War kinda sorta sucks: Destruction vs. Repurposing :smallfrown:

[Echch]

So I'll give you the basics: The party is in a war, one good-aligned nation vs. another (there is no evil dude they can team up against, so now they are sweating small stuff...)

Now the party is more neutral than good, so they aren't that concerned with alignment most of the time. Now, as generals, they have to think about how to do things. However, after the basic ideas (get a Runesmith for Proximity-Triggered Cloudkill-Runes and all that), we are now at a problem:

See, the question came up of what else to do. Which is never good, but y'know, happens.

The first suggestion was the following: We take stuffed animals and fill them with caltrops, poison the caltrops, drop them into enemy zones, and if a child comes by to pick it up, it explodes for a neglectable amount of damage (originally we wanted the caltrops to deform inside the body, but we had no idea how to) and poisons the child. Of course, the good-aligned characters didn't want that, so after a bit of discussion, we came to the conclusion that, since poison is evil and shouldn't be used, we use a disease instead (if there is one which makes them turn into something that attacks the villagers, that's bonus points, but no undeads, because they are evil due to negative energy), since that could help us demoralize the warriors.
It was also suggested that we use orbital bombardment via homebrewed (no range and pound limit) Ring Gates on some settlements to show others that we can basically target anyone at anytime without much warning.

Suddenly, someone said he had a better idea: We could repurpose them instead! The idea was to hunger the village (after raiding their stuff and all that) and only reward good behavior to slowly brainwash them over the course of months so we can send them to the front as reinforcements (the argument was that children can be brainwashed easily). The added benefit was to force the population to sell themselves for...purposes to keep the soldiers happy. And since it's technically not really rape, it's not evil, and since it actually helps a good cause if they make more soldiers (even if we said we don't send people under 12 into war, but whatever) it might even be a good act since it helps the cause of a good nation (I called BS on that, but I was playing neutral and the other player was playing good, so he was kinda the expert on all things good, so when he said it wasn't evil, my opinion didn't matter as much). We could even take some of the villagers as hostages or relocate them as shields if the reformation of their mindset should fail/they prove to be irredeemable. In addition, it would also make the enemy angry/provoke them so they may make strategic mistakes they wouldn't make otherwise.


And... That's when the session ended.

Now, I don't know much about D&D Warfare, so I just wanted to ask: How feasable are these approaches? Which one is better? Should we use neither? If we should use neither, does the playground have any tips, tricks or strategies that would help?

My head kinda hurts when it comes to large scale battles, so I have no idea what would be best way to deal with the enemy and/or his civil population...
Would my character object to these methods? I mean, he's neutral, so I'm not sure he would care, but still... Even if they are "good guy approved" (I'm really starting to think he and the other guy use misdirection effects though), some of them seem unneccessary or even wasteful. I mean, if we take a village, we'll still need to pay the costs that come with holding said village.

TL;DR: How do you "war" in D&D?

EDIT: I'm actually really suspicious about the guy with the toy idea, since he's claiming to be a neutral cleric that "choose" negative energy...

[flappeercraft]

Well, on the alignment thing I got nothing. It could be seen either way on the last example but I would look at it as more of neutral than good or evil as they would be doing it out of free will. But I would reccomend for the warfare part to get warriors with heavy crossbows or bows with the long range MW quality (Dr 358). That would help with skirmishing and hit and run tactics especially if they are mounted which would be even better. Hell, that is without need of magic items or spellcasters. That or eternal wands of fireball could help a lot.

[icefractal]

So just checking ... these are supposed to be evil ideas, right? If anyone's saying they're not, then they're either:
A) Bluffing you, they are in fact evil.
B) Extremely misinformed about alignments, and common sense for that matter.
C) Trolling. :smalltongue:

How feasible are they? Well again, is being evil the point, or is it just a side effect? Because most of these are gratuitously evil to the point of being less practical - booby trapped stuffed animals, really? Orbital bombardment would work (you don't even need a custom ring gate, just two pairs you can use to accelerate a rod to relativistic speeds), and if you want to "repurpose" the villages you conquer then make them into undead or something, it's not really worse than what you're planning and its a lot faster.

Of course if you have the magic capabilities to pull off orbital bombardment, then attacking villages at all is just showboating. Go after the leaders, take control of them, done.

[Sun Elemental]

Small note: poison isn't evil. Poison is a weapon and a tool that can kill people. So is a sword. Swords aren't evil. The action of poisoning or stabbing is evil.

It's a common misconception that the Paladin's Code calls poison evil. It calls poison dishonorable, which is a fairly acceptable description. Paladins can't be evil or dishonorable. Not because good is honorable, but because they chose to also be honorable.

As for war...
If you players feel poison is 'evil', then so are diseases.
Weakening a village's economy so the woman are forced into prostitution is very evil.
If you can find mercenary Runesmiths to make Cloudkill IEDs, teddy bear plague IEDs are a waste of time.

In fact, if you can make Cloudkill IEDs, do it. Kill ALL the people. Win it already. War doesn't have to be complex. You have the wizards.
Cloudkill every battlefield. Scry on leaders. Scry-n-die the leaders. Have body-doubles of yourselves discuss false information to foil scrying. Summon earth elementals to rip apart fortification. Bypass fortifications with flyers. Have Dispel wands for enemy summons. Divine everything. Make a friendly, spawn-making undead and drop it behind enemy lines. Fly over cities and drop propaganda. Infiltrate cities and Charm the politicians.

And be care with airdropping the Cloudkill mines willynilly... because you know how much trouble Vietnam has with unexploded mines; even decades after the war ended.

[Zanos]

Now the party is more neutral than good

...and if a child comes by to pick it up, it explodes for a neglectable amount of damage (originally we wanted the caltrops to deform inside the body, but we had no idea how to) and poisons the child.

....since poison is evil and shouldn't be used, we use a disease instead

...orbital bombardment via homebrewed (no range and pound limit) Ring Gates on some settlements to show others that we can basically target anyone at anytime without much warning.

