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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SHARK" data-source="post: 468545" data-attributes="member: 1131">Greetings!Hey Emirikol! Thanks! How are you? Are you a Marine? You should E-Mail me!<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Indeed, the Romans were the masters of warfare. They weren't superior to their enemies as individuals--for as individuals, many of the Germans, and many of the Celtic barbarians of Gaul and Britain were in fact, head and shoulders taller than the Romans, weighed more, and were stronger. For raw courage, they were superior as well. That was the heart of the barbarian peoples, from Britain, to Germania, to Dacia, to Spain, and to Africa. They were all individually strong, and fearless in battle.Those qualities though, were in some ways what beat them. The Romans won their wars because they were organized, well-equipped, fiercely disciplined, and led by excellent commanders that approached warfare from a professional viewpoint. The Romans fought in wars all the time, and they trained and trained and trained. The enemies that faced them just did not approach warfare the same way, and they paid the price for it. Even the Persians, though numerous and well-equipped, and while occasionally delivering a defeat to the Romans, were usually defeated by the Romans' superior discipline and leadership. What really kept the Persians independent had far more to do with the size of the land involved, the sheer distances, and the difficulty of the Romans in supplying a large enough army to march through it all, and remain supplied long enough, to conquer it all. These kinds of geographical features and realities combined with the efforts of the Persians to frustrate the Romans from completely conquering them. The same could be said for Scotland, Hibernia, and Germania alike. Still, these factors that I mentioned must be aggressively used by the DM to make them have any kind of application, otherwise then warfare is just a matter of who has the more bodies to throw into the meatgrinder, and who gets the fireball off first. Well, that isn't the prime consideration in warfare, and even in a magical environment, the virtues and skills that the Romans mastered would be critical to their domination of the fantasy battlefield as well. The Romans would be quite prepared to integrate the use of magic into their arsenal of war, and would do so in far more organized and effective ways than their enemies, who often see Wizards and such as being "isolated in their towers" or some other nonsense. For some reference, see some of my articles about my Thandor Campaign with the Vallorean Empire. I think there is stuff in "How would you defend a Mountain Fortress" volume I and volume II. Volume I is in the archive section, and volume II is floating around here somewhere.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Good stuff!Semper Fidelis,SHARK</blockquote>

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