The army behind the army

[Celebrim]

Sure it is relevant. When there are no heroes present the armies rule. You seem to think that heroes are everywhere.

No, I don't. I think that, under certain D&D demographics, its not relevant whether an army is present. The locals will just shrug and say, "Yeah, you could kill us, but then you'd have to answer to the heroes when they inevitably come along."

The real problem here is that you are preexisting the existance and concept of an army in a world where the fundamental laws of the universe make such a concept improbable. It's like answering a question about this world with, "Ahhh, yes.. but magic." Start with the assumption that the world is filled with heroes and postulate the successful creation of an army.

Bad thing is, in most settings those are rare...

First of all, we aren't dealing with 'most settings'. We are examining the consequences of a world where victory goes to the brave rather than the bigger batallions. So we can dispense with discussing all the worlds where that isn't true and save them for a different thread of conversation. And secondly, it is not true that 'most settings' have heroes 'rare'. Most published D&D demographics and most published D&D campaigns have heroes sufficiently common that it is not explained why armies exist. FR is an example, and there are several others, and I note that FR at least tries to explain it by having average members of armies be 4th-6th level fighters (which produces its own problems with the settings internal logic).

No, without garrisons you can't rule anything.

Sure you can. There aren't garrisons in most villages, towns or cities either now in the modern era or especially in middle ages. In the middle ages, the era from which we draw the myth this 'victory to the brave not the battlions' is drawn on, there are real parallels to this world without armies. For one thing, there was almost no such thing as a standing professional army. Moreover, it's not usual to keep the peace with your standing army. You don't need garrisons to rule, and arguably, during the middle ages, the peasant class didn't care who was in charge so long as they respected thier historical priveledges and kept the taxes at the same rate. Wars were for nobles (heroes); it was the very basis of noble priviledge that they would protect the peasant class and keep them out of their squabbles. Peasants barely participated in wars as such.

How to make sure that the conquered village/town is actually doing what you want?

You don't generally care what they are doing so long as when your tax collector comes around they pay up. So all you really need is the aforementioned armed bureacrats. If some towns gives the armed bureacrats trouble, he just says, "Pay up or I'll summon my Lord, and you know what sort of trouble that will mean."

Keep a hero in every town?

In sense, "Yes." You enfuedate every hero whose allegiance you can muster and distribute them around the kingdom as point defense.

Then you hardly have heroes left and have to rely on armies.

Your logic does not follow. You basic problem here is that you are trying not to have the world work according to the premise, because you don't like the consequences of the premise. I can't be blamed for that, but I assure you that it is quite easy to reach the world of the premise via the D&D rules set.

So you just send some heroes with the army. Army + heroes > lone heroes.

Not necessarily. Crowd of toddlers + band of heroes < band of heroes. The problem you get into is that at some level 'n', ordinary soldiers are not only no longer relevant, but because of the supply problems that they represent, because of their visibility and lack of stealth, because they represent extreme threat to themselves and their allies if someone bounces a ball with a Symbol of Confusion into their midst, and so forth the army actually becomes a serious liability. If 'n' level characters exist in any numbers, then the army becomes just a way to get a lot of your citizens killed and make your people demoralized.

In WW2 infantry was, at least in the beginning, pretty useless against tanks and aircrafts. But did nations stop using infantry?

Bad analogy. We know that the real world generally favors big battalions both by observation and the fact that we know it doesn't have superheroes in it.

You run a very strange game.

I didn't run that game. I run a gritty game. I was a PC in that game. It was strange, but it was an interesting change of pace from my normal fare. And yes, it started out with armies and all the other assumptions in it, but it pretty quickly became clear that with high end D&D PC's (and NPC's) armies were mostly decorative unless you did some rules alteration.

Cut that (by destroying the mines, etc) and even they get problems. And break their magic stuff and they have a hard time getting it back.

Sure, but the problem with all this guerilla warfare stuff is that the heroes just do it better. Destroy the mines? "Hmm... I teleport without error to the mines, summon a greater earth elemental, and order it to dig up some diamonds. Ok, now I cast a divinition of some sort to find out how annoyed me, teleport there and cast a Storm of Vengence to kill the entire rebel army. Then I'll summon up a few Invisible Stalkers and order them to paint "Thus it happens to any that thwart Lord V." on the walls of the dead men's homes in the blood of their families." (Or some variant thereof.) Break their stuff? Get real. First level characters don't have anything that could break a +5 sword even if they could get a hold of it.

First level characters don't mess with high level characters. And in any world where high level characters exist, they would have learned that long long time ago.

Also what are the enemies 17th level heroes doing? They can fortify a place like heck. So, siege.

Do you know what the word 'siege' means? It doesn't mean merely assaulting a fortified place.

 

[Celebrim]

I REALLY doubt you run your campaign this way From most of what you post, you don't seem interesting in running a "Super Friends Boss the World" campaign.

Good. Glad you pay attention.

I assume you see how incredibly boring that kind of campaign world would be.

It wasn't boring at all. It was the most interesting game I was ever in that I didn't run. Sure, it got a bit stale after all while, but it was epic, grand, lavishly detailed. And it was different.

<Shakes head> I'd never allow this crap as a DM. Again, I'm surprise if you would. If it starting going this way, if the peasants didn't get them with poison, eventually something like those would happen.

My point is not to tell someone what they should or shouldn't run. My point is to advise them that, if they want to read about real world logistics, make sure they create a world sufficiently like the real world that what they learn is applicable. Nothing is worse than doing what you think 'makes sense' when all your assumptions are wrong.

As for your example with the gods, there is a limit to how fun that is as well.

 

[Balesir]

Tut, tut - you are treading on cherished imaginary constructs. I predict pitchforks. And lit torches.