...brainwash them over the course of months so we can send them to the front as reinforcements (the argument was that children can be brainwashed easily). The added benefit was to force the population to sell themselves for...purposes to keep the soldiers happy.

more neutral than good



http://replygif.net/thumbnail/770.gif

[Eox]

The, uh... The kingdom knows what war crimes are, right? The kingdom and the party? You might want to sit them down and have a talk about that.

[PersonMan]

Keep in mind that there are good arguments that, if it isn't necessary to shorten an otherwise exceedingly lengthy war (which it really shouldn't be if you're in a fantasy-medieval setting that doesn't replicate technology with magic), escalating to Total War is a bad thing. Rather than armies fighting for a while and some possible looting afterwards, you have thousands of innocent people being killed and terrorized for what amounts to no reason (it's not like they're in factories actively working to support the war effort, after all) and you still have an army to fight anyways.

A note regarding orbital-bombardment-via-ring-gates: I'm curious as to how they got this idea? In-character, specifically, since I don't think most fantasy setting dwellers would expect anything other than a loud thump out of that kind of "weapon", unless you aim it at a specific building or person.

All in all, it looks like you have the issue of players trying to bring in a mix of bad ideas (poisoned toys) and out-of-place modern ideas (brainwashing villagers, systematically reforming a portion of society to aid in the war effort) into the situation, none of which even faintly fit the mold of "Good-aligned nation".

Honestly, it sounds like a great hook to me. After a few war councils, the party finds themselves arrested in the middle of the night and sent to the dungeons; depending on how things went before, possibly for being obvious Evil impersonators of these fine, Good-aligned people.

[Echch]

Well, on the alignment thing I got nothing. It could be seen either way on the last example but I would look at it as more of neutral than good or evil as they would be doing it out of free will. But I would reccomend for the warfare part to get warriors with heavy crossbows or bows with the long range MW quality (Dr 358). That would help with skirmishing and hit and run tactics especially if they are mounted which would be even better. Hell, that is without need of magic items or spellcasters. That or eternal wands of fireball could help a lot.

Eternal Wand of Fireball could work. Sadly, I can't give them the long range quality, since Dragon Magazine is off the table.


So just checking ... these are supposed to be evil ideas, right? If anyone's saying they're not, then they're either:
A) Bluffing you, they are in fact evil.
B) Extremely misinformed about alignments, and common sense for that matter.
C) Trolling. :smalltongue:

How feasible are they? Well again, is being evil the point, or is it just a side effect? Because most of these are gratuitously evil to the point of being less practical - booby trapped stuffed animals, really? Orbital bombardment would work (you don't even need a custom ring gate, just two pairs you can use to accelerate a rod to relativistic speeds), and if you want to "repurpose" the villages you conquer then make them into undead or something, it's not really worse than what you're planning and its a lot faster.

Of course if you have the magic capabilities to pull off orbital bombardment, then attacking villages at all is just showboating. Go after the leaders, take control of them, done.

The idea isn't so much to be evil as it is to instill terror and fear into the other side (at least, that's what I was taking away from it). I still need a custom ring gate though, otherwise I'd be limited to 100 pounds per day per Ring Gate. I can't easily take control of the leaders because, while it would be favorable, we aren't the only side with magic. And we can't use Undead because they are evil due to the whole negative energy business... even if I'm starting to have suspicions that some people of my party are, in fact, actually evil.


Small note: poison isn't evil. Poison is a weapon and a tool that can kill people. So is a sword. Swords aren't evil. The action of poisoning or stabbing is evil.

It's a common misconception that the Paladin's Code calls poison evil. It calls poison dishonorable, which is a fairly acceptable description. Paladins can't be evil or dishonorable. Not because good is honorable, but because they chose to also be honorable.

As for war...
If you players feel poison is 'evil', then so are diseases.
Weakening a village's economy so the woman are forced into prostitution is very evil.
If you can find mercenary Runesmiths to make Cloudkill IEDs, teddy bear plague IEDs are a waste of time.

In fact, if you can make Cloudkill IEDs, do it. Kill ALL the people. Win it already. War doesn't have to be complex. You have the wizards.
Cloudkill every battlefield. Scry on leaders. Scry-n-die the leaders. Have body-doubles of yourselves discuss false information to foil scrying. Summon earth elementals to rip apart fortification. Bypass fortifications with flyers. Have Dispel wands for enemy summons. Divine everything. Make a friendly, spawn-making undead and drop it behind enemy lines. Fly over cities and drop propaganda. Infiltrate cities and Charm the politicians.

And be care with airdropping the Cloudkill mines willynilly... because you know how much trouble Vietnam has with unexploded mines; even decades after the war ended.

Wasn't poison being evil in the BoED?
Anyway, we can do most of that except for possibly the Scry-n-die (because they'll likely have protections up, since they have magic too, which is very inconvenient for us), the spawn-making Undead (because the enemy has a dense population of divine spellcasters, moreso than our side does) and the charming of high-ranking members of society (Protection from X is very popular in the setting).

The rest will be implemented though :D


http://replygif.net/thumbnail/770.gif

...I don't get it...


The, uh... The kingdom knows what war crimes are, right? The kingdom and the party? You might want to sit them down and have a talk about that.

No, we don't. As in, I know some (all) of these things are bad IRL, but I'm not sure where I can find the D&D information on that. I didn't find it in Heroes of Battle, though I could have skipped over it while reading... (There is also the fact that this is ponies, so I don't even know where to start there @_@)


Keep in mind that there are good arguments that, if it isn't necessary to shorten an otherwise exceedingly lengthy war (which it really shouldn't be if you're in a fantasy-medieval setting that doesn't replicate technology with magic), escalating to Total War is a bad thing. Rather than armies fighting for a while and some possible looting afterwards, you have thousands of innocent people being killed and terrorized for what amounts to no reason (it's not like they're in factories actively working to support the war effort, after all) and you still have an army to fight anyways.

A note regarding orbital-bombardment-via-ring-gates: I'm curious as to how they got this idea? In-character, specifically, since I don't think most fantasy setting dwellers would expect anything other than a loud thump out of that kind of "weapon", unless you aim it at a specific building or person.

All in all, it looks like you have the issue of players trying to bring in a mix of bad ideas (poisoned toys) and out-of-place modern ideas (brainwashing villagers, systematically reforming a portion of society to aid in the war effort) into the situation, none of which even faintly fit the mold of "Good-aligned nation".

