what does army-scale combat look like in 3.5? [Archive]

Velaryon

2022-01-27, 10:04 PM

To say 3.5 is not made for mass combat is a gross understatement. Sure, Heroes of Battle exists, but while I haven't read it the whole way through it doesn't give me the impression that it really adequately deals with the implications of what army-on-army combat would look like in a world where a handful of individuals can amass ridiculous amounts of personal power via leveling up in the span of weeks or months. When a standard adventuring party reaches the point where they can wade out into an army of soldiers, and nobody can hit the Fighter without a nat 20, the casters can wreck soldiers by the dozen without even dipping into their stronger spells, and a team of 4-5 powerful adventurers could theoretically walk straight into an enemy encampment and just either obliterate or outright ignore most standard soldiers while making straight for the general's command tent... what does war even look like?

My 3.5 campaign has reached the point where this is a serious issue - nations are going to war and the PCs are neck deep in the politics of it. They're level 15 now, and they're decently optimized but not insane (a wizard/warlock eldritch theurge, a centaur cavalier build that I allow to act as his own mount, a dread necromancer and... well, the last character is a druid's awakened gorilla former animal companion that went for a weird grapple-based build. He's basically the comic relief who can lock down the occasional mid-tier threat as long as it doesn't have blanket immunity to his entire gimmick. I know how to challenge them in regular encounters, at least well enough to keep things going. But my struggles to figure out where and how they interact with this brewing war has made me realize that I don't even know what war looks like in a world where mid- to high-level D&D characters exist. Where to even begin figuring this out?

RandomPeasant

2022-01-27, 10:37 PM

Oddly enough, Complete Warrior has one of the better first-party writeups on the subject. So I'd check that out if you have a copy on hand.

As you note, throwing low-level conscripts at high level characters is unlikely to accomplish much of anything. Throwing Commoners, or Warriors, or even low-level PC classes into the face of cloudkills, bound Outsiders, or Dragons is a waste of human (or Elven) life on par with the worst engagements in WWI. So nations presumably don't do that.

My basic model for national conflict in D&Dland is that it probably starts with both sides coming together to have their champions fight. If your champion gets their ass kicked hard enough, that means you're probably not going to win the war, so outside extreme circumstances you just give up and the other side gets what they wanted. If things are close to even, that means you may have a chance of winning through sufficient skill, luck, or planning.

As a result of this, you'd expect that nations largely don't bother with armies of soldiers dramatically weaker than the strongest (reliable) members of their side. If you have a 15th level character on your side, no amount of 1st level levies is going to tip the scales for you, so armies like that just don't get raised (though smaller peacekeeping forces of low-level troops may exist). Your army probably doesn't take anyone under ~8th level, maybe lower if you think nations have the ability to optimize their soldiers aggressively and execute complicated tactics based on that. Depending on the overall demographics of your setting, that may mean either that armies are small groups of skilled professionals (more akin to modern special forces, or medieval knights if you really stretch) or just that you have regular-sized armies composed exclusively of dudes who could personally beat a grizzly bear to death.

As far as in-battle tactics go, that's a really wide-open question. Armies presumably engage in some sort of combined-arms tactics based on the strengths of the soldiery available to their nation, but what that looks like is heavily setting-dependent. A simple example would be a nation with a bunch of necromancers training their spellcasters to use spells like cloudkill or practice the techniques of the Uttercold Assault Necromancer.

Maat Mons

2022-01-27, 11:43 PM

The idea of defending borders kind of stops making sense when strike forces can teleport. And the idea of worrying about supplies and infrastructure kind of stops making sense when all food and equipment can be conjured out of thin air. So I guess it's down to assassinating key officials and causing general havoc.

That means warfare looks like everyone powerful or important being subject to unpredictable scry-and-die attempts, and people dropping devastating effects on population centers then running away.

I think the PC's role should be doing hits on high-profile enemies and wiping out major cities.

If you sneak up on an sleeping monster, you can Greater Teleport or Plane Shift it wherever you'd like to sow some chaos. Incorporeal undead are hard to deal with, and many types can theoretically double their population every 1d4 rounds.

Elves

2022-01-28, 12:13 AM

Yes, it could be a superhero world where it's powerful PCs against masses of level 1 warriors. Could also be a high magic world where nations have lots of magical and monstrous troops and defenses. It could be an anime world where high-level characters are common (see FR). Or if you want to run a game like this, homebrew to make it work -- cap PC levels like in E6, or give the common soldiers custom abilities to make them competitive.

4e's answer to this question is to model low-level monsters as high-level minions. 5e realized you can do the same thing more simply by squishing die modifiers while retaining hp inflation. But in the context of 3e, a minion style solution would be easier to implement.

In "superhero world", aid another is useful. The helpful trait raises it to +3. Improved Aid feat from OA instead makes it +4 (they don't stack). If you have masses of 1st level guys, stacking up those numbers is better than 5% individual rolls until high levels. You should make the typical soldiers 1st level fighters with the commander variant class, which can use aid another at 60 ft. range. If you have a formation of these soldiers using aid another you can certainly put up competitive attack mods. They're still vulnerable to AOE spells, but the 60-foot aid another range makes it easy for them to spread out, and it means they can direct their aid where it's needed.

So you have these masses of 1st level fighters using aid another at range. Then sprinkle them with higher-level "point guys" who are the recipients of the aid. (Against human PCs, even a 1st level "point guy" ranger with FE human, solitary hunter and a mwk composite longbow gives baseline stats of +6 hit and d8+4 damage, which isn't horrible. Create squads of 6 fighters and 1 ranger, and every 7 men in the army are putting out one attack at +30.)

Even a 1st level commoner conscript with Improved Aid -- a very reasonable feat to take, useful in all parts of their life -- who must be adjacent to aid another can be a threat if they're adding +4 to a higher level soldier's attack.

Velaryon

2022-01-28, 12:18 AM

These are all great thoughts so far, please keep them coming!

Is it possible to try to ward against scry-and-die while on the move with an army? I imagine you can cast a lot of the same spells to protect a command tent and the surrounding ground that you could cast to protect a wizard's keep, but it might be harder to sustain those effects on the move without a permanent location. At what point does it become more trouble than it's worth to protect your commander from enemy assassins teleporting in, and become more feasible to just teleport in and assassinate their leader first?

Melcar

2022-01-28, 02:54 AM

We ran a campaign like that for a few years. We zoomed in on a squat or platoon, and ran that like a normal d&d game, with initiative for the sides and moved every little character... the result of that squat or platoons result would then carry over into the rest of the army that was engaged in a similar battle/terrain/enemy etc.

So the better the squat/platoon did the better the army in its entirety did. We never did major battles, because it would take a very long time... but we did run a company size engangement once... took like 5 sessions! The plan was to retake a dwarven subtarainian battlement, which was garrissoned by drow. It was taken over, and then we had to defend it against drows trying to take it back. It was a strategic defencive possition for the dwarves, so we had to do it.

We did, and it was fun, but it took forever!

100-91% 90-76 75-26 25-11 10-0
Victory +10% +10 +5 +5 +0
Stalemate +5 +0 +0 +0 -5
Defeat +0 -5 -5 -10 -10
Table 1.1 - Combat outcome modifier

Table 1.2 – Combat outcome result
Outcome roll (d100) Result
25-75 No change
12-24 / 76-88 25% -/+
5-11 / 89-95 50% -/+
1-4 / 96-99 75% -/+
100 Reroll

Table 1.3 – Proxy battle outcome
Troop numbers Result of proxy battle
100-91% Major Victory
90-76% Minor Victory
75-26% Deadlock
25-11% Minor Defeat
10-0% Major Defeat

That was our rules... we made them ourselves to they can surely be optimimzed quite a bit...

Mnemnosyne

2022-01-28, 02:55 AM

Bards are, by far, the most valuable members of any army. A single bard can give an entire army a massive bonus to hit and vast sums of damage with Inspire Courage and Dragonfire Inspiration. While high level adventurers of any type are a massive asset to a nation's military forces, the bard is more valuable than anyone but the most optimized fullcaster (unless she is, herself, an optimized fullcaster via Sublime Chord, in which case she remains the most valuable person). Also, Good armies (or at least armies that can employ extremely Good Bards) will stomp others.

So what does an army fight look like with 3.5 armies? It's...short. VERY SHORT. Lasts a few rounds at most; may well be decided in a single round, by which side wins initiative, because as soon as either army gets their turn, they're gonna open fire. If we assume the bard is anywhere between level 1 and 7, he's got...+1 from base IC, +1 from Song of the Heart, +1 from Inspirational Boost, +1 from a Badge of Valor, and +1 from a Vest of Legends. He doesn't get +1 from a masterwork instrument because he's not using a masterwork natural horn; instead he's using an Alphorn so that his song affects all allies that hear it within 1d10 miles. So he's got +5 Inspire Courage. If the army is lucky enough to have two bards, one of them does a regular Inspire Courage, the other does Dragonfire Inspiration, and now you've got hundreds, or thousands of archers shooting arrows at +5 that deal 5d6 damage. But if those bards are Exalted, and have Words of Creation? +10 with +10d6 damage.

But they're still level 1 warriors, probably. Which means every one of them that takes a hit is going to die. And most of them will hit. So whoever wins initiative...instantly wipes out the majority of the enemy army before they even get to act because they're rolling either a +7 or so bonus (conservatively) against an AC of 16 to 18, or if the bards are exalted, +12 or so. Most of them are going to hit, and those hits are going to average over 18 damage, which is far more than any of the targets have. If you only have one bard, then you've got a tough choice to make: does the bard sing IC for the to-hit bonus, or Dragonfire Inspiration for the damage bonus on the first round? Probably the damage first, because a straight longbow attack probably isn't going to one-shot the enemy warriors even if it hits, but even if your guys are only shooting with a +2 against AC 18, they've still got a 25% chance to hit, and whoever they hit is gonna die. So shoot first with the damage, take out 25% of your targets, and hope you still have enough numbers next round after they've returned fire, once your bard's Inspire Courage comes online for the attack bonus.

Note that this literally requires just level 1 bards with some flaws, and a pile of gold to equip them with. Even in a world like Eberron where level 8-12 is considered very high level, this remains the case, because low level bards can still accomplish this if they're given the magical equipment they need. That, of course, means that the bards are the primary targets for assassination and the most important people in the army to defend. An army without its bards doesn't even stand a chance of winning when they win initiative, since their attacks will be comparatively ineffective.

Vaern

2022-01-28, 05:07 AM

After I picked up Leadership and calculated my follower count in one game the DM made a joke about swapping out the standard battle grid for a Risk board.

Max Caysey

2022-01-28, 05:29 AM

King of Nowhere

2022-01-28, 08:36 AM

my campaign world was high magic, and regular armies got completely disbanded due to being useless.
armies are made of two components: golems and high level adventurers. golems are strong enough that they can be useful. they also are slow, and they are not a realistic challenge to adventurers on their own. on the plus side, they don't eat and they don't get old, so you can have two or three being built every year, and still ammass a useful army over time. they are also the one resource you can control surely.
adventurers are more powerful, but they are also less reliable - you need them to be faithful to your cause, and they do get old and die with time. to support them, nations hoard diamonds for resurrections.

in warfare, adventurers engage in scry and die tactics on a large scale - at least, large in that each side is doing it regularly, but every side only has a few dozen people doing it. golems are used to control and conquer land; generally you send your golem army against the enemy heatland, or you send it to intercept the enemy's golems, and if enemy adventurers show up to engage your golems, your own adventurers do show up too, and with the golem's help they have the upper hand.
was itself had been phased out by this system, though, because of mutually assured destruction. when you took one century to build up your army, you're not going to waste it all in a single battle even if you win, you'll lose decades of careful savings and it will weaken you greatly against everyone else.

development and improvement on gunpowder changed that, because a platoon of riflemen can pose a significant obstacle to a high level party. A golem with a cannon or heavy machine gun strapped on its shoulder becomes a lot more effective.
So you still have high level adventurers doing scry and die missions, but you also have regular armies advancing on strategic objectives. My current "meta" involves a shieldwall of golems - with shields strong enough to stop cannons - backed by low level wizards with scrolls of repair spells, followed by ruiflemen in spread formation, backed by low level casters to provide stuff like detect invisibility and healing.

