Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6800458" data-attributes="member: 6777454">Yeah-- that is just monumental garbage based on your own laughable ignorance.Mod Note:  This is monumental rudeness.  Unacceptable.  Hobgoblin here won't be in the conversation for a little while.  ~UmbranThis craziness always comes up whenever someone wants to cite an ancient culture they think of as "warriors". Whether it be Romans, Mongols, Japanese, Norse... people proclaim themselves to be fans of it and 100% buy into this notion that these cultures of 10000s of people were more or less identical clones.They all looked exactly the same, had exactly the same height, weight and build, they all wore exactly the same outfit in exactly the same manner all the time for generation on end. They all had exactly the same personality traits, exactly the same outlook on life, exactly the same values and morals and political leanings, specialized in exactly the same skills to exactly the same extent and lived each day exactly the same way.When they went to battle they all had precisely the same equipment and had exactly the same roles and reacted to everything exactly the same way.It invariably comes up. You hear the story of one particular officer or one particular part of one particular army and then posit that to be the way they all were. But it just has never been true. There has never been a culture that outsourced 90% of the things it needs done and all its skilled positions to foreigners, certainly not servants and slaves.The fact that you would with all sincerity write that you are fully convinced that it is historically accurate that no person of Roman lineage ever picked up a bow or rode a horse or simply never participated in the Roman legions for any meaningful length of time shows just how out-of-touch you have to be with basic common sense. The Auxilia outnumbered legion 3 to 1. While being in the legion might have been limited to those of Roman blood, nothing stopped them from joining Auxiliary units. Furthermore, most Romans never seriously participated in the legion for any meaningful length of time-- the ability to feed, equip and manage the army precluded this being the case. And once Rome was on the losing side or simply couldn't expand further, the legion melted away in a heartbeat (which is the situation of any hobgoblin in Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Mystara, Dragonlance, etc.).I suppose your complete misconception of how human cultures have existed throughout time and what they actually looked like makes it a lot clearer why you would posit such utter nonsense about fictional near-human cultures. But it just does not mathematically work out the way you want it to, which seems to be a desire to make everything as uninteresting and shallow as possible.A more realistic picture leaves you with a far more interesting society than the clone army nonsense you are positing.In the more realistic picture...You have farmers, or at least plantation owners who get lesser races to do the field work and more or less direct the for the most part. You have ranchers and shepherds and hunters. You have horse and dog breeders and trainers (or something equivalent). You have weavers and tanners and dye makers. You have couriers, you have cooks, you have merchants and/or distributors.You have miners, you have smelters, you have smiths. You have wood cutters, you have carpenters, you have crafters. You have stonecutters, you have masons, you have architects, you have builders. And many have jobs necessary for there to be a functional society that I haven't listed.For you to have your "proper" hobgoblin soldier in his nice chainmail armor with his red cotton or wool and black leather clothing with his very own shield and spear and short sword, all of those people need to exist. They all need to be doing their jobs and there needs to be more of them than there are that ideal "proper" soldier. Only some of that can be put onto slave labor, but not all that much of it-- at least outside of one kingdom in Eberron, the Kalimar setting and apparently possibly Spelljammer. Otherwise? It is their own people filling those roles.So while a greater tendency towards keeping slaves may allow them to move more of their own people out of those less savory roles and allow them to field a larger percentage of their own people, it is still not 100%. Nor even all males (and I could have sworn a later edition retconned the idea that females were necessarily not dedicated warriors, you can't just write off one gender any more than you do for humans in the setting).Can they universally have some basic military drilling? Sure-- in the same way every Dwarf knows a craft and can identify stonework and every High Elf can cast a spell and every Wood Elf can hide effectively in the woods.Are they going to be on par with the Hobgoblin legionnaires, guards, watchmen, overseers, or outlaws? Certainly not! They are sentient intelligent people who are fully capable of  learning skills an those whose roles allow them to focus fully on combat are going to be superior to those whose time is primarily focused on fulfilling the other various jobs necessary for them to function and engage in training only part time.Hobgobin archers have always been a thing. It really was sort of one of the very first reasons they were created. They need to have scouts for survival, and they aren't going to entrust something that important to a lesser people. Why you would insist they use Ogres and Trolls and Bugbears to scout and patrol their lands based on your misconceptions of the Roman legions... I just got to wonder why...There is no driving force that would at all prevent some number of those who have "classes" to become Rangers, Bards, and Rogues and too much to be gained through it to think they wouldn't specialize in such ways-- and we can be certain that some number of them are Clerics, after all-- they do have a racial god. And there are almost certainly special chosen of Maglubiyet that could be modeled on the Paladin class. Some waywards, backwater tribes might end up being Barbarians.One can functionally take any class from the PHB and reason how it could somehow fit into their society, with some being certainly rarer than others. Even those that are Fighters, some are going to specialize in riding, some archery, and some skirmishing even if the stereotype is the legionnaire.Because the same absolutely WAS true of the Romans. And the Mongols. And the Samurai. And the Cossacks. And the Persians. And... well... any other "warrior" people you want to compare them to. Especially when you considered how fractured and divided the tribes are. Different fighting traditions would inevitably spring up and compete for dominance within their divided societies.</blockquote>

Verification