Questions on medieval armies!

[Victim]

Cool.



Let me know when the system arrives that you feel gives you the best opportunity to show off your abilities, and we'll play it out. Of course, you're stacking the deck since you can claim, even after the fact, that any system where I kick your butt will not have met your parameters but kicking your butt will be enough for me.

It's great. Neither of us can ultimately lose, because we can just blame the system.

 

[DM with a vengence]

One thing about D&D is that levels scale exponentially. One properly equipped 10th level character could break a non-magical army numbering in the thousands. It's even worse when you consider the effect monsters with spell-like and supernatural abilities can have on the battle field. Let's look at Dragons and Evil Outsiders.

A dragon is the equivalent of bomber, it flies, it's tough, and it does a lot of damage. However the real problem comes with Young Adult and older dragons. Young Adults get Fearsome Presence, which extends out to 150 feet, Will DC 20+ or beome panicked or shaken. Since most of an army has less then 5 levels, a few quick flyovers by the dragon could rout an entire army in under a minute. Anybody left is easy fodder for the dragon's breath weapon and litany of attacks. The main weakness of dragons is that they often aren't properly buffed, but with Army Casters standing by, they sould go into battle with Mage Armor, Shield, Protection from Arrows and/or Elements, Cat's Grace, Bull's Strength, Endurance etc. A dragon could even carry an invisible cleric with a Wand of Cure Moderate wounds. The only way to defeat such a dragon would be to have a group of champions challange it, however by then you're army's already halfway home.

Many Evil Outsiders get Animate Dead as a spell-like ability. If you summon some of these with Planar Bindings, they can fly invisible behind enemy lines raising fallen soldiers as zombies. A sudden attack by the undead in the rear would not be a pretty thing, and as many demons and devils get fly, invisibility, and Teleport w/o Error as spell-like abilities, they would be nearly unstoppable. Even more fun would be sending them to enemy villages, killing and animating the inhabitants, and having them attack other villages. War in a D&D world would be particularly unpleasent, like WW1 faught with 2000 technology.

Just more rambling, I'd really like to write a book on this or something...

 

[jester47]

Balance doesn't mean that nothing changes. Modern armies for advanced countries have access to missiles, bombers, tanks, maybe nukes. That's balanced. But wars today aren't fought the same way as medieval wars, WWI, or WW2. ICBMs balanced each other, but they still changed the military and political situation.

Because both sides can have flying characters with ranged attacks, each side will have a tough time marching guys through unfortified areas. So you might have forces defending static fortresses with lighting quick raids intended to neutralize the enemies elite characters, or whatever.

It would be like aircraft in WW1. Eventually the flyers would just start shooting at each other rather than the army. In fact the spellcasters of the army would probably be under constant attack by each other, in effect neutralising thier opponent(s) while the army moves.

 

[Mark CMG]

It's great. Neither of us can ultimately lose, because we can just blame the system.

Perhaps you and I could play a series of games with each of the systems that are coming out and make some sort of comparative report on them collectively...?

 

[S'mon]

I would say, actually, that magic would be a lot more prevalent in armies, given what may be in armies within the world. For example.

On the good side: 500 pikeman

vs

On the bad side: 5 gargoyles

I think we can just write off the people who probably can't do 16 points of damage a hit.

If you expect to be fighting damage-resistant monsters, you use weapons with a high CRIT multiplier - great axes are good, lucern hammers (x4 crit) would be perfect. Warrior w ST 14 and great axe does 3d12+9 dmg per critical hit. If your War 1 troops are ambushed by gargoyles though, their natural run-away reaction is probably best; leave it to the 4th level officer with a +1 weapon to deal with them (one at a time: the other levelled troopers can hold off the other 4 gargoyles).

The other trick if you have a 7th level cleric, distribute Greater Magic Weaponed arrows to your archers before the battle. That's at least 50 archers equipped w +2 arrows per 4th level spell slot.

BTW, for level distribution for mundane troops (Warriors) I use 75% 1st level, 25% level 2+, halving number at each higher level.
Eg:

500 troops:

375 Wr1
62 Wr 2
31 Wr 3
15 Wr 4
8 Wr 5
4 Wr 6
2 Wr 7
1 Wr 8 commander.

Probably the top half-dozen men would have magic weapons. There'll probably be a few low-level adepts or clerics and maybe a low level wizard providing support. This force would have no trouble dealing with a few gargoyles: even if the leaders had no magic weapons they can always Power Attack.