Berenger

2022-01-28, 09:33 AM

The truth is, the rules of D&D just don't work very well for a setting that includes conventional medieval warfare. Or a medieval society in general. Competent high level characters work like Superman or Hercules, not like Aragorn. You can either acknowledge this and make a world which has few things in common with real life and more grounded fantasy or else try to cover up the most egregious inconsistencies. If you go with the latter route, determine how many persons there are at each step of the level pyramid.

For example, if your setting has half as many persons at level 2 than there are at level 1, and half a many persons at level 3 than at level 2, and so on, all the way to the top, you get the following distribution:

Level 20: 1
Level 19: 2
Level 18: 4
Level 17: 8
Level 16: 16
Level 15: 32
Level 14: 64
Level 13: 128
Level 12: 256
Level 11: 512
Level 10: 1024
Level 9: 2048
Level 8: 4096
Level 7: 8192
Level 6: 16384
Level 5: 32768
Level 4: 65536
Level 3: 131072
Level 2: 262144
Level 1: 524288

If we suppose there is an army camp of two thousand men, and if we suppose they follow the level distribution of the general population, the three level 15 characters could be opposed by perhaps one enemy of level 12 (50% chance), one enemy of level 11, and two enemies of level 10. Note that the two level 10 guys turn this encounter from "Easy" to "Very Difficult". An army camp of only several hundred troops won't, on average, have the capability to offer meaningful resistance to a level 15 party except by drowning them in blood and burying them with corpses.

The basic principle of warfare would be to counter enemy high level troops with your own high level troops supported by your mid level troops. In other words, the bulk of your level 1-4 troops isn't expected to fight or even slow down level 15 enemies - they are there to keep the enemy level 1-4 troops too busy to support the enemies level 5-8 troops fighting your own level 5-8 troops. Those, in turn, are fighting to keep the enemies level 5-8 troops from supporting the enemy level 9-12 troops... and so on.

It's a mess.

RandomPeasant

2022-01-28, 10:26 AM

The idea of defending borders kind of stops making sense when strike forces can teleport.

That's not really true. teleport only moves a few people at a time, and in the grand scheme it's pretty rare. It shows up on the Sorcerer/Wizard list, the Wu Jen list, and a couple of domains. On top of that, it's a 5th level spell. Depending on your assumptions about organization and demographics, nations may not have the capacity to move big enough strike forces to break fixed defenses with only the troops they can move with teleport.

Even if you assume viable strike forces can be moved with teleport (not unreasonable given the levels listed), the limited volume still means you need to move conventional forces through the territory to do anything with the territory your assault teams have captured. Outside of a really high-magic (or high optimization) setting, you can't viably run a resource extraction operation off of teleport-based couriers. Especially since 10th level Wizards are probably not interested in being your gophers.

Border defenses are also useful against threats that aren't peer competitors. Not everything a nation needs to protect against can field an assault force lead by a teleporting War Weaver. They also need to stop incursions by Winter Wolves or Ogres or Hydras, against which fixed fortifications supporting reaction forces are quite useful.

And the idea of worrying about supplies and infrastructure kind of stops making sense when all food and equipment can be conjured out of thin air.

Again, that requires a pretty high density of magic. A 5th level Cleric dedicating all their 3rd level spell slots to create food and water can feed 30 people. That means you need to be able to attach Clerics at roughly the platoon level to be able to replace food wholesale (and even then you've got very little margin if one of them gets killed), which is a significant investment of resources. Conjuring equipment is pretty rough, as far as I know. major creation has a duration measured in hours, meaning you probably can't use it to replace logistics effectively. fabricate simplifies your logistics train (because you can ship raw materials and manufacture on-site), but it doesn't let you move any less stuff.

The one exception to this are primarily-undead (or other non-eating creature types) armies, as they don't need food and can march without resting. They still need supplies of ammo for ranged weapons, but an army of undead swordsmen only needs to carry enough to replace broken weapons, plus spell components for their magical support. In that situation, create food and water probably is feasible, since your only living troops are a relatively small contingent of high-level spellcasters.

Is it possible to try to ward against scry-and-die while on the move with an army?

Your best bet is anticipate teleportation. The area effected isn't huge, but it lasts 24 hours and can give you a big enough clear area that either A) you get warning to marshal your forces against the assault or B) the enemy has to come in outside of your fixed defenses and get ganked by bodyguards. Alternatively, classic anti-teleport strategies like deceptive illusions work well enough.

At what point does it become more trouble than it's worth to protect your commander from enemy assassins teleporting in, and become more feasible to just teleport in and assassinate their leader first?

That's a very complicated question, and depends on the resources available to each side. Honestly, the best solution is probably to have your commander be somehow hard to kill. If your army is lead by a Ghost or Lich general, even a successful teleport gank is at best an inconvenience.

Who cares about bards when you have battlemages carpet bombing the battlefield with widened war spell fireballs???

Or cloudkill. wind wall notably beats the listed strategy pretty hard, and unless you have some way of consistently producing DFI Bards (which is a pretty serious assumption), even with Bard support low level troops aren't doing much to the high-DR monsters that get employed in the army-breaker role (e.g. Dragons, Demons). Even a Skeleton has enough DR to survive a shot from a non-DFI-boosted archer, and they work way better with magical support than humans.

Seward

2022-01-28, 11:11 AM

I've seen a few approaches used in battle interactives we've played. One interesting wrinkle is that adventurers of any level could participate (with sometimes dozens of GM's and 100+ players), so you had to have things to do for brave low level types, and the most powerful heroes in the land.

First and most common is the battle happens in the background while PC's do special forces type ops on key individuals (enemy leaders, a squad of artillery mages, logistics, whatever) where the GM works out what happens if they fail everything, and the impact of each success accordingly.

Second was to actually use the miniatures rules in Miniatures Handbook, with PC's as leader types. This works pretty well when you have a normal adventure with a party of 4 and they get to try to use their skills to help out a military unit get into position or buff them to supercharge them or whatever in the relatively low levels 1-8ish. If you are doing a battle interactive it works better when the PC's are stronger (volley fire from an enemy platoon can gank most heroes in the level 1-4 range if they're caught in the open), level 6-10ish they're strong enough to influence the battlefield while defensively weak enough to benefit from being incorporated into a military unit. (it is in these battles I came to appreciate spells like pyrotechnics, cloudburst and similar long range/huge area spells. Druids rock on the battlefield).

Finally I've seen a homebrew option which (not a coincidence) scaled pretty well to almost any level given appropriate enemy military units. Basically it is statistical. If you have 20 soldiers, you can assume they are getting a range of attack rolls from 1-20 and a statistically normal amount of damage. You can work out how much damage they should do vs any armor class at X range based on attack mod vs AC. Picking off individuals weakened the unit, about 30% casualties caused it to disperse if it wasn't under some kind of mental control such as dominated or undead troops. Area attacks (and some feats/class abilities like great cleave or arcane archer hail of arrows were treated as area attacks) injure the whole unit, making it easier to pick off individuals (or vaporize the lot of them) but don't affect combat capability any more than hitpoint loss does a normal creature. I think they had morale rules too if the squad was highly injured but few or none dead. In a way this is similar to how the "mob" rules turned out, but without some of the weirdness (like how a bunch of mephits can automatically grapple a dire tiger if they just smush themselves together into a swarm-like entity, or their immunity to failing saving throws by virtue of being treated as a huge hit die creature, rather than a bunch of low saving throw individuals)

Xervous

2022-01-28, 11:51 AM

When it comes to war in D&D it depends on what the particulars of your given setting are, but you will be observing some general constants across the variants.

Lower level troops, being more plentiful, are going to be the main detail that the rest of the combat interacts with. It’s low level troops that you’ll hold positions with, loot the city with, and round up the rebel sympathizers with. Given the quadratic costs of higher end magic items there’s a lot to be gained in bolstering your typical soldiers to the point that they can threaten EL 10+ opposition when massed.

Sample a team of 8x EL 4 commoners trained as archers. Using default array they’ll have +2 dex modifier and +2 BAB. With Magic Weapon’d ammunition (silver etc as appropriate) and taking advantage of teamwork volley they each have an attack bonus of +12. Scale this up to L4 warriors and it’s +15. 8x +15 / 1d8 +1 before adding further non cheesy magical support. The stats on D&D archery make open fields extremely dangerous places to be caught. If not boasting outright immunity or sufficiently high stats a single unit will get chewed up by groups of archers + ammo enchanting casters. Mundane gearing options can push the range on these arrows well past that (400 + 40xCL) of your typical fireball. Cover is invaluable and you either stay outside the archery engagement range or jump on top of them. Such a large number of arrows being directed at single combatants is not overkill, it’s merely ensuring the kill since the healers are capable of restoring any individual who is down but not dead.

Higher level units will generally be reserved for situations where they can leverage their stat density against units which pose them less of a threat, or positioned to oppose similarly leveled units attacking choke points or other narrow objectives. Caught out in the open a L11 adamantine full plate fighter will be a pin cushion before long. Holding a tunnel entrance he will be a costly obstacle who might chew up 100s of soldiers because they can’t leverage their numbers to land frequent blows.

If you have sufficient high level characters on both sides then wars look like superhero movies. If one side has them it goes like Watchmen. If nobody has characters that are so far out there they merely serve tactical uses.

Max Caysey

2022-01-28, 12:21 PM

Berenger

2022-01-28, 01:03 PM

That's statistically one Ioulaum per 1.099.511.627.776 inhabitants. Obviously, not every planet in a fantasy universe should have one.

Telonius

2022-01-28, 02:04 PM

Just being able to teleport in and take out a high-value target, doesn't mean that a particular nation would be willing to. Once you get a high enough level spellcaster, you start getting into "Mutually Assured Destruction" territory. Unless a kingdom was completely sure it could do a decapitation strike on all of its rivals simultaneously, they would never initiate a WMD (Wizard, Maybe Druid) attack. You'd still have regular low-level armies involved in conflicts, with some agreed-upon level of magic allowed.

TalonOfAnathrax

2022-01-28, 06:49 PM

I've ran this in several different ways depending on state capacity:

Pseudo-medieval armies are fairly easy for states to create. Sprinkle level 1 Dragon Shamans in every unit, have a small number of ECL 5-7 creatures/monsters as shock troops (trolls will do!), and you have a battle that's very easy for a GM to imagine and run while still having opportunities for mid-level players to shine. It's realistic if the sides involved don't have significant state capacity (in terms of money, manpower, institutional skill, etc).
Once your nation-state has the money, training systems and discipline to run a decent force with good logistics (even if they still can't muster units where people are above ECL 5 or even 3) then standard combat evaporates. A dozen level 1 Wizards with a bunch of wands of fireball hiding behind pavises can pretty much erase standard medieval armies, even if said armies have a bit of healing/boosting. This does, however, require the money to craft these wands as well as the ability to get enough trained wizards able and willing to do this (as well as the auxiliary resources and strategies to keep them alive long enough to matter, because level 1 wizards die in a stiff breeze). If you have even more state capacity you can have professional troops able to adopt complex tactics (ex: using the archery teamwork bonus to get huge to-hit bonuses against single PCs who try to solo an army)? Remember that strong spellcasters are rare, run out of spells, suffer from limited ranges, etc.
Once your nation-state has money AND mid-level PC-equivalents, things get weirder. You'll want to identify what each faction can easily obtain (trained Druids? Wizards? Demons? Specific creature types?) because this will significantly impact their capabilities and tactics, but overall this type of warfare is all about the pre-fight skimirshes between strike teams of PC-equivalents. Armies are there as occupation forces and to crush some characters beneath the weight of numbers, but a group of PC-equivalents willing to turn terrorist can and will defeat such an army (maybe not all in one go, but soon enough they will). Said army needs strike teams of its own PC-equivalents to intercept and/or strike from enemy strike teams. And every unit will have a few "disablers" hidden within them to handle casual obliteration (ex: Cleric 5 with Divine Defiance to negate a few Fireballs, low-level casters with scrolls of Entangle or even Solid Fog, etc).
At high level of state capacity (strong ability to find, organize and equip armies + high-level PC-equivalents), you quickly get MAD. Let's say that every nation-state can muster a few dozen strike teams of ECL 15-20 PC-equivalents, and that a few of them can craft items in their spare time with infinite Share Pain factory XP. At this point either you have MAD, or you're in "how do nation-states even exist" territory. Most D&D settings don't get quite this far though, either making state capacity limited or making available character level limited. This is usually done to avoid the "why are there problems for the PCs to solve at low levels" issue, but it also avoids this situation.
Beyond that, you're in the realm of "what about infinite Wish loops". Not a fun thought or constructive experiment.

