I just ran the finale to a more-than-a-year-long face-to-face Masks campaign. I posted a fuller recap of the session on the Magpie Forums, but there was one individual moment that I thought worth highlighting here.
As the heroes battled the army of their greatest antagonists, most of the campaigns NPCs (heroes and villains) joined in the fight. Rather than narrating both sides of the battle myself as the GM, I turned to my players and asked each of them: What NPC contributes to the battle by striking a major blow against Rime Court forces, and how?
This was, of course, an adaptation of Jason Cordova’s Paint the Scene technique, and it worked like gangbusters here. I got to sit back for a bit and hear the players describe their favorite NPCs being epic or endearing. Team-ups emerged that I never would have thought of. And I didn’t need to decide in prep or in the heat of the moment which NPCs the players would want to see most—they did all that for me! After painting the scene of the larger battle together, we were excited to zoom in again and see how the heroes took on the foe they were most interested in tackling themselves.
I highly recommend using this variation of painting the scene for epic, cast-of-thousands battles. What else has worked well for folks when you run a climactic scene bringing together many characters from a campaign?