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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2316631" data-attributes="member: 4937">I could answer that question in one of two ways.  The first is, the DMG/D&D has long held the view that the overwhelming majority of all 'people' out there - whether humans, orcs, or goblins - were War1's.   If you have any sort of rich political enviroment and a world with a living history, its envitable that some of these societies will come into conflict.  If that happens, and the DM chooses for whatever reason to march out armies of low level warriors - which he's explicitly encourage to believe exist - then envitably the PC's will come out against one side or the other with pretty devastating results.  The second is that at some level "Why?" is probably a pretty good question.   Why do masses of Hobgoblin war1's descend out of the hills when a half dozen human high level characters could defeat them handedly?  Why maintain armies of war1's, when the only thing such armies are good for is resisting - other armies of war1's - and even then they aren't very good at that.In my experience, not really.  The local militia is better off being productive citizens than wasting thier time getting killed fighting wars when a handful of high level characters can handle the situation easily.   Why presume that the high level characters have been busy trying to destroy the one ring?  Maybe they've been busy trying to manage kingdoms, set up trading companies, negotiate treaties, and fight off terrorist cults?As I've said before in this thread, these aren't abstractions.   They've happened before in campaigns that I was a part of, including ones in which I was a PC.  Abstractions are when 20th level barbarians are fighting completely uniform armies of mooks with bows on an open plain and the barbarian is for some reason fighting to the death rather than waiting until he's lost half his hit points or so and then using his fast move to get out of there, leaving behind hundreds of dead war1's on the field of his slaughter.   That is an abstraction. These are realistic examples drawn from actual play experience.   I've been the 11th level M-U fighting hordes of low levels, in order to protect low levels which owe allegiance to me from having to do so, in order that my low levels can do useful things like make me money (so that I can continue to expand my base of power).  I've been the DM and seen hordes of low levels carved up by good tactics from a party of characters that aren't that high of level.   I am most certainly not speaking of the merely theoretical.   I'm advising DM's reading the thread about how it will actually work out if you approach these problems with a mixture of D&D informed mechanics/abstraction and real world informed military knowledge.   D&D demographics simply will not lead to any thing like real world historical combat, and the more 'realistic' you try to be the more painfully obvious that fact will be.</blockquote>

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