 

[Derren]

Start with the assumption that the world is filled with heroes and postulate the successful creation of an army.

I do and I still come up with armies.

We are examining the consequences of a world where victory goes to the brave rather than the bigger batallions.

And how does that work? Does a 12 year old always automatically win over a hero because he is "more brave"? If the world works that way than heroes are useless because untrained peasants or children beat them.

You propose a world so silly that it could only come from a Monty Python sketch and expect us to simply accept it with no explanation of how that should work?

I can't be blamed for that, but I assure you that it is quite easy to reach the world of the premise via the D&D rules set.

Because of the 20 always hits mechanic enough archers can kill pretty much everything unless DR is involved. Give them the ability to penetrate DR and an army can waste everything with losses.

Not necessarily. Crowd of toddlers + band of heroes < band of heroes.

But you just have established that not combat power but instead bravery wins. And the toddlers going into battle are obviously much more brave than the highly trained heroes with superior equipment.
That leads to the interesting conclusion that heroes become weaker and weaker the more experienced they are as by your definition someone strong can't also be brave.
You have to decide if still combat power decides battles, in that case armies still exists because they can kill everything except the most powerful heroes (and even they have troubles fending off an army) or if only bravery counts and in that case heroes are useless too as a brave commoner can kill them.

 

[haakon1]

we aren't dealing with 'most settings'. We are examining the consequences of a world where victory goes to the brave rather than the bigger batallions. So we can dispense with discussing all the worlds where that isn't true and save them for a different thread of conversation.

I think this is why we're vehemently disagreeing. Derren and I had a different view of what we're talking about than you did, Celebrim.

In the middle ages, the era from which we draw the myth this 'victory to the brave not the battlions' is drawn on, there are real parallels to this world without armies.

The relevant quotes are (IMHO):

"Fortune favors the brave." -- Terence, Roman playwrite, 2nd century BC

"Fortune is always on the side of the big battalions."-Marie de Sevigne, a French noblewoman in the 1600s (Louis XIV era)

"Give me some men who are stout-hearted men,
Who will fight, for the right they adore,
Start me with ten who are stout-hearted men,
And I'll soon give you ten thousand more.
Shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder,
They grow as they go to the fore.
Then there's nothing in the world can halt or mar a plan,
When stout-hearted men can stick together man to man."
-- Oscar Hammerstein, 1927.
The song is about how a few stout-hearted men can inspire an army, not that they are better than an army, as I always assumed.

''Who dares wins" -- British Special Air Service motto, World War II

I'm not sure that either theory (numbers or elites) is the property of any particular era. I think both are have a nugget of truth, probably always have, and probably always will.

 

[Celebrim]

And how does that work? Does a 12 year old always automatically win over a hero because he is "more brave"?

I thought it was understood, from the context and from the quotes that the context were drawn from, that 'the brave' was a euphamism for the heroic elite. The contrast is between small elite band having 'martial virtue' and the large conscription army.

You propose a world so silly that it could only come from a Monty Python sketch and expect us to simply accept it with no explanation of how that should work?

If you leave D&D magic as is, in pretty much any edition, then you render the conventional army obselete. This has been demonstrated by me and to me many many times. No, you can decide if this is 'silly' if you like, but if you ever play high level games where uber-powerful characters take on armies, and you have a reasonably RB set of players, you'll see what I mean.

Because of the 20 always hits mechanic enough archers can kill pretty much everything unless DR is involved.

Well, sure, if the small elite team of commandos is stupid enough to meet an army in open battle, then yeah. But against a reasonably compotent set of players with high level characters that is just not going to happen. At the very least, they'll attack at night while the army is encamped. They'll disrupt command and control by assasinating leaders, killing sentries before they can react, and using silence spells to squash alarms. They'll take advantage of the fact that you can't hit what you can't see, that there is a 50% miss chance firing into total darkness AND you have to guess where to fire. They'll use area of effect spells to kill encamped soldiers 100 or 200 at a time. They'll summon creatures with DR/magic to rampage through the camp and distract and disrupt defenses before units can develop cohesion and mass. They'll abuse spell mechanics that were balanced on the assumption that anyone high enough level to cast them would be facing giants and dragons. They'll fly high above the army and attack with impunity. They'll snear at what low level mages or clerics try to do to respond, and prioritize killing them the next night. And if the defenses do become organized, they'll cast invisibility or transportation magic and disappear into the night... but not before poisoning the camps water supply.

Regardless of edition, four to six high level characters can take out an army of several ten's of thousands of first level characters without really breaking a sweat. They can probably take on a thousand in pitched battle, cast mass heal and be good to go. They can probably destroy the better part of an army of several thousand in a single night. Unless it has some equally high level characters to baby sit it, then by the time an army can muster, get its baggage train together, and march into the next desmanse, they are mostly dead and the ones that aren't are throwing there weapons away and fleeing into the hills because moral broke.

There are ways to compensate if you want epic battles with large armies to be logical. There are ways that you can abuse the rules in low level characters favor (how depends on the edition). But my point is that while it's great to read real world military history and theory, it often isn't applicable in D&D unless you try to make the rules allow for it. For example, D&D warfare - left untouched by the rules - probably looks a lot more like WW2 than antiquity. There is a well known 'law' in military science that as the lethality of weapons increase the distance between soldiers increases with it. Formation warfare, without ammendments to the rules, is rendered obselete by the presence of arcane magic. Large masses of men in a small area is rendered obselete by elite teams of leveled characters. Castles can't be designed according to the Edwardian style most familiar to Anglos. And so forth. And that's to not even address how magic effects the modes of production and the economies of a world.