Honestly, it sounds like a great hook to me. After a few war councils, the party finds themselves arrested in the middle of the night and sent to the dungeons; depending on how things went before, possibly for being obvious Evil impersonators of these fine, Good-aligned people.

We don't know how long the war will last. If it's a quick thing spanning a few years, then targeting their ability to spawn more isn't effective, but the longer it goes on, the more people will die and leave positions that need to be replaced with the current population. The idea behind that was, supposedly, no children = no future soldiers they can send against us and that they can remember having heard of the Russian military having employed that tactic. Then again, as it has been suggested, the guys that considered this a good idea might be evil, so there could be other motives...

On the topic of orbital strikes and why they think it's a good idea is that their characters would probably think that the longer something falls, the more damage it does. And since we don't have a space treaty like in real-life, we don't have to rely on metal rods and can throw down other stuff without having easily visible (including invisible, due to "See Invisible" or "True Seeing") carriers fly over there and possibly getting shot down before they reach the target.

And to that plot point... Should my character attempt to defect? I mean, if he stays, he has a good chance of getting imprisoned...

[exelsisxax]

Your party needs to be less worried about winning that war, and a lot more worried about the inevitable party of vengeful murderhobos that are going to kill you.

Because that's what happens to evil lunatics that conspire to use children as bio-weapon vectors.

[Fizban]

The idea isn't so much to be evil as it is to instill terror and fear into the other side
By attacking innocent civilians, children even. The quintessential definition of terrorism.

No, we don't. As in, I know some (all) of these things are bad IRL, but I'm not sure where I can find the D&D information on that. I didn't find it in Heroes of Battle, though I could have skipped over it while reading... (There is also the fact that this is ponies, so I don't even know where to start there @_@)
Evil isn't evil because the Book of Vile Darkness says so, if you know that attacking innocents is bad why do you need a special dnd war book to tell you?

Dnd war is the same as any other war. If two good aligned nations have gone to war for some stupid reason, the winning move is to get them back into negotiations to stop pointlessly killing each other. If that fails, they still won't go around committing war crimes as national policy, since their national policy mostly consists of "we don't do war crimes."

The first post really says it all though. Your group's first bright idea as generals of a war was a chemical weapon attack against children, followed by starvation and a line including the phrase "since it's technically not really rape, it's not evil." And since you don't like large scale battles, the direction of which is literally the whole point of being a General, you actually considered it. You all fail. You fail for having to ask, and If the other players actually think they aren't evil they infinity fail. The only way they have a chance of getting out of this clean is if this is the most recent in a long line of attempts to get you to realize they've been evil the whole time, and somehow I don't think that's the case.

We don't know how long the war will last. If it's a quick thing spanning a few years,
Maybe try collecting some information and being adventurers before you jump straight to terrorism.

[Echch]

By attacking innocent civilians, children even. The quintessential definition of terrorism.

Evil isn't evil because the Book of Vile Darkness says so, if you know that attacking innocents is bad why do you need a special dnd war book to tell you?

Dnd war is the same as any other war. If two good aligned nations have gone to war for some stupid reason, the winning move is to get them back into negotiations to stop pointlessly killing each other. If that fails, they still won't go around committing war crimes as national policy, since their national policy mostly consists of "we don't do war crimes."

The first post really says it all though. Your group's first bright idea as generals of a war was a chemical weapon attack against children, followed by starvation and a line including the phrase "since it's technically not really rape, it's not evil." And since you don't like large scale battles, the direction of which is literally the whole point of being a General, you actually considered it. You all fail. You fail for having to ask, and If the other players actually think they aren't evil they infinity fail. The only way they have a chance of getting out of this clean is if this is the most recent in a long line of attempts to get you to realize they've been evil the whole time, and somehow I don't think that's the case.

Maybe try collecting some information and being adventurers before you jump straight to terrorism.

I know modern day war crimes are Evil, hence why I called BS. What I'm not sure about is if D&D has different war crimes. Or rather, is there a list I can, IC, talk about. I didn't find such a list, so I figured it would be metagaming.

And I'm... more or less riding this wave to it's inevitable crash. Not going trough great lenghts to stop their plans and ideas (as in, if the council veto me, which is rather unlikely, I'm not gonna do anything about it) might make my character evil, but not being invested in this sort of thing would be IC (and it's not even my nation).

The terrorism thing is actually kinda ironic, when I think about it: Our first quest did actually have us attack civilian buildings because we managed to piece together that the buildings are cover-ups for a vampiric cult. So yeah...

Anyway, this wasn't supposed to devolve into a alignment thread.
So I'll just make this a bit shorter: Do any of the things in the original post have strategic value? If not, I have a logical reason to refute them, if yes... I can appeal to morals, but if half the party is actually evil, they won't listen to that anyway.

EDIT: To make it simpler, let's assume the nation we are working for is evil. Would the nation apply such methods? And if not, why?

[Fizban]

Need more information. You say the other side has casters but apparently your side has some amount of casters, no mention of class or level or numbers or area or distance. The gold standard for war spells is Control Winds, depending on caster level and ambient wind strength you can kill the entire army with a single spell even at minimum caster level by intensifying a storm or eventually even from a dead calm. The only counter is to have your own druid onsite to negate it with their own Control Winds. Everything else is either finding other wide area spells that are less efficient, create spawn apocalypse, or trying to find a spell that will properly start a plague.

Weather or not you would use those tactics should depend on your goals. If you want to take control then killing your new subjects is dumb. If you want to move in your own people then leaving them alive would be dumb. We don't know what small stuff they're fighting over so we don't know what tactics they would use.

The specific stuff from the OP? All dependent on the DM. Attacking the kids is as effective as the DM says it is, destroying crops is as effective as the DM says it is, propaganda is as effective as the DM says it is. Manufacturing large quantities of poison or diseasing things generally requires DM fiat to circumvent the normal mechanics which are too slow. Unless your DM has studied medieval-ish era warfare and then applied dnd mechanics to it, in the same way we would, nothing we say is going to matter.

[hector212121]

You can be ruthless without being terrible...

