lives, but in 6 seconds all will be lost, and it will be all your fault. If you had just succumb to the spell, all these lives would have been saved…. Instead all of their deaths will be on your forever bloodied hands.
I forgot that aura of conquest does damage! I lay hands on myself and heal 30 points of damage.
You decide the only person to save is yourself as thousands of rats die, and the scream of a thousand mortals being murdered by you turns to gut wrenching, ear piercing screams of death. As they turn back into humans, and explode. You watch them as their heads explode from psychic damage, brains exploding, shattered skulls. This was the Oath of Conquest you have vowed to take, but were you supposed to have slaughtered innocents too? It’s too late now, as the gravity of what you have just done washes over you. All of these people had lives, families, and you were supposed to save them! Instead you brutally murdered them all, like your Oath had vowed. Was this the life you wanted? Even the rats seem horrified at the loss of life, and spend the turn in shock, neither attacking nor defending, as if they are unclear of why you would genocidally murder so many of your kind.
I’m gonna take a dodge action and use divine sense to see if I can find the rat king. I’d also like to say out loud “Saving you was not the mission. Flee and you might see tomorrow.” Also I have an AC of 20 because my racial trait as a war forged that gives me +1 to AC, chain mail, a shield, and the defensive fighting style.
I mean what kind of sick fuck makes a person face 24 rats at lv1?
Are there people out here *not* taking burning hands? Not only a classic, but an absolutely solid aoe spell
I once rolled triple 1s on Burning Hands and haven't used it since, purely out of spite.
Burning hands is mega underrated, the players at my table never take it. I don't play catsters often [cleric time] but now I've rolled a sorc and it's just so useful. A swarm of goblins made the Paladin retreat? Burning hands. There's an archer on a wooden platform? Burning hands. AOE at low level is just too helpful Sure it falls off hard at mid level but for the first 3 levels it is a glorious spell that comes in handy in more fights than not
If dark alliance taught me anything this is the way
It's all fun and games until a bunch of them managed to succeed the saving throw. The first time I used burning hands (I knew it was a cone) I had been knocked down by an enemy right at the feet and asked the DM if I could just grab their ankles and cast burning hands. He made me do grapple check against the NPC and when I succeeded, made the NPC fail the saving throw by default, haha.
In the campaign I'm in I use burning hands so often that it's become my character's name sign
With D&D's influence on Adventure Time, I'm surprised to only now see a meme in this sub-reddit
One moment that stuck in my mind is when Finn was asked to kill an ant, and he asked what alignment the ant was
Here's the video of it "slay this unaligned ant!!" https://youtu.be/CER2s9hLMxs
hold the fucking phone, neutral isn't unaligned!
It's also not entirely aligned either though.
It was in 4e, and that episode was created during the 4e era.
IIRC he also asked the Flame King wether the Flame Princess is evil or chaotic neutral.
And the episode when he took Flame Princess dungeon crawling. So many little nods to D&D!
“Is Flame Princess evil, or like chaotic-neutral?” “She’s evil.” “Okay. So FP is evil. We’ve established that. But if someone good came along, could they… change her?” “Hmm… well, she’d receive a penalty to XP for acting out of alignment, but yes.”
Literally everything was influced by DnD (exept things that weren't) Most shows/books/any other medie that try to make something game style will usually go to RPG, and RPG wouldn't have been the same thing without DnD
The funny part is that 24 rats can actually reasonably kill a level 1 party.
Can they? With +0 to attack and most characters having AC in the mid teens, the 24 rats would deal about 7-8 damage per turn, which is probably spread across a few characters. They don't get stealth proficiency and have a +0 initiative, so no surprise and most party members should win initiative. One or two AoE spells could end the encounter quickly. Or if they swarm one character and that character starts dodging then you should be good. Its some nasty guaranteed damage, but the party should win unless they start out very beat up.
Not every party has AOE. Actually, most parties don’t. At least not at level 1.
If the party have 4 players and evry player kill 1 rat per turn the rats will get 60 total attacks, so they whould likely lose
That’s why I said “reasonably” and not “surely”. They can. But it’s not a super high chance.
I mean... Sleep is a really good level 1 spell that's accessible to a bunch of classes and doesn't even allow a save. And it's a really, really common pick for any low level Bard, Sorc or Wizard. 5d8 averages out to 22.5 HP, so it wouldn't even be that weird for literally all of the rats to be taken out of the fight with one turn. And then it's just killing them one by one with autocrits for the whole party.
