Thinking about taking 4 Players in 5e, making them whip up 20 lvl 1 characters each on spread sheets...

Thinking about taking 4 Players in 5e, making them whip up 20 lvl 1 characters each on spread sheets, then 3 lvl 3 characters each, a lvl 5, and finally their actual lvl 12 characters.

The players will be an adventuring party that have become the governors of a new colony as a reward from the king. The colony will be on the other side of a portal they found, that only opens once a month on the full moon. It leads to a strange new land that is on the same plane but difficult to figure out where (the fucking moon), and the portal is also in some contested territory on the boarder of an enemy nation so what aid from home they can get has to be subtly delivered, maybe by an envoy with a bag of holding.

The players start off taking all the characters they made plus like 400 unskilled labor refugees through the portal and have to deal with founding and building up a frontier town. I figure the players can secret Santa the Lvl 5s to each other as subordinates that the creators rp, everything else is me, though the players do most of my paperwork and worldbuilding.

Helpful suggestions or questions? Any proper home brew or old easily convertible rules for something like this?

This isn't going to work. Why should the players send their level 5s out to die when they could send their level 20s out and just roflstomp everything?

They don't have level 20's. They have 20 level 1's.

The players highest Lvl characters are only Lvl 12, and there going to be enough problems and opportunities and benefits to leveling that sending one Lvl 5 out with a few of the Lvl 3s to deal with minor problems should be common

sounds interesting, and for a player like me it has a fairly significant and strong appeal.

HOWEVER
if you players are not experienced in the system and its skill mechanics
>do not do this
if your players don't know that craft and profession skills are important here
>do not do this
if you are not prepared to brew systems IN BOTH ADVANCE AND ON THE FLY for dealing with combined skill checks with this many individuals
>do not do this
if your players are prone to significant disorganization
>do not do this
if your players are not prone to sharing a pooled resource like the 400 peasants
>do not do this

ALL THIS SAID
again this sounds really cool
how are you going to deal with peasant leveling?
do you think they will divvy up the labour evenly?
what sort of environment are they colonizing?
what sort of encounters would you run up for this sort of game?
will there be places in game for 4-man party-play as well as en-masse stuff?
labor riots, group happiness, recreation, etc. how will you manage all of this?
weather and its effects on a village of this size?
>asking cause i like this idea enough to steal it and try it

bumping for the coming day

also, on what time-scale will you be doing this?
is it a play-by-post somewhere?
>I feel like the PBP might well lend itself to this type of game
>or perhaps some hybrid of play-by-post and in-person play

what sorts of resources are available and what comes through the portal with them? livestock? supplies?
>you might do a Dwarf-Fortress style pre-embarkation load-up with resource points for things like "headcount of livestock" "anvils" and "bonus races".
>"bonus races" because this way you can stop them going full (specialized race) and ALSO having a full resource pool.

>and the portal is also in some contested territory on the boarder of an enemy nation so what aid from home they can get has to be subtly delivered, maybe by an envoy with a bag of holding.
maybe a "wagon" with several such bags. a single bag, even the larger bags may not have enough material-lift to be significant to a community of that size.

you might do some research with some doomsday preppers, on average consumption of basic supplies per week per person. many militaries also have information like this. another point to note is "this much food comes out to how much arable land?" and also "what is your famine/drout margin for error"(the right pintrest settings will THROW this info at you in abundance)

making them design fortifications would be fun, but its more fun if you can consult a city planning specialist, surveyor, or civil engineer on what can go WRONG with one of these(any engineering campus will have these, as will /diy/)

bump

Basically playing Ars Magica. Building a covenant.

...

another bump

I still don't think it's going to work, even between 5 and 12 there's a huge difference in power such that an encounter that's meant for one will not work at all for the other. What incentive is there to use the lower level characters instead of the higher ones?

I think it will depend a LOT on if the underlings can also level, and how fast they do relative to the available dangers.

and if the peasantry gets class levels or if they get NPC levels...
you may not be able to levy an army from them, but a good number of defensive works or exploratory expeditions. from some of them.

Look into the Kingdom Building rules from Pathfinder, and pay attention to what works vs what doesn't. A number of people have homebrews and fixes for it, so might be worth some ideas at least.

Not sure if this will do you any good. It may help with some ideas.

So Sid Meier's D&D.

Your overthinking it I believe... I would just focus on the PC's and mass roll everything else. Who gives a fuck what stats ass-hole # 32 has or if he loses 4 hit points.

Sounds like a civ that DnD PCs run

>Your overthinking it I believe... I would just focus on the PC's and mass roll everything else. Who gives a fuck what stats ass-hole # 32 has or if he loses 4 hit points.
this, it's necessary to keep track their classes, but it seems like WAY too much work for people to have to rp these characters

>people to have to rp these characters
I bet the GM RPs them in the form of parties, riots, phalanxes, crews etc. as individual units, based on their allotted tasks.

