Armies in D&D Settings

[Amphiox]

The conversation in various threads concerning how the Order can survive against Tarquin's army has raised the point that a group of high level adventurers like the Order can really decimate a LOT of level mooks in very short order.

But this raises a question to me regarding the utility of armies in D&D settings.

Quite simply, armies should not exist unless they are useful. Nations don't go to the expense of raising and maintain armies unless they are useful. If the rules are such that a well balanced party of mid-level adventurers can easily take down a large army of low level mooks, then nations in the setting will be spending their defence budgets on hiring teams of mid-level mercenary adventurers, and not on raising large armies.

So, unless large armies CAN defeat teams of adventurers, and defeat them easily, in a D&D-based world, large armies should not exist. Any that have would have been wiped out long ago by teams of superior adventurers, and any nations that bothered to maintain armies would have been conquered long ago by nations that instead spent their resources on hiring and equipping small groups of adventurer units. And the first ambitious adventuring party that reaches epic levels should have conquered the entire world.

Therefore, if we see armies in a D&D setting, we know immediately that in this setting, armies CAN, and MUST, be able to defeat teams of adventurers, and do so without sustaining losses so great that hiring (or training) teams of adventurers instead of raising armies is actually the cheaper option for rulers.

And we KNOW this is the case in the Stickverse, because it is canon that Tarquin was unable to conquer and hold the Western Continent openly. If it is impossible for armies to beat high level adventurer teams then Tarquin and his team of near-epic adventurers could have just conquered the entire Western Continent themselves, wiping out each and every army sent against them on their own.

So given this, what should an army look like in a D&D setting? The requirements are that they must be able to beat most adventurer teams in open battle, and the total cost of raising the army plus the losses that army would take when fighting an adventurer team must be less than what it would take to just create that adventurer team itself. Except for that cost requirement, there are no limitations on how many troops you can have, what you can equipment them with, how many levels you will train them to, and what distribution of classes you will have within your ranks.

[EmperorSarda]

But this raises a question to me regarding the utility of armies in D&D settings.
First, see this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html).


Quite simply, armies should not exist unless they are useful. Nations don't go to the expense of raising and maintain armies unless they are useful. If the rules are such that a well balanced party of mid-level adventurers can easily take down a large army of low level mooks, then nations in the setting will be spending their defence budgets on hiring teams of mid-level mercenary adventurers, and not on raising large armies.

You're assuming that Tarquin raised this army to fight high level adventurers. Given how much Tarquin has conquered, the army is quite useful. As it is right now, it's sort of being used as a hammer as individual soldiers go to attack and there is no captain leading a concentrated charge (that we see at least).

Also going back to Azure City, Hinjo says (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0467.html) that they can kill hundreds more. Not all of them. Plus there is attrition. Without V, the likelihood of running out of potions and heals before the whole army is defeated is high. So you cannot say that just because the Order has killed some 30+ mooks that they can defeat an entire army.

[Leecros]

The conversation in various threads concerning how the Order can survive against Tarquin's army has raised the point that a group of high level adventurers like the Order can really decimate a LOT of level mooks in very short order.

But this raises a question to me regarding the utility of armies in D&D settings.

Quite simply, armies should not exist unless they are useful. Nations don't go to the expense of raising and maintain armies unless they are useful. If the rules are such that a well balanced party of mid-level adventurers can easily take down a large army of low level mooks, then nations in the setting will be spending their defence budgets on hiring teams of mid-level mercenary adventurers, and not on raising large armies.

So, unless large armies CAN defeat teams of adventurers, and defeat them easily, in a D&D-based world, large armies should not exist. Any that have would have been wiped out long ago by teams of superior adventurers, and any nations that bothered to maintain armies would have been conquered long ago by nations that instead spent their resources on hiring and equipping small groups of adventurer units. And the first ambitious adventuring party that reaches epic levels should have conquered the entire world.

Therefore, if we see armies in a D&D setting, we know immediately that in this setting, armies CAN, and MUST, be able to defeat teams of adventurers, and do so without sustaining losses so great that hiring (or training) teams of adventurers instead of raising armies is actually the cheaper option for rulers.

And we KNOW this is the case in the Stickverse, because it is canon that Tarquin was unable to conquer and hold the Western Continent openly. If it is impossible for armies to beat high level adventurer teams then Tarquin and his team of near-epic adventurers could have just conquered the entire Western Continent themselves, wiping out each and every army sent against them on their own.

So given this, what should an army look like in a D&D setting? The requirements are that they must be able to beat most adventurer teams in open battle, and the total cost of raising the army plus the losses that army would take when fighting an adventurer team must be less than what it would take to just create that adventurer team itself. Except for that cost requirement, there are no limitations on how many troops you can have, what you can equipment them with, how many levels you will train them to, and what distribution of classes you will have within your ranks.

It's not a large army though, it's likely little more than a batallion. Also PC's tend to be so rare in a campaign setting that nations would still need to rely on armies to get anything done. Also as mentioned in Azure City, even an army is a threat to a party of adventurers. You hit on a natural 20, period. That means that at worst 1/20 of all soldiers will hit. Assuming they all have longswords, that's 1d8+str. An average human has between an 8-12 str score, but these are trained soldiers soldiers, not average humans, so let's give them a 14. A nice, round number. That means that each of these groups of 20 people are dealing at most 10 points of damage. A level 15 fighter with a 16 constitution would have a median hp of about 127. That means that it would take about 250 level 1 men with a decent str score to kill a level 15 fighter, barring feats or healing.

Assuming it's a party of 5 level 15 fighters then yes definitely they can deal a lot of damage...but considering the fact that armies tend to number in the tens of thousands and not the thousands. An army could still handle a party of adventurers.

Why are armies still used then? Well, because typically high level characters or NPC's are either very rare, or they just don't care. High Level wizards could decimate an entire army. Also there's a lot of circumstance that i didn't take into account. Most soldiers in any kind of trained army are not going to be level 1, they'll probably be level 5. This means that they'll hit more often and deal more damage and be able to take more hits. Also there's more than just swordsmen in an army. There's archers and (if they're smart) spellcasters. Also the adventurers would have feats. A fighter with great cleave could take out a dozen low-level people in one round.



However, these circumstances complicate things. TL;DR:

An decent sized army would be able to decimate a non-epic adventuring party, Tarquin hasn't sent his entire army against the OotS, likely just a battalion, and the reason why nations don't use high-level adventurers instead of armies is because they're just too rare to rely on or even to bother to take into account when planning a war.

[Scow2]

The issue is that High-level adventurers like the OotS are aberrations, on par in power with Dragons and Greater Demons. Armies are useful against other armies and nations with reasonable demographics. Heroes above level 10 break everything, though.

Also... there are a lot of statistical errors in saying "At worst, 1 in 20 soldiers will hit" - First off, it's an ~50 chance of having at least one in 20 soldiers hit... but another, only slightly smaller chance of getting MORE than expected hits in (statistics don't like to line up with output very well), and in order to even GET that chance to hit, they need to be able to make the attack in the first place. A guy with DEX 16, Combat Reflexes, and a Longspear on a 15' or narrower bridge can hold out against infinite mooks armed with non-reach melee units.

[Amphiox]

First, see this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0417.html).
You're assuming that Tarquin raised this army to fight high level adventurers. Given how much Tarquin has conquered, the army is quite useful. As it is right now, it's sort of being used as a hammer as individual soldiers go to attack and there is no captain leading a concentrated charge (that we see at least).

I'm saying that he HAS to have raised his army with the idea that, if required, they will be able to fight at least highish level adventurers. Otherwise there would be no point in having that army instead of hiring highish level adventurers to do his fighting for him.

An army that cannot defeat at least mid-level adventurers is utterly useless in a D&D setting. The first time battle is joined, the opposing commander merely has to walk into the nearest town, go to the tavern, recruit 5 mid-level mercenaries, and wipe out your army with them. YOU could do the same. So why would either of you even bother HAVING an army at all?

And the army of a major power or superpower in the setting would need to be able to defeat EPIC level adventurer parties. If not, then no nation could ever even survive long enough to BECOME a major power.

It is true that Tarquin has conquered a lot. So who did he beat? Either other armies or teams of adventurers. If it was armies he beat, then why did his opponents send armies against him, and not simply teams of adventurers? The only reason they would do so is if teams of adventurers are not effective against his army, ie his army can beat teams of adventurers easily.

Remember that new warlords have arisen on the Western Continent almost yearly, and usually in bunches. If teams of adventurers can actually beat armies then at least one of them should have realized this by now and used adventurers instead of armies, and he would have conquered everything.

Furthermore, Tarquin has an adventurer team, one that is near-epic or even fully epic in average level. He did not use that adventurer team to fight his battles. Why? The only reason would be if a near-epic adventurer team cannot defeat armies in battle.

Thus the reality of the Stickverse, as directly demonstrated by the events as described, is that armies beat teams of adventurers in battle.

You bring up strip 417, but that is exactly my point. That strip again shows that armies beat teams of adventurers in battle.

BUT, based on many discussions elsewhere by people familiar with the rules, a team of mid to high level adventurers should wipe the floor with vast numbers of level 1 mooks. In other words, if the opposing army were made up mostly of level 1 mooks, then O'Chul's words to Haley in 417 would have been wrong per D&D RAW.

Clearly they were not wrong. And clearly we know that Redcloak's army was not made up entirely of level 1 mooks. And there is no mention of what precisely it was made up of. We do know that it had a mixture of classes and abilities and had higher level characters among the ranks.

So what WAS it made up of, SPECIFICALLY?

An effective army in a D&D setting *cannot* consist mostly of level 1 mooks.

What I'm interested is the details.

[ooOoo]

An army can hold territory. An empire is big. Guarding all the cities, borders, ports etc. will require thousands of men. Mooks are cheap and can deal with the minor threats of bandits, lower level monsters and such. You wouldn't want to hire thousands of adventurers just to patrol along the walls of all the castles in your empire.

Tarquin seems to also use his army as a police force, to keep the populace in line.

Currently the order is fighting a few hundred, maybe a thousand men - which can be called at best a small army - and is not exactly having the easiest time of it, even though they're all around lvl. 15.

[Amphiox]

Why are armies still used then? Well, because typically high level characters or NPC's are either very rare,

Tarquin stated outright that Elan could go to any tavern and easily recruit replacements for Roy and Durkon. That is only possible in a world where characters of Roy and Durkon's approximate level are common.



or they just don't care. High Level wizards could decimate an entire army.

All it takes is for a handful to care. If they are common enough that recruiting them isn't a problem, then having NONE of them care just isn't narratively plausible.

[Scow2]

Otherwise there would be no point in having that army instead of hiring highish level adventurers to do his fighting for him.Except there are more countries than High-enough-level adventurers... and most of those adventurers are in groups of 4. The demand for adventurers would far outstrip the supply, and thus armies are needed because when quality's not available, you need to break out the Quantity.

Tarquin stated outright that Elan could go to any tavern and easily recruit replacements for Roy and Durkon. That is only possible in a world where characters of Roy and Durkon's approximate level are common.Not common. They just tend to congregate around each other by Narrative Chance.

[Blisstake]

All of the above points are excellent (especially that Tarquin didn't bring an entire army), but there's one other thing: Tarquin's goal (likely) isn't to defeat them with his army; it's to wear them down until the more powerful members can swoop in for a kill. Notice how Laurin, Tarquin, and Miron haven't gone into the fray yet. It's because every hit point, every spell (Tarquin doesn't know Durkon is nearly out), and every consumable that the Order uses fighting troops are resources that they can't use later when fighting the bigger threats.

Of course, certain things, like DR and fast healing (*cough Durkula and Spiky cough*), make attrition victories a lot tougher. If the mounted troops were optimized for charging (probably not, because of the lack of lances), maybe they could be a threat to Durkon, but Roy is taking care of them pretty well.

[King of Nowhere]

but attrition works both ways. a team of adventurers can teleport in, kill a few hundred mooks, teleport out, rest, repeat the procedure another day. So, it really depends on how common are high level adventurers, because if they are rare enough, armies are still useful, siince they are generally used against other armies, and hope you'll never have to face high level people - or keep a contingency plan for that.
On the other hand, If a nation manage to get the loialty of at least a few dozen adventurers of level 10+, then in my estimation regular armies become next thing to useless, except for policing and keeping check on the conquered land, since high level adventurers cannnot be everywhere and see everywhere.

Following that principle, when I made my campaign world I decided that human armies are completely nonexistent except in really underdeveloped third world places, and that advanced nations had armies made of only three things: a few parties of mid-or-higher level adventurers, golems, and artillery (there was gunpowder). golems would be the blunt force of an invasion, cannons can take down golems, and adventurers would teleport around, trying to destroy enemy cannons, or wear down the golem armies, or go deep into enemy ground and cause some mayem, or intercept enemy teams of adventurers and gang up on them.
Only three kind of nations existed: those that had enough loial adventurers and magic that no party of adventurers could conquer them, those that could glue their lips to a strong nation's ass and be protected by their adventurers, and those that were too poor to be worth conquering by high level adventurers. anything else didn't last. there were vast areas of the world where there was no centralized power, and anyone with a few levels could conquer some land for himself, a bit like the western continent in oots. but they generally preferred to leave the place cause there was little worth conquering.
I think that's the logical consequence of a world where some people have the kind of power high level adventurers do.

On the other hand, in oots there are few enough high level people that armies still have some use. though in my opinion that is overrated. xykon and redcloak by themselves could have conquered azure city in a few weeks, just by teleporting in a safe place once they started running low on spells. Tarquin alone could have already killed all the oots, something which an entire legion cannot accomplish. if he was less lazy, he could have had his psion disintegrate the gates of the city of doom, walked in, and killed by himself all the troops in the city.
the only asset of an army, the way I see it, is that it is risky for high level adventurers to attack them because when they are low on spells and a bit weakened, about to teleport out, the enemy's adventurers could teleport in, cast dimensional anchor on them, and kill them. destroying an army makes you slightly more vulnerable to enemy addventurers, and for that armies are a bit useful.
Plus, the risk of investing money on adventurers is that they may just decide to go away with your money instead of fighting for you.

[Amphiox]

A guy with DEX 16, Combat Reflexes, and a Longspear on a 15' or narrower bridge can hold out against infinite mooks armed with non-reach melee units.

All this means is that commanders raising and training and equipping armies in a D&D setting MUST plan for a way to get past this guy on the bridge. His army cannot be solely made of mooks with non-reach melee units.


An army can hold territory. An empire is big. Guarding all the cities, borders, ports etc. will require thousands of men.

An army cannot hold territory effectively in a D&D setting if it cannot defeat a team of mid-level adventurers in battle. Otherwise your enemies will simply go out and hire five to ten teams of level 10-15 adventurers to infiltrate your territory with hit and run attacks and your empire will fall within a month.


Currently the order is fighting a few hundred, maybe a thousand men - which can be called at best a small army - and is not exactly having the easiest time of it, even though they're all around lvl. 15.

D&D RAW seems to suggest that a party around lv 15 should not be having any trouble with a few thousand level one mooks. Since they ARE having such difficulties, it stands to reason that the army they are facing is NOT make of level one mooks.

So what IS the army made of? What composition does it need to be to be giving the Order trouble?

[Blisstake]

but attrition works both ways. a team of adventurers can teleport in, kill a few hundred mooks, teleport out, rest, repeat the procedure another day.

A quote from Tarquin: "Note to self: Elf cannot teleport."

[Renegade Paladin]

I'm saying that he HAS to have raised his army with the idea that, if required, they will be able to fight at least highish level adventurers. Otherwise there would be no point in having that army instead of hiring highish level adventurers to do his fighting for him.

...

Furthermore, Tarquin has an adventurer team, one that is near-epic or even fully epic in average level. He did not use that adventurer team to fight his battles. Why? The only reason would be if a near-epic adventurer team cannot defeat armies in battle.

Thus the reality of the Stickverse, as directly demonstrated by the events as described, is that armies beat teams of adventurers in battle.
Actually, you're ignoring the major factor: Armies don't need to beat high level adventurers, because that's not their job. They don't beat them in open combat without horrendous casualties, but they do things that the adventurers cannot, namely take and hold ground. Adventurers are very good at going to a place and killing everything there, but ask four people - any four people, no matter how skilled or powerful they are - to occupy a country. It won't work. This is why real world armies maintain large numbers of regular troops instead of using special forces for everything and calling it a day.

[Amphiox]

Not common. They just tend to congregate around each other by Narrative Chance.

Which means that the moment the storyline swings to become a story about empires and wars, Narrative Chance will dictate that such a congregation will occur.

Thus, if empires and armies exist in the setting, and they clearly do, then an army MUST be capable of defeating a team of mid to high level adventurers in battle. If they could not, then they should not exist in the setting.

[Amphiox]

Actually, you're ignoring the major factor: Armies don't need to beat high level adventurers, because that's not their job. They don't beat them in open combat, but they do things that the adventurers cannot, namely take and hold ground. Adventurers are very good at going to a place and killing everything there, but ask four people - any four people, no matter how skilled or powerful they are - to occupy a country. It won't work.

Holding ground means preventing the enemy from doing what he wants with that ground.

Holding ground means that when you have your boots on that ground, you have sufficient force that you cannot be dislodged from that ground by your enemy.

If a D&D setting where adventurers exist, if an army cannot defeat adventurers in battle, they CANNOT hold ground. Their enemies merely need to walk to the nearest town tavern, recruit a few teams of adventurers, crush your army in combat, at once or over repeated skirmishes, and they'll have taken your ground from you.

Holding ground means being able to DEFEAT IN COMBAT anyone or anything that wants to take that ground from you.


Adventurers are very good at going to a place and killing everything there, but ask four people - any four people, no matter how skilled or powerful they are - to occupy a country. It won't work. This is why real world armies maintain large numbers of regular troops instead of using special forces for everything and calling it a day.

If an army can't beat a team of four people in combat. If a team of four people is supreme in the area of going to a place and killing everything there, then what you have is a situation where 1) no one should ever be attacking anything with armies. All aggressive military action should be conducted by mercenary teams of 4 high level people, and 2) No one can STOP a mercenary team of 4 high level people form going wherever they want and killing everything there. In other words, your army of large numbers of regular troops CANNOT HOLD GROUND against mercenary teams of 4 high level people.

In this situation, if armies truly cannot defeat mercenary teams of 4 high level people in combat, then the end result is a world where NO ONE can hold ground. NO ONE can establish cities. NO ONE can build countries. NO ONE can found empires. There would be no civilization, period. Merely roving bands of mercenary adventurers killing wherever they wish, pursued by more roving bands of mercenary adventurers trying to hunt them down and kill them.

[jere7my]

An army cannot hold territory effectively in a D&D setting if it cannot defeat a team of mid-level adventurers in battle. Otherwise your enemies will simply go out and hire five to ten teams of level 10-15 adventurers to infiltrate your territory with hit and run attacks and your empire will fall within a month.

There are not 5-10 teams of level 10-15 adventurers available for hire. One such team would happen to be in a tavern if Elan wandered in there looking for an adventuring party, but that's only because it's Elan's story.

Here's a question for you: Why, in the real world, do countries have standing armies instead of just having a few thousand fighter jets? After all, a big mob of grunts can't do anything against fighter jets.

[AKA_Bait]

Which means that the moment the storyline swings to become a story about empires and wars, Narrative Chance will dictate that such a congregation will occur.

Thus, if empires and armies exist in the setting, and they clearly do, then an army MUST be capable of defeating a team of mid to high level adventurers in battle. If they could not, then they should not exist in the setting.

You are ignoring the other option: Armies in the setting are not used to defeat adventuring parties. Empires have other adventuring parties with class levels for that. Those parties, like Tarquin's, may lead the armies, but in the end it is they who are expected to take out other high level characters.

[King of Nowhere]

All this means is that commanders raising and training and equipping armies in a D&D setting MUST plan for a way to get past this guy on the bridge. His army cannot be solely made of mooks with non-reach melee units.


Originally Posted by ooOoo View Post
An army can hold territory. An empire is big. Guarding all the cities, borders, ports etc. will require thousands of men.

An army cannot hold territory effectively in a D&D setting if it cannot defeat a team of mid-level adventurers in battle. Otherwise your enemies will simply go out and hire five to ten teams of level 10-15 adventurers to infiltrate your territory with hit and run attacks and your empire will fall within a month.


but a low level army can call reinforces with magic, and have your own high level aedventurers teleport in and batle the enemy.
of course you need teleport, or you're pretty much screwed




D&D RAW seems to suggest that a party around lv 15 should not be having any trouble with a few thousand level one mooks. Since they ARE having such difficulties, it stands to reason that the army they are facing is NOT make of level one mooks.

Currently the order is fighting a few hundred, maybe a thousand men - which can be called at best a small army - and is not exactly having the easiest time of it, even though they're all around lvl. 15.
So what IS the army made of? What composition does it need to be to be giving the Order trouble?

the order was deprived of spellcasters, low on hp, belkar was con-drained. what addventurers have on regular armiees is not manpower, is mobility and support. the cleric to cast heal and undo the work of attrition of hundreds of mooks that scrificed their lives to get one chance in 20 to hit once. the wizard to teleport out once the part runs out of spells. oots did not have those factors. that's why they were in trouble. also, since V cannot teleport, they would be in trouble even normally, once durkon runs out of healing. of course that would take thousands of mooks.

[Gorbad Ironclaw]

What you're assuming is that the nations in the stickverse have standing armies. Seeing as D&D is medieval fantasy, it seems likely that many of the nations, possibly Tarquin and likely the hobgoblins, use the feudal levy system. For those who don't know what that is, it's basically a form of conscription; when a war is declared, the lords put a sword or spear in the hands of any able bodied man, and tell them to fight. It allows for pretty large armies without many of the costs associated with maintaining a standing army. This is a very simplistic answer, and I'm sure I completely missed something. This could be used in favour of the adventurers, but isn't really.

As for armies not being useful, there's no way that even a high EPIC adventurer could take on ten thousand men and win. Even if they have protection from arrows, a +5 sword, and the best possible armour, they would likely die pretty quickly due to the sheer number of times they'd get hit, even if all of the soldiers are 1st level commoners (which would be a side effects of the levy system). O-chul's speech may not have been accurate mathematically, but his point certainly stands.

[Scow2]

An army cannot hold territory effectively in a D&D setting if it cannot defeat a team of mid-level adventurers in battle. Otherwise your enemies will simply go out and hire five to ten teams of level 10-15 adventurers to infiltrate your territory with hit and run attacks and your empire will fall within a month.

An army CAN beat mid-level adventurers in battle. The problem is that, although in the middle of the 20-level scale, the Order of the Stick is actually High level. Not Mid-level. Mid level is anything between 3 and 7.


As for armies not being useful, there's no way that even a high EPIC adventurer could take on ten thousand men. Even if they have protection from arrows, a +5 sword, and the best possible armour, they would likely die pretty quickly due to the sheer number of times they'd get hit, even if all of the soldiers are 1st level commoners (which would be a side effects of the levy system). O-chul's speech may not have been accurate mathematically, but his point certainly stands.The number of times an actually Epic-level character would be hit by an attack that hurts is precisely ZERO. Hits that do nothing aren't worth anything.

[Amphiox]

Here's a question for you: Why, in the real world, do countries have standing armies instead of just having a few thousand fighter jets? After all, a big mob of grunts can't do anything against fighter jets.


For one thing, a fighter jet is FAR less powerful, relative to a regular soldier than a level 16 wizard, relative to a level one mook.

A level 16 wizard in a D&D setting is a walking (flying, teleporting, etc) demi-god.

But if armies cannot thwart them, then armies in D&D worlds should not exist. No point in wasting the money raising and maintaining them.

And finally, and critically, an army in real life CAN DEFEAT AND DESTROY fighter jets in combat, even when not possessing fighter jets of their own.

[Reddish Mage]

The issue is that High-level adventurers like the OotS are aberrations, on par in power with Dragons and Greater Demons. Armies are useful against other armies and nations with reasonable demographics. Heroes above level 10 break everything, though.

Also... there are a lot of statistical errors in saying "At worst, 1 in 20 soldiers will hit" - First off, it's an ~50 chance of having at least one in 20 soldiers hit... but another, only slightly smaller chance of getting MORE than expected hits in (statistics don't like to line up with output very well), and in order to even GET that chance to hit, they need to be able to make the attack in the first place. A guy with DEX 16, Combat Reflexes, and a Longspear on a 15' or narrower bridge can hold out against infinite mooks armed with non-reach melee units.

Here's the thing, crossbowmen will get their attacks in. Natural 20 will hit regardless of whether it is exactly or approximately 5% as the number of soldiers get high enough. Enough crossbowmen and the heroes should be dead.

[The MunchKING]

High EPIC?? Unless I missed something there's no way a level 1 would ever HIT an Epic ANYTHING, much less hard enough to do damage.

[Gray Mage]

Well, the thing is that thinking things through the most logical outcome considering high levels, many things simply start to break down.

An effective army would probably need access to a lot of magic, either through casters or items, and even then I'd think constructs would be used whenever possible. I imagine territories wouldn't be as vast either.

You might want to check out the Tippyverse (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=222007) too.

[Gorbad Ironclaw]

Here we hit one of the flaws of assuming D&D is entirely realistic. If we assume this epic adventurer is all by himself against ten thousand low level soldiers with no way out except to kill them, he'd get exhausted eventually. An exhausted opponent is much easier to attack, and exhaust him enough, he falls over. This makes it much easier to kill him, because you can take away his magic items.But there are no rules for fatigue in D&D as far as I know, so that won't happen.

[Scow2]

Here's the thing, crossbowmen will get their attacks in. Natural 20 will hit regardless of whether it is exactly or approximately 5% as the number of soldiers get high enough. Enough crossbowmen and the heroes should be dead.Assuming no miss chance, and they're in range, and can draw LoS through all the bodies in the way, and the crossbows are actually capable of doing damage to the party. If there's even one wizard in the party, all those crossbows are doing diddly-squat.

[Gray Mage]

Here's the thing, crossbowmen will get their attacks in. Natural 20 will hit regardless of whether it is exactly or approximately 5% as the number of soldiers get high enough. Enough crossbowmen and the heroes should be dead.


Just because it's a hit it doesn't mean it can actually do damage (DR in its many forms), or that it can even be a hit (flight plus wind wall means that crossbows can't touch you), that the damage'll stick (fast healing and regeneration), that the target'll stand around long enough to die (teleport effects aplenty) or that he won't kill everyone/make the army rout due to AoE and BFC spells first.

[JustWantedToSay]

Also... there are a lot of statistical errors in saying "At worst, 1 in 20 soldiers will hit" - First off, it's an ~50 chance of having at least one in 20 soldiers hit...

Not 50.
1/X chance X number of times, levels off at about 63.2% chance of having at least one hit., the bigger x gets.

For 1 in 2, 2 times that's 75%
1 in 10, 10 times is ~65%
For 1 in 20 that's ~64%

The formula you want is

1 - ([X-1]/X)^X

[AKA_Bait]

High EPIC?? Unless I missed something there's no way a level 1 would ever HIT an Epic ANYTHING, much less hard enough to do damage.

You appear to have missed lucky crits and unlucky saves vs. spells. Not that I'm saying a level 1 character, or even a horde of them, is likely to do substantial damage. It's just that the possibility is there and with an infinite number of mooks etc. etc.

[NerdyKris]

It only takes one spellcaster to eliminate another. Or one fighter to block a high level fighter from the rest of the troops. An army would simply need a few high level mercenaries to fill those slots to defend against another.

Tarquin probably assumed that once his army is being sufficiently destroyed, he, Malack, his psion, and the possibly magic user would be capable of stopping Vaarsuvius. He assumed when he left that Durkon was still under Malack's thrall, that Malack was alive, and that Belkar was near death.

He had more than enough firepower to deal with the Order if they got the upper hand on his army. Now that Malack is dead and Durkon is back on their side, he might not. But it's not a sure bet that the Order can simply trounce his battalion so long as his team can fire at them from outside the ring.

[androkguz]

Well, first of all I kind of disagree with you premise. The way it really works in D&D is that armies of low level minions can't effectively attack and kill high level adventurers. But adventurers aren't good at killing entire armies. In other words: high level adventurers are very good at defending themselves from armies. They are not, however, that great at defending civilians from other nation's armies. That's why as a ruler you hire armies and adventurers.

The real use of an army in D&D is to provide support to the higher level warriors and to be at everywhere at once in a battlefield. You can think of armies as another one or two party members that cover a role in the team but still require aid.

There is also the fact that high level adventurers just don't exist by default which means that you can't always simply train 15th level wizards. Those are special guys.

But to answer what I think is your question...
If I was the one creating an army for a kingdom that fears being under attack by high level adventurers or expects to have to kill some party of lvl 12+ the first thing I would pay attention is to who is on my team that has high levels. Those people would play a mayor critical role.

Depending on my alignment I would train my soldiers to expect their families to be wiped if they don't die heroically when commanded and to get a resurrection if they do (I would pay those resurrections with the dead party's gear and the state budget. Before doing it I would have the battle scried upon to see who is and who isn't worth it).

All of the army would be trained to support our own high level adventurers the best way they can (by flanking for rogues, by being hard to kill so the assassin can get her 3 rounds for death attack, by tanking for the wizard and learning to fight under mass boosts, etc.)

There would be many teams of elites (I would expect them to be low level PC classes) that would be extremely overgeared and prepared to fight particularly troublesome adventurer types.

Anti-magic tactics would include:
-At least 1 of every 5 warriors should get the feat "Improved Grapple" and jump ASAP on into grapple with whatever wizard-sorcerer-bard or even cleric-druid they encounter. They are instructed to disarm this characters from spell component pouches, holly symbols, spellbooks, staffs, etc. Being grappled is a lot more troublesome to cast spells than taking damage from mooks and casting defensively is a cake for high levels.
-Disperse. Never be too close to your comrades. Phalanxes are good to fight cavalry, not to survive fireballs. Unless of course your commander considers otherwise.
-If possible, I would have a mage killing squadron. It would include as many strong damagers as it can and they would drink potions of fly and invisibility and sneak up on any Vaarsuvious or Xykon that is blasting from the sky.

Anti-Bigshot warriors (such as Roy) tactics would include:
-If possible, I would have a debuff squadron. It would include a bunch of magewrights, adepts, low level casters and people trained in use magic device. It would be important to have more than 30 members of a this team. They would be instructed to remain always out of melee from the target and to bombard it with the use of wands or scrolls of incapacitating spells such as Hold Person, Shatter, Blindness/Deafness, Command (drop weapon! Then a melee mook is to run and pick it up and get it away from the guy), etc. He is bound to roll a natural 1 on some save and then is when you throw the army against him.

[The MunchKING]

You appear to have missed lucky crits and unlucky saves vs. spells. Not that I'm saying a level 1 character, or even a horde of them, is likely to do substantial damage. It's just that the possibility is there and with an infinite number of mooks etc. etc.

DR Armor is available for non-epics. by Epic levels, there's DR feats.

[Amphiox]

To clarify, as it seems from some of the replies that I wasn't sufficiently clear in the OP, I'm not trying to argue that armies are useless in a D&D setting. I was trying to say that *if* armies were useless in the setting, they would not exist, but since they obviously do, then they must be.

But my question was how? How, with D&D RAW do you make an effective army in a scenario where marauding bands of evil adventurers are a potential threat that one has to defend against?

For example, can you do it by numbers alone? If level one mooks are hopeless, what about level 5. Can a several thousand strong force of level 5-10 characters beat a team of level 15-20 characters?

If mid level adventurers are common enough, you could just have your own teams standing by to counter them. But if higher level adventurers are rarer, not every nation may have access to them. What would those nations do? If the goal was to assemble a force to take out a team like Team Tarquin, and you didn't have another team of similar level, what could you do? Could you do it with an army of mostly level 5 characters? Would you need level 10 characters? Imagine that you as a ruler of a wealthy nation could break the level-wealth rules and equip your forces with equipment more advanced than their levels would otherwise allow? Or would it be most cost effective to take your 12 best level 1 recruits and train them into epic level special forces (one team and one backup team, just in case)?

[jere7my]

But if armies cannot thwart them, then armies in D&D worlds should not exist. No point in wasting the money raising and maintaining them.

That doesn't follow.

Leaving adventurers aside, there are monsters in D&D that are literally untouchable by soldiers without access to magic. They could stroll through an army of fighters without breaking a sweat, and eat the general for tea.

Your response seems to be "Non-magical armies cannot thwart these monsters, so non-magical armies in D&D should not exist." A more appropriate response would be "These monsters are really rare, and difficult to prepare for. Let's raise an army to deal with the 99% of situations we're likely to find ourselves in, and then talk about maybe hiring some specialists."

Same thing with adventurers. They're rare, and when you need to deal with them you hire specialists (or you lose). In the day-to-day business of waging war and dealing with the populace, your basic army does just fine. Taken to the extreme, your argument says that no crime boss should ever hire a couple of bruisers to guard the warehouse, because they'll get taken apart if Elminster shows up to steal this year's grain shipment. After all, in a world with high-level adventurers, low-level mooks are useless, so why waste money paying them?

This is why D&D castles have walls: not every soldier can afford wings of flying.

[stavro375]

That doesn't follow.
Same thing with adventurers. They're rare, and when you need to deal with them you hire specialists (or you lose).
I find this premise dubious. If Nale acting alone can recruit 3 Linear Guilds' worth of mid-level adventurers within the span of (presumably) a few weeks each, then how much time would an entire country need to build even a single battalion of adventurers?

And why bother recruiting adventurers anyway? What exactly is stopping militaries in the OOTS-verse from sending their soldiers on adventuring missions every few months to grind XP? Just build a fortress in a remote part of your terrority, abandon it and let the monsters move in (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0191.html), send in some soldiers to kill everything and grind XP, rinse & repeat until you have several hundred mid-level soldiers who can carve a path through every horde of low-level mooks they face.

[The MunchKING]

And why bother recruiting adventurers anyway? What exactly is stopping militaries in the OOTS-verse from sending their soldiers on adventuring missions every few months to grind XP? Just build a fortress in a remote part of your terrority, abandon it and let the monsters move in (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0191.html), send in some soldiers to kill everything and grind XP, rinse & repeat until you have several hundred mid-level soldiers who can carve a path through every horde of low-level mooks they face.

The problem is challenge rating. If the monsters are too tough, you lose all your soldiers that way. If the monsters aren't tough enough, then the XP scale will pewter out before the Soldiers can get to High levels.

Also I think when you start sending hundreds of soldiers in, what counts as a "challenge" to get XP is significantly raised.

[Reddish Mage]

That doesn't follow.

Leaving adventurers aside, there are monsters in D&D that are literally untouchable by soldiers without access to magic. They could stroll through an army of fighters without breaking a sweat, and eat the general for tea.

Your response seems to be "Non-magical armies cannot thwart these monsters, so non-magical armies in D&D should not exist." A more appropriate response would be "These monsters are really rare, and difficult to prepare for. Let's raise an army to deal with the 99% of situations we're likely to find ourselves in, and then talk about maybe hiring some specialists."

Same thing with adventurers. They're rare, and when you need to deal with them you hire specialists (or you lose). In the day-to-day business of waging war and dealing with the populace, your basic army does just fine. Taken to the extreme, your argument says that no crime boss should ever hire a couple of bruisers to guard the warehouse, because they'll get taken apart if Elminster shows up to steal this year's grain shipment. After all, in a world with high-level adventurers, low-level mooks are useless, so why waste money paying them?

This is why D&D castles have walls: not every soldier can afford wings of flying.

Your treating adventurers and monsters as extraordinary oddities. However, adventurers are certainly not rare, and the rarities of monsters are listed in the monster manual.

