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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3260587" data-attributes="member: 4937">In a world were one hero really can be worth 100 or 300 warriors, skilled retainers are certainly a resource you'd try to dominate.There are several parallels in real history.  In the bronze age, a healthy athletic and experienced armored warrior really was worth dozens of poorly trained, poorly equiped, unamored conscripts and militia.  A few of these could make a kingdom and battles really were largely decided by which side had the stronger heroes.  The Illiads account of warfare in the bronze age is pretty accurate from its tribalism writ large to the fact that the battle really turned on issues of morale and the key to turning the morale was the actions of the champions on both sides.  Heavy bronze armor temporarily tipped the scales in favor of defence sufficiently that a skilled champion really could seem invincible, and a reputation of invincibility goes a long ways toward routing a foe.  Or consider the similar accounts in the Old Testement of biblical heroes (David and his 'mighty men' come to mind).  A city state which could attract the alleigence of a few Heracles, Ajax's, David's, Samson's, or Achilles really could dominate its neighbors.  Similarly, the early medieval period with its armored knights had a similar math and political logic going.  One armored knight trained almost since birth in martial arts was worth a couple dozen unarmored peasants with spears and farm implements.   A core group of knightly retainers could win you empires.   And so we have mythic and half-mythic accounts of Beowulf, King Arthor and Lancelot, and Charleslemange and Roland (who sword Durindana incidently was said to be an artifact of that earlier age of heroes) and ultimately we have from those same myths D&D.So I'm going to first suggest that you've reinvented what is I think supposed to be the default D&D setting.  Every D&D nation, any D&D lord that wants to be anything, has to have a band of loyal and powerful retainers, and the more of these that they can keep on a leash the more powerful that nation is.I think that you can have a 'Land of Heroes' which is exceptionally powerful because it has an abundance of higher level characters in service at its court.  The problem I think this raises is how does this nation keep all those people on retainer.   At some point, I'd expect that average PC party to start looting Heroville.   Or if the PC party, then certainly one of the other adventuring parties.  And how do you get all those egos to get along?  Traditionally, adventuring parties in D&D are all rivals of each other and prone to fighting whenever they encounter one another.   Besides which, how do you end up with a surpluss of heroes without attracting them from all sorts of varied nations and cultures and ethnic groups.  But surely these heroes will bring with them thier own pre-existing loyalties, biases, philosophies, and hatreds.  It's highly unlikely that such a cosmopolitian community will just get along without bickering unless the pool of candidates is basically a monoculture initially.  And in anything but a democracy, its highly unlikely that the band of heroes is held together by anything but the personal charisma of the leige lord.  I can't see that loyalty persisting from generation to generation.  Eventually someone's kid is going to turn out to be a loser.There is an even more subtle problem with trying to recruit foreign heroes.Lawful heroes will tend to remain loyal to whatever they gave thier loyalties to in the first place.  So if you are successful, the tendancy will be to recruit mostly self-interested individuals of a chaotic disposition (this is a problem that makes it hard to recruit large numbers of loyal mercenaries of any sort).   These are hardly the ideal retainers, and the trend is going to greatly effect all of the problems mentioned above.The streets are probably safe because thier are adventurers around?  I'm not so sure.  I'm of the opinion that one person's hero is likely to be another person's bandit.  After all, what are adventuring parties known for if not pillaging, murdering, and looting?</blockquote>

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