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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5120672" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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