Its worse in many settings and in OOTS in specific, since adventurers and adventuring seems to be downright mainstream (everyone we run into seems to know all about them, and how they work, not to mention the game rules; Also even high level magical items are available at a marketplace and you have to stand in line).

Also, OOTS commoners don't seem to be living on a budget of a silver a day, magic seems a lot more common.

[Scow2]

For example, can you do it by numbers alone? If level one mooks are hopeless, what about level 5. Can a several thousand strong force of level 5-10 characters beat a team of level 15-20 characters?
A force of level 5-10 characters can, but you can't get people in that number in a concentration large enough to threaten the level 15-20 characters except as a small level 5-10 special forces team (Ranging from 5-20 individuals in any unit). Fortunately, adventuring parties higher than level 15 are very, VERY rare.

Facing an adventuring party in the 15-20 range is the same as trying to fight a Wyrm lesser true dragon (Brass/Black), Adult Greater true dragon (Red, Silver, Gold, Bronze), Titan, or Tarrasque. A party of level 15 characters is CR 19. A 4-person party of level 16 characters is CR 20. A party of level 17 characters is CR 21. A 4-person party of level 20 characters is CR "WTF!?"

[stavro375]

The problem is challenge rating. If the monsters are too tough, you lose all your soldiers that way. If the monsters aren't tough enough, then the XP scale will pewter out before the Soldiers can get to High levels.

Also I think when you start sending hundreds of soldiers in, what counts as a "challenge" to get XP is significantly raised.
Fair enough -- maybe my exploit won't work, but that still doesn't mean that creating large forces of mid-level soldiers isn't possible. For example: Azure City. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0413.html) On the eve of Xykon's invasion there were at least 100 Paladins in Azure City itself, implied by O-Chul to be a fraction of the total size of their Paladin corps itself.

The scale of the Battle of Azure City raises some questions -- the Hobgoblin horde was about 30,000 strong (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0413.html), opposed by ~10,000 low-level soldiers. Would Azure City have fared better if it structured its military the way it structured its Azure Guard, sending platoons out on adventuring missions every few months until the military as a whole is mid-level?

Quick mechanics question: Do XP requirements to level up increase with level? Because if so, the Azure Guard probably could've distributed XP among its members much more intelligently than it did.

[Gray Mage]

Fair enough -- maybe my exploit won't work, but that still doesn't mean that creating large forces of mid-level soldiers isn't possible. For example: Azure City. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0413.html) On the eve of Xykon's invasion there were at least 100 Paladins in Azure City itself, implied by O-Chul to be a fraction of the total size of their Paladin corps itself.

The scale of the Battle of Azure City raises some questions -- the Hobgoblin horde was about 30,000 strong (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0413.html), opposed by ~10,000 low-level soldiers. Would Azure City have fared better if it structured its military the way it structured its Azure Guard, sending platoons out on adventuring missions every few months until the military as a whole is mid-level?



Sending a bunch of low level Warriors on adventuring missions is a great way of getting them all killed. Plus, while it could have helped, if it worked, against the hobgoblins, Xykon could probably still kill the whole army by himself anyway. Sure, it'd take some days.



Quick mechanics question: Do XP requirements to level up increase with level? Because if so, the Azure Guard probably could've distributed XP among its members much more intelligently than it did.

Yes, not only do lower CR challenges give you less XP, but you need more XP to level (Level * 1000 for the next level).

[The Giant]

Parties of high-level adventurers don't have time to piss around with wars and sieges and such; they're busy preventing all the horrible things that fill up 3-5 Monster Manuals from taking over.

Plus, any character who gets to be high level gets to be too expensive for any kingdom to actually afford to hire, whether that's because their fees are too high or they just don't care about money as much as they care about lost artifacts. The GNP of most countries is less than the expected wealth of a 20th level adventurer. So your nation ends up with a handful of high-level folks that are personal friends or family members of the ruling class, a slightly larger pool of mid-level people who are pricey but effective, and then a lot of low-level people who are good for keeping order among the peasants or warding off goblins.

The idea that you can walk into any tavern and 2-5 adventurers of high level will be there is literally a joke. It may be how it works in OOTS, but only because OOTS is a parody. It's making fun of the fact that because every D&D game needs to start with the players "meeting" each other, lazy DMs have them all walk into the same tavern at the same time looking for work. The truth is, in an average D&D world, you can walk into a tavern and find 2-5 adventurers under 5th level—people who are just starting their career and looking for any lead they can get—and then it gets harder the higher level you want. No wizard of Vaarsuvius' level hangs out in a tavern waiting to be hired by a kingdom to go rough up the baron next door, though. If he wants money, he plane shifts to the Elemental Plane of Earth and digs out a diamond the size of a watermelon.

[Scow2]

Quick mechanics question: Do XP requirements to level up increase with level? Because if so, the Azure Guard probably could've distributed XP among its members much more intelligently than it did.Exponentially so - but then again, so does the power level of the characters. The issue with raising character's levels is that it forms a logarithmic positive-feedback loop: Higher-level characters are more likely to survive more dangerous situations than lower-level characters, and you're constantly having to replace losses, driving the "Average" level down. It's also difficult gauging the exact level of a character, usually off by one (Unless it's a Full Caster), so you end up sending out mixed-level parties. There isn't enough wealth in a kingdom to give them all even NPC-level WBL, though, making it harder for higher-level characters to be systematically "power-leveled". The strongest characters are those that seek out challenges of their own initiative (Like Miko), or are tough enough to survive hell, high water, and acid-breathing sharks that cast Scorching Ray from their heads (Like O-Chul).


The idea that you can walk into any tavern and 2-5 adventurers of high level will be there is literally a joke. It may be how it works in OOTS, but only because OOTS is a parody. It's making fun of the fact that because every D&D game needs to start with the players "meeting" each other, lazy DMs have them all walk into the same tavern at the same time looking for work. The truth is, you can walk into a tavern and find 2-5 adventurers under 5th level—people who are just starting their career and looking for any lead they can get—and then it gets harder the higher level you want. No wizard of Vaarsuvius' level hangs out in a tavern waiting to be hired by a kingdom to go rough up the baron next door, though. If he wants money, he plane shifts to the Elemental Plane of Earth and digs out a diamond the size of a watermelon.On this note... there ARE a few times adventurers of high level hang out at taverns. They're usually following intuition (Or estabilished cross-border adventuring support netowrks) to either fill lost roles in previously-established parties that can't bring their previous ally back to life, or look for someone trying to do so. However, it usually amounts to chance encounters, frequently out in the wilderness. The odds of a band of high-level adventurers recently losing a party member (And NOT on the verge of imminent collapse) and a lone high-level wanderer being in the same area are so infinitesimally small that, by the laws of Drama, it's guaranteed to happen. They defy and deny probability, not reinforce or indicate it.

[Amphiox]

You are ignoring the other option: Armies in the setting are not used to defeat adventuring parties. Empires have other adventuring parties with class levels for that. Those parties, like Tarquin's, may lead the armies, but in the end it is they who are expected to take out other high level characters.

If this were true, and if adventurers over level 10 are supposed to be rare, as others have pointed out, then national leaders in D&D settings really should be losing a lot of sleep of "Adventurer Gaps", and doing everything they can to attract adventurers into their territory, and create adventurers among their citizenry.

High level adventurers become nukes.

You might even see conspiracies between Lawful Evil nations to eliminate adventurers (except state sanctioned ones) from their territories, and to have laws prohibiting characters from attaining levels beyond level 10 (without official approval).

Lawful Good nations might attempt to pre-emptively eliminate all powerful creatures within their territories, so that no one will have a chance of obtaining the xp necessary to get beyond level 10. Level 10+ adventurers are simply too dangerous to allow to wander around freely as loose cannons.

Invasions would be prefaced by a rash of assassinations as the aggressors preface open hostilities with an attempt to purge their target's territory of adventurers that might be recruited to help defend the nation.

Really wealthy and powerful nations would be setting up schools of wizardry with the express purpose of training at least a handful of level 15+ wizards (and making sure they are brainwashed to be loyal to the state).

Pretty much all of geopolitics would need to revolve around adventurers, who they are, where they go, and what they are doing.

[Poppatomus]

But my question was how? How, with D&D RAW do you make an effective army in a scenario where marauding bands of evil adventurers are a potential threat that one has to defend against?


I am no rules lawyer, but I think the answer is items. Hire people who can make, say arrows of slaying in crossbow bolt form (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/magic-weapons/specific-magic-weapons/slaying-arrow), and give them to level one sorcerers who know how to cast true strike. Now you can create an, admittedly expensive, musket line, who will basically hit with every shot, and frequently do tremendous damage. I am sure there are other similar items out there, not to mention poisons, magic suppressors, etc . . . There are also seige weapons.

I also think that, even for this question, the catch all rule of sanity makes some sense. The DM has some freedom when the rules would give an unreasonable result (like a very inexpensive ring of true strike, that is in effect a +20 weapon), and I think it would be fair, for instance, to say that members of an army get certain bonuses to damage or to hit when they've completely engulfed you, or are firing hundreds of arrows in a round. Of course, that's not quite the world that the OoTS are in, but that's also a way to deal with it within the rules, at least in spirit.

I will mostly stay out of the argument about whether armies have a place in a world with high level adventurers and high level monsters, since you've said that's not really what this is about, but I did want to say that I think that the analogy isn't "why have an army when fighter jets exist?", but rather, "why don't police forces have fighter jets?"

[Amphiox]

Parties of high-level adventurers don't have time to piss around with wars and sieges and such; they're busy preventing all the horrible things that fill up 3-5 Monster Manuals from taking over.

Plus, any character who gets to be high level gets to be too expensive for any kingdom to actually afford to hire, whether that's because their fees are too high or they just don't care about money as much as they care about lost artifacts. The GNP of most countries is less than the expected wealth of a 20th level adventurer. So your nation ends up with a handful of high-level folks that are personal friends or family members of the ruling class, a slightly larger pool of mid-level people who are pricey but effective, and then a lot of low-level people who are good for keeping order among the peasants or warding off goblins.

It follows from this that a group of level 20 adventurers who wanted to destroy/overthrow a nation could do so, so long as all the other handful of level 20 adventurers were too busy with the eldritch abominations to care.

It seems that this is essentially what Team Tarquin did.

If you were the ruler of a small nation there might not be anything you could do about that, and you can only regard the high level adventurers as forces of nature and hope none of them notices you enough to care about destroying you.

But if you were the ruler of a very powerful and wealthy nation and you were a responsible leader, I would think that you would at least make an attempt to try to keep tabs of all the high level adventurers in your world, so that if some of them looked like they were planning on conspiring against you, you would have at least some advance warning and time to make preparations.

[The Giant]

If this were true, and if adventurers over level 10 are supposed to be rare, as others have pointed out, then national leaders in D&D settings really should be losing a lot of sleep of "Adventurer Gaps", and doing everything they can to attract adventurers into their territory, and create adventurers among their citizenry.

High level adventurers become nukes.

You might even see conspiracies between Lawful Evil nations to eliminate adventurers (except state sanctioned ones) from their territories, and to have laws prohibiting characters from attaining levels beyond level 10 (without official approval).

Lawful Good nations might attempt to pre-emptively eliminate all powerful creatures within their territories, so that no one will have a chance of obtaining the xp necessary to get beyond level 10. Level 10+ adventurers are simply too dangerous to allow to wander around freely as loose cannons.

Invasions would be prefaced by a rash of assassinations as the aggressors preface open hostilities with an attempt to purge their target's territory of adventurers that might be recruited to help defend the nation.

Really wealthy and powerful nations would be setting up schools of wizardry with the express purpose of training at least a handful of level 15+ wizards (and making sure they are brainwashed to be loyal to the state).

Pretty much all of geopolitics would need to revolve around adventurers, who they are, where they go, and what they are doing.

Any or all of those could be true, but you're making a huge assumption that nations are the factions with true power in a D&D world. They're not; adventurers have power, and kings rule at the sufferance of adventurers. Most adventuring parties owe no loyalty to any crown, and will happily overthrow any government that looks at them funny. Governments who target adventurers are governments that get meteor swarmed.

Also, remember that outside of OOTS, people don't recognize the causal relationship between fighting monsters, gaining XP, and gaining levels. People know adventurers are powerful, but the exact process is not something that can be scientifically pinned down. So it's not really plausible for kingdoms to "farm" adventurers like that.

[IW Judicator]

On top of all that there is the issue of what happens if said adventuring party changes its mind. If they decide they don't want to work for you anymore (better offer somewhere else, they discovered that their philosophical views clash with yours, they're just sick of the job, what have you) what is to stop them from crushing you? If you don't have something in reserve, like that army of mooks, then you're going to experience a very short and painful destruction of your ruling class either because of the power vacuum caused by their absence, or because the adventuring party decided to wipe you out themselves.

[Scow2]

But if you were the ruler of a very powerful and wealthy nation and you were a responsible leader, I would think that you would at least make an attempt to try to keep tabs of all the high level adventurers in your world, so that if some of them looked like they were planning on conspiring against you, you would have at least some advance warning and time to make preparations.And yet, most high-level parties have so many extraplanar and supernatural enemies that they have enough counterdivinations that there's no way to know anything about them more than what they want you to know.

[The Giant]

It follows from this that a group of level 20 adventurers who wanted to destroy/overthrow a nation could do so, so long as all the other handful of level 20 adventurers were too busy with the eldritch abominations to care.

It seems that this is essentially what Team Tarquin did.

If you were the ruler of a small nation there might not be anything you could do about that, and you can only regard the high level adventurers as forces of nature and hope none of them notices you enough to care about destroying you.

But if you were the ruler of a very powerful and wealthy nation and you were a responsible leader, I would think that you would at least make an attempt to try to keep tabs of all the high level adventurers in your world, so that if some of them looked like they were planning on conspiring against you, you would have at least some advance warning and time to make preparations.

Yep, all true. Look at a setting like Forgotten Realms; there are tiny nations that are only independent from the huge evil conquering empires nearby because everyone knows that one or two specific world-famous high-level adventurers live there.

[stavro375]

Parties of high-level adventurers don't have time to piss around with wars and sieges and such; they're busy preventing all the horrible things that fill up 3-5 Monster Manuals from taking over.

Plus, any character who gets to be high level gets to be too expensive for any kingdom to actually afford to hire, whether that's because their fees are too high or they just don't care about money as much as they care about lost artifacts.
So it's not possible to recruit the hundreds of adventurers that any noticeable military would need? Fair enough.

But it's still clearly possible to train a large force of level 3-7 soldiers -- we know it is, because Azure City did it. From a mechanics standpoint, how effective would the ~150 (I'm guessing) paladins Azure City fielded be against an army of 500 level 1 soldiers? 1000? 3000?

And why is Azure City unique in having a corps of mid-level paladins? Do the economics of sending soldiers out adventuring just not work out, or does every city-state have such a force that just isn't relevant to the plot?

[The Giant]

Also, everyone's getting it wrong with the "soldiers/fighter jets" analogy.

The real question is, "Why have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League?" And the answer is, "Because the Justice League isn't always available, and doesn't always agree with you when they are."

[The Giant]

And why is Azure City unique in having a corps of mid-level paladins? Do the economics of sending soldiers out adventuring just not work out, or does every city-state have such a force that just isn't relevant to the plot?

Mostly the, "Not relevant to the plot," point. But also, in the specific case of Azure City, they weren't there to defend the country. They were there to defend the Gate, and the country happened to be around the Gate. It was a unique aligning of a national interest with an adventurer-type interest.

[androkguz]

Given what the Giant has said about armies and superheroes adventurers I would like to post the question:
What would armies have to do to be effective against High level adventurers? I think there is many things but most require preparation

[Scow2]

If this were true, and if adventurers over level 10 are supposed to be rare, as others have pointed out, then national leaders in D&D settings really should be losing a lot of sleep of "Adventurer Gaps", and doing everything they can to attract adventurers into their territory, and create adventurers among their citizenry.

High level adventurers become nukes.

You might even see conspiracies between Lawful Evil nations to eliminate adventurers (except state sanctioned ones) from their territories, and to have laws prohibiting characters from attaining levels beyond level 10 (without official approval).

Lawful Good nations might attempt to pre-emptively eliminate all powerful creatures within their territories, so that no one will have a chance of obtaining the xp necessary to get beyond level 10. Level 10+ adventurers are simply too dangerous to allow to wander around freely as loose cannons.

Invasions would be prefaced by a rash of assassinations as the aggressors preface open hostilities with an attempt to purge their target's territory of adventurers that might be recruited to help defend the nation.

Really wealthy and powerful nations would be setting up schools of wizardry with the express purpose of training at least a handful of level 15+ wizards (and making sure they are brainwashed to be loyal to the state).

Pretty much all of geopolitics would need to revolve around adventurers, who they are, where they go, and what they are doing.In order for a Lawful Good nation to "Pre-emptively eliminate all powerful creatures from their borders", they either need to hire high-level parties, or they find the guys they sent on the task end up being the high-level parties they tried to prevent. And, they'd be giving the world high-level parties on top of a "Morally Justified Genocide" from a Supposed-to-be-Good nation.

Seriously - they're not killing the monster because they've been a direct menace to society or even 'are evil', but because they might be Experience-Fodder for adventuring parties!? A remedial course in Lawful Goodness ethics this natio needs. Hrmm... as amusing/ironic as bringing the huge spectacle surrounding a specific case of overenthusiastically misapplied mass murder that's been flaring around the threads I've been visiting into THIS thread as a joke, I think I should drop it.

However... a more morally-grey nation might accuse mid-level parties that are getting so strong as to become uncontrollable of crimes they didn't actually commit, to try and turn the local populace against them and make it easier to track them down before they get TOO strong... but this ALSO has a high chance of backfiring. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyz_2DEah4o)

[RolkFlameraven]

It all has to do with the setting. In FRCS there are country's who's whole army are made up of low to mid level NPC's, undead and golems. But that is a very high magic world.

The best point to make as to how and why army's work would be Cormyr. Between the Purple Dragon's, the Purple Dragon Knights and the War Wizards they have almost every base covered and then they also make all adventuring parties get a permit to operate and THEY can be drafted if needed.

This is why Cormyr is (one of) the most powerful country(s) on Faerun and how they can beat just about anything that is tossed their way. You use an army, they use theirs you use an adventuring parting they toss one your way. You attack with Dragons and Wizards of nigh unstoppable might? Well Vangi would like to say "hi!"

To put it simply High level adventures are WMDs and are to be thought of and used as such. They can solve almost any problem you might have but you might not have anything left once they are done.

[stavro375]

Given what the Giant has said about armies and superheroes adventurers I would like to post the question:
What would armies have to do to be effective against High level adventurers? I think there is many things but most require preparation
My first instinct is liberal application of siege weaponry. If it can demolish castle walls it can demolish adventurers... but actually *hitting* could be a major problem. My second instinct application is liberal application of archers -- you can get more soldiers doing damage and take less losses, although against an adventuring party with ready access to ranged weaponry I'm sure how much good it would do.

Maybe some sort of super-heavy crossbow, manned by a crew of 4-6 firing long-range, high-damage bolts could work? But again, a single wizard with Fly and Chain Lighting is all it'd take to ruin the plan...

[Gray Mage]

My first instinct is liberal application of siege weaponry. If it can demolish castle walls it can demolish adventurers...

I wouldn't count on that if I were you. High level adventurers can survive falls from the stratosphere and short lava baths (as in full imersion) with HP alone. They're pretty tough.

[bguy]

Also, everyone's getting it wrong with the "soldiers/fighter jets" analogy.

The real question is, "Why have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League?" And the answer is, "Because the Justice League isn't always available, and doesn't always agree with you when they are."

Would you have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League though? Wouldn't conventional militaries be pretty much worthless in such a world? After all there's not much reason to spend 3 billion dollars on an aircraft carrier or armored division if Superman's around. If he's on your side you don't need those forces, and if he's against you then they aren't going to do you any good. You are a lot better off investing that 3 billion in something like Cadmus tech, so you actually have the means to fight the Justice League if necessary. Just as a D&D nation would need to focus its military spending on having the means to fight high level adventurers.

[jere7my]

Would you have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League though? Wouldn't conventional militaries be pretty much worthless in such a world?

"Because the Justice League isn't always available, and doesn't always agree with you when they are."

[Scow2]

Would you have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League though? Wouldn't conventional militaries be pretty much worthless in such a world? After all there's not much reason to spend 3 billion dollars on an aircraft carrier or armored division if Superman's around. If he's on your side you don't need those forces, and if he's against you then they aren't going to do you any good. You are a lot better off investing that 3 billion in something like Cadmus tech, so you actually have the means to fight the Justice League if necessary. Just as a D&D nation would need to focus its military spending on having the means to fight high level adventurers.The issue's not that black+White. What if Superman's off fighting Doomsday when rebels in Elbonia threaten allies in Quarac, or a natural disaster strikes Supermegatopia while the Justice League is suppressing the Elbonian uprising? You work around adventurers, not against them.

There is a whole range of power levels, most of which are gathered around the bottom, in which armies are exceptionally effective.

[TRH]

Given what the Giant has said about armies and superheroes adventurers I would like to post the question:
What would armies have to do to be effective against High level adventurers? I think there is many things but most require preparation
If you insist on fighting adventurers with an army, then probably the most important thing you should do is enforce really, really rigid discipline. It's hard to pull off that "wearing down with natural 20's alone" gig when your army routed after taking 25% casualties, but since that's happened plenty of times in the real world, you really need to take steps to prevent that. Other than that, you'll probably need to improvise. Maybe try having soldiers throw marbles into the middle of the enemy party, since pretty much no one puts points into Balance. Have some low-level Rogues around, to fish for Sneak Attack damage. Use throwing weapons like Acid or Alchemist's Fire, since a ranged touch attack would bypass all that fancy armor high-level adventurers will be sporting. Have archers fire from behind cover, employ small-unit tactics if you feel like breaking the verisimilitude of the setting a bit, you'll need all the advantages you can get, since you're really, really praying on the dice to let you win regardless.

[Gray Mage]

Would you have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League though? Wouldn't conventional militaries be pretty much worthless in such a world? After all there's not much reason to spend 3 billion dollars on an aircraft carrier or armored division if Superman's around. If he's on your side you don't need those forces, and if he's against you then they aren't going to do you any good. You are a lot better off investing that 3 billion in something like Cadmus tech, so you actually have the means to fight the Justice League if necessary. Just as a D&D nation would need to focus its military spending on having the means to fight high level adventurers.

You also need to consider the possibility that he's indifferent to you. In that case it'd be nice to have the aircrafts.

Also, just because armies can't deal with high level adventurers, it doesn't mean they're useless, it just means that they are needed to handle the things they are in their scope, like bandits or an inhading horde of numerous but low level marauders or other low level low CR threats.

[Reddish Mage]

Given what the Giant has said about armies and superheroes adventurers I would like to post the question:
What would armies have to do to be effective against High level adventurers? I think there is many things but most require preparation

Against the likes of poorly built, poorly prepared, lacking magical items, spells and already half run down like Roy and Co. prior to V's arrival? They can probably win a war of attrition. Admittedly, they aren't going to take down Durkon.

Against a properly prepared party? One with the right spells, and the right magic items? Impossible. At some point, a DM might say the party should be exhausted from having killed so many soldiers, but by that time, realistically, the army should flee in terror. Note that such a party can also just teleport away.

Of course if you allow the army to be composed of anything other than low level fighters, that may change things just a bit. I'm sure a munchkin can figure something out assuming access to alchemy items, and maybe some low level spells and magic items, and perhaps favorable conditions for the initial attack, but seriously no its not going to happen.

[bguy]

The issue's not that black+White. What if Superman's off fighting Doomsday when rebels in Elbonia threaten allies in Quarac, or a natural disaster strikes Supermegatopia while the Justice League is suppressing the Elbonian uprising? You work around adventurers, not against them.

Then you call on Captain Atom, or Green Lantern, or Martian Manhunter, or Wonder Woman. :smallsmile:


There is a whole range of power levels, most of which are gathered around the bottom, in which armies are exceptionally effective.

Yeah, there would still be some value in having forces available to respond to natural disasters and maintain civil order, but that could be done by police or emergency response agencies just as easily as by militaries. For actual conventional military forces that are designed to fight wars there would be little point since why would you want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and tie up hundreds of thousands of your people in building and training an army that Superman could destroy in an afternoon. You would just be investing in obsolescence.

[Reddish Mage]

Also, everyone's getting it wrong with the "soldiers/fighter jets" analogy.

The real question is, "Why have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League?" And the answer is, "Because the Justice League isn't always available, and doesn't always agree with you when they are."

Interesting though is that the existence of the Justice League would change priorities in the world as far as expenditures go. I'm not enough of a comic geek to know what the Justice League has done with wars in past comics. My knowledge of the subject is that they are pretty non-interventionist since at least middle of the cold war but they don't seem the type to ignore mass-scale suffering.

[RolkFlameraven]

So you build your army, and then when Sup's comes flying down on it like a vengeful god you let him take it apart. You then prove to the UN and the public that your army was doing nothing but defending itself from attack/participating in war games and that Sups is out of control rogue agent that needs to be brought to heel for interfering in the interests of a sovereign nation without being asked.

I think that been used before :smallwink:

The point is that the JLA/JLI/JLE or what have you CAN'T just do what they want unless they want the whole world against them. At that point they either take over or stand down, and as strong as the JL might be, they can't beat the whole world, not without having every "hero" on their side at lest.

[Scow2]

The point is that the JLA/JLI/JLE or what have you CAN'T just do what they want unless they want the whole world against them. At that point they either take over or stand down, and as strong as the JL might be, they can't beat the whole world, not without having every "hero" on their side at lest.Actually, the only thing keeping Superman from taking over the world is him knowing that he couldn't run it properly, and would turn it into an oppressive, fascist state where Altruism is Mandatory (Which defeats the entire purpose)

[bue52]

I think another consideration is a nation's sovereignty is partly symbolised through an army. Sure the various members of the justice league can save you from the mean terrorist groups, but what does that make you? A pathetic nation that needs to beg for help. Why would you elect a leader that appear so weak? Why show other nations that you are not independent or self-sustaining enough to solve your own problems.

And therefore, it is not just a matter of having an adventuring party be the nation's mascot, but rather the idea that you have a big force of nationalistic people who are willing to fight for the country and by extension its leader

[Scow2]

Another thing I remembered/realized from the main comic discussion thread about armies: They rise organically from low-level bands of people trying to protect themselves, serve as 'training grounds' for higher-level characters as veterans surivive and slowly level up (Training and staged/mock encounter don't level up people. Only authentic encounters do) through experience. They also serve as propaganda machines, and beacons for patriotic adventurer-stock soldiers (Who quickly find themselves in positions of authority despite only being level 1, because they have Elite Array and a level in a PC class instead of Warrior or Commoner)

High-level wizards don't rule nations... they retreat to hidden, crazy-prepared sanctums so they can do things that actually matter. Occassionally, one might try to take over the world with Shadesteel Golems and Mindrape traps, but they get foiled by more altruistic/freedom-loving powers (Gods and wizards) that see through the Create Food+Water trap Utopia ruse.

[The Giant]

You are a lot better off investing that 3 billion in something like Cadmus tech, so you actually have the means to fight the Justice League if necessary. Just as a D&D nation would need to focus its military spending on having the means to fight high level adventurers.

Problem: There are 100 superhumans we can't control.
Solution: Let's invest 3 billion dollars making Invinc-o-man to stop them!
Problem: There are 101 superhumans we can't control.

[DaggerPen]

Problem: There are 100 superhumans we can't control.
Solution: Let's invest 3 billion dollars making Invinc-o-man to stop them!
Problem: There are 101 superhumans we can't control.

Basically.

Every now and again, in the comics, it does work. This superhero will frequently be an antagonist, though they'll occasionally be on a superteam, where they'll have conflict with the other members. That's a very rare thing, though, something at most 1 out of every 10 nations will be able to accomplish given massive resources. So such a program is usually a waste of time. For the few times when it does succeed- well, DMs, take note.

(You can also get some real fun out of Suicide Squad-esque teams wherein a government manages to get control over a group of powerful villains, but again, that's the exception, not the rule.)

[Amphiox]

Also, everyone's getting it wrong with the "soldiers/fighter jets" analogy.

The real question is, "Why have foot soldiers when you have the Justice League?" And the answer is, "Because the Justice League isn't always available, and doesn't always agree with you when they are."

What I'm arguing is not "let's not have foot soldiers". I'm arguing that foot soldiers should not and cannot be level one mooks in a D&D setting. The discrepancy in power between levels makes this equivalent to having your standing army made up of newborn babies.

In a D&D setting (unless of course there was actually a way in the rules that can protect a massed group of level one mooks from being slaughtered by higher level enemies) even the lowest ranked foot soldiers should have at least a few class levels.

And again, this argument is based on the assumption that it really is true that there is absolutely no way that an army of level one mooks can hold their own if attacked by a single high level spellcaster or a group of mid to high level adventurers. If such a way does exist, then the problem goes away.

[Poppatomus]

What I'm arguing is not "let's not have foot soldiers". I'm arguing that foot soldiers should not and cannot be level one mooks in a D&D setting.


They can't be lvl 1 if there purpose is to dominate the battlefield against all comers. They can be level one if, as the Giant has pointed out, adventurers are seen more as forces of nature than as something that you can simply cultivate and deploy as you see fit.

A thought experiment: Imagine tomorrow dragons appear on regular earth. No human weapon can harm them. Some dragons are good, some are bad, if they decide to attack your nation you can do nothing about it. Would we disband the Army?

No. We might take some military spending and divert it to appeasing dragons, or long term, anti-dragon research, but we'd still need the army for whenever the Dragons weren't around.

[Scow2]

What I'm arguing is not "let's not have foot soldiers". I'm arguing that foot soldiers should not and cannot be level one mooks in a D&D setting. The discrepancy in power between levels makes this equivalent to having your standing army made up of newborn babies.

In a D&D setting (unless of course there was actually a way in the rules that can protect a massed group of level one mooks from being slaughtered by higher level enemies) even the lowest ranked foot soldiers should have at least a few class levels.

And again, this argument is based on the assumption that it really is true that there is absolutely no way that an army of level one mooks can hold their own if attacked by a single high level spellcaster or a group of mid to high level adventurers. If such a way does exist, then the problem goes away.
Foot soldiers are a broad group. You have to be a level 1 mook before you can become a level 3 sergeant before you can become a level 5 leitenant/knight before you can become a level Name lord.

Adventurers are outliers to the social order, and less than a fraction of a percent of a rounding error in a demographic breakdown.

[Amphiox]

I think another consideration is a nation's sovereignty is partly symbolised through an army. Sure the various members of the justice league can save you from the mean terrorist groups, but what does that make you? A pathetic nation that needs to beg for help. Why would you elect a leader that appear so weak? Why show other nations that you are not independent or self-sustaining enough to solve your own problems.


An army is a symbol of sovereignty in the real world only because an army is they most effective way of wielding massed destructive force in conflicts between societies in the real world.

And this is true in the real world because real world humans are weak and fragile things and can only wield mass destructive power in large groups backed up by technology.

In a world where it is possible for individuals to become nigh-indestructible demigods, armies will not be a symbol of sovereignty. Wizards will be a symbol of sovereignty.

And the argument that it costs too much or wizards are too rare is specious. In a world where wizards exist, being able to afford to recruit or produce a high level wizard becomes the entry requirement for being a nation-state, just as raising an army is the entry requirement for a being a nation-state in the real world. If no one can afford this, then the few wizards who do actually care about conquest will rule the world, and soon enough all the other wizards will have to care about geopolitics to protect themselves from those ambitious wizards who will see them as a threat. Either way all the geopolitics of social organization will inevitably end up revolving around the wizards, either with the wizards ruling directly, or with everyone and everything set up to appease the wizards such that the wizards DON'T get interested in trying to rule directly.

Unless, of course, it is actually possible within the rules for an army (or any collection) of low level people to, if properly prepared, defeat or at least contain, a high level wizard in combat. Then the problem goes away.

Or to put it another way, society among humans became possible because the majority that were individually weak were able, by collective action in cooperation together, contain, control, defeat the minority that were individually strong. Whether that was by force alone or by trickery or by simple persuasion. Society only works and only exists if the strong can be made to submit their wills to the collective which are individually weaker than they. Otherwise the strong will do as they please and the weak can only abide.

If the rules do not allow for some means for 10,000 commoners to enforce their collective will on one recalcitrant level 15 wizard then social organization at the nation level is not possible. All we can have is an eternal war between wizards while every one else runs and hides.

[Forikroder]

The conversation in various threads concerning how the Order can survive against Tarquin's army has raised the point that a group of high level adventurers like the Order can really decimate a LOT of level mooks in very short order.

But this raises a question to me regarding the utility of armies in D&D settings.

Quite simply, armies should not exist unless they are useful. Nations don't go to the expense of raising and maintain armies unless they are useful. If the rules are such that a well balanced party of mid-level adventurers can easily take down a large army of low level mooks, then nations in the setting will be spending their defence budgets on hiring teams of mid-level mercenary adventurers, and not on raising large armies.

So, unless large armies CAN defeat teams of adventurers, and defeat them easily, in a D&D-based world, large armies should not exist. Any that have would have been wiped out long ago by teams of superior adventurers, and any nations that bothered to maintain armies would have been conquered long ago by nations that instead spent their resources on hiring and equipping small groups of adventurer units. And the first ambitious adventuring party that reaches epic levels should have conquered the entire world.

Therefore, if we see armies in a D&D setting, we know immediately that in this setting, armies CAN, and MUST, be able to defeat teams of adventurers, and do so without sustaining losses so great that hiring (or training) teams of adventurers instead of raising armies is actually the cheaper option for rulers.

And we KNOW this is the case in the Stickverse, because it is canon that Tarquin was unable to conquer and hold the Western Continent openly. If it is impossible for armies to beat high level adventurer teams then Tarquin and his team of near-epic adventurers could have just conquered the entire Western Continent themselves, wiping out each and every army sent against them on their own.

So given this, what should an army look like in a D&D setting? The requirements are that they must be able to beat most adventurer teams in open battle, and the total cost of raising the army plus the losses that army would take when fighting an adventurer team must be less than what it would take to just create that adventurer team itself. Except for that cost requirement, there are no limitations on how many troops you can have, what you can equipment them with, how many levels you will train them to, and what distribution of classes you will have within your ranks.

since we have things like wizard/fighter college and band camp, its seems likely that there are large amounts of low-mid level adventurers (like around lvl 5-8) most likely every nation has an army un trained but low level soldiers and some groups of these adventurers (we know Azure City has there paladins, the Elves have team peregrine and most likely others, Gobbtopia has there Clerics)

when it comes down to it though you need a large standing force (relative to how large your country is) simply to deal with things not worth sending the big guns to and to deal with small time criminals and raiders who specialize in getting in and out before the higher level adventurers can get there

high level adventurers in a nations employ would be used as spys, ambassadors, bodyguards and such things that theres a small amount of things they need to worry about but require large amount of power to handle

[Amphiox]

They can't be lvl 1 if there purpose is to dominate the battlefield against all comers. They can be level one if, as the Giant has pointed out, adventurers are seen more as forces of nature than as something that you can simply cultivate and deploy as you see fit.

A thought experiment: Imagine tomorrow dragons appear on regular earth. No human weapon can harm them. Some dragons are good, some are bad, if they decide to attack your nation you can do nothing about it. Would we disband the Army?

No. We might take some military spending and divert it to appeasing dragons, or long term, anti-dragon research, but we'd still need the army for whenever the Dragons weren't around.

What purpose can 100 level one mooks be deployed for that 2-3 level 5 mooks won't do better with less risk of loss of life?

