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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2314071" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my experience, the lots of 1st level warriors model can present serious problems.   One of the most obvious that a DM will run into is that the first time you player's (say in junior high) decide to rob and loot the towns rather than the dungeons, because by the books the towns are richer and the 'monsters' easier to kill, you'll find that you've got no real tools to handle that.The next question might be, if the 'monsters' gaurding the town really are easier to kill than the ones in the dungeon, why haven't the ones in the dungeons long ago killed off the ones in the the town?  If your answer to the above conundrums is 'High Level Characters', it begs the question of why the town would bother with an army at all since it isn't good for much of anything.   What good is an army that can't defeant any of its potential foes?  Why not have an Ankh Morpork style watch to handle criminal matters and fire the whole useless army?  After all, both sides of the fight aren't getting much use out of thier army at all, so why bother?   Why not just send out the high level characters and be done with it?Another problem presented by the masses of war1's model is that very quickly, humanoids become unusable foes against PC's.  By the time you get PC's into even the mid-levels, the party can probably take on 100 War1's in a straight up fight if it has to.  By the high levels, this number probably reaches into the thousands.   To solve that problem, almost everyone creates dungeons full of tougher opponents.   But if Orc 3rd level barbarians or 4th level Hobgoblin fighters exist in some numbers, why aren't these in the 'armies'?   And if there are guard rooms of such in the dungeons, why aren't there equivalent guard rooms containing more elite troops back in the cities?   If there aren't, why haven't the armies of drow/orc/ogre/goblin/mongrelmen/etc. fighters (or whatever) long ago taken over the world?   Is it merely be humans have more 12th level characters, even though their armies are pathetic compared to everyone elses?Yet another problem is how in the world do those War1's and Com1's survive when the heroes aren't around?  You create a 'Batman problem'.  If you are me went out to become a vigilente, and patrolled the streets of Gotham, it would probably be months or years before we actually happened to come across a crime (robbery, mugging, rape, whatever) in progress.  Yet Batman happens to come across a purse snatching or jewelry robbery in progress every single night.  How does he always manage to be at the exact right place at the exact right moment to save the day?  To me, this problem is insufferable if we are trying to model something rather than simply tell a linear story.   The PC's may be necessary to save the day, but they can't be everywhere at once and the ordinary folks have to present enough of a threat that the numerous monsters of the world can simply go wherever the PC's aren't and murder or loot at will.    Do the monsters really just sit still and wait for the PC's to come and kill them?No, they are meeting foes from cultures that don't have academies at all.  The assumption is Warrior represents a class of individuals who must be prepared for combat, but are basically self-taught amateur combatants who have demands on thier time that prevent them from spending 4 hours a day in training and don't have a large body of experts standing behind them ready to repair armor, cook thier meals, mend thier uniforms and so forth.   In other words, warriors are part time combatants without formal training.   This potentially includes things like youths in a street gang, bandits, primitive tribal warriors, and anyone who lives near or in a dangerous region but spends most of thier time doing something other than fighting.  The town watchmen who spends 8 hours a day wandering around keeping an eye on things, stopping into the pub for a bitter, and occasionally knocking heads is a warrior classed individual.  The same goes for the goblin tribal member that spends most of his time hunting squirrels, cultivating mushrooms, carving out tunnels to live in and so forth.   Neither of them are full time fighters, though they can do well enough in a pinch.  If the Goblins happen to have an actual empire with 100,000 members, and a full time professional army with an extended training period (goblin boot camp), I would expect thier Worg cavalry to be full fledged fighters rather than mere warriors.I find the MM structure creates problems.   But, note that my system produces exactly the same distribution that you described - lots of low-level grunts, a few mid-level commanders, and no high-level characters (except for the PC's and thier mentors and foils).  And I also season with a few 'monsters' to taste - griffin cavalry, archers mounted on war mastadons, etc.It's just that I consider low-level to extend up to about 3rd level.</blockquote>

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