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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1983330" data-attributes="member: 3146">A lot of people here are long on theory and short on actual examples. I had the interesting experience of playing out the final assault on a fortified city using only slightly modified D&D rules. Here are some things I noticed:1. Disintegrate is overrated by far. The walls of a heavy fortification will be very thick. So, it will take multiple disintegrates to get through. Furthermore, when you do get through, you have... a ten foot wide tunnel. That's not enough to bring an army through. In large scale battles, a hole in the wall that two soldiers can walk through at a time is not a really big deal. Try to use it and you'll end up with hundreds of soldiers standing outside the wall, waiting for the front line to clear room for them.2. The importance of spell range is dramatically underestimated and the significance of small area effect spells is dramatically overestimated. A composite longbow has a range increment of 110 feet. Heavy crossbows aren't much worse. That means, that, in order to cast any spell with a range other than long, you need to spend several rounds moving through the field of fire to get in range. Even hitting only on 20s, 200 archers will deal a lot of damage. Similarly, in a best case scenario, a fireball will take out around 40 soldiers. (In a realistic scenario, it's a lot less since they won't be so tightly packed if they can help it). If the combat measures thousands on a side, that's not going to change the course of the battle. Even if it's only hundreds per side, it's not an "I win" card.  A unit of 100 archers will generally take out a similar number of enemies (especially if buffed with high level bardsong, or Flame Arrow). And they've got more staying power and are cheaper than the wizard.It's only the really high level magic--Cloudkill, Sunburst, Holy Word, Firestorm, etc that changes the course of a large scale battle.3. The effect of mobility spells is also overestimated. They can play a large role in small engagements and special operations, but you're not going to dimension door enough troops onto the walls of a fortified city to do anything other than maybe hold out against the hundreds of defenders--especially if some of those defenders are also high level characters.4. The synergy between high level characters and low level troops is often overlooked. Flying, invisible wizards with wands of fireball sound good.... until you consider that one mid level wizard with see invisibility, glitterdust and a squad of fifty archers makes that a recipe for a flying, invisible, and dead wizard.5. The influence of clerical healing magic, etc. is over-estimated. Sure, mid-level clerics can create food and water. But they can't create enough for hundreds of people. They're limited to dozens. Create water and purify food and drink are less limited since it's zero level and the ratio of 1st level clerics and/or adepts to population/army is a lot higher than the ratio of level 5 clerics to population/army. Remove Disease suffers from the same limitation. (Especially since a lot of diseases can spread before people show symptoms that would enable clerics to cure the initial victims of the disease). They will all have an effect, but it only makes starving a population out harder--not impossible.6. Nobody's mentioned the effect of DR here either. Units, individuals, or summoned creatures with DR are at a huge advantage on the large scale battle because they are less vulnerable to cheap and effective mass ranged attacks. A fighter with great cleave and armor of invulnerability will cut a much longer swath through his foes than a fighter with only great cleave. (In fact, really high level warrior types will mow through ordinary soldiers like Achilles in the Illiad and can generally only be stopped by heroes of similar stature... or a thousand guys with bows (50 hits including 2.5 crits, even if they need a 20 to hit=52.5d8+ 52/5x bardsong bonus, etc). High level summoned elementals are also a very significant factor on the battlefield (though they can be neutralized with magic circles).7. One thing that nobody has yet mentioned is the effect of magic that makes fortifications easier and quicker to build. A high level character with wall of stone can erect a small fortress overnight. Move Earth enables a character to construct massive earthworks very quickly. I didn't see very heavy use After that experience, my thought is that D&D magic has the greatest effect on small to mid-scale engagements. The border fort and the small castle fare far worse than Ninevah, Troy, or Krak des chevalliers. Thus, while I would expect some of the effects of the age of canon to recur in a D&D world, I think that small scale engagements would see more changes than large scale ones.</blockquote>

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