It seems to me that no nation should be deploying their level one soldiers in the field. All their level one soldiers should be classed as trainees, not to see real combat, until they have attained high enough levels to be useful in the field. (They could be used as police for maintaining order domestically, but I can't see any circumstance where they should ever be deployed in battle against an external threat).

Unless of course there exists a means within the rules by which a large number of very low level characters can defeat or contain a small number of higher level characters. If such exists, then the problem goes away. Hence my question at the start of the thread. Can you create an army under D&D rules, with soldiers of levels 1-15, that can defeat/contain a level 15+ spellcaster, at a cost that is at least equal to if not less than the cost of producing that level 15+ spellcaster?

[Forikroder]

What purpose can 100 level one mooks be deployed for that 2-3 level 5 mooks won't do better with less risk of loss of life?

It seems to me that no nation should be deploying their level one soldiers in the field. All their level one soldiers should be classed as trainees, not to see real combat, until they have attained high enough levels to be useful in the field. (They could be used as police for maintaining order domestically, but I can't see any circumstance where they should ever be deployed in battle against an external threat).

Unless of course there exists a means within the rules by which a large number of very low level characters can defeat or contain a small number of higher level characters. If such exists, then the problem goes away. Hence my question at the start of the thread. Can you create an army under D&D rules, with soldiers of levels 1-15, that can defeat/contain a level 15+ spellcaster, at a cost that is at least equal to if not less than the cost of producing that level 15+ spellcaster?

maybe the Gods dont give XPerience to any soldier that hasnt been in active combat?

maybe training drills dont actually give a soldier any XP?

kinda hard to say... how much does a lvl 15 spellcaster cost? how much does a mook cost?

[Amphiox]

Adventurers are outliers to the social order, and less than a fraction of a percent of a rounding error in a demographic breakdown.

What would the real world look like if less than a fraction of a percent of a rounding error of the demographic breakdown, some of which were known to be omnicidal maniacs, were capable of being nigh-invincible demigods that could slaughter hundreds of thousands with a thought, and there was nothing any one not of that fraction could do about it, no matter what strategy they deployed or how many of them there were?

I posit to you that nations, laws, society, civilization itself, could not exist.

Unless the majority had a way of containing that minority.

The Justice Leaguers have weaknesses. An army group with kryptonite bullets can take down Superman.

Does a Level 15+ wizard have an equivalent weakness?

[Amphiox]

when it comes down to it though you need a large standing force (relative to how large your country is) simply to deal with things not worth sending the big guns to and to deal with small time criminals and raiders who specialize in getting in and out before the higher level adventurers can get there

It strikes me though that the only things not worth sending the "big guns" (or medium guns as it were) to deal with which your level one mooks actually could deal with without excessive loss of life would all qualify as basic policework, which once again brings us to the issue that level one mooks should really never be deployed in the field against any external threat.

Or put it this way: there are threats you could send a squad of 100 level one mooks out, and they could deal with it, and perhaps take 10-15 casualties. The same threat could be dealt with by sending out 2-3 level 5 second tier forces, taking no casualties. Even if the second option does cost more, which one would any good government or neutral government choose to use? I submit to you that it should be the second, and not the first.

Every level one mook is a sentient life. If sentience creatures should not simply be declared "always evil" and killed off, then sentient mooks should not be sent off to die just because we declare them to be "level one".

[Poppatomus]

What purpose can 100 level one mooks be deployed for that 2-3 level 5 mooks won't do better with less risk of loss of life?

It seems to me that no nation should be deploying their level one soldiers in the field. All their level one soldiers should be classed as trainees, not to see real combat, until they have attained high enough levels to be useful in the field. (They could be used as police for maintaining order domestically, but I can't see any circumstance where they should ever be deployed in battle against an external threat).

Unless of course there exists a means within the rules by which a large number of very low level characters can defeat or contain a small number of higher level characters. If such exists, then the problem goes away. Hence my question at the start of the thread. Can you create an army under D&D rules, with soldiers of levels 1-15, that can defeat/contain a level 15+ spellcaster, at a cost that is at least equal to if not less than the cost of producing that level 15+ spellcaster?

I am going by the Giant's earlier statement that most people don't understand how XP works, and so it would not occur to them/would be impossible to farm adventurers, at least high level ones.

The more direct counterpoint in the "battle against an external threat" line is that the external threat might be another army of level 1-3 mooks. It's also the case that, while a high level party might be able to beat a low level army, a party plus an army against a party alone might make a huge difference.

As I said earlier in the thread, my admittedly inexpert answer is, as you said recently "kryptonite bullets." give your mooks slaying arrows, let them ride golems but high CR poison on all their weapons, and they will pose at least some threat, certainly enough to justify an army existing for all the other times it would be useful.

[Forikroder]

It strikes me though that the only things not worth sending the "big guns" (or medium guns as it were) to deal with which your level one mooks actually could deal with without excessive loss of life would all qualify as basic policework, which once again brings us to the issue that level one mooks should really never be deployed in the field against any external threat.

Or put it this way: there are threats you could send a squad of 100 level one mooks out, and they could deal with it, and perhaps take 10-15 casualties. The same threat could be dealt with by sending out 2-3 level 5 second tier forces, taking no casualties. Even if the second option does cost more, which one would any good government or neutral government choose to use? I submit to you that it should be the second, and not the first.

Every level one mook is a sentient life. If sentience creatures should not simply be declared "always evil" and killed off, then sentient mooks should not be sent off to die just because we declare them to be "level one".
what about a party using similar tactics to your defense force? teleport in, take whatever isnt nailed down and be gone before the overly complicated systema alerts the adventurers

and unless the adventurers spend all day joined at the hip the rounds it takes to get together means more time to loot and pillage all the raiders need to do is ensure tehy snag enough goods to be worth the teleport and there solid

or what about roaming monsters? if a dangerous beast finds an unprotected settlement it could munch on dozens of commoners before the adventurers arive to deal with it

[The Giant]

Look, in any world other than OOTS, there ARE no "level 1 mooks." There are are brave, strong young men and women who believe in their king and country and are willing to take up arms to defend it. Yes, those wicked Overthereians may have a foul sorcerer on their side, but truly, the courage of our people will overcome his treacherous magic and bring victory to our side, because lo, did not the Golden Champion, god of light, just send an omen of a dozen sparrows to the temple steps? Then question not our mettle, for today we march to VICTORY!

People in the world don't know what a level 1 fighter is. They don't know what a level 10 fighter is. They don't know how many hit points anyone has. They don't know what anyone's armor class is. They do know what wizards are, but they don't know whether one wizard is more or less powerful than another, or how much damage they can really do. Basically, they don't know anything. The only means they have of judging relative power level is one side winning in a fight, which you can't do unless you have the fight.

So the nations of the world go around having knife fights, and sometimes, one of them brings a gun instead. But if all you've ever seen are knife fights, and you have $100 to spend, do you buy a knife or do you buy a bulletproof vest? You buy a knife, because that's what you're expecting.

[jere7my]

And the argument that it costs too much or wizards are too rare is specious. In a world where wizards exist, being able to afford to recruit or produce a high level wizard becomes the entry requirement for being a nation-state, just as raising an army is the entry requirement for a being a nation-state in the real world. If no one can afford this, then the few wizards who do actually care about conquest will rule the world, and soon enough all the other wizards will have to care about geopolitics to protect themselves from those ambitious wizards who will see them as a threat.

Or the wizards will form a nonaggression league, because they realize that high-level magical conflict is too devastating, and any rogue wizards will be taken out by the league. There are probably between three and a dozen high-level wizards in your average D&D world.

You have a fine worldbuilding idea, but you're fixated on it. There are eight billion other ways it could go.


Does a Level 15+ wizard have an equivalent weakness?

"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between his shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style."

[Amphiox]

what about a party using similar tactics to your defense force? teleport in, take whatever isnt nailed down and be gone before the overly complicated systema alerts the adventurers

There is absolutely nothing a standing army of mooks could do any better in that scenario. Either there is a way to combat that kind of assault, or civilization in a D&D setting crumbles under a wave of hit and run raids by rogue chaotic adventurers, until only societies whose territory is small enough that their mid-level defence forces CAN get to all such threats in time remain.


or what about roaming monsters? if a dangerous beast finds an unprotected settlement it could munch on dozens of commoners before the adventurers arive to deal with it

If you send a battalion of level one mooks against any monster in D&D that counts as "dangerous" all you end up with is dozens of dead commoners AND dozens of dead mooks.

Level one mooks are flat out useless in virtually any combat scenario of significance. All you get by deploying them is more sentient deaths.

Unless, of course, I am wrong about level one mooks being useless. In other words, if the rules allow for numbers to offset CR, if for any CR, no matter how high, there is a number such that a group of level one mooks exceeding that number could collectively could overcome it, then the problem goes away.

[Oko and Qailee]

Unless, of course, I am wrong about level one mooks being useless. In other words, if the rules allow for numbers to offset CR, if for any CR, no matter how high, there is a number such that a group of level one mooks exceeding that number could collectively could overcome it, then the problem goes away.

To a certain extent, you are.

Until DR comes into play (things with DR are rare in D&D by design, Titans and demons dont roam free everywhere, most monsters you'd see are owlbears for example) you can always use mundane arrows and volley rules and kill stuff from a distance.

Level one mooks arent useless, they just cant fight a lvl 15 wizard that decides to show up .000000000000000001% of the time, they are useful the other 99.99999999999999999% of the time

Btw, love this thread, its interesting.

[Forikroder]

There is absolutely nothing a standing army of mooks could do any better in that scenario. Either there is a way to combat that kind of assault, or civilization in a D&D setting crumbles under a wave of hit and run raids by rogue chaotic adventurers, until only societies whose territory is small enough that their mid-level defence forces CAN get to all such threats in time remain.

even if they cant prevent it entirely they can do enough to slow it

also Tarquins small force of mooks managed to stop the bar fight well enough despite some heavy hitters present

actually the perfect example is Gobbtopia despite having so many high level adventurers they still needed the mooks on the ground as the first line of defense and to get a warning off, and even then the rebels succeeded pretty well


If you send a battalion of level one mooks against any monster in D&D that counts as "dangerous" all you end up with is dozens of dead commoners AND dozens of dead mooks.

no you wind up with a few dead mooks and evacuated civilians

[The Giant]

Or put it this way: there are threats you could send a squad of 100 level one mooks out, and they could deal with it, and perhaps take 10-15 casualties. The same threat could be dealt with by sending out 2-3 level 5 second tier forces, taking no casualties.

Or, you send a squad of good hearty soldiers with strong shields and sharp blades against a threat of unknown ferocity and then hope that their bravery wins the day, cursing the Underworld when fifteen of them fall beneath the enemy's blades.

I guess it's my fault that you have this idea that "levels" are a thing that people know about in any D&D setting, but...they're just not. At best, you might have rookies, seasoned soldiers, and battle-scarred veterans available, but that veteran may still be a level 1 warrior if he's just good at keeping himself alive.

[Bulldog Psion]

Modern infantry are useless against a nuke, yet we still have them. :smallwink:

[Giggling Ghast]

People in the world don't know what a level 1 fighter is. They don't know what a level 10 fighter is. They don't know how many hit points anyone has. They don't know what anyone's armor class is. They do know what wizards are, but they don't know whether one wizard is more or less powerful than another, or how much damage they can really do. Basically, they don't know anything. The only means they have of judging relative power level is one side winning in a fight, which you can't do unless you have the fight.

If they did know about rule mechanics and such, then every monster would flee upon sighting a group of 4-6 adventurers because they'd know they were intended as a standard encounter.

[Amphiox]

Look, in any world other than OOTS, there ARE no "level 1 mooks." There are are brave, strong young men and women who believe in their king and country and are willing to take up arms to defend it. Yes, those wicked Overthereians may have a foul sorcerer on their side, but truly, the courage of our people will overcome his treacherous magic and bring victory to our side, because lo, did not the Golden Champion, god of light, just send an omen of a dozen sparrows to the temple steps? Then question not our mettle, for today we march to VICTORY!

People in the world don't know what a level 1 fighter is. They don't know what a level 10 fighter is. They don't know how many hit points anyone has. They don't know what anyone's armor class is. They do know what wizards are, but they don't know whether one wizard is more or less powerful than another, or how much damage they can really do. Basically, they don't know anything. The only means they have of judging relative power level is one side winning in a fight, which you can't do unless you have the fight.

So the nations of the world go around having knife fights, and sometimes, one of them brings a gun instead. But if all you've ever seen are knife fights, and you have $100 to spend, do you buy a knife or do you buy a bulletproof vest? You buy a knife, because that's what you're expecting.

True, but in my OP I was specifically referring to D&D settings like OOTS, where people do know what levels are and leaders explicitly make tactical decisions with such knowledge at hand.

Sure, those level one citizens are brave and strong and loyal and confident that their gods will protect them from the other side's foul sorceror, but the military leaders who command them know what high level sorcerers can do. If they are responsible they will not ask those under their command to do the impossible and die in the process unless there literally is no choice, not even surrender (Azure City for example, is a case where even surrender was not an option). Either they will devise a strategy that will give their side at least a chance for victory, or they won't deploy those particular forces for that particular task.

Which is why I asked if there was any way within the rules by which an army can defeat (or at least contain) a high level spellcaster.

Consider the precedent of Jepthon the Unholy. This was a case of an actual epic level spellcaster who decided to raise an army and conquer the world. Surely, after he was dead, the leaders of the nations he left smoking in his wake (or their successors) must have gotten together and said "holy crap, we can't let another spellcaster like Jepthon arise again. We've got to do something!" after which the armies of the world would be training anti-spellcaster squads and stockpiling anti-spellcaster equipment.

[The MunchKING]

In a world where it is possible for individuals to become nigh-indestructible demigods, armies will not be a symbol of sovereignty. Wizards will be a symbol of sovereignty.

Why? A Theocracy with a high level Cleric would be as good.

If I wanted to be overly literal I'd point out Sorcerers are good too. :smalltongue:



The Justice Leaguers have weaknesses. An army group with kryptonite bullets can take down Superman.

Of which there hasn't been since Pre-Crisis. :smallannoyed:

[The Giant]

Level one mooks are flat out useless in virtually any combat scenario of significance. All you get by deploying them is more sentient deaths.

That cannot be true. If there's nothing for Level 1 mooks to fight and win against, then there ARE no Level 2 mooks. The only way to get Level 2 mooks is by sending your Level 1 mooks into actual combat.

[The MunchKING]

If they did know about rule mechanics and such, then every monster would flee upon sighting a group of 4-6 adventurers because they'd know they were intended as a standard encounter.

Depends. They could be the fools that wandered out to pick a fight with something way out of their weight class.

A lot of moronic first levels do that. :smalltongue:

[Forikroder]

True, but in my OP I was specifically referring to D&D settings like OOTS, where people do know what levels are and leaders explicitly make tactical decisions with such knowledge at hand.

Sure, those level one citizens are brave and strong and loyal and confident that their gods will protect them from the other side's foul sorceror, but the military leaders who command them know what high level sorcerers can do. If they are responsible they will not ask those under their command to do the impossible and die in the process unless there literally is no choice, not even surrender (Azure City for example, is a case where even surrender was not an option). Either they will devise a strategy that will give their side at least a chance for victory, or they won't deploy those particular forces for that particular task.

Which is why I asked if there was any way within the rules by which an army can defeat (or at least contain) a high level spellcaster.

Consider the precedent of Jepthon the Unholy. This was a case of an actual epic level spellcaster who decided to raise an army and conquer the world. Surely, after he was dead, the leaders of the nations he left smoking in his wake (or their successors) must have gotten together and said "holy crap, we can't let another spellcaster like Jepthon arise again. We've got to do something!" after which the armies of the world would be training anti-spellcaster squads and stockpiling anti-spellcaster equipment.

taht sort of meta knowledge isnt known to the people of the DnD-verse

with Jepthon the unholy, what do you think the reaction is more likely to be?

"wow that dude was dangerous, we better shill out millions of gold on the off chance someone like that happens again"

or

"wow that dude was dangerous, good thing those other guys dealt with him and its not out problem"

[Amphiox]

You have a fine worldbuilding idea, but you're fixated on it. There are eight billion other ways it could go.

Not so much fixated as interested in exploring the ramifications of it. That's why the scenario is an "if" scenario. If massed groups of low level people can be effective with the right equipment, leadership, and tactics against single or small groups of higher CR foes, be it spellcasters or monsters, if a leader can deploy them with at least the expectation of hope for success, then the problem disappears.

[The MunchKING]

"wow that dude was dangerous, we better shill out millions of gold on the off chance someone like that happens again"

I'D look in to some way to stop that kind of thing (and profit by it), but that's why I'm the MunchKING.

[Amphiox]

Modern infantry are useless against a nuke, yet we still have them. :smallwink:

Yes, but we also have international treaties that forbid the use of nukes in warfare and classify such use as a war crime.

It should also not need mentioning, but a high level spellcaster is not just a nuke, such a character is much MORE powerful, relatively, and MORE flexible, than any nuke.

A high level spellcaster is a demigod....

[Oko and Qailee]

Level one mooks are flat out useless in virtually any combat scenario of significance. All you get by deploying them is more sentient deaths.


I'm sorry, I want to touch on this same quote.

This is also wrong because it keeps ignoring the premise "nearly everything is level 1"

You keep treating the scenario as "The city must have high levels because high levels attack every other day"

No, thats not true. The city has a bunch of low levels, and the opposing enemies that are frequently attacking are also usually low level. This means level one mooks are not useless, and thats why you would have an army, even with meta game knowledge.

with metagame knowledge, a city must attempt to locate what few high level characters it has, and prepare defenses accordingly, fortifications mean a lot.

[Forikroder]

Yes, but we also have international treaties that forbid the use of nukes in warfare and classify such use as a war crime.

It should also not need mentioning, but a high level spellcaster is not just a nuke, such a character is much MORE powerful, relatively, and MORE flexible, than any nuke.

A high level spellcaster is a demigod....

what about fighter planes? what on earth is an infantry going to do against long range missile attacks? against drones and other such things

nukes may be forbidden but we have plenty of other such weapons that could decimate infantry easy enough

[Oko and Qailee]

Yes, but we also have international treaties that forbid the use of nukes in warfare and classify such use as a war crime.

It should also not need mentioning, but a high level spellcaster is not just a nuke, such a character is much MORE powerful, relatively, and MORE flexible, than any nuke.

A high level spellcaster is a demigod....

But a nuke is better than a lvl 20 fighter, and the conversation applies to them too.

Saying "this isn't the exact same power" doesn't invalidate the argument unless the power differential between the analogy and a soldier doesn't invalidate soldiers.

Sure, a Drone, for example, isn't as powerful as a wizard, but like a wizard, there is no reason to use a foot soldier when a drone can do the same, except wthout the loss of life.

The OBVIOUS response to that is "a drone costs millions more", that is the only reason ever to use a foot soldier over a drone for the sole goal of attacking.

My obvious response to that response is, obviously a high level wizard costs a fortune more than a soldier.

[Poppatomus]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/afflictions/poison/tears-of-death

Another item that, placed on 20 arrows fired by level 1 characters or blades wielded by 20 level 1 attackers, would effectively end any high level character not specifically prepared to defend against it.

To the extent you are interested in the mechanics question, it may be better to ask it in the gaming forums, rather than here. I am sure there are plenty of people there that would rise to the challenge of "equip 100 lvl 1-2 chars to defeated 2-3 level 20 characters"

[Oko and Qailee]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/afflictions/poison/tears-of-death

Another item that, placed on 20 arrows fired by level 1 characters or blades wielded by 20 level 1 attackers, would effectively end any high level character not specifically prepared to defend against it.

To the extent you are interested in the mechanics question, it may be better to ask it in the gaming forums, rather than here. I am sure there are plenty of people there that would rise to the challenge of "equip 100 lvl 1-2 chars to defeated 2-3 level 20 characters"

Immunity to poison is easy to get.

TBH, arbitrary number of lvl 1 characters cannot ever defeat lvl 20 characters, ever. The lvl 20 characters can fight all day, the leave at their leisure, rest, come back, and fight all day again.

The only way to do so is make all the lvl 1 characters way past WBL or do cheesy things (all lvl 1's pool money, candle of invocation, Gate in Solars)

[Forikroder]

Immunity to poison is easy to get.

TBH, arbitrary number of lvl 1 characters cannot ever defeat lvl 20 characters, ever. The lvl 20 characters can fight all day, the leave at their leisure, rest, come back, and fight all day again.

The only way to do so is make all the lvl 1 characters way past WBL or do cheesy things (all lvl 1's pool money, candle of invocation, Gate in Solars)

if the goal is to kill the lvl 20s then maybe, but the time the lvl 20s are resting the army is taking over the country

[The Giant]

True, but in my OP I was specifically referring to D&D settings like OOTS, where people do know what levels are and leaders explicitly make tactical decisions with such knowledge at hand.

Well, that's sort of a useless thought experiment, then, because there are no such settings. So if you want to postulate that adventurers would run rampant and there would be no armies, go ahead. But it has no bearing on what happens in actual D&D games, because in actual games, NPCs have no idea how the rules work.


Which is why I asked if there was any way within the rules by which an army can defeat (or at least contain) a high level spellcaster.

No, there isn't. There just really isn't. In established D&D settings, high-level spellcasters can pretty much go to town on an army of low-level warriors with impunity, at least until another caster shows up. But it doesn't matter, because the people living in those worlds don't know how the rules work, and the wizards have better things to do anyway. If Elminster wanted to conquer Faerun, he could do it tomorrow. He doesn't, because Plot. That's all there is to it. The system just doesn't support the level of extrapolation you're trying to apply. It breaks down, and we all sort of agree not to take it there as part of the social contract of playing the game.

D&D nations have armies because D&D is meant to evoke images of the Middle Ages, and there were armies in the Middle Ages. We can hang whatever in-world reasoning we want on that, but if you keep poking at it, it will collapse.


Consider the precedent of Jepthon the Unholy. This was a case of an actual epic level spellcaster who decided to raise an army and conquer the world. Surely, after he was dead, the leaders of the nations he left smoking in his wake (or their successors) must have gotten together and said "holy crap, we can't let another spellcaster like Jepthon arise again. We've got to do something!" after which the armies of the world would be training anti-spellcaster squads and stockpiling anti-spellcaster equipment.

Or, they say, "Good thing he's dead! We'll probably never have to worry about that again, it was just a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. Caviar?"

I mean, if nothing else, your scenarios posit a world filled with competent rational actors who put the best interests of their state ahead of their personal wealth and comfort level and have a deep interest in being Batman-level prepared for unlikely contingencies. Whereas medieval-era kings are statistically more likely to be gluttonous buffoons who have sex with their siblings and choose their commanders based on how fluffy their hair is.

[Poppatomus]

Immunity to poison is easy to get.

TBH, arbitrary number of lvl 1 characters cannot ever defeat lvl 20 characters, ever. The lvl 20 characters can fight all day, the leave at their leisure, rest, come back, and fight all day again.

The only way to do so is make all the lvl 1 characters way past WBL or do cheesy things (all lvl 1's pool money, candle of invocation, Gate in Solars)

Immunity is easy, just listing it as an example of a getable item that would be, in effect, a "kryptonite" against, say, a lvl 16 sorcerer who's not prepared to make to fail a fort check and then face 20 separte coup de graces. [not sure how you pluralize that.]

honestly, I think the candle of invocation thing is a good answer to Amphiox's question though. One way that a bunch of low level characters with excess wealth (say the wealth of a nation) could stand against such a character would be to procure an item like that an use it to cancel out high level characters on the other side, allowing a bigger, better army to beat a smaller, crappier army.

EDIT: then again, if the Giant says I'm wrong on the mechanics, I'm probably wrong on the mechanics.

[Amphiox]

One of the things that got me thinking about the OP was the fact that D&D originally began as a war game.

Just from that point of view it is interesting to see how the game evolved from such beginnings into one where a single player character can destroy armies at will.

[The Giant]

One of the things that got me thinking about the OP was the fact that D&D originally began as a war game.

Just from that point of view it is interesting to see how the game evolved from such beginnings into one where a single player character can destroy armies at will.

In that wargame, characters topped out at 5th level. Fireball was the single most powerful spell in existence. By the time they invented higher-level magic, it was already a game for small bands of adventurers fighting monsters. So this level of power discrepancy never mattered.

[Oko and Qailee]

Immunity is easy, just listing it as an example of a getable item that would be, in effect, a "kryptonite" against, say, a lvl 16 sorcerer who's not prepared to make to fail a fort check and then face 20 separte coup de graces. [not sure how you pluralize that.]

honestly, I think the candle of invocation thing is a good answer to Amphiox's question though. One way that a bunch of low level characters with excess wealth (say the wealth of a nation) could stand against such a character would be to procure an item like that an use it to cancel out high level characters on the other side, allowing a bigger, better army to beat a smaller, crappier army.

EDIT: then again, if the Giant says I'm wrong on the mechanics, I'm probably wrong on the mechanics.

TBH since D&D gods are known existing and very active entities, it would make sense for them to defend a theocracy of theirs when the need arrives.

Obviously Asmodeus can destroy every city in existence if he feels like it, it's just heaven will have a few choice words to say to him while hes doing it (such as "die"). Or an ancient Dragon could choose to destroy a city... but thats when the Good-aligned adventuring party shows up...

"I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for Rob Redblade"

[Amphiox]

what about fighter planes? what on earth is an infantry going to do against long range missile attacks? against drones and other such things

nukes may be forbidden but we have plenty of other such weapons that could decimate infantry easy enough

Fighter planes can't destroy an entire tens of thousands strong infantry army with just the missiles it carries, unless it is carrying nukes. And real life armies don't deploy with just their infantry, they'll have anti-aircraft support.

When air attack decimates infantry in a single engagement (like at the end of the first Iraq War) it usually occurs only after the losing side has already been routed and has broken formation and lost all tactical order.

And it is very likely that militaries are currently in the process whereby eventually ever more sophisticated drones will ultimately replace the infantry for all combat operations, with infantry only being deployed after the real fighting is over to mop up and secure ground.

In a world running on D&D rules, one would expect to see a similar historical transition, with standing armies gradually replaced by smaller forces of high level characters, and higher level characters should become more and more common as time progresses as well. Of course this scenario won't occur in most D&D fiction or gameplay since those worlds tend to remain locked in medieval stasis for plot reasons.

[Everyl]

A good start for an anti-wizard squad would be training monks for military purposes. Monks have the best saves of any basic class, gain Evasion early on, have unusually good touch AC, get easy access to Improved Grapple, and if they live long enough to get a few levels, they start to become terrifyingly agile. If anyone's going to successfully close with a wizard and tackle him, forcing him to rely on Still Spells with a high-DC Concentration check, it's probably a monk.

Anything else that can limit the spellcaster's mobility or spellcasting ability would be valuable. Tanglefoot bags and thunderstones are reasonably effective against even high-level wizards, since wizards have poor Fortitude and Reflex saves; a deafened spellcaster will fail on 20% of their spells, which may not sound like much, but could easily turn the tide of a battle or negate his escape teleport. If you catch the wizard on the ground, the tanglefoot bag prevents them from lifting off to fly to safety. Lassos could be used to reel a low-flying spellcaster into grappling range, too. Tactics similar to Haley's smokestick-on-an-arrow can limit the caster's ability to target spells and keep track of enemies.

It could be possible to make magic items engineered to be particularly effective against rogue high-level casters, as well. Something that could deliver a Dispel Magic payload, or a projectile with its own Antimagic Field, could potentially shut down most of the wizard's defenses, even the straightforward ones like flying out of reach of most attacks. Homebrew magic items aren't really RAW, though, I suppose.

Ultimately, a high-level wizard could be prepared for just about anything that an endless swarm of level 1 soldiers could try to do to him. In preparing his spells for that purpose, though, he'd probably leave himself exposed to a counterattack from the mid-level adventurers who are sympathetic to the nation's plight for whatever reason. In that case, the crazy-prepared army hasn't defeated the caster directly, but it has helped expose his weaknesses to other resources that are at least potentially at the disposal of a small nation.

In general, though, I agree with the Giant that it's high-level adventurers who are the real movers and shakers of a typical game setting. A suitably nefarious high-level spellcaster could singlehandedly blast his way through a typical army and overthrow the army's home nation, but he's likely to step on the toes of at least a few other high-level adventurers in the process, and they would seek revenge if they're not close enough to fight back before the one-man invasion is completed.

Another way to think about it, if you don't buy that high-level adventurers are too busy battling eldritch horrors and dragons with the wrong scale color to be invested in humanoid geopolitics, is that the leaders of nations probably ARE high-level adventurers. This happens to an extent even in the OOtS-verse - Soon was a high-level (maybe epic) paladin, Shojo was level 13 in one of the less terrible NPC classes, and Hinjo is a paladin of at least moderate level. Redcloak is basically the kingmaker for Gobbotopia - he doesn't rule it himself, but he reshaped the local politics to his liking. The warlords who keep rising and falling in the Western Continent are probably at least high enough in level to get the Leadership feat by the time they raise their armies, not to mention the epic-ish shadow government that Tarquin's been building. Basically, the folks in charge of any significant nation are disproportionately likely to be of significant level themselves - it's entirely possible that all a king needs to do to gather a mid-to-high level adventuring party is call on his strongest, wisest, and most mystically-inclined dukes and barons. That group of leaders is unlikely to risk their lives on the front lines particularly often, but when Hypothetical Evil Wizard starts nuking soldiers by the score, the kingdom at least has access to some folks who can counter with adventuring-class shenanigans.

And I apologize if this is rambly and/or others have said it before me, I did the writing in multiple sittings.

[Haluesen]

Been lurking on this interesting topic for a bit now, about time that I actually take part. :smallbiggrin:


Yes, but we also have international treaties that forbid the use of nukes in warfare and classify such use as a war crime.

It should also not need mentioning, but a high level spellcaster is not just a nuke, such a character is much MORE powerful, relatively, and MORE flexible, than any nuke.

A high level spellcaster is a demigod....

Maybe they do have some major differences, but in terms of a war scenario with large armies, there isn't a big discrepancy to what they do: kill a lot of people and terrify those that witness it. Sure a high level caster can destroy minor forces in more creative and varied ways than a nuke, but they still both decimate opposition, which kinda matters a lot in a pitched battle.


Well, that's sort of a useless thought experiment, then, because there are no such settings. So if you want to postulate that adventurers would run rampant and there would be no armies, go ahead. But it has no bearing on what happens in actual D&D games, because in actual games, NPCs have no idea how the rules work.

No too be too argumentative, but I must take exception to this. I have had fun running occasional games where the rules are more than just a system, but an invariable law of the universe that is acknowledged by PC and NPC alike, usually for comedic purposes though I do honestly try to explain in the game why there is this understanding. And if I have thought to play this way, I am certain I am not the only one. So in the majority of setting yes, the characters in the game should not know about the rules. But not all settings must follow this rule.


No, there isn't. There just really isn't. In established D&D settings, high-level spellcasters can pretty much go to town on an army of low-level warriors with impunity, at least until another caster shows up. But it doesn't matter, because the people living in those worlds don't know how the rules work, and the wizards have better things to do anyway. If Elminster wanted to conquer Faerun, he could do it tomorrow. He doesn't, because Plot. That's all there is to it. The system just doesn't support the level of extrapolation you're trying to apply. It breaks down, and we all sort of agree not to take it there as part of the social contract of playing the game.

D&D nations have armies because D&D is meant to evoke images of the Middle Ages, and there were armies in the Middle Ages. We can hang whatever in-world reasoning we want on that, but if you keep poking at it, it will collapse.

But this I absolutely must agree with. Sure it is an interesting thought experiment, but in the end of things kingdoms don't consider how to deal with very high level PC's in terms of war and armies and holding ground and dealing with levels or anything like that. Sure, the military of such worlds would likely have spellcasters to deal with enemy spellcasters, and strike forces composed of mid-level PC class people, but in the end trying to over think it just breaks it all. This game just wasn't made to handle such considerations.


Nonetheless, in at least a bit of trying to tackle the original topic, here is what I think: I believe that there is a point where high-level PC's just cannot be taken down by a standard army, no matter what. I'm honestly surprised in the comic that Roy has taken as much damage as he seems to have, since most of those common soldiers shouldn't even be able to really hard him much with him Great Cleaving like that, they rarely have the chance to make many attacks on him. Suffice it to say, any force that can on a group of high level PC's is no longer just "a standard army", and usually has either very unique story connotations behind them or a very pissed off DM. :smallbiggrin:

[The Giant]

honestly, I think the candle of invocation thing is a good answer to Amphiox's question though. One way that a bunch of low level characters with excess wealth (say the wealth of a nation) could stand against such a character would be to procure an item like that an use it to cancel out high level characters on the other side, allowing a bigger, better army to beat a smaller, crappier army.

EDIT: then again, if the Giant says I'm wrong on the mechanics, I'm probably wrong on the mechanics.

You're not wrong per se, but the problem is once you do bend the game's premise to allow thousands of level 1 characters to pool their wealth and buy a Candle of Invocation, then you have to also ask yourself who in their right mind would be selling a Candle of Invocation if it were commonly known that it could be used to defend against anyone? If you owned one, wouldn't you rather use it to become king than hand it over to a pack of 2000 foot soldiers who walk into your store? If it's that powerful, then the only people willing to sell it would be the ones who were powerful enough that they would be the logical targets, so they wouldn't. There's a reason no one can buy a nuclear bomb.

You really can't pull at one thread without the whole tapestry unraveling. Suspension of Disbelief rules the day.


In a world running on D&D rules, one would expect to see a similar historical transition, with standing armies gradually replaced by smaller forces of high level characters, and higher level characters should become more and more common as time progresses as well. Of course this scenario won't occur in most D&D fiction or gameplay since those worlds tend to remain locked in medieval stasis for plot reasons.

No, that won't happen because you can't ever manufacture high-level characters. A wizard isn't a machine that you can build when you want a new one. You can only promote low-level characters, and those low-level characters need to take part in regular deadly combat during which like 75% of them will die before seeing the next level. At that rate, for every 262,144 people who pick up a sword and become a 1st level character, only ONE will make it to 10th level alive. So the best way to make a 10th-level character is to have hundreds of thousands of low-level characters and throw them against another group of hundreds of thousands of low-level characters...

...like in a war.

[Amphiox]

Ok, this a little bit off the OP topic, but still relevant to the question of fielding large armies of level one forces in D&D.

Suppose instead of maintaining a standing army of 10,000 level one fighters, a nation instead invested in 250-300 summon monster III scrolls and just enough people with class levels to use them? (50 using one per round could deploy the whole bunch in 6 rounds, for instance)

(Or would it be more effective to use those scrolls to summon 250-300 level 3 monsters instead of 1d4+1 per scroll of summon monster I level 1 monsters?)

[Amphiox]

No, that won't happen because you can't ever manufacture high-level characters. A wizard isn't a machine that you can build when you want a new one. You can only promote low-level characters, and those low-level characters need to take part in regular deadly combat during which like 75% of them will die before seeing the next level. At that rate, for every 262,144 people who pick up a sword and become a 1st level character, only ONE will make it to 10th level alive. So the best way to make a 10th-level character is to have hundreds of thousands of low-level characters and throw them against another group of hundreds of thousands of low-level characters...

...like in a war.