RSGA

2022-01-28, 07:08 PM

One idea I wanted to run after seeing the War Magic in Dragon mag. was to run a game where other than some level 1 and 2 attack spells, all the attack spells (and some applicable buffs and debuffs) started off as the War Magic/Battle Mind form and it was only recently that some people extracted a 'weaker' form that is the book based base form.

The PCs would be either early initiators or associated with some early adopters, and basically start playing up how much this starts to change things. You don't need one master wizard that knows Blazing Field and his ten or so associates to cast it on the battlefield, just a few journeymen mages that cast a comparatively uninterruptible fireball.

bekeleven

2022-01-29, 11:18 AM

Dangit, now I need to rewatch youjo senki. You guys are jerks.

Seward

2022-01-29, 11:49 AM

Hm, one more option. We called it the Ahlissan Legion, because back in the Gary Gygax days the Ahlissan empire was in trouble but the SE province had a dynamic leader that would either turn things around or maybe get ganked for his trouble or break free on his own.

In 1st edition, the number of people who can have levels is a demographic thing (it is in the henchman rules, the only way you can use cha mechanically in AD&D). So....

They drafted their entire population. Tested them for ability levels, and anybody with a 9 int or 9 wisdom was trained as a cleric or wizard (with preference for wizards - massed acid arrows or sleep spells are devastating, and sleep had no save at the time but clerics are needed for eventual undead chain gangs and such). Anybody who survived the trials but didn't gain a level went back to whatever they used to do. The wizards shared a common spellbook which kept costs low, although you had to mix squads carefully to ensure each squad had all spells needed between them. Loot was spent on scrolls which they could eventually scribe themselves but at first were provided by full time effort of the Empire's original priests and wizards (labs provided by the state, costs funded with loot gold which was otherwise useless anyway once you'd got the XP reward for it). These units were trained out of baby levels by basically ending the humanoid/demi-human problems in the region, wiping out disorganized tribes that might number in hundreds but only had a handful of leveled leaders (massed magic missiles for them, sleep for the mooks, clerical command spells if they got close, again no save on that spell below certain levels).

By level 3ish with long range options like acid arrow and shorter range but equally devastating effects like stinking cloud and, in forests, web, they were a threat to even more organized enemies and some long standing elf-problems, rebelling nobles and such were smashed. By level 5 they were basically invincible to any typical Greyhawkian army. They were also turning the realm into a higher magic place, with labor-saving skeleton chain gangs and cleric-wranglers, magic mouth-based alarm system (no resource cost, last forever), continual light everywhere (ditto) etc etc. They pacified the entire subcontinent, including Temple of Elemental Evil when they were EL10ish and got to about level 12 before they ran out of things that could really challenge the initial legions, re-unifying the empire as they went. Their forests were game reserves, all pesky druids and elves exterminated, swamps safe to drain and civilize, gnome and dwarf burrows repurposed to productive work after the vermin were exterminated (nonhumans all had level limits except for rogue, not seen as useful to the Empire. We are a LE society after all). At L9 they also had teleport-based response teams to magic-mouth-based emergency alarms and with some tripwire skeleton guards on the border they were pretty much immune to invasion. The problem then was they ran out of anything that could really give xp, and training a next generation was problematic. A plan to invade their neighbors with the second generation of legions was plotted, equipping them with wands of ice stormfor quick easy low level wins (formed of people who had become adults during all this, not of all ages like the original legions) but the problem of an army of high level soldiers, even if in relatively small numbers.

At some point when not focused on immediate missions and existential threat to their home, they started wondering why they're taking orders. The emperor finally failed to survive an assassination attempt which involved trapping his soul to prevent revival, and then there was a warlord period....

But while the legions lived, Ahlissa was immune to outside threat. That became less true once the humans who formed the legions died of old age and/or civil wars. But for about 100 glorious years it worked really well.......the engame though caused nobody to really want to replicate it, and the longer lived races breathed a sigh of relief when the last of the legionaries died. (their ethos frowned on intelligent undead too, so none became liches and survived their fellows, for example, but longevity potions were fine, although after the Elf Exterminations, the elf blood component was harder to find without raiding neighbors).

This concept has been extended to 3.0 and 3.5, although the mix (you include sorcerers and wizards based on int/cha of 11+, clerics wis 11+, no druids though, their ethos doesn't work) varies and because there is no leveling demographic what you do is draft an entire generation of teenagers before they can get their first level and train them. It is more expensive to set up, and some of the free stuff in AD&D takes resources leading to the "Dark Onyx confiscation" etc. We never did this exercise noncore, and it was all pretty much on paper using the Gygax published articles on the regions and MM which had sizes of tribes, armies etc with full leader and demographic breakdowns.

I did actually play the CRPG Temple of Elemental Evil game with a 2 wizard/2 sorcerer/2 cleric party, a squad of these guys, probably second generation, sneaking out into other lands to level. In spirit of the game I set their attributes to straight 3d6 rolls until I had the right mix of folks, so their casting stats were pretty low, other stats all over the place. That was a 3.0 game and a rare CRPG that supported crafting so at level 5 they started making wands.....

Lets just say clearing the dungeon happened really fast after that, with 4 wands of fireball (and lightning bolt as backup for fire immune) being drained on each incursion....the only real problem was they hit the level cap of the game too soon. While direct damage may suck when only one AOE spell is used compared to monster hitpoints, they aren't really equipped to get 4x the expected EL in damage every round and to not have the PC's run out of spells after a few encounters.

The clerics, it being a CRPG, mostly just stood in front and took hits, healing through the damage while the arcane killed everything, and retreats when out of spells were easier than in a P&P game, but I tried to stay in spirit of the thing and always retreat all the way back to town, and never when fully tapped for resources to allow for an ambush on the way back.

Elves

2022-01-29, 04:20 PM

So whoever wins initiative...instantly wipes out the majority of the enemy army before they even get to act
Remember that people still act one at a time. It's not one side goes then the other.

D+1

2022-01-29, 05:34 PM

We know Ioulaum is real, and that He is level 41… try doing The calculation from 41!
Why? A single 24th level character would already require a population in excess of the current real world population of Earth.

That's statistically one Ioulaum per 1.099.511.627.776 inhabitants. Obviously, not every planet in a fantasy universe should have one.
...or 1 for about every 140,000 Earths.

RandomPeasant

2022-01-29, 08:49 PM

The stats on D&D archery make open fields extremely dangerous places to be caught. If not boasting outright immunity or sufficiently high stats a single unit will get chewed up by groups of archers + ammo enchanting casters.

But that's the thing. Plenty of monsters do have immunity, or effective immunity. Outsiders typically have DR/alignment, not DR/magic, and many have AoE attacks that shred low level troops. Even Dragons, while nominally vulnerable to magic arrows, are fairly hard to tag if you're relying on magic weapon from low-level casters. The spell only has a minute/level duration, so if the Dragon pops up, gets you to start distributing arrows, then flies off, it can easily run you out of resources. And if it gets close, you archers are going to break basically instantly off of Frightful Presence. All the people talking about how you can get bunches of low level chumps to work together radically underestimate how easy it is to kill low level troops wholesale. control weather being the most effective solution (which, conveniently, shuts down archery too).

Just being able to teleport in and take out a high-value target, doesn't mean that a particular nation would be willing to. Once you get a high enough level spellcaster, you start getting into "Mutually Assured Destruction" territory. Unless a kingdom was completely sure it could do a decapitation strike on all of its rivals simultaneously, they would never initiate a WMD (Wizard, Maybe Druid) attack. You'd still have regular low-level armies involved in conflicts, with some agreed-upon level of magic allowed.

You don't even have to invoke MAD. Low-level armies are going to get used for plenty of stuff, because there are plenty of things that matter to a kingdom that a 10th level Wizard has no real reason to get off their ass to deal with. If you can cast fabricate, what do you care if Genericia has access to the forges and artisans of Placeburg? You can make anything they could without leaving your house. Unless casters are strongly integrated into government and the military, they probably aren't going to go to war unless A) it's a war over something that matters to high level characters (e.g. supplies of powerful magic items) or B) it's a war of annihilation that risks their people getting wiped out. Even in settings with high-level characters, there will be plenty of conflicts where it's recognizable (if magically-supported) armies marching against one another.

]A dozen level 1 Wizards with a bunch of wands of fireball hiding behind pavises can pretty much erase standard medieval armies, even if said armies have a bit of healing/boosting.

But not if they take cover. A fireball-slinging Wizard is like a field artillery piece. Those change how battles work, but they don't obsolete armies entirely.

Remember that strong spellcasters are rare, run out of spells, suffer from limited ranges, etc.

This is why you want Warlocks for your army. As an adventurer, a Warlock struggles because they don't have the raw power of traditional spellcasters and their unlimited slots don't matter much when the party is going to have limited resources somewhere anyway. However, the difference in power doesn't matter against low-level characters and having at-will abilities means you can mop up troops all day. Plus, they're good at UMD and can do the same sort of artillery role as traditional spellcasters.

Seward

2022-01-30, 10:02 PM

But not if they take cover. A fireball-slinging Wizard is like a field artillery piece. Those change how battles work, but they don't obsolete armies entirely.

There is a point where that isn't true, in our world it was machine guns that ended cavalry and bayonet charges as a viable tactic (and breech loading rifles almost succeeded at that 50 years earlier). You get there by about level 6 if your entire army is made up of full casters, even if they have crappy mental stats. You could put the artillery behind such lines and it was safe from anything but other artillery (and pretty safe from them. WWI was great for arms manufacturers, not so good for "kills per shell expended")

There is a reason my Ahlissan Legion was a Legion though. You needed critical mass of casters, even without consumables those baby casters could cast enough sleep to reliably put an entire enemy unit to sleep from ambush (easier in 1st edition, but you'd get it down to a handful who rolled repeated saves who get put down with truestriked large crossbow bolts). You required special tactics to manage the higher level officers/sergeants etc usually attached to an army (or who are tribal leaders), you had to devote a certain percentage of your folks to stuff that damn near can't miss and just does straight up damage that can't be resisted by a humanoid opponent.

They're fragile until about level 3, when things like invisibility and silence come on line to support the direct damage and set up ambushes. All those familiars make a pretty solid scouting arm by themselves.

