Dungeon Master Forum

Hi! I'm new here, and I had some questions. I haven't really been part of a forum before, but I felt I could use some advice or tips from other DMs.

First, a little about myself and play style.

8 years ago, my brother and I created our own world to play in, based off the Forgotten Realms Faerun map. For the most part, we play by 3.5e rules, but bent a few to our liking. He was the DM until about a year ago, when he passed the torch to me. It's been fun getting to plan and run the world. I have a lot of simultaneous story lines going at once, and control/play a LOT of NPCs around the world, making things happen that my players aren't even aware of. We've had the story span generations of characters over the years, and some have become related in some way to previous characters and players even without that being their original intention.

There's a war going on in the world, and until this point, the group I've DM'd for has done a lot of covert type missions, either getting the drop on enemy forces, or being 1 step behind and falling into traps to fight small platoons or monsters. However, the next game is going to be the first time there's an all out battle where they're joined with a small force of soldiers and are up against 1000+ enemy soldiers. I've got the enemy formations figured out, the problem is that we usually play very in depth with combat, always making attacks specific towards a certain body part, spot on the armor, or weak spot on a weapon, taking environment, size, and anything possible into account.

I'm curious if any of you have DM'd for a large battle before, because I'm not exactly sure how to roll for the mass number of enemies. Most of them are lower level than my party (who are primarily levels 15-20 at this point), standing at levels 5-15, which would make them fairly easy to kill man to man, but I just don't know how to roll for ALL of them without it taking days just to get a couple turns done.

How do you guys handle these kinds of things?

Wow, this seems to be happening a lot lately...
Sooo...the Dungeon Master referred to in the forum title here isn't that kind of Dungeon Master. It is in fact a game of that name which came out in 1987, a first-person dungeon-crawling RPG in which you control a party of four characters (one of the first games to have this kind of set-up and considered ahead of its time when it came out).
That said, there are several of us here who do play tabletop (and forum-based) RPGs and stuff so if you want to stick around we can still talk about it - often people who mistake this place for the DMing kind of DM forum don't ever come back after their first post.
Anyway...which system are you using? I have more experience with 4th Edition (assuming you're talking about DnD) than any other, but I've done a bit of 3.5 in forum-based games in recent months and I had one, short-lived game of ADnD 2nd at a gaming club I used to go to...not playing that one again though, lol.
But to streamline mass-combat like that...I dunno if any of the books have any rules for handling that kind of stuff. if not, maybe you could streamline it by just having people make a bunch of attack rolls and each one counts as multiple rolls or something, therefore kills multiple people. Actually I can probably presume you're not playing 4th Edition, otherwise all those guys would just be Minions (average stats for their level but always deal fixed damage and only have 1hp therefore die in one hit as soon as anything touches them...they take no damage from any "half damage on a miss" effects that many Daily powers have, though) and you'd probably have an easier time of it . You'll probably need to basically come up with a special new "mass combat" mechanic. I know that at least one of the 40k games has that (might've been Black Crusade or Deathwatch), but that's a system with entirely different mechanics to any of the DnD games.
Umm...maybe you could treat groups of X blokes as a special kind of "swarm" or something, and have them make one roll for the lot of them? Then each group counts as one enemy, in effect, and sort of has a collected hp total, and as they lose hp the blokes are being killed until they have 0hp and the last guy is dead . I think that's actually similar to the horde mechanics in the 40k games that I vaguely mentioned above. So you could have five blokes with 50hp between them, and for every ten damage dealt, one bloke dies (of you could have ten blokes where one dies for every five damage, or whatever). If they are just crappy footsoldiers and generic army troops ("Mooks", as TV Tropes would call them) then it's okay for them to have substantially smaller hp per person than your average enemy because it reflects how they're falling before your mighty PCs as they stride about kicking arse and terrifying the crap out of everyone due to being the heroic PCs that all the lowbie bad guys are now scared of because they're so high level .