>Sounds like a civ that DnD PCs run
honestly, that sound great to me

It's been said, to me this sounds really cool. But this definitely takes the right type of players.

if you were gonna play in a game like this, what sort of quirks would you want to see?

The fledgling town is more important than the success of any individual mission. Deploying your strongest forces to deal with low level missions could leave the town vulnerable to being assailed while it's best combatants are absent.

What galaxy is that Stargate design from?

I think its an OC portal

thus leading to the problem of militia forces and training peasants.

another bump

It still comes down to managing your character pool as another resource like any other.

Haven't you ever played a game where you needed to manage a large pool of soldiers? A recent example would be the new XCOM games with the long war mod. You COULD send your A-team to the milk run mission and it would be a cakewalk for them. There would be no drawback to doing that if the rest of the world froze and patiently waited for your A-team to finish their mission. But problems arise when the world keeps spinning and some other pressing mission pops up in the interim period and the A-team is unavailable because you sent them to pickup the groceries because you thought "why not just send our best guys all the time?" So now you're caught with your pants down because you misallocated your forces.

>vomiting ideas because why the hell not

so start cultivating combat teams among the low levels, shield+spear with plain bows, crossbows, and slings for range backup. nobody leaves the settlement alone. nobody leaves unarmed. hunting parties start to form, as do specialist crafter professional groups.

the 400 begin to level a little and so you have little assembled groups that work like well oiled teams which you can send as deep country scouts. close order beacon towers, mapping is a priority, food or allowance bonuses to those that discover new caves, ruins, resource opportunities(like good hunting spots)[but only if they follow the rules about never going out alone!]

if you cant hunt, you better be farming, if you cannot farm you better be making something useful, if you can neither hunt nor farm nor make you had better be fucking learning.

roads radiate out and get improvements as material and labour is available, as well as defensible structures+caches every so often.(caches get checked, anything but the food gets taken move to DEFCON 1)

set starting quotas, reasonable ones, if a producer beats his quota by enough he gets an incentive.
if a farmer can get more land area producing than his mandated minimum he keeps his excess or gets the same incentive as the explorer and the makers.
any child showing a real contribution beyond the expectation of their years gets an incentive for their family or themselves.

I love the resource management. I might lower the number of characters making them have overall 10-15 so each one can have a bit more personality.

I'd probably want to see how Farming or Foraging goes, with the lower levels, some exploration with groups of the threes, Fives to set up defenses, and higher levels to play the between trying to rush between all the problems and player factions.

Might be interesting to see some sessions where one player ran a little troop to do some things in a bluebooked(texted session) between games to let a little more happen with how much was going on.

The Exploration could be great too as runners come back with the next interesting thing maybe not surviving an attack. I'd definitely want to see some Leathality if I were playing with so many and keeping enough alive to maintain a secure camp being a thing.

These are just some of my loose thoughts though.

Sounds cool but also sounds like a DM shirking the npc creation off on players under the guise of creative freedom

So, is every player supposed to have their own colony/group/whatever?
If yes, how would you make the players interact with each other? Or are they supposed to roleplay conflicts and interactions just by themselves, while the others watch?

Yes this is a nice part of it for me
I would like to keep the faceless masses largely faceless, maybe the players can institute training to give them proficiency with slings or shortbows but otherwise keep any real characterization of bookkeeping to the 100 npcs, they should be more than enough
Neat i will give these a look

>I love the resource management. I might lower the number of characters making them have overall 10-15 so each one can have a bit more personality.
I meant in the plot, encounters, settled area, etc.

>Might be interesting to see some sessions where one player ran a little troop to do some things in a bluebooked(texted session) between games to let a little more happen with how much was going on.
yeah, thats almost a requirement for a game like this. otherwise all the face-to-face time becomes bookkeeping

well, he COULD just rando-roll the bulk of the characters...

4 players sharing the leadership of a single group I think is what OP wanted

>I would like to keep the faceless masses largely faceless
eh, like I said. teams. the away teams are the lvl 1s for the most part, maybe with a trainee peasant under each of them
thats 2% population per team. probably more as you'll want larger teams for better security.

as teams lose the losers and keep the better members the population will shrink a little.

individual teams can have personalities while still keeping pretty much faceless. also, each player might only have 2 teams to worry over at a time.

then there will be working crews that can be wholly faceless, ditto the farmers, crafting specialists might need some face or personality based around what crafts are most prevalent, but not a whole hell of a lot.

leaders will need faces too.

but again. this is all just vomiting ideas some more

You asked quirks so those are ones I liked. But being largerly into Don't Starve and Oxygen not Included like games scarcity and frantic panic of juggling impossible tto keep up on tasks makes for great story.

I have my own head cannon of day 93s Fire spider incident. And the over population of cycle 121. These become fun stories alone of hardship without an enemy. I think something like this stories could tailor to the mistake and have meaningful dialogue about them rather than one person's made up story about the incident. With fallout and all those fun story factors.

>Don't Starve and Oxygen not Included
I salute your taste in games.

I also see your point.

...