If such a unit bumped into somebody super-dangerous, like a company that had a party of L8 adventurers attached, everybody grabbed a scroll for just such an emergency. How many ice-storms can your party take? Even if you are cold resistant the 3d6 bludgeon just works, no save. A silence scroll shuts down a lot of spellcasting and they have enough clerics to each devote readied actions to each caster on the opposite side. An Ahlissan Legion squad could launch 8 ice storms and 4 silence spells in one round, and they usually deployed at least at platoon strength (about 24 arcane casters, 12 clerics plus 6-9 utility martials who had skills like tracking, trapfinding, logistics, scouting skills etc, including an actual military officer who specialized in deploying casters to maximum advantage who would be an expert or maybe aristocrat in 3.x). Something like a Globe of Invulnerability could stop an ice storm but that was damn rare in Greyhawk, where L12 casters are rarely deployed in a military setting. If they did encounter something like that the unit would scatter after 1 round of trying, then reform in 10 minutes or so, figuring whatever buff stopped them would have expired. Message spells, familiars etc let them disperse without losing unit cohesion.

SR is a problem...they didn't do any underdark expeditions or attempts on the kinds of casters who could draw on outsiders till their own caster levels got high enough to succeed without consumables.

Generally though, to do such a mobilization takes both a national emergency and a society willing to cripple itself for the war effort. And as noted, you have a long term problem of all those high level veterans wandering around when the emergency is over.

This is why you want Warlocks for your army.

Ahlissa would have rejected warlocks for the same reason they rejected "must be chaotic" bards. Not because they aren't useful, but because they're beholden to something other than the Emperor and/or the war god Hextor for their power.

That said - an army of casters that can craft its own consumables had quite a bit of staying power after the initial investment. You do need to devote a certain % of plunder to crafting scrolls and wands, but it is worth it.

In a military setting, burst damage on offense seems pretty important. Staying power only matters if you can't destroy enough of the enemy to shatter it with your spell slots, or if you can't reliably retreat after taking a giant bite out of the opposition. Again, in a modern setting, if you can blow up the entire building they're using for cover, you don't need a lot of ammunition. One drone and rocket load and the fight is over. If instead you are spending 1000 bullets to get just one kill, you worry a lot about how much ammo each infantryman can carry before becoming overloaded and how to resupply after each battle.

What is critically important to being able to use all that firepower though, is scouting/intelligence gathering. A dispersed enemy might be able to assassinate your very-expensive-to-train-and-level caster assets then combine to be dangerous. Of course in D&D, it is the side with a bunch of casters who has an edge in that department too. Imagine a bunch of level 1 rangers vs a bunch of L1 wizards who each have familiars. Who is likely to ambush who?

TotallyNotEvil

2022-01-30, 10:32 PM

It depends a lot on what your setting looks like. Is the average person lv 1? 3? 6?

How many people can become casters? How many people are casters? Is there a bottleneck in people having access to magic, be it through training or items?

How common are outsiders? Spirits of nature? Undead?

The above poster has an entire army of wizards with plentiful scrolls. Another setting might have one wizard per army regiment. A third setting might have it so the average trained adult is, say, between lv 3 and 6, so not fodder for a lot of spells that might otherwise rip through them, and surprisingly competent at fighting things like simple monsters using just decent mundane gear and a cool head.

Mechalich

2022-01-30, 10:40 PM

The problem with this question is that it pretty much immediately hits on 'crap we have to go back to first principles.' Specifically, you have to go and consider what kind of societies even exist in a setting where high-level Tier I casters of even moderate optimization levels are operating before you can consider how those societies (or even if) those societies are going to fight each other. Since D&D rules with high-level casters do not produce quasi-medieval worlds, this is a big problem.

Now, if you've placed your campaign in which a quasi-medieval world with typical D&D-style fantasy nations states exists then what you are doing, fundamentally, is pretending that the world operates on E6 rules and that the PCs and their immediate allies/enemies are simply exceptions to this rule. In which case war functions more or less how you'd expect it in a quasi-medieval scenario - which is to say a lot like medieval warfare only with much higher casualties due to magic and the PCs represent super-special forces that go up against the super-special forces of other opponents.

In gameplay this means don't run mass combat. Armies clash exclusively in the background (and maybe present a terrain or adventure-scale buff/debuff), but the PCs simply don't engage with huge numbers of opponents. Instead, they go after objectives that just happen to be guarded by enemies of an appropriate challenge level that have strategic significance. Various McGuffins and Superweapons are useful in this regard.

Seward

2022-01-31, 06:52 PM

Doctor Awkward

2022-01-31, 10:27 PM

My basic model for national conflict in D&Dland is that it probably starts with both sides coming together to have their champions fight. If your champion gets their ass kicked hard enough, that means you're probably not going to win the war, so outside extreme circumstances you just give up and the other side gets what they wanted. If things are close to even, that means you may have a chance of winning through sufficient skill, luck, or planning.

That's not that far off from how it would sometimes go in real life in history.

There are even instances where two armies would meet for battle and then rather than fight each side would simply count the number of soldiers they could see on the other side and meet in the middle for a parley and just agree that whatever side had the most troops "won" and everyone went home alive.

Seward

2022-01-31, 10:57 PM

There are even instances where two armies would meet for battle and then rather than fight each side would simply count the number of soldiers they could see on the other side and meet in the middle for a parley and just agree that whatever side had the most troops "won" and everyone went home alive.

That worked great until you encountered somebody like the Romans in the Republic period. And to avoid violating policy about talking about real world stuff...look it up yourself.

A contest of champions isn't a terrible idea, in a world where even a tier 4 epic character like Lord Robilar can probably mop up an army single handedly, given enough time (pre-epic he had a ring of regeneration, ring of invisibility and high AC. I'm sure his epic gear is better. He can probably outheal incoming damage passively, although he would have to prioritize taking out casters at first, to avoid having to make so many saves he runs out of reroll items for the natural 1s)

King of Nowhere

2022-02-01, 05:14 AM

Something else to consider....

No matter how powerful individuals are, there is a saying that basically goes "it isn't yours if there isn't a 16 year old with a gun standing on the corner" (or peasant with pike or whatever).

To occupy and hold land you need a lot off people working in shifts 24x7 to keep it pacified and to make it productive (otherwise why bother?) These are usually young people with inexpensive weapons who aren't from that location and don't have ties there that might make them sympathize with the locals.

This isn't something you can do with your high-K troops (golem army, or elite adventurer mercenaries or Ahlissan legion troops). You have to have a plan for that. Well, unless you really are going for extermination and ethnic cleansing (which was actually the Ahlissan Legion model when going after nonhumans, and its wars were basically defensive or reunification vs humans, which changed the dynamic).

You can't garrison a town with an Abram Tank, even if said tank is more than capable of flattening the town with no risk to itself. The military models with ordinary grunts supercharged by bardic and other similar army-scale buffs work better in that role than the ones with a handful of individuals who can kill any number of cannon fodder given an afternoon to work.

You don't need to garrison the land all the time against insurrections, especially if you have an invincible army. Just leave a guy in charge, with the task to collect taxes or stuff. If the taxes don't arrive, or there is a rebellion, go in force and exterminate.
After a few such "examples" most towns will behave.
This has the additional advantage that, as long as the taxes/tributes are paid and there is no rebellion, the people can go on with their lives, and won't be prone to rebelling. Several highly successful empires founded their fortune on such a premise.

Seward

2022-02-01, 12:06 PM

If the taxes don't arrive, or there is a rebellion, go in force and exterminate.
After a few such "examples" most towns will behave.

History argues against this with many cultures interacting with a foreign invader, unless you are willing to actually exterminate/ethnic cleanse them from a region. D&D lore has plenty of examples of such as well, which isn't surprising, Gygax was a history geek and Greyhawk was a mashup of ethnicities, cultures and such drawn from both history and fantasy (although unlike, say, Golarion he at least mixed it up, rather than just creating cultures from stereotypes from our own history) The Tenha, one of the cultures that resisted invasion/occupation forever regardless of oppression or magical disasters, were physically a lot like plains Native Americans but culturally a lot closer to Scottish Highlanders or your typical Afghan tribe, allowing for religious differences in both cases (Catholicism or Presbyterianism or Deobandi Islam not being very much like the Druidic Old Faith or Ur-flan variants practiced by the hard-core resistance Tenh)

Yes, Tenh may be a blasted wasteland but it is OUR blasted wasteland. Iuz and the Pale can stick it where the Sun doesn't shine.

arkangel111

2022-02-01, 01:26 PM

Mechalich

2022-02-01, 07:37 PM

History argues against this with many cultures interacting with a foreign invader, unless you are willing to actually exterminate/ethnic cleanse them from a region. D&D lore has plenty of examples of such as well, which isn't surprising, Gygax was a history geek and Greyhawk was a mashup of ethnicities, cultures and such drawn from both history and fantasy (although unlike, say, Golarion he at least mixed it up, rather than just creating cultures from stereotypes from our own history) The Tenha, one of the cultures that resisted invasion/occupation forever regardless of oppression or magical disasters, were physically a lot like plains Native Americans but culturally a lot closer to Scottish Highlanders or your typical Afghan tribe, allowing for religious differences in both cases (Catholicism or Presbyterianism or Deobandi Islam not being very much like the Druidic Old Faith or Ur-flan variants practiced by the hard-core resistance Tenh)

Gygax - and basically every other D&D author who worked at setting design in every way (including Keith Baker designing Eberron even though it was nominally designed for 3e) - operated on world-building assumptions built off the mechanics of 1e and 2e D&D, not 3e, 3.5 or Pathfinder. The problem is the assumptions of those earlier editions do not hold for the 3e paradigm. In 1e and 2e, a high-level fighter was basically invulnerable to SoD attacks and could chew through the most powerful monster in just a few rounds - as everyone who played BGII is well aware. In 3e a high-level fighter dies almost instantly to SoD attacks and unless their damage output has been very carefully optimized, wails pointlessly against most level-equivalent opponents. At the same time, the power of even a modestly optimized full caster is multiple orders of magnitude greater than in 1e or 2e. In 2e Elminster was a powerhouse. In 3e Elminster is a living god if you give him a decent spell loadout (and Elminster is decidedly not optimized worth anything).

3.X D&D rules do not produce a quasi-medieval world. They produce some sort of bizarre magic-mediated utopia/dystopia. The Tippyverse is one, actually rather simplified, example of how such a world might look. War in such a world looks nothing like war in a quasi-medieval fantasy world and assumptions drawn from the literature surrounding such worlds, including D&D worlds, is useless in determining how it would work.

GeoffWatson

2022-02-01, 09:29 PM

RandomPeasant

2022-02-01, 09:36 PM

Since D&D rules with high-level casters do not produce quasi-medieval worlds, this is a big problem.

Sure they do. "Quasi-medieval" means a whole range of things, most of which have more to do with aesthetics than social organization. Your average D&D player doesn't know or care about the details of how medieval society actually worked. What they want is a medieval aesthetic. If your army has dudes with swords and chainmail and archers and not dudes with AKs and tanks and helicopters, that "feels medieval" even if your tactics end up looking more like modern ones than whatever a medieval historian would reconstruct.

And harping on high-level characters is fundamentally the wrong issue. It's not Fighters or Wizards that obsolete armies. It's Demons and Dragons. Because they get at-will AoEs and enough DR to ignore low-level troops. Even casters don't (easily) get that, so the best way for a high level caster to win a battle is to delegate to summoned or conjured monsters. And it's not even the high level ones that do that. Even something like a Babau has enough DR to basically ignore low-level troops, and it's only CR 6. At a very rough level, D&D battles are a rock-paper-scissors arrangement between troops, monsters, and heroes.

To occupy and hold land you need a lot off people working in shifts 24x7 to keep it pacified and to make it productive (otherwise why bother?) These are usually young people with inexpensive weapons who aren't from that location and don't have ties there that might make them sympathize with the locals.

