Do castles make sense in a world of dragons & spells?

[Celebrim]

While 5th-level Mages may be relatively common, and it would be fairly easy for such a mage to infiltrate a conventional castle using invisibility, fly, spider climb, etc. I'm not sure what the mage is going to do once he gets in. He'll have to devote most of his spell slots to defense/infiltration with relatively few left over for offense. Even if he can compensate for offense with items (a wand of fireball or lightning bolt might be good) his hit points won't let him stand and fight once he blows his invisibility by attacking. He might cause a lot of damage up front, but I don't think he'll last long.

Military tactics are often driven by economics. An armored mounted knight makes sense only if the cost of training, equiping and maintaing the knight in the field is less than the cost of training, equiping and maintaining an equivalent force with a different composition. If an armored knight is easily countered by a much less expensive unit, say peasant with a crossbow, then force composition will necessarily shift toward a larger force composed of less expensive units.

In D&D, the question has always been, does a force of low level wizards equipped in a relatively expensive fashion (scrolls, wands, etc.) have so much offensive punch, that it obseletes non-arcane soldiery as a main battle force. Under unmodified 3e RAW, and to a lesser extent under 1e, a pretty strong case can be made that it does. Since most DM's would not consider a world were army normally means 'a small force of flying invisible wizards with wands of fireballs' to be a desirable outcome, the question becomes what happens in your campaign world to prevent that outcome.

1) 'Wizards are really rare': One answer is that for every 5th level wizard there are 100 or so 5th level fighters, so the impact of Wizards is relatively small. The problem I see with this answer is that doesn't typically conform to player experience. Few DM's are so stingy with NPC spellcasters that there isn't a low level wizard or two in every community, to say nothing of what might be present in larger communities.
2) 'Wizards don't participate in politics': Another answer is that wizards just aren't willing to fight on behalf of the community, or our culturally forbidden to do so. This answer also has several problems, the first of which being that its an unstable situation. The first culture to break the rules gains a pretty significant advantage. Also, and even harder to get around, it again doesn't conform to player experience. The PC's not only encounter wizards as foes with political interests, the PC's themselves might be arcane spellcasters serving essentially as mercenaries in the employ of some political interest.
3) 'Something is wrong or missing in the RAW': This is my answer, mainly because it in part addresses the question of 'Are spell-casters just better than non-spellcasters?' that starts cropping up as PC level increases. The problem with this answer is obviously, 'Ok, but what is wrong or missing?'

Now, in 4e, this problem doesn't really come up, because 4e doesn't worry really about the simulation level effects of its rules, or really about the question of, "How do NPC's interact with other NPC's?" at all. And, that's another approach you can take.

 

[Haltherrion]

Two points:

1) I largely agree with Celebrim that flying monsters usually suffer from low hit dice and poor AC, which makes them less of a threat than they might immediately appear. Further, if flyers are a commonly encountered threat, I suggest it makes more sense for the defenders to train up their own flyers instead of trying to build elaborate static defenses.

Defenders training their own flyers is an excellent point and one likely to happen in a "real" fantasy world. New military technology may allow an advantage to one side in the short run but in the long run others will acquire it (or be eliminated and no longer matter).

But it does raise several points: rulers have finite resources and if you spend more one place, you have less money for other places. Raise a large flying force and you might not be able to afford the big stone castles, for instance. Or perhaps just as important: you might not see the need for the castle.

For much of the middle ages, the castle served as a place to project force from, for controlling an area or for preserving forces that an invader could not affort to bypass. If you can fly your force in from a distance, do you need the castle?

On the other hand, one would think that a flying creature needs a huge amount of high energy food (meat). It might be very expensive to maintain flying forces in large numbers or for long. Maybe they are more for recon.

Some years ago I ran a campaign where the premise was that the players were playing a people conquered by invaders who had used griffins to overthrow the old regime. But decades had gone by and the griffins were much fewer in number now since they were so expensive to maintain and the balance had changed although the conquered did not realize it yet.

Anyway, I love a big stone castle as much as anyone and I use them. I try to address the most egregious aspects of "castles in a fantasy world" but I also realize that in a world of real magic and creatures people would figure out ways to use them that would probably leave little place for castles as most of us imagine them from the high middle ages.

 

[Filcher]

Military tactics are often driven by economics. An armored mounted knight makes sense only if the cost of training, equiping and maintaing the knight in the field is less than the cost of training, equiping and maintaining an equivalent force with a different composition. If an armored knight is easily countered by a much less expensive unit, say peasant with a crossbow, then force composition will necessarily shift toward a larger force composed of less expensive units.

Agreed.

In D&D, the question has always been, does a force of low level wizards equipped in a relatively expensive fashion (scrolls, wands, etc.) have so much offensive punch, that it obseletes non-arcane soldiery as a main battle force. Under unmodified 3e RAW, and to a lesser extent under 1e, a pretty strong case can be made that it does. Since most DM's would not consider a world were army normally means 'a small force of flying invisible wizards with wands of fireballs' to be a desirable outcome, the question becomes what happens in your campaign world to prevent that outcome.