Well that gets into some of my earlier speculations. Since it is possible for characters to gain xp in non-lethal combat encounters, or by role playing and what not, what prevents a nation from setting up a training program that can level-up their recruits without exposing them to a 75% attrition rate? If you have your level one trainees fight each other in nonlethal bouts such that the winners get xp while the losers aren't killed, or at least the risk of lethal injuries is low, and have clerics standing by to raise those who do accidentally die. Then you pit the winners against each other again and again until they level up, while the losers fight other losers until someone wins and gains xp. When some of your recruits get to level 2, you have them spar with each other, until you get level 3 recruits. Meanwhile some of your original loser's pool have managed to gain enough to get to level 2 anyways. They join the level 2 pool. You repeat until you get a nice solid core of trainees to levels that allow for survivability in campaign type settings. Then you put them to work in your kingdom on PC-like quests, ridding the land of monsters and the like. Or your create training dungeons filled with monsters you breed for the purpose for them. These will be real encounters with real risk of death, but each room of the specially designed dungeon has an escape hatch, so your team of trainees can flip it and get out of dodge if they ever get into a situation where it looks like they're in danger of dying. And of course you're sending your recruits in as balanced adventurer teams with level appropriate gear.

While it is obvious hard to scrounge up the resources to get to really high levels this way, but it seems not that hard to get a solid number to mid levels to form the elite core of your armed forces.

[Gray Mage]

Ok, this a little bit off the OP topic, but still relevant to the question of fielding large armies of level one forces in D&D.

Suppose instead of maintaining a standing army of 10,000 level one fighters, a nation instead invested in 250-300 summon monster III scrolls and just enough people with class levels to use them? (50 using one per round could deploy the whole bunch in 6 rounds, for instance)

(Or would it be more effective to use those scrolls to summon 250-300 level 3 monsters instead of 1d4+1 per scroll of summon monster I level 1 monsters?)

It'd probably not be a good idea, since summon spells have a short duration (summon monster III at the minimum CL lasts for half a minute). Enough for an enconter, but probably short as an army substitute and it'd get expensive fast, I think.

[Everyl]

Suppose instead of maintaining a standing army of 10,000 level one fighters, a nation instead invested in 250-300 summon monster III scrolls and just enough people with class levels to use them? (50 using one per round could deploy the whole bunch in 6 rounds, for instance)


That would be an interesting idea for a nation that's trying to avoid casualties. The problem is that a standard scroll of Summon Monster III would have a duration of 5 rounds. Whether you did the level 3 monsters or the 1d4+1 weaker ones, all your opponents have to do is fall back and take full defense for a minute or so, and all of the summoned monsters would disappear. It could have specific situational use, but probably wouldn't serve as a replacement for an army.

I think it would be best used as a surprise flanking maneuver. Engage the enemy forces with your soldiers, then have your smallish group of casters start summoning expendable monsters from an unexpected direction. Then the monsters don't need to last for long, they just need to cause chaos in the enemy ranks and hopefully take down some enemy archers and casters.

[The Giant]

Well that gets into some of my earlier speculations. Since it is possible for characters to gain xp in non-lethal combat encounters, or by role playing and what not, what prevents a nation from setting up a training program that can level-up their recruits without exposing them to a 75% attrition rate?

You can't "game" the XP system in-game. If an event is set up as a training exercise, then it is by definition training—not an actual encounter. If there's no threat of death, no penalty for failure, you don't get XP. If your sparring partner is not willing to kill you, you don't get XP for beating him. And the reason that is true is specifically to prevent the exact scenario you are describing. Otherwise adventuring parties could just fight each other all day long and level up to infinity.

(EDIT: As far as roleplaying XP goes, that's a metagame construct. It's a reward for the player at the table for enhancing the enjoyment of the game. NPCs never get roleplaying XP no matter what they do.)

I suppose nations could do the "training dungeon" but there are rules for lowered XP in any situation where the danger is less-than-normal. An escape hatch in every room might lower the XP gain to only 25% normal, or less. The gain wouldn't be as high as you would think it should be, and there would be a cut-off point where it would be impractical to keep monsters of a certain level or higher captive. And again, that's all assuming that the people in the world understand the concept that fighting monsters makes you better at casting spells.

But really, it seems like you have this idea of how you think it should work that is overriding what everyone is telling you about how it does work in actual campaigns. I came into this conversation thinking you wanted to understand the in-world reasoning behind the existence of armies in D&D worlds, but it seems like you're only interested in justifying your pre-existing idea that there shouldn't BE any armies. Which is fine, you can do whatever you want in your own campaign, but it's not really a conversation that interests me as much as the one I thought it was.

[Amphiox]

But really, it seems like you have this idea of how you think it should work that is overriding what everyone is telling you about how it does work in actual campaigns. I came into this conversation thinking you wanted to understand the in-world reasoning behind the existence of armies in D&D worlds, but it seems like you're only interested in justifying your pre-existing idea that there shouldn't BE any armies. Which is fine, you can do whatever you want in your own campaign, but it's not really a conversation that interests me as much as the one I thought it was.

Actually that was never my intent at all, and I apologize if I did not express myself properly. The idea that there "shouldn't" be any armies in a D&D based world didn't even come to me until after reading several responses to my original post, and that was always an "if" scenario, as in "if" this mechanic worked the way it seemed to be working, then the logical outcome should be a world where large standing armies would not be sustainable and should be phased out, the same way big battleships were phased out of the real world when aircraft carriers became available.

I don't actually play D&D campaigns (though I've watched friends play), and wasn't thinking about the question in terms of played campaigns at all. 99% of everything I know about D&D rules I learned on this forum (the rest from playing Baldur's Gate), or from looking up terms people mention on this forum, and every rules-based argument I made was actually based on something I read someone else say about those roles, on this forum.

I was approaching this question from the point of view of narrative world-building, ie the consequences of the rules as written if extended out as far as you can take them into the postulated fantasy world. Or, in other words, speculating about the OotS world not as a D&D campaign necessarily, but as a fantasy world that runs on D&D rules, where the D&D rules replace the regular rules of the universe, which means they have to extend beyond campaign settings and into other aspects of the world which would not normally feature in campaigns, because there is more going on in any world than just campaigns.

And it seemed to me that is was a place where the rules "break" so to speak, where the logical extension of the rules returns a nonsensical result, not unlike how the regular rules of physics in the real world appear to "break" in singularities. But I wanted to see if it really was a "break" or if there was something I didn't know about the rules that "fixed" the break.

I can't imagine how anyone would even begin to design a campaign based on such broad socio-political themes (it would be more like Civilization than a role-playing game, I would imagine).

(And going back to the days I did High School debate club, sometimes when discussing an issue I will take one side of it and deliberately argue that side as far as I can go, even if I do not actually fully believe in that side, just to see what kind of responses I'll get from the other side. I can get carried away doing that sometimes. If that offended you, I apologize)

[Fish]

So the best way to make a 10th-level character is to have hundreds of thousands of low-level characters and throw them against another group of hundreds of thousands of low-level characters...
Out of curiosity, I threw some numbers at it.

Suppose you had 45,000 soldiers, all Level 1, leather armor, and some weapon that does d6 damage.

9K of your soldiers have a DEX penalty of -1. 27K have a DEX with no bonus or penalty (because this is a more common die result), and 9K others have a +1. As far as damage goes, one-third of your army has a +1 attack/damage STR bonus, one-third has no bonus, and one-third has -1.

They face off against a similarly equipped army, with each soldier fighting 1 other soldier. Every person in both armies has 8 hp (for the sake of argument, nobody has any CON bonuses or penalties).

To make it fair, we spread out the opponents so they are evenly distributed. Your guys with a STR penalty of -1 face a balanced group of enemies: one-third have AC 13, one-third have AC 14, and one-third AC 15.

Your STR +1 guys (regardless whether they are AC 13, AC 14 or AC 15) will defeat their AC 13 opponents in an average of 5 rounds. Their STR -1 guys will defeat your AC 13 soldiers in an average of 8.89 rounds. And, of course, vice-versa; your STR-1 guys are fodder for their STR+1 guys. In like-versus-like battles it's a toss-up. In other words, a STR bonus means you can kill them faster than they can kill you on average. A DEX bonus buys you some time but not much.

All you can really say for sure is that guys with higher stats are more likely to live. There would be some abberations, of course; there would be some freak rolls, because probability allows that. But you aren't guaranteed to end up with a bunch of Level 2 guys — because you'd have to survive a lot of combats just like that in order to level up.

[Scow2]

The thing about level 15+ wizards is that they are international threats and hazards.

I'd disagree with the Giant about the world being different if people don't know level differences. In fact, a +/- 4 level difference can be overcome by a 'small' numeric advantage. +/- 8 can be overcome with overwhelming numeric advantage. The average army (Mostly level 1, but with regular level 3 sprinkled through and level 5 significant characters, and level 8 leaders) can take on a full party of up to level 9 without issue, and not have major issue until level 11.

But, after level 11 or so, Nations outnumber Adventurers. To improve the power of a nation, warbeasts are brought in. The more ruthless an empire is in trying to establish superior forces, the more likely they are to become a plothook and quest-target. Mr. Evilwizardington, who rules a kingdom through his own arcane might alone (Instead of, say, the consent and will of his constituents), is likely to become a target of quests by parties level 12-13 adventurers, who have a 50%+ chance of taking him down.

Most high level characters don't care about world politics any more than most humans care about the politics of Bee Colonies - The difference in intellect between a Wizard and a Common man is greater than that between a Common Man and his pet dog.

[Clistenes]

I have no problem with the power gap when roleplaying in homebrewed worlds: The assumption is that virtually everybody is low level, with mid-level characters being extremely rare awe-inspiring heroes of the Lancelot/Miyamoto Mushashi/Robin Hood/William Tell/The Cid kind, and high-level characters being the stuff of ancient myth, like Achilles or Merlin or Väinämöinen or Hercules or CuChulainn.

There are powerful monsters, yes, but they must be rare, or otherwise there wouldn't be people at all (red dragons would have eaten them all) unless we are speaking of a Tippyverse-like magocracy. Or maybe they all live in other planes and only occasionally step onto the Prime Material.

When the heroes appear, they are the kind of stuff that only happens once every century of so, a team made of 4-6 Lancelots, and the lich or demon or whatever is the Big Bad is an Evil of the kind that only happens every thousand years of so. There aren't parties of murder hobos roaming the country, the PCs are THE Adventuring Party.

The trouble starts with established settings, when you know the name of dozens of mid-level NPCs per country, and the names of dozens of high-levels NPCs per continent, and you start to wonder how could Furyondy's army of mooks and very few mid-level NPCs fight back the demigod Iuz and his circle of mid or high level named minions (I mean, even a single cleric could raise and control an army of shadows and wights able to depopulate a kingdom, just create and control the first one and let it spawn thousand of minions, and that's just the easiest trick Iuz could pull)...

[iTookUrNick]

I'd like to add my thought on this topic.

First off, to my knowledge it is true there is no other setting like OotS, where characters have a meta-knowledge of the underlying rules. The OP question is moot in every setting but OotS. Therefore, we shall confine our speculation to the OotS-verse (which would make for a great tongue-in-cheek setting btw, but let's not digress). This is one of the most important points to keep in mind.

Let's review the OP assumption: an army is the most cost-efficient tool to have at one's disposal when waging war, otherwise smart cookies like Tarquin would not bother with it (leaving aside the fact that Tarquin himself would not dispense with the mook army for dramatic reasons).

The OP asked for a theoretical optimization answer with a twist (gp costs) to prove them right (or wrong). However, many more valid points have been raised in the meantime. I'll try not to repeat what has already been said.

My contribution in the general debate is the following: when taking costs into account one must remember that it is not always possible to convert one type of "value" into another. Suppose you have at your disposal a vast population of weaklings, mostly farmers and (say) iron miners. You can have them forge armor and weapons, conscript them into service, and you have an army. Alternatively, you could take all those items and put them in a pile, and use the theoretical gp value of the amassed items as a reward to high-level adventurers, saving yourself the trouble of strategy and organization and veterans with PTSD.

Well, the question one must ask is this: would a high level-party accept a bunch of mundane items as payment? Not unless they are reasonably sure they can move them before jumping to the next adventure. This is where another of D&D conventions breaks the game: fixed prices. But not in OOTS: we know from experience that demand and offer do exist in the setting (see haley's expenses in azure city). Therefore, unless your empire happens to have a gold mine (or equivalent resource that could be of interest to adventures, like diamonds or precious inks for scribing spells), raising an army is the only use for your wealth.

My 2¢.

Tl;DR
Wealth and cash are not interchangeable when dealing with nation-wide economies. No cash no adventurers.

[AKA_Bait]

One of the things worth keeping in mind when considering GP in D&D is that unless your setting just hand waves economics at high levels, actual gold piece value stops being meaningful. As the Giant pointed out, once full spell casters reach a certain level the acquisition of essentially limitless funds is really not all that complicated. Really expensive and rare magical items, as a result, probably can't really be sold for money, even though they have a theoretical price tag.

[Jay R]

I guess it's my fault that you have this idea that "levels" are a thing that people know about in any D&D setting, ...

No, that's Gygax's fault. It's inherent in how we play the game that players will think in those terms, so of course PCs act on that kind of thinking, so we assume that NPCs will as well.


Which is why I asked if there was any way within the rules by which an army can defeat (or at least contain) a high level spellcaster.

Given what the Giant has said about armies and superheroes adventurers I would like to post the question:
What would armies have to do to be effective against High level adventurers? I think there is many things but most require preparation

The modern military answer is combined arms. Nobody sends in infantry without planes, tanks, and other hjigh-level support.

The D&D equivalent is that an army of 10,000 low-level soldiers and six high-level adventurers can do much more than six high-level adventurers alone. So an army like the one we see should include Tarquin, Miron, Laurin, etc. (and of course they expected to have Malack as well). Note that Miron and Laurin are from different empires. Tarquin went out of his way to call in the big guns - to augment his army.

There are many things that the army can do that a small party couldn't, such as maintain control over an entire empire, as shown in the arena, at the gates, around the castle, etc. And the advantage of the army is best expressed in the first two panels of strip #918 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0918.html). They are kept in line by their fear of what Tarquin will do to their families. In this sense, the fact that none of them can stand up to the power of the warlord is a feature, not a bug.

To sum up: an army of low-levels by itself cannot defeat a small party of adventurers, but that isn't their job. A proper empire would use an army plus a group of adventurers.


In that wargame, characters topped out at 5th level. Fireball was the single most powerful spell in existence. By the time they invented higher-level magic, it was already a game for small bands of adventurers fighting monsters. So this level of power discrepancy never mattered.

True, but the principal still applied. The majority of every army were the swordsmen, bowmen, and spearmen. The dragons and wizards were great additions to the army, but were far too expensive to replace it.

[happycrow]

I'm a medieval milhist geek, and I see a lot of good thinking but bad premises going on in this discussion. First up, let's look at generically feudal society. Maybe contrast it with Roman.

In the feudal society, powerful guys (and gals) run a local area. They form the cadre. The "Konigsnahe" (people close to the ruler) are seriously skilled people, because they've risen to the point that "hey, Bob over there is a badass. Give him a barony out on the marches and let's see how he does with it."

If Bob rules well, too, he keeps it, and he and his get the best gear you can get, stellar training, all the things that make even a minor noble worlds above the average commoner. When he goes to war, he brings all his noble guys. All his noble guys bring their followers. All their followers bring their peasants.

That army has a lot of "random untrained brave guys." It also has a slew of people who wouldn't think twice about taking on adventurers if they happened to wander into his barony. They might lose, but now that we transport this to DnD, upholding the local law and squashing uppity adventurers (let's call them "jerkwad bandits") is what these guys do for a living, and why they have the barony in the first place.

So, okay, what if you're not in a prime-divider society, and you want to go to something more like the Empire of Blood, where you have a functional state? Look at the Romans. You have recruits. You have the local decurion, etc. Aka, corporals, sergeants, and people who are a far cry above the average level one commoner (the US has famously invested *hugely* in the competence and skill of NCOs just like that Roman decurion), and a good bit past the average trained level one recruit. The recruit can handle his weapons. The decurion has all that stuff down so smooth that he awes the regulars. Who awes the decurion? Oh, yeah, the centurion. And that doesn't even get to, again, whoever's forming your actual elites and trouble-shooters (your Mirons and Cat-Gurls). Your State army also usually does a better job of training the little guys, too, even if they tend to have fewer guys way at the top.

Again, just like the feudal "lance" structure, once you put these guys in the field, there's a heterogeneity of ability. And these armies can do things that the elite adventurer squads can't. Like hold ground, fortify multiple fortresses, patrol in depth, engage in construction work, route intelligence, perform crowd control, provide logistical support to starving civilians, all the things the actual ruling parties need done. And the army can do all that *simultaneously.* And particularly, if it's an actual civil state, it can do something really amazing: replace itself. Rome didn't beat Carthage because its soldiers were really all that formidable -- Carthaginians regularly kicked the apple snot out of the Romans. Rome won because it was able to say "oh, you kicked the apple snot out of the army? Emergency recruitment! Bam, here's another army to deal with."

Whereas your team of adventurers? They can do one of those at a time. Sure, they can be IMMENSELY destructive, because they're a team of elites. And if they're a full-on high-level party, then they can exert just a tremendous amount of power that can wipe you out. If they're in your neck of the woods, rather than somewhere else. And if they're actually better than your own elites. Because, as Rich so beautifully put it...

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0512.html

[Amphiox]

It occurred to me while thinking about the responses on this thread overnight that one key difference between how real life and how D&D works breaks to some extent the validity of using real life analogies (including many of my own).

Experience gain in D&D is supposed to model individuals gaining experience and abilities in the real world, but there appears to be one key difference. In real life one doesn't need to get into life threatening situations to do the trick. It is entirely possible to train a neophyte into a very competent fighter without that person ever seeing real combat at all. It is even possible for a person to become the greatest human fighter of his or her generation without ever engaging in real life-and-death combat (though admittedly difficult). So the real life equivalents of an epic fighter or an epic mage can be "manufactured" in a training center/university environment.

But you can't do that in a D&D setting. In this sense the very levelling up process is itself a manifestation of the magic inherent in a D&D setting, since in real life one cannot gain superpowers no matter how often one exposes oneself to life-threatening situations and survives.

[Amphiox]

Another issue that has relevance to narrative settings like OOTS is the overarching issue of in media res. The scenario I had speculated about regarding the obsolescence of standing armies of low level mooks is one that would have to evolve over time. Even if the premises that lead to that conclusion were actually true and none of the things brought up by others would stop it from happening, it is something doesn't instantly happen. If you leave a world running on such D&D rules over a timespan (and allow for spontaneous evolution of the societies without imposing any sort of temporal/technological/arcane stasis) one might see over time a gradual accumulation of higher and higher level characters (as these would tend to survive, particularly among races with longer lifespans), and eventually it may come to pass that enough high level spellcasters exist that their use as a military resource becomes something that can be contemplated. Similarly, if the world should eventually develop a discipline equivalent to science in the real world that investigates the "rules" that govern the world, meaning that eventually the people within it will, through experiment, observation and so forth, figure how levelling works and so forth. It would probably be only when such a world gets near the equivalent of the modern era in its development before phenomenon like armies disappearing and being replaced by elite spellcasters, constructs and summoned creatures start being seen.

One can easily still have armies appear in such settings simply by having the action take place before any such developments are likely to occur, within the simulated history of that world.

[Scow2]

But you can't do that in a D&D setting. In this sense the very levelling up process is itself a manifestation of the magic inherent in a D&D setting, since in real life one cannot gain superpowers no matter how often one exposes oneself to life-threatening situations and survives.I'm going to

Its' actually possible to 'manufacture' level 3-5 characters through arduous training, but the time-to-create them is quite long, and most people 'wash out'. Sports may not be (deliberately) lethal, but the genuine competition is undeniable. And even the most staged sports (Such as many martial arts competitions) still have that competition.

The issue is that, in the real world, Level 5 is the highest a person can usually reach, and it takes exceptional drive, luck, motivation, and opportunity to pull it off.

The reason you can't "Power Train" armies of level 5 guys is that 90% of them just can't be bothered to put forth that kind of effort. They can manage level 1. Maybe.

[Oko and Qailee]

It occurred to me while thinking about the responses on this thread overnight that one key difference between how real life and how D&D works breaks to some extent the validity of using real life analogies (including many of my own).

Experience gain in D&D is supposed to model individuals gaining experience and abilities in the real world, but there appears to be one key difference. In real life one doesn't need to get into life threatening situations to do the trick. It is entirely possible to train a neophyte into a very competent fighter without that person ever seeing real combat at all. It is even possible for a person to become the greatest human fighter of his or her generation without ever engaging in real life-and-death combat (though admittedly difficult). So the real life equivalents of an epic fighter or an epic mage can be "manufactured" in a training center/university environment.
.

Yes an no. Because an Epic level cap is explicitly beyond human capability. Even if we granted exp for mundane tasks, the exp gain would have to be extremely small.

An Epic Fighter is not a real life equivalent of a trained human, a real life equivalent of a fighter is a human turning into superman.

No matter how much training a person has in real life, they will never survive a naked fall from space like a Barbarian can.

So, even if we translated real life exp to D&D exp, the gain would be so small that you would only get 1-2 levels in your life time. Keep in mind a 75% death rate to get to level 2 through vicious, extreme, life threatening encounters. Now tell me how much exp you should get weaving baskets and fighting other people with wooden swords, the answer is not much.

D&D is like this:
lvl 1: average person with training
lvl 2: experienced person
lvl 3: Very experienced person
lvl 4: one in thounsands
lvl 5: one in a lifetime

There was only one einstein, and he may have been a lvl 5 expert, but if he was there was not a single other one in his lifetime.

[Psyren]

Tarquin stated outright that Elan could go to any tavern and easily recruit replacements for Roy and Durkon. That is only possible in a world where characters of Roy and Durkon's approximate level are common.

That doesn't mean they're common, it just means that the few that are out there will be narratively drawn to Elan.

Put in Wheel of Time terms, Elan is Ta'veren :smalltongue:

The demographics for Azure City's defenders, and Qarr's comment about V, are much more indicative of the actual situation.

[AKA_Bait]

The issue is that, in the real world, Level 5 is the highest a person can usually reach, and it takes exceptional drive, luck, motivation, and opportunity to pull it off.

The reason you can't "Power Train" armies of level 5 guys is that 90% of them just can't be bothered to put forth that kind of effort. They can manage level 1. Maybe.

Indeed. Once you get past low levels, D&D no longer models the real world in any useful way. This essay is an interesting discussion that topic. (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2)

[johnbragg]

What would the real world look like if less than a fraction of a percent of a rounding error of the demographic breakdown, some of which were known to be omnicidal maniacs, were capable of being nigh-invincible demigods that could slaughter hundreds of thousands with a thought, and there was nothing any one not of that fraction could do about it, no matter what strategy they deployed or how many of them there were?

Well, we've spent seventy-odd years now living in a world where Stalin, Mao a their successors had nuclear weapons. Now, you could argue that it's not the same, and cite the legend (I forget if it's true or not) of Kissinger or Al Haig telling the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him first if Nixon ordered them to launch the nukes. But the other side can't count on that.


I posit to you that nations, laws, society, civilization itself, could not exist.

Well, there's the threat of retaliaion. If Albertus the Mad decides that this week is a good week to start the Omnicide, that's going to attract the attention of the other walking demigods.

Unless the majority had a way of containing that minority.

The Justice Leaguers have weaknesses. An army group with kryptonite bullets can take down Superman.

Does a Level 15+ wizard have an equivalent weakness?[/QUOTE]

[pendell]

I haven't read all of the thread, but I would like to respond to the original question.

I see an army in D&D like pawns in chess, and the high-level characters as pieces. Actually, a bit more higher power than pieces, as if your "king" has damage reduction there's no way for the pawns to damage them at all.

But in any case, I think it's a good analogy: There are pieces on the board that are of overwhelming power compared to the individual pawns, but they are limited in number . The enemy ALSO has pieces. So your typical chess game involves the mutual annihilation of those high level pieces by each other. The end game is typically decided not by the pieces, but by the kings and a handful of pawns. Whoever goes into the end game with one extra pawn is usually the winner. If you get to the end game and the other guy has a great deal more material than you do, then there is an obvious mismatch in skill, along the lines of a duffer playing a FIDE-rated grandmaster.

In such a game -- and I actually, in high-school, played a Persian variant of checkers in which kings could not be captured by ordinary checkers but only by other kings -- you do NOT throw away your low-ranks attacking high-value pieces. Instead, you use the high-value pieces to destroy each other, while the low ranks shape the battle field for the appropriate use of high-value pieces.

Anyone here play Star Wars: Rebellion? I think it's the same situation. The ultimate decision as to the winner of the game revolves around who can collect and train the most Jedi Knights/ Sith Lords. That doesn't mean there's no place for common soldiers. In a galaxy with quintillions of individuals and only a few tens of thousands of force users, the Jedi can't be everywhere. Instead, they are best used as a rapid-reaction force, or the tip of a spear made up of an ordinary army. Employing Jedi to kill battle droids is equivalent to going quail-hunting with a tank cannon. You save the Jedi for the Sith Lords or for critical situations. Likewise, if you encounter a jedi the correct answer is NOT a legion of storm troopers unless you don't like them. The correct answer is specially trained assassins, force users, and purpose-built droids.

I also question the assumption that every king and nation can simply walk into a tavern and higher an infinite supply of level 13+ adventurers. If I remember the original D&D, Gary Gygax had it set up so that most adventurers in the game world were expected to be around level 2 or 3. Level 1 was a soldier in basic training, level 2 and 3 were elite special forces, while level 6 was "name level", the point at which you become a legend. There's only one or two of these in a generation. A level 6 scholar would be somebody like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. A level 6 general would be somebody like Hannibal or Hercules or Achilles. A level 13 character just doesn't exist.

Of course, 'power creep' in forgotten realms means that every tavern is being run by a retired epic adventurer. And that's a flaw in the world-building. Characters above level 3 are supposed to be so rare you have to go on a global search to find them, and can identify them by name. The fact that the setting has so many is a concession to the fact that D&D is heroic fantasy -- it requires that heroes be able to dominate masses of ordinary men. If this were not so, we're playing something more like Risk than D&D.

So the presence of multiple high-level adventurers is a flaw in the world building which we're supposed to ignore as part of the suspension of disbelief. If the world was built for simulation rather than entertainment, there should be no heroes or villains much above level 6!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Scow2]

Yes an no. Because an Epic level cap is explicitly beyond human capability. Even if we granted exp for mundane tasks, the exp gain would have to be extremely small.

An Epic Fighter is not a real life equivalent of a trained human, a real life equivalent of a fighter is a human turning into superman.

No matter how much training a person has in real life, they will never survive a naked fall from space like a Barbarian can.

So, even if we translated real life exp to D&D exp, the gain would be so small that you would only get 1-2 levels in your life time. Keep in mind a 75% death rate to get to level 2 through vicious, extreme, life threatening encounters. Now tell me how much exp you should get weaving baskets and fighting other people with wooden swords, the answer is not much.

D&D is like this:
lvl 1: average person with training
lvl 2: experienced person
lvl 3: Very experienced person
lvl 4: one in thounsands
lvl 5: one in a lifetime

There was only one einstein, and he may have been a lvl 5 expert, but if he was there was not a single other one in his lifetime.Actually, you're inflating the levels a bit. Einstein was the only level 6 Expert with an INT of 19.

Most people past level 1 are older, and toss all their points and abilities all over the place instead of focusing.

[johnbragg]

They can't be lvl 1 if there purpose is to dominate the battlefield against all comers. They can be level one if, as the Giant has pointed out, adventurers are seen more as forces of nature than as something that you can simply cultivate and deploy as you see fit.

A thought experiment: Imagine tomorrow dragons appear on regular earth. No human weapon can harm them. Some dragons are good, some are bad, if they decide to attack your nation you can do nothing about it. Would we disband the Army?

No. We might take some military spending and divert it to appeasing dragons, or long term, anti-dragon research, but we'd still need the army for whenever the Dragons weren't around.

Right. We LIVE in a world where one military has the physical power to devastate the physical infrastructure of almost any country they choose, with no fear of similar retaliation. If President Obama made the decision, the Syrian military and government (for example) could be wiped out in a matter of weeks (or days, if we have the right ships and planes in the right places already.) So the American President, relative to anyone without nukes, might as well be a demigod wizard.

And yet most of the world--including and especially the places we're more inclined to bomb to smithereens--still maintains standing armies, and often puts serious resources into them.

[AKA_Bait]

The Justice Leaguers have weaknesses. An army group with kryptonite bullets can take down Superman.

Does a Level 15+ wizard have an equivalent weakness?

An antimagic field might be a rough equivalent.


Most people past level 1 are older, and toss all their points and abilities all over the place instead of focusing.

As the comic depicts pretty well, most real people aren't optimized. I know if you represented me in D&D terms, my skill point investment would be all over the place.

[allenw]

Mostly the, "Not relevant to the plot," point. But also, in the specific case of Azure City, they weren't there to defend the country. They were there to defend the Gate, and the country happened to be around the Gate. It was a unique aligning of a national interest with an adventurer-type interest.

Azure City also had the habit of sending its Paladins out to massacre Goblins in remote locations, which presumably helped them level up (even if some of them may not have remained Paladins).

[Amphiox]

Yes an no. Because an Epic level cap is explicitly beyond human capability. Even if we granted exp for mundane tasks, the exp gain would have to be extremely small.

An Epic Fighter is not a real life equivalent of a trained human, a real life equivalent of a fighter is a human turning into superman.

No matter how much training a person has in real life, they will never survive a naked fall from space like a Barbarian can.

So, even if we translated real life exp to D&D exp, the gain would be so small that you would only get 1-2 levels in your life time. Keep in mind a 75% death rate to get to level 2 through vicious, extreme, life threatening encounters. Now tell me how much exp you should get weaving baskets and fighting other people with wooden swords, the answer is not much.

D&D is like this:
lvl 1: average person with training
lvl 2: experienced person
lvl 3: Very experienced person
lvl 4: one in thounsands
lvl 5: one in a lifetime

There was only one einstein, and he may have been a lvl 5 expert, but if he was there was not a single other one in his lifetime.

It is nice to have the equivalencies laid out like that. Thanks for that info. When I made the original analogy, I was "normalizing" the scales. Since it is a given that D&D involved superhuman powers analogies cannot work with real life for those higher levels unless you try to posit real life equivalencies. So I deliberately shrunk the D&D scale so the bottom end and top ends matched (ie epic levels represent the highest abilities that a character in its own setting can achieve, matching up with the same in real life). Of course doing so will always raise its own problems, but without it, you can't use real life analogy at all, and would have to determine the D&D situation from the "bottom-up" approach, ie analyzing straight from the RAW.

[Amphiox]

I haven't read all of the thread, but I would like to respond to the original question.

I see an army in D&D like pawns in chess, and the high-level characters as pieces. Actually, a bit more higher power than pieces, as if your "king" has damage reduction there's no way for the pawns to damage them at all.

But in any case, I think it's a good analogy: There are pieces on the board that are of overwhelming power compared to the individual pawns, but they are limited in number . The enemy ALSO has pieces. So your typical chess game involves the mutual annihilation of those high level pieces by each other. The end game is typically decided not by the pieces, but by the kings and a handful of pawns. Whoever goes into the end game with one extra pawn is usually the winner. If you get to the end game and the other guy has a great deal more material than you do, then there is an obvious mismatch in skill, along the lines of a duffer playing a FIDE-rated grandmaster.

In such a game -- and I actually, in high-school, played a Persian variant of checkers in which kings could not be captured by ordinary checkers but only by other kings -- you do NOT throw away your low-ranks attacking high-value pieces. Instead, you use the high-value pieces to destroy each other, while the low ranks shape the battle field for the appropriate use of high-value pieces.

Anyone here play Star Wars: Rebellion? I think it's the same situation. The ultimate decision as to the winner of the game revolves around who can collect and train the most Jedi Knights/ Sith Lords. That doesn't mean there's no place for common soldiers. In a galaxy with quintillions of individuals and only a few tens of thousands of force users, the Jedi can't be everywhere. Instead, they are best used as a rapid-reaction force, or the tip of a spear made up of an ordinary army. Employing Jedi to kill battle droids is equivalent to going quail-hunting with a tank cannon. You save the Jedi for the Sith Lords or for critical situations. Likewise, if you encounter a jedi the correct answer is NOT a legion of storm troopers unless you don't like them. The correct answer is specially trained assassins, force users, and purpose-built droids.

I also question the assumption that every king and nation can simply walk into a tavern and higher an infinite supply of level 13+ adventurers. If I remember the original D&D, Gary Gygax had it set up so that most adventurers in the game world were expected to be around level 2 or 3. Level 1 was a soldier in basic training, level 2 and 3 were elite special forces, while level 6 was "name level", the point at which you become a legend. There's only one or two of these in a generation. A level 6 scholar would be somebody like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. A level 6 general would be somebody like Hannibal or Hercules or Achilles. A level 13 character just doesn't exist.

Of course, 'power creep' in forgotten realms means that every tavern is being run by a retired epic adventurer. And that's a flaw in the world-building. Characters above level 3 are supposed to be so rare you have to go on a global search to find them, and can identify them by name. The fact that the setting has so many is a concession to the fact that D&D is heroic fantasy -- it requires that heroes be able to dominate masses of ordinary men. If this were not so, we're playing something more like Risk than D&D.

So the presence of multiple high-level adventurers is a flaw in the world building which we're supposed to ignore as part of the suspension of disbelief. If the world was built for simulation rather than entertainment, there should be no heroes or villains much above level 6!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

One difference between chess and D&D though is that in chess pawns can, in sufficient number, contain the other pieces. In fact, much of chess strategy involves using the pawns to contain your opponent's pieces. 3 pawns can contain a bishop or a knight, 5 can contain a rook, 4 can checkmate the king, all 9 can (sometimes) contain the queen. Also, when a pawn attacks a piece, the piece has react. The pawns can herd and drive the pieces when working together. But a high level D&D character can ignore a low level one as an elephant ignored a gnat....

[Forikroder]

One difference between chess and D&D though is that in chess pawns can, in sufficient number, contain the other pieces. In fact, much of chess strategy involves using the pawns to contain your opponent's pieces. 3 pawns can contain a bishop or a knight, 5 can contain a rook, 4 can checkmate the king, all 9 can (sometimes) contain the queen. Also, when a pawn attacks a piece, the piece has react. The pawns can herd and drive the pieces when working together. But a high level D&D character can ignore a low level one as an elephant ignored a gnat....

not true, if 1000 mooks are attacking an important area then the high level has to respond, and while there responding there the opponents high level can attack the real target

[Oko and Qailee]

Actually, you're inflating the levels a bit. Einstein was the only level 6 Expert with an INT of 19.

Most people past level 1 are older, and toss all their points and abilities all over the place instead of focusing.

At work in a lab... I kinda want to stat out Albert Einstein now.

[Oko and Qailee]

It is nice to have the equivalencies laid out like that. Thanks for that info. When I made the original analogy, I was "normalizing" the scales. Since it is a given that D&D involved superhuman powers analogies cannot work with real life for those higher levels unless you try to posit real life equivalencies. So I deliberately shrunk the D&D scale so the bottom end and top ends matched (ie epic levels represent the highest abilities that a character in its own setting can achieve, matching up with the same in real life). Of course doing so will always raise its own problems, but without it, you can't use real life analogy at all, and would have to determine the D&D situation from the "bottom-up" approach, ie analyzing straight from the RAW.

Obviously, in D&D, a lvl 5+ is more than once in a lifetime, but not by much. Ofc this means that larger cities DO have individuals higher than lvl 5, but very few.

In a setting, you can obviously expect that, other than the PC's, there is probably at least 1-2 people of every alignment at high level (there's some "lvl distribution for populations by city size" in some book). They're either off doing their own thing, and maybe, in rare circumstance they are living in a city.

