Better means of handling decaying group combat?

[Keltyrr]

Okay so I DM 3.5e and I have some custom rules I use for group combat designs to keep players off the front lines.

So lets say the party's stronghold is being attacked by 50 goblins. What I would do is split this into 5 groups of 10 instead of 50 individuals. Each of the 5 groups would have the same AC, saves, and so forth. But when they land an attack they would do 10d8 damage instead of 1d8 meaning it's truly brutal for a player to take at level 4. But it would promote them to put their own soldiers on the front lines while they support the NPC soldiers. So far I have sent some PC's fleeing and I have pasted a mount but so far these method has worked perfectly in forcing the players to spend little time on the front lines. They have lost a good chunk of their NPC soldiers which is my goal.

My question is if there is an easy way in FG to handle when the player kills 1-2 goblins in the group, to degrade it to a group of 8 goblins from 10. Without me having to make 10 different encounter sheets and keep swapping them out constantly during the fight.

[Nylanfs]

Name the NPC "Gob group #1", "#2" etc. Have the NPC have an attack of 10d8, then as gobs are killed in each one change the damage to keep track of numbers in that group.

Unless that is what you are trying to avoid, I didn't quite follow the swapping encounter sheets comment.

[Keltyrr]

I was hoping there was a 'cleaner' way to do it. I understand that it's an option, hoping there is a better way.

[Trenloe]

Anything will have to be fairly manual as there's no built in support for this type of custom system.

One idea is to use a base damage of 1d8 and then add on an average based on the number of NPCs over 1 in the group. e.g. 1d8+4 for 2 NPCs, 1d8+9 for three, etc.. The +4, +9, +13... modifiers could be assigned to a hotkey at the bottom of the FG desktop and the GM could press the "3 NPCs" hotkey before rolling damage, this would add +9 (or whatever you chose) to the modifier box and then roll the base damage from the NPC sheet (1d8 or whatever). One-click (or hotkey press) to apply the modifier and normal damage rolling that uses targeting, etc. as normal.

You could do something similar with DMG effects using a custom() condition and conditional modifiers. This would allow you to have additional damage dice roll, something like: IF: custom(ten); DMG:9d8 But, you'd need to keep the custom(ten) conditions up to date as NPCs die - remove the previous custom() condition and add the new one before rolling. You'll end up with a lot of conditional effects (9 in total for a group of 10) and conditions.

Or, just manually swap out/change a static DMG effect. DMG:9d8 for 10 people, DMG: 8d8 for 9 etc..