Ultimately, the enemy overcome their problem with their too closely ranked numbers by giving up any pretense of order or formation, and just jump onto the heroes in a massive, chaotic jumble. Since we’re talking Orcs and Trolls here, a hidden desire to do so was actually present from the start, but they didn’t admit it to each other before it became inevitable. Even Orcs and Trolls are sometimes ashamed of their baser instincts, it seems.
Shameful or not, our heroes’ final, desperate struggle is now truly on, and even if the odds are hopeless, they sure don’t want to go down before taking an adequate number of their enemies with them. So it’s only opportune that every member of the party tries to keep track of the number of enemies they’ve taken down, and the numbers are indeed heroical.
Save for Snuka, in whose case the numbers are genocidal, but he doesn’t really count. His license to deploy chemical weapons give him an unfair advantage…and if wasn’t for the fact that his stock of gas is limited, he might in fact have been the only one who could have stood a chance to overcome the numerical odds. But the gods, or rather DM, only gave him a single can…a fact for which DM, or even the gods, might feel profoundly grateful right now.
The others’ scores are naturally much lower, but no less impressive, considering the much more honourable means with which they achieved them. Gregory is in the lead, of course – beyond a certain level, physical attacks just no longer can keep with the havoc wrought by spells, no matter how skillful the user. The others struggle valiantly…save for the Professorian, who’s struggling mathematically. As has been indicated before, his math abilities are nowhere near to where they used to be, but rest assured that his numbers would be similarly impressive to the others’, if not more so, if he could just properly count them.
And with a situation this desperate, even Si’ri engages in the fight, as reluctant as she was, up to now, to consider herself an adventuring member of the party. And her score is pretty impressive as well, for a member of her species. She’s already brought down .65 Orc…if she keeps on like that, he soon might actually notice her.
All the fighting might avail our heroes little, in the end, but I’d say their later entry into Valhalla is already about 80% assured.
More on Monday.
Fortunately, while the forces of evil tend to be large and imposing, they also tend to be fatally incompetent. I blame the practice of hiring, “examples.” You purposefully hire someone incompetent so that when they inevitably fail, you execute them in front of the others for motivation. Obviously, this creates a bit of a personnel problem and you don’t want to start executing your actually competent minions so you have to be overzealous in hiring incompetents. What then ensues when the hero(es) finally arrive is a bloodbath as they slog through your incompetent forces to reach the ones that actually pose something of a challenge.
On the plus side, this is great for cinema because it LOOKS like the hero(es) is/are nigh-unstoppable and makes the competent evil forces appear all the grander when they face off against the hero(es).
On a side note, why do you keep going for the nipple Biff? D:
Yeah, forces of evil need at least a few incompetents so the Big Bad can demonstrate their complete ruthlessness on them…although, technically, a Big Bad can also unfairly execute competent underlings, if they like, without loss of evil stature. They might even gain a few negative cookie points for that.
And in RPGs, the bad guys have little choice but having quite paradoxical hiring practices. In order to provide a suitable learning and training curve to the heroes, they have to put their weakest troops in the spearhead of their invasion, as little sense as that makes. In real life, the troops in the rear echelon have less fighting prowess than the front-line troops…in a fantasy RPG, the front-line soldiers are skinny elementary schoolers while the generals are 8 feet tall hunks of muscle crowned with spikes.
But, yeah, it does make for good cinematics, in any case.
Biff isn’t really aiming for the nipple…you have to keep in mind that she’s aiming from the other side. She needs to find an angle that gets her past the shoulder blade, she isn’t worrying too much about the exit point. XD