Now small towns don't get access to that, which means when a large invading army, or evil PC's, or the BBEG attacks, it is up to the good PC's/heros to save them or they're just out of luck. So they either flee if the know the magnitude of the threat or die.

[hamishspence]

In a setting, you can obviously expect that, other than the PC's, there is probably at least 1-2 people of every alignment at high level (there's some "lvl distribution for populations by city size" in some book). They're either off doing their own thing, and maybe, in rare circumstance they are living in a city.

Yup- the DMG. And the Epic Handbook has an updated version of that table to incorporate epic characters.

[bguy]

You can't "game" the XP system in-game. If an event is set up as a training exercise, then it is by definition training—not an actual encounter. If there's no threat of death, no penalty for failure, you don't get XP. If your sparring partner is not willing to kill you, you don't get XP for beating him. And the reason that is true is specifically to prevent the exact scenario you are describing. Otherwise adventuring parties could just fight each other all day long and level up to infinity.

That makes sense as a rule for PCs, but does it actually apply to NPCs? The existance of NPC classes in particular seems to suggest that NPCs can level up by means other than fighting. Otherwise the blacksmith who has spent 20 years perfecting their craft would be no better than the guy who just entered the trade two days ago since they would both would only be 1st level experts with the limits that imposes on their skill ranks.

It also seems like holding NPCs to PC advancement rules would break verisimilitude for most campaign worlds. Is the High Priest of a god of agriculture doomed to never rise above 1st level because he spends all his time casting spells to increase crop yields rather than fighting monsters? That seems like an absurd result.

[johnbragg]

Experience gain in D&D is supposed to model individuals gaining experience and abilities in the real world, but there appears to be one key difference. In real life one doesn't need to get into life threatening situations to do the trick. It is entirely possible to train a neophyte into a very competent fighter without that person ever seeing real combat at all.

Yes'n'no. Excellent training will take you pretty far. But it's hard to simulate real experience in training, and the only way to make the training better ends up making it more dangerous--you train a fighter pilot on simulations to a certain point, then you put him in a "trainer jet" with a teacher-copilot, then you have him train in a real fighter jet, THEN he's available for combat missions.


It is even possible for a person to become the greatest human fighter of his or her generation without ever engaging in real life-and-death combat (though admittedly difficult).

That doesn't seem to be true. Boxing isn't life or death, but Mike Tyson always said "Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth."


So the real life equivalents of an epic fighter or an epic mage can be "manufactured" in a training center/university environment.

Not true. Plenty of Education majors get out of college and then fall flat on their faces their first year teaching. (Some do fine their first year). Some learn through experience, and then can blend that experience with their training. You can argue with the example, but it's a pretty widely shared principle that "Training != experience." Now, ideally you want "Training + Experience". Or if you're talking about armies, "Training + Experience + Superior Gear + Coordination".


But you can't do that in a D&D setting. In this sense the very levelling up process is itself a manifestation of the magic inherent in a D&D setting, since in real life one cannot gain superpowers no matter how often one exposes oneself to life-threatening situations and survives.

Right. This line of argument puts the highest-achieving humans in history at single-digit levels. Einstein as Expert 5 or 6, veteran police as Level 2 (some warrior-rogue hybrid class), military Special Forces as level 4 or 5 or 6. Beyond that is Paul Bunyan/Chuck-Norris-jokes territory.

There's a D&D variant called E6 ("Epic Starts At 6th Level") that operates on that idea, capping level advancement at 6th level. (You still gain abilities, but much more slowly.)

[hamishspence]

In a setting, you can obviously expect that, other than the PC's, there is probably at least 1-2 people of every alignment at high level (there's some "lvl distribution for populations by city size" in some book). They're either off doing their own thing, and maybe, in rare circumstance they are living in a city.

Lets take wizards as an example (many classes have higher minimum levels though- especially NPC ones):

Small city:
DMG: A small city might have only two 7th level wizards (min level), but it might have 2 10th level wizards (maximum)

Epic Handbook: 2 9th level wizards min, 2 12th level wizards max

Large City
DMG: 3 10th level wizards min, 3 13th level wizards max

Epic Handbook: 3 13th level wizards min, 3 16th level wizards max

Metropolis
DMG: 4 13th level wizards min, 4 16th level wizards max

Epic Handbook: 4 17th level wizards min, 4 20th level wizards max

Planar Metropolis (Epic Handbook only)
6 21st level wizards min, 6 24th level wizards max

The Epic Handbook also gives random percentages for frequency of settlement sizes:

10% of settlements are Thorps (population 20-80)
20% of settlements are Hamlets (population 81-400)
30% of settlements are Villages (population 401-900)
30% of settlements are Small Towns (population 901-2000)
15% of settlements are Large Towns (population 2001-5000)
10% of settlements are Small Cities (population 5001-12000)
4% of settlements are Large Cities (population 12001-25000)
1% of settlements are Metropolises (25001+)

Planar metropolis (population 100000 and up) have frequency: Special, since most nations don't have them.

[Scurvy Cur]

I'm saying that he HAS to have raised his army with the idea that, if required, they will be able to fight at least highish level adventurers. Otherwise there would be no point in having that army instead of hiring highish level adventurers to do his fighting for him.

An army that cannot defeat at least mid-level adventurers is utterly useless in a D&D setting. The first time battle is joined, the opposing commander merely has to walk into the nearest town, go to the tavern, recruit 5 mid-level mercenaries, and wipe out your army with them. YOU could do the same. So why would either of you even bother HAVING an army at all?

And the army of a major power or superpower in the setting would need to be able to defeat EPIC level adventurer parties. If not, then no nation could ever even survive long enough to BECOME a major power.

It is true that Tarquin has conquered a lot. So who did he beat? Either other armies or teams of adventurers. If it was armies he beat, then why did his opponents send armies against him, and not simply teams of adventurers? The only reason they would do so is if teams of adventurers are not effective against his army, ie his army can beat teams of adventurers easily.

Remember that new warlords have arisen on the Western Continent almost yearly, and usually in bunches. If teams of adventurers can actually beat armies then at least one of them should have realized this by now and used adventurers instead of armies, and he would have conquered everything.

Furthermore, Tarquin has an adventurer team, one that is near-epic or even fully epic in average level. He did not use that adventurer team to fight his battles. Why? The only reason would be if a near-epic adventurer team cannot defeat armies in battle.

Thus the reality of the Stickverse, as directly demonstrated by the events as described, is that armies beat teams of adventurers in battle.

You bring up strip 417, but that is exactly my point. That strip again shows that armies beat teams of adventurers in battle.

BUT, based on many discussions elsewhere by people familiar with the rules, a team of mid to high level adventurers should wipe the floor with vast numbers of level 1 mooks. In other words, if the opposing army were made up mostly of level 1 mooks, then O'Chul's words to Haley in 417 would have been wrong per D&D RAW.

Clearly they were not wrong. And clearly we know that Redcloak's army was not made up entirely of level 1 mooks. And there is no mention of what precisely it was made up of. We do know that it had a mixture of classes and abilities and had higher level characters among the ranks.

So what WAS it made up of, SPECIFICALLY?

An effective army in a D&D setting *cannot* consist mostly of level 1 mooks.

What I'm interested is the details.

The main reason for still having an army is that its another tool in the toolbox. In a pitched battle, who is going to win: the guy who hired 10 level 12+ adventurers, or the guy who did that and brought two legions of his finest troops?

Used in a supporting fashion (see battle of Azure City) each component covers what the other can't. The army holds ground, takes and holds key strategic points, and enables the commander to exercise power over a large area. The Adventurers fight the key engagements, undermine the opposing army's positions, and provide massive local superiority to their side. Unsupported armies are going to take massive casualties when they run into adventurers. Unsupported adventurers are going to blow a lot of resources and time trying to do the grunt work of an army, and they're pretty inefficient at projecting power across the entirety of the battlefield all at once (that would take a lot of adventurers and probably be prohibitively expensive).

The issue Tarquin is running into right now is probably that, given the story he thinks he's in, he assumed the powers of narrative structure would weigh in on the side of killing Roy to enable Elan's growth. He may reconsider in the next strip or two.

[AKA_Bait]

In a pitched battle, who is going to win: the guy who hired 10 level 12+ adventurers, or the guy who did that and brought two legions of his finest troops?

What classes are each side's ten adventurers? :smallwink: Still, I agree with your analysis generally here.

One other point about standing armies, they make sense as a social control tool in this sort of setting, even if they don't really win battles. From the standpoint of keeping an orderly tyranny kingdom, isn't having a good proportion of the violently inclined young men in your society in your employ and acting under your direction better than having them directionless, unemployed, and probably prone to banditry?

[King of Nowhere]

I haven't read all of the thread, but I would like to respond to the original question.

I see an army in D&D like pawns in chess, and the high-level characters as pieces. Actually, a bit more higher power than pieces, as if your "king" has damage reduction there's no way for the pawns to damage them at all.

But in any case, I think it's a good analogy: There are pieces on the board that are of overwhelming power compared to the individual pawns, but they are limited in number . The enemy ALSO has pieces. So your typical chess game involves the mutual annihilation of those high level pieces by each other. The end game is typically decided not by the pieces, but by the kings and a handful of pawns. Whoever goes into the end game with one extra pawn is usually the winner. If you get to the end game and the other guy has a great deal more material than you do, then there is an obvious mismatch in skill, along the lines of a duffer playing a FIDE-rated grandmaster.

In such a game -- and I actually, in high-school, played a Persian variant of checkers in which kings could not be captured by ordinary checkers but only by other kings -- you do NOT throw away your low-ranks attacking high-value pieces. Instead, you use the high-value pieces to destroy each other, while the low ranks shape the battle field for the appropriate use of high-value pieces.
One difference between chess and D&D though is that in chess pawns can, in sufficient number, contain the other pieces. In fact, much of chess strategy involves using the pawns to contain your opponent's pieces. 3 pawns can contain a bishop or a knight, 5 can contain a rook, 4 can checkmate the king, all 9 can (sometimes) contain the queen. Also, when a pawn attacks a piece, the piece has react. The pawns can herd and drive the pieces when working together. But a high level D&D character can ignore a low level one as an elephant ignored a gnat....

Actually, the one about chess is a good comparison. one just has to take in mind that one "pawn" is an army of thousands of mook, while one bishop is maybe a mid-level party and the queen is one single near-epic character.
Only problem is that the stronger pieces coulkd avoid getting captured by pawns simply by teleporting away. you need some low level wizards with some scrolls of dimensional anchor in the middle of your "pawns" to fix that.



You really can't pull at one thread without the whole tapestry unraveling. Suspension of Disbelief rules the day.



Well, I think that's quite a pessimistic view. If nothing else, D&D allows ample freedom in making the setting, so there are many ways to adjust the setting so that high level adventurers cannot just walk in any throne room an mind dominate the king.
Without going to houseruling or changing the specifics of the settings (which would be outside the scope of this discussion, since we are talking about a "regular" D&D world), we may imagine that about one third of all high level aventurers would be good aligned, and they would react if one evil adventuring group did particularly heinous things. While on the other hand no evil adventurer would help them, cause they would have no reason to do so.

One may even think good-aligned adventurers are more common than evil-aligned ones, for a number of reasons:
1) most evil adventurers are just intersted in loot and personal power. once they hit level 10, they are rich enough to buy a small country and live like gods the rest of their lives. so there would be a sharp decline in the number of REALLY high evil adventurers.
2) evil adventuring parties are more prone to betray each other for money. if one of their teammates die, they may not resurrect him to save the money, unless they are a team like tarquin's. both problems do not exist with good adventuring parties.
3) evil adventuring parties are likely to make more enemies than good ones. true, most of them will never be a challenge to you. then one day old duke Kholsa Ehld (http://z11.invisionfree.com/delkana/ar/t789.htm) will walk among the remains of the silver court, find the weeping queen, and then you'll be screwed. goood parties are less likely (though not completely immune, as V could attest) to be affected by this kind of backfire.
4) if a good aligned adventurer dies, it is possible some king or whatever gathers the diamonds to raise him, because he already protected the kingdom and he will be a valuable asset to have alive in case some other big villain comes. the same is less likely for evil adventurers.
So, for all those reasons, it would be possible that good-aligned adventurers are more common, at high-levels, than evil-aligned ones. that may be enough to prevent the evil guys from going over a certain level of evil deeds, a level that would make them targets to the good guys.
So, while those few high level adventurers are not part of any army, they protect every kingdom from an invasion of high level parties, because they would not stand such a thing.

I'm sure one can find many perfectly reasonable in-world explanations that would stop a low number of adventurers from ruling the world, without recurring to "suspension of disbelief". Suspension of disbelief is applied to the existence of magic and of people capable of taking 20 stab wounds in the chest and go on fighting without any hindrance. It should not be applied to following the logical consequences of the rules that have been established for the setting (unless it's a comedy, then inconsistencies that are glissed over by the rule of funny may even add to the humour).

By the way, a book about what could happen if there were highly powerful evil people and the armies could not contain them is steelheart, by brandon sanderson. it is set in our world after at some point people started manifesting superpowers, but all of them turned out to be evil. after trying in vain to fight them, the government issued the capitulation act, establishing that "epics" were to be considered forces of nature, and as such above the law, cause you cannot make a law to stop the wind from blowing. a few years later, the world is in anarchy, with some places clinging to some weak government and trying to live as best as they can, other places where the most powerful epic rules and does whatever he pleases
it's going to be released in a few days, and I can't wait to read it.

[Oko and Qailee]

Metropolis
DMG: 4 13th level wizards min, 4 16th level wizards max



See, at this point there is clearly a point to a standing army. With numbers and 2 level 16 wizards, you can handle a lot of things (barring cheesyness ofc).

Naturally the wizards cant be bothered for every single low lvl encounter, thats where your army comes in.

Thanks for all the info btw :)

[kinem]

Most D&D armies would include spellcasters, but this is not just any army. It's Tarquin's army. My guess would be that he didn't want an army that could be a threat to him personally. When he sent it after those in the crater, he didn't know about Durkon being a vampire, so he thought it would suffice. Another possibility is that since these soldiers were trained for plot reveals, they have too much information and he wants to get rid of them :smallwink:

[hamishspence]

Without going to houseruling or changing the specifics of the settings (which would be outside the scope of this discussion, since we are talking about a "regular" D&D world), we may imagine that about one third of all high level aventurers would be good aligned, and they would react if one evil adventuring group did particularly heinous things. While on the other hand no evil adventurer would help them, cause they would have no reason to do so.

One may even think good-aligned adventurers are more common than evil-aligned ones, for a number of reasons:
1) most evil adventurers are just intersted in loot and personal power. once they hit level 10, they are rich enough to buy a small country and live like gods the rest of their lives. so there would be a sharp decline in the number of REALLY high evil adventurers.
2) evil adventuring parties are more prone to betray each other for money. if one of their teammates die, they may not resurrect him to save the money, unless they are a team like tarquin's. both problems do not exist with good adventuring parties.
3) evil adventuring parties are likely to make more enemies than good ones. true, most of them will never be a challenge to you. then one day old duke Kholsa Ehld (http://z11.invisionfree.com/delkana/ar/t789.htm) will walk among the remains of the silver court, find the weeping queen, and then you'll be screwed. goood parties are less likely (though not completely immune, as V could attest) to be affected by this kind of backfire.
4) if a good aligned adventurer dies, it is possible some king or whatever gathers the diamonds to raise him, because he already protected the kingdom and he will be a valuable asset to have alive in case some other big villain comes. the same is less likely for evil adventurers.
So, for all those reasons, it would be possible that good-aligned adventurers are more common, at high-levels, than evil-aligned ones. that may be enough to prevent the evil guys from going over a certain level of evil deeds, a level that would make them targets to the good guys.

Actually, the DMG has tables for random characters with PC levels that your party can encounter- and alignment percentages:

20% Good
30% Neutral
50% Evil

[AKA_Bait]

By the way, a book about what could happen if there were highly powerful evil people and the armies could not contain them is steelheart, by brandon sanderson. it is set in our world after at some point people started manifesting superpowers, but all of them turned out to be evil. after trying in vain to fight them, the government issued the capitulation act, establishing that "epics" were to be considered forces of nature, and as such above the law, cause you cannot make a law to stop the wind from blowing. a few years later, the world is in anarchy, with some places clinging to some weak government and trying to live as best as they can, other places where the most powerful epic rules and does whatever he pleases
it's going to be released in a few days, and I can't wait to read it.

I've been thinking about that book throughout this entire thread too.


When he sent it after those in the crater, he didn't know about Durkon being a vampire, so he thought it would suffice. Another possibility is that since these soldiers were trained for plot reveals, they have too much information and he wants to get rid of them :smallwink:

The latter is more likely as we know that Tarquin was aware of Durkons vampirisim (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0882.html).


Actually, the DMG has tables for random characters with PC levels that your party can encounter- and alignment percentages:

10% Good
20% Neutral
50% Evil

Never noticed that. Power tends to corrupt eh? (also, where is the other 20%)

[Doug Lampert]

"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between his shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style."

In the book from which that quote comes one wizard gets a greatsword through her body, back to front, and if COMPLETELY FAILS to cramp her style at all. IIRC they eventually kill the big bad, but it doesn't actually take.

Vlad's world is a LOOSY example for knife between the shoulderblades working, the only time it works is when done with a powerful artifact level knife.

[hamishspence]

(also, where is the other 20%)

Sorry about that - have corrected the error.

[The Pilgrim]

And it is very likely that militaries are currently in the process whereby eventually ever more sophisticated drones will ultimately replace the infantry for all combat operations, with infantry only being deployed after the real fighting is over to mop up and secure ground.

In a world running on D&D rules, one would expect to see a similar historical transition, with standing armies gradually replaced by smaller forces of high level characters, and higher level characters should become more and more common as time progresses as well. Of course this scenario won't occur in most D&D fiction or gameplay since those worlds tend to remain locked in medieval stasis for plot reasons.

Actually, no, this is not how the historical developement of military has worked.

Up until the Middle Ages, the rules for warfare were basically "the side with better discipline wins". And "better discipline" meant "soliders capable to form a close formation and keep it while fighting and maneouvering, and hold longer without running away". That's how the Greeks, then the Romans conquered most of their known world. And, since trained infantry (the key to victory) was expensive both in time and resources, then it was important to keep the soldiers alive. So they were issued metal armor, shields and helmets.

In the middle ages, warfare was very much unorganized and consisted mainly on raids on enemy territory. Cavalry was thus the key and trained infantry almost dissapeared. Engagements were small-scale, 1,000 combatants per side was already a big battle, and cavalry charges could trunce infantry because infantry were basically poorly trained and equiped serfs. When organized infantry came back in the latte middle ages, the squares of pikemen dominated the battlefields.

Then gunpowder was introduced. And since any idiot could learn to fire a musket, and the bullet would kill a knight or a peasant with equal ease, quality began to weight less and give way to who could field the most firepower. By the time of the French Revolution, the professional, mercenary armies of the XVI-XVIII centuries had been replaced by forced conscription and leve en masse.

Today, we have got back to small professional armies because, after the Nuke was introduced, there has been no wars, neither expectative of wars, between First World countries. First world armies are only involved in assymetrical warfare. When we see a conflict between equal forces, though, the good old unprofessional infatryman armed with a cheap assault rifle is still the backbone of the war effort.

Now, about an Heroic Fantasy setting... Heroic Fantasy is not actually based in real european middle ages, but in the romantic, XIX century view of european middle ages. That means warfare would be, in principle, closer to Classical Antiquity than to the Middle Ages, with big armies of well equipped and trained troops. Then we have heroes factoring in. But we have also got magic.

And problem is, Magic basically means you have got the equivalent of Gunpowder. Training troops to become 5th or even 10th level fighters who can trounce scores of 1st level mooks is very expesive both in time and resources. Having an artificier build you scores of Wands of Fireballs and issuing it to 1st level mooks who have been trained in "Use Magic Device: Wand of Fireballs" is way cheaper. A group of high-level characters can survive agains an army of 1,000 mooks equipped with swords and bows, but I wouldn't bet my ass on them if just 1/10 of those mooks were equipped with wands of fireballs.

It has happen before, in our world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Nagashino), more than once (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satsuma_Rebellion).

(I use "fireball" as an example, the point here is that any country can devout resources to mass-manufacture relatively cheap high destructive magic items for their armies to use).

But we want to keep things heroic, that's why we are playing Heroic Fantasy. So we skip mini-munchinks with fireballs and go back to good old foot soldiers armed with swords and shields. And heroes, well, they should be scarce, that's why they are heores, because they are capable of things most people can't. So countries would still field big armies of low-level troops, but they should also have a bunch of high-level heroes, specially some wizards, to counter any adventurers or enemy magic.

And that's what is failing here, in the current battle. Tarquin has the resources for countering the high level adventurers: Himself and his team. But he is just looking while the adventurers trounce trough his troops. Now, Tarquin being Tarquin, I understand he does it for dramatic reasons. But I suspect also that maybe he is just throwing wave after wave of mooks to wear down the adventurers before facing them himself. Any fireball V uses on his mooks is one less fireball she will use against himself. Mooks can be replaced, but his own life can not (specially after having lost his cleric).

[King of Nowhere]

Most D&D armies would include spellcasters, but this is not just any army. It's Tarquin's army. My guess would be that he didn't want an army that could be a threat to him personally. When he sent it after those in the crater, he didn't know about Durkon being a vampire, so he thought it would suffice. Another possibility is that since these soldiers were trained for plot reveals, they have too much information and he wants to get rid of them :smallwink:
Good point. Plus, they have seen tarquin with his two other pals, who officially are high-raking members of an enemy empire. This thing may very well blow his cover, so it may be reason enough to want every single soldier on that field dead. On the other hand, if he didn't wanted to be seen by the soldiers, he could have avoided gathering that army, in the first place...


Actually, the DMG has tables for random characters with PC levels that your party can encounter- and alignment percentages:

10% Good
20% Neutral
50% Evil
Didn't knew about that. However, I suppose that was specifically crafted because your party is supposed to be the good one, and you are supposed to have enemies to fight. basically all of the manual is made just to describe ways in which you can have an encounter. So we may assume those numbers are not representative of the real alignments of adventurers, but only of those you can get in random encounters.

Or we may postulate that since evil parties are dishunited, each one with their own goal, that 10% of good adventurers is enough of a voluntary police force to keep in check, at least to an extent, the greater number of evil parties. In a way like "if you do that, we will try to kill you. We may as well fail, of course, but why do you have to take the risk when you already have more money than you an possibly spend and the power to do anything you want except crimes so bad that would piss me enough that I would be willing to take the risk of going against you? You just don't have any good enough reason to take the risk of going against me".
Well, they don't have any good enough reason unless they are after some overarching evil scheme, and that's where plot comes into the story...

[hamishspence]

I suppose that was specifically crafted because your party is supposed to be the good one, and you are supposed to have enemies to fight. basically all of the manual is made just to describe ways in which you can have an encounter. So we may assume those numbers are not representative of the real alignments of adventurers, but only of those you can get in random encounters.

If you're playing an evil game, possibly with BoVD, then this will still be the average unless the DM chooses not to generate NPC alignments randomly.

[Doug Lampert]

If you're playing an evil game, possibly with BoVD, then this will still be the average unless the DM chooses not to generate NPC alignments randomly.

And an evil game with those demographics just means that 100% of encountered adventurers are potentially hostile rather than 50% or so. (Evil is not one big happy family.)

If you looke at the detailed tables, humans, elves, dwarves, and the like are fairly likely to be good. But there are also orc, goblin, and mind-flayer adventurers coming up on the table, and with them, not so many good ones.

[hamishspence]

If you looke at the detailed tables, humans, elves, dwarves, and the like are fairly likely to be good. But there are also orc, goblin, and mind-flayer adventurers coming up on the table, and with them, not so many good ones.

The tables work the other way round- once you've determined alignment, and class, then you roll for what race the character is.

Humans are much more heavily represented for some Evil members of classes.

A random Evil bard is 75% likely to be human, for example.

[Fish]

I'm not positive the math is sustainable.

Take a nation of 1,000,000 people, with a growth rate of 0.5% per year. In 16 years they have 83,287 more people. Assuming the new guys are all are Level 1, that's 20,821 4-man encounters, worth 6.2 million XP. If you killed all those new guys, that's enough XP to raise 6,000 PCs to 2nd level... over 15 years. Considering you stop getting XP if your enemies aren't a challenge, eventually there's a maximum cap on how many PCs can be successfully leveled up to mid-level ranges without having to fight each other.

[hamishspence]

But there are also orc, goblin, and mind-flayer adventurers coming up on the table, and with them, not so many good ones.

Strictly, you can't randomly generate any Good or Neutral aligned NPCs of those 3- the DM pretty much has to choose to create one.

It would work, for example, as:

50% of NPC adventurers met are Evil
Of those 50%, 20% are clerics
Of those clerics, 1% are orcs (31% are humans, etc)

And so forth for the various other classes.

[bguy]

The main reason for still having an army is that its another tool in the toolbox. In a pitched battle, who is going to win: the guy who hired 10 level 12+ adventurers, or the guy who did that and brought two legions of his finest troops?

The problem though is that the money you are spending to pay for those two legions is money that could be going to outfit additional adventurers for you. So unless those 2 legions are more powerful than the additional adventurers you could get for their cost, you are still better off investing in more adventurers.

The biggest issue seems to be insuring the adventurers stay loyal to your nation, but it's not like that problem doesn't exist with having a standing army also. And indeed in some ways it may be easier to keep the adventurers loyal, since being higher level they should be much less vulnerable to being magically dominated than the lower level officers of a conventional army.

[Oko and Qailee]

I'm not positive the math is sustainable.

Take a nation of 1,000,000 people, with a growth rate of 0.5% per year. In 16 years they have 83,287 more people. Assuming the new guys are all are Level 1, that's 20,821 4-man encounters, worth 6.2 million XP. If you killed all those new guys, that's enough XP to raise 6,000 PCs to 2nd level... over 15 years. Considering you stop getting XP if your enemies aren't a challenge, eventually there's a maximum cap on how many PCs can be successfully leveled up to mid-level ranges without having to fight each other.

The VAST majority of people aren't fighting each other to the death. Even in wars, the sides are uneven, usually by a decent bit. This means that the side most likely to win (more troops) has tons of decreased exp gains.

When individuals are breaking the law and becoming an "encounter" usually the police force which is ~lvl 2-3 handles it. When this happens those lvl 2-3 police guys are getting little exp.

Add in the fact that the majority of that population is CR1/2 commoners, and now the only people that would ever fight that population is receiving no challenge and getting little exp.

Most people in a city don't fight.

[Oko and Qailee]

The problem though is that the money you are spending to pay for those two legions is money that could be going to outfit additional adventurers for you. So unless those 2 legions are more powerful than the additional adventurers you could get for their cost, you are still better off investing in more adventurers.

The biggest issue seems to be insuring the adventurers stay loyal to your nation, but it's not like that problem doesn't exist with having a standing army also. And indeed in some ways it may be easier to keep the adventurers loyal, since being higher level they should be much less vulnerable to being magically dominated than the lower level officers of a conventional army.

two legions cost less than the amount of adventurers needed to defend the same thing those legions could simultaneously defend.

[pendell]

One difference between chess and D&D though is that in chess pawns can, in sufficient number, contain the other pieces. In fact, much of chess strategy involves using the pawns to contain your opponent's pieces. 3 pawns can contain a bishop or a knight, 5 can contain a rook, 4 can checkmate the king, all 9 can (sometimes) contain the queen. Also, when a pawn attacks a piece, the piece has react. The pawns can herd and drive the pieces when working together. But a high level D&D character can ignore a low level one as an elephant ignored a gnat....

I don't think so. Even if the mooks can't hurt the high-level characters they can still run interference, act as decoys, or force the high-level characters to spend a round killing them rather than something more productive. Even a very high level fighter can't just ignore someone trying to stab him with a spear, and if he's great cleaving his way through a level 0 peasant with a pitchfork he's not advancing to the epic level mage behind him who's in the process of casting implosion.

Consider the illusionary battle Roy fought with "Xykon" in Girard's gate. If "Xykon" had brought along a bodyguard of 20 hobgoblins in this illusion, the battle would have been far different. Because rather than having uninterrupted time to slash through Xykon's defenses the hobgoblins can act as a living wall, a cushion , between Roy and Xykon, giving Xykon time to uncork meteor swarm et al on the OOTS party.

Now, granted 20 hobgoblins won't survive longer than a round or two. But, as in the battle between Darth V and Xykon, sometimes even a single round makes all the difference. The wards in the tower had minimal effect on Darth V, but they did buy Xykon time and cause V to forfeit the surprise round. Living low-level soldiers can have the same effect.

ETA: If I were organizing a D&D army I would structure it on very different lines than the traditional high fantasy army. Instead of masses of Roman legions, I would expect the battlefield to be dominated by firepower. I would have mages as an 'artillery division'. Mooks would be trained as scouts -- not to bunch up, but to be dispersed in camouflage. Their job is to act in small parties to find and fix the enemy. Once the mooks find and fix the enemy, it is the job of the mages to blow it up. So in this battle a mook is actually in the role of Skirmisher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirmisher) rather than legionary.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[NerdyKris]

The problem though is that the money you are spending to pay for those two legions is money that could be going to outfit additional adventurers for you. So unless those 2 legions are more powerful than the additional adventurers you could get for their cost, you are still better off investing in more adventurers.

The biggest issue seems to be insuring the adventurers stay loyal to your nation, but it's not like that problem doesn't exist with having a standing army also. And indeed in some ways it may be easier to keep the adventurers loyal, since being higher level they should be much less vulnerable to being magically dominated than the lower level officers of a conventional army.

Adventurers are not omnipresent. If you tried to fight a battle with just adventurers, the day would be won by the group that said "Hey, half of you go around there and don't bother fighting the other adventurers. Just nuke the town and take over.". That's the point of an army. That's the point of regular soldiers. That's the point Superman has made over and over again, and Irredeemable pointed out would drive most heroes mad. One person simply cannot cover the same ground as an army. Even if they're the Flash.

[luagha]

And just to add; Malack himself mentioned that he was tutored in 'battles of attrition' by Tarquin.

A low-level large group against a high level party is a battle of attrition - they take horrible losses in order to do grinding damage. Some character builds will be more or less effective against armies than others. The more preparation the high level party has the better for them.

For example, Roy's Great Cleave is amazing, but he doesn't appear to have Combat Reflexes - if five guys can charge him on their round a few times, they may be able to get off a grapple when he rolls low, and that wastes his next round while he breaks the grapple and a bunch of them stab him and so on.

Belkar is weaker against the grapple tactic but he uses Light weapons; even if one guy gets a grapple in on him and six follow suit in a dogpile, when his turn comes he just stabs them all and their pointless deaths end the grapple for him.

[Apricot]

I don't think so. Even if the mooks can't hurt the high-level characters they can still run interference, act as decoys, or force the high-level characters to spend a round killing them rather than something more productive. Even a very high level fighter can't just ignore someone trying to stab him with a spear, and if he's great cleaving his way through a level 0 peasant with a pitchfork he's not advancing to the epic level mage behind him who's in the process of casting implosion.

Consider the illusionary battle Roy fought with "Xykon" in Girard's gate. If "Xykon" had brought along a bodyguard of 20 hobgoblins in this illusion, the battle would have been far different. Because rather than having uninterrupted time to slash through Xykon's defenses the hobgoblins can act as a living wall, a cushion , between Roy and Xykon, giving Xykon time to uncork meteor swarm et al on the OOTS party.

Now, granted 20 hobgoblins won't survive longer than a round or two. But, as in the battle between Darth V and Xykon, sometimes even a single round makes all the difference. The wards in the tower had minimal effect on Darth V, but they did buy Xykon time and cause V to forfeit the surprise round. Living low-level soldiers can have the same effect.

ETA: If I were organizing a D&D army I would structure it on very different lines than the traditional high fantasy army. Instead of masses of Roman legions, I would expect the battlefield to be dominated by firepower. I would have mages as an 'artillery division'. Mooks would be trained as scouts -- not to bunch up, but to be dispersed in camouflage. Their job is to act in small parties to find and fix the enemy. Once the mooks find and fix the enemy, it is the job of the mages to blow it up. So in this battle a mook is actually in the role of Skirmisher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirmisher) rather than legionary.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

To provide a counterpoint, assuming that mages are available to both sides of the conflict, wouldn't a potentially stronger strategy be to have the mages cast reinforcing magic on the average soldiers so that they can resist enemy magic and easily defeat the enemy infantry in direct combat?

[Fish]

The problem though is that the money you are spending to pay for those two legions is money that could be going to outfit additional adventurers for you.
What about simply upgrading the legion you already have?

Based on my math, upgrading your legions from d6 weapons to d8 weapons — even if you just re-equip the weaker guys who lack the STR bonus — could decrease your army's casualties by 40% at little cost.

[Scow2]

See, at this point there is clearly a point to a standing army. With numbers and 2 level 16 wizards, you can handle a lot of things (barring cheesyness ofc).Just because someone lives in town doesn't mean they're loyal, or are willing to answer the call.

[AKA_Bait]

To provide a counterpoint, assuming that mages are available to both sides of the conflict, wouldn't a potentially stronger strategy be to have the mages cast reinforcing magic on the average soldiers so that they can resist enemy magic and easily defeat the enemy infantry in direct combat?

If memory serves, which it may not, the mass versions of the good buffing spells (a) don't affect enough creatures to buff a significant portion of an army, and (b) tend to be high enough level that I'd think other spells of the same level would be more effectively used just to kill the other sides soldiers directly.


Just because someone lives in town doesn't mean they're loyal, or are willing to answer the call.

The odds of their willingness to answer the call probably increase if they know that not answering the call will result in the deaths of their children. :smallbiggrin:

[hamishspence]

If you looke at the detailed tables, humans, elves, dwarves, and the like are fairly likely to be good. But there are also orc, goblin, and mind-flayer adventurers coming up on the table, and with them, not so many good ones.

Monsters are rare enough not to skew the demographic pretty much.

When I did a detailed breakdown (assuming 1 million random NPCs generated, of which roughly 36.435% were human) - then the breakdown for percentages of Evil, Neutral, and Good humans was:

Evil: 47.96%
Neutral: 32.85%
Good: 19.18%

(since these figures are rounded, it comes to 99.99% rather than 100%)

From this one can conclude that, even for humans, Evil random NPCs are a lot more common than Neutral & Good ones.

[Fish]

Let me throw another log on the fire. Hiring adventurers has an opportunity cost. While the adventurers are handling your petty army problem and mowing down the no-XP mooks from Freedonia, who is doing the mission the adventurers were on?

"They were not ON an adventure!" you cry. But that's not much of an answer. Presumably these adventurers didn't reach level 15 by mopping up your national messes. There's no XP in that. And they didn't level up by sitting around by the Batphone waiting for your call. No, they leveled up by taking care of problems that were much bigger.

"Nobody does the adventure. They'll have to do it later!" you say. Well, in the meantime, that mad sorcerer is creating zombies out of your citizens, the dragon is burning your crops to ash, and the Sylanian assassins have escaped unpunished. Your army can't just sub in and do those jobs.

[hamishspence]

Not all adventurers go on missions on behalf of others- some are primarily dungeonlooters rather than troubleshooters.

[bguy]

Adventurers are not omnipresent. If you tried to fight a battle with just adventurers, the day would be won by the group that said "Hey, half of you go around there and don't bother fighting the other adventurers. Just nuke the town and take over.". That's the point of an army. That's the point of regular soldiers. That's the point Superman has made over and over again, and Irredeemable pointed out would drive most heroes mad. One person simply cannot cover the same ground as an army. Even if they're the Flash.