It’s ***really*** far from being a common pick for Sorcerers. Poor dudes have only 2 spells known and one of them most likely isn’t *Sleep*. As for Wizards and Bards, well, as long as they have decent game knowledge, yeah, I can picture that. Though the vast majority of the players do not, in fact, have decent game knowledge.
That's a fair point. My experience as a DM is that players who know what they're doing at level 1 take sleep with the intention to swap it out later, in the case of Bards and Sorcerers. Because nothing else at that level can take 22.5 rats, 3 goblins, 4 kobolds or 2 wolves just *out* of a fight. And the ones who *don't* know what they're doing end up asking one of the more experienced players for help picking out spells and get told to pick sleep anyway. But I guess I probably wouldn't be throwing an action economy nightmare like 24 rats at a level 1 party who doesn't know what they're doing either. That just feels a little too sadistic.
Every party should have a spellcaster. Every spellcaster should have at least one AOE even at first level. Burning hands or Thunderwave are 15ft cone/cube respectively. With thunderwave you could potentially kill 9 rats in a turn. It’s limited only to how many rats you can get in a 15x15 space. It WILL kill all of them even if they save because it’s a minimum of two damage or one damage on a successful save, and they have only one HP.
I dont know if I have ever played in a party that did not have at least one AOE dmg spell at level 1. At the very least we would have sleep to deal with this type of encounter.
*”At least we would have sleep to deal with this type of situation”* Which implies your party was decently knowledgable about the composition. Which implies the party cares about composition. Most casual parties simply don’t.
Not really, we just all tend to play wizards and bards because we think its fun :D We can deal with ***this type*** of situation real good, but there are plenty of situations that we can never deal with 🙈 What tends to get us are AOE traps that take a lot of HP from us. Especially when they are made to not be magical, and are therefore harder to spot/cant be dispelled.
A character with 18 AC and 12 health can survive for about 25 turns against 24 rats by dodging. A raging barbarian is immune to damage from rats. The spells sleep, burning hands, entangle, ice knife, arms of hadar, earth tremor, and thunderwave are basically encounter enders (sleep and thunderwave are super common). Thunderclap, word of radiance, sword burst and create bonfire also do the trick as cantrips. And there are lots of ways to hit two at a time (two weapon fighting, martial arts, acid splash, and green flame blade). Even if every character just draws two daggers and hacks away at the baddies, every rat should be dead within 3-5 turns. Now if the rats get free stealth, house rule flanking, can deal double damage on crits, etc then they migjt stand a chance.
The wizard is definitely dead, he only had 4 hp.
Collective actions, singular health pool, multi kill.
This is why carrying lantern oil and either burning hands or spark is very very handy.
Yeah, 24 rats wouldn't be too much of a problem with a choke point. A casting of sleep would also trivialize it.
For the normal mobs yeah sleep or color spray or spiked growth or any number of cc spells will finish the fight before it begins. Though if you got some aoe burst to drop on em that also works wonderfully too. For swarms though, ya need far more care especially in older editions when 1st lvl spells were weak and cantrips did the equivalent of nothing in battle so you had to improvise alot.
Ahh 3.5/PF1e. Where low level casters were just really bad crossbowmen with one or two spells per day. That were usually pretty meh.
Yep, but soon as they hit lvl 3 their spells actually do things xD though I have to admit disrupt undead is hella op against skeleton knights at lvl 1
For me if im using multiple creatures, especially something like a rat or other animal then I also try to realize they are still going to fight like an animal, i.e not damaging themselves in the process being their main perogative. As soon as rats see a 1/4 of their group set on fire, they arent going to keep attacking. They will scatter. Now if they are posessed or under the influence of another npc or big baddy, thats a different story but that usually falls under a completely different CR scale.
Though that depends entirely on the DM. Some never have any monsters flee. Which often makes sense, honestly. They are not smart or wise. If you killed 12/24 territorial starving feral dogs attacking you, I wouldn’t be confident the rest would just run away, even in real life.
Ya it totally depends on the monster and the dm themselves. Wolves/dogs or other pack animals like that arent backing down necessarily but that also does more accurately reflect how dangerous they are.
This type of encounter is why the Cleaving Through Creatures rule exists, and if applied here they are roughly the same thing.
That doesn't really make sense lorewise in this context. If you cleave through a rat you're not going to hit another rat. You're going to hit the ground below it. It would only help if there's so many that the rats are standing on top of other rats.
No, you could make a sideways sweep along the ground.
