NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="leporidae" data-source="post: 2320689" data-attributes="member: 19624">Great thread. 'Who would win in a war?' was one of the questions that interested me when I started up my first 3.0 campaign after many years away from D&D. The world was just starting to recover from a magical apocalypse so the new powers didn't have any history to look back on to see what would be the most effective tactics (sort of paralleling me relearning the rules). My experiences were closest to what Celebrim has been talking about. I ran fairly large scale combats (100 - 200 participants) on several occasions between groups that I thought would give a representative sample of what a would occur on the battlefield in a war between the factions. Once the power level of the characters reached about 8th level, low level creatures (1st or 2nd level) on the battle map became mostly irrelevant to the battle. If they massed up to swarm high level fighters, high level magic-users would mow them down with spells. When they spread out to avoid spells the fighters could pick their battles, and wear them down without taking significant damage. On the other hand, I also found that greatly widening the scale of the battle could change things, perhaps indicating that better tactics on my part, or minor changes to house rules could have a large impact on high vs low battles, as gizmo33 mentions. For one battle I used 30x scale (1 inch = 150ft.) to represent several hundred low level archers spread out across a rocky valley, with a force of several dozen ogres hidden in strategic spots, led by a few mages who were invisible and could fly but weren't high enough level to really hurt the party (only 5-7th though the party didn't know that at the time). They mainly coordinated the lower level units.The party consisted of about 12 total (PCs + NPC allies) 13th - 14th level characters. The mobile fighters (there was a reason that boots of speed became known as boots of brokenness) charged in and started killing everyone they could reach while the mages used up all their long range spells (to reduced effect because of the rocky and steeply sloping terrain). The mages were nervous about getting into medium spell range (where they could be pincushined by the long bows if the lurking mages dispelled their invisibility) and zoomed around looking for the enemy mages. Meanwhile the slower moving party members (clerics and a paladin) were swarmed by ogres, once the fighters (of various specializations) were out of sight. The fighters were slowly accumulating melee and arrow damage, and eventually realized (they had become somewhat arrogant) they were cut off both from healing and quick escape. The clerics and paladin cut their way free, but were forced to retreat even further away from the fighters. Eventually two of the fighters retreated carrying the bodies of two fallen companions. One of the mages flew down to rescue the remaining fighter, and faced off against the enemy mages (who had been conserving their magic missiles for such an opportunity) she forced them to flee, but ended up needing rescue by the other two magic users.With standard damage rules half the party would have died (I house ruled no death until 2Xnegative CON, but resurrection essentially required divine intervention), instead they had to quickly retreat to friendly territory, and were far more cautious travelling overland after that.</blockquote>

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