Well that assumes there are no natural choke points to funnel the enemy attack into. Attacks on walled cities inherently involve such chokepoints, and defending armies in the field will usually try to position themselves at naturally occuring chokepoints (a ford, a mountain pass, on a steep hill, etc.) If the adventurers are holding the chokepoint, you really can't go around them. (And of course adventurers also have a good amount of magic to further shape the battlefield by creating their own chokepoints.)

Also, even if you do slip by the adventurers merely taking the objective is not enough. You also need to be able to hold it which means you are still going to have to deal with them at some point. Otherwise they will just whittle down your forces with hit and run raids that your regular soldiers can't possibly defend against.

[Fish]

That's not a good reason for those adventurers to stop what they are doing and help you.

Dungeon looting: gains XP, earn money, discover new gear.
Fighting your war against level 1 mooks: earn money.

[Scurvy Cur]

The problem though is that the money you are spending to pay for those two legions is money that could be going to outfit additional adventurers for you. So unless those 2 legions are more powerful than the additional adventurers you could get for their cost, you are still better off investing in more adventurers.

The biggest issue seems to be insuring the adventurers stay loyal to your nation, but it's not like that problem doesn't exist with having a standing army also. And indeed in some ways it may be easier to keep the adventurers loyal, since being higher level they should be much less vulnerable to being magically dominated than the lower level officers of a conventional army.

This assumes an infinite supply of adventurers willing to take on military work in which they will almost certainly get no XP (every opponent is so far below their level that it doesn't register as worth XP) at a cost efficient level. This simply isn't the case. There are not huge numbers of adventurers floating around. Eventually, someone is going to hire every last one of them that doesn't say " thanks, but I'd rather gain a level sometime this decade". At which point, what do they do to ensure that they get an edge over the opponent who has also done the exact same thing?

Yep. They field an army. Strategic considerations aside (you still haven't addressed how you get enough adventurers to hold all the important points for your military strategy; there are still things the army is better at because you don't win wars just by killing the other guys), the advantage always goes to the side that has one-upped the opposition's strategy.

This is how an arms race works. No matter how big your pile of military adventurers gets, you will always be at a disadvantage to the guy who has done the same thing as you, plus built an army.

Fish's point is also a good one. Every team of adventurers that gets employed to fight wars isn't a team that is out solving special case problems. I would additionally suspect that hiring adventurers of mid level or above gets prohibitively expensive. Especially if both sides start bidding on them.

[hamishspence]

Technically they might earn "story XP" but in general it doesn't make much sense for high-level adventurers to hire themselves out as mercenaries.

[Spoomeister]

Another issue that has relevance to narrative settings like OOTS is the overarching issue of in media res.

This reminds me of something that occurred to me in this thread - most campaigns and most stories revolve around the PCs, so the story needs and world background kinda flows backward from that. Things like armies spring up when the plot demands such. It's not as common to have a fully fleshed out world, that if left to its own devices would credibly "go on without the adventurers". Even campaign settings that supposedly map out things that way are more a menu of plot hooks than an organic thing with events that go off at certain times, societies rising and falling, etc.

So issues like how armies could or should work, are typically only figured out to the extent of giving the PCs something to do, and not necessarily a fully mapped out and realistic thing that progresses naturally.

Tarquin's backstory and plot line (and those of his adventuring party, by extension) is neat because you don't see it often, and very rarely have the political angles and ramifications of being a high level adventurer unless that's the campaign one wants to play in. In many campaign settings, a 15th level somethingorother just wanders the landscape looking for level-appropriate challenges. They don't take over / lead / save the world.

[Amphiox]

Assuming one chooses to spend one's resources on better equipment, and assuming that as a very wealthy nation you can break the level rules regarding wealth, how much of an edge could you give your forces? Taking the most extreme example you can imagine, if you outfitted your best level 1 forces with as much non-Homebrewed equipment that normally the rules only allow level 19 characters to afford, that your treasury can sustain, how many CR levels would that let your thus equipped level squad make up for. Could they take on a CR 5 encounter? CR 10? Could they even use that kind of equipment properly?

[AKA_Bait]

Let me throw another log on the fire. Hiring adventurers has an opportunity cost. While the adventurers are handling your petty army problem and mowing down the no-XP mooks from Freedonia, who is doing the mission the adventurers were on?


Isn't that just another argument to have adventurer's on retainer though? Sure, sometimes you might need to prioritize where they belong at any given moment, but what are the odds on any given Tuesday that they need to both lead your armies and slay the dragon.

[hamishspence]

I would additionally suspect that hiring adventurers of mid level or above gets prohibitively expensive. Especially if both sides start bidding on them.

Hiring an NPC adventurer to fill a missing role in a party is fairly expensive in DMG2- they charge their level squared in GP per day, plus a half share of loot. If higher level than the rest of the party is- they charge 10x this, plus a full share.

So- a 10th level NPC, fighting for a low level party would cost 1000 gp per day, and expect to share in any treasure the low level party (or army, if you prefer) obtains from its defeated enemies.


Taking the most extreme example you can imagine, if you outfitted your best level 1 forces with as much non-Homebrewed equipment that normally the rules only allow level 19 characters to afford, that your treasury can sustain, how many CR levels would that let your thus equipped level squad make up for. Could they take on a CR 5 encounter? CR 10? Could they even use that kind of equipment properly?

Exceptional equipment typically adds up to 2 to an NPC's CR in Dungeon Magazine- but those were generally already high level NPCs.

in practice though, it isn't equipment, but captains, that make such a unit more dangerous.

A large squad + a high level Warblade specializing in White Raven manoeuvres, for example, could gain enormous bonuses to their To Hit.

[Oko and Qailee]

Just because someone lives in town doesn't mean they're loyal, or are willing to answer the call.

Yes, but if they live there they might have some reason to care about it if serious threats attack.

I'm not saying the lvl 16 wizards will always show up, but if your scale of spell casting is between lvl 1-16, well, you might be able to field a decent defense with who is willing to help, and that can be the difference between a city falling or not ofc.

[hamishspence]

Indeed. Town clerics might have even more incentive to join in- feeling an obligation to aid and defend their "flock".

[ManicOppressive]

No wizard of Vaarsuvius' level hangs out in a tavern waiting to be hired by a kingdom to go rough up the baron next door, though. If he wants money, he plane shifts to the Elemental Plane of Earth and digs out a diamond the size of a watermelon.

Stealing one from the cast page really was more direct though.

[Oko and Qailee]

Assuming one chooses to spend one's resources on better equipment, and assuming that as a very wealthy nation you can break the level rules regarding wealth, how much of an edge could you give your forces? Taking the most extreme example you can imagine, if you outfitted your best level 1 forces with as much non-Homebrewed equipment that normally the rules only allow level 19 characters to afford, that your treasury can sustain, how many CR levels would that let your thus equipped level squad make up for. Could they take on a CR 5 encounter? CR 10? Could they even use that kind of equipment properly?

With the wealth of a lvl 19 character, provided you don't care for any amount of cheese, you can handle up to CR = arbitrary.

Like I mentioned before, it only takes a lvl 1 Cleric and a candle of invocation to cheese your way to being unbeatable.

The Giant did mention though (and I agree) that logic dictates this shouldn't happen, or else every city would have a Solar guarding it all day.

But, from a theoretical standpoint, abusing mechanics, you can handle anything. Save for someone abusing the game the same way.

[pendell]

To provide a counterpoint, assuming that mages are available to both sides of the conflict, wouldn't a potentially stronger strategy be to have the mages cast reinforcing magic on the average soldiers so that they can resist enemy magic and easily defeat the enemy infantry in direct combat?


While the rules escape me at the moment, I think this would only work for small groups of people. Providing a small group with bull's strength etc would enable them to tear through their opposition, but I don't think it would work on a mass army.

The first principle of War is concentration. "He who gets their fustest with the mostest wins". To simply spread your magic evenly across all forces is to fall prey to the same penny packeting (http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2010/June%202010/0610penny.aspx) error that the allies in early WWII fell into -- you spread your assets so thinly they have no measurable effect. It's far better to conserve your strength and bring overwhelming force to bear at the point of decision, rather than spread it out evenly. At best, this forces a grinding battle of attrition which you will win. It doesn't give the kind of sudden, decisive, speedy victory that is the hallmark of modern war.

As towards hiring adventurers , review Macchiavelli's discourse on mercenaries (http://harpers.org/blog/2007/10/machiavelli-on-the-mercenary/) and see if it doesn't apply equally well to an adventuring party.

The problem with mercenaries is that they have no transcendent reason to risk their lives. Pay, however handsome, is enough reason to hire a security guard but not enough to hire soldiers willing to risk all. That requires personal loyalty -- to country, to the king, to some transcendent ideal.

There's also the problem that if you're hiring somebody who is much, much better at fighting than you are, there is a significant temptation to rob the paymaster. Or continually change the terms of the agreement and bleed the employer dry. Or kill the king and take his place.

Which is why it's better to pick your loyal soldiers and followers from people who follow you for some other reason than simply because you pay them. Of course you SHOULD pay them, and handsomely, but if money is the only thing motivating them then they will leave when they get a better offer.

After all, consider Tarquin. He and Malack were a mercenary team, and he probably came into the service of the Empire of Blood because the Empress' predecessor decided s/he needed to hire a high level adventurer. This is a decision that was greatly mistaken.

It's not like all mercenaries and adventurers have a great big EVIL sign glowing over their heads. It is possible to foil alignment detection, and not all evil adventurers wear black robes with skulls dangling everywhere.

Also .. just because a person starts out good doesn't mean they will stay that way. Power has a tendency to corrupt. Darth Vaarsuvius did things normal Vaarusvius never would, because V knew V could get away with it. There is nothing more dangerous to the human psyche than unlimited, unaccountable power. It goes to the head of even the best humans. There are an unlimited number of real-world examples if one cares to look :).

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[hamishspence]

in practice you'll get bigger bonuses, for much lower prices, if you have one adventurer per squad, casting spells (or using manoeuvres etc) on that squad.

Vaarsuvius demonstrates this tactic here:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0427.html

[Willis888]

A society that can mass produce cheap, consumable magic items would be able to respond effectively to the threat posed by teams of adventurers.

An army would need to employ several diviners who could cast teleport, provide special training to the mooks who fire the artillery*, and give minor magic items to the rank and file like a wand of magic missile with 6 charges, one glass bead that casts dispel magic when shattered, one glass bead that casts sound burst when shattered, one alchemists fire or acid vial, etc...

*with security measures in place like self-destruct mechanisms if the PC's get to close, command word on ballista trigger changes with each use, etc

If you knew what buffs and immunities the adventurers have, you can optimize your force layout and composition. Give your ballista teams a custom load of enchanted bolts that provide the effects they need for that one encounter - probably a mix of dispels, Reflex saves v damage, and Fortitude saves v poison/damage.

Such a society might even be able to produce save or die AoE munitions, but probably would not use them wastefully.

Teleport your fire teams into place and overwhelm the adventurers with numbers - with the right force multiplying magic items (which you've been stockpiling for years) your losses incurred defeating a team of adventurers will be less than the cost of training and equipping your own adventuring team.

[Everyl]

Well that assumes there are no natural choke points to funnel the enemy attack into. Attacks on walled cities inherently involve such chokepoints, and defending armies in the field will usually try to position themselves at naturally occuring chokepoints (a ford, a mountain pass, on a steep hill, etc.) If the adventurers are holding the chokepoint, you really can't go around them. (And of course adventurers also have a good amount of magic to further shape the battlefield by creating their own chokepoints.)

That gets into the advantages of adventurers + armies. Look at the Battle of Azure City again - Redcloak summoned titanium elementals to breach the city walls, reshaping the battlefield to favor his forces and force the defending adventurers to split up, reducing their overall effectiveness.


Also, even if you do slip by the adventurers merely taking the objective is not enough. You also need to be able to hold it which means you are still going to have to deal with them at some point. Otherwise they will just whittle down your forces with hit and run raids that your regular soldiers can't possibly defend against.

That depends on the objective. In the weeks it takes your adventurers to whittle down the invading army, they could have, pillaged, burned, and moved on to the next kindgom. Not to mention the problems many have mentioned with retaining the loyalty of high-level mercenary adventurers - what does a king do to keep that loyalty if the enemies have successfully captured the royal treasury? You'd better hope that's an exceptionally dedicated bunch of adventurers, because your typical high-level mercenary is either going to skip town or raid the captured treasury for back-payment and then skip town. The only adventurers who a king could rely on to help fight a war are ones who owe personal loyalty and friendship to the leaders or to the nation, and it's pretty difficult to cultivate that kind of emotional attachment; the 'easiest' way to do it is to develop that loyalty/friendship before the adventurers are high-level forces of nature, but how do you know which band of ragtag dungeon explorers are going to survive long enough for that?

EDIT:
Here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/treasure.htm#usingTheTreasureTable) is a table to give a general idea of how much loot an adventurer is going to expect for fighting a battle that's worth their attention. If a national leader can't afford to pay the adventurers at least that much, including the opportunity costs of missed adventures, they're likely to have a hard time holding the adventurers' attention for long.

Of course, there are probably ways around this. Offering land and a title to a high-level adventurer who operates out of your general vicinity might buy some loyalty of the "that's where I keep my stuff!" variety, if nothing else.

[Amphiox]

I looked up the Candle of Invocation and I have to ask, how exactly does it protect your force from an enemy high level spellcasters? The +2 bonuses don't seem to make up for the level difference, the 30ft radius of effect isn't enough to cover your entire force, and the two level spell bonus for your clerics doesn't seem to be enough if the clerics are so low level to begin with, and gating in a Solar won't help if the enemy spellcasters also can cast Gate.

[hamishspence]

How about if it's not ones that are still operating- but retired adventurers who are actually residents of the kingdom that's being attacked, being "called up in time of need"?


I looked up the Candle of Invocation and I have to ask, how exactly does it protect your force from an enemy high level spellcasters? The +2 bonuses don't seem to make up for the level difference, the 30ft radius of effect isn't enough to cover your entire force, and the two level spell bonus for your clerics doesn't seem to be enough if the clerics are so low level to begin with, and gating in a Solar won't help if the enemy spellcasters also can cast Gate.

Wish allows you to wish for magic items: so you'd gate in a Solar, and ask him to use his Wish ability to get you more candles of invocation- use those, and so on. Result- eventually you have an arbitrarily large number of candles.

[johnbragg]

Wand of Cure Minor Wounds 375 gp
Wand of Floating Disk 750 gp
Wand of Expeditious Retreat 750 gp.

So for less than the cost of a single +1 weapon, you've equipped a squad of Combat Medics. (Someone has to have caster levels, or Use Magic Device)

Scrolls might or might not be even more cost-effective.

EDIT: Can't stack Floating Disk with Expeditious Retreat--the Disk just goes at your movement rate.

[Amphiox]

How about if it's not ones that are still operating- but retired adventurers who are actually residents of the kingdom that's being attacked, being "called up in time of need"?



Wish allows you to wish for magic items: so you'd gate in a Solar, and ask him to use his Wish ability to get you more candles of invocation- use those, and so on. Result- eventually you have an arbitrarily large number of candles.

Good god....

That's like wishing for more wishes from the lamp genie....

Who thinks up items like this?!

[King of Nowhere]

My recipe for getting adventurers to be loial to my country is the following:
I would offer them a relatively small fixed pay (a few gp/day) but that would not be important. the hook is that they are free to adventure on their own all the time, and they just get some extra gold for me. then, in case of need, I may call them, and they have to come. If I call them that way, I don't have to pay them any extra, but any loot they may gain goes entirely to them, with the sole exception of plot-critical implements they were asked to retrieve. plus, all expenses necessary to the mission I give them are paid: if they need to bribe people, or buy a particular scroll, i refund them (within reasonable limits, depending on how wealthy my nation is, how important that mission, how trusted the adventurers).
Last, the more important bits:
1) if they die while on a mission for me, I will pay for their raise. if I am the head of a nation, I probably know of some powerful cleric around. If they are particularly trusted, I will raise them even if they died on any mission, because their lives are a matter of national security. So, a monster in a dungeon tpked you? I will send someone to recover your corpses and raise you, and i'll lend you some money to buy some equipment
2) they may come and go in my national bunker all the times. So, they made some important enemy? my bunker is teleport-proof, scryproof, and as well-guarded as I can make it. It's the safes place you can be, and will save you lots of torubles if you just want to sleep longer than usual and the duration of your protection spell expires, or if you want to get drunk for a night without having to to bother about someone popping in to kill you.
3) they may ask me help for their personal missions; even if I am unlikely to offer them direct assistance, as the head of a state I can set teams of clerks to dig out informations for them, and I will ask (only ask, no obligation) other adventurers loial to me if they may be willing to help. in fact, I will encourage my teams of adventurers to exchange favors and bond between them, so that they will come to feel as part of a greater team and will start being loial to each other and to my country.

So, getting in my special operations team do not entail much troubles. Probably, you'll be called once a year to kill some random monster that popped out. the work of an afternoon, and you get to keep the loot. for that you gain some nice side benefits, which basically sums up to protection and cooperation. if there is a war you will be called for more service, but hey, it's a good chance to gain some money, since you'll be able to loot all the equipment of your high level enemies, and it's relatively safe cause they will try hard to raise you if you die. certainly it don't have a greater risk/benefit rate than regular adventuring.

[Tvtyrant]

In E6 armies make a lot more sense IMO. Each army is made around casters and tamed beasts, and they are capable of overrunning max level characters with ease.

Also Legion Devils are amazing. 1700 HP per legion and +300 to attack, which makes them great.

[Fish]

For a few GP a day, "they have to come?" I wonder, King of Nowhere, what you would do if they didn't. Logically, if you have enough power to enforce that contract, you don't need them.

[King of Nowhere]

another way to protect your country from marauding adventurers could be the following
1) make a covenant of nations so that, if you of you get robbed, you still have enough money to pull the plan.
2) when someone robs your national treasury, or do something really bad to you, use the combined economic power of those nations to put a ludicrous bounty not on his head, but on his disembodied soul
3) wait for someone of level 17+ to solve your problem. pay him the bounty
4) display the trapped-souls-in-a-gem in your throne room. keep just enough money to do it another time
5) I seriously doubt anyone will dare risk attacking you again.

the certainty of spending eternity in a gem is not entertaining, especially to someone who got used to the idea that if he dies he'll get raised anyway. Sure, you won't be able to pull it many times. you just have enough money to do it once or twice. but that's enough for deterrence. it's a bit like nukes: you don't have the power to nuke all the countries in the world, but you only need to be able to nuke one country to make sure no one will want to attack you first.

EDIT

For a few GP a day, "they have to come?" I wonder, King of Nowhere, what you would do if they didn't. Logically, if you have enough power to enforce that contract, you don't need them.
if they do not come, the contract is void, and they lose all the neat benefits they were getting from me. I don't expect them to do it for the gp, they are just a sweetener. I expect them to do it because I can provide them some services that are useful to them. and then I expect them to develop loialty over time.
Oh, not to mention that they get to keep their loot. Sure, you don't want to go kill that ogre tribe that's raiding my borders. I will ask team peregrine to do it. too bad, I heard they robbed several rich merchants...
from their point of view, I am providing them with free plot hooks.

Plus, If I feel I have the manpower (i.e. other loial adventurers) I may give them a fine for breaking contract. something light for their wbl, just simbolic to remind them that I do have some power over them and they cannot just do whatever they please with me. But only if I have the manpower.

[urkthegurk]

An effective army in a D&D setting *cannot* consist mostly of level 1 mooks.

What I'm interested is the details.

Level 1 mooks are the cannon fodder, the raw recruits. Send them into battle, hopefully some of them will level up, and/or maybe encounter a more level-appropriate (say 2-4 levels higher) adversary to fight.

He's a lawful ruler, so likely his recruitment and

Tarquin's army isn't entirely level-one mooks, there's also dinosaur riders. The dinos are CR 6 for the megaraptor and CR 8 for the Tyrannosaurus. They should probably have mooks of at least close to their level, to handle the ride checks and make sure the mount isn't left unattended in the middle of battle when its level-one rider drops. Etc. So imagine how that would feel and look to an opposing army. However, we saw how one megaraptor did against Roy alone. At this point it become valuable to have mooks again, because they absorb hits, and can perform aid another actions for the dinos.

There's also no reason to assume Tarquin always does this when encountering adventurers. Tarquin has no qualms getting his hands dirty, when he knows he can win. (although he has no fear of letting a few dozen die to wear his opponents down and ensure his victory.) But hese circumstances are exceptional: he wants to prove a point to his one remaining son. If Elan saves them, or they survive, Elan's one step closer to becoming a hero and standing up to his dad, who he now has to take seriously as a villain. If Roy and the party dies, then he still gets what he wants. Fighting in the battle himself jeoprodizes that, and he's already lost one party member today.


An army can hold territory. An empire is big. Guarding all the cities, borders, ports etc. will require thousands of men. Mooks are cheap and can deal with the minor threats of bandits, lower level monsters and such. You wouldn't want to hire thousands of adventurers just to patrol along the walls of all the castles in your empire.

Tarquin seems to also use his army as a police force, to keep the populace in line.

Currently the order is fighting a few hundred, maybe a thousand men - which can be called at best a small army - and is not exactly having the easiest time of it, even though they're all around lvl. 15.

This.

Plus, adventurers are usually PCs, or at least PC-like NPCs. They're headstrong, they are focused on experience, they loot tombs, they upset the public order, they overthrow rulership, either to put themselves in charge or in order to fight tyranny. They're willing to grind and level up, and cart away every copper peice from any dank hole in the ground they can find. They aren't nice, and their impact, whatever their individual alignments, is not a lawful impact. A LE ruler wouldn't stand for that. Azure city fielded a lot more teams of 'adventurers' (the Sapphire Guard), but they were all paladins.


Tarquin stated outright that Elan could go to any tavern and easily recruit replacements for Roy and Durkon. That is only possible in a world where characters of Roy and Durkon's approximate level are common.


They aren't THAT common, its just that the rules of the narrative and the genre state that they'll be really easy to find. Genre-savvy, remember/



It is true that Tarquin has conquered a lot. So who did he beat? Either other armies or teams of adventurers. If it was armies he beat, then why did his opponents send armies against him, and not simply teams of adventurers? The only reason they would do so is if teams of adventurers are not effective against his army, ie his army can beat teams of adventurers easily.

Maybe they didn't have enough high-level adventurers at their disposal, maybe Tarquin killed them and used his army to take care of the low-level mooks. Having an army frees him up to engage the enemy champions directly, create distractions, and attack multiple places at once. As with Azure City, you don't have to take out the mid-level adventurers, you just have to take the objective they care about. The order retreated from the city, but had there only been hobgoblins there, they might've risked staying. It was TE being in the neighbourhood that made them NEED to leave. But the hobgoblins were at that point a serious threat: even a wizard can run out of spells. And the hobgoblins made TE's job taking the city and holding it a lot easier.




Remember that new warlords have arisen on the Western Continent almost yearly, and usually in bunches. If teams of adventurers can actually beat armies then at least one of them should have realized this by now and used adventurers instead of armies, and he would have conquered everything.

Furthermore, Tarquin has an adventurer team, one that is near-epic or even fully epic in average level. He did not use that adventurer team to fight his battles. Why? The only reason would be if a near-epic adventurer team cannot defeat armies in battle.


Once you loose your high-level team member, they're gone. You're fighting a group that could, conceivably, do serious damage, and you don't know what else is out there. For all you know a team from one of those upstart warlords is scrying on you right now, waiting for a TPK. Why take any risks?

Furthermore, where are you going to get a sufficient pool of mid-level adventurers if you don't have a soldiers levelling up every now and then? Once they get a few levels, promote them, and then try not to let them die on suicide missions such as this. They'll be valuable later.



Clearly they were not wrong. And clearly we know that Redcloak's army was not made up entirely of level 1 mooks. And there is no mention of what precisely it was made up of. We do know that it had a mixture of classes and abilities and had higher level characters among the ranks.

So what WAS it made up of, SPECIFICALLY?

Its true. I think they had wights, ghouls, zombies, hobgoblins and ogres. There seem to be quite a few low-level hobgoblin clerics. And probably a smattering of hobgoblin captains and sergeants in there, with a half dozen levels each.

[bguy]

That gets into the advantages of adventurers + armies. Look at the Battle of Azure City again - Redcloak summoned titanium elementals to breach the city walls, reshaping the battlefield to favor his forces and force the defending adventurers to split up, reducing their overall effectiveness.

But if Redcloak hadn't been there then the Order could have held all of Azure City's natural checkpoints and the hobgoblins would never have gotten in. And likewise if the Order hadn't been there then Redcloak's titanium elementals would have won the battle all by themselves. The mass armies for both sides were relatively meaningless in that battle. It was the high level characters that decided the battle.


That depends on the objective. In the weeks it takes your adventurers to whittle down the invading army, they could have, pillaged, burned, and moved on to the next kindgom. Not to mention the problems many have mentioned with retaining the loyalty of high-level mercenary adventurers - what does a king do to keep that loyalty if the enemies have successfully captured the royal treasury? You'd better hope that's an exceptionally dedicated bunch of adventurers, because your typical high-level mercenary is either going to skip town or raid the captured treasury for back-payment and then skip town. The only adventurers who a king could rely on to help fight a war are ones who owe personal loyalty and friendship to the leaders or to the nation, and it's pretty difficult to cultivate that kind of emotional attachment; the 'easiest' way to do it is to develop that loyalty/friendship before the adventurers are high-level forces of nature, but how do you know which band of ragtag dungeon explorers are going to survive long enough for that?

Well like others have said, a nation really needs to develop its own adventurers corps that will fight for it out of loyalty and patriotism rather than for money or XP. Any nation that can't engender such loyalty from its adventurer citizens is probably doomed anyway. (If it can't get its adventurer citizens to fight for it, how is it going to do any better at insuring the loyalty of it's conventional army?) If developing its own adventurers is not an option though then high level adventurers are probably rare enough that they would have pretty well established reputations (or they would belong to organizations that do). As such nations should have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into when they hire them.


Here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/treasure.htm#usingTheTreasureTable) is a table to give a general idea of how much loot an adventurer is going to expect for fighting a battle that's worth their attention. If a national leader can't afford to pay the adventurers at least that much, including the opportunity costs of missed adventures, they're likely to have a hard time holding the adventurers' attention for long.

Sure, if you are employing adventurers who only care about money and power. That's why you ideally need to find (or create) the ones who are motivated by patriotism, or loyalty, or morality, or idealism or religious fervor, or glory etc. Hiring the ones who only care about money is pretty much the last resort option.

[Oko and Qailee]

Well like others have said, a nation really needs to develop its own adventurers corps that will fight for it out of loyalty and patriotism rather than for money or XP. Any nation that can't engender such loyalty from its adventurer citizens is probably doomed anyway. (If it can't get its adventurer citizens to fight for it, how is it going to do any better at insuring the loyalty of it's conventional army?) If developing its own adventurers is not an option though then high level adventurers are probably rare enough that they would have pretty well established reputations (or they would belong to organizations that do). As such nations should have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into when they hire them.


No, they don't, because the majority of times a nation is attacked, it wont be by a lvl 17 wizard, it will be by an army of lvl 1 mooks.

You guys are assume a nation gets attacked on a daily basis by high levels, and that is simply not true. A nation cant develop a hero corp, just like an invader cant just develop a villain corp.

IF a villain rises up, then a group of heros usually springs up as well, there are as many forces of mortal good as evil.

Heroes that are level 16+ dont spend time defending one city, because they're busy defending the entire world from cliche villains. They only show up when the villain appears in that town, they don't wait there and the certainly don't stay in a nation as a defense option.

Everyone sayng "a nation must have a hero core" are thinking "Asmodeus attacks every city every other day", no he doesn't, armies comprised of 99% lvl ones and a few lvl 2-5's attack a city.

[King of Nowhere]

No, they don't, because the majority of times a nation is attacked, it wont be by a lvl 17 wizard, it will be by an army of lvl 1 mooks.

You guys are assume a nation gets attacked on a daily basis by high levels, and that is simply not true. A nation cant develop a hero corp, just like an invader cant just develop a villain corp.

IF a villain rises up, then a group of heros usually springs up as well, there are as many forces of mortal good as evil.

Heroes that are level 16+ dont spend time defending one city, because they're busy defending the entire world from cliche villains. They only show up when the villain appears in that town, they don't wait there and the certainly don't stay in a nation as a defense option.

Everyone sayng "a nation must have a hero core" are thinking "Asmodeus attacks every city every other day", no he doesn't, armies comprised of 99% lvl ones and a few lvl 2-5's attack a city.

(emphasis mine)
he don't have to stay in the city all the time. he only have to teleport to the city in the time of need, neutralize the treath, then go on with what he was doing before.
you don't need a high level adventurer to stay in your city and protect it all the time. you just need adventurers you can Send to and know they are likely to come for you at a price you can afford (not necessarily money, maybe you can do them a favor or two). to them, defending a city is just a day's job, and you admitted it's not something that happens often, so it's not going to hinder their careers.

[Doug Lampert]

The tables work the other way round- once you've determined alignment, and class, then you roll for what race the character is.

Humans are much more heavily represented for some Evil members of classes.

A random Evil bard is 75% likely to be human, for example.

Yes, I don't see how this contradicts my statement.

You roll for alignment first, and then get race and class (this avoids evil and neutral paladins or good mindflayers showing up at random).

But the Evil alignments have a LOT of random orcs and goblins and the like, and those don't happen on other alignments, thus the PC races are more heavily good than the 20%/30%/50% division for overall alignment.

[Doug Lampert]

Monsters are rare enough not to skew the demographic pretty much.

When I did a detailed breakdown (assuming 1 million random NPCs generated, of which roughly 36.435% were human) - then the breakdown for percentages of Evil, Neutral, and Good humans was:

Evil: 47.96%
Neutral: 32.85%
Good: 19.18%

(since these figures are rounded, it comes to 99.99% rather than 100%)

From this one can conclude that, even for humans, Evil random NPCs are a lot more common than Neutral & Good ones.

Sounds possible, now what about the other PC races? Randomly generated evil NPCs run a noticable fraction of non-PHB races, good and neutral are almost entirely PHB races.

[Valanarch]

In my world, the reason why adventurers don't obsolete armies is because both sides have mid-high level characters and both sides have armies. The rampaging orc horde has it chieftain, general, and high priests. The good kingdom has the PCs and other assorted people. If the heroes and villains both exist with their armies, they will cancel each other out. The wizards from each group will be too busy with the other groups to destroy the army. The armies have to fight each other themselves.

[littlebum2002]

I still don't understand why you think high-level adventurers would make armies obsolete, considering

1) there's about a hundred of them in the whole world, and
2) they're out adventuring

If there were tens of thousands of high level adventurers, and each nation could afford a few, and they somehow could level very high while just sitting around in a castle all day, then your hypothesis would make sense. But as of right now, you're just assuming too many things that are simply not true.

[Raenir Salazar]

My own thought on the question in the OP is that first we need to make some assumptions.

(1) The D&D world runs on D&D rules.

(2) The "people", NPC's or PC's alike, have varying knowledge of the mechanics. Using one of the earlier OOTS strips as an example a character's knowledge of mechanics is proportional to their schooling, education, general experience. Durkon hasn't had formal training in adventuring, so he forgot basic mechanics that made the difference between missing and one shotting a goblin. While Roy has nearly perfect mechanical knowledge because of Fighter College and can plan his build ahead.

(3) Everyone, everyone is level 1. No exceptions.

Thus, things I think progress rather naturally. You still have Kingdoms and Empires that need armies, either to defend from monsters or swarms of house cats and to seize and defend territory.

Eventually a small percentage of this becomes "mid level" adventurers, a smaller percentage of that becomes "high level" varying proportions will retire and offer services for the next generation of adventurers. A small small percentage of that becomes Epics.

As the time progresses the HD of CR appropriate monsters grow, dragons get bigger and more powerful as time goes by. Assuming a large chunk of the world is unexplored including the underdark this is a large amount of area for higher level stuff to grow within.

So these monsters provide the XP for adventurers to keep level'ing up, Dwarves constantly expand new kingdoms, acquire gold, wake up a dragon and lose a hold giving the dragons a hoard which becomes targets for other dragons or adventurers etc.

Since some "monsters" are also PC's they also help "strengthen" their NPC communities once they reture and become NPC's, allowing for more versatile monster communities and organizations as their higher level "children" or friends spread out.


I think in the end such a world would end up a lot like Faerun, and reach a 'balance' at around enough higher level adventurers to force Kingdoms to make sure they have enough mid level mooks to act as a viable deterrence, most of the world are between levels 1 to 5 yes, but enough are "elite" that a high level party can't just conquer the world.

In Faerun, every organized community of some sort, always seemed to have an understanding of combined arms tactics of having low-mid level guys in a mixed balanced group that always seemed to generally challenge the characters in the novel, working in a team et cetera.

In Faerun for example, using the latest Drizzt novels, Drizzt fights a lot of what I would consider to be CR appropriate encounters against mid to high level mooks, so I imagine a world beginning in a tabula rasa like blank slate would end up with something similar. Some high level dudes, a lot of medium level dudes, and a boat load of low level dudes. And there's enough medium level dudes to entertain the high level dudes.

[i6uuaq]

A society that can mass produce cheap, consumable magic items would be able to respond effectively to the threat posed by teams of adventurers.

An army would need to employ several diviners who could cast teleport, provide special training to the mooks who fire the artillery*, and give minor magic items to the rank and file like a wand of magic missile with 6 charges, one glass bead that casts dispel magic when shattered, one glass bead that casts sound burst when shattered, one alchemists fire or acid vial, etc...

*with security measures in place like self-destruct mechanisms if the PC's get to close, command word on ballista trigger changes with each use, etc

If you knew what buffs and immunities the adventurers have, you can optimize your force layout and composition. Give your ballista teams a custom load of enchanted bolts that provide the effects they need for that one encounter - probably a mix of dispels, Reflex saves v damage, and Fortitude saves v poison/damage.

Such a society might even be able to produce save or die AoE munitions, but probably would not use them wastefully.

Teleport your fire teams into place and overwhelm the adventurers with numbers - with the right force multiplying magic items (which you've been stockpiling for years) your losses incurred defeating a team of adventurers will be less than the cost of training and equipping your own adventuring team.


I'm a little sad that most people are questioning the validity of the OPs assumptions, rather than responding to the question, because I think the OP is extremely interesting.

Some people have responded, as quoted above and also elsewhere. Perhaps if I try to make the question more specific...

You have a hundred soldiers. 60 of them are level 1, 30 of them are level 2, 5 are level 3, 3 are level 4, one level 5 and one level 6. You have 100,000 gp to outfit them any way you like, and a level 12 wizard on your payroll whose sole job is to craft magic items and respond to occasional existential threats to your kingdom. How would you outfit them to best cope with a standard group of 6 level 13 adventurers? If you want specific load outs for different threats, describe them.

Now, my DnD knowledge comes entirely from OotS, so my numbers may be a little unrealistic. But I think that's the general idea of the OP.

[johnbragg]

I'm a little sad that most people are questioning

You have a hundred soldiers. 60 of them are level 1, 30 of them are level 2, 5 are level 3, 3 are level 4, one level 5 and one level 6. You have 100,000 gp to outfit them any way you like, and a level 12 wizard on your payroll whose sole job is to craft magic items and respond to occasional existential threats to your kingdom. How would you outfit them to best cope with a standard group of 6 level 13 adventurers? If you want specific load outs for different threats, describe them.

60 L1s, 30 L2s and 10 L3-6's can't really do much damage to a Level 13 party. Optimized, the army could slow the Level 13 raiders down, maybe cause the LEvel 13s to use teleport and retreat. But the recovery capacity of the Raiders is almost infinitely greater than the army. In two days at most, the Raiders have all their spells back and, because of magical healing, all their hit points. Any mooks killed by the Raiders are probably still dead.

