D&D 5E Why do cities in Faerun have fortified walls?

[HammerMan]

Because Ed's vision of Faerun is with a bunch of walled city-states.

Or did you mean some in game justification? Because their really isn't one.

because no one has in the 50 years of D&D has made a campaign world with first thought to be how the world would evolve with magic...

 

[Willie the Duck]

Fantasy has the problem of being 'like the middle ages/renaissance, but with magic and dragons.' Magic and dragons mean that many of the traditional components of real medieval life* aren't necessarily the best fit for a given situation. However, if you deviate too far from the medieval setup, you're disrupting the escapist fantasy your audience was seeking in the first place.
*not just the arms and armor and castles stuff, although in a combat-heavy game those naturally get a lot of spotlight

Some settings will acknowledge this directly, and include some non-medieval components (such as magical gates networks or Continual Light streetlights or Eberron's genie powered trains or whatever the specifics were-- often gated behind a 'too expensive for the common folk' gate to explain why there are still caravans and lamp oil to buy and such). Likewise, most settings will over-emphasize the medieval tropes that best explain things like 'so why don't _____ absolutely dominate here?' -- such as the overemphasis on ballista as compared to catapults or other such weapons, since they make the most sense in a work with flying threats.

However, at the end of the day, fantasy worlds have castles and knights on horseback and weapons designed to fight other humans and common careers meant to evoke at least the renaissance fair-level understanding of what life was like bitd because people interested in fantasy signed up for that form of escapism.

Now, if you are trying to find an explanation for why that works and why it was done (keep your verisimilitude intact, as it were), I would say that it is because castle walls are 1) cheaper and easier to build in FR than real medieval settings, 2) good enough against enough kinds of threats that they are still worthwhile, and 3) threats which can obviate walls as a defense (aerial and incorporeal creatures) are rare enough and dangerous enough that you have another separate line of defense for them (perhaps you have normal guards on walls for the standard orc armies and owlbear infestations and when the dragon comes a calling you summon the town wizard and bard the archer with his quiver of dragon-slaying arrows).

 

[Bolares]

"Why do cities in Faerun have fortified walls?"

Because they are a very recognizeable fantasy element and cities look cool with them.

 

[Oofta]

Standing armies were generally not a thing until relatively recent times. People hired mercenary armies, used conscription to raise armies and required the populace to be ready to go to war but otherwise were farmers or held jobs.

On the other hand, most D&D is a mish-mash of imagery of a world that never existed.

 

[David Howery]

So, there's an illogic to the idea that, since some things can fly, we should not use the simple defenses against the majority of things that cannot fly.

yeah, this. Sure, the walls won't help much when you get that 'once in 500 years' dragon attack. But they work fine for those 'every other year massive hordes of orcs/whatever' attacks...

 

[Umbran]

I suppose you're right. This may be rolled into a gripe of mine that a setting that doesn't reflect the passage of time in it's culture, architecture, clothing, etc.,

I don't play any of these worlds over more than a few years of its timeline. My players don't see more than a sliver of the cultural history, so the fact that it doesn't change much is hidden.

 

[David Howery]

wouldn't the walls also be useful on a day to day basis for things like security (the guards see who is entering) and taxes (merchant caravans, etc.)? Restricting access to several gates seems like it would be a lot easier to keep track of such things. Again, it wouldn't help with powerful magic/etc,, but there's a lot of ordinary business going on most of the time...

 

[purplkrush]

You're limiting your concept of fantasy to extraordinary things. There's still tens of thousands of bodies which could be called to war at any time by their Lords. Tall stone walls minimize the external threats you need to worry about. Lose the walls and all sorts of formerly unavailable strategies and tactics are suddenly back on the table for much lower resource cost. Even talking about supernatural or magical assaults, without strong walls an enemy could suddenly flood a city by diverting the river flow, they could release a very mundane plague via some small rodent or any other of a number of easily imagined assaults. Just because dragons, pixies and demons exist doesn't discount the mundane and naturally present threats.

 

[purplkrush]

You're limiting your concept of fantasy to extraordinary things. There's still tens of thousands of bodies which could be called to war at any time by their Lords. Tall stone walls minimize the external threats you need to worry about. Lose the walls and all sorts of formerly unavailable strategies and tactics are suddenly back on the table for much lower resource cost. Even talking about supernatural or magical assaults, without strong walls an enemy could suddenly flood a city by diverting the river flow, they could release a very mundane plague via some small rodent or any other of a number of easily imagined assaults. Just because dragons, pixies and demons exist doesn't discount the mundane and naturally present threats.

 

[Ixal]

But the walls in most of the art and maps look contemporary of a civilization with a 15th - 16th century sensibility. They're either updating their defenses for offenses that don't exist...or cities in Faerun in the late 1400s looks the same as they did centuries ago.

In the 16th century the primary (european) type of wall was the star (bastion) fort and I have never seen a star fort in any FR publication, also because the technologies which made star forts necessary like cannons do not exist.
In general, war in the 16th century looked very different from what people expect from medieval fighting or how war would look in D&D.
Look for example some documentaries about the siege of Malta for example.

Not if all the walls are equipped with anti-dragon ballistas, of course you would expect to have a more angled breastwork, casements and civilian domes

I doubt that normal ballistas can shoot as high as a dragon can fly.