Are military armies valid in 4e?

[S'mon]

Unlike 1e-3e, there is nothing inherent in the 4e rules to invalidate the use of traditional mass armies in the game world. Where 1e 0th-level men at arms and 3e 1st level warriors were utterly useless against even mid-level PCs, the power disparity in 4e is much less.

One thing I love in 4e is high level minions, who can represent well-trained but non-heroic troops. They can threaten even high level PCs, without presenting an unstoppable juggernaut to low level NPCs.

Eg: compare the Orc Warrior (9th level Minion) to the Human Rabble (minion) and Human Guard (3rd level soldier). Those orcs' high +14 to attack makes large numbers of them scary to PCs up into paragon tier, but yet their lowish AC 21 and 1 hp means that a squad of human guards could kill many of them, and even human rabble can threaten them.

You can do the same in reverse, eg create 10th level minion human Elite Pikemen based off the Human Guard, they can threaten PCs but low-level Orc Berserkers could plough through a bunch of them before going down. The 9th level human pirate in the MM2 is a particularly good candidate for minionisation IMO.

Anyway, yes, for the first time in D&D, mass armies are militarily valid. To me that is a great thing. Sure Epic tier PCs could dispatch hundreds or thousands of Heroic-level foes, but that's perfectly in-genre. You don't get the 3e situation where one PC with a 5th level fireball wand can wipe out the Duke's army singlehanded.

 

[S'mon]

When you get down to it, most mass battle games have minions fighting minions anyway. (Chainmail, progenitor of D&D, certainly did!) The trick is to have the minions within a reasonable level of each other.

Cheers!

Actually, one of the emergent features of 4e I really like is that you can have 1st level minions battling 10th level ones, and you get reasonable (fun) results, with the low level guys taking out a fair number of enemy elite troops. In fact you can have Human Guards battling Legion Devils and they'll give a good account of themselves! Totally different from 1e-3e.

If you want to have unstoppable monsters slaughtering the city guard, you can do that too with Elite Soldiers vs human Minions, but that is no longer a forced result of the system. It's now much easier to see how humanity can survive in the D&D world.

 

[S'mon]

Hold your horses, buddy! That may be a problem in Forgotten Realms and/or 3E, but Old School D&D does not presuppose or necessitate large numbers of wizards in the world, ruling the roost. The number of magic-users who can decimate an army may be only a handful, or two, or none at all.

Certainly at least by 1e, the random encounter tables were generating plenty of ca 8th-11th level Magic-Users who could easily trash hundreds of 0-level troops; as indeed could Fighters with the 1 attack per level rule. Look at the 1e MM - many of the Men encounters include high level casters who alone are more powerful than the hundreds of nomads, bandits, et al they accompany. Or look at the DMG random Stronghold and random City/Town encounter tables. Again, the default is a world with lots of Wizards (high level M-Us).

 

[S'mon]

The 'real' Achilles mowing down scores or even hundreds of unarmored foes without apparantly breaking a sweat is probably not that far of an exagerration. Bronze plate, shield, and sword likely made the wielder seem invincible to unarmored warriors wielding wooden spears and clubs.

Real-world examples do exist but depend on the hero not being surrounded/mobbed. A famous one is the viking who held Stamford Bridge against the entire Saxon army, before being backstabbed by a Saxon Rogue.

A small team of elite armoured warriors can potentially defeat any number of poorly armoured infantry, as everyone from the Spartans to the Conquistadores demonstrated, but it still depends highly on teamwork. Even in the Iliad, champions don't let themselves be surrounded by the enemy spear-carriers.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Well, 4E might not intended to be used as very simulationistic, but it isn't impossible to use so. More importantly, you can still model any type of combat, the question is how to do it. And how you model something might depend on relative levels and similar aspects.

The most important change to previous edition is that the power levels are closer to each other. A large number of low level monsters actually have a fair chance of beating a considerably high level PC or monster. It wouldn't necessarily be a fun or interesting fight if you'd played it through, but that's not relevant to determine if "army combat" is possible.

The rules do not explicitely require or suggest that you should do so, but a common idea is that "normal monsters" might be better described as Minions against PCs of Level levels notably higher than that of the original monster. And if you go even further, you could try using the Swarm rules.

Under this approach, there is actually a fair chance for a large group of peasants to bring down an epic level hero - even if lots (most) of them end up dead or incapicitated.

They start as level 1 Minion. If you put 20 of them together, you might have a Level 5 "Swarm" or "Mob". If you put 5 of those together, you might get a level 10 Swarm. And so on, until you have effective 12,000 or so peasants modeled as a single Level 25 Gargantuan Swarm, probably a suitable challenge for a single 21st level epic hero.
Of course, that's pretty much the "worst" case, basically 12,000 Kobold peasants. Human Rabble starts at level 4, IIRC, and we'd end with a Level 29 Mob or "only" 2,400 peasants at level 24.

I based my guidelines on the vague idea that "XP" value is kinda the "absolute" combat value of a monster. If my memories are correct, XP values increase by a factor of 5 every 5 levels or so.

Another aspect is "combat magic". It is pretty much all blown out in 5 minutes. If you can't decimate an army in that time, your magic is essentially spent. You can cause serious damage, but after that, you are down to at-will powers. These powers will be certainly useful, as they contain area effects - but remember, the ranges of these powers are very low - 50 feet for scorching burst.