Also, why not make delayed-activation tree feather tokens for the ring gate? If it doesn't activate until it's on the other side, without customizing you still get like 100 tokens per day, and a tree of that size weighs at least 300-400 pounds.

[PersonMan]

No, we don't. As in, I know some (all) of these things are bad IRL, but I'm not sure where I can find the D&D information on that. I didn't find it in Heroes of Battle, though I could have skipped over it while reading... (There is also the fact that this is ponies, so I don't even know where to start there @_@)

In-world you're unlikely to have a list of "war crimes", apart from something like "attacking under a banner of truce" or similarly shunned things.



We don't know how long the war will last. If it's a quick thing spanning a few years, then targeting their ability to spawn more isn't effective, but the longer it goes on, the more people will die and leave positions that need to be replaced with the current population.

A quick war for a (non-magic-modern-esque) medieval setting would generally be under a year - keeping the men away from the harvest is a pretty big deal when >80% of your population is farming.


The idea behind that was, supposedly, no children = no future soldiers they can send against us and that they can remember having heard of the Russian military having employed that tactic. Then again, as it has been suggested, the guys that considered this a good idea might be evil, so there could be other motives...

Sure. In theory, if you know you're fighting a super-long-term war.

In practice, you're just murdering children for no real gain. Remember: you still have to do the important bit of killing or routing their army.


On the topic of orbital strikes and why they think it's a good idea is that their characters would probably think that the longer something falls, the more damage it does.

Yes. But would it really make sense to extrapolate from "it might make a bigger hole" to "it'll blow up a town"?

[Extra Anchovies]

Edit: What are the casus belli here? How did the war start? Is there a territorial dispute, or did someone at a state dinner take the last chicken tender without asking?


The first suggestion was the following: We take stuffed animals and fill them with caltrops, poison the caltrops, drop them into enemy zones, and if a child comes by to pick it up, it explodes for a neglectable amount of damage (originally we wanted the caltrops to deform inside the body, but we had no idea how to) and poisons the child. Of course, the good-aligned characters didn't want that, so after a bit of discussion, we came to the conclusion that, since poison is evil and shouldn't be used, we use a disease instead (if there is one which makes them turn into something that attacks the villagers, that's bonus points, but no undeads, because they are evil due to negative energy), since that could help us demoralize the warriors.

This is a plan to very directly injure and kill random civilians. That should be answer enough regarding its ethical justifiability.

To go into more detail, what you're discussing here is called an "indiscriminate weapon", i.e. those incapable of distinguishing between combatants and civilians. They are largely prohibited under international law.


It was also suggested that we use orbital bombardment via homebrewed (no range and pound limit) Ring Gates on some settlements to show others that we can basically target anyone at anytime without much warning.

See above re: indiscriminately targeted weapons.


Suddenly, someone said he had a better idea: We could repurpose them instead! The idea was to hunger the village (after raiding their stuff and all that) and only reward good behavior to slowly brainwash them over the course of months so we can send them to the front as reinforcements (the argument was that children can be brainwashed easily). The added benefit was to force the population to sell themselves for...purposes to keep the soldiers happy. And since it's technically not really rape, it's not evil, and since it actually helps a good cause if they make more soldiers (even if we said we don't send people under 12 into war, but whatever) it might even be a good act since it helps the cause of a good nation (I called BS on that, but I was playing neutral and the other player was playing good, so he was kinda the expert on all things good, so when he said it wasn't evil, my opinion didn't matter as much). We could even take some of the villagers as hostages or relocate them as shields if the reformation of their mindset should fail/they prove to be irredeemable. In addition, it would also make the enemy angry/provoke them so they may make strategic mistakes they wouldn't make otherwise.

In all, this is a plan to:
1. Starve nonmilitary civilians
2. Conscript child soldiers
3. Force women into sex slavery
4. Use nonmilitary civilians as hostages

And you're unsure of its ethical standing?

Also:
1. Anyone who thinks they know anything about "brainwashing" without any formal education in sociology or psychology has no idea what they're talking about.
2. Anyone who describes an action as "technically not rape" is not describing a Good action, and if they claim otherwise they are wrong. There's just no argument with that.


Now, I don't know much about D&D Warfare, so I just wanted to ask: How feasable are these approaches? Which one is better? Should we use neither? If we should use neither, does the playground have any tips, tricks or strategies that would help?

Both of them are ethically deplorable and strategically foolish.


Would my character object to these methods? I mean, he's neutral, so I'm not sure he would care, but still... Even if they are "good guy approved" (I'm really starting to think he and the other guy use misdirection effects though), some of them seem unneccessary or even wasteful.

Your character would object, and if the other players claim to be actually playing good-aligned characters, they're actually just wrong about that. Bring up both in and out of character that the plans described are not the plans of Good characters.


TL;DR: How do you "war" in D&D?

The answer is the same in D&D as it is in life. Win without fighting. Strike at the enemy leadership such that they can no longer manage a war. Cut off the head of the snake and the body will die.

In D&D, magic triumphs over everything else. What sorts and levels of spellcasting does the party and their nation of choice have access to, and what do you know of the opposed nation's spellcasting access?


EDIT: To make it simpler, let's assume the nation we are working for is evil. Would the nation apply such methods? And if not, why?

Let's clear this up real quick: alignment is a silly system, and using "evil" as shorthand for "has been arbitrarily deemed worthy of destruction" is just as silly. An evil nation looks out for its own people over the people of other nations. A lawful nation expects some consistency in its people's behavior and maintains some consistency or hierarchy in its government. With those things in mind, most nations are automatically lawful evil. Replace good/neutral/evil and lawful/neutral/chaotic with honorable/realistic/determined and honorable/practical/independent, and you have a set of descriptors consistent with how the alignments are described but without the pointless moral connotations.


Keep in mind that there are good arguments that, if it isn't necessary to shorten an otherwise exceedingly lengthy war (which it really shouldn't be if you're in a fantasy-medieval setting that doesn't replicate technology with magic), escalating to Total War is a bad thing. Rather than armies fighting for a while and some possible looting afterwards, you have thousands of innocent people being killed and terrorized for what amounts to no reason (it's not like they're in factories actively working to support the war effort, after all) and you still have an army to fight anyways.

