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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6899627" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Note that "actively fighting in a war for the past three years" doesn't have to mean "involved in continuous battles to the death for three years running." You know what they say about war: "long periods of crushing boredom punctuated by short periods of frantic activity." He could have spent weeks or months at a time patrolling an area or a supply route to keep it secure against raiders, then a day or so ambushing small groups (squads) of raiders with overwhelming force (company-strength) to ensure that none of them escape, then another week patrolling followed by a fighting withdrawal against a battalion of enemy troops, etc. You'd expect to see lots of maneuvering, with attack rolls only being made when someone's maneuvering has failed. E.g. "fighting withdrawal" might mostly involve concealing two dozen horses in a location such that after you make several rounds of attack rolls from high ground and behind partial cover onto the enemy forces advancing on your position, you can then still get to your horses and retreat safely out of range before they can overrun your position; do that enough times and the enemy's advance will slow because he has to always bring enough soldiers to the party to beat you even if you're behind partial cover on high ground, which means he has less forces available elsewhere to secure his own supply lines against your mobile attackers or night-time skirmishers, etc. "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics." Perhaps your veteran soldier has spent three years fighting these types of battles and still been in only ten or twelve engagements; he may have killed fewer than twenty enemies over the course of the whole campaign. (And twenty enemies is still a very respectable kill count for a veteran BTW, even in real life. In D&D it would put you at third level or so.)So, as much as I hate quick levelling, from a plausibility perspective it's not that hard to imagine that killing "a band of goblins and a few other monsters" could be a fairly new experience for your dragonborn soldier, depending on what the other monsters are.What makes D&D contrived is not the number of combats veterans survive, it is that (especially in bad modules) the combats are often constructed to let the PCs crush the enemy with overwhelming force regardless of what the players do. It's one thing to be a veteran of twelve battles; it's another thing entirely to be a veteran of twelve "level-appropriate/Medium difficulty" effortless cake-walks. It gives you a skewed perspective on war.</blockquote>

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