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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5394556" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think you're drastically overestimating the utility and capability of such forces. The entire history of medieval warfare demonstrates the almost uniform total ineffectiveness of this kind of system. Norse raiding parties roved all over the countryside of northern France for 100 years looting practically at will and rarely, if ever, ran into serious opposition. The problems are manifold. First of all the population is HIGHLY rural, so basically if you have a Duchy with say 250,000 people in it maybe 3-4 thousand of them might live in anything resembling a town. The rest are scattered hither and yon across the countryside. When the bad guys show up getting them mustered requires a very considerable amount of time. Remember, there is no system of communication besides sending people around the countryside at horse speed at best. Even a well oiled militia will probably take DAYS to muster. By then the action has long since played out.The other issue here is that you simply cannot afford to be constantly calling up the militia. The same 20% of the population that are your militia are also your main pool of labor. Those people are out doing vital agricultural work.Check out for instance Harald's response to the invasion of England by William. The Fyrd was called up, but most of them were unable to muster and Harald eventually engaged with a force of less than 10,000 men, probably much less, out of a population of at least a million. There are other problems as well. Logistics was very poor and underdeveloped. Even if you COULD gather together a substantial number of fighters in one place they would run out of food in short order. Disease and other issues would ravage your army pretty quickly too. On the whole mass mobilizations were infeasible and ineffective in a medieval context. You might manage to get together a bunch of men and drive off moderate threats, but relying on a militia as any kind of feasible defense in the long term or against a major threat didn't even work in historical medieval Europe and would be unlikely to work in most D&D campaign worlds either.I think actually the case from the dragon's perspective is quite good. He's enormously more mobile than any army. He's able to concentrate all of his force trivially on one spot, and can scout the enemy with impunity. He's going to ALWAYS strike unguarded places, and few places are going to be guarded because if the local humans muster a large force he's simply going to ignore it. In a few days the militia will go home, starve, etc. In the mean time he's out burning their farms, and they can't possibly defend more than a few of them. The defense is effectively a lost cause.I'd say even a low paragon adult dragon won't find your average human society much of a challenge. Their only actual response that will be effective is to gather up a band of heroes and have them try to off the dragon. Well, dragons are certainly one of the toughest types of monsters in this scenario, but again look at what the Norsemen did in France. Defense in this case was largely ineffective. Now, they had ships (mobility) and their bases were practically invulnerable. A bunch of bands of giants and humanoids however could probably pull off raids without too much trouble.</blockquote>

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