Yes, this, a hundred times this. Wars occur when two nations have an irreconcilable disagreement. If negotiation cannot resolve a dispute, then the dispute will persist until the nation of greater potential military force uses that force to exert its will upon the other. War, conducted only between armies made up of willing volunteers, is a perfectly acceptable state for two nations to exist in regardless of the war's duration. Certainly more acceptable than any state of war in which civilians and/or nonmilitary infrastructure become targets.

[Zanos]

...I don't get it...
Guy 1: "Why don't we throw poisoned caltrops everywhere, so that children will find them? Maybe we can get them to deform in their bodies so they can't get them out!"
Guy 2: "Great idea! Hey wait, isn't poison Evil?"
Guy 1: "Oh yeah, we could infest them with diseases instead!"
Guy 2: "Much better!"
Guy 3: "What if we starved and brainwashed the enemy women and children, so they'll be forced to have sex with our men to survive, and we can send their children to fight on our frontlines!"
Guy 2: "Genius!"

Nothing about this seems weird to you? We can't use poison because it's Evil, but starving women into selling their bodies to survive and brainwashing children into child soldiers are totally Neutral activities?

Your party is seriously on the express train to Hell.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Asmodeus is very pleased with you, Echch.
https://cdn.meme.am/instances/57987793.jpg

[Eox]

Your goal in winning a war should generally be minimizing bloodshed and making sure you do it in such a way that doesn't make every other nation unite to stop you from doing stuff like this to them. Every soldier or civilian that dies in wartime is still a thinking, breathing person with hopes, dreams and a family. If you've lost sight of that, you're probably due for a sound thrashing from this newly created UN.

Hell, some of these ideas are probably going to attract celestial attention and you do NOT want that

[Sun Elemental]

I feel like you want to win the war, with the efficiency that comes from war crimes or being evil, but without committing war-crimes or being evil.

And every commenter has a slightly different view of what separates legitimate military actions from war crimes, or what evil is.

First, have a long talk with the DM and the rest of the party about how you're handling alignment. Why do you call things evil? Screw what the BoED says about things, think for yourself. The cleric's player should be doing a lot of talking, as should the DM.

Now, you can decide how you want to war. And if you do go the Prostitution-and-Civilian-Casualties route... well, that's ok. Medieval wars sometimes went like that. The crusades were waaay ****tier than WWI or Vietnam.


Frank Trollman is a homebrewer that made a massive handbook full of classes and advice, and I feel like a few paragraphs from it are relevant, even if you might disagree with his interpretations.


The goblins have gone and conducted a raid on your village in full force. They rode in, took a bunch of the sheep, killed some of the people, set fire to some of the cottages, and rode away again with Santa Sacks filled with this year’s crop. And they laughed because they thought it was funny. And now that your elder brother has been slain you want to dedicate yourself to the eradication of the Goblin Menace and begin the training necessary to become a Ranger so that you can empty the goblin village from the other side of the valley once and for all. Par for the course D&D, right?
Wrong! Killing all the goblins isn’t just an Evil act, it’s unthinkable to most D&D inhabitants. This is the Classical Era, and actually sowing the fields of Carthage with salt is an atrocity of such magnitude that people will speak of it for thousands of years. In the D&D world, goblins raid human settlements with raiding parties, humans raid goblin settlements with “adventuring parties”, and like the cattle raiding culture of Scotland, it’s simply accepted by all participants as a fact of life.
When your city is raided by other groups of humanoids, it’s a bad thing for your city. Orcs may kidnap some of your relatives and use them as slaves (or food), and many of your fellow villagers may lose their lives defending lives and property important to them. But that’s part of life in the age, and people just sort of expect that sort of thing.
Sometimes in history there would come a great villain who just didn’t get with the program. The Classical example is the Assyrians. Those bastards went around from city to city stacking heads in piles and levying 100% taxation and such to conquered foes. They became. . . unpopular, and eventually were destroyed as a people. That’s the law of the jungle as far back as there are any records: if a group pushes things too far the rules of mercy and raiding simply stop applying. Goblins, orcs, sahuagin. . . these guys generally aren’t going to cross that line. But if they do, it’s OK for the gloves to come off.
In fact, if some group of orcs decides to kill everyone in your village while you’re out hunting so that you come home to find that you are the last survivor, other humanoids (even other Evil humanoids like gnolls) will sign up to exterminate the tribe that has crossed the line. Cultural relativism goes pretty far in D&D. Acceptable cultural practices include some pretty over-the-top practices such as slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. But genocide is still right out.
That being said, some creatures simply haven’t gotten with the program, and they are kill-on-sight anywhere in the civilized world or in the tribes of savage humanoids. Mindflayers, Kuo-Toans, and [Monster] simply do not play the same game that everyone else is playing, mostly because their culture simply does not understand other races as having value. And that means that even other Evil races want to exterminate those peoples as a public service. Like the Assyrians, they’ve simply pushed their luck too far, and the local hobgoblin king will let you marry his daughter if you help wipe them out of an area. Solitary intelligent monsters often get into the same boat as the Kuo-Toans. Since the Roper really has no society (and possibly the most obscure language in Core D&D), it’s very difficult for it to understand the possible ramifications of offending pan-humanoid society. So now they’ve done it, and they really haven’t noticed the fallout they are receiving from that decision. Ropers pretty much attack anything they see, and now everyone that sees a roper attacks them. In the D&D worlds, ropers are on the brink of extinction and it probably never even occurs to them that their heavy tendrilled dealings with the other races have pushed them to this state.

[Eox]

I gotta say, I love how we all seem to be politely ignoring that this is ponyfinder. That's an extra layer of absurdity that nobody wants to deal with.

[Yahzi]

Now the party is more neutral than good,
There is nothing even remotely good about your party. They range from Narcissitic Evil to Wantonly Evil.


See, the question came up of what else to do.
Your tactics are both needlessly cruel and hopelessly ineffective.

On the bright side, while your characters were sitting around trying to figure out how to murder helpeless people for no reason, the other side teleported a strike team into your quarters and killed you all. So, problem solved!

