Where are hte polearms?

[Felon]

I see reach weapons in play all the time. They offer very appealing options.

Halberds, not so much. A d10 damage for a two-handed non-reach weapon isn't too attractive. Too bad too, used to see them all the time back in the day. I think they had really good damage against large creatures.

Anyway, D&D characters are adventurers, not soldiers. The weapons that serve a warrior well on the field of war aren't necessarily ideal for the multitude of situations an adventurer might find themselves in.

 

[Banshee16]

You know, following up on this, taking it to its full scale culture-wide conclusion, would be a fascinating idea.

In a high-magic world, where fireballs and the like can be expected on almost every battlefield, what sort of combat tactics would evolve? What sort [i[wouldn't[/i] evolve? What would a formation of pikemen look like? What would a cavalry charge look like? Would the shield wall ever have been developed? Why or why not?

I don't have the real-world military knowledge it would take to do something like this on my own, but it'd be a great project to participate in on the fringes, or just to buy.

Given that European armies practiced massing troops into ranks, and marching them into cannonfire, which could decimate multiple troops with each shot, I'd think it would be fairly similar to fireballs. They still did it well into the 19th century..

Plenty of polearms are useful outside of massed formations though....as the documentary showed, weapons like the poleaxe were used widely by knights in one on one combat, because they were much more effective at injuring heavily armoured knights than swords were.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

I like Stephen Erikson's take on battlefield magic. Both armies have cadres of mages whose job is basically to negate the enemy mages. The soldiers are there to protect the mages. When one side's mages fall to the other side's mages, the soldiers are quickly obliterated by the magical might of the winning side.

Very interesting reads.

That's the author of Gardens of the Moon, right? I was asking about that book in another threat. Sounds like something I should check out.

That's sort of like what the sorcerers in Robert Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" series are like also....in those books, there is some kind of stone (Chorae?) that is like an heirloom. It's very rare, but when held against the skin, it makes the person 100% magic resistant. When touched to a sorcerer, it kills the sorcerer, basically casting "Flesh to Salt" on him.

So, armies all had mages, but they spent a whole bunch of money on outfitting the nobles with Chorae, and having archers with Chorae-tipped arrows ready and waiting for the opposing sorcerers to reveal themselves, to then decimate them with a flight of arrows. The sorcerers were almost a deterent against each other. In one battle, the enemy's army had their knights ambush and slaughter the opposing side's archers...without the Chorae arrows in play, the defenders were able to get their sorcerers onto the field, and they basically annihilated the other army. But in most cases, the sorcerers stood around, without much to do, because they had to be protected.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

Effective forces will be relatively high level, with a lot of hitting power. Individual heroes will dominate a battle in a way that has never happened in the real world. Teleport / Dimension Door a few monks on top of the enemy wizards. Make your high level rogue invisible and send him to kill the enemy general. Use tamed flying creatures or magic to give you airborne cavalry to strike fast and unexpectedly.

Sometimes even in real-life, individual troops dominate....think of the Red Baron. Or that Canadian infantryman who lost an eye, and still managed to capture a platoon of 50+ german soldiers who had captured a village. Can't remember his name...they mentioned him in the news a few months ago.

But yeah, with levels and such, you'd see more of an effect from powerful individuals than you do in reality.

Banshee

 

[Hypersmurf]

I like Stephen Erikson's take on battlefield magic. Both armies have cadres of mages whose job is basically to negate the enemy mages. The soldiers are there to protect the mages. When one side's mages fall to the other side's mages, the soldiers are quickly obliterated by the magical might of the winning side.

Steven Brust gives a brief history of magic-in-warfare in Dragaera in Dragon. He talks about how generally, it's easier to disrupt major workings than to cast them, so the primary role of wizards was to make sure the other side couldn't do anything nasty. Then, for some years, flashstones - one-shot offensive spells in an item, that could be triggered by common soldiers - were very popular, with every soldier carrying a couple... right up until someone developed a spell that caused all the opposing army's flashstones to detonate in their hands. After that, people stopped using them.

At the time the book is set, he notes that the average soldier is generally safe from direct magical attack unless he's wearing a lot of metal, which is why Dragaeran armies are lightly armoured. Until the next major development in offensive magic, that is.

-Hyp.

 

[Zaruthustran]

4) Necromancy- face it- undead soldiers change the equation. Wights make dandy SEALS. Recylcling your troops is efficient. Incorporeal undead can go almost anywhere.

