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World Building: Army building
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9051182" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>This is generally not a question a novice GM needs to answer since it usually only comes up like years after you start playing when you've reached high levels of play and the PCs have become lords with kingdoms, and that might not even be the style of your first campaign but something you take on as a novelty after playing more traditional adventure paths.</p><p></p><p>However, the way you set up for that question is to firmly establish at the beginning of play what the demographics of your society actually are. That is, what does an "average" NPC and an "average" population look like. If the PC's run into a city guard, what are his attributes? What is his class? What is his level? Or if guards are monsters, what are their HD and abilities? What percentage of the population is classed and what are the distribution of levels? </p><p></p><p>I could go into a long description of what choices I've made about levels and demographics, but that wouldn't I think the details would be particularly useful. The important thing is that my choices are designed to make NPCs competent but not heroic and they are not focused as some demographics are on stopping high level PCs from dominating the environment. As a result, PC and NPC lords can recruit competent and effective armies, but those armies won't be filled with campaign changing heroes. No units of 10th level fighters or entire companies of youthful willing patriotic 5th level wizards.</p><p></p><p>Likewise, my demographic choices is that all "people" are classed and leveled like PCs and are not monsters the way you'd typically see in 1e or 4e or 5e. I have that preference because I got really frustrated with NPCs and PCs use different rules back in 1e and was moving away from that choice in my own play by giving monsters explicit Dexterity, Constitution and levels (if they were "people" like Elves or Goblins) already in 1e. So 3e moving fully to that was something I embraced strongly as already being my preference. </p><p> </p><p>Once you've established your demographics, then you have three choices. Either you can absolutely ignore that completely and just treat battles as pure story and decide for yourself by fiat how the battles go. Or you can use a tactical combat determines the outcome of strategic combat model using a methodology similar to Pendragon's "Book of Battles". Or you can go all the way to translating the individual characters into some sort of battle system where the figure stats determine in some faction the unit stats. The simplest way to do this if you have combat that is similar to the real world would be to have 1 figure stand in for 100 figures and run it like tactical combat except that death if 1 figure means that like 50 NPC die and the rest scatter or something of that sort. However, you are going to get into complexities when 100 2nd level archers fight a single old red dragon that will require some sort of complex battle system. I'm not aware of a good choice for 3e, though we did use 1e Battle System back in the day with some degree of success.</p><p> </p><p></p><p></p><p>Generally, it depends on the culture and need, but with a typical medieval economy standing professional armies tend to be less than 1 combatant per 1000 population. Levied armies that can be mustered for a season tend to be about 10 times larger than that, but after a few months they have to go home. At Hastings in 1066, the future of the 2+ million inhabitants of England was being determined by about 10,000 defenders - about 0.5 combatants per 100. Note that "barbarian" cultures typically have lower population but can muster warbands that approach 100% of the fighting age male population owing to the lack of need to take care of farms to sustain their population. </p><p></p><p>Fantasy cultures tend to have standing professional armies approaching the size of modern professional standing armies in terms of percentage of population owing to the fact that most people don't care about yield of wheat per acre and other detailed simulation when writing a story. I personally tend to use 0.8 combatants per 100 population, and 8 combatants per 100 population for levied troops.</p><p> </p><p></p><p></p><p>Very much depend on whether you have rules for fighting in formations and how common spells like fireball are and what the range of spells are. I have deliberately modified the rules of my game as well as the demographics of my world to make spellcasters on a battlefield less impactful than you might expect. I'd done things heavy infantry effectively gets evasion versus attacks like fireball because I have rules for shield walls and turtling up, and I've nerfed the range of spells relative to missile weapons that leave spell casters exposed to ranged attack, saving throws versus spells are easier than RAW, and I also have bonus hit points (based on size) at first level that mean the damage from low level spells is less impressive than you might expect. Combine this with the relative expense of something like a wand of fireballs, and the scarcity of young able-bodied wizards who are relatively high level and willing to fight in anything but a defensive action, and you get magic isn't unknown on the battlefield but it doesn't dominate it. If an army might have 1 combatant per 200 population, then it might have 1 war wizard per 20000 population which is enough to use wizards as special forces but not enough to field units of wizards that totally dominate the battlefield. Your hypothetical of 60 5th level wizards in my campaign looks like 60 senior citizens 6 CON and 6 DEX each mustered in an emergency to defend a kingdom of a million citizens. And it better be an emergency, because they won't be happy about it and it's a bad idea even for a king to meddle in the affairs of wizards without good reason. "Some other ruler might take the throne" isn't an emergency. It needs to be something like, "Everyone is going to be turned into mindless undead or eaten by a dragon unless you do something."</p><p></p><p>If you don't give some thought to this you might want to consider a world where warfare as we understand it doesn't exist, because if fighters are tier 7 combatants that don't even do fighting well, then it's likely armies consists of monks (if no weapons are just as good as weapons, monks are much cheaper to field than fighters) and spellcasters (if casting spells is more powerful than martial attacks, then armies of casters are better than armies of martials). My biggest problem with that is that the less like the real world your fantasy world is, the harder it will be to imagine it and make it consistent.