"Why bother" is a very serious question for high-level characters, particularly high-level casters. If you can cast fabricate and teleport, most of the things you could get from oppressing random peasants can just be reproduced on your own in like half an hour. The natural state of D&Dland is one of extreme stratification, where high level characters have no natural reason to interact with low level ones. There are wars that are fought with armies with modest magical support, and there are armies that are fought with teleporting ninja squads, but those are very rarely going to be the same wars. A Wizard is not going to fight a war for control of the fertile farmlands around the Altrus River, which need to be administered and controlled (at least, not without something like nationalism in play -- and that's a concept that is wildly anachronistic for D&Dland). He's going to fight a war for control of the Thunderhead, a magical storm in the Howling Peaks which produces mystical artifacts at some rate. It doesn't have an indigenous population to rebel, and it's dangerous enough that anyone who could feasibly poach those resources is a peer competitor for the Wizard.

I think you're forgetting that most NPCs are npc classes, and Most of those are commoner or other mundanes. You sprinkle a few high skilled people (PC classes) into the mix occasionally, but by and large 99% of the army will be conscripted commoners.

That's one of those things that really depends on which part of the rules you're trusting most. If you think people mostly use the character advancement rules, you get a setting where things go totally nuts because people can bounce up to 20th level in less than a year. If you think the random town rules in the DMG are the be-all and end-all, then you get something like you're describing. If you believe in Mentor, then you can train people up to ~5th level as long as you can keep your society relatively organized. And then, of course, you have the various races who turn into high level characters just for becoming adults. If most people are Commoners, the result is that Dragons or Frost Giants or Mind Flayers rule the world, because a Frost Giant Commoner is easily capable of wrecking medieval armies.

Your strategies also fail to take in the human aspect entirely. Not every wizard wants to learn fireball, just every PC. For your everyday wizard, fireball and all other forms of offensive magic is worthless. I mean we all have the capacity to be a Navy Seal, Sniper, or Fighter pilot, but very few actually are.

I would say with Wizards that's a pretty minor concern, as Wizards are plug-and-play. If you have ten Wizards, only one of which knows teleport, you can have ten Wizards who know teleport tomorrow. The issue is that for Sorcerers or Dread Necromancers or Wilders, that's not true. So nations are going to have real issues designing doctrine around magical assets when they have no way to ensure magical assets have any particular set of capabilities. A Warmage and a Beguiler are both capable of doing effective work as a squad support mage, but you're going to run into real problems designing tactics that work equally well for either character.

In 1e and 2e, a high-level fighter was basically invulnerable to SoD attacks and could chew through the most powerful monster in just a few rounds - as everyone who played BGII is well aware. In 3e a high-level fighter dies almost instantly to SoD attacks and unless their damage output has been very carefully optimized, wails pointlessly against most level-equivalent opponents.

I have to say that I don't really see what the point here is. The Fighter's performance against equal-level opponents is largely irrelevant to a military scenario, because in a war you aren't fighting a sequence of equal-level opponents. You're fighting a bunch of low-levle troops, you don't have SoDs and who get red-misted by even an unoptimized Fighter.

At the same time, the power of even a modestly optimized full caster is multiple orders of magnitude greater than in 1e or 2e. In 2e Elminster was a powerhouse. In 3e Elminster is a living god if you give him a decent spell loadout (and Elminster is decidedly not optimized worth anything).

But most of that power is not something that really directly effects a battlefield. The most powerful offensive spells don't have an AoE any larger than a common fireball. planar binding is absurdly broken in normal play, because a party is force-constrained, but on the scale of kingdoms and armies it isn't particularly better than simply having a larger and more multicultural kingdom that happens to have some Eldritch Giants or Yuan-Ti Abominations you can call to arms with your peasant levies. The most effective strategy for a caster who wants to personally kill a bunch of troops is to buff yourself into something approximating a mid-CR monster, and the nature of diminishing returns means that you're not really doing any better than those monsters would against low-level troops.

King of Nowhere

2022-02-02, 03:15 AM

History argues against this with many cultures interacting with a foreign invader, unless you are willing to actually exterminate/ethnic cleanse them from a region.

It depends. It depends on a lot of circumstances.
I could quote a dozen historical examples, and you could quote a dozen other counterexamples, except that the forum rules forbid hystorical examples.
Let's stay away from there, then, and focus on the fact that the rebelling population cannot hurt the high level magical army in any way. Even if they rebel, it's not a big deal.

I do believe the lord ruler from mistborn would be a great example of how a high level character can dominate a large population. And sure, in the final empire there were rebellions all the time, but the lord ruler never cared.
"Let them kill the nobles, it's irrelevant. And if they attack the palace, i will deal with them personally"

TalonOfAnathrax

2022-02-02, 10:32 AM

Some classes are far better than others at army combat. For example at level 10, a Wizard can create Wands of Fireball in his downtime, can use a few AoE that can maybe kill a single unit, can take down some monsters or enchant some for his own side, and can lead a Teleport-strike against enemy leadership. In downtime, he can use Wall of Stone for fortifications, and maybe use some Calling spells.
A 10th-level Druid has Control Winds, as well as some good downtime area-reshaping.
Meanwhile a 10th-level Binder (with the Ipos + Zceryll + Favored Vestige (Zceryll), which isn't an especially army-focused build) has infinite Wall of Stone, has infinite summons with 3 Quickened CL 10 Fireballs on top of solid melee and ranged abilities, has a pile of healing, has good resistances + SR + sensory abilities, and has a summon with reflective spell resistance to wreck people using low-level Wands of Fireball.

Meanwhile a level 5 Binder is still very useful to an army, because with Tenebrous + 1 feat they can provide infinite healing and cover to a unit. Not as good as a proper caster who can craft in downtime, but also a lot easier to train (Binder lore is that it's really easy to learn the basics of Binding, vs magic that takes years of study and/or magic blood and luck).

This leads me to think that decently-sized nation-states will not only stockpile important gear (eternal wands of fireball, ways to transmit orders between units to get the kind of modern unit tactics that D&D requires, etc) but will also push for increased training of key classes (Clerics and Wizards, obviously, but also maybe Dragon Shamans and Binders).

Seward

2022-02-02, 11:39 AM

Let's stay away from there, then, and focus on the fact that the rebelling population cannot hurt the high level magical army in any way. Even if they rebel, it's not a big deal.

They can just not do their jobs, pay tribute, etc. At which point we are like "why bother conquering them at all, if all they do is refuse to admit I am their god-king and killing them just makes the survivors more hostile and less inclined to cooperate".

I think the argument above that high level folks don't fight wars because there is nothing in it for them is pretty valid. It even fits the original D&D settings, where nations were ruled by a 10th level whatever and the epic folks (Circle of 8 and its rejects/traitors, Great Druid and his militant-neutrality minions, epic wildcards like Rary and such) fought private wars that mostly didn't impinge on nations, except for oddballs like the Empire off Iuz, ruled by a literal god that would draw attention of high level opposition when it got aggressive. More typical was something like the Living Greyhawk Bright Sands plot, which had a ton of high level and even epic people meddling, but was mostly experienced by neighboring kingdoms as "some epic dude is squatting in the desert and equipping and organizing the local tribes. Should we be worried?"

Outcomes were either - he failed and tribes went back to being poor weak desert tribes, or he succeeded and made the desert bloom. THEN there was maybe a problem for local kingdoms, as it would be restored to a fertile, high population place (and quickly, a lot of the monsters were cursed to be monsters and would become normal humans/humanoids within months), and that epic mage would presumably delegate running it to some 10th level typical noble dude that might be at trade or military rival, with an epic wizard who would probably intervene if anybody tried to bother that new kingdom. (canonically based on a time travel prophecy-type-thing that outcome would eventually lead to this new kingdom clashing with Iuz's kingdom with catastrophic results on anybody inbetween, as an argument to PC's to maybe stop him from healing the desert...although it also results in death of Iuz..and most nonhumans in the area)

So basically unless some epic dude takes an interest in a kingdom, and by Epic, that includes really near-epic or even 15+ish characters in a Greyhawk-like-setting, the mid-level rulers get to have their quasi-feudal society with armies of cannonfodder. And the trouble with an epic patron is they tend to get into conflicts with other folks of equal power, which tends to go poorly for anybody nearby if they're not isolated away from population centers and/or mustered armies.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-02, 11:59 AM

AvatarVecna

2022-02-02, 01:20 PM

I think you're forgetting that most NPCs are npc classes, and Most of those are commoner or other mundanes. You sprinkle a few high skilled people (PC classes) into the mix occasionally, but by and large 99% of the army will be conscripted commoners.
The only reason PCs meet an abnormal amount of PC classed characters is because they (the players) are the center of an epic story.
Therefore I think war would be very similar to medieval warfare. The PC classes would act as elite soldiers. While the few "hero level" NPCs would act as a strike force buffering failing lines, or used to target high profile NPCs, or strategic areas.
I mean think about modern warfare. A stealth fighter can strategically hit special targets behind enemy lines, yet ground troops are still needed to hold area. Tanks are superior to regular troops as well yet the tactic isn't "send in the tanks!". Why? Because they are too valuable (strategically) to waste on your every day assault.
Your strategies also fail to take in the human aspect entirely. Not every wizard wants to learn fireball, just every PC. For your everyday wizard, fireball and all other forms of offensive magic is worthless. I mean we all have the capacity to be a Navy Seal, Sniper, or Fighter pilot, but very few actually are.

Building off this:

DMG actually addresses this stuff - like what the existing guard looks like, and what the "conscripted militia" would look like. The most relevant sections:

Guards/Soldiers: For every 100 people in the community (round down), the community has one full-time guard or soldier. In addition, for every 20 people in the community, an able-bodied member of the local militia or a conscript soldier can be brought into service within just a few hours.

Do the same for NPC classes, but leave out the final stage that would generate the number of 1st-level individuals. Instead, take the remaining population after all other characters are generated and divide it up so that 91% are commoners, 5% are warriors, 3% are experts, and the remaining 1% is equally divided between aristocrats and adepts (0.5% each). All these characters are 1st level.

Using these guidelines and the tables in the previous section,
the breakdown by class and level for the population of a typical
hamlet of two hundred people looks like this:
• One 1st-level aristocrat (mayor)
• One 3rd-level warrior (constable)
• Nine 1st-level warriors (two guards, seven militia members)
• One 3rd-level expert smith (militia member)
• Seven 1st-level expert crafters and professionals of various sorts
• One 1st-level adept
• One 3rd-level commoner barkeep (militia member)
• One hundred sixty-six 1st-level commoners (one is a militia
member)
• One 3rd-level fighter
• Two 1st-level fighters
• One 1st-level wizard
• One 3rd-level cleric
• Two 1st-level clerics
• One 1st-level druid
• One 3rd-level rogue
• Two 1st-level rogues
• One 1st-level bard
• One 1st-level monk

So the guard consists of:

(1) Warrior 3
(2) Warrior 1

And the full militia consists of:

(1) Warrior 3
(9) Warrior 1
(1) Expert 3
(1) Commoner 3
(1) Commoner 1

It's worth noting that despite having three fighters in town, none of them are guards or even militia members, meanwhile every warrior is at least in the militia. Additionally, it's worth mentioning that "1 in 20" being militia members is around the same percentage of remaining citizens that are supposed to become Warrior 1s (once the PC classes and high-level NPCs are dealt with). It makes sense to me that the militia is going to be basically all warriors, with some spilling out into high level experts/commoners if they run out of Warriors before the militia is filled out.

It's also worth mentioning: the militia is in addition to the usual guard, not in place of it. In the above example, we have a constable (warrior 3), two guards, and 10 militia members. I'm counting the constable as a member of the guard, but if you don't count him, both the guard and militia are exactly on par with how big the rules say they should be. All in all, the full militia of a settlement should end up around 6% of its adult population, and short of weird small ones that rolled really low on warriors, the vast majority of both the guard and militia should be Warriors, with the remainder being (probably) high-level NPC classes rather than NPCs with PC class levels.

They have 13 NPCs with PC class levels, and none of them are guard or militia. Most of the NPC wizards are more akin to scientists than grenadiers. Most of the NPC clerics are more akin to priests than crusaders. Most of the NPC rogues are thieves and con artists, not assassins. Heck, most of the NPC experts are more akin to scholars than factotums-lites. They might help defend the community, but they're not conscripted.

