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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6295175" data-attributes="member: 58197">Bombs and incendiaries weren't invented in the 20th century. Such weapons have existed since ancient times, and cannons and knights coexisted for quite a while. What makes the difference in modern warfare is mass production. Billions of artillery shells were fired in the World Wars, each one of them the equivalent of a 3rd-level spell slot*. Unless your army can field a corps of 18th-level evokers, wizards don't pack anywhere near enough ammo to recreate WWII. Furthermore, while artillery can hit targets miles away, the range of fireball is a mere 100 feet. Longbows outrange it by a factor of six. You have to be practically on the front lines to cast it, exposed to every archer the enemy's got... and if you order friendly soldiers to clump around you with shields, you invite a fireball from your opposite number.A low-magic setting with few wizards would look a lot like late medieval/early Renaissance warfare, with wizards more or less substituting for cannon. A setting like Forgotten Realms would look like neither medieval warfare nor modern; it would be completely its own beast. Even in FR, there aren't enough wizards to recreate a modern battlefield, but there are more than enough to transform warfare by acting as scouts, saboteurs, infiltrators, and assassins. It would be like war with medieval weapons but modern information technology.*Edit: After some more thought, I realized this is the wrong comparison. An artillery shell isn't a fireball--it's a meteor swarm. The fireball is essentially a grenade. So your 18th-level evoker can play a howitzer for 2 shots per day; then she's just a grenadier.</blockquote>

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