The army is facing fireballs, cloudkill (kills L1-3 no saving throw, L4-6 save or die), ice storms (twice the radius of fireball). Not to mention Summoned Monsters. Oh, and the ranged firepower of the mundane Raiders, and any Raiders who want to deign to slaughter the soldiers in melee combat.

If you have your own band of adventurers on call, it may make sense to have scrolls of true strike[i] and [i]dimensional anchor, which would prevent the Raiders from making an easy escape until your adventurers can teleport in.

I'd add Dancing Lights, but the idea is that these 100 are your elite force, so you probably know where they are. If you spread them out as a guard force, they can't do diddly squat to the Raiders, so just go with 100 scrolls of sending to send up the Bat-signal. Work out a coordinate system so that the mook doesn't have to figure out exactly what to say before the murderhobos slaughter him.

[Everyl]

For the 100-soldiers-and-a-wizard scenario, you want the wizard to craft magic items that make Antimagic Field available to the soldiers somehow without the wizard being forced to cast it. A crew of soldiers like that with Antimagic Fields could rush the invaders' casters, suppressing nearly all of their shenanigans, including teleportation-retreats, and probably kill the arcane casters with proper tactics (see above posts on fighting the hypothetical omnicidal 15th-level wizard for examples of such tactics).

Dealing with level 13 fighter-type classes in that scenario is a bit trickier, but if the antimagic bum rush works against the casters, then your level 12 wizard might be able to mop up the remainder.

[Coat]

... armies of low level minions can't effectively attack and kill high level adventurers. But adventurers aren't good at killing entire armies. In other words: high level adventurers are very good at defending themselves from armies. They are not, however, that great at defending civilians from other nation's armies.

I think this is a really important point that's been missed.

High level adventurers are very capable of slaughtering entire armies - what they can't do is it quickly. There's a limit to the number of sentients they can snuff out in 6s, and that number is a lot lower than, say, 100,000 men holding swords.

High level adventurers might be able to carve a path through the middle of an army, but they can't actually stop it from doing things armies exist to do - kill people, destroy infrastructure, and loot stuff.

If you're a Good state, you need an army to stop the Evil army getting at all your valuables. If you're an Evil state, then your Evil army is going to take a lot of casualties from the High Level Adventurers while they smash, loot and kill: but at the end of the day, the smashing, looting and killing still happens, and you're evil, so what do you care about mortality rate?

[pendell]

I think this is a really important point that's been missed.

High level adventurers are very capable of slaughtering entire armies - what they can't do is it quickly. There's a limit to the number of sentients they can snuff out in 6s, and that number is a lot lower than, say, 100,000 men holding swords.

High level adventurers might be able to carve a path through the middle of an army, but they can't actually stop it from doing things armies exist to do - kill people, destroy infrastructure, and loot stuff.

If you're a Good state, you need an army to stop the Evil army getting at all your valuables. If you're an Evil state, then your Evil army is going to take a lot of casualties from the High Level Adventurers while they smash, loot and kill: but at the end of the day, the smashing, looting and killing still happens, and you're evil, so what do you care about mortality rate?

This is an excellent point and one I had forgotten about: The concept of frontage (http://www.ageod.net/aacwwiki/Frontage). A division of 10,000 mooks takes up a lot more space than 6 adventurers do. So if the adventurers take up a stand to stop an army made up of low-levels, A small minority will actually engage the adventurers (and die) while the rest of the army simply goes around them.

A team of adventurers can't be everywhere at once. So one thing a low-level army can do by virtue of numbers is be many places at once. Wherever the adventurers aren't , that's where the army hits. It's a variation on Mao's little red book: Enemy advances we retreat, enemy halts we harass, enemy retreats we advance.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Everyl]

But if Redcloak hadn't been there then the Order could have held all of Azure City's natural checkpoints and the hobgoblins would never have gotten in. And likewise if the Order hadn't been there then Redcloak's titanium elementals would have won the battle all by themselves. The mass armies for both sides were relatively meaningless in that battle. It was the high level characters that decided the battle.

If Redcloak hadn't been there, then the hobgoblins would have needed to rely on traditional artillery to breach the walls, which would have required their catapults to be within range of return fire from Azure City. They could still have breached the walls and overrun the city, but it would have cost them more lives to do it. If the Order hadn't been there, the titanium elementals would have done more damage, but would still have been limited to Redcloak's ~90-second summon duration, so they couldn't finish defeating the defending army, just pave the way for Redcloaks army.

And what if either mass army hadn't been there? If Azure City's army was gone, then the six-man Order would have been unable to defend as soon as the hobgoblins breached the walls in 7 places (realistically fewer, given that not everyone in the Order could reasonably expect to hold a choke point alone). If the hobgoblins hadn't been there, it would have been just Xykon and Redcloak storming the castle themselves, and they would have most likely lost to Soon and the ghost-martyrs, not to mention that even victory would be putting themselves inside a siege situation surrounded by hostiles at best.




Well like others have said, a nation really needs to develop its own adventurers corps that will fight for it out of loyalty and patriotism rather than for money or XP. Any nation that can't engender such loyalty from its adventurer citizens is probably doomed anyway. (If it can't get its adventurer citizens to fight for it, how is it going to do any better at insuring the loyalty of it's conventional army?) If developing its own adventurers is not an option though then high level adventurers are probably rare enough that they would have pretty well established reputations (or they would belong to organizations that do). As such nations should have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into when they hire them.

Ensuring the loyalty of the level 1 army isn't nearly as difficult. Pay them enough to support their families and you've already gone a long way toward achieving it, even if morale and patriotism are otherwise low. The issue with keeping the loyalty of higher-level adventurers is that they have so many other options on the table. I raised money as the issue because earlier posters spoke of hiring adventurers as being cheaper than a standing army, but really, higher-level characters are likely to have competing loyalties on every level. Can you count on their loyalty to you being higher than their loyalty to, say, their elven allies who have been dealing with an encroaching dragon? Can you count on them being willing to drop the quest to destroy the Artifact of Ultimate Evil to drive off the mere mortal invaders who are threatening your borders? Heck, can you even count on them having an extra Teleport and otherwise-full spell slots ready to go when you Send for them?

I think we're making different default assumptions about nations in fantasy worlds, too. I tend to think of fantasy geopolitics as consisting of lots of small countries, ranging in size from city-states to nations large enough to have a handful of significant cities. Those cities will still be tiny population-wise compared to modern cities - a major nation might have a population of a few hundred thousand at the outside, most of whom are busy producing food. There may be one or two empires that cover a notable percentage of a continent in the world at any given time, but for the most part, the world is a patchwork, and adventurers are going to be spending a huge percentage of their time traveling in the lands of other kings. In that scenario, retaining the loyalty of "local" adventurers is going to be a challenge; the adventurers have seen the world beyond your borders, and know there is more to the world than ensuring that the king in the place they were born doesn't lose a war. And furthermore, most countries don't even have enough population to statistically have one high-level adventurer, much less an entire party of them who share a strong loyalty to the local government.


Sure, if you are employing adventurers who only care about money and power. That's why you ideally need to find (or create) the ones who are motivated by patriotism, or loyalty, or morality, or idealism or religious fervor, or glory etc. Hiring the ones who only care about money is pretty much the last resort option.

Appealing to things like religion or morality may work for maintaining the loyalty of appropriately-inclined characters, yeah. There are ways to manipulate loyalty I hadn't really considered. That still doesn't get around the problem of most nations lacking sufficient population to reasonably raise even a single full party of pro-government adventurers. If you assume that nations are larger and more populous on average, that problem may go away, though.

Another factor to consider is how few adventuring parties all hail from the same place. A party that contains a human, an elf, a dwarf, a gnome, and a halfling is unlikely to all owe homeland loyalty to the same place, and is also likely to follow at least a small variety of religions, ideals, and/or morals, making them harder to manipulate as a group. And, now that I think about it, that also ties into what I said above - if two people in the same adventuring party have their homelands threatened at once, which one does the party go bail out? Both nations had best hope that they have some backup plan for dealing with threats besides just Sending for help from those who may not be in a position to provide it in time.

[bguy]

If Redcloak hadn't been there, then the hobgoblins would have needed to rely on traditional artillery to breach the walls, which would have required their catapults to be within range of return fire from Azure City. They could still have breached the walls and overrun the city, but it would have cost them more lives to do it.

If Redcloak and the rest of Team Evil's high end characters hadn't been there, the Order could have just sortied out and destroyed the hobgoblins artillery. The hobgoblins wouldn't have been able to stop them and after that they would have no way of breaching the walls.


If the Order hadn't been there, the titanium elementals would have done more damage, but would still have been limited to Redcloak's ~90-second summon duration, so they couldn't finish defeating the defending army, just pave the way for Redcloaks army.

Fair enough, I forgot the elementals were summoned rather than conjured. Though Redcloak could have easily conjurered up an ally strong enough to slaughter the defenders (or used the rest of his vast store of magic to get the job done.)


And what if either mass army hadn't been there? If Azure City's army was gone, then the six-man Order would have been unable to defend as soon as the hobgoblins breached the walls in 7 places (realistically fewer, given that not everyone in the Order could reasonably expect to hold a choke point alone). If the hobgoblins hadn't been there, it would have been just Xykon and Redcloak storming the castle themselves, and they would have most likely lost to Soon and the ghost-martyrs, not to mention that even victory would be putting themselves inside a siege situation surrounded by hostiles at best.

How does the hobgoblin army breach the wall in even one place after the Order takes out their siege engines? The hobgbolins would be like Hannibal after the Battle of Cannae, standing at the gates of Rome after crushing the Roman army in the field, but powerless to actually take the city because he had no way to get past it's walls.

And Xykon and Redcloak losing to the ghost martrys supports the point that it is only the high end characters that matter. Neither of them would have been in any danger from a besieging mook army. Xykon especially could literally poke an army of low levels to death since they would have no way of damaging him given a lich's crazy amount of DR.


Ensuring the loyalty of the level 1 army isn't nearly as difficult. Pay them enough to support their families and you've already gone a long way toward achieving it, even if morale and patriotism are otherwise low.

The problem though is that its not a matter of ensuring the loyalty of the rank and file troops, it's that you need to ensure the loyalty of their commanders. Charismatic generals leading an army that is more loyal to them than to the state can turn on the state just as easily as an adventuring party can. And as I previously mentioned this is an even bigger problem in D&D, since even if your commanding general is entirely loyal to the nation, he can still potentially be magically controlled or replaced by someone using shapeshifting/illusion magic. (And he's probably a lot more vulnerable to such an attack than the adventurer party, unless your General is a high level adventurer himself.)


The issue with keeping the loyalty of higher-level adventurers is that they have so many other options on the table. I raised money as the issue because earlier posters spoke of hiring adventurers as being cheaper than a standing army, but really, higher-level characters are likely to have competing loyalties on every level. Can you count on their loyalty to you being higher than their loyalty to, say, their elven allies who have been dealing with an encroaching dragon? Can you count on them being willing to drop the quest to destroy the Artifact of Ultimate Evil to drive off the mere mortal invaders who are threatening your borders? Heck, can you even count on them having an extra Teleport and otherwise-full spell slots ready to go when you Send for them?

Well that's why you would ideally promote from within so you would have your own force of adventurers who will prioritize the defense of your nation.
Nations that can't afford that would need to ally with more powerful nations or at least try and keep several bands of suitable adventurers on retainer, so they have a wide range of options in a crisis.


I think we're making different default assumptions about nations in fantasy worlds, too. I tend to think of fantasy geopolitics as consisting of lots of small countries, ranging in size from city-states to nations large enough to have a handful of significant cities. Those cities will still be tiny population-wise compared to modern cities - a major nation might have a population of a few hundred thousand at the outside, most of whom are busy producing food. There may be one or two empires that cover a notable percentage of a continent in the world at any given time, but for the most part, the world is a patchwork, and adventurers are going to be spending a huge percentage of their time traveling in the lands of other kings. In that scenario, retaining the loyalty of "local" adventurers is going to be a challenge; the adventurers have seen the world beyond your borders, and know there is more to the world than ensuring that the king in the place they were born doesn't lose a war. And furthermore, most countries don't even have enough population to statistically have one high-level adventurer, much less an entire party of them who share a strong loyalty to the local government.

Yes, but any nation that isn't populous or wealthy enough to afford adventurers probably can't afford a large standing army either. What we would probably see happen is that the smaller nation-states who can't really afford their own adventurer teams would ally with larger nations that do have adventurer corps available. That is certainly what we see in real life. Very few nations maintain nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers or large standing armies because they can't really afford them and don't really need them as long as they are allied to a nation that does have them and is willing to help protect them.


Another factor to consider is how few adventuring parties all hail from the same place. A party that contains a human, an elf, a dwarf, a gnome, and a halfling is unlikely to all owe homeland loyalty to the same place, and is also likely to follow at least a small variety of religions, ideals, and/or morals, making them harder to manipulate as a group. And, now that I think about it, that also ties into what I said above - if two people in the same adventuring party have their homelands threatened at once, which one does the party go bail out? Both nations had best hope that they have some backup plan for dealing with threats besides just Sending for help from those who may not be in a position to provide it in time.

Well, yeah any nation that is putting all its eggs in one basket is just asking for trouble. That's why if you don't have your own adventurer corps you would ideally have good relations with multiple teams, so you would have a wide range of options in a crisis situation. And if no one comes to your aid then you may be screwed. But then small nations are always at that risk. If I am a tiny city-state, bordering a powerful, hostile empire that I have no way of defeating on my own, then my only defense strategy is to find allies that can help me against it. And if those allies bail on me when the empire attacks then I am in serious trouble.

[Scow2]

If Redcloak and the rest of Team Evil's high end characters hadn't been there, the Order could have just sortied out and destroyed the hobgoblins artillery. The hobgoblins wouldn't have been able to stop them and after that they would have no way of breaching the walls.
Actually, the Hobgoblins alone were a threat to the Order at the time of the battle of Azure City. The party's gained a few levels since then, though.

[Crystafent82]

My 2 cents:

Armies in D&D are still a necessity. They protect your lands against enemies from outside and from the inside, since most lands do not have a dedicated police force. So, for you to protect and rule that land you need your thousands of capable (and loyal) mooks who keep the peace and enforce your laws.
And as long as you treat them accordingly and keep them happy enough and loyal they will be there in the hundreds of different places at the same time.

An army composing of only level 1 mooks cannot exist very long.
The sheer number of different tasks they are assigned to, protection installations and people, your borders, your roads, routing bandits and rebels, helping your citizens in case of a natural catastrophy and such alone ensure that every mook gets confronted with enough challenges that (if he survives them all) get him enough XP to reach level 2.
Longer tours of duty can even get them to level 3. After that most encounters will not net enough XP to push them any further. Unless they are selected for special tasks and high risk operations. Elite Soldiers with level 5 are pretty heavy hitters compared to mooks and peasants. A Veteran General with decades of warfare can even reach level 8-10. Such a life is filled with enough encounters to make certain adventurers pale.

I assume therefore that there are 3 possibilities to meet huge amounts of level 1 mooks in 1 place:
1. Boot Camp
2. 1st tour of duty freshmen
3. Levée en masse (mass conscription)

As for the fight in the current strips: Someone else already did the math and has proven that Roy one-shots Warriors with Level 3-4. And the standard infantry men are rarely higher than 3.


Magic is a given fact in the D&D universes.
So any general/ruler who is worth his salt will take it into consideration for his plans. He HAS to add it to the other forms of combat like infantry and archers or he will lose against an opponent who does. Another arm in combined arms.
It is therefore to assume that armies have to prepare for magical assaults and defenses as well. While the fresh recruits will not get any special training officers easily get some special training.

Just a little example, but allow me to elaborate:
Even in our modern age it is assumed that you need a numeric advantage of 3-4:1 over your enemy to beat him and take his land (so to speak). The lower the number advantage on your side means that more of your soldiers will get hurt/killed up until you have not enough soldiers left to keep going.
There are exceptions, but those are so rare that you cannot rely on them. A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Suomussalmi (Battle_of_Suomussalmi) is not happening very often.
So, following that train of thought a general in D&D might also try to boost the number of his troops.
IF even 10% of his infantry men are given a scroll of Summon Monster II that can tip the battle instantly. It gives the soldiers
-) in needed key positions the necessary numeral advantage (let's assume the general sent 200 soldiers with scrolls to take a certain position, they suddenly double their numbers if even for a brief time)
-) frees up some soldiers to fall back into a better position
-) stops an enemy (cavalry) charge with summoned bodies before your line
-) a chance to fight another day since the enemy is busy/gets killed by the summons
Even if Cpt. 'Hawkeye' Pierce hates the statement but war (and death) is all about numbers. Just by making sure that 10% of you soldiers do not get killed/wounded you save a lot of time to get them either treated, buried and replaced. And you can push further on.
And those scrolls per piece aren't even expensive. Just consider the time and money that is required to train and equip a replacement who could otherwise keep his old job and pay taxes.

Of course in an army of several thousand soldiers that are still hundred of scrolls. Therefore bigger and better spells and equipment are given only to key personel to use.

And we are not even talking about spell level 5 or higher here. So you need to keep magic in mind for your plans both as another weapon and shield.


How do you get enough and loyal mages for your army/land?
The best shot at this is to controll the education of the mages.
Here's a plan for that:
As a lord you require to find a good (competence not morale) mage of medium to high levels who is reliable and minimum one of the following:
a) loves to teach
b) likes parades in his honor
c) likes to boast about his prowess
Thats not too hard. Just make sure he understands your arrangement:
You controll the city and lands, s/he the magical school.
You supply the school with funds and materials, they protect your lands against magical problems.
S/he is also your advisor who you listen to (thats otherwise the most common mistake). You still make the final decision.
You respect each other. Nobody said anything ab LIKING each other although it's a plus.

Now you need to establish him/her as the citys magical defender, a few public demonstrations with flashy spells help with that.
Make sure your propaganda machinerie helps him/her to get the image s/he likes to have and that appales to your citizens.
Make sure your magic school is the best if not only place for parents to send their kids to when they show signs of magic.
How to keep the pupils loyal and happy?
1.) Great opening ceremony with oaths (of loyalty)
2.) making sure they keep a good standing in the city
3.) regular public contests among wizards/classes for nice prices
4.) that point i forgot
5.) Mages in their last 2 semesters get sent into the field with army troops for tours of duty. Practice makes perfect and gives your mages a taste of army live.
6.) a kick-ass graduation ceremony!
Make sure that your citizens are as proud to have that academy here as the students are proud to be defenders of the city/lands.
Sure, not everyone will be loyal or join your military but it will still get you enough mages for both your military and your civil needs.

[Iago]

This is an excellent point and one I had forgotten about: The concept of frontage (http://www.ageod.net/aacwwiki/Frontage). A division of 10,000 mooks takes up a lot more space than 6 adventurers do. So if the adventurers take up a stand to stop an army made up of low-levels, A small minority will actually engage the adventurers (and die) while the rest of the army simply goes around them.

A team of adventurers can't be everywhere at once. So one thing a low-level army can do by virtue of numbers is be many places at once. Wherever the adventurers aren't , that's where the army hits. It's a variation on Mao's little red book: Enemy advances we retreat, enemy halts we harass, enemy retreats we advance.

Exactly. Look, let's analogize it to current forces. If SEAL Team Six or a similar strike force can be deployed, why do we still need the 82nd Airborne division or the Army Corps of Engineers? The answer is obvious: because a SEAL Team can do things a battalion of troops can't, and vice versa.

There are some jobs that a small unit just isn't built for. Establishing, holding and patrolling captured territory; logistics and maintenance of fortifications and supplies; training and education of additional troops. A strike force is expected to go in, do its job, and get out -- they don't carry sufficient food reserves, ammunition, or other materiel and equipment to engage in a sustained military operation.

An adventuring team (like The OOTS, Team Peregrine, the Linear Guild, etc.) is a phenomenally powerful and strategically valuable small unit. Which does not replace the need for a city guard or patrol force.

[Sky_Schemer]

Well that's why you would ideally promote from within so you would have your own force of adventurers who will prioritize the defense of your nation.
Nations that can't afford that would need to ally with more powerful nations or at least try and keep several bands of suitable adventurers on retainer, so they have a wide range of options in a crisis.

...

Well, yeah any nation that is putting all its eggs in one basket is just asking for trouble.

Just keep in mind that training adventurers is expensive. The optional training rules in 3.5 reference professional trainers costing 50gp per week and a week of training for a new skill or feat. Older rules even had fixed costs per level for training, and downtime between them. These rules are more or less hand-waved because they are annoying and get in the way of game play, but the point is: it's expensive to have specialists. They require special training, often times individualized training, and in a D&D setting they need things to kill (of an appropriate CR) to gain XP.

Armies are not good at individualized training. They are good at issuing every soldier of a particular type (archers, infantry, etc.) the same armor and weapons, teaching soldiers to work and act as a unit, engaging in mass combat without panicking, and so on. Armies work because they do things that scale to "quantity 1,000" and "quantity 10,000". Sure, one out of every 20 or so soldiers might be highly proficient and end up with fighter levels instead of warrior, and advance to low-to-mid levels as positions of authority in your army (lieutenants, sergeants, and whatnot), but most of your guys are still 1st level warriors whose training keeps them functioning as effective platoons, not advancing them in levels.

It is probably cost-effective to have a few highly-trained specialists to deal with the occasional odd problem or special need, but even then it is difficult to fund and train these folks-- what we would call adventurers-- past the mid-levels because at some point you run out of things for them to do "at home" and they stop advancing. Or you run out of money to feed the things they need to do so (magic items and so on). There's this point of diminishing returns where their upkeep is too high.

[King of Nowhere]

I think we're making different default assumptions about nations in fantasy worlds, too. I tend to think of fantasy geopolitics as consisting of lots of small countries, ranging in size from city-states to nations large enough to have a handful of significant cities. Those cities will still be tiny population-wise compared to modern cities - a major nation might have a population of a few hundred thousand at the outside, most of whom are busy producing food. There may be one or two empires that cover a notable percentage of a continent in the world at any given time, but for the most part, the world is a patchwork, and adventurers are going to be spending a huge percentage of their time traveling in the lands of other kings. In that scenario, retaining the loyalty of "local" adventurers is going to be a challenge; the adventurers have seen the world beyond your borders, and know there is more to the world than ensuring that the king in the place they were born doesn't lose a war. And furthermore, most countries don't even have enough population to statistically have one high-level adventurer, much less an entire party of them who share a strong loyalty to the local government.


Yes, the setting is important. if we assumed small population and small states, then likely there will be less adventurers party than nations. if we assumed nations closer to present day ones, with capitals of around 1 million population (remember that in phb definition of "metropolis" is 25000 inhabitants*, and THAT is supposed to contain a few level 15ish characters), then it make sense to have greater adventuring populations, less nations, and any nation big, powerful, whealty, and influencial enough to be able to field at least a few of them in times of need. It all depends on how one builds the world, really. one may assume that magic helps life and started a sort of industrial revolution, or that marauding monsters are rregularly destroying civilized areas and so population is scarce and resources are limited.

* unless it was revised from my arcaic 3.0 handbook

There is however another point I want to dispute, which is the general concept that "high level adventurers are busy". most people here expressed the idea that they would be always fighting eldrich abominations or plans to take over the world. I disagree with that notion. How many such treaths can exist?
a high level party is not going to make a big trip lord-of-the-ring style. a high level party is going to prepare a bit, then teleport, storm the dungeon, remove the treath or die trying. either way, it's often the work of an afternoon. I have troubles imagining adventures for high level pcs that last more than a few weeks. and the kind of extreme treaths they face regularly cannot happen too often. Furthermore, how many adventurers can raid a dungeon before there are no more unexplored dungeons in the world?
So in my imagination high level adventurers spend most of their time idly, waiting for the next plot hook.
Under that premise, it is much easier to persuade them to help you for a discount price if you provide them with a plot hook that is likely to give them loot.
(by the way, I solved the "dungeon exaustion" problem by stating that most loot in dungeons is just the equipment of adventurers who tried to storm it and died. even after a dungeon had been cleared, there will always be someone who will not know it, will try to explore it, and will die dropping a magical sword and armor or a bunch of scrolls and a few wondrous items. that process make dungeons to be looted a renewable resource).

[bguy]

Actually, the Hobgoblins alone were a threat to the Order at the time of the battle of Azure City. The party's gained a few levels since then, though.

The hobgoblin army as a whole was a threat yes. But if the Order was making a targetted strike on the siege engines they could be in and out long before the rest of the army could get there. Heck, Durkon was already high enough level to cast Planar Ally by that point. All he has to do is conjure up a single Astral Deva, and the Deva alone could take out the siege engines, since she gets invisibility as an at will ability and the hobgoblins would have a very difficult time overcoming her DR and spell resistance. The Order wouldn't even have to enter the fight.

And in fact forget just targetting the siege engines, the conjured Deva by herself could pretty quickly and easily destroy the entire hobgoblin army since she also gets Holy Word at will which is going to let her automatically kill or paralayze every evil hobgoblin soldier within 40 feet of her every single round. That's an army killer right there which the hobgoblin mooks have no way to counter or outlast on their own. So all the Order has to do to defeat the hobgoblin army is cast a single 6th level spell.

[Jay R]

The advantages that an army has over adventurers are that they are far more numerous, and they work for the leader full time.

Here's a list of things an army can do that a small group of adventurers cannot or will not do:

1. Garrison a fort, all day and all night, for years.

2. Check the identification of all visitors to the city, all the time.

3. Ring the sides of a coliseum to stop a dinosaur or prisoner revolt, every time there is an activity in the coliseum.

4. Search an entire city quickly.

5. Hold onto a conquered empire for years.

6. Take several thousand prisoners, individually, at the end of a battle.

No, of course the least powerful members of one side of a conflict can't defeat the most powerful members of the other side. That has been true at all times and in all places.

But that's not their job.

[Fish]

if they do not come, the contract is void, and they lose all the neat benefits they were getting from me.
Yes, let's review those:

• A few GP per day.
Most mid-level adventurers sneeze that much cash.

• They get to keep the loot they find.
In exchange for fighting off that invading army for 0 XP gain, they get all the level 1 loot they can carry? That's not much of an offer.

Okay, suppose you needed these adventurers to fight off a high-level encounter: marauding were-gibbon necromancers or something. You say "you will allow them to keep the loot?" Really, the question is, how can you prevent them from keeping it? Again, if you had the power to "allow" a party of 6 mid-level adventurers to do anything, you'd have to be epic yourself.

• All expenses paid for doing the mission they don't want to do.
It's your mission; why should the adventurers care about losing this benefit?

• Free raise dead if they die or TPK while doing a mission they don't want to do.
Again, if they aren't interested in doing your mission, they don't need this perk.

And still we come to the question: how do you accomplish this? You claim that you have the power to rescue a mid-level party from TPK? How? Whatever killed those 6 level 15 guys is still there. In order to retrieve their bodies (assuming they're simply dead and not zombified, soul bound, petrified, etc) you have to have an even-stronger force. Where does this even-stronger force come from? And what happens when your even-stronger guys get TPK, who saves them?

• Free use of your ultra-safe royal fortress.
Do you really have the power to make your panic room safer than one the adventurers make themselves? In order to make a safe room like you're proposing, you need access to the strongest magic available. So ... what do you offer the wizard who makes your fortress room? You can't offer him anything that he can't already make himself.

• Research on their personal missions.
I bet that one level 15 wizard can get more information with a spell, in less time, than an army of clerks. The adventurers probably don't want this kind of help.

Your plan for enforcement:
Have an even-more-powerful group of adventurers ("team peregrine") on call.

Presumably, if Team Peregrine ever decides to disobey, you'll have an even-more-powerful group ("team super-peregrine"). And another ("team super-super-peregrine") in case they disobey...

Do you see a flaw here?

[Jay R]

You have a hundred soldiers. 60 of them are level 1, 30 of them are level 2, 5 are level 3, 3 are level 4, one level 5 and one level 6. You have 100,000 gp to outfit them any way you like, and a level 12 wizard on your payroll whose sole job is to craft magic items and respond to occasional existential threats to your kingdom. How would you outfit them to best cope with a standard group of 6 level 13 adventurers? If you want specific load outs for different threats, describe them.

I'd run, of course. We're outnumbered. But that's a stupid way to attack high-level adventurers, and an incredibly badly designed army.

I can't imagine how somebody would get an army but no high-level fighters. Certainly none of my NPCs are that stupid.

Let's modify the question. How would you use an army of low-level mooks to defeat a party of adventurers.

That depends on the circumstances. If I were truly evil, and didn't care about the lives of my own people, and were deeply into advance planning and preparedness, and if I had already noticed that the enemy could not teleport, then I would

1. Go after them with a party of adventurers of my own, while the enemy adventurers were on a different quest. One of my adventurers would be optimized for dominating or otherwise gaining control of others.

2. Pay attention and wait for a time in which the enemy were already in bad shape from other attacks (including from my group), and ideally split.

3. Only then would I go get my army of low level soldiers.

4. Under the pretense of parlay, I would separate the members of the enemy band I had a use for from those I wanted to kill.

5. During the parlay, I would have my army surround the smaller number of adventurers I actually wanted to kill, while taking care of any loose cannons myself.

[This is the part where you think your question starts, but in fact, use of the army would be carefully planned, using other assets as well.]

6. Then I would send my army in a mass attack on the sub-party who are already depleted, in order to force them to use up their remaining spells.

7. I would calmly watch the battle beside my other high-level allies until the enemy were finally depleted of spells.

8. Then I and my high-level allies would come in over the bodies of my dead army to defeat the now worn-down and spell-depleted enemy.

This should work just fine (unless something really weird happened, like if the enemy's most powerful caster had somehow stayed out of all the previous fighting and still had a full daily allotment of spells).

The crucial thing to realize is that a real warlord wouldn't have just an army; he'd have all the standard assets, including high-level allies of his own. Nobody sends low-levels alone against high-levels. But the army is doing its job right now, depleting the Order of spells. [They're also dying, but Tarquin hasn't shown deep levels of concern for the well-being of others.]

[hamishspence]

Sounds possible, now what about the other PC races? Randomly generated evil NPCs run a noticable fraction of non-PHB races, good and neutral are almost entirely PHB races.

Gnomes for some reason aren't listed as an option for Evil NPCs to be- but here's the others:

Hill Dwarves: 51.32% Good, 43.10% Neutral, 5.58% Evil
High Elves: 46.89% Good, 36.14% Neutral, 16.98% Evil
Lightfoot Halflings: 20.70% Good, 38.08% Neutral, 41.23% Evil
Half-Elves: 14.73% Good, 31.79% Neutral, 53.48% Evil
Half-Orcs: 10.99% Good, 34.79% Neutral, 54.22% Evil

(hill dwarves, high elves, and lightfoot halflings are the standard versions of PHB dwarves, elves, and halflings)

By contrast Lightfoot Halfling community power centers and High Elf community power centers are quite a bit more biased toward Good than their randomly generated NPCs are- and Hill Dwarf ones are also, to a lesser extent (taken from Races of The Wild & Races of Stone):

Lightfoot Halfling Community Power Centers:
42% Good, 53% Neutral, 5% Evil

High Elf Community Power Centers
80% Good, 13% Neutral, 7% Evil

Hill Dwarf Community Power Centers
59% Good, 23% Neutral, 18% Evil

This might suggest that adventuring members of PHB races do in general tend to be less likely to be Good, and more likely to be Evil (with the exception of Hill Dwarves), than the leaders of communities themselves tend to be.

[The Pilgrim]

Even if Cpt. 'Hawkeye' Pierce hates the statement but war (and death) is all about numbers. Just by making sure that 10% of you soldiers do not get killed/wounded you save a lot of time to get them either treated, buried and replaced. And you can push further on.
And those scrolls per piece aren't even expensive. Just consider the time and money that is required to train and equip a replacement who could otherwise keep his old job and pay taxes.

Scrolls cost money. The dead are free.

This truism is true basically because you have to pay in order to produce scrolls, but producing soldiers is free (you don't pay their mothers for them, you just feed the guys some bull**** to get them elisted into your army).

So do not waste your money into equipping your soldiers with scrolls to summon monsters. Invest your money into equipment that increases their damage output.


How do you get enough and loyal mages for your army/land?

That's what nationalism+religion was invented for.

Paying them well also helps, but it's a secondary incentive.


EDIT: Your post was a good read, though.

[Reddish Mage]

As far as the availability like spells like Raise Dead goes. I think the spell may be pretty available in OOTS the way it is mentioned, but then I think that there is generally a greater availability of everything in OOTS, from equipment to magic to knowledge. In standard D&D it is not supposed to be that way.

Raise dead requires a mid-level cleric and diamonds worth 5,000GP. The latter may not seem like a lot to adventurers, but if you look at the services table a typical soldiers wages is under 1gold a day and it doesn't rise higher than a couple of gold.

What's more on the premise that a silver a day represents minimum wage (about $50 a day) [I have a treatment on why this is useful (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=288600)], a gold piece would be about $500. That means that single raise dead spell is about 2.5 MILLION dollars!

Of course, there's a number of ways to figure out what 5k in gold is worth economically (our thread went anywhere between $50-500), but even at 250k its too expensive to be cavalier with soldiers lives over!

Order of the stick in several places suggest that they conversion rate is more like 1gp = $1 (looks at the price of rouge at 5gp, the cost of fighter college at 40k a year, or Haley's comment about staying in a city can top out at 1000gp a day). That makes raise dead cheap and the shenanigans more worth it. Of course, that also means that comparatively high level magic items should be in the grasp of run of the mill nobility and wealthy folk...

[King of Nowhere]

Yes, let's review those:

• A few GP per day.
Most mid-level adventurers sneeze that much cash.

• They get to keep the loot they find.
In exchange for fighting off that invading army for 0 XP gain, they get all the level 1 loot they can carry? That's not much of an offer.

Okay, suppose you needed these adventurers to fight off a high-level encounter: marauding were-gibbon necromancers or something. You say "you will allow them to keep the loot?" Really, the question is, how can you prevent them from keeping it? Again, if you had the power to "allow" a party of 6 mid-level adventurers to do anything, you'd have to be epic yourself.

• All expenses paid for doing the mission they don't want to do.
It's your mission; why should the adventurers care about losing this benefit?

• Free raise dead if they die or TPK while doing a mission they don't want to do.
Again, if they aren't interested in doing your mission, they don't need this perk.

And still we come to the question: how do you accomplish this? You claim that you have the power to rescue a mid-level party from TPK? How? Whatever killed those 6 level 15 guys is still there. In order to retrieve their bodies (assuming they're simply dead and not zombified, soul bound, petrified, etc) you have to have an even-stronger force. Where does this even-stronger force come from? And what happens when your even-stronger guys get TPK, who saves them?

• Free use of your ultra-safe royal fortress.
Do you really have the power to make your panic room safer than one the adventurers make themselves? In order to make a safe room like you're proposing, you need access to the strongest magic available. So ... what do you offer the wizard who makes your fortress room? You can't offer him anything that he can't already make himself.

• Research on their personal missions.
I bet that one level 15 wizard can get more information with a spell, in less time, than an army of clerks. The adventurers probably don't want this kind of help.

Your plan for enforcement:
Have an even-more-powerful group of adventurers ("team peregrine") on call.

Presumably, if Team Peregrine ever decides to disobey, you'll have an even-more-powerful group ("team super-peregrine"). And another ("team super-super-peregrine") in case they disobey...