Since we're talking about really large-scale stuff, let's get an actual example metropolis.

Assuming population of 40000 adults.

Class
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Adept
190
32

16

6
2

3

1

Aristocrat
190
32

16

4
4

1
1

2

Barbarian
64
32

16

8

4

Bard
80
40
8
12
4

6

2

1
2

1

Cleric
96
48
16
8
8

4
4

1
1

2

Commoner
34507
64
32

16

8

4

Druid
80
40
8
12
4

2
4
2

1

1
1
1

Expert
1137
64
32

16

2
6

1

3

Fighter
112
56
24
4
12

2

2
4

1

1

2

Monk
64
32

16

6
2

1
2
1

Paladin
64
32

16

6
2

2
1
1

Ranger
64
32

16

4
4

1
1
2

Rogue
80
40
8
12
4

4
2
2

2

1

1

Sorcerer
64
32

16

2
6

1
3

Warrior
1896
48
16
8
8

4
2
2

2

1
1

Wizard
64
32

16

4
4

2

2

That guard+militia needs 2400 members. There are 1988 warriors in total. The remaining 412 militia members need to come from the non-warriors who are lvl 2+ (1156).

High-level PC class NPCs are more able to contribute, but are also more likely to have responsibilities to their own sub-communities that take precedent over city defense (ie an archmage worried about his school in the middle of the metropolis, as opposed to the whole metropolis). Some high-level PC class NPCs might be working in direct service to (or might themselves be) the people in charge of the community as a whole, such as one of those Cleric 18s being the pope of this theocratic town, and will probably be more willing to spend spell slots in its defense.

In general, though, I would expect the PC-class NPCs in the militia to be pretty evenly spread across their given populations; power isn't directly correlated with feelings of responsibility to the larger community, after all. There's gonna be way more Fighters 1s in the army than Fighters 20s, not because Fighters 20s are beholden to noone, but because Fighter 1s are a dime a dozen. And a bit more to the point...I would expect more fighter-types getting conscripted, or just plain being combat-capable. It's a question if a given wizard is any good in a fight; if a Fighter isn't any good in a fight, then what does he even do. If I were assigning the 412 additional militia members...the full guard+militia would end up looking like this:

Class
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Adept

4

3

1
1

1

Aristocrat

2

1

1
1

1

Barbarian
16
8

4

1
1

1

Bard
6
4
1
1
1

1

1

Cleric
13
6
2
1
1

1

1

Commoner

5
2

1

1

Druid
6
4
1
1

1

1

Expert

6
3

1

1

1

Fighter
71
28
12
2
6

1

1
2

1

1

Monk
11
6

2

1

1

Paladin
32
16

8

3
1

1

1

Ranger
23
10

5

2
1

1

Rogue
9
5
1
1

1

1

Sorcerer
5
2

1

1

1

Warrior
1896
48
16
8
8

4
2
2

2

1
1

Wizard
5
3

1

1

1

There are 54 people in the militia above 6th level. Of those 54, 23 have spells slots of some kind. Of those 23, 11 are paladins/rangers (so barely even real spell slots). 97.75% of the militia (391 in 400) cannot cast even a teeny tiny bit.

Make no mistake: this militia has some spell power. There's a cleric 18, a druid 16, a sorcerer 13, and a wizard 13. And they're a lil bit combat-inclined given that they're in the militia. But they're still NPCs - that means elite array, relatively low wealth for their level, and relatively low-op builds for the most part. They're not useless, but we're talking more fireball and mass cure light wounds than like...planar binding. There's only so many casters, and they're only so good. A 5-man band of murderhobo PCs will be a serious gamechanger, even if they're just mid-level.

Seward

2022-02-02, 01:39 PM

One interesting implication of the "high level people do their own thing" dynamic is that it's largely casters who have the ability to do that. A Wizard or Cleric can provide for themselves and a small household independently. A Barbarian or Fighter can't

Well they can, they just have to get to high enough level that they can fit in Leadership and outsource spells for cohorts.

Something I noticed when writing up an epic version of Lord Robilar (to run a social interaction with him at level 24 with level 12-15ish pc's), just with boring-old-non-epic leadership, his cohort could casually provide either 9th level arcane or divine casting (or both at about 7th level if he tolerates split casting PRCs in his cohort, possibly to get better crafting options), and his followers could pretty much administer a small realm (of the sort in Greyhawk that could be ruled by a 6th level person...say Dyvvers or Ratik, not Furyondy or similar).

He had no problem getting anything he needed. And that leaves aside any deals, favors, etc an individual like him could demand or be owed. Indeed in the relevant story arc he was "doing a few favors" for Rary (a 24th level wizard) for reasons never specified (he claimed boredom, and the fun of freaking out the Circle of 8 just by having him show up on the scene) but they probably included something his cohort couldn't craft or cast with nonepic capabilities. He also left when he got what he wanted (and did a couple things off-the-books for "fun" while there), so wasn't around to be a problem when PC's try to decide whether they want Rary to succeed or fail.

Waiting till level 24 for 9th level cohort casting isn't actually needed. Great Renown adds a flat +2, being fair and generous to your pampered cohort adds a +1, having a castle or base adds +2, and just not having a bonded mount or familiar avoids penalties. Which means even an 10 charisma purely martial character can still have a tier 1 caster with 9th level spells by level 19...and if he is 8 charisma, a +2 charisma ioun stone is pocket change, and if a dwarf or halforc with minimum charisma, well, leave a cloak slot open for a cheap +4 or pay more for a rod of splendor (which might be worth it anyway for the fancy stuff it gives you, helping with that great renown thing)

My original Living Greyhawk Character (who retired at level 16 on the day the campaign died...I had lots of alts) was a half-orc mostly-monk who married the daughter of an orc shaman about level 4. They were both interested in education and he got her arcane and divine training. I took his L15 feat as leadership and she even showed up on one adventure, as a L12sh Mystic Theurge, providing him all the key buffs that supercharge a martial who gets 6 attacks a round and can reliably hit with all of them, cast mostly before any fighting happens, and during combat just did low level support stuff, like any underleveled and undergeared NPC caster might. He was a 6 charisma dude, but the feat was still worth it to him that early, and she was one of the things that made his retirement make sense. With her backing him, he could join his family and hold a key mountain pass for their community until the Theocracy of the Pale got its latest civil war out of its system, needing no help from other adventurers anymore to operate at full power. As a Pholtan there was no winning getting involved on either side. Let the high priests work out the doctrinal disputes. Pholtus would understand him taking care off his family and community and staying the heck out of it.

There's only so many casters, and they're only so good. A 5-man band of murderhobo PCs will be a serious gamechanger, even if they're just mid-level.

Which is the plot of Red Hand of Doom in a nutshell. Without 4 level 5 PC's arriving at the beginning, the horde would win easily, in spite of the fact that the opposition has many mid-level fighter types, casters ranging from L6-9, including a wizard and cleric in the largest nearby city both at level 9, and a level 7ish elf druid who got sucked in, plus whatever the local dwarves might provide if you get them involved. The horde has similar resources, plus dragons and somebody seriously going crazy making potions and low level gear for the troops, but most importantly they're all pulling in one direction, every leveled individual with a role, a goal and mostly not working at cross purposes.

Part of why the PC's matter so much is that they level so fast. By the time of the showdown, those 4 level 5 murderhoboes with PC-level wealth are level 8 murderhoboes who have gotten very, very good at killing army units, military spellcasters and dragons over the past very intense weeks. They double the high level firepower in the final battles but more importantly they get stuff done that breaks up alliances and resources on the horde, adds alliances on the human side and slows the invasion's timeline down enough to get their act together. Not to mention the attrition rate they put on all the assassin-squads sent to remove them in the various chapters. Some of those guys had seriously useful skillsets, including a near scry-and-die type capability+serious buff spells for the folks they bring into the fight.

A typical balanced PC adventuring party is not only an Abrams Tank on a pitched battle situation, they're also a recon unit, a diplomatic envoy, an interrogation unit at a level the CIA could only dream of, can move around the map much faster than anybody else and do all of that out of their own resources, needing no logistics beyond an occasional safe place to rest, and in a pinch they can do that for themselves too.

Darechan

2022-02-02, 04:14 PM

It varies wildly based on setting assumptions. But at the same time, it does help to look less at tactics or strategy than logistics.

The game I GM is actually in a somewhat similar situation, so I've been addressing this. However, this campaign is tier-capped at T3. (This includes a number of T3 gestalts for those who like the style of lower-tier classes, and a few "stripped" classes for those who like the style of higher-tier classes.) That strongly affects it.

Perhaps the strongest effect is level metrics are worthwhile. A 10th-level warblade and a 10th-level beguiler are on par, in a way that doesn't resemble a 10th-level fighter and a 10th-level wizard.

So, let's start with the same exponential curve Berenger described, but also apply it to logistics. A 2nd-level character costs twice as much to field as a 1st-level character, and a 3rd-level character costs twice as much again. Easy enough so far.

The military takes in 1st-level commoners — mostly rowdy teenagers — and trains them into 1st level in a T4..5 class like Rogue or Healer, then trains them into 1st level in a T3 class, then trains them to level up their T3 class. Each class change is basically equivalent to a level. The military occasionally gets someone who got a PC class and leveled up on their own, but this is less efficient for the individual than enlisting, so they can train up as their job. In a pinch, the military could field their commoners and rogues and such, but that would be a desperate ploy, cutting into the military's future for very little gain. However, each successive training costs twice as much. As a result of all this, their general availability of troops follows a similar exponential pattern, unless they spend less efficiently.

Given frequency and cost both following this curve, each level layer of a unit costs the same. For example, a 3rd-level troop costs 8 whatevers, two 2nd-level troops also cost 8 whatevers, and four 1st-level troops also cost 8 whatevers.

Lower-level troops are often engaged in training, but are also used for lesser jobs like border patrol. When you have a task, that question of efficiency pops up: How can you deal with this problem cheaply? If eight 5th-level troops can do the job as well as four 8th-level troops, then you use eight 5th-level troops, and save the more-expensive troops for bigger tasks the cheaper troops can't do.

However, while it all has a medieval/Classical aesthetic, it works much more like modern warfare. Looking at "save the more-expensive troops for bigger tasks the cheaper troops can't do", that's basically special forces, isn't it? So you have this tiered system, where in any engagement, you roll out the fighter fodder, and look for "cruxes", places the higher-level troops can really make a difference. If you're taking some village that barely has a name, and the main reason for taking it is just so it's feeding your troops not the enemy's, then the leader of that unit might be 5th-level. That is, it's a 5th-level unit. Under that 5th-level troop, you have two 4th-level, four 3rd-level, eight 2nd-level, and sixteen 1st-level, all in T3 classes. The 1st-level and 2nd-level grunts make a show of force with numbers, and the 1st-level ones Aid Another the 2nd-level ones when dealing with significant threats. The other seven go where they're needed; they're basically a squad of two fireteams, each fireteam having one 4th-level and two 3rd-level troop, and the 5th-level leader goes with one or the other, or off on their own if stealth is needed. Perhaps one fireteam and the leader go in under cover of night, score some objective, then the lowbies assault at dawn, and the other fireteam responds as needed. Once the village is taken, the lowbies maintain martial order among the civilians, while the higher troops respond to resistance.

A party of four 6th-level troops could take the village easily, but would have trouble holding it, and costs more than the 5th-level unit combined.

Alternately, part of a unit — usually larger units — would be people with other specialties. Capturing resources in the field and using Fabricate to make what you need can make a unit even more self-sustaining, which is a big deal logistically. Every burst door can be turned into arrows.

The other matter is aging. Old soldiers don't retain their fighting prowess, even if this isn't reflected so well in the rules. To a certain extent this can be modeled with gradual class downgrades, one level at a time dropping from a T3 class to Aristocrat, but that's at best a rough approximation. So at the highest ranks, the equivalency of level breaks down, and these are leaders, not ass-kickers.

