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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 698747" data-attributes="member: 6533">A DnD world without armies wouldn't be as different from the early middle ages as you might expect.It's not that people like William the Conqueror didn't have armies, but the man constantly campaigned for forty years and only ever participated in two pitched battles.  Most conflict consisted of siege warfare and small scale battles involving limited numbers of elite troops and their supporters as they moved about the countryside looking to secure loose assets like poorly protected supplies, villages, nobles, and fortifications.You basically have an adventurers style of conflict right there.When pitched battles did occur casualties were only counted among the elite units, as they were the only casualties that really mattered.I can certainly see some of the paradigms and tactics from this period working for a world with a fair population of levelled and interested individuals.You could also settle things via the 'LotR general strategic usefullness paradigm.'  In that scenario you give all the really elite characters some easy means of checking up on each other and limiting each others power.  Which means all the big wigs are far more vulnerable to each other when they use their power in full effect.  So armies and kingdoms become useful as catspaws, and gaining the alliance or servitude of a fantasticly powerful character is the sweetest victory of all.  Course that's not core rules.Core rules elite characters don't seem to be effective checks on each other since divination magic is too limited and easy to evade.  You may as well go after the peasants since going after the enemy wizard in his tower is suicide and you don't really know when he leaves or if he leaves or if he's even there.  That's only true of the very highest level people with their insane versatility and mobility, however, the lower down you go the more conventional you can make the tactics.The lack of a proper system of long range power detection and tracking seems to me to be the major flaw in Elminster's argument in FR about the effectiveness of high level characters.</blockquote>

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