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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 2318633" data-attributes="member: 1264">I largely agree with Gizmo that the answer (uhm, what was the question again? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) must lie in the demographics of the army and the general population.IF you want a world in which mass armies are useful, then the number of higher-level soldiers shouldn't outweigh the threat posed by the lower-level ones. That way, it's not just a matter of the higher-level commanders having to "baby-sit" the lower levels, because it's the lower levels which form the bulk of the power in the army. Otherwise, we're just going to see small high-level strike teams fighting each other, not mass armies. Let's start with those 100 War1 for example, but now add to that 50 War2, 20 War3, 10 War4, 5 War5, 2 War6 and a single War7 to lead them. Just by the raw EL numbers, those 100 War1 should pose a more serious threat than any single level of the officer hierarchy. Also keep in mind that for those 100 War1 we began with, there will be a significant number of support troops of other NPC classes. Experts and (especially) Adepts come to mind. These will typically be more abundant in the general population than PC classes such as Cleric and even Fighter. Let's say you get one Adept for every 10 War, so 10 Adp1, 5 Adp2, 2 Adp3 and one Adp4. Now you start to add the ability to cast 2nd level spells to your "grunt" army... Invisibility / See Invisibility, Web, not to mention Bless, Obscuring Mist, etc. All that gives you a common "cannon-fodder" type unit, led by a sprinkling of adequately competent veterans. By no means a crack combat unit, as evidenced by the large numbers of low-level soldiers and the lack of PC classes. But one that is *far* more useful and far more likely to be able to take on a high level party than just those 100 War1 by themselves.I guess the basic idea of mass armies in D&D has to be to defeat the assumption that anything X levels lower is essentially not a challenge. Sure, the raw math tells us that one 19th level character should be equivalent in power to 512 1st level characters, but we all know what's going to happen in that case. The challenge in building an efficient army is to sprinkle in just enough higher-level support characters that the math *does* work out, and the 1st level characters can leverage their numbers without being made completely irrelevant. The higher level ccharacters aren't there to do all the work, they should be there to enable the lower-level masses to be effective.</blockquote>

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