At this range, the enemy soldiers can charge and even circle the enemy spellcaster. Archers actually have a higher range (100 to 200 ft), and can harrass the spellcaster. Additional troop support guarding the spellcaster is probably strongly advisable, especially since, after 5 minutes, he can't hope to just fly away or teleport to a safe place. He's stuck on the battlefield until he can find a few minutes to perform a ritual or a short rest.

A Wizard or any other character mounted on a flying mount sure will fare a little better, but even he is not safe from enemy archery, since his spells range is limited. And of course, the mounted archer is not safe from archers, either.

Of course, spellcasters or anyone with access to area effects are still a powerful force on a battlefield of low level, low hit point creatures. But "this time", these creatures get a fair chance to fight back.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Yes, armies are quite valid and more important castles are useful military structures, though they would have design quirks to reflect the D&D world like no curtain walls less than 35 feet or so.

I do like the idea of modelling some battlefield encounters as swarms.

In play, do the battle by scene and skill challange. If you want to game an entire battle then I would use a different system like Battlelore. Though it could be interesting to use a battle system to generate scene where the pc directly intervene.

 

[S'mon]

A thought about low-level creatures as an environment hazard for high-level characters.

Say the PC is on an open plain, surrounded by low level minions who hit him on a 20 for 6 damage.

With moving and shifting, every square around the PC could have 2 foes in it each round. That's 8 x2 = 16 attacks/round. Add in some thrown missiles, call it 20 attacks/round. Or, an average 1 hit/round.

So, the battlefield becomes an environmental hazard doing 6 damage/round.

Edit: And you don't need to put any minis down for the mooks; just treat the whole area as difficult terrain. Do put down minis for enemy leaders and champions.

This is assuming that being amongst the enemy is giving the PC cover against enemy missile troops - per the RAW, allies don't give cover to the enemy, but I think it's better to stick to realism here. If the PC is caught in the open by enemy archers, you can have say 100 archers fire at him each round, 5 hits at 6 damage each or 30/round. I'd suggest (a) capping the number of archers - not everyone target the hero, some auto-miss and (b) applying any damage reduction only once. If the player insists on DR applying vs each shot, apply the RAW - say a battalion of 600 archers all fire at him for 1d10+3 each, on average that's 30 crits each for 13 damage, so unless he has 13+ DR he's in a world of hurt.

Edit: You can use your battlemat to quickly mark out eg enemy-occupied zones (6 damage/round environmental hazard), friendly-occupied zones (no damage, as your troops are giving you cover) and free-fire zones empty areas where enemy archers target your PCs for 30 damage/round).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

A thought about low-level creatures as an environment hazard for high-level characters.

Say the PC is on an open plain, surrounded by low level minions who hit him on a 20 for 6 damage.

With moving and shifting, every square around the PC could have 2 foes in it each round. That's 8 x2 = 16 attacks/round. Add in some thrown missiles, call it 20 attacks/round. Or, an average 1 hit/round.

So, the battlefield becomes an environmental hazard doing 6 damage/round.

Edit: And you don't need to put any minis down for the mooks; just treat the whole area as difficult terrain. Do put down minis for enemy leaders and champions.

This is assuming that being amongst the enemy is giving the PC cover against enemy missile troops - per the RAW, allies don't give cover to the enemy, but I think it's better to stick to realism here. If the PC is caught in the open by enemy archers, you can have say 100 archers fire at him each round, 5 hits at 6 damage each or 30/round. I'd suggest (a) capping the number of archers - not everyone target the hero, some auto-miss and (b) applying any damage reduction only once. If the player insists on DR applying vs each shot, apply the RAW - say a battalion of 600 archers all fire at him for 1d10+3 each, on average that's 30 crits each for 13 damage, so unless he has 13+ DR he's in a world of hurt.

Only if it is just the PC or party vs the army. If the PCs are part of a larger army then most of the incoming attacks are on allied npcs and the PCs are only affected by what is playing out around them. Hence it can be viewed as a scene.

 

[Dausuul]

Uh, Forgotten Realms has been around since 1st edition.

And Old School D&D certainly may not have had 'large' numbers of wizards but they could easily decimate armies. Especially as Fireballs tended NOT to cap at 10d6 eh?

Not that that mattered. When you're shooting at low-level troops, a 10d6 fireball has exactly the same effect as a 20d6 fireball or a 100d6 fireball; it kills all of them.

The ability of wizards in older editions to decimate armies with direct blasting damage is much overrated. A high-level wizard can certainly lay some smack down, but a big army could absorb the losses and keep on truckin'. Misdirection, maneuverability, and precision strikes are a wizard's best weapons in mass combat... why waste time killing soldiers when you can scry 'n' die the general, or take over his mind?

Of course, before 3E there was one other option - animate dead, which had no Hit Die cap and could (if you had enough time to work on it) be used to raise a whole army of absolutely loyal soldiers who needed neither food nor rest.

 

[billd91]

Not that that mattered. When you're shooting at low-level troops, a 10d6 fireball has exactly the same effect as a 20d6 fireball or a 100d6 fireball; it kills all of them.

The ability of wizards in older editions to decimate armies with direct blasting damage is much overrated. A high-level wizard can certainly lay some smack down, but a big army could absorb the losses and keep on truckin'. Misdirection, maneuverability, and precision strikes are a wizard's best weapons in mass combat... why waste time killing soldiers when you can scry 'n' die the general, or take over his mind?

Indeed. And when you look at how the areas of effect translated into Battlesystem, you saw that your big old fireball was affecting maybe 2-4 figures. At that point, you realized that a single wizard's effect on the battle, to be decisive, had to be much more carefully considered than just blasting away at masses of troops.