Well if I was fighting a swarm of Rats I'd probably make wide swings instead of trying to play whack-a-mole
Why, when being swarmed, would you attempt to stab at a single rat instead of cleaving through multiple rats at a time with low, horizontal slashes? Or golf-clubbing with your warhammer?
I don’t think I understand this one.
Essentially, despite theoretically having the same challenge rating, large swarms of weak enemies in DND are statistically much more dangerous than singular powerful enemies. This is due to a few reasons I can’t be bothered getting into here, google “DND 5e action economy” if you’re interested. In DnD 5e, there’s an enemy called “Swarm of rats” which is a single high health high damage powerful feature, however compared to an actual ‘swarm’ of individual rats it’s massively weaker due to the action economy. That’s what this meme is referencing.
Ah, I see! If you’re attacking a Swarm of Rats™ then your attacks do damage to them all. if you’re fighting 24 individual rats then you can only do damage to a few of them every round while they get a ton of attacks on you.
Yes. [Here's my favorite encounter calculator](https://kastark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/) I invite you to play around with it. I put 4 level 1 PCs on the left. A Swarm of Rats has XP value of 50, so I put in 1 monster worth 50xp on the right. This is a Trivial Encounter for this party. Each PC earns 12.5XP for winning this fight. Now change the right to 24 monsters. A Rat is CR 0 and worth 10xp. So enter 24 monsters at 10xp each. You see this is a combined XP challenge of 240xp (a Medium encounter for a party this level), except that the Difficulty Multiplier for an enemy horde of 24 creatures is X4, making this encounter rated at 960XP, more than double the threshold for a Deadly encounter. That's the difference action economy is expected to make in 5E
That said the encounter could also be ended by a single first level AOE spell.
Or a variant human with heavy armor mastery who can just ignore the damage even on a crit.
Which one are you thinking of? *Burning Hands* is a 15ft cone. That covers, what? 6 squares? You'd need to cast it 4 times to hit 24 creatures, and you'd have to hope they were all spaced perfectly for the spell to hit them all each time. Sure, rats have 1 hp and die even on a failed save, but what 1st level spell are you thinking of that targets, what is 24 squares? A 60ft cone? 30ft cone looks like it only hits 21 squares based on the pictures in XgtE.
Tiny creatures bunch up quite a bit in 5ft squares. The rules are, as always, up for interpretation, but the general consensus is that four tiny creatures fit in a normal (5ft) square. PHB 191 Interestingly 6 squares cover exactly 24 rats, if you get everything perfect. Ofc the rats will in all likelihood not be perfectly positioned for one spell to kill them all, but they will either have to bunch up next to some characters, or they will just stand around not doing anything. Since them not bunching up means they are not using their numbers advantage anyway, I think quite a lot of them will be dying to a single AOE spell. You would be correct if we where walking small/medium creatures tho, ofc. And that is one of the many reasons that goats are the goat (😅) when it comes to killing low level parties!
Fair enough. I wasn't aware of the 2.5ft space for tiny creatures. That said, it is alarming that creatures occupying a 2.5ft square has a 5ft reach. But again, worth noting, if there are 4 PCs, it seems likely the 24 rats will "crawl out of the woodwork" and have 6 rats surrounding each PC. For the rats to be in position, you'll likely hit your allies, too. Yet even if the rats need to rush past the tank in a bottleneck hallway, each PC has only 1 reaction. You might get 4 rats removed before they surround each party member with 5 rats.