1) 'Wizards are really rare': One answer is that for every 5th level wizard there are 100 or so 5th level fighters, so the impact of Wizards is relatively small. The problem I see with this answer is that doesn't typically conform to player experience. Few DM's are so stingy with NPC spellcasters that there isn't a low level wizard or two in every community, to say nothing of what might be present in larger communities.

2) 'Wizards don't participate in politics': Another answer is that wizards just aren't willing to fight on behalf of the community, or our culturally forbidden to do so. This answer also has several problems, the first of which being that its an unstable situation. The first culture to break the rules gains a pretty significant advantage. Also, and even harder to get around, it again doesn't conform to player experience. The PC's not only encounter wizards as foes with political interests, the PC's themselves might be arcane spellcasters serving essentially as mercenaries in the employ of some political interest.

I wonder if one solution is a blend of 1 & 2. In that:

1. Wizards are "rare." No more than 1 for 100 mundanes.

2. Wizardry takes work. Years of practice. (This isn't borne out in our games, sadly.)

So if I am rarity, and I've worked years to even master a light spell, no way in this world or the next am I going to risk all that for a bit of nationalistic glory.

Temporal power? Gold? A mage wants not these things. I'm after absolute mastery of the multiverse.

Some might, but they are *really* rare. So this then allows us to rationalize the 1 in 1000 model that permits the use of castles.

Maybe?

 

[Ariosto]

For the purposes of this thread, let's assume the something of value to protect would be the lives of the defenders under siege in the castle.

Doublespeak, Department of, procedure, standard, Mark I. But why is castle X there in the first place, and who and what is there with an interest in besieging it?

If you really want to talk about what "makes sense", then -- to the extent that the elements have real-world analogs -- you cannot well dismiss real-world experience.

If you really want to talk about what makes sense in the context of a Dungeons & Dragons game, then you cannot well dismiss actual play experience. If there is advantage to be had, then count on players taking it! D&D is "survival of the fittest" on overdrive.

At least it used to be so. If the "magic economy" in 4e (plate +1, leather +1, same price!; no incentive to make ritual scrolls for sale; etc.) is "D&D rules", then certainly so are the Original and Advanced games' assumptions.

If you just want to shoot the breeze about whatever measures and counter measures people posting here can theoretically contrive, then you may as well simply drop those conceits -- contentiously dismissive claims that distract from your desire.

By pressing an argument that castles do not "make sense in a world of dragons and spells" -- and arbitrarily, against all evidence, insisting that the world must (in what becomes a circular argument) conform in every respect to the needs of your case -- what do you expect?

What I think one reasonably ought to expect as a consequence is counter-arguments.

 

[Dausuul]

Temporal power? Gold? A mage wants not these things. I'm after absolute mastery of the multiverse.

This brings up an interesting possibility, which is that wizardry might favor practitioners who do not concern themselves with material things. Perhaps too much focus on matters of the temporal world diminishes a wizard's power in the mystical world.

Hence, the majority of wizards are loners with little connection to society; ivory-tower scholars, hermits living in the wilderness, witches in huts at the far edge of town, et cetera. A handful might decide to become wizard-kings, probably to secure more resources for their rituals or to take advantage of the mystic connection between the king and the land; but even these are apt to leave the mundane details of running their kingdoms to subordinates while they themselves study the stars and probe into forbidden mysteries. (This tends to undermine their effectiveness as kings, of course, which is why every kingdom on earth is not ruled by an arcane monarch.)

 

[S'mon]

What I've seen a lot IMCs re the use of low-medium level Wizards in attacking a castle: they don't. Even 30 level 0 men-at-arms are a severe threat to a lone M-U 5. What actually happens is that the M-U 5 casts Fly and Invisibility on the attacking army's best Fighter (often a PC), he flies into the castle and kills the defenders.

To be safe you need a couple of M-U 5s or 1 M-U 6 so you can do this to at least 2 high level champions; a lone attacker might just roll a '1' on his saving throw vs Command by a 1st level Cleric in the castle, or vs Charm Person from an M-U 1.

 

[Ariosto]

The enemy has a 5th-level (or even 6th- or 7th- level) m-u? Is there some reason we lack a thaumaturgist of our own? No? Then it is basically a matter of who is quicker on the draw (assuming memorization of appropriately violent spells).

If you can fly your force in from a distance, do you need the castle?

"Yes!" is clearly the answer of, e.g., the U.S. in Iraq.

Look into the importance of fortresses in 18th-century European and colonial warfare. Look also at consequences of the employment in that of highly trained professional soldiers (probably not more expensive or less reliable than monsters and magicians, methinks).

