So one of my big weak spots is that I love the idea of going "Black Hawk Down" on my players and throwing an entire city full of motivated Ak-97 wielding mooks at them. I desperately want to use the phrase "You have more problems than you have bullets to solve them with." (Thank you Schlock Mercenary)

But I don't know how to do this without bogging the game down into sloggfest 2070... 71... 72... 72.5... etc.

So I'm looking for some abstraction, perhaps not to the length that 2nd ed D&D went but definitely some way of resolving huge combat so:
1. Players have interesting choices to make that are shaped by their skills.
2. Given the disparity between a 400 bp+ PC's and mook NPC's... how do you decide how many of them die or are maimed so badly they won't be an issue anymore? I'm thinking of the 12+ Body troll with the gyromounted MMG with APDS laying into a wall of angry people.
3. Damage? Should we just assume they're constantly resisting some amount of damage unless they have complete cover? Kind of like a large group of full auto mooks get a persistent "suppressing fire" that operates independently of their actual rate of fire.
4. Mook Morale? Should I just make a group composure test?

Or am I abstracting this in all the wrong ways? There's some simple game mechanic I can use to resolve all of this?

Right now it's all GM handwaving.
"You are confronted by many many metas with an equal amount of many weapons. You should start running or chucking grenades... or both."
"Okay, you're shooting grenades, you're laying down suppressing fire, and you're using all your drone mounted LMG's to 'Cut them down where they stand' Uh... about half of them die and they rest run away."

It works but I'm hoping to give my players something beyond "We shoot the fuck out of them" and me saying "Yes you do! Here's so karma for all your hard work."

I think you're on the right track. One thing I would recommend for mooks, one shot, one kill. Wether or not he dies of his wounds in the long run, for the purposes of your combat, he should be down. You could also use the 4 dice = 1 hit rule for NPCs to rate their dodge/init/hits, save yourself some rolling.

Yes, buying hits is an excelent option. Your other option is to roll once and say it applies to the next 10 mooks to do something, or 20 or 100 or whatever based on how many mooks you have and how much you feel like rolling. And in general, yeah, one hit one kill is going to be your friend. Even if they aren't actually dead, they're very likely to get out of dodge once they have a wound of any kind.

Edit: One of your other options that is.

Gamestyle wise, this will only work if you don't set them on a static defensive. That gets boring because you're quite a bit more constrained in activities than a team that can be mobile.

As a primary mechanic, I'd suggest paying a lot of attention to Perception checks. Even if the entire city is trying to kill you, every person has to find/get-to/know-about you first. You can minimise the likelihood of getting spotted in a number of ways. Blend, avoid open streets, move fast. Grabbing a local vehicle and driving fast through back alleys is going to make you almost impossible to engage unless they're waiting for you (necessitating a plan or communication). If you can move faster than their communication, then you can effectively avoid being attacked. The situation described does not seem to imply reasonable communication.

One aspect of this kind of Perception is that you need to define what is normal and abnormal and apply modifiers appropriately to cover attempts by the team to blend into the everyday activity. Your world has to be alive to make some of their choices meaningful.

One way you can run things in SR is to roll the average dice pool (with modifiers for the scope of the group you're abstracting away rolls for) and rule that the number of net hits on that roll is the number of people who succeed with either one or no net hits on their respective pseudorolls. I'm sure the mathematics does not work out, but it's good enough.

Only problem with that last method is you have to figure out how many people your going to count in your roll. For example if you have an average skill and stat of 3 among all your people, but you have 100 people... 6 dice won't represent that properly.

Perhaps do a little work on the odds. Lets say you work it out and each person has a 50/50 chance of doing whatever. Well you roll once die for each person doing whatever. Rolls of 1,2,3 indicate failure, rolls of 4,5, 6 indicate bad stuff for your players.

@Heath Robinson: Mmm... I like that idea and it sounds like it'd work well for hardcore mooks with DP of 6 or lower. Keeping the players moving is important but in the times I have run massed combat effectively I've been able to simply tell them that if they try to dig in they're going to either be overrun or something bigger than they are will show up (like a MiG-67 with cluster munitions).


How do you all handle tactics rolls in these cases? Do they simply provide a bonus to the players or do they actually take dice away form the enemy? or both? Or does tactics serve to open up new options instead of shoot and run and shoot again?

Depends on what they do, but most tactics are based on either options, or a battle of negitive dice. For example, you take cover, I get negative dice. I flank your cover, I get my dice back. You throw a smoke grenade, I lose dice again. I have thermal and snipe you through it, I get my dice back and you lose dice to defend.

In generally tactics won't give you a bonus, it'll give the other guys penalties. Least that's how I tend to run it.

Group like NPCs together in a Unit.

A Unit, for the purposes of these streamlined rules, is a group of NPCs which are treated as a single character for the purposes of combat.

The stats of a Unit are equal to the averages of the stats of its members; ideally, all will have the same stats. In addition, it will have an two extra stat called Members and Guns, abstracted from the number of members the unit has. Members is reduced by 1 for every hit the Unit takes and replaces the Condition Monitor while Guns is equal to Members +, -, *, or / a modifier chosen by the GM and determines both the number of bullets that the unit can fire in a single IP without suffering from recoil modifiers and the number of characters that the unit can engage in a single IP. Attacks from units are treated as bursts, up to a total number of bullets equal to Guns x10, with recoil divided by Guns (round down) and a Wide Burst from a Unit can hit a number of targets equal to the Unit's Guns. A short Burst from a Unit would have Guns x3 bullets, for example, and hit for the appropriate amount of damage.

When a Unit's Members is reduced to 0, that unit is destroyed.

