Are military armies valid in 4e?

[Kwalish Kid]

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.

If one looks at "D&D", the real, official and definitely old-school "D&D" of almost two decades (not "AD&D"), there were dozens of high level magic-users for the armies of the biggest nations.

 

[Hussar]

In AD&D, Wall of Fire was far and away more effective than fireball for wiping out lots of troops.

I like S'mon's idea though. Treat the battle as part of the terrain and then have the party deal with the bigger threats. You could perhaps have allied and enemy terrain plotted on the battlemap so that various movement powers could work for both sides.

 

[S'mon]

In AD&D, Wall of Fire was far and away more effective than fireball for wiping out lots of troops.

I like S'mon's idea though. Treat the battle as part of the terrain and then have the party deal with the bigger threats. You could perhaps have allied and enemy terrain plotted on the battlemap so that various movement powers could work for both sides.

Yes, to both points.

 

[Doug McCrae]

A battle in 4e is probably best treated as a mix of combat and roleplaying and/or skill challlenges. Normal combat for those times when the PCs are in the thick of the fight, face-to-face with enemies. Roleplaying or skill challenges for things like strategic insights, tactical advantage, rallying your own side's forces and demoralising the enemy.

As Korgoth says, you wouldn't want it to be one long combat lasting dozens of rounds, that doesn't work. Instead there should be multiple combats of typical length with short rests in between. I understand that this is actually quite realistic for fighting in plate armour. The wearer would get overheated after a few minutes and have to retire.

 

[Korgoth]

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?

Um. Might want to check that reading comprehension, there.

I wasn't saying that FR was not around since 1E (I know that all too well, thank you). I said that Old School D&D does not presuppose a large number of wizards.

There's no reason to think that, in a given D&D world, there won't be traditional armies. Only if the world includes wizards as something common will such formations be impractical. But if there are only a half-dozen magic-users of any note in the entire world, or less, then there would be a negligible impact on the military.

Remember that a 4th level fighter is a "Hero". That is, a character of great renown. Now, if you run a game like FR where the gatekeeper is a 6th level fighter, the mayor's accountant is a 5th level magic-user and every town has a local archmage then yes, conventional militaries are worthless. But that's not the only type of game it's possible to run.

Myself, I don't write up townies as higher than 3rd level, tops.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

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.

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.

What are you talking about? Maybe at very high levels a band of PCs can singlehandedly wipe out large armies. Because they're nearly demi-gods by then. But at mid-levels? A fireball is "only" a 20 ft radius. Especially if you're not running the enemy like idiots who think that army battles should be run like medieval Europe with tight formations even though there's magic rampant (not to mention CANTRIPS to massively extend communication range, the primary reason for those tight formations), you're not going to kill more than 0.01% of the thousands attacking you with each fireball. I've also always been fond of entire archery platoons readying actions to "counterspell" with "sun-blocking rain of pointy stick death." Enemies always have at least a 5% chance to hit, which means, consequently, NO, a mid level fighter cannot wade into a giant mass of soldiers and survive, unless he's obtained several-many points of DR. Sheer odds means he'll be skewered to death after a while.

And I've never seen a level 5 wizard with a wand of fireballs. Those things are expensive as hell! And if the enemies aren't all level 1, the low save DC of an item + only 5d6 damage means it could even be fairly survivable.

I don't know why people always focus on the blasting spells, they're not great ways to deal with mass troops. Cloudkill and Stinking Cloud would do a much better job over time at killing scores of people. Druid spells like Spike Growth and Spike Stones may not auto-death the entire enemy army. But once they realize how much crud they're wading in, and how wide the effect is, they're basically completely immobilized. If you have greater ranged attacks than the enemy side, you've effectively won the battle at that point. Even if you don't, if they don't either, they're likely to surrender. Those are the kinds of spells that MIGHT allow a mid-level party to defeat an army.

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.

Heh, Animate Dead had no limits, huh? Maybe that's how Xykon and Redcloak have so many undead minions -- using 2E rules.

Didn't fireball in previous editions also have a much bigger area of effect? I recall in at least one edition from the comparing fireball thread that the area was so huge it was nearly impossible in anything but a very wide open space to ever use it and not hit your entire party, too. That could potentially make it a battlefield killer. Of course, the earlier you go in edition, the squishier the mage probably gets, so I don't know if he'd want to attract the attention of any survivors like that.

