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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5973685" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.   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.</blockquote>

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