Tangent: my primary character is a shadowdancer, high enough level to have a shadow companion. The game really changes when you have an incorporeal undead ally totally immune to turning. He's 100% effective at scouting secret doors, checking inside chests and coffins for loot/traps/monsters, spying, and just completely breaking any encounter with animals, plants, mundane soldiers, and other creatures without spells/magic weapons.

Point being, again, that weapons dictate tactics.

-z

 

[darious777]

My $0.02 as for magic warfare... I can see pretty much all the points presented here but would have to say that in the end it all comes back to logistics.

If you have an army of 25,000 and you are facing an equivalent army of 15,000 and 10 mages with fireballs... you are still probably going to win. Up that number to 100 mages and then you're talking something different.

I would like to think that the static defense would dissappear - castles and other hardpoints would be too vulnerable to too many attacks (earth elemental sapper tunnels anyone?).

Another possibility is that mages become too valuable to use in direct combat. A cadre of flying mages could be considered something akin to an Apache helicopter unit.. except that it probably takes more than 20 years to replace even one fireball & flight capable mage.

20 years+ is a LONG time to deal with resource replenishment.

Mages might end up being of the reserves of a unit - only to be deployed when there is no other option. Or - tired of being the obvious highest priority target - the mage guilds might have come up with laws expressly forbidding all mage intervention in kingdom warfare.

There are so many variables here that it may not be really possible to envision what open warfare would be like. And that's not even considering the highest level mage spells (50+ years to replace) or even the cleric and druid spell lists.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If you have an army of 25,000 and you are facing an equivalent army of 15,000 and 10 mages with fireballs... you are still probably going to win. Up that number to 100 mages and then you're talking something different.

There are lots of RW battles where the larger armies were soundly beaten by smaller forces. Ask Persians about what Alexander the Great did to them; ask Britons about what the Roman Legions did to Bodicca's armies; ask the French about Archers from the British Isles...

If those 10 mages are equipped with the right spells (Fireball, Wall of X, Wish, etc.) and they use them properly, that larger army is in for a rude surprise.

I would like to think that the static defense would dissappear - castles and other hardpoints would be too vulnerable to too many attacks (earth elemental sapper tunnels anyone?).

Darn good points! But remember, magic is just as available to the defenders as the attackers. If you have earth elemental sappers, you can also use earth elementals against the same.

Siege warfare, though, would be VERY different. How do you starve out opponents who have "Create Food & Water?" OTOH, Dimension Door, T-port, etc. makes walls useless against a well-equipped intruder.

In fact, its very possible that siege warfare would be replaced by magically/psionically equipped assassins. You may be able to stop an army, but "lone gunmen" are much harder to stop. A cost-conscious would be "king of the world" might invest more in such assassins than in siege engines.

 

[pawsplay]

If I were a commander, the first thing I would do against fireballs is send in massed troops. The wizard is either rapidly using up 3rd level spells against low level troops, or else burning charges at 300 gp a pop. I would send waves of troops in with tower shields, to all but force a magical counter against my shield wall.

Webs and entangle versus cavalry are no worse than rolling logs, spiking the trenches, and other common anti-cavalry tactics.

Spellcasters, compared to historical artillery, are rare and very expensive. They take years, if not decades, to produce, and are not always well suited for combat by disposition. The difference between a machine gun unit and a wizard is that you don't have to send a machine gun engineer along with the unit to fire the machine gun.

Special forces units would probably include well-trained rogues and bards with UMD maxed out for their modest levels; even intermittent spells are better than no spells at all, and ultimately more cost effective than trying to field a great number of skilled spellcasters.

And how many spellcasters would you have available? Even a metropolis only has so many spellcasters, by the DMG guidelines, and many will be unpatrotic, noncombat oriented, very independent minded, or several of those traits at once.

Also keep in mind that a 1/day or 2/day greater dispel magic item is not cost prohibitive; using it judiciously could cause your opponent to expend a lot of resources on expendable magical items he will not recover, in addition to nullifying the active casting by enemy casters. Simply canceling flight, or temporarily nullifying an enemy champion's magic items, would be a huge advantage.

 

[pawsplay]

Siege warfare, though, would be VERY different. How do you starve out opponents who have "Create Food & Water?"

Summon swarm.

OTOH, Dimension Door, T-port, etc. makes walls useless against a well-equipped intruder.

Not really. During a siege, individuals can often breach a castle's defenses. Those spells would be helpful for attacking portcullis guards and so forth, but I think that just means vulnerable points would be more solidly guarded. And some key locations might be antimagical, or occuped in ethereal space.