I don't know, if my goal was to overrun a kingdom, and not to engage in some sort of spectacular set-piece of "let's wtfpwn this castle," I'd say getting the barbarian/orc/hobgoblin horde to sweep across the kingdom and raze it to the ground would be a lot more practical than spending the same amount of resources to fight it out with the wizards of the enemy over one small area.
Just curious, but do you know anything about the logistics of warfare, military strategy, or anything of the sort, or are you just going off of Hollywood tactics?
Offhand, I can see a problem with your horde. An army marches on its stomach, so the horde will require food. Where does it get food? Supply lines can be overextended and vulnerable (see, Napoleon in Russia), so you'd have to try and supply the army with food locally.
Strategic food production areas tend to be defended. This might necessitate a siege at a choke point, or something like that.
Of course,
I don't know anything about military tactics, so if you feel this to be an issue, we can both admit we're talking out of our rears on this issue and discount it.
Uh, no, they presumably would do the same thing -- since screwing around with aerial magic shows over the castle is about the least productive way to use magical geniuses, which at least one of them would eventually point out.
Perhaps it is; I'm not a tactician so I wouldn't know. I thought it would have been a good way of dropping projectiles larger than a trebuchet could handle on an enemy fortification, as well as inflicting morale damage on the enemy.
Uh, we're not engaged in any sort of battle here.
I just think the notion of staging some sort of superhero battle with wizards is unlikely. The Mage: The Awakening style of wizards, liches and the like acting with a great deal of advance planning, surgical strikes and with a ridiculous escalation of counter-measures and counter-counter-measures is a lot more likely. If I've learned how to even do something as relatively simple as fling a fireball, I'm going to know that being the target of such a thing is something I want to avoid at all costs. Anyone who tells me "hey, take this boulder, shrink it, cast Protection from Normal Missles, Fly and Invisibility and go drop it on a bunch of idiots in a castle" is getting turned into a frog.
So, if he had added "And Resist Energy", he'd be a normal human?
A single NPC adventuring group doesn't require wizards willing to do the equivalent of the sort of adventures PCs go on all the time to be anything more than uncommon. A battalion of flying invisible boulder-droppers is a lot more wizard-intensive.
Who said anything about a battalion? Making a large amount of shrunken boulders doesn't require an army of wizards given the 1day/level duration.
It is for an army, since that 4,000 gold piece for each ring could buy a whole lot of foot soldiers. Heck, that'd probably be enough to get a whole tribe of Easterlings/neanderthals/gnolls or whatever tearing up the countryside.
I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Charles, King of France, was allowed to seize Italy with chalk in hand; and he who told us that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty.
Because, remember, you'd need one of those rings for each of your wizards and the wizards would cost more besides.
Well, at most we'd need one for every wizard who goes flying, but that doesn't have to be a large amount.
Just to clarify: Do you mean that wizards cost more to hire? Well, that may be true, but they also come with their own wealth, which includes things like magical items.
It's still a very showy and not terribly productive way to wage magical war. You can get a lot more bang for your gold piece in countless other ways.
Let us agree that, if nothing else, there are many terrific offensive uses of magic against a castle.
thats out I guess. See invisibilty doesn't come up till the rocks start falling.