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9051182, member: 4937"] This is generally not a question a novice GM needs to answer since it usually only comes up like years after you start playing when you've reached high levels of play and the PCs have become lords with kingdoms, and that might not even be the style of your first campaign but something you take on as a novelty after playing more traditional adventure paths. However, the way you set up for that question is to firmly establish at the beginning of play what the demographics of your society actually are. That is, what does an "average" NPC and an "average" population look like. If the PC's run into a city guard, what are his attributes? What is his class? What is his level? Or if guards are monsters, what are their HD and abilities? What percentage of the population is classed and what are the distribution of levels? I could go into a long description of what choices I've made about levels and demographics, but that wouldn't I think the details would be particularly useful. The important thing is that my choices are designed to make NPCs competent but not heroic and they are not focused as some demographics are on stopping high level PCs from dominating the environment. As a result, PC and NPC lords can recruit competent and effective armies, but those armies won't be filled with campaign changing heroes. No units of 10th level fighters or entire companies of youthful willing patriotic 5th level wizards. Likewise, my demographic choices is that all "people" are classed and leveled like PCs and are not monsters the way you'd typically see in 1e or 4e or 5e. I have that preference because I got really frustrated with NPCs and PCs use different rules back in 1e and was moving away from that choice in my own play by giving monsters explicit Dexterity, Constitution and levels (if they were "people" like Elves or Goblins) already in 1e. So 3e moving fully to that was something I embraced strongly as already being my preference. Once you've established your demographics, then you have three choices. Either you can absolutely ignore that completely and just treat battles as pure story and decide for yourself by fiat how the battles go. Or you can use a tactical combat determines the outcome of strategic combat model using a methodology similar to Pendragon's "Book of Battles". Or you can go all the way to translating the individual characters into some sort of battle system where the figure stats determine in some faction the unit stats. The simplest way to do this if you have combat that is similar to the real world would be to have 1 figure stand in for 100 figures and run it like tactical combat except that death if 1 figure means that like 50 NPC die and the rest scatter or something of that sort. However, you are going to get into complexities when 100 2nd level archers fight a single old red dragon that will require some sort of complex battle system. I'm not aware of a good choice for 3e, though we did use 1e Battle System back in the day with some degree of success. Generally, it depends on the culture and need, but with a typical medieval economy standing professional armies tend to be less than 1 combatant per 1000 population. Levied armies that can be mustered for a season tend to be about 10 times larger than that, but after a few months they have to go home. At Hastings in 1066, the future of the 2+ million inhabitants of England was being determined by about 10,000 defenders - about 0.5 combatants per 100. Note that "barbarian" cultures typically have lower population but can muster warbands that approach 100% of the fighting age male population owing to the lack of need to take care of farms to sustain their population. Fantasy cultures tend to have standing professional armies approaching the size of modern professional standing armies in terms of percentage of population owing to the fact that most people don't care about yield of wheat per acre and other detailed simulation when writing a story. I personally tend to use 0.8 combatants per 100 population, and 8 combatants per 100 population for levied troops. Very much depend on whether you have rules for fighting in formations and how common spells like fireball are and what the range of spells are. I have deliberately modified the rules of my game as well as the demographics of my world to make spellcasters on a battlefield less impactful than you might expect. I'd done things heavy infantry effectively gets evasion versus attacks like fireball because I have rules for shield walls and turtling up, and I've nerfed the range of spells relative to missile weapons that leave spell casters exposed to ranged attack, saving throws versus spells are easier than RAW, and I also have bonus hit points (based on size) at first level that mean the damage from low level spells is less impressive than you might expect. Combine this with the relative expense of something like a wand of fireballs, and the scarcity of young able-bodied wizards who are relatively high level and willing to fight in anything but a defensive action, and you get magic isn't unknown on the battlefield but it doesn't dominate it. If an army might have 1 combatant per 200 population, then it might have 1 war wizard per 20000 population which is enough to use wizards as special forces but not enough to field units of wizards that totally dominate the battlefield. Your hypothetical of 60 5th level wizards in my campaign looks like 60 senior citizens 6 CON and 6 DEX each mustered in an emergency to defend a kingdom of a million citizens. And it better be an emergency, because they won't be happy about it and it's a bad idea even for a king to meddle in the affairs of wizards without good reason. "Some other ruler might take the throne" isn't an emergency. It needs to be something like, "Everyone is going to be turned into mindless undead or eaten by a dragon unless you do something." If you don't give some thought to this you might want to consider a world where warfare as we understand it doesn't exist, because if fighters are tier 7 combatants that don't even do fighting well, then it's likely armies consists of monks (if no weapons are just as good as weapons, monks are much cheaper to field than fighters) and spellcasters (if casting spells is more powerful than martial attacks, then armies of casters are better than armies of martials). My biggest problem with that is that the less like the real world your fantasy world is, the harder it will be to imagine it and make it consistent. [/QUOTE]
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