I think you can create the feeling of epic battles without having the PC engage and kill every mook on the battlefield. I would use some rules like hyzmarca suggested to shift the combats closer to a 5:1 or 10:1 mook to PC ratio but beyond that you can create a great deal of tension (desperation?) through creative story telling.

The key is to give the players a sense that they are experiencing a small tactical engagement against a backdrop of large scale combat occurring all around them. Their success or failure in their finite tactical situation dictates their subsequent interactions with the greater conflict. If they crush their opposition they may advance toward the next objective with some kind of tactical advantage. On the other hand, if they take massive casualties they may have to retreat under fire and find a safe place to field dress their wounded. A third option is that they back themselves into a corner and allow the massive opposition to overwhelm their limited numbers and resources. Each of these offers dramatically different interaction with the battlefield setting.

Also you can use pivotal shifts in the battle as plot driving devices. Think about the scene in BHD where Eversmann needs to deploy the IR strobes to direct an incoming air strike. You can create situations where the players need to exfil from area X within a certain amount of time or the whole place is going to be leveled by a MOAB. Or they need to take out a bridge before an enemy armored column can cross the river (a la Saving Private Ryan). In other words they don't have to directly engage the massive enemy horde in order to feel its weight crushing down on them. Whether they are overrun or not might depend on the success or failure of their mission and you simply increase or decrease the steady stream of mooks to apply more or less pressure for dramatic effect.

Mmm... that's all certainly true and they are certainly elements I would try to use for such conflicts. In the past, when I've run scenes set against a larger battle, I've relied mostly upon description and the inconvient appearance of armor or air cover. I think it's worked but I think these additional elements will make it easier to convey that feeling of the few hiding or running from the many.

I think I like Hyz's idea best, by grouping the enemies I have easy book keeping while still offering the players something of a "boss fight" for they vastly more powerful PC's. By grouping them as fire teams it also makes it easy to develop simple tactical situations for the characters to work around, through, or avoid entirely. Hyz gets further cool points because he's also solved my "How do I mechanically reproduce the effect of attacking players with a wave of shittering rat death?"

iirc, BBB holds a rule to that effect, professionality rating.

that is, if they take more then x damage, they wimp out and either play dead or flee.

more often then not, that will have the same basic effect as the mook rules used in games like feng shui, where a hit on a mook takes it out of the game.

err, my bad. that was more older editions. SR4 uses a combo damage track for much the same effect...

Here is an idea I came up with, after discussing the matter with Nath. You only roll one suppressive fire test for all the enemies. The characters inside the area of the suppressive fire have a -1 modifier per enemies to their dodge pool. Each net hits deal the base damage of the weapons.
All the enemies share the same condition monitor. Each time it is filled up, one of them dies.

Of course, elite troops (or an isolated basic soldier) will use the same rule as usual.

I think i'd go for a "density" of fire solution when resolving street crossings, getting pinned down etc. This is of course a bit half-baked hand-knitted solution but when your runners cross a street with people shooting form roof tops, there are X number of pretty uncontrolled burst fires shot down into the street. Some bonus should be given for the characters speed, to for each turn you spend you'd have to dodge bullets equal to a target of a shot density (sorry still on SR3 rules).
For example, the merc crossing a narrow street with 20 goons on the roof, and no supressing fire is laid down would have to dodge 1/1d6 * 20 (round down) using his quickness with a target of the fraction against a "stray bullit damage of the weapons base single shot damage (e.g. the AK-97). So if gm rolls 4, its 1/4 * 20 = 5. If suppressing fire is laid down by other team members, they can clear a 45 degree arch of goons from shooting back and thus reduce the density of the wildfire into the street. Obviously the GM does need a map with densities of goons in various positions, but it would help.
The character laying down supressing fire will just roll once for the round as blind fire, and for each success he incapacitates one goon (whether he kills them is not relevant, they are no longer combat active and drop from the density calculation)

Does that makes sense to anyone but me? Sorry don't know how tricky it would be to translate this into SR4 either. Just a suggestion

I'm gonna go against the grain and suggest switching to conflict resolution rather than task resolution. Set an appropriate Threshold, make the players describe their intentions and how they're going to accomplish it, then see if they make it. Don't let them use an intention like, "I shoot them." Make them be more specific: Get to the building unseen. Rescuing their pinned-down buddy. Lay cover-fire to keep the enemies' heads down. If they fail, pile on complications: They make it to the building, but the opposition saw them. They get to their friend, but now they're pinned, too. The enemy keeps low, but the character runs out of ammo.

If you want the PC's to actually get hurt, you can always assign a dice pool to the group of NPC's and just make straight-up opposed rolls. If the PC wins, he gets his intent unscathed. If he fails, he could either resist weapon + net hits damage, or it could get complicated as above.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that it keeps both math, bookkeeping and dice-rolls to a minimum, without sacrificing excitement.

Also, Vincent's Admonition is appropriate here. If there's no immediate threat, just say, "Yes," and move on. Save dice rolling for when there's actually a conflict.

*yawn*

Sorry to bore you, man, but there's no need to be a dick. I was just offering the OP some ideas.

I am thinking that hobgoblin's response was directed more toward 'Vincent's Admonition' than it was to you personally.

Meh. Still doesn't help Doc, which is, I believe, what this threads about, right?

Shrug.

I'm not going to try to put words in his mouth, but the fact remains that he is also entitled to his opinion. What works (or is entertaining and fun) for one person, or even group of people, sometimes does nothing but bore the crap out of another.

lets just say i think the whole new age of roleplaying spearheaded by ron edwards is a derailment of epic proportions...

Have you taken a look at Wushu? You might want to incorporate some of the rules when it comes to dynamic and cinematic combat w/o getting bogged down in rolls.