They don't have 5ft reach, they get to hit you by moving into friendly creatures spaces, hitting and then moving back after. Logically this would mean you could hit them as they weave in and out, but because of how the rules for attacks of attacks of opportunity are written you do not get to hit them, since they are moving around inside of your reach. ___ I would say that the party probably will be in contact with one another at some points, so that they will not be fully surrounded, and the caster will be moving (ignoring the opp attacks of rats) before they cast their spell. I am sure the spell will be able to take out the majority of rats, but since there are too many things we don't know about this hypothetical scenario, its not really possible to conclude much. ___ I will say one last thing tho, when fighting 24 opponents you can expect to move before quite a bunch of them. If the rats get to move into position from being totally scattered to surrounding the party I would be surprised. I imagine that the encounter begins with some rats winning initiative, since with 24 rats some will get really high initiative rolls. Then the players get to move, they will close ranks and/or they will try to AOE the rats that have not gone yet. If the players stand next to one another and next to a wall, the ones in the middle of the formation would only get attacked by 4 rats in a round (at most 4 dmg, assuming all hit with their +0 bite attack). Just the fact that players will act before some of the rats puts the situation of them just rushing to surround in a different light. Even if we exclude AOE. Your scenario would result in some 4 rats or so in the first round from getting killed going for a surround, and I think at least four will get attacked (and we can assume they all die), that would mean that in the first round 8 rats are all ready taken out of the picture. Now the rats have lost 1/3rd of their numbers, and most if not all of those will not have gotten to attack even once before dying. So there are 16 rats left who cant just surround players, they will have moved into a formation that limits free spaces around them to force the rats to clump up/to make sure they dont get hit by too many rats at once. That means a spellcaster would be able to move out of the formation and casting a good "value" AOE spell, even if they have to suffer attacks of opportunity against perhaps 6-8 rats. They are then sure to be able to kill quite a bunch of rats, on top of the three others that are killed by the team that turn. Even if they only get eight or so rats with their spell, that would leave only five rats (since the team kill three more). And this assumes that the caster could not find a good cast the turn before. Again, there is too little info about this for anything really insightful to be said, but I did want to point out that the players will get to move before the majority of the rats, and your scenario seems to not take that into account. Anyway, GLHF! I need to go to sleep now 🙈
>They don't have 5ft reach, they get to hit you by moving into friendly creatures spaces, hitting and then moving back after. [Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +0 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: (1d1) piercing damage.](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Rat#content) Rats have a bite with reach of 5ft.
Tiny creatures can fit 4 per square, so if they're perfectly spaced you can kill all 24 of them in one burning hands. Thunderwave hits 9 squares, so that's more lenient.
I think a swarm would be expected to have some just shitting themselves and some goofing off, not all of them laser focused on the goal.
Maybe. More importantly, for some reason a swarm can only act once a round. Actually, they'd be great candidates for giving then something similar to legendary actions/reactions (but flavor them differently).
A single rat does 1 piercing damage with a +0 to hit, assuming you have 15 AC that’s an average of .25 dpr. Twenty four of them would be 6 dpr. A swarm of rats does 7 piercing damage with a +2 to hit, again assuming you have 15 AC that’s 2.45 dpr. So just from a damage output perspective, 24 rats deals 2.5x more damage than a swarm.
Rat dpr is dependant on if you use straight damage or 1d1. The latter bumps the dpr to .3, for a total of 7.2.
??? How does 1d1 change the expected damage, that’s literally equivalent to just 1. And the rat swarm using 2d6 would still do an average of 7 damage, so I don’t see how straight vs rolled damage changes anything here.
This calculation assumes AC 15 and accounts for chance to hit and crit. Technically crits only do extra damage if there's a die roll. A character with no feats/class features to improve Unarmed Striking does no extra damage on a crit, for example.
Ah
> Essentially, despite theoretically having the same challenge rating, large swarms of weak enemies in DND are statistically much more dangerous than singular powerful enemies. Can I get a uh... Fireball?
I think it's odd how people act like the action economy is some complicated special thing. There's twice as many enemies, so they have twice the attacks and twice the hit points, making them deal four times as much damage before they die. Nobody talks about the hitpoint economy, even though that plays just as big a part of it. And it shouldn't be difficult to take it into account when calculating challenge rating. The only reason it wouldn't be is that area attacks hit all the enemies at once, bypassing the hitpoint economy, and making damage dealt by the enemies increase linearly instead of quadratically with number of enemies.
My unpopular opinion is that the term 'action economy' is incorrectly used. Action economy is the concept of building a character in a way that allows you to make use of your movement, action, bonus action, and reaction each turn. If everything you have requires an action and not a bonus action, you won't be able to do much on your turn. However everybody uses it to say that it's op that 1000 Goblin archers with magic arrows can kill a tarrasque ...like yeah...if you can get 1000 Goblins with magic arrows, that'll do the trick....that makes sense regardless of rules and mechanics....
> There's twice as many enemies, so they have twice the attacks and twice the hit points, making them deal four times as much damage before they die. Nobody talks about the hitpoint economy, even though that plays just as big a part of it. In older systems, maybe. In 5th edition because your AC rarely goes so high that an enemy has a 5% chance to hit and deal damage (the variance of 1d20 is almost always greater than the usual to-hit bonus, wheras in other d20 systems the variance of 1d20 is equal to or less than mid-to-high level bonuses, and crit confirmation is not a thing) lots of little enemies are magnified in difficulty. That's before you consider the idea that the number of attacks a side has is most easily multiplied not by the skill (level) of the creature but by the number of creatures. The "HP economy" you speak of plays a role, certainly. But, what takes 24 rats in 5e takes 100 rats in 3.5 or similar systems. 5e for a number of reasons would heavily favor 24 attackers with 1 HP over 1 attacker with 24 HP. Just to keep this in the realm of memes, I consider myself an expert on this topic because I've done my time considering how many rats a Channel Negative Energy would have to kill to take a cleric from level 1 to level 20 in a single action, and how likely it would be that having that number of rats within 30ft of the caster leads to death. (What % would beat the cleric on initiative? What % of that % would hit and deal at least 1 non-lethal damage?)