Do you see a flaw here?
No, I do not see any flaw, and I think you are just trying to nitpick, or else you think those adventurers really hate me and are trying their best to turn me down.
My mission may not be their mission, but it's still free xp, free loot, and limited risk. Advneturers normally look for plot hooks. I'm providing them with plot hooks. many would be fine just for that.
and I offer them plenty of commodities and services that they MAY be able to get by themselves, but why should they bother so much? It's like saying that since people can cook their own food, no one will ever go to a restaurant.
So yes, they could cast a magnificent extradimensional dome of mordekaiser, but it's a 7th level slot, they won't need to use it if they stay with me. They may be able to find more informations by casting spells, but not necessarily. I'm not an expert of divinations, but I'm pretty sure that a) there are some informations that are better researched by hand, especially if someone is trying to protect himself from magical information gathering, and b) many of the most powerful spells for collecting informations have xp cost or high material component cost. Why should they turn me down? because on average once every year they may have to spend a few days working on a mission I give them? is it any worse than dungeon crawling? Because, let's be honest, if I weren't giving them any mission, they would be looking for a mission themselves.

So I postulate that while some adventurers will prefer to stay independent, others will like the comforts I offer. with time, they'll hopefully start feeling loialty, at least some of them. hopefully, different groups of adventurers will occassionally work together and bond between them, and that will reinforce the feeling of being part of a team and therefore ensure loialty.

Once I have this mechanism started, and I will have some adventurers I feel I can trust enough, beeyond mere money, then I can force recalcitrant adventurers to respect the laws of my state. I don't need my teams all the time. Once I make some example, and I show the world that if someone creates too much troubles I will send not one but several parties against him, then most adventurers will avoid making troubles in my land.

For the resurrection, sometimes you just get killed by unsentient monsters. in that case, getting someone to sneak in the cave once the monster is out and recover your remains should be feasible. At worst, I will just pack the 30k gp and call a 17th level cleric. I can't guarantee success, but at least I will try, and that's more than you could otherwise get.


You're falling in the nirvana fallacy. just because my offer isn't perfect, it don't mean it's bad, and while some adventurers will refuse, or will just get in for the benefits, others will eventually come to like me enough.

[Forikroder]

You're falling in the nirvana fallacy. just because my offer isn't perfect, it don't mean it's bad, and while some adventurers will refuse, or will just get in for the benefits, others will eventually come to like me enough.

its not a bad deal, but its not a good deal either most partys wouldnt want to get tied down, if they think you have access to info they need then they can parlay with you the other 99% of the time they dont want to be at your beck and call

[Amphiox]

I still don't understand why you think high-level adventurers would make armies obsolete, considering

1) there's about a hundred of them in the whole world, and
2) they're out adventuring

If there were tens of thousands of high level adventurers, and each nation could afford a few, and they somehow could level very high while just sitting around in a castle all day, then your hypothesis would make sense. But as of right now, you're just assuming too many things that are simply not true.

Like I have said, I approached this question from the point of view of world-building, and not from the point of view of a narrative or a campaign, both of which are fixed within a specified sliver of time within the world that pre-exists.

Take the RAW, start up the world, sit back, let it run, and do not interfere. Then see what happens as history unfolds.

In the time period during which campaigns typically occur and the narratives are written, high level adventurers may be rare. But extrapolate forward - will they always be rare? Consider that the higher the level, the harder they are to kill. Some of them can gain access to life extension capabilities. Some of them belong to races with extended lifespans.

The noninterference aspect also means there are no players, no authors, no DMs. That means every sentient being in the universe is a PC, or can be one if they want to be one.

The inevitable outcome is that the number of high level adventurers will rise (and more and more of them will be elves and the like, and fewer and fewer, relatively speaking, will be humans and the like). A point will come, inevitably, when that number crosses the critical threshold whereby the military implications become real. What happens then? Does the world blow itself up in arcane conflagarations? (As some in the SETI community have speculated about advanced civilizations nuking or grey gooing themselves into oblivion once a certain technological threshold is crossed). Or can such a geopolitical construct keep functioning with a relative maintenance of peace and order? If so, what kind of order is most likely to arise?

[Amphiox]

Or to put it in terms of more a more concrete example. In the real world we have technological processes that can manufacture industrial grade diamond (ie, diamond dust) quite cheaply from pretty much any run-of-the-mill source of carbon. There is nothing in the rules of D&D that disallow the same process from working in a D&D based world.

What happens when such a process is discovered and large states gain the capacity to manufacture diamond dust cheaply on an industrial scale? Such states could start training their armies by sending their recruits into inappropriate level encounters. Those who die will be raised. Those who die so often that the level loss from being raised outpaces their level gain will "wash out" and be discharged from the army, just as 95%+ of all real life conscripts do not have what it takes to make it out of military basic training. A nice core of level 2-5 characters to form the core of your army becomes readily achievable.

[Amphiox]

This is an excellent point and one I had forgotten about: The concept of frontage (http://www.ageod.net/aacwwiki/Frontage). A division of 10,000 mooks takes up a lot more space than 6 adventurers do. So if the adventurers take up a stand to stop an army made up of low-levels, A small minority will actually engage the adventurers (and die) while the rest of the army simply goes around them.


However, the adventurers can have their spellcasters cast terrain affecting spells that control the battlefield. Stonewall, Ring of Fire, Wall of Fire, etc. Basically, instead of looking for a battleground like Thermopylae, they can make their own, at will.

[Amphiox]

One thing I've not seen anyone address so far, which I've raised before, is the political cost of losing your army to a band of adventurers.

Such a disaster will have ramifications that will shake any ruler's control over his territory. The legitimacy of his very rule will be put into question. He will get a lot of the blame for the debacle whether it was his fault or not. For every soldier he lost, he can expect 2-3 angry relatives, some of fighting age. If he is a tyrant, revolt against his rule is inevitable. If for no reason other than the loss of his army in such a fashion would demonstrate profound weakness to any foes, domestic or foreign. And the army he would have otherwise used to suppress such revolts is now gone.

With that in mind, the ruler's personal calculus with respect to raising, maintaining, and deploying his army will certainly change. If he decides that he still must have that army, the way he uses it, how he supports it (and perhaps how he structures his intelligence networks) will surely be altered compared to the equivalent in the real world by this different threat landscape. I wonder if anyone has thoughts about how it might change?

[pendell]

However, the adventurers can have their spellcasters cast terrain affecting spells that control the battlefield. Stonewall, Ring of Fire, Wall of Fire, etc. Basically, instead of looking for a battleground like Thermopylae, they can make their own, at will.


*Looks it up* Wall of fire (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfFire.htm) is 20 feet/level and 20 feet high, lasting 1 round per level. I could be misreading, but unlike what we just saw in OOTS (which is fast and loose with rules when it comes to drama) the caster must make a concentration check every round in order to maintain the wall.

So if you're willing to burn a spell slot and pay the opportunity cost of making a caster do this for multiple rounds, you can build a wall roughly 400 feet (for an epic level caster) wide, a little bit wider than a football field or a soccer pitch. The mooks counter by simply moving around the fire. 30 foot movement rate means a guy in the middle of the wall can go around it in less than a minute.

If you're really ruthless -- and samurai were this ruthless -- you just bury the fire under the bodies of minions. Sacrificing minions solves a LOT of problems for an evil party, and even a good commander might be willing to pay that price if the situation is desperate enough. If it is a choice between losing thousands of civilian lifes and hundreds of soldiers, even Hinjo would make that choice, I suspect.

Stonewalls can't be overcome this way, but there is such a thing as ladders.

So you're still better off with an army. Presenting this kind of roadblock is something best done by a low level army, not by a caster. Far better to let the army do the things it can do while reserving the casters slots for things the army can't do.



One thing I've not seen anyone address so far, which I've raised before, is the political cost of losing your army to a band of adventurers.


Tyrants, especially, survive because of a myth of infallibility. Big brother is the best swimmer, smartest chess player, the best at everything father figure. When they suffer any kind of defeat, that myth is punctured. Overthrow or civil war becomes a real possibility.

In the real world, most armies do NOT exist to fight foreign enemies. On the contrary, most foreign armies exist to protect the rulers from the peasants who would otherwise storm the castle. If you send your army into a buzzsaw against any enemy, not only does the weakness tempt the people who hate you, it makes it likely your own soldiers will stand aside and let them do it, if they don't actively frag (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging) you themselves. Soldiers don't appreciate being sent to pointless deaths, and if you push them far enough they eventually reach the point where they figure it's easier just to turn around and kill you than it is to keep marching bravely to their deaths.



Respectfully,

Brian P.

[The Pilgrim]

What happens when such a process is discovered and large states gain the capacity to manufacture diamond dust cheaply on an industrial scale?

That the price of diamonds will fall and you still need 5k GP worth of Diamonds (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0677.html). Meaning you need more diamonds to perform the ressurrection.


Such states could start training their armies by sending their recruits into inappropriate level encounters. Those who die will be raised.

If I were an overlord, I'd prefer to enlist a new recruit (which is free) rather than waste my resources in raising a lvl1 guy crippled with a -2 CON.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

*Drop lurking shields*

One thing I think most people are ignoring is what the army's objective is.

Say the party of PCs is protecting a village. If the army can just ignore them, or tarpit them with a couple of units, or pin them in place with archers, or have cavalry and can just run around them, they can sack the village without the PCs being able to do anything. PCs lose. Without people to grow their food, provide them a place to rest or whatever, the PCs are on the run, starving, scavenging off any enemy troops then can find, and more than likely bleeding resources as they go (and that might be an interesting campaign to run).

In the current story line, the Order ARE the objective, specificially the deaths of Roy, Belkar, Durkon and now V. Tarquin's army can't ignore them and so they're being fed into a meatgrinder.

Any other situation, a group of PCs on their own against an army - well, the mage might drop 20-30 with their first fireball, but after that, a commander with more than 2 brain cells will have their troops in skirmish formation so that at best, the mage might hit 5 at a time until they run out of fireballs, and 50 or so casualties will probably be well below the butchers bill the commander was expecting against a regular army. They can pin down the PCs with archers, or just try and stay out of the mage's range. Ok, V can probably hit things as 1000 feet or so, but the average battlefield will almost certainly be in excess of that, and the PCs are basically limited to running speed, so unless a unit decides to engage the PCs, only someone with a missile weapon is going to be able to do anything, and even that's only going to cause a few casualties a turn at best.

[SoC175]

Holding ground means preventing the enemy from doing what he wants with that ground.Managing ground then. In many cases the line between army and police force is very blurred.

Unless your adventureres want to spend all day policing their holdings and collecting taxes and enforcing laws all by themselves, that's where the army-police-tax-collector force comes in.

But my question was how? How, with D&D RAW do you make an effective army in a scenario where marauding bands of evil adventurers are a potential threat that one has to defend against? You don't. The army is there to keep peace where the evil high level adventurers aren't currently marauding and your own high level guys are chasing after these evil adventurers

There's a lot of mundane work needed to keep your kingdom running that high level guyes are to hoity toity for.

What purpose can 100 level one mooks be deployed for that 2-3 level 5 mooks won't do better with less risk of loss of life? Collecting taxes / keeping the peace in 10 villages at once

If they did know about rule mechanics and such, then every monster would flee upon sighting a group of 4-6 adventurers because they'd know they were intended as a standard encounter. A weak monster would, a strong monster would attack the lvl 10 party and be truly surprised when these lvl 10 humans don't die in one claw swipe like all other humans it encountered before did

If Elminster wanted to conquer Faerun, he could do it tomorrow. Until faced with Szass Tam, the princes of Shade, Larloch ....

The odds of their willingness to answer the call probably increase if they know that not answering the call will result in the deaths of their children. :smallbiggrin: These are the "creepy guy living in his walled off tower/manor where no one dares to visit" they don't have families. And since you just tried to threaten them, you're reign (and life) just ended

[King of Nowhere]

its not a bad deal, but its not a good deal either most partys wouldnt want to get tied down, if they think you have access to info they need then they can parlay with you the other 99% of the time they dont want to be at your beck and call

true, but I don't need most parties; I only need a few to start with. Then I can start to grow big.
Once I got a couple of adventuring parties on my side (maybe they just wanted to retire and my offer guarantee them that they will still get good money all the year for maybe a week of work every year), then my nation will become more powerful. suddenly, among the services I can offer, is the assistance of a couple of adventuring parties. my capability of granting protection, information, cooperation and resurrection will grow with the number of adventurers I bring on my side, and that will encourage others to come to me. I'm hoping to snowball the thing into something big.
Of course it's not guaranteed to succeed. maybe too many of my adventurers will die and I won't be able to raise them, so the others will leave. Maybe they'll see that they are a group of 50 mid to high level guys that are more loial to each other than to my country, they will just invade me (hint: maybe I should make sure most of them aren't evil). But I think it's the best strategy available to try and secure someone who will help your cause and not your money.
Of course I can't order them around like I do my soldiers. I will put a friendly charismatic guy in charge of special operations team, and I will be accomodating - within reason - to their requests.

Plus, I hope that if they start spending time in my city, they will hook up and marry with someone. I mean, adventurers are handsomely rich, and they are heroes. they are very smart or very strong (in a few fortunate cases, both), they are no uglier than the common people and if they really are, they can always get a charisma boosting item. I think they should have a line of girls/boys waiting for their chance at them. Of course most of them are free spirits and won't get more than the occasional flirt, but some will. And when they have family in my country, I can be sure they will defend my country if attacked, if nothing else because their relatives lives there.

In fact, this bring me to the following conclusion:
the more cost-effective way to get some loial adventurer is to set up a geisha school and send the graduated to try to seduce adventurers :smallbiggrin:

[Gray Mage]

*Looks it up* Wall of fire (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfFire.htm) is 20 feet/level and 20 feet high, lasting 1 round per level. I could be misreading, but unlike what we just saw in OOTS (which is fast and loose with rules when it comes to drama) the caster must make a concentration check every round in order to maintain the wall.

The round/level duration only starts after the caster stops concentrating. V could keep it indefinitely if he focused on it, barring it being dispelled.


*Drop lurking shields*

One thing I think most people are ignoring is what the army's objective is.

Say the party of PCs is protecting a village. If the army can just ignore them, or tarpit them with a couple of units, or pin them in place with archers, or have cavalry and can just run around them, they can sack the village without the PCs being able to do anything. PCs lose. Without people to grow their food, provide them a place to rest or whatever, the PCs are on the run, starving, scavenging off any enemy troops then can find, and more than likely bleeding resources as they go (and that might be an interesting campaign to run).

It really depends how much time the PCs have and what spells they can cast. Defending a village is actually can be quite doable, to varying extents, depending on if you want the buildings intact or just everyone alive.

Also, a caster's strength comes much more from battle field control spells then pure AoE spells (V's Wall of Fire is going to be much more usefull then the Fireball she cast just before).

Also, welcome to the playground. :smallsmile:

Edit: @King of Nowere: I wonder what kind of retirement plan you're offering that can match having an entire demiplane that you've made it yourself (Genesis is "merely" a 9th level spell).

[Friv]

I feel as though this discussion is missing a key factor.

While Level 1-4 characters are so much chaff before Level 15 characters, there are 11 levels between those two points that are also represented.

I assume that a D&D army looks kind of like this:

*) The mundane forces (Levels 1-4): Mostly warriors, with some fighters, and a handful of lesser clerics and wizards and the like to offer support. These guys function mainly like a medieval army, and fight each other. If the other side's bulk army is taken out, they start chasing down...

*) The special forces (Levels 5-8): These guys work in tight regiments, and almost always include one or two magical folks supporting a team of fighter and rogue types. They move fast around the battlefield, looking for high-opportunity targets. They can be pulled down by the guys below them, though, so they try to avoid getting bogged down. They're mainly aiming to destroy each other, and also to gang up on...

*) The Heroes (Levels 9-12): These guys work in parties. They're almost, but not quite, immune to the mundanes, so they may take moments to blast through them, but mainly they're trying to take out the heroes on the other side. They have to avoid getting taken apart by small special forces regiments, while they deal with their opponents' heroes. If they can take out all of the heroes on the other side, they fight the enemy's mundane forces, using their own mundane forces to shield themselves from the enemy's special forces. Of course, with particularly powerful armies, they might also have to deal with...

*) The Legends (Levels 13-16): Like the Heroes, Legends work in parties, but their parties are likely a little smaller. They can basically chew through mundanes with impunity, and are likely to be devastating to whatever area they're focusing on, but a few regiments of special forces can still take them down, and if they try to take the field alone the enemy's Heroes will use their mundanes as a screen and carve them to pieces. Still, those armies that have Legends are probably toting a serious advantage. As long as they're not up against...

*) Freaking Demigods (Levels 17+): These guys have Level 9 spells. They have crazy magic items. Mundanes are useless against them. Special forces are, basically speaking, useless against them. The only hope is for the other side to use all of their Heroes and Legends to try and pull them down before they single-handedly change the course of the battle.


To summarize: Each stage of enemy starts by fighting their equivalents on the other side, then seeks out and pulls down people operating one level above them. That frees up their people on that level to seek out and pull down people operating one level above them, and so on. If everyone a level above you is gone, you go after people a couple of levels below you so that your lesser forces can pull down the guys who are coming after you.

If your side loses absolutely everyone in the middle layers, you've lost the battle, probably. Your bottom layer can't fight their top layer. But battles being battles, probably every layer is being wiped out at a similar rate, so by the time that happens the win has resolved itself.

[Everyl]

Like I have said, I approached this question from the point of view of world-building, and not from the point of view of a narrative or a campaign, both of which are fixed within a specified sliver of time within the world that pre-exists.

Take the RAW, start up the world, sit back, let it run, and do not interfere. Then see what happens as history unfolds.

In the time period during which campaigns typically occur and the narratives are written, high level adventurers may be rare. But extrapolate forward - will they always be rare? Consider that the higher the level, the harder they are to kill. Some of them can gain access to life extension capabilities. Some of them belong to races with extended lifespans.

The noninterference aspect also means there are no players, no authors, no DMs. That means every sentient being in the universe is a PC, or can be one if they want to be one.

The inevitable outcome is that the number of high level adventurers will rise (and more and more of them will be elves and the like, and fewer and fewer, relatively speaking, will be humans and the like). A point will come, inevitably, when that number crosses the critical threshold whereby the military implications become real. What happens then? Does the world blow itself up in arcane conflagarations? (As some in the SETI community have speculated about advanced civilizations nuking or grey gooing themselves into oblivion once a certain technological threshold is crossed). Or can such a geopolitical construct keep functioning with a relative maintenance of peace and order? If so, what kind of order is most likely to arise?

I think I disagree with this premise. I don't think that populations of high-level adventurers will inevitably rise over time, or at least not rise faster than staying demographically proportionate with a growing population of commoners. Naturally long-lived races, like elves, also have naturally low population growth and replacement rates. In the case of elves, it takes over a century to for an infant to reach adulthood; replacing lost commoners takes forever, much less replacing a lost high-level character. And high-level characters do still die, whether it's by old age or by conflict with other high-level characters/high CR monsters. The proportion of characters who attain effective immortality and then lead lives cautious enough to avoid getting killed by an outside force is vanishingly small, to the point that, depending how the world was built before being set free to run "unattended," they may not even exist outside of powerful self-willed undead, like liches and vampires. You could assume that such characters would slowly increase in number over time simply because they're so hard to destroy, but that leads in exceptionally dark directions - the vampire ruling class that Rich has said would be a part of Malack's long-term plans, for example. A lich-king who arranges for anyone who begins to look like they might get powerful enough to challenge his reign to "disappear," for another. Survival-oriented immortals would have a vested interest in keeping mortals from ever achieving the kinds of power that they have.

In short, armies don't go obsolete, because the paranoid high-level immortals on top of the heap don't mid-level adventurers survive long enough to become high-level adventurers. At least, that's what I see happening in a world where you assume that high-level characters seek and attain immortality on a regular enough basis to make their numbers steadily increase over time.

[Sky_Schemer]

*) The Heroes (Levels 9-12):

I think it unlikely an army has any of this level or higher. Characters at this level just cost too much. They are carrying magic items that are valued in thousands of gold pieces. Even a measly +1 sword carries a 2000gp surcharge, which is an unfathomable sum to the average commoners whose lives are managed in copper and silver. Even large nations don't have the kind of cash needed to keep high-level adventurers running.

And, as Rich has pointed out, high level PCs aren't training to be a part of your boring army. They are either out there saving the world, or plotting to be its next super-villains. The politics of what ruler sits on which piece of land is meaningless trivia. Nations suffer adventurers, not the other way around. Especially in a feudal-like system such as D&D where power and wealth are all but synonymous.

[The Pilgrim]

I feel as though this discussion is missing a key factor.

While Level 1-4 characters are so much chaff before Level 15 characters, there are 11 levels between those two points that are also represented.

I assume that a D&D army looks kind of like this:

*) The mundane forces (Levels 1-4): Mostly warriors, with some fighters, and a handful of lesser clerics and wizards and the like to offer support. These guys function mainly like a medieval army, and fight each other. If the other side's bulk army is taken out, they start chasing down...

*) The special forces (Levels 5-8): These guys work in tight regiments, and almost always include one or two magical folks supporting a team of fighter and rogue types. They move fast around the battlefield, looking for high-opportunity targets. They can be pulled down by the guys below them, though, so they try to avoid getting bogged down. They're mainly aiming to destroy each other, and also to gang up on...

*) The Heroes (Levels 9-12): These guys work in parties. They're almost, but not quite, immune to the mundanes, so they may take moments to blast through them, but mainly they're trying to take out the heroes on the other side. They have to avoid getting taken apart by small special forces regiments, while they deal with their opponents' heroes. If they can take out all of the heroes on the other side, they fight the enemy's mundane forces, using their own mundane forces to shield themselves from the enemy's special forces. Of course, with particularly powerful armies, they might also have to deal with...

*) The Legends (Levels 13-16): Like the Heroes, Legends work in parties, but their parties are likely a little smaller. They can basically chew through mundanes with impunity, and are likely to be devastating to whatever area they're focusing on, but a few regiments of special forces can still take them down, and if they try to take the field alone the enemy's Heroes will use their mundanes as a screen and carve them to pieces. Still, those armies that have Legends are probably toting a serious advantage. As long as they're not up against...

*) Freaking Demigods (Levels 17+): These guys have Level 9 spells. They have crazy magic items. Mundanes are useless against them. Special forces are, basically speaking, useless against them. The only hope is for the other side to use all of their Heroes and Legends to try and pull them down before they single-handedly change the course of the battle.


To summarize: Each stage of enemy starts by fighting their equivalents on the other side, then seeks out and pulls down people operating one level above them. That frees up their people on that level to seek out and pull down people operating one level above them, and so on. If everyone a level above you is gone, you go after people a couple of levels below you so that your lesser forces can pull down the guys who are coming after you.

If your side loses absolutely everyone in the middle layers, you've lost the battle, probably. Your bottom layer can't fight their top layer. But battles being battles, probably every layer is being wiped out at a similar rate, so by the time that happens the win has resolved itself.


Great battle plan!

If I were to confront your army, I would get everybody above level 5 together in the same unit and send them into a beeline towards your Heroes, Legends or Demigods, wichever is nearer, while my mundane forces keep all your other groups busy.

By the time you realize your error and group all your Adventurers, I would have already won an advantage by having killed either your 9-12, 13-16 or 17+.

:smallwink:

[Trixie]

*) Freaking Demigods (Levels 17+): These guys have Level 9 spells. They have crazy magic items. Mundanes are useless against them. Special forces are, basically speaking, useless against them. The only hope is for the other side to use all of their Heroes and Legends to try and pull them down before they single-handedly change the course of the battle.

...

If your side loses absolutely everyone in the middle layers, you've lost the battle, probably. Your bottom layer can't fight their top layer. But battles being battles, probably every layer is being wiped out at a similar rate, so by the time that happens the win has resolved itself.

Why not? :smallconfused:

People here act like adventurers are end-all stuff. Like they were something akin to laws of physics that cannot be bent or broken. That, is, IMHO, nonsense. Even 1st level character can kill an adventurer given enough resources to work with. Remember Kubota-Elan fight? Elan/Therkla could have been far stronger than Kubota, end result still was death of Therkla and Elan unable to do anything.

That 17th level legendary swordmaster that can behead any man alive? Still need to sleep, drink, eat, socialize, sell loot. All of the above give openings for the 'lesser' men to kill him, no matter how unfair and dirty method it will be used if need be, humans proved long ago how creative they are.

Now, spellcasters might be tougher need to crack, but the only truly unkillable caster is horrifically paranoid caster straight from CharOp boards - and even the infamous Batman Wizard was only unbeatable if you hand-waved in infinite amounts of free time to re-memorize spells. The best CharOp could do was to try different time passage, giving him relative time - but internal time was still the same. Your wizard contracted disease that will kill him in 6 hours, 2 hours before he can reshuffle spells? Oops.

Above all, everyone is vulnerable to coup de grace rules. Every loose cannon would find himself very dead very fast, IMHO. You would need to liberally apply familicides everywhere to escape it, and even then, you will inevitably place yourself in the spotlight of something vastly above your grade that will be very displeased.

On the same notion, the idea adventurers can just go meteor swarming countries they don't like is nonsense. Even in medieval diplomacy, people had ways to ally extremely fast to bring down someone trying to rise above the balance of power. Even extremely powerful men needed to be much more powerful than everyone else combined to escape this.

You try something funny, like coup d'etat? You end up like Tarquin, at his first takeover, not because of wacky war cycle, but because everyone around couped state (and possibly allies beyond that) will take note and hunt you down. You are adventurer, but that doesn't give you nobility or whatever right to rule current social order has. No, very idea adventurers can try to remain outside system imposed by civilization is cartoonish and preposterous, unless there is extremely valid need for them to be there.

[littlebum2002]

Like I have said, I approached this question from the point of view of world-building, and not from the point of view of a narrative or a campaign, both of which are fixed within a specified sliver of time within the world that pre-exists.

Take the RAW, start up the world, sit back, let it run, and do not interfere. Then see what happens as history unfolds.

In the time period during which campaigns typically occur and the narratives are written, high level adventurers may be rare. But extrapolate forward - will they always be rare? Consider that the higher the level, the harder they are to kill. Some of them can gain access to life extension capabilities. Some of them belong to races with extended lifespans.

The noninterference aspect also means there are no players, no authors, no DMs. That means every sentient being in the universe is a PC, or can be one if they want to be one.

The inevitable outcome is that the number of high level adventurers will rise (and more and more of them will be elves and the like, and fewer and fewer, relatively speaking, will be humans and the like). A point will come, inevitably, when that number crosses the critical threshold whereby the military implications become real. What happens then? Does the world blow itself up in arcane conflagarations? (As some in the SETI community have speculated about advanced civilizations nuking or grey gooing themselves into oblivion once a certain technological threshold is crossed). Or can such a geopolitical construct keep functioning with a relative maintenance of peace and order? If so, what kind of order is most likely to arise?


OK, OK. Sorry, I misunderstood.

But still, if you send an army of mooks up against Roy, as is occurring now, but assume Roy is well-prepared, he can not be defeated.

Assume he has 80 HP (average). Each mook has a 1d8 longsword that crits on 19&20. That means they will hit 1/20 times, and crit 2/20 times. The hit will be for, on average, 4 damage. The 2 crits will ONLY hit when they roll a natural 20, so that means 1/200 (2/20 * 1/20) will be a critical (8 damage).

So for every 200 mooks, he will be hit for 1(8) +10(4)=48. This means that he can last a LITTLE less than 400 mooks before going to 0HP. To make it easy math, let's assume he has Diehard, or extra HP, or something so he can survive 400 mooks before going to 0HP.

But he's prepared. He has enough money to buy well over 100 wands of Cure Light Wounds. Each one heals 50*4 =200HP, or about 800 mooks. At 100 of them, he can kill 80,000 fighters plus his original 400. Of course some of these will be higher level, so the number is not that high, but we are also ignoring some 130,000GP worth of magical items he has, which would probably make the number MUCH higher.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure, at some point, they will lose morale. I'm sure you would, too, if you had to fight a guy standing on the corpses of 60,000 of your fellow soldiers.

So Adventurer>army, every time.


They why would armies exist? As others said much better than I can, why would you send an army up against a fighter? If you want to attack a city, and you have an army and they have, say, 6 of the people I described above, they could wipe the floor with you. But you don't send your army at their guys. You send them past the adventurers, toward the city. The adventurers can attack, what? 9 squares each? Around an entire city? The rest of the army would flood in and take over.

Adventurers are better at adventuring, armies are better at armying.

[Everyl]

If Redcloak and the rest of Team Evil's high end characters hadn't been there, the Order could have just sortied out and destroyed the hobgoblins artillery. The hobgoblins wouldn't have been able to stop them and after that they would have no way of breaching the walls.

(snipped to next quote)

How does the hobgoblin army breach the wall in even one place after the Order takes out their siege engines? The hobgbolins would be like Hannibal after the Battle of Cannae, standing at the gates of Rome after crushing the Roman army in the field, but powerless to actually take the city because he had no way to get past it's walls.


Could the Order really move through tens of thousands of enemy troops with the kind of ease and freedom of movement necessary to take down potentially dozens of catapults before any of those catapults got within range and fired rocks big enough to breach the walls? Also, ladders.


Fair enough, I forgot the elementals were summoned rather than conjured. Though Redcloak could have easily conjurered up an ally strong enough to slaughter the defenders (or used the rest of his vast store of magic to get the job done.)

A Planar Ally arms race is probably not a place we want to go. Azure City had casters who could summon planar allies, too. I, at least, don't see much point in debating who should have chosen which elementals/outsiders to counter whatever the opposition called in. It would quickly become a question of which side has more gp and xp to burn on calling outsiders. I'll agree that it's a game-breaking spell if only one side has access to it, though.



And Xykon and Redcloak losing to the ghost martrys supports the point that it is only the high end characters that matter. Neither of them would have been in any danger from a besieging mook army. Xykon especially could literally poke an army of low levels to death since they would have no way of damaging him given a lich's crazy amount of DR.

If Xykon and Redcloak, operating alone, managed to capture the castle without being defeated by Soon or letting Miko destroy the Gate, then I agree that the army wouldn't have been the deciding factor in what happened next. They would have holed up to finish studying the ritual that Xykon was too lazy to figure out beforehand, and before they succeeded, the Order would sneak in, steal Redcloak's holy symbol when he's asleep, and dispose of Xykon once and for all. The hobgoblin army is useful for controlling the territory to make that kind of surgical strike exceptionally difficult to do without mooks alerting the big guns.

My general argument is this: in a setting with both large armies and high-level characters, the side that brings one or the other to the battlefield loses in the long term to the side who brings both. The example of the Azure City siege seems to support this. The Order couldn't defend the city alone, because the hobgoblins could strike in too many places at once. The army couldn't defend the city alone, because they need higher-level characters to defend against the tactics of enemy high-level characters. Team Evil couldn't take the Gate alone, because they'd lack the basic security they need to hold it long enough to carry out their Nefarious Plan. The hobgoblins probably couldn't capture and hold the city alone, though they might be able to win a short-term battle - lacking high-level casting support, they'd suffer far more casualties at every step in the process, and probably not have enough left to suppress the city population even if they got in.

(Not quoting all the stuff about promoting-from-within to save space)

I think I said in an earlier post directed at someone else that I'd expect the mid-to-high-level characters in a medieval-style kingdom to basically be the ruling class. They'd be the barons and the dukes who have led their forces in smaller skirmishes against neighboring kingdoms, bandits, and dangerous monters for many years. Their loyalty is relatively ensured, because they would ideally feel that they have a vested interest in defending their own barony and the kingdom that keeps most of its borders safe. It's not quite the same as having adventurers on call, because you aren't pulling up folks whose day jobs are exploring ancient ruins and battling the eldritch horrors who reside there; it's more like living in a world where even the duties of maintaining peace in a small section of countryside can be fairly adventurous over time.

I think we tend to assume that leaders and generals are going to be fighter-types, similar to their troops. We're familiar with this concept - the basis of most historical feudal societies was a ruling warrior class of some sort. In D&D, though, I'd expect at least some of those leaders to be of other classes - a cleric of a militant god, a wizard who's read every book ever written on military tactics, or even a rogue spymaster who lives by the intelligence their agents can gather on neighboring lands. I would also expect to see cultures where one of those standards was more deeply entrenched than warrior-generals - a magocracy or theocracy, for example.

Sorry for rambling, but I think we're generally in agreement that a kingdom could raise a number of "adventurers" internally, but we probably disagree about how many and of what level. I wouldn't expect to see high-level leaders in an average nation unless that nation had a LOT of war in its recent history, but the ability to field a mid-level group of local leaders wouldn't be out of the reach of most kingdoms of decent size. I wouldn't think they'd be called upon to act as an impromptu adventuring party except in pretty extreme circumstances, though - they'd usually be busy trying to keep their holdings functioning.

[Sky_Schemer]

On the same notion, the idea adventurers can just go meteor swarming countries they don't like is nonsense. Even in medieval diplomacy, people had ways to ally extremely fast to bring down someone trying to rise above the balance of power. Even extremely powerful men needed to be much more powerful than everyone else combined to escape this.

Doing so indiscriminately and making yourself a threat to others, sure. As you point out, there is always a bigger fish, or at least enough slightly-smaller fish to gang up on you.

But, a nation that harasses or targets an adventurer or his party unfairly or unjustly will be in big trouble. Eventually, even the lawful good characters will tire of an obvious abuse of power, recognize there is no diplomatic solution, and exercise a change in administration. I think what Rich is trying to say is that adventurers are dangerous, and nations must tread carefully because high-level characters have the means. What they lack is the motivation.

[bguy]

I think it unlikely an army has any of this level or higher. Characters at this level just cost too much. They are carrying magic items that are valued in thousands of gold pieces. Even a measly +1 sword carries a 2000gp surcharge, which is an unfathomable sum to the average commoners whose lives are managed in copper and silver. Even large nations don't have the kind of cash needed to keep high-level adventurers running.

Alrighty, lets play with the numbers a bit. Per Wikipedia, the Roman military budget in AD 150 was about 16,800 pounds of gold per year. Assuming 50 GPs per pound, that would mean a superpower could be expected to have a military budget of 840,000 GPs per year.

Now someone earlier stated that the cost for hiring adventurers is their level squared in GPs per day. Going with that the cost of a 4 person adventure party for an entire year would be:
at 9th level 118,260 GPs
at 11th level 176,660 GPs
at 13th level 246,740 GPs
at 15th level 328,500 GPs
at 17th level 421,940 GPs

Which means at a cost of about half their defense budget our superpower could afford to hire a single 17th level team, a 13th and 11th level team, or an 11th and 2 9th level teams for an entire year, while still maintaining a large conventional army for routine policing and border protection. It would mean giving up tens of thousands of regular soldiers but is probably still worth it when you live in a world where your nation can come under attack by chromatic dragons or fiends or arch-mages (none of which your thousands of low level soldiers are likely to be able to do anything against.)

If the nation could instead work out some sort of retainer deal (we pay the adventurers 1/10 of their yearly rate while letting them go off and adventure on their own in exchange for them agreeing to drop everything and come to our aid if we call for help) they could muster an even larger adventure force in an emergency. (This is probably the only way smaller nations could really afford the services of high level adventurers since keeping a team on staff permanently is going to be cost prohibitive for all but the richest nations.)

So overall the superpower nations could probably afford a small adventurer corps but everyone else would probably have to hire adventurers on an as needed basis.

[Raenir Salazar]

I'm not sure if the point has been raised, but I think the best counter example to the "adventurers make armies obsolete" is that in real life, Nukes were seen in the exact same light, but the nations of the world still maintained and heavily invested in their large conventional armies so that they had strategic, operational and tactical flexibility to respond to rivals, as well as to engage in wars by proxy.

The same logic applies.