Warfare in a 4e fantasy setting

[kieza]

Since the other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=239695)veered more towards 3.5 and eventually got moved to the 3.5 forum, I thought I'd start the 4e version.

The new topic: given the existence of magic based on the 4e arcane, divine and primal classes, what is mass warfare going to look like?

My thoughts:
-Spellcasters will be less powerful, but still useful and maybe more common than in 3.5. (It's easier to survive low-level combat and become more effective.) They'll be used more for direct combat and logistical support, and less for their mass buffs.
-Specifically, wizards and other controllers are essentially man-portable light artillery, easily concealed and with no supply constraints. Leaders like the cleric are good at buffing small groups of soldiers, as well.
-Rituals will be important. Linked Portal is a big one (creating dependence on a teleport network, incidentally), as are the scrying and communications rituals. There might even be research into weaponized rituals.
-Flight is pretty difficult to attain. I never bought into the "armies of flying soldiers" concept in 3.5, because a flying soldier is essentially skeet, but it's much harder in 4e. Conversely, an army that can make it work (flying soldiers with really good armor and weapons) will have a sizeable advantage.

[hamishspence]

Are we presuming that characters other than the PCs will use the DMG rules for NPCs with PC classes?

That might limit the utility somewhat. Still quite powerful though.

[Tegu8788]

The idea of battle lines would alter drastically. Normal "martial" combat would still function normally, but if a firing line of wizards can cast magic missile from a distance and throw up shield, especially if they sure a floating disc to get tactical advantage, it doesn't matter how many fighters, rogues, warlords, or melee rangers you throw at me, my wizards can float protected out of range. Arcane characters would have a distinct advantage.

Think about martial combat we have in our history. Pepper the target with spears and arrows until both sides run out, minimal attrition. After that, one or both sides will charge, a front line of shield bears using brute strength to push the line back and forth, few causalities. Once a line is broken, out come the swords and axes and hammers, and the side that wins the push sweeps in and engages in ideally one-on-one combat, here we have the majority of injuries and deaths.

With arcane magic that ranged combat becomes really lethal. Teleporting would allow you to bypass the shield line and strike anywhere in a formation and then teleport back out. By my estimation this gives arcane a big advantage over martial.

Divine would be able to handle ranged combat better than martial, and with paladins I'd bet the pushing the battle line would be a challenge for the martial group. Once in melee avengers, paladins, and clerics would also be a good challenge to the martial forces. The far greater ability to heal gives the divine the ability to survive long enough to simply wear down the martial source.

Primal is similar to divine, having strength at range and in melee. Being able to mess with the actual battlefield itself can not be overstated. Terrain is key in combat, and being able to always have that advantage would give them a major boost.

Shadow is just pure strikers, if they can get through the battle line they will slaughter the martial classes, otherwise they will get picked off until they break and retreat.


If you are going to mix the classes up through, then all bets are off. More than thinking about how each side would fight, would be how to counter each side. Then how to counter the counters. It becomes an arms race to see which side eventually can bring the bigger stick to bear.

[Raimun]

I think spell casters would actually be a bit more powerful in an actual battle than in standard dungeon skirmishes... with some complications.

In regular 4e skirmishes, you'll be lucky to line three enemies to a single blast or burst, without first moving some of them... which requires actions, Powers, coordination and doesn't mean all the would be targets will remain in the kill zone.

In a battle with actual formations, even the lowliest Burst 1 or Close Blast 3 could hit nine warriors.

That's assuming those nine warriors won't gank the robe guy. Blasting them from the orbit isn't really an option nowdays.

[Katana_Geldar]

If you want mass combat for 4e look no further than the mass combat rules for SW Saga, found in the Clone Wars Campaign guide. I've looked through them many times just in case I want to have big battles in my 4e games and they'd require very little change.

[Fatebreaker]

Well, the classes are much more balanced in 4e than in 3.x., so more classes and combinations are viable. A paladin/bard-themed nation is not inherently rendered obsolete by a wizard/cleric-themed one. So I imagine that you'd see a wider variety.

Compared to 3.x, abilities have much shorter ranges, flying is harder to achieve, and rituals are useable by anyone. Classes no longer have an "out of spells!" limit, but likewise healing magic will only take you so far. Monsters become a much bigger end-run option than in 3.x, because they offer such odd and useful abilities which are difficult to obtain otherwise (and those abilities come with a big nasty monster to boot!).

In some ways, a semi-traditional military is still relevant. Formations of defenders with leader support clash while strikers and controllers serve as specialists.

But two things worth establishing is the following: PC vs. NPCs, and minions.

4e makes (in my eyes) a smart move by making players mechanically different than everyone else. However, NPCs can gain unique abilities relevant to their role. This makes defining what an army looks like difficult, because it's harder to establish what a man-at-arms is capable of.

