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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5394476" data-attributes="member: 58197">Certainly yes, by fighting them. You underestimate what fifty 8th-level minions can accomplish with bows and longspears. It's quite doable.In fact, after crunching some numbers and looking at the results, I'm revising my opinions. A lot of people on both sides of this debate, including me, have been taking for granted that an epic-level threat is simply beyond the ability of "town guardsmen" to handle. But, y'know... now that there is no longer any such thing as damage reduction versus ordinary weapons, that isn't true any more. Through the magic of natural 20s and the law of large numbers, a sufficient number of human soldiers can take on ancient dragons and demon princes and emerge victorious.Moreover, "sufficient number" is often lower than you might think--certainly lower than I thought when I started doing the math. Suppose a human soldier is a minion who deals 8 points of damage per hit, and hits on a natural 20. Suppose further that 50% of the minions are in a position to attack at any given time (the rest are infantry who are out of reach of the threat, or archers whose line of sight is blocked).Then against a foe with 1,000 hit points, who kills 5 minions per round, you need, on average... 222 minions to win. That's a substantial force, but well within the ability of any decent-sized town to field. I played around a bit with Lolth from Monster Manual 3 and found that with 480 men, fighting in an open field, you can force her to discorporate even with the most generous assumptions on her behalf (e.g., any burst or blast attack hits the maximum possible number of targets, Lolth's attacks never miss, a dominated foe always kills one ally per turn, etc.).Still thinking through the ramifications of this, but epic tier is clearly not as inherently wahoo as I had thought. Powerful though they are, epic creatures cannot simply wade through armies and expect to survive. A hundred epic-level monsters can be overwhelmed by ordinary mortal humans; you may need twenty or thirty thousand of them to pull it off, and a leader who can inspire them to suicidal heroism, but you can do it.</blockquote>

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