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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8779986" data-attributes="member: 6801845">The enchantment spells have significant drawbacks.  Charm person isn't all that powerful, it just makes you a friendly acquaintance with advantage on persuasion checks. People know they've been charmed after the spell wears off.  Suggestions must be reasonable and, again, people know they were affected by magic once the spell is over.  Modify memories?  Can you modify the memories of everyone that person knows?  Destroy all evidence that their memories have been modified?  On a small scale and over the short term these things work well enough.  Long term?  If used for political gain?  It's a very risky gambit.  It's one thing to use persuasion to manipulate people, once you convince someone to believe something attempting to change their firmly held beliefs often just reinforces those beliefs because they're based in other deeply held biases and preconceptions.  Convince someone that you are their rightful leader through persuasion and people will die for you.  Dominate someone to have them do what you want makes an enemy once the spell wears off.   Inspiring leaders may be great warriors but in general they are inspiring leaders because of their vision and political acumen, not because of their capabilities at small scale encounters.Necromancy?  Create undead is a 6th level spell that makes 3 ghouls that only last for 24 hours.  So you have a half dozen or so low intelligence undead under your control using spells from the book? That's not even enough for a personal guard.  Obviously if you have access to some artifact or ritual you could raise an army.  Are people really going to be loyal to a ruler of the dead?  Unless you can create mass amounts of undead it's not relevant.  You also need some way of maintaining control over them which will include some sort of leadership hierarchy and intelligent undead.It all goes back to casters from the book having relatively small scale tactics with very limited application.  I don't care if you're a high level ... any class really ... a powerful individual is still just one individual.  If you don't know how to work the levers of politics or are born into a system where you are assumed to rule your personal capabilities mean very little in the grand scheme of things. I do have an island nation ruled by a royal family of sorcerers, but it's not because a lone individual decided one day to take over the kingdom.  The ruling family just happens to be magic users and are the exception not the rule.  If it makes sense for your campaign to be run by casters, go for it.  It's certainly a fairly common trope.  I just don't think it would be the default.  For every military development there has always ultimately been a counter.  Whether that's an army of thousands, snipers and assassins that specifically target enemy spellcasters or simply infiltrators that do nothing but cast counterspell at opportune moments, there is no silver bullet to defeating enemies.</blockquote>

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