#I'll have to look into hellpiercer this is the first I'm hearing of it

[owlbear33]

oh yeah for sure, that's the way to do it, a swarm or a mass combat unit or whatever, that's also largely how exalted (3e) handles things

I think my point is to keep things balanced you need to give each player no more than 1 or two extra combat units to controll (besides their character)

in terms of our hypothetical necromancer that's a horde of zombies and Nilobth the Rotted their revenant lieutenant

mechanically speaking a swarm of mooks is more or less the same as a single more powerful ally (actual specific mechanics may differ)

actually no I'm not done, the problem with running a necromancer or other character with a great number of minions in dnd or another tactical strategy ttrpg is that sort of RPG, the combat is basically I skirmish wargame, it's just that one side (the gm) controls a whole Warband, and the other side (the players) are collaboratively controlling the other, each player controlling a single combatant, maybe 2 or 3, if the character has a pet, or a hireling or like single summons, and that's fine,

the problem is that when a minion controller character goes "Wait no, I want to controll a whole Warband" it totally unbalances things

and the way to fix that is to move away from games that treat combat as a tactical war game at least a bit or give every player a small warband or at least the option of having a small warband