I talked about my frustration with the DMG II a couple of days ago: It’s a book that has rules for a lot of situations that I find it useful to have rules for, but most of those rules are either needlessly complicated, unbalanced, incomplete, or some combination of three. One example of this, in my opinion, are the rules for burning buildings, which I’ve already discussed.
Another example are the rules for handling crowds, mobs, and traffic.
The most glaring problem is that there are different rules for handling crowds, mobs, and traffic. These are all obviously different facets of the same phenomenon (large groups of people), so it would make sense for them all to be based on the same mechanic. Instead they’re all based on different mechanics, which makes the rules more difficult to use and more difficult to master.
For example, traffic is supposed to be a “specific type of crowd”. But the rules for traffic alter the standard rules for crowds in about a half dozen different ways until they have fewer things in common with crowds than they have things not in common with crowds. (And even though traffic is a “specific type of crowd”, there are some forms of traffic which aren’t crowds. Yeah, that’s not confusing in the slightest.)
Meanwhile mobs are handled with a completely different mechanic which can basically be summed up like this: Apply a template to the base creature making up the mob in order to make the base creature more powerful than an an ancient red dragon.
Mobs are ridiculously overpowered. This not only makes it difficult for the DM to use the rules to construct interesting scenarios, it becomes completely untenable if the players decide to use the rules to their own advantage: There are a wide variety of ways for characters to accumulate a couple dozen people under their control or influence.
Mobs are also unnecessarily complicated. The description of the template alone takes up a page and a half of text — and applying it requires you to essentially create an entirely new stat block from scratch. This means that the rules can never be effectively used on-the-fly.
In the end, I decided to simply scrap the DMG II rules entirely. The rules I’ve devised for handling crowds can be found here. They’re designed to use existing abilities and conditions as much as possible, and to keep the rules simple enough that you can use them quickly and efficiently use them during play even if you’ve never looked at them before. They have only been playtested once — resulting in a very memorable experience — so I’d love to get feedback from anyone who uses them. The rules are also being released under the OGL.