 

[Dausuul]

The enemy has a 5th-level (or even 6th- or 7th- level) m-u? Is there some reason we lack a thaumaturgist of our own? No? Then it is basically a matter of who is quicker on the draw (assuming memorization of appropriately violent spells).

Problem is, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the spell list as written massively favors offense over defense. This is of course an artifact of D&D's focus on the dungeon crawl. PC wizards are crawlers, not crawlees, so their spells are oriented toward infiltration and evasion rather than defense and detection.

 

[S'mon]

The enemy has a 5th-level (or even 6th- or 7th- level) m-u? Is there some reason we lack a thaumaturgist of our own? No? .

Yes. The attacking force is vastly superior. That's the whole point of fortifications: to tripwire a superior invading force, until reinforcements can be brought up. Castle sieges & assaults are never battles between equal forces. IRL castles could be held with tiny forces against large armies; that's why they were worth building.

Thus, if the defenders have M-U 5s, the attackers better have M-U 10s. If the attacker cannot muster even local superiority at the point of impact there's no way they can expect to win the war.

 

[Celebrim]

1. Wizards are "rare." No more than 1 for 100 mundanes.

That's not enough. I can already presume that there is 1 spell-caster per 100 commoners/experts, and this doesn't get us what we want. In fact, it drives the reverse. If the ration is 1 wizard per 100 mundanes, then the relative power becomes more concentrated in the hands of wizards rather than less. This doesn't get us around the problem of player experience, which is that wizards while rare, aren't notably rare. Also, as DMs we'd rather like a different answer than this because if wizards are really really rare, then it raises the relative importance of the PC spellcaster even beyond what we might like for the PC as protagonist/hero. One of the classic problems with 'average NPC's are 0 level fighters model' is it doesn't address how the population protects itself from threats, and particularly from the PC's. The classic examples of this are things like 'Keep on the Borderlands' and 'Village of Homlet', where at some point the player with a purely gamist approach to the game realizes that the 'good guys' have more treasure, and better treasure, and relatively less ability to defend it than the 'bad guys' and hense are a much more attractive option to kick the doors down and loot than going dungeon delving.

2. Wizardry takes work. Years of practice. (This isn't borne out in our games, sadly.)

No and isn't, and it's also irrelevant to whether M-U's would be used in battle. Knighthood took work, years of practice (14 years of training, at least 7 of them in combat techniques), but despite its expense was deemed worth it because of the advantages that society obtained in point defense, operational mobility, and concentration of force especially in comparison to undisciplined troops.

So if I am rarity, and I've worked years to even master a light spell, no way in this world or the next am I going to risk all that for a bit of nationalistic glory.

If we postulate that advantages in an arcane force or mitigated solely by culture and not some non-arcane countermeasure, then any society that successfully shifted that culture by appealing to nationalist pride, loyalty to the group, or whatever would obtain an overwhelming advantage against ones that didn't.

So this then allows us to rationalize the 1 in 1000 model that permits the use of castles

Let me refer you back to earlier posts by me and note that quite the contrary, the RAW (especially in 3e) rationalize for the use of castles as an arcane countermeasure more than the rationalize for having an army composed of martial classes in the first place. Assuming the existance of an army of marial classed beings, the castle is actually one of the ways you can most easily protect them. At least in 3.0, arrow slits provide 90% cover, which in turn provides the all important improved evasion, meaning that lower level fighters actually have a decent chance of surviving fireballs and similar attacks. Walls, roofs over your heads and closed gates provide barriers to invisible and/or flying attackers that make it harder for them to maximize the benefits of their advantage. Massed missile weapons under these conditions can compete with spell casters.

The real question then becomes not so much 'Why castles?' as 'Why armies in the first place?' The advantage of a castle is not really the same sort of advantage provided by a gun emplacement in an artillery position. A castle doesn't directly defend or threaten the surrounding area. The advantage is more akin to that provided by an aircraft carrier. A castle provides a basis for projecting force through sortees from the castle, and for storing the means of that force projection securely. This means that you cannot safely bypass a castle and leave it in your rear the way you could a fixed artillery position that didn't threaten you supply lines (think a cannon on an island you can safely bypass). However, if non-arcane forces have no practical way of projecting force out into the field, then the castle is rendered obselete not by the fact that it can't protect a force, but that the very act of protecting that force is mostly meaningless. If the castle cannot project force beyond the immediate vicinity of its walls, the castle could be bypassed and its inhabitants would remain beseiged and unable to leave nonetheless.

I'm not sure that 'castles' would be completely obseleted even in this case, but their role would be very much closer solely to that of a saferoom, shelter or bunker, a place of temporary safety that the villagers could retreat to in event of attack. And in that case, the 'castle' would probably evolve toward being more bunker-like. The villagers would then huddle in the bunker like Keep, while the army (consisting mostly of spell-casters) would go defend against whatever magical threat (a monster, another army of spell-casters) was attacking. But again, I don't think that this is a desired result, so we need better answers for how a small unit of fighters deals with a wizard of comparable level.