Questions on medieval armies!

[Mark CMG]

Good to see you're taking the high road mark... The greatest measure of a game is if you win

*jgbrowning interjects from his migraine "I bet you play a mean game of chutes and ladders."

suzi
p.s. yes, the truely nerdy couples do tag team posts at 1 in the morning.....

Just a little friendly banter between two competitors. No need to snipe from the sidelines, please.

As to winning or losing, unlike D&D a combat oriented d20 game where there is expected to be a winner and loser requires that you go in with the intention of winning...or why play? As an old grognard who played wargames before D&D was even invented, you're damed right that I intend to win.

(I hope you feel better soon, Wobblington. When you do, let me know if you wish to back up that trash talk in a Chutes and Ladders game. )

 

[S'mon]

In my experience, many people don't use it, but D&D does allow for the caster classes to be just as common as fighter classes. Standard infanty would probably be made up of non-classes warriors, but if you had a well trained army, you would first think to make them out of trained fighters. But if you are playing in a game world where wizards are as common a class as fighters (and some people do play that way), then I could see entire armies filled with finger-wagglers. Imagine just lines and lines of just level 1 clerics and wizards and whatever you want. Imagine how many magic missiles there would be? Cure light wounds? If you had a strong religious kingdom, you might have a large percentage of paladins. Lay hands? In general, if you are expecting to win a war with numbers, and you are hoping that each man kills at least one other man, then common low level magic users might become a dominate feature in a D&D army.
Patrick

Mystara (OD&D) works like this. I ran a Thyatian (fighter-dominated) invasion of Alphatia (Wizard-dominated). One small battle featured an assault by Thyatian infantry against a position held by Alphatian boltmen - low-level mages armed with wands of lightning bolts. The Thyatians spread out their force so one bolt only killed one man, and were able to get into melee with heavy-but-acceptable losses and slaughter the Alphatian mages. Of course the Thyatians in this battle started with around 10:1 numerical superiority. Of course wands of fireball would have been a lot deadlier; for some setting-specific reason they weren't as common. Maybe the Alphatians had discovered how to make lightning bolt wands particularly cheaply.

Assuming level-distribution is similar and both sides can access minor magics, a wizard-based force won't dominate a fighter-based force IMO. Wizards are very vulnerable until they get 3rd level spells (especially Fly). 12th level Wizards can do huge damage, but are often easily killed by a 12th level fighter with a couple of potions (or spells cast on him) to enable him to detect & reach his doubtless invisible & flying opponent.

 

[S'mon]

Peasants might not wield crossbows regularly, but burghers did. The armories of the German and Swiss imperial cities (and probably the princely cities too) were full of crossbows. I'd have to review my research from last term but I seem to recall that in the fifteenth century, Nuremberg (and probably a number of other German cities too--Nuremberg was influential) required its citizens to own a certain number and quality of weapons.

So, while you may be right that peasants didn't ordinarily use crossbows, it doesn't necessarily follow that they weren't common weapons in conflicts.

I agree with this entirely. My point was merely that _peasants_ as such (persons who farmed a liege's land, not their own land, but were not directly bonded to it like serfs) wouldn't usually have crossbows - their noble lieges wouldn't be keen on seeing their peasants carrying weapons that could puncture plate armour, for one thing! For townsmen & free yeomen the crossbow was an ideal weapon, for much the same reason...

 

[Black Omega]

I like cavalry. Especially the way their use of horses makes them roll twice on saving throws. "Sorry Bob, you made your save but your horse didn't. You're now running away"

I like cavalry, but they have to be used right. Cavalry are great at flanking, mobile reserve and pursuit after the battle. Any cavalry that charge in without counter-magic support deserve to get toasted.

2. Do you make up magic that you think would occur? (magic plows)
joe b.

The trouble here is that such made up magic is very campaign specific.

 

[xrpsuzi]

I hope you feel better soon, Wobblington. When you do, let me know if you wish to back up that trash talk in a Chutes and Ladders game.

That was actually one of the few games we had available to us in India while joe was getting over Giardia (I know, he's a weak stock). But don't worry, I kicked his butt four times over

suzi
P.S. I'm interested in a system that doesn't have to have winners and losers. Sometimes, even in war, both sides "win" and I have yet to see a system that reflects that (either in consequences or experience points.) food for thought for you war guys....

