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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5394511" data-attributes="member: 58197">Where are you getting these numbers? This is militia--farmers taking up arms to defend their homes, not a professional standing army. There was a while in medieval England when every able-bodied man was required to have a longbow and be trained in its use. In a country with a strong militia tradition--and in a D&D world, that ought to include pretty much everywhere--I should think you could call up as much as 10-20% of the population to defend a settlement, and do it on very short notice, too.Obviously, militia wouldn't have nearly the training and discipline of a professional force, and an epic-level threat could often rout them by sheer terror. But don't underestimate the willingness of people to fight for their land.Now look at it from the dragon's perspective. Dragons aren't dumb. What's the tradeoff here? If the dragon wins, it gets a paltry town's worth of loot; maybe a few trinkets from the mayor's house. If it loses--it dies. That's a bad gamble even at highly favorable odds. The richer targets, like a duke's castle, will be correspondingly more "hardened," with stone walls and professional soldiers guarding them.The end result of this is that a dragon, even an elder or ancient, isn't going to just fly about wreaking havoc. When it gets hungry, it will raid an outlying settlement, snatch up some livestock or peasants from the farms on the periphery, and vanish back into the night. When it wants plunder, it will look for a merchant caravan. Direct dragon attacks on towns and cities will be rare, because they depend heavily on the dragon's ability to catch the town off guard. Once word spreads that a marauding dragon is ravaging the land, people will make plans and be ready for it.And dragons are a really extraordinary case. They're one of the hardest foes for a "town guardsmen" force to take on--intelligent, highly mobile, with lots of area attacks and a big "shock and awe" factor. A typical high-level monster threat looks more like a gang of ogres or giants; they're big, they're bad, but they won't fare well against a fortified settlement, and a strong kingdom could mount a punitive expedition to hunt them down and wipe them out.</blockquote>

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