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Message: <blockquote data-quote="argo" data-source="post: 1980259" data-attributes="member: 5752">Well, lets look at what happened to castles in the real world.  When the cannon was first introduced it did not mean the immediate end of massive defensive positions, instead castles changed and adapted to the new weapons while sieges focused on slowly approaching the walls under cover (trenches) to attack at point blank range.  The outcome was much the same as before: a castle besieged by superior forces with no relief will fall given enough time.But castles did eventually go out of style.  Once fierarms became plentiful enough and portable enough governments eventualy decided that it was better to mantain a standing army (which can also be used in attack as well as defense) and try to take the initative away from the enemy by meeting him in battle at a place of your choosing to destroy him.  Now stationary defenses are used mostly to protect the most vital locations and to control the shape of large scale manuvers: force the enemy to approach your country from a particular angle or suffer the ranged fire of your castle battery.Then we get to modern warfare and two factors make all static defenses, even fire-support batteries, useless.  The first is mobility, the power to either close on your defenses and overwhelm them before they have time to prepare or else to bypass them and attack from the rear or attack the command/supply centers.  The second is the overwhelming power of offensive weapons: no castle design could withstand a sustained high-level bombing let alone a singel nuke.Since there is no problem in standard DnD with the portability of magic I think it comes down to how plentiful the magic is.  If all we are talking about is a lot of 3rd and a few 4th level spells then I think you could build castles that adapt to that level of force and sieges would just have a lot of additional fireworks.  However, if we are talking about spells of about 6th level or higher then the attackers are going to start having a massive advantage in terms of mobility and firepower.  Even if the defenders have equal magic it isn't going to do them much good against "bombing raids" unless they want to go out and hunt the mage and then we are back to open field fighting again.  So yes, I do think that there comes a point where static defenses become less cost-effective than a well equiped standing military and that is the point when castles will start to dissapear.Of course none of this mentions stealth attacks, but I guess that is where the king goes out and hires a party of adventurers right?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Later.</blockquote>

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