Well, that went horribly…

Baby DM with two campaigns. All the players are good friends of mine. Sometimes they can’t make it to game, so instead of cancelling when one person can’t show up, I decided to merge the tables on weekends when a player is missing and running a flash-back sort of one-shot series that tells a the tale of a critical war that shaped the world in which the two campaigns take place. We play over zoom.

Tonight’s session, our first, had 7 players. I never ran a game for more than 4 ppl and I immediately got overwhelmed with the prospect of keeping everyone engaged and entertained.

Social interactions went well enough, but the main event was a looming battle. This is where my mistakes were most exposed.

They are in a square fort with 4 main gates. Ballistas mounted at the towers of each gate. Different enemies gradually came knocking at each side, but the gate remained closed and the players mainly just shot them with ballistas. We played for 4 hours and no one lost any HP. For context, I had 11 zombies, a ghoul and a ghast coming at them at one point.

With the advantage of the fort and ballistas, the combat stagnated. The enemies couldn’t break in and the fort was too big for any of the players to feel like they could meaningfully engage with each part of the battle (south, north, west, east). It would take at least two dashes to get from one end of the fort to another…

4 hours in, they killed 3 bosses (one being a green wyrmling) with the ballistas, took no damage, and didn’t feel any true threat. Worse, they felt like the battle was unrealistic because no one else in the fort seemed to be doing as much as they were to fend off the attackers.

I know I bite off more than I can chew or digest, but help me out—is there any way of running large scale combat, like I intended, without ending up with a boring, lackluster, drama-less battle?