Which is how you "war" in D&D. Armies, as you think of them, do not exist. Feudal warbands do; you summon your nobles, who show up with their class ranks and a handful of picked retainers. Maybe they bring a squad of bowmen or a troop of low level knights. Then you all go to a big field and mix it up - unless somebody can teleport, in which case we're back to scry and die.

[Bohandas]

Wasn't poison being evil in the BoED?
Whether it was or wasn't the core rules say it's not

(Animals, traps, poisons, and other potential perils are not evil -PHB pg.219)

[Luccan]

I don't know which of those strategies would be the most effective or even if all of them are possible, but I'm going to have to agree with people saying some, if not all of these potential actions are evil (I say all, but I might budge orbital strikes to neutral, if only because there would hopefully be no time for unnecessary suffering). And I agree with Fizban, your goal should be stopping this with as few casualties as possible, possibly by using your legit magic powers to remind the leaders that their nations should have something approximating similar goals (since, you know, GOOD), and even where they differ isn't worth getting their people killed over. Even your neutral characters shouldn't really be considering forcing women to be prostitutes out of desperation or using children as means of fighting a war. They're neutral, which in simple terms means they won't go out of their way for anybody they don't know personally most of the time, good or evil. Destroying/enslaving a population kinda pushes that barrier, even if there are personal loyalties or rewards on the table.

I have some suggestions, if you absolutely must have this war, and you can't just slip in and assassinate the enemies leaders or teleport an army into the middle of the capital or whatever instant wins would prevent lots of innocents and most others from dying:

1. If it comes down to a war, military targets should be your only targets. Delay or stop supply trains, fight large scale open battles if needed, skirmish and attack in the night if necessary. Capture, don't kill where possible. Civilians and their property should not be slaughtered en masse and killing any of them needs to serve a purpose greater than convenience

2. Remember, if you're all good or neutral, most of these people are not goblins or other races the game says is ok to kill, they're men and halflings and dwarves, and elves and whatever races are the "civilized" races in your campaign. Killing them should have a real effect on your characters, so consider how your characters would feel about striking first against those with and without weapons

3. Your characters may be forced or seem to be forced to do something terrible. But unless they're evil, they shouldn't make a habit of it

4. Keeping this in mind, if you can't stop the war, end it as fast as you can with as little collateral damage as you can. You might have to do bad things, but do as few as possible and only when completely necessary. Genocide and slavery should not be on the table.

5. When you are done, rebuild. For the neutrals, this will mean peace and low crime in the area, both of which are good for them. For the goods, this is the right thing to do, even if the people hate you. You have ended the lives of soldiers with friends and family, the least you can do is ensure their loved ones are able to make it.


I want to reiterate, you should avoid this war at all costs and hit an insta-win, low body-count button if you can't. But if neither is possible, consider those five points.

[Echch]

So what I'm taking away from this is: None of these strategies my teammates suggested are effective at all, since all medival wars and most modern ones would be over before the plans would allow any sort of tactical advantage. What we thus should do is not bother with the civilians at all and focus on military targets. Which begs the question: If civilans are aiding their military in any way... does that make them military targets too? I mean, what if civilians are the ones that run the supply trains, or rather, what if the soldiers on the front gain their necessary stuff (food, water) from a non-military provider (a merchant that let's them buy on credit or something like that).

Charming high-level leaders won't work, because Protection from Evil is a very common spell. The continious item variant costs about 5000 gp for politicians, so... Most will have it. Scry and Die sadly won't work, since most military bases are made of a specific stone (I forgot the name) that blocks teleportation (interestingly enough, different forms of stone seem to be easily available... Maybe I should look at the Voidstone stuff from Jowgen) and Undeads don't work because the enemy side has high-level (well, level 13) clerics at their disposal, and since both nations worship Pelor (Well... Celestia, but it's basically Pelor), I belive they are very good at turning/destroying them.

They might work against our side (we have a higher amount and quality of arcane casters, but our clerics can rarely cast level 5 spells). The biggest problem of this war is the reason it's there at all:

Our nation is against the extended use of Deathless. They are good, yes, but we are still keeping them in this world in an unnatural form as a type of Undead (just, y'know, positive energy). The other side says Deathless are good and if someone returns as a Deathless, that's totally ok.

Normally, they'd contact Pelor, but he has apparently gone silent (it was a bad night that day: We had 5 divine casters botch the Spellcraft check and no one in the party invested in the necessary knowledge to know that it's a Seal of Binding-Sign and the two countries are actually supposed to work together, not to mention that an actually silent Pelor would mean that they couldn't even CAST divine spells). I could metagame this or have my character research to avoid the war, but that clashes because I don't really want to metagame story-important stuff and my character probably wouldn't bother to research anyway because... Well, he didn't grow up in that nation and if push comes to shove he can just abandon post and move somewhere else.

So with no one to tell them they are right (or wrong), there is a war now. My greatest fear is if we let the general populance live, they turn terrorist, given that the general population in these countries is really religious. So coming in and telling them their priests are liars is probably really bad.

On the topic of Control Winds... I mean, we might be able to do it by getting Domain Draughts, but we don't have any native Druid Circles around. And even if we had, our enemy would be more capable of pulling that strategy off.


Yes. But would it really make sense to extrapolate from "it might make a bigger hole" to "it'll blow up a town"?

...They think it just makes a bigger hole and that you have to be precise with your targeting to inflict any damage at all. Which, given that it's D&D, might actually just be the case.


Frank Trollman is a homebrewer that made a massive handbook full of classes and advice, and I feel like a few paragraphs from it are relevant, even if you might disagree with his interpretations.

I do understand the general idea: If you can't afford to be evil, then don't be evil. There is a reason why I build any evil character I play with a higher level of optimization in mind: I know it is more likely for the party to turn on me as soon as they figure out I have an E on my character sheet than it is for me to betray them even if it would benefit me.

Which actually makes me wonder: How effective are illusions in D&D warfare? I mean, my character is probably gonna be masked the entire time, since he doesn't want to be associated with most of this stuff (and because it allows him to lead a normal life after the war), but I'd still like to know.