The PCs, on the other hand, are 15th-level ass-kickers. They are the ultimate flying battery, supremely expensive to field, supremely effective for the few situations where you need such an investment.

Elves

2022-02-02, 06:28 PM

Which is the plot of Red Hand of Doom in a nutshell. Without 4 level 5 PC's arriving at the beginning, the horde would win easily
If you read the module, there's more than a full adventuring group worth of lvl 4-6 NPCs in the starting village alone. The PCs only prove important because the town has been complacent about investigating the hobgoblin raids and the PCs happen by chance to be going in the right direction to find the army, and because after that they're the ones who volunteer for the Rhest mission despite having little reason to do so. Honestly the module might be improved if you just played it with the PCs as citizens of the starting town.

RHOD is actually pertinent to this thread. If the antagonist had just taken his dragons, his wyverns, his manticores and his abishai and flown to Brindol he could have easily cowed it into submission. But the module revolves around the idea that he has to spend weeks trucking a land army of hobgoblin mooks across the valley.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-03, 07:33 PM

It's a question if a given wizard is any good in a fight; if a Fighter isn't any good in a fight, then what does he even do.

Again, I would disagree with that specifically in the context of Wizards. With even a modest defense budget, you can get any given Wizard to be reasonably combat-capable, because they can just learn spells. They may not do as well as Wizards optimized to the purpose, but a military is probably better off recruiting a randomly-built Wizard than they are a randomly-built Fighter. The issue is really the classes like Sorcerers, Warlocks, or to a lesser extent Warmage-types who can't simply be retrained to match whatever your doctrine is.

But they're still NPCs - that means elite array, relatively low wealth for their level, and relatively low-op builds for the most part.

That starts getting in to some assumptions though. Yes, you could take NPC WBL as gospel and assume that none of the characters are doing anything to generate wealth. But then you have to ask why you aren't assuming things like XP/advancement rates or Mentor aren't being taken as gospel as well. You've worked through a reasonable example using one source of truth presented by the rules for setting demographics. But it's not the only source of truth, and the others that you could use instead produce very different outcomes.

Well they can, they just have to get to high enough level that they can fit in Leadership and outsource spells for cohorts.

Well, maybe. But Leadership is supposed to be a proxy for in-world organizations, so it's not clear to me that Leadership should really be considered when we're talking about the composition of in-world organizations. That said, I won't dispute that there will be some number of high-level martials who are attached to high-level casters or who have some sort of relevant PrC or who found a useful collection of magic items. But it seems pretty obvious that whatever the rate at which Wizards are able to detach themselves from worldly affairs, that rate will be lower for Fighters, as they don't have any class-native ability to do so.

The other matter is aging. Old soldiers don't retain their fighting prowess, even if this isn't reflected so well in the rules. To a certain extent this can be modeled with gradual class downgrades, one level at a time dropping from a T3 class to Aristocrat, but that's at best a rough approximation. So at the highest ranks, the equivalency of level breaks down, and these are leaders, not ass-kickers.

That just sounds like yet another reason that Team Evil wins everything forever. Because they get to turn their old soldiers into skeletons that retain their prowess forever. Or better yet, not use living people as soldiers at all and make only the people who are no longer a part of your society into troops.

RHOD is actually pertinent to this thread. If the antagonist had just taken his dragons, his wyverns, his manticores and his abishai and flown to Brindol he could have easily cowed it into submission. But the module revolves around the idea that he has to spend weeks trucking a land army of hobgoblin mooks across the valley.

He's also dumb in the standard way that antagonists of series with escalating power levels are dumb, sending his lieutenants after the PCs according to the Sorting Algorithm of Evil rather than just going to murder them directly the second they demonstrate that they're more dangerous than the random militias his troops have been engaging. Maybe there's some super-compelling reason given that he doesn't do that which I forgot, but mostly the lesson of RHOD seems to be "if one side has really crappy strategic doctrine, they will probably lose even from a position of strength".

Seward

2022-02-04, 01:49 AM

Well, maybe. But Leadership is supposed to be a proxy for in-world organizations

Actually, Leadership is the 3.5 evolution of what every high level person got in AD&D when they reached "name" level and built a stronghold. You got "leadership" for free, and it was baked into high level play assumptions. Once past level 10, an adventurer didn't need a party anymore, he could do it with henchmen and followers. Maybe not as well, but this was the main appeal of Charisma.

As a GM running Temple of Elemental Evil I had the L4 cleric who is the first "boss" with high intelligence and charisma get defeated but escape from a L1 party. He vowed to make his own adventuring bands, having seen how dangerous even beginning adventureres were, and recruited the 15 henchmen allowed from his 18 cha, from a city big enough to have that many to recruit, formed them into 3 parties and became a menace on par with the actual story arc threat...those guys had pretty good pr, were careful about what people saw them do, and because the guy running them knew all about where the wild humanoids and rival evil organizations were in the local area, they were very very good at finding easy targets to level on while also disrupting the organizations good, neutral and otherwise opposing the people he theoretically worked for (he was CE, he really worked for himself). It got to where the Paladin in the party literally said "we need to deal with this temple of elemental evil problem so we can concentrate on the REAL threat...." (that cleric and his merry bands of murderhoboes)

It models an organization that is created around a famous PC, who is famous by virtue of having achieved 6th level and devoting a feat to gathering it. It is no less a part of the game than Weapon Spec or Craft Rods, both of which have level limits (explicit or de-facto) before you can take them.

rather than just going to murder them directly the second they demonstrate that they're more dangerous than the random militias his troops have been engaging. Maybe there's some super-compelling reason given that he doesn't do that which I forgot, but mostly the lesson of RHOD seems to be "if one side has really crappy strategic doctrine, they will probably lose even from a position of strength".

He tries, once he figures out who they are.

Until chapter 2, the PC's are random yahoos who disrupted a raid or two. Dropping Skull Gorge bridge, especially if they kill the wyrmlord and dragon responsible for that area gets their attention.

There are 3 encounters explicitly designed to set the pc's up to die, and one of them is the cause of more character death than pretty much anything else in the module.

One is a prisoner the PC's "Rescue" who has long range communication spells, a glibness potion to get accepted and pretty good native bluff anyway, plus spell support to charm or just shadow the party invisibly. It is fairly easy for her to be the reason the later encounters happen, or just steer the party into situations where the enemy is somehow always ready for them. If the PC's are too good at detecting that sort of spy, she can shift to disrupting things in the major city and just show up in one of the Brindol Battles to stab PC's when things are touchy (streets of blood, or possibly the sniper encounter, or the dragon encounter, or at minimum the final encounter).

One is a literal night ambush by Barghests who buff cannon fodder . They have invisibility, bull strength to prebuff with and can literally be dimension door-d next to sleeping enemies and get a coup-de-grace opportunity before even an alert guard would know they were there...and god help you if that guard gets charmed and lead off before the killing starts.

The final one involves a fake "raiders torturing civilians" mission when greater barghests dimension door in fully buffed blackspawn raiders, enlarged, bull strength, raged, all potions active and into full attack position on whomever is most likely to die. This can be an incredibly dangerous encounter and if you ask RHOD players when deaths happened and what brought them closest to a TPK, it's this encounter.

The only saving grace on the latter two is that if the Barghests do the most effective assassination tactic, they don't have a dim door to escape with, so you don't have to keep fighting them. If one does get away though, keeping it from shadowing your party and setting up more ambushes is very difficult.

There's also a sniper assassin in the city battle. While canonically he shoots a council member and PC's are sent to kill him, our GM decided we'd become a bigger threat, and he tried to take out our "face" character. That was another very dangerous encounter, as leaving aside the assassin, his buddies have aoe blasting spells that can get most or all of the party in the terrain specified, often twice before anybody can act if they managed to get surprise.

These ambush attempts, especially the Barghest, are more dangerous with a core game than a splatbook game. Anticipate teleport undoes two of them (or at least is reduced to "sneak up invisible" which is easier to cope with, although it works better if they draft one of the L3 hob clerics to cast silence too) and just delay death can also reduce the body count, if not the risk of tpk, as you do still have to win the fight and losing people early messes with your action economy. If the party can routinely detect invisible enemies, some alternative routes to ambush are also cut off, and the odds of not being surprised by the sniper encounter if directed at PCs is much higher.

Finally using Barghests means he's deadly serious. If the party loses, nobody who died is ever going to be raised, and those lesser Barghests will be greater barghests when the replacement party faces them. It also means that if a Barghest is near a downed ally, you have to accept he won't be rezzed or you have to do something about that Barghest right now to prevent a consume action the next turn.

Aside from one dumb move with his final dragon in chapter 5 (it is important to remember all of the RHOD dragons were very very young for dragons and the largest CE one isn't going to take orders well) most of the mayhem PC's caused was them acting on him, and they tend to move around the map so fast it is hard to know where they are going next. If the PC's are being slow and obvious, you could of course add some more targeted assassinations, but we never felt in play that we weren't being taken seriously.

RHOD actually has no scry or die resources - its best clerics are doing the big ritual (it is possible all the deaths ARE the ritual and the horde win or lose is why they get close to completion). They have no arcanist capable of teleport, and being humanoids, have no way to just buy scrolls at a neighboring magic-mart. So they have to locate the PC's with troops also capable of ambushing. Mostly they have a few quite appropriate dedicated resources who grab local muscle to help with the attempt.

Also the Wyrmlords are military leaders. Staff pukes, not Navy Seals. Their real talents are in herding humanoids and dragons (sometimes the dragon is what lets them herd humanoids...and that relationship is the most important). They aren't who you send to kill an elite enemy murder-team, and if said murder team locates them before they know they are targeted, their random staff/bodyguards won't be enough, and usually aren't. Although the chance of escaping on dragonback is always there, and happens often enough that even careful parties have a hard time getting a clean sweep of both dragons and Wyrmlords, and some groups struggle to get any. A 4 person party of level 5-7 has a hard time killing a dragon fast enough to keep it from leaving. Even little dragons.

Having the survivors all show up for the finale is a sign of how desperate things have gotten for Kharn. The horde is losing faith in the leadership of himself and his lieutenants, so they have to lead from the front. Which almost always goes badly for them, even in the rare campaign where the horde wins overall.

AvatarVecna

2022-02-04, 09:23 AM

That starts getting in to some assumptions though. Yes, you could take NPC WBL as gospel and assume that none of the characters are doing anything to generate wealth. But then you have to ask why you aren't assuming things like XP/advancement rates or Mentor aren't being taken as gospel as well. You've worked through a reasonable example using one source of truth presented by the rules for setting demographics. But it's not the only source of truth, and the others that you could use instead produce very different outcomes.

Firstly: by default, NPCs don't gain XP. The XP rules as presented in the DMG don't allow for it. Go ahead and read through the XP section if you don't believe me - every single time it's discussing who's getting XP, it's discussing "the party" in general, or "the PCs" in particular. This is why Leadership has a whole section discussing how cohorts are supposed to gain XP - because if that section wasn't there, they wouldn't get any. You're welcome to houserule that if you want, and that would lead to enormous consequences for the setting as a whole. But if you're wondering why I'm "assuming things like XP/advancement rates aren't being taken as gospel", the reason is that I am. I read the rules, and they say PCs get XP, not NPCs.

If NPCs can get XP, the world gets very different very quickly. Toads are real-world animals that breed extremely quickly, and some of them can be Elite Toads (that is, toads with the elite array). Furthermore, Toads are actually incapable of hurting you, all the while capable of giving some modicum of XP. Setting up Elite Toad Breeding Farms will give your community an easy source of CR 1 creatures to literally crush underfoot. That's enough to grind to level 9 at warp speed before you even have to consider fighting something that can fight back. And that if the whole society is going this hard, a meager bit of work by dozens of high-level crafters before you were even born assures that you'll get a full set of +5 inherents coming out of the hospital, and a few hundred thousand gold in magic item loans when you become an adult. Don't worry, even a modicum of optimization will see you pay those loans back in spellcasting services and item crafting yourself. And the whole of society will grind the world under its heel, even if they're only trying that one "next step" harder than WotC.

