Mainly I figure once you have a 1:10 or even 1:100 scale to the normal one going on, it might be hard to track PC movements if they're still single person units. Fighting ability's a good point though. Well, you could also just put the PCs into a regular allied squad (since single creatures and swarms can share a space), assume they'll keep moving within that squad, i.e. move them when the squad moves, maybe give the squad a few stat bonuses or a higher level altogether for having The Heroes in their midst, and otherwise have them act normally. Or put each PC in their own squad.

For my part I'll definitely try using enemy groups as swarm enemies in my battle, I'll let you know how that works out.

Well if you were to use just swarm mechanics, just have the PCs as single units and don't give allied swarms any bonuses at all (unless the PCs have auras or group buffs or what have you). Then PCs fighting in their midst can just attack enemy swarms directly to knock down their huge HP.


There can be a slight downside to this which I discovered two months back when I ran a sort of "test." The PCs had to defend a hilltop against swarms of melee fighters. I treated them as one unit and just added up all their HP, and multiplied their damage by their homogenous weapon dice (so the swarm of 1d6+2 did 6d6+8, for example).

I found my group had a lot of fun planning for the battle, but the battle itself became an enormously long, drawn out HP-sink battle. I am attempting to mitigate this.

Ouch. Yeah, swarms are treated exactly like any other enemy in regards to hit points and damage output, so that was no wonder.

e: in fact, part of why it became so drawn out was, if I'm reading you correctly, probably that there was only one target with massive hit points for the characters to attack, whereas if you'd ran every enemy as one creature, the controller could have hit (and damaged) more than once a turn, the striker could have dropped a few (reducing overall damage output over time), and everyone could have made opportunity attacks against multiple enemies. Even if you had multiple swarms on the map it probably was a bit like fighting several solo monsters, and fighting a solo monster can quickly become tedious for all the reasons mentioned and more.