 

[S'mon]

sorry, i missed that part. its probably not very accurate, though. Cippolla suggests closer to 5 million for the british isles and dropping it down to around 3 million after the plague. .

Er, a figure of 3 million in the whole British Isles post Black Death (late 14th century) ties in pretty much perfectly with a figure of 2 million for England in the early 15th century...
England was much less dominant population-wise back then than it is now, no more than 2:1 vs the Celtic fringe. But let's say 2.5 million if you like...

 

[S'mon]

Our imaginary Nation consists of 100 randomly generated towns from the DMG. It has a population of 285,000, so a real country would have around 5-10 times as many people, with a proportinate increase in spellcasters.

Not exactly - based on medieval demographics, 90% of the population would be in thorpes (under 100 people) or hamlets (100-300), in richer areas, which according to the DMG don't generate high-level NPCs. But you would get lots more low-level spellcasters, agreed. The proportions from the DMG town table are really wacky anyway - the % of classed characters actually decreases in the larger cities, it creates a small number of mostly very high-level characters in metropolises. I don't personally think it, or other encounter tables designed for fun encounters, make a suitable basis for world-building extrapolations.

 

[S'mon]

Something that seems rarely considered: the effect of magic, and other things, depends very much on the level of mobilisation & general efficiency of a country's war effort. Feudal mobilisation levels are very low compared to eg the mass warfare of the 20th century, but most of us tend to think along 20th century 'total war' lines when thinking about how D&D warfare might work. There's no reason not to run 'D&D total war', but it's not the only way to go - and histoically total war has been much more the exception than the rule.

A similar point re spellcasters - is the typical NPC Archmage or other high-level spellcaster in your game a heavily min-maxed, 'PC type' who reached his position through dungeon delving & killing enemies? If so - and this assumption fits well with eg Greyhawk - he'll have lots of combat oriented spells and will have a major battlefield impact. OTOH, in some worlds the typical Archmage may have reached that status through pursuing esoteric challenges in magical research, planar philosophy or whatever, and never toasted a single goblin with a fireball. This assumption fits much better with many high magic worlds like Mystara (where Thyatis has 200 Archmages* & Alphatia has/had over 1000). On such a world, there _may_ be war-wizards with spell lists similar to PCs, but many high-level casters may have little or no combat experience (or spells) and be almost useless in a fight unless equipped with issued magic items, that could just as easily be assigned to a low-level wizard.



*36th level magic-users in OD&D.

 

[Mark CMG]

That was actually one of the few games we had available to us in India while joe was getting over Giardia (I know, he's a weak stock). But don't worry, I kicked his butt four times over

Hardly any butt worth kicking left, then, I suppose...

P.S. I'm interested in a system that doesn't have to have winners and losers. Sometimes, even in war, both sides "win" and I have yet to see a system that reflects that (either in consequences or experience points.) food for thought for you war guys....

No losers in war...? I've heard the inverse suggested before, but both sides "win"? Maybe there are degrees of victory and maybe if both sides go in with non-competative goals that somehow still require that they go to war with one another, then it is possible for both sides to "win"...but a game where two armies come together to fight inherently requires that they do battle and that one be triumphant and the other be vanquished. I suppose you could create a seige game where no one actually ever attacks the other, you keep track of rations and supplies and play it to a point where one player acknowledges they are no longer interested in playing (and agree to a stalemate) but I really do not see the point. You'll have to bring me up to speed on this but I think maybe that you have chosen a specific meaning for "win" that is not akin to my own.

 

[S'mon]

Just a comment that I agree with those posters who've pointed out that high-level spellcasters (and other high-level characters) have much more of an impact on the pre-battle skirmishing than on the actual battlefield, assuming a large battle with at least a few thousand combatants. IMC raids, assassinations, and strikes to 'soften up' the opponent before battle are a regular feature, if time & position allow. Such tactics are most successful against a lower-magic opponent. Where the two sides are evenly matched, they are _extremely_ dangerous; the defender being in the middle of his army has a big home-field advantage and many N/PC strike teams have perished when they underestimated the enemy's strength. In my experience the attacker typically needs about a 5-level advantage over the defender (12th vs 5th, or 20th vs 15th) to make assassinations, surgical strikes & such practical. The PCs in my game (around 10th level) did manage to assassinate an enemy CR 14 ogre mage commander recently, but that was in near-optimal circumstances and the planning & battle took up an entire 4 hour game session. If the ogre mage had been less overconfident he could probably have escaped.