[weckar]

I gotta say, I love how we all seem to be politely ignoring that this is ponyfinder. That's an extra layer of absurdity that nobody wants to deal with.Yeah... It certainly makes it no better...

[Fizban]

I gotta say, I love how we all seem to be politely ignoring that this is ponyfinder. That's an extra layer of absurdity that nobody wants to deal with.
I didn't catch it in the first post and it doesn't really matter. Play whatever creature you want, if they're supposed to be decent civilized beings it still works the same.

There is nothing even remotely good about your party. They range from Narcissitic Evil to Wantonly Evil.
I would have gone with, "There is nothing even remotely neutral about your party." All those plans are Evil, make no mistake, but the players are clearly the bloodthirsty type that tries to dodge their actions by focusing on specific details they can say some book hasn't defined as Evil.

Which is how you "war" in D&D. Armies, as you think of them, do not exist. Feudal warbands do; you summon your nobles, who show up with their class ranks and a handful of picked retainers. Maybe they bring a squad of bowmen or a troop of low level knights. Then you all go to a big field and mix it up - unless somebody can teleport, in which case we're back to scry and die.
Well that is the classical armies on the field, but I guess what you're suggesting is that the OP is thinking in terms of modern armies or something. Neither is appropriate without modification, since the nature of war in DnD is entirely dependent on the number, distribution, and disposition of high level assets. The catch is that most people throw around high level classed NPCs around like candy because they want to use NPCs instead of monsters, which means war is high level commando squads for everything important. Even so, regardless of how powerful your strike teams are you still need armies to hold territory, which is necessary to control the population. What actually happens is completely dependent on the DM though, since they're running the other side and who knows if they know the "right" way to run it and how good they are at doing so.

So what I'm taking away from this is: None of these strategies my teammates suggested are effective at all, since all medival wars and most modern ones would be over before the plans would allow any sort of tactical advantage.
Oh starvation and terror should be as doable as anything else if you figure out how, it's the "main the children so they won't have soldiers 30 years from now" that's hilarious.

What we thus should do is not bother with the civilians at all and focus on military targets. Which begs the question: If civilans are aiding their military in any way... does that make them military targets too? I mean, what if civilians are the ones that run the supply trains, or rather, what if the soldiers on the front gain their necessary stuff (food, water) from a non-military provider (a merchant that let's them buy on credit or something like that).
Your question begs the question: why do you keep focusing on civilians? You haven't so much as engaged in a single combat and you're like "kill the peasants! make plans for excuses to kill the peasants!" Unless your DM has explicitly made a point of that thing happening the only people bringing it up is you lot.

Our nation is against the extended use of Deathless. They are good, yes, but we are still keeping them in this world in an unnatural form as a type of Undead (just, y'know, positive energy). The other side says Deathless are good and if someone returns as a Deathless, that's totally ok.
Here's more preoccupation of "good" labels. People don't care if deathless are "good," they care that undead are Evil: even mindless undead will kill people for no reason if left uncontrolled. What deathless are you even talking about? Unless this "ponyfinder" has some easily mass producable deathless they're simply not mass producable. Your country lacks the ability to produce them with their low-level clerics and thus decides they're unnatural. Never mind that if Deathless are Good and their creation is Good then they are by definition here voluntarily and you have no business deciding they should get back to the afterlife.

In short, your country is in the wrong. Which makes it even more hilarious, your government is complaining about the other guys having a technology that makes them more powerful so it must be declared heresy and your first thought when they start a war over it is "let's murder civilians, that'll teach them to have a painless volunteer spirit army."

Normally, they'd contact Pelor, but he has apparently gone silent (it was a bad night that day: We had 5 divine casters botch the Spellcraft check and no one in the party invested in the necessary knowledge to know that it's a Seal of Binding-Sign and the two countries are actually supposed to work together, not to mention that an actually silent Pelor would mean that they couldn't even CAST divine spells). I could metagame this or have my character research to avoid the war, but that clashes because I don't really want to metagame story-important stuff and my character probably wouldn't bother to research anyway because... Well, he didn't grow up in that nation and if push comes to shove he can just abandon post and move somewhere else.
You've yet to say anything about what the DM thinks of this. Hey bro, let you in on a little secret: metagaming isn't bad. If you know that it's just dumb luck that things are going wrong, all that means is that you have your character keep trying until they get to the right solution. Adhering to dice is the exact opposite of putting the story first, but it's clear that you don't really care anyway since you'd rather abandon this "failed" plot than try to fix it.

So with no one to tell them they are right (or wrong), there is a war now. My greatest fear is if we let the general populance live, they turn terrorist, given that the general population in these countries is really religious. So coming in and telling them their priests are liars is probably really bad.
Of course that's your fear, people always fear others responding in kind and the first thing your group suggested was outright terrorism, obviously that's what you're going to fear. And you'll guarantee it with your own actions.

Which actually makes me wonder: How effective are illusions in D&D warfare? I mean, my character is probably gonna be masked the entire time, since he doesn't want to be associated with most of this stuff (and because it allows him to lead a normal life after the war), but I'd still like to know.
If you haven't figured out the answer is "as effective as the DM says they are" by now, I've got nothing.

[Necroticplague]

Keep in mind that there are good arguments that, if it isn't necessary to shorten an otherwise exceedingly lengthy war (which it really shouldn't be if you're in a fantasy-medieval setting that doesn't replicate technology with magic), escalating to Total War is a bad thing. Rather than armies fighting for a while and some possible looting afterwards, you have thousands of innocent people being killed and terrorized for what amounts to no reason (it's not like they're in factories actively working to support the war effort, after all) and you still have an army to fight anyways.

All wars are Total wars. An army marches on it's belly, and survives on it's ability to replenish itself. The farmer who provides the army with food so it can campaign instead of scavenge, and the smith who provides them with the weapons they use, and the banker that gives them money so they can afford the last two, are just as much a part of the war effort as the soldiers. Targeting farms and cities is merely picking whether you want you're victory to be quick (destroy army head-on, riskier targets) or certain (attack supply lines and suppliers, wait for army starvation. Easier target, time delay between this and military victory).

[Sheepherder]

The idea behind that was, supposedly, no children = no future soldiers they can send against us and that they can remember having heard of the Russian military having employed that tactic.