 

[coyote6]

First, I would describe the battlefield, the armies facing each other, the nervousness of the troops, the flags, the drums, the trumpets...

Then I would start a multi-part Skill Challenge / Delve mix:

Another thought -- during the combat encounters, treat parts of the battlefield as a hazard, with arrows or magical blasts randomly coming in from afar (akin to artillery in a WWII movie -- have the "shells" falling between the PCs and some kind of objective).

Patches of trampled mud-and-blood can form patches of difficult terrain, and you can have wrecked defensive works (hedgehogs, berms, ditches, & the like) as complications, too. Maybe toss in an abandoned or half-wrecked siege engine that creative players (or villains!) can exploit.

(Of course, that's more "how to run a mass battle with 4e" then "are armies valid".)

 

[Rechan]

Didn't fireball in previous editions also have a much bigger area of effect? I recall in at least one edition from the comparing fireball thread that the area was so huge it was nearly impossible in anything but a very wide open space to ever use it and not hit your entire party, too. That could potentially make it a battlefield killer. Of course, the earlier you go in edition, the squishier the mage probably gets, so I don't know if he'd want to attract the attention of any survivors like that.

2e fireball was measured in cubic feet. So if you unleashed it in a tunnel, you'd have to calculate how far it would go given that it couldn't spread out normally. It wasn't a matter of "so huge" as it was compensating for the entirety of the sphere's blast. On an open field, you're not going to have guys stacked ON TOP of eachother, so the straight-up nature of the blast is wasted.

 

[Dausuul]

2e fireball was measured in cubic feet. So if you unleashed it in a tunnel, you'd have to calculate how far it would go given that it couldn't spread out normally. It wasn't a matter of "so huge" as it was compensating for the entirety of the sphere's blast. On an open field, you're not going to have guys stacked ON TOP of eachother, so the straight-up nature of the blast is wasted.

I have to admit, despite the logistical problems and the math issues, I kind of miss 2E-style fireballs. There were so many clever tricks you could pull... and so many opportunities for a careless wizard to fry his own party.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What are you talking about? Maybe at very high levels a band of PCs can singlehandedly wipe out large armies. Because they're nearly demi-gods by then. But at mid-levels? A fireball is "only" a 20 ft radius. Especially if you're not running the enemy like idiots who think that army battles should be run like medieval Europe with tight formations even though there's magic rampant (not to mention CANTRIPS to massively extend communication range, the primary reason for those tight formations), you're not going to kill more than 0.01% of the thousands attacking you with each fireball. I've also always been fond of entire archery platoons readying actions to "counterspell" with "sun-blocking rain of pointy stick death." Enemies always have at least a 5% chance to hit, which means, consequently, NO, a mid level fighter cannot wade into a giant mass of soldiers and survive, unless he's obtained several-many points of DR. Sheer odds means he'll be skewered to death after a while.

And I've never seen a level 5 wizard with a wand of fireballs. Those things are expensive as hell! And if the enemies aren't all level 1, the low save DC of an item + only 5d6 damage means it could even be fairly survivable.

I don't know why people always focus on the blasting spells, they're not great ways to deal with mass troops. Cloudkill and Stinking Cloud would do a much better job over time at killing scores of people. Druid spells like Spike Growth and Spike Stones may not auto-death the entire enemy army. But once they realize how much crud they're wading in, and how wide the effect is, they're basically completely immobilized. If you have greater ranged attacks than the enemy side, you've effectively won the battle at that point. Even if you don't, if they don't either, they're likely to surrender. Those are the kinds of spells that MIGHT allow a mid-level party to defeat an army.




Heh, Animate Dead had no limits, huh? Maybe that's how Xykon and Redcloak have so many undead minions -- using 2E rules.

Didn't fireball in previous editions also have a much bigger area of effect? I recall in at least one edition from the comparing fireball thread that the area was so huge it was nearly impossible in anything but a very wide open space to ever use it and not hit your entire party, too. That could potentially make it a battlefield killer. Of course, the earlier you go in edition, the squishier the mage probably gets, so I don't know if he'd want to attract the attention of any survivors like that.

But there was a reason why these formations where used. They provided a tactical advantage to deal with other armies. If you add spellcasters raining hell from air, these might no longer work. But what works? Certainly not the military armies of the medieval time. You will have to buid your tank and flak equivalents very soon. If there is no magic or technology to do that, what would happen?