Training peasants to fight

[Tayne]

Training the peaceful villagers.

It's an old trope. Seven Samurai. Army of Darkness. The Three Amigos. You've seen it before.

The brave, capable hero teaches the quivering, cowardly farmers how to fight those nasty banditos that keep takin their wimmins.

Have you done this in a campaign? How did you handle it? How WOULD you handle it?

Is it even doable in a rush? Or is the idea laughably implausible?

 

[MortalPlague]

I haven't done this in a campaign, but it's something I would love to do. I have a scene in my head of the characters standing on the town walls at night, staring out at the torches of the enemy army. They know they've done all they can to prepare, and all that remains is to wait for the enemy to assault with the dawn. They know there's a chance not all of them will live to see another sunset. But they are ready.

I've had that mental image in my head for a while, and I've never had a campaign swing that way.

 

[Tayne]

I haven't done this in a campaign, but it's something I would love to do. I have a scene in my head of the characters standing on the town walls at night, staring out at the torches of the enemy army. They know they've done all they can to prepare, and all that remains is to wait for the enemy to assault with the dawn. They know there's a chance not all of them will live to see another sunset. But they are ready.

I've had that mental image in my head for a while, and I've never had a campaign swing that way.

Of course, it doesn't have to be banditos either. Could be zombies, giants, treants, werewolves, whatevs.

 

[Wycen]

Crossbows. Lots of crossbows.

I remember trying to defend a town in a short Tunnels and Trolls campaign. We basically played ourselves and we built a catapult. Honestly, while I understand the principles involved, I don't know if we really could have built one. I assume we tried to train the town people, but maybe not because this was a viking/Anglo Saxon realm we got dumped in so maybe just the men of fighting age were expected to do anything.

More recently we attempted to build the morale and effectiveness of Farshore's town militia in the Savage Tide adventure path. Our fighter, the best person to actually show them how to fight, was a moron and dullard so he could NOT actually teach them to even pick their own nose.

 

[S'mon]

IME D&D tends to discourage this trope because of the way it stats out peasant militia as incredibly feeble and doomed to die in droves. 'Com-1 1d4 hp' is just terrible.

I think if the GM wants to do this he needs to let the players know it will be mechanically supported. For a low-level 3e/Pathfinder game, trained peasants could be raised from Com-1 to War-1 and given max hp (8); the common bandits might have similar stats, with PC-class leaders.

For 4e I'd do something similar, maybe raise from min-2 Human Rabble to min-7 Human Lackey; this would work if the PCs were in the ca 5th-10th level range; again the bandits could be statted similarly, min-7 thugs with skirmisher leaders of similar level. I think the 4e Minion rules do potentially help a lot with enabling this kind of scenario.

 

[Tayne]

Something i initially missed from the link i provided -

In Traveller, mercenaries are often hired to do this.

Frighteningly prevalent with experienced players in D&D.
-The degree to which this can work varies by edition. As of 4E, you can arm everyone in town with reasonable gear and give them weeks of training, but they'll still have exactly one hit point and die from the indirect side-effects of a single enemy's attacks. Third edition let them live long enough to buy the heroes time and/or provide flanking bonuses. Second edition would let them win almost any fight hands-down through mob rules for overbearing.

So, who has played traveller?

 

[IronWolf]

Answered this in the Pathfinder forum too.... Might want to have the threads consolidated...

I think if the GM wants to do this he needs to let the players know it will be mechanically supported. For a low-level 3e/Pathfinder game, trained peasants could be raised from Com-1 to War-1 and given max hp (8); the common bandits might have similar stats, with PC-class leaders.

This was my initial thought if there was some reasonable form of training. Just apply the warrior template to them.

If time is very limite, then perhaps the Aid Another mechanic applied to the group of them giving them a +2 to hit and possibly other abilities if the time to train was longer than 24 hours, but not quite the time to warrant applying the warrior templete.

I think the 4e Minion rules do potentially help a lot with enabling this kind of scenario.

Good point. Several of us Pathfinder folks use minions in our 3.x/Pathfinder games, so it could be an option in those games as well. I think it would help a lot though to re-enact this particular trope.

 

[the Jester]

Yes, several times!

I more or less winged it each time, though.

In my current (4e) campaign, the pcs took over their local area after discovering that the "governor" of the area, who kept to himself in an isolated tower, hadn't actually been around for about 20 years. When word got out, a local free company of mercenaries tried to muscle in and actually took one of their towns for a couple of months. They defeated them with a combination of poorly-trained peasant militia and surgical strikes against the leadership.

But pretty much their lackeys are low-heroic level minions, with a few notable exceptions- they picked up an npc level 1 minion and dragged him along on some adventures, and he's gradually improved from "minion" to "not a minion" to "holy crap, he killed a dragon? Let's give him another level" to "damn, he keeps saving the day" to now, when he's become a paragon-level npc sometimes companion/sometimes guardian of their lands.

 

[wingsandsword]

Training the peaceful villagers.

It's an old trope. Seven Samurai. Army of Darkness. The Three Amigos. You've seen it before.

The brave, capable hero teaches the quivering, cowardly farmers how to fight those nasty banditos that keep takin their wimmins.

Have you done this in a campaign? How did you handle it? How WOULD you handle it?

Is it even doable in a rush? Or is the idea laughably implausible?

I saw it done in a FR 3.5 game. The PC's were building a fortress and wanted to raise an modest army to go along with it (since bandits were a regular problem in the area). Rather than hire mercs, they decided to raise an army locally.

They recruited a couple hundred of the healthy adults and gave them weapons/armor they had salvaged from various defeated foes. So, each one got a suit of orc-grade chain mail, a rusty shortsword and club issued to them (while the forge at the new Keep was working on churning out more professional arms) and practiced with those weapons, and there were enough crossbows and polearms to let them all train on various weapons. They got a couple basic riding lessons on a few horses they had, some basic orientation in military bearing and first aid and tactics. They trained every day for a couple of months. It was narrated to the players like it was a "training montage" out of a movie or TV show (the players said they wanted to raise an army, and their characters would know more about it than them).

I basically took my experience from Basic Combat Training in the Army and my experience with the National Guard, and combined that with what D&D warfare is to get a simplified D&D "basic warrior training" and a local militia.

As for mechanics, they changed in class from Commoner 1's to Warrior 1's. Each peasant soldier had a suit of chain mail (the orc suits cleaned up and repaired a little), a shortsword and either a club (for those assigned militia/town guard duty, as a sort of patrolman's billyclub) or a crossbow (for those on patrol, to shoot at bandits).

Only a fairly small number of militiamen were on duty at any one time, a couple of 10-man patrols (with a PC sometimes leading them, so a few solo adventures of the PC and 10 NPC soldiers against some bandits), a dozen or so on duty at the keep & village as town/keep guards.

Each soldier got a tiny pittance of money, they weren't in it for the money, but was provided with shelter and food, and the benefits of greatly eliminating bandit raids on the trails meant merchants were more willing to come to town, increasing trade and making the militiamen richer because of their civilian livelihoods were better.

 

[adwyn]

For a 3.5 game a few years ago I ran a 7 samurai scenario where each PC effectively trained a mob with basic stats. Then during the final scenario the PC's mob received morale bonuses based on how the PC was doing -thus individual combats were reflected by the villagers' performance.