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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aulirophile" data-source="post: 5395031" data-attributes="member: 86312">The French notably did not have a strong militia tradition. The English did. Which one got raided by vikings for longer? As long as we are going to make assumptions about these fictional people, let us not insult them by making them French. Bows were what now? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="O.o" title="Er... what?    O.o"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="O.o" /> English long bows were ubiquitous, and England had a lot of forest in which people hunted with short bows. Metal arrowheads were slightly rare, but your average peasant would have a bow and 10-20 arrows and 3-4 metal arrowheads, possibly supplemented with some stone arrow heads. Irrelevant, in 4e sharp wooden arrows do as much damage as metal ones. Communications: Rituals, instantaneous. Travel: Portals, high initial cost but once setup are permanent, easily within the resources of a place large enough to have cities to begin with. Each settlement of sufficient size can have a caster capable of casting Linked Portal.Sexism: Men were required to be trained in the use of the bow in order to be called up as militia, women were not welcome except as camp followers/doxies/etc., In 4e a natural 20 is a natural 20, women can use bows! Barring old people and "children" , more then 50% your population could instantly be called upon to start shooting arrows. A dragon in an open field versus readied action bows dies vs a calculable number of arrows. An Elder Dragon will die in two rounds against roughly 1,800 people. Lesser threats aren't even worth considering, considering the advantages the Dragon has, and the scenario is not at all unrealistic: many times, in many places throughout history people have been required to maintain a weapon. Bows are cheap to make, arrows are cheap to make. Given all that, let us set up a scenario. A single epic level something that rules a small barony. He has a clever arrangement of portals in his barony for various uses (cheap from his perspective). He receives word that a Dragon is attacking part of his kingdom. He goes there personally, waits for the dragon, and using his PC-like powers he auto-prones/dazes/stun/dominate/whatevers it for one round using a Daily. It doesn't live to see another round because of the peasant archers. I feel comfortable in the assertion you don't get to be an Elder Dragon by putting yourself in a situation where being taken out by peasant archers is not only possible, but likely.And it carries over to larger numbers. 100,000 level 1 minions led by a handful of epic characters can take out 2,000 epic level creatures. In a credible war the larger population of weaker units is a real threat against a smaller army of elite units (WW2 American tanks vs German tanks). The only assumption necessary is that epic characters run into epic monsters because they go looking for them, not because they are incredibly common. So long as they are uncommon at a roughly 5,000:1 ratio with your average Halfing/Eladrin/Elf/Human/etc population, the mortals win.</blockquote>

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