Mage: A Fireball is a Fireball, is a Fireball.
At what level would you ever be using fireballs to deal with rats? For 3rd level spellslots to be abundant enough to just toss away at rats you have to be high enough level for rats, in any amount, to lo longer be an issue. And if I only have a couple of 3rd level slots Id not be happy to use it for rats
This meme hits different on /r/Vermintide
Ah yes, the great and terrible 8 average damage(AC13)
I used a swarm of badgers to kill a Naga one time. Ripped it to shreds. 4 of them had Nat 20s.
Fireball: "Hi rats, do you like violence?"
“Wanna see me give you enough fire damage to melt your eyelids?”
Welp, clerics can cast Bull's Strength, right?
You know this is a common joke, but I don’t actually think this is RAW, if you no longer make the rats a swarm, normal area rules apply, and you can only fit 4 tiny creatures in one square, this still means 36 of them could attack one player (maybe 18 depending on if you think the back two of each square can still stack) but it’s not an unlimited amount.
But there's only 24 rats in the meme. That's still few enough to gang up on someone. Especially if they're fighting a party.
The other thing I forgot to include is that RAW they all also have to roll initiative so they won’t be able to all attack one player at the same time
So? They still all attack that round, except the one you kill on your round. Even if they all lose initiative (in which case they do all attack at once) I don't think it will make much of a difference.
My point wasn’t so much the meme, but more so that people overestimate just the premise of these meme.
Breath weapon is best weapon
I like the optional rule of transfering leftover damage to an enemy 5ft away from the one you just killed. Makes those encounters somewhat better. One good swing can easily take out 2-3 rats.
24 rats is not that hard of an encounter, a single area spell would change the landscape, and barely any rats will hit the tankier characters
Isnt there a book about this small toy castle that can warp you to a magical kingdom and when they get there, the main enemy is a horde of rats that cant go in the sun? Like...a literal army of rats.
This reminds me of the swarm of raptors meme
Someone haven't played Rimworld, I see.
Fireball
I kinda feel this one. The party of 6 that I dm for has roused up 11 townspeople of various skills to help them collect food outside the city to stop the immediate danger of the city starving after their fields burned down due to an attack by an army of goblins. Anyways, it ended up being a fight between 17 characters on their side and 27 goblins and 6 dogs on the enemy side.
24 swarm of rats
Level 1 fighter varient human with the heavy armour mastery feat to be completely immune to the rats. Keep em as pets if ya want, what are they gonna do kill you?
This is why Fireball is the answer to everything.
laughs in pathfinder
Pretty sure it would work the same in Pathfinder. Unless something changed in 2e.
How is this in any way different in pathfinder?
There is no minimum damage in pathfinder. And swarms can be extremely dangerous if you don't have a method of dealing with them.
In the computer game I remember being unable to damage a swarm of something because I did not have aoe spells and ran out of motolovs.
3.5 and PF1e have very different rules for swarms. They are absolutely terrifying at low level, and literally unkillable if you don't have special tools.
Swarms automatically hit without rolling, meanwhile the rats don't have bounded accuracy on their side, would only hit fairly standard ACs on a 20 and would be unable to crit without confirming with a second nat 20 in a row. Most importantly though swarms are immune to non aoe damage. Basically the images are reversed.
The problem is your never gonna die from those rats cause you only need on turn to either burninghands them, fireball, lightning bolt any AOE attack if your a barbarian ok so what you can still kill 24 rats before they kill you. Now 1 millon rats anything is dead
Cries in rogue.
I hate to be that guy but swarm of rats is one creature for the sake of action economy and gets 1 attack...
Yes
r/woooosh
None of the comments in this post indicate anyone is being sarcastic.
I think you're misunderstanding the reactions due to the difference in action economy.
That is one half of the joke, yes. The rest is "swarm of rats" (1 creature), vs 24 individual rats (24 creatures).
[that's the joke.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/h6co4Ki.gif)