Secondly: I'm fully aware that I'm making some assumptions. That's because I've seen threads like this before. You wanna know how threads like this go when you make more generous assumptions about NPC capabilities? Pun-Pun. Okay maybe not literally Pun-Pun, sure. But like...this town has a Wizard 13, who is theoretically capable of casting Planar Binding. "How much he can do for the war effort" ranges from "cast a couple Cloudkills" to "infinite genie wishes of infinite power". Assumptions have to be made, because otherwise the answer to "what does army-scale combat look like in 3.5?" is "I dont know and neither do you because the field of possibilities is literally infinite and we have no idea where along that infinite spectrum the NPCs ended up".

Except that last bit about not knowing where they are? We actually have some guidelines. We have guidelines on what level they should be from the community rules. And we have some guidelines on how optimally they're built - because the DMG also provides baseline stats for NPCs of all the core classes. It provides a level-by-level breakdown for their gear, which gives us an idea of how much gold they have for other stuff, and also just gives an idea of how optimally they're already spending it to give us a guess at how optimal their feats/skills/spells will be. But also it gives us sample NPCs of various levels. Here's what the lvl 10 sample wizard looks like:

Sample 10th-Level NPC Wizard: Drow Wiz 10; CR 11; Medium humanoid (elf ); HD 10d4+3; hp 29; Init +3; Spd 30 ft.; AC 17, touch 14, flat-footed 14; Base Atk +5; Grp +5; Atk +6 melee (1d6+1/18–20, masterwork rapier) or +9 ranged (1d4/19–20, masterwork hand crossbow); Full Atk +6 melee (1d6+1/18–20, masterwork rapier) or +9 ranged (1d4/19–20, masterwork hand crossbow); SA —; SQ drow traits; AL NE; SV Fort +4, Ref +7, Will +9; Str 10, Dex 16, Con 11, Int 19, Wis 12, Cha 10.

Skills and Feats: Concentration +13, Craft (alchemy) +14, Knowledge (arcana) +17, Knowledge (dungeoneering) +17, Knowledge (history) +14, Listen +3, Search +6, Spellcraft +19, Spot +3; Brew Potion, Combat Casting, Craft Wondrous Item, Great Fortitude, Scribe Scroll, Spell Penetration, Toughness.

Drow Traits: Immune to magic sleep spells and effects; +2 racial bonus on saves against enchantment spells or effects; darkvision 120 ft.; entitled to a Search check when within 5 feet of a secret or concealed door as though actively looking for it; spell resistance 26; +2 racial bonus on Will saves against spells or spell-like abilities; spell-like abilities (1/day—dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire as the spells from a 10th-level caster); light blindness (blinded for 1 round by abrupt exposure to bright light, –1 circumstance penalty on all attack rolls, saves, and checks while operating in bright light); +2 racial bonus on Listen, Spot, and Search checks (already figured into the statistics given above).

Wizard Spells Prepared (4/5/5/4/4/2; save DC 14 + spell level): 0—daze, detect magic, ghost sound, ray of frost; 1st—magic missile (3), shield, true strike; 2nd—blur, flaming sphere, glitterdust, Melf ’s acid arrow, web; 3rd—dispel magic, fireball, haste, lightning bolt; 4th—enervation, ice storm (2), shout; 5th—cone of cold, teleport.

Spellbook: 0—daze, detect magic, detect poison, flare, ghost sound, ray of frost, read magic; 1st—charm person, identify, mage armor, magic missile, magic weapon, protection from good, shield, true strike; 2nd—bear’s endurance, blur, bulls’s strength, cat’s grace, glitterdust, invisibility, Melf ’s acid arrow, resist energy, scorching ray, web; 3rd—dispel magic, fireball, fly, haste, hold person, invisibility sphere, lightning bolt, suggestion; 4th— charm monster, confusion, dimension door, enervation, ice storm, Otiluke’s resilient sphere, scrying, shout, stoneskin; 5th—cone of cold, dominate person, telekinesis, teleport, wall of force.

Possessions: Bracers of armor +2, ring of protection +1, amulet of natural armor +1, cloak of resistance +1, masterwork rapier, masterwork hand crossbow, 10 bolts, 3 doses drow knockout poison, spellbook.

We know what NPCs look like. We know how they pick feats and skills and spells and items. We know what their stats look like. We know what their finances look like. We know how optimal they're built, and deep down we know how optimal they're actually played. That's how we know PCs are special: they get to use their brains. It may be a kind of boring answer, but it's the closest we have to an official answer, and it's the closest we could ever possibly have to a concrete answer. Anything else is fan fiction where we're arbitrarily picking a number from 1 to infinite and calling that "reasonable".

That just sounds like yet another reason that Team Evil wins everything forever. Because they get to turn their old soldiers into skeletons that retain their prowess forever. Or better yet, not use living people as soldiers at all and make only the people who are no longer a part of your society into troops.

I mean if we're following your logic, then yes. If NPCs get to build/play smart, that includes the bad guys. And the default setup of D&D is that the bad guys are stronger than the good guys, which is why the PCs are needed to come in and tip the scales in favor of good again. If you set a party of lvl 10 casters against a BBEG Wizard 13, well guess what he can have Planar Binding and you can't so you lose. And so does everybody else, forever, because infinite wishes of infinite power.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-04, 02:30 PM

RHOD actually has no scry or die resources - its best clerics are doing the big ritual (it is possible all the deaths ARE the ritual and the horde win or lose is why they get close to completion).

So the reason the BBEG doesn't do anything personally is that he's busy with "arbitrary plot ritual"? That's kind of disappointing, but I suppose that does count as an explanation.

Firstly: by default, NPCs don't gain XP. The XP rules as presented in the DMG don't allow for it. Go ahead and read through the XP section if you don't believe me - every single time it's discussing who's getting XP, it's discussing "the party" in general, or "the PCs" in particular.

Yes, because it's discussing the party getting XP. Those rules mean that if you have a pet Vrock or whatever it doesn't eventually start gaining Barbarian levels. They don't, as far as I'm aware, say anything like "no one except the PCs gets XP ever". If you think there is a rule that says "NPCs in general don't use the XP rules", please cite it. I'm not going to dig through books to prove a negative.

You wanna know how threads like this go when you make more generous assumptions about NPC capabilities? Pun-Pun. Okay maybe not literally Pun-Pun, sure. But like...this town has a Wizard 13, who is theoretically capable of casting Planar Binding. "How much he can do for the war effort" ranges from "cast a couple Cloudkills" to "infinite genie wishes of infinite power".

Well, yes. But the PCs vary in the same way. You have to answer the question of "what is planar binding allowed to do" if you are going to have any 13th level Wizards in your game. Punting on it for NPC Wizards doesn't solve your problem unless you're playing E10. And, as I said earlier, planar binding is far less broken in the context of a nation and an army. If an 11th level Wizard binds eight CR 10 monsters on rotation, that's a huge swing in the power level of their party that's not really replicable anywhere else. But for a nation, that's not really any different than happening to have some more 10th level characters, or allying with a tribe of Fire Giants.

Assumptions have to be made, because otherwise the answer to "what does army-scale combat look like in 3.5?" is "I dont know and neither do you because the field of possibilities is literally infinite and we have no idea where along that infinite spectrum the NPCs ended up".

Which is why the discussion should start with "what assumptions do you want to make" or "what are the results of various assumptions". Not "these are the correct assumptions to make and everything else produces nonsense results". For example, if you don't assume the standard settlement rules are the default for everything, you can very easily get demographics where most nations just don't have access to planar binding-capable casters, but still have a reasonable range of magic at their disposal. That provides a much more compelling explanation for why that spell doesn't come up than "they don't use it because NPCs are dumb".

We know what NPCs look like. We know how they pick feats and skills and spells and items. We know what their stats look like. We know what their finances look like. We know how optimal they're built, and deep down we know how optimal they're actually played. That's how we know PCs are special: they get to use their brains.

I don't think that's really accurate. Because we have access to at least outlines of PCs the designers built, and those are also really unoptimized. It's not that NPCs are supposed to play worse than players, it's that the designers didn't understand how to play their game very well. I will grant you that it's probably reasonable to say that NPCs will have simpler builds than PCs (e.g. no dips, at most one PrC, less sources), and that they are modestly less powerful as a result, but NPCs are not intended to be dramatically less powerful than PCs.

Seward

2022-02-06, 03:15 AM

So the reason the BBEG doesn't do anything personally is that he's busy with "arbitrary plot ritual"? That's kind of disappointing, but I suppose that does count as an explanation.

Yup. That's why a lot of GMs go with the Thanatos Gambit (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThanatosGambit) headcanon, where basically to do the ritual lots of people had to die nearby. BBEG doesn't care if they are his horde, or the defenders of the vale. If enough die, he gets the ritual to work. Being, you know, evil, he doesn't bother to tell even his Wyrmlords this truth, so they have no idea their deaths are considered just as good as them killing others.

That turns it from kind of dumb to actually a pretty clever idea.
It just doesn't quite finish before enraged, leveled-up PC's come crashing down the door, unless said PC's are too cautious or get distracted and wander off.

Also canonically, the folks doing the ritual are mentally exhausted as they've been not sleeping and using lesser restoration spells to keep going for the entire period of the adventure, over a month usually, and so probably aren't at their best either and have pretty much stopped directing the minions, who are mostly doing their own thing in the stronghold. Which explains why the defense is so disjointed in the final chapter, although again a lot of GM's throw out the tactics and do something less stupid with resources available to hold off the PCs.

martixy

2022-02-06, 10:18 AM

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Optimization is pretty big in this forum, but it's all PCs and their overpowered classes and builds. No one ever thinks of optimizing the lowly mook.

Lets start...

~
In "superhero world", aid another is useful. The helpful trait raises it to +3. Improved Aid feat from OA instead makes it +4 (they don't stack). If you have masses of 1st level guys, stacking up those numbers is better than 5% individual rolls until high levels. You should make the typical soldiers 1st level fighters with the commander variant class, which can use aid another at 60 ft. range. If you have a formation of these soldiers using aid another you can certainly put up competitive attack mods. They're still vulnerable to AOE spells, but the 60-foot aid another range makes it easy for them to spread out, and it means they can direct their aid where it's needed.

So you have these masses of 1st level fighters using aid another at range. Then sprinkle them with higher-level "point guys" who are the recipients of the aid. (Against human PCs, even a 1st level "point guy" ranger with FE human, solitary hunter and a mwk composite longbow gives baseline stats of +6 hit and d8+4 damage, which isn't horrible. Create squads of 6 fighters and 1 ranger, and every 7 men in the army are putting out one attack at +30.)

Even a 1st level commoner conscript with Improved Aid -- a very reasonable feat to take, useful in all parts of their life -- who must be adjacent to aid another can be a threat if they're adding +4 to a higher level soldier's attack.

Build-wise it's valid. Trying to justify it is pointless.

In any case, aid another is actually not very good. It is only helpful in very limited circumstances.

Which I will now demonstrate using the awesome power of math. BEHOLD! (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14P-_AUDhtIEwav7dhF5G7AD0OowlRq2MmRVabsqDTU8)

Feel free to play around with the values as you want. Understanding what's going on will require some basic understanding of statistics. For those that don't I will just state the final conclusion here:
Aid another is only relevantly useful if the attacker hits on a die roll of 20, if automatic hits didn't exist.

Notice how incredibly specific that condition is.

If aid another doesn't alter the die roll needed to hit, it won't matter - if you hit only on a 20 even with aid another you