No doubt referring to the "toy" mines used in Afghanistan. They are wrong.

The mine in question is the PFM-1 aerially dispersed mine, which are shaped sort of like a maple seed and so spin when they're dropped by aircraft, which decreases their rate of descent to a point where they normally hit the ground hard enough to arm the mine but don't explode on impact. And because they don't need a drogue parachute they're cheap to manufacture and don't turn into a tangled mass of cord and silk if shaken a little in transit. It's actually a rather ingenious design, copied from an almost identical American device, the BLU-43 "Dragontooth."

Of course if you're an Afghani kid and you see thousands of little green things come slowly twirling towards the ground the first thought in your head is that they look fun to play with.

[Echch]

Oh starvation and terror should be as doable as anything else if you figure out how, it's the "main the children so they won't have soldiers 30 years from now" that's hilarious.

Well, then by all means, give me some information on that. Unlike the alignment stuff that came from the forums side, this was what I asked about.


Your question begs the question: why do you keep focusing on civilians? You haven't so much as engaged in a single combat and you're like "kill the peasants! make plans for excuses to kill the peasants!" Unless your DM has explicitly made a point of that thing happening the only people bringing it up is you lot.

Well, given that the last band of civilians we encountered was the reason for a lot of backstory-drama (Vampire-Cult, remember?) we are well aware of what civilians are capable of if left alone. 200 Werebears, for example, can be a real pain to deal with.


You've yet to say anything about what the DM thinks of this. Hey bro, let you in on a little secret: metagaming isn't bad.

It... isn't? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not true, I've just heard other things when it came to the topic of metagaming.


If you haven't figured out the answer is "as effective as the DM says they are" by now, I've got nothing.

Is that really all there is to it though? I mean, that's great and all, it's just that it seems really freeform, which is something that I normally don't associate with D&D too much.


No doubt referring to the "toy" mines used in Afghanistan. They are wrong.

The mine in question is the PFM-1 aerially dispersed mine, which are shaped sort of like a maple seed and so spin when they're dropped by aircraft, which decreases their rate of descent to a point where they normally hit the ground hard enough to arm the mine but don't explode on impact. And because they don't need a drogue parachute they're cheap to manufacture and don't turn into a tangled mass of cord and silk if shaken a little in transit. It's actually a rather ingenious design, copied from an almost identical American device, the BLU-43 "Dragontooth."

Of course if you're an Afghani kid and you see thousands of little green things come slowly twirling towards the ground the first thought in your head is that they look fun to play with.

Huh... That is really accurate actually. That 100% debunks that tactic then. I'm going to tell them that next session, thanks^^

[Fizban]

Well, then by all means, give me some information on that. Unlike the alignment stuff that came from the forums side, this was what I asked about.
You'll have to figure it out yourself based on your resources and what the DM will let you do. There are other threads with lists of war scale spells, but there are no rules to tell you how effective terrorism is.

Well, given that the last band of civilians we encountered was the reason for a lot of backstory-drama (Vampire-Cult, remember?) we are well aware of what civilians are capable of if left alone. 200 Werebears, for example, can be a real pain to deal with.
Acquired template abuse has nothing to do with civilians. You're still aiming to kill people not currently fighting you for the crime of existing. If you're afraid of spawn creation maybe go kill the spawners, it's kindof the literally most obvious thing you could possibly do. Seriously, who responds to "someone might arm these peasants" with "kill all the peasants" instead of "stop the arms shipment?"

It... isn't? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not true, I've just heard other things when it came to the topic of metagaming.
There's no such thing as the monolithic idea of metagaming, it means nothing without context. In this context everything's gone to pieces in the plot so using a little metagame hint to keep trying instead of abandoning ship is perfectly fine.

Is that really all there is to it though? I mean, that's great and all, it's just that it seems really freeform, which is something that I normally don't associate with D&D too much.
Did I say freeform? I said it depends on your DM, who may or may not have the same ideas that we do. If your DM is freeform then it will be freeform, if your DM likes making up rules then it will be their custom rules, if your DM wants to run everything by the book then they've just made a bad decision letting the dice paint him into a war corner. The very first thing I'd need to know, a full inventory of casters and levels on each side, I can guarantee will not match what your DM is using. Nor will the troops, or the armaments, or the tactics, or anything else. Even if they've gone studying dnd war tactics the chances they're doing it exactly the same way as anyone else are laughable. If you can't answer any of these questions how do you expect to wage a war? War is not something you solve, it's something you wage. So as I said before, go investigate and be adventurers, wage some war and see how it goes. Or better yet, don't.

[Necroticplague]

Acquired template abuse has nothing to do with civilians. You're still aiming to kill people not currently fighting you for the crime of existing. If you're afraid of spawn creation maybe go kill the spawners, it's kindof the literally most obvious thing you could possibly do. Seriously, who responds to "someone might arm these peasants" with "kill all the peasants" instead of "stop the arms shipment?"

A sensible one. The arms shipment is likely heavily defended, and would thus prove difficult to stop. The peasants those arms are going towards, however, are less likely to be so. Thus, by slaughtering the peasants, you get the same results (no armed peasants to kill you), but with less tisk on your part.

[icefractal]

Charming high-level leaders won't work, because Protection from Evil is a very common spell. The continious item variant costs about 5000 gp for politicians, so... Most will have it. Not quite. In Pathfinder, Protection from Evil just grants an extra save. In 3.5, it blocks them, but only those that grant "ongoing control", so not something like Suggestion.

In either version, it does nothing about other methods of manipulation, such as:
1) Modify Memory and/or illusions to make people believe what you want.
2) Replace someone with a Simulacrum, Doppelganger, or other fake.
3) Use spells like Glibness to augment your non-magical trickery to extreme levels.

Also, your Clerics still worship Pelor? Unless the DM is doing an Eberron-style "the gods don't give a ****" kind of thing, be prepared for a sudden loss of divine powers when you start putting some of these plans into action.

[Zanos]

I gotta say, I love how we all seem to be politely ignoring that this is ponyfinder. That's an extra layer of absurdity that nobody wants to deal with.
Scratch what I said then. Murdering ponies is always Good.