 

[S'mon]

(double post removed)

I think the quite enlightening conclusion that comes out of this discussion is that D&D rules actually give rather a good basis for magical medieval feudal warfare, with small bands of superbly equipped knights & heroes fighting each other, and peasant levies regarded as pretty much useless, there only to cheer on the glorious heroes.

A problem with appraising the impact of D&D magic is that people have traditionally tended to assume the existence of professional armies, which in the real world existed only from the 18th century onwards, and in particular the 'mass citizen army' - huge numbers of (1st level, in D&D terms) soldiers, which in the real world date only from ca 1800 around the time of the French revolution. This style of army dominated warfare for 200 years, but it's very arguable that we are now returning to a more medieval paradigm, with the emphasis on small groups of 'knights' - whether those are special forces or Apache attack helicopters, and the mass citizen armies disbanded (eg the UK now has only 100,000 men in its army) or relegated to impotence - like Iraq in the last Gulf war, or the effectively useless conscript armies of mainland Europe.

 

[S'mon]

As for a small number of mostly high-level characters in metropolises, for every 15th level person, you have 128-1st level caster, 64-3rd level caster, 32-5th level casters, etc....

As per DMG: x2 number at half the level, so 1 15th gives 2 7th, 4 4th, 8 2nd, 16 1st.

A metropolis allows for 4 rolls, so roughly speaking multiply above by 4 to get number of 1st levellers. Still not a huge number of low-levellers.

I don't know where you got your figures from? Not the DMG, anyway. Not that your system (double number at 2 levels below) isn't perfectly reasonable, but it bears no relation to Monte's rules.

 

[Carnifex]

(double post removed)

I think the quite enlightening conclusion that comes out of this discussion is that D&D rules actually give rather a good basis for magical medieval feudal warfare, with small bands of superbly equipped knights & heroes fighting each other, and peasant levies regarded as pretty much useless, there only to cheer on the glorious heroes.

A problem with appraising the impact of D&D magic is that people have traditionally tended to assume the existence of professional armies, which in the real world existed only from the 18th century onwards, and in particular the 'mass citizen army' - huge numbers of (1st level, in D&D terms) soldiers, which in the real world date only from ca 1800 around the time of the French revolution. This style of army dominated warfare for 200 years, but it's very arguable that we are now returning to a more medieval paradigm, with the emphasis on small groups of 'knights' - whether those are special forces or Apache attack helicopters, and the mass citizen armies disbanded (eg the UK now has only 100,000 men in its army) or relegated to impotence - like Iraq in the last Gulf war, or the effectively useless conscript armies of mainland Europe.

The idea that professional armies did not exist before 1800 is untrue, I'm afraid. Now, if we talk about national armies, there are plenty of cases where you'd be more accurate. However, professional troops existed in abundance as mercenaries, and there were various times when a ruler of a nation would use money for the war effort to hire large numbers of merc troops instead of putting his own levies into the field.

And if you think professional armies only existed from 1800 onwards I have to point you towards the Ottoman timar system - the timars and zeamets providing an easily assembled force of sipahis.

 

[xrpsuzi]

As per DMG: x2 number at half the level, so 1 15th gives 2 7th, 4 4th, 8 2nd, 16 1st.

We are reading the same DMG... Just an unclear DMG . The example that follows the sentence you are referring to says "For example, if the highest-level fighter is 5th level, then there are two 3rd level, and four 1st level fighters."

The two sentences seem to contradict themselves..... But if you go by the example, then you have more and more classed people (percentage of the population-wise) in your core communities. But if you have your own campaign with different demographics, then these numbers do not apply.

Thanks for pointing out that sentence, I hadn't seen the discrepancy from the "rule of thumb" and the example before.

suzi

 

[S'mon]

We are reading the same DMG... Just an unclear DMG . The example that follows the sentence you are referring to says "For example, if the highest-level fighter is 5th level, then there are two 3rd level, and four 1st level fighters."

Monte took 5 and divided by 2 = 2.5, he rounded it up to 3 (strictly speaking he should have rounded down to 2 in 3e) for the first iteration. To balance that, when on the next iteration he took 3 and divided by two to 1.5, he rounded down to 1. So the example fits his rule, not that I think it's a good rule. Your rule is better, although Monte's highest levels-of-NPCs by community rules are too high for most larger communities in my game. His wealth by community rules also gives crazy results for larger towns.

Re professional armies pre 1700 - obviously I wasn't discussing mercenaries; I take the point re Ottoman empire though (or the Roman empire, for that matter!), I was over-generalising slightly.