Likewise, how much of the army is minions vs. non-minions? Huge formations of minions is great, but they're easily decimated by controllers or other AoE attacks. Like Raimun said, AoE attacks that clip two or three guys in a spread-out skirmish are ridiculously useful when you pack everyone shoulder to shoulder.

These are worth establishing to define a common ground.

[Beleriphon]

I'd wager the vast majority of soldiers/combatants would be classified as minions. If you have hundreds, or even thousands of combatants on a battlefield most of them should probably be minions.

Generals and such should probably classed as higher level monsters. Functionally though the stats in 4E really run more towards how they serve the game rather than being a simulation of the character. So maybe we'd look at the powers that crop up, rather than raw stats since they really are designed to interact with a small group of characters.

For example if two minions fight do they each die in one hit, or is that a function how a minion interacts with PCs? I'd lean towards a PC interaction rather than only having one hitpoint against every possible attack.

[kieza]

I'd actually kind of like to steer away from bringing the actual PC vs. NPC rules into it. Let's just say that everyone's either a PC or a minion, since the main reason NPCs have different rules is to make it easier for a DM to roll them up. (Also, let's keep things in the heroic tier, since that's the level at which players are interacting with mortal nations the most.)

I'm not actually looking for mechanics--I've got a mass combat system based on WarmaHordes already. What I'm interested in is how armies might train and field casters, given the sorts of things 4e magic can do (not super-powerful like 3.5, not trivial to fly, casters can go all day on their at-wills, etc.).

Do they have a corps of artillery wizards who stand back and use long-range, large-burst abilities? Do they have close-combat mages with blasts? Battlefield controllers or invisible assassins? How useful are Illusionists? Summoners? Scryers and Senders? Artificers and other item-enchanters? How big a role would Linked Portal alone play? Does the military have weaponized rituals for heavy bombardment or mass-buffing? How often do adventurers get involved?

[hamishspence]

4E tends to have a bit less invulnerability than 3E- even incorporeal monsters can be hit- they just take reduced damage.

This may make a difference.

The longest ranged mundane weapon (Greatbow, Adventurer's Vault) has a range of up to 50 squares (250 ft) - I think that outranges most wizard powers.

Flying by item is not likely at low level. However flying by monster is not so hard- the cheapest monster mount that can fly and has a price (in the books) is the Glidewing from Eberron Campaign setting- only 2600 GP, and oddly, higher level (7th) than the much more expensive Hippogriff in Adventurer's Vault (3400 gp, 5th level)

Teleportation Circles take a year and a day to create (Manual of the Planes) so aren't something that's likely to see use in a short war.

[Tegu8788]

With all the various rituals available, I would think communication would be really easy. So some way to intercept all the messages would likely develop. Similarly, there would be defenses against scrying.

Linked portals could also serve a good function. Have a couple ritual casting rangers, or other stealth and perception focused strikers, sneak into the enemy city, and open a portal. Now you can funnel your army directly into the city without having to march the whole way there, fight past a standing army, or break through any defenses. A fresh army suddenly shows up in a highly populated civilian area, and the battle is already half won. So there would probably be some kind of defense against teleportation around major cities. Having both cities agree on a location to fight may seem odd, but that's how the British used to do it. With portals, those options for time and place greatly change. Also, getting enforcements would be a sinch, and so would retreating. With properly warded capitals the entire might of a county could be unleashed one a single battlefield.

If you look at the average party composition, you could pretty easily turn that into a military squad. This would make most fights play like a doppelgänger fight. Think about tank warfare. A tank was functionally invincible to anything but another tank until rocket launchers showed up. Them you needed a squad of guys to protect the tank from rockets while the tank focused on killing everything else. While more complicated, I see that happening in this situation as well. Perhaps there would be a set of AoE focused soldiers that can just walk through combat with a few guards to help fight off the unblasted, but once a line of greatbow rangers or others that can hit hard farther than the AoE guys can, the line of wizards will break, and a new strategy will have to come into place.

I'd also see gishes becoming really useful. A Cleric|Fighter or Paladin|Warlock, perhaps your Swordmage|Wizard, would be more common. Having the ability to fight well at two ranges would be important. Sure your wizard can blast a coordinated squad but one hit and she's dead. This guy can teleport in with defender level defenses, and fight just as well.

A new strategy will show up, and a counter will be developed for it, and/or everyone will start using it. How things actually play out is up to you, depending on your setting. Justify it how you like, but with all these options and variables, things could go any number of directions.

[Fatebreaker]

4E tends to have a bit less invulnerability than 3E- even incorporeal monsters can be hit- they just take reduced damage.

This may make a difference.

Oh, absolutely. Key difference between 4e and 3.x here, and one well worth emphasizing.

If nothing else, it means that armies can operate outside of their comfort zone and still get by, and they're less likely to find that they've been hard-countered.


Teleportation Circles take a year and a day to create (Manual of the Planes) so aren't something that's likely to see use in a short war.

Though they would encourage long-standing alliances and shore up established empires. Heck, if you want a good backstory for why old empires fell, having some "magical disturbance" that temporarily deactivated all the teleportation circles is a good way to go. It would also make diplomacy between Circle'd allies all that more important, and if friendship breaks down, all the more important to invade now rather than let the enemy get the jump on you. Counter that with inward-facing fortifications, so anyone teleporting in is at a major disadvantage and heavily outnumbered, and so on and so forth. There's some neat ideas to follow there.


With all the various rituals available, I would think communication would be really easy. So some way to intercept all the messages would likely develop. Similarly, there would be defenses against scrying.

There should be or there are?

If such rituals exist, let's define them -- what can they do, exactly, what does it take to cast them, how long does it take to cast them, and most importantly, what book can we find them in?


A new strategy will show up, and a counter will be developed for it, and/or everyone will start using it. How things actually play out is up to you, depending on your setting. Justify it how you like, but with all these options and variables, things could go any number of directions.

Absolutely. Always worth keeping in mind.

[hamishspence]

4E has very little in the way of "strategic nuke" rituals.

The closest I've found is one in Forgotten Realms Players Guide, that, if the D&D world has the same high altitude issues (low oxygen, low pressure) can kill everyone within a 10 mile radius.

Raise Land (Level 30 ritual, 1 hour casting time).

If you make a DC 41 Arcana check when casting the ritual, then (when complete) an area of land 10 miles in radius and 5 miles deep starts floating upward (10 ft per round), until it reaches an altitude of 10 miles.

Which would (If D&D atmosphere is like ours) kill everyone there who hasn't evacuated.

[Dimers]

Since individual combats would last longer, characters with psionic augmentation would have a bit of an edge, having more at-wills to choose from and the ability to do something in-between "at-will" and "encounter" in potency. Because of the longer and lower-level combat, humans would more frequently take an extra at-will known instead of Heroic Effort.

The cost of armor and weapons is much less significant in 4e than 3.5, so battalions of plate-clad knights would actually be viable. This gives some advantage to classes that have (or can easily get) plate armor training.

Shields are much more valuable than two-handed weapons if most enemies are minions. Doesn't matter if you deal d4 or 6d6, your foe is just as dead.

Mounted Combat feat would probably be much more popular. :smallsmile:

Roles: Leaders and controllers would be a lot more important in a fight that involves minions on both sides. They'd also probably be targeted as much as possible. Defenders would require the most extra investment to have their usual value. AoE and ranged would be a high priority for all classes -- AoE at a distance, even better.

[Tegu8788]

I had not considered the psionic power source, but you are quite right. Having more options will certainly be helpful.

Does the OP want an idea of how to describe an ongoing battle, work front line combat into a campaign, allow the players to control and run armies, or something else? If it's a purely intellectual venture, then this can go a lot of different ways, and will pretty quickly fall to opinions, such as my feeling that martial source will pretty quickly fall behind.

The area where the combat takes place would also have a pretty big effect on the combat. Flat land, hilly, wooded, open ocean, mountainous path, castle sage, they all require different tactics, and things would be very different. Then there are extra fun bits, like if one side can get a couple dragons to attack the enemy camp.

[kieza]

It's a semi-intellectual venture. I'm interested in the sorts of army structures and tactics that a 4e-style setting might produce, which would inform the sort of enemies I throw at a party in a military adventure. I'm not planning on running gigantic battles in tactical combat, though.

I've already got a few interestingly-different armies fleshed out for a campaign setting. One uses Linked Portal (with the conceit that it's possible to quickly create a one-use destination circle) to constantly outmaneuver their enemies--They've got an entire branch of the military whose specialty is deploying direct into combat via portal. The elves have lots of soldiers with swordmage, warlock, and artificer abilities, which are uncommon in any other army.

[Beleriphon]

It's a semi-intellectual venture. I'm interested in the sorts of army structures and tactics that a 4e-style setting might produce, which would inform the sort of enemies I throw at a party in a military adventure. I'm not planning on running gigantic battles in tactical combat, though.

In terms of what to expect its going to depend, with the way power sources work and the way each race is described you can have two very different armies from dwarves and elves. For example you'll likely get divine and martial on the dwarves and arcane and martial from the elves.

Generally though the way 4E seems to work mechanically means that you can have any kind of dang army you like and still be able to justify its composition since the rules work differently for NPC design (essentially give the NPCs whatever abilities they need to fulfill their intended role).

That said most armies are going to composed of foot soldiers. But even racial abilities will come into the forefront. Elves make excellent archers, and probably make use of large archery contingents, while Eldarin can teleport short distances which seems useful in a battle.

Dragonborn with breathweapons also seem to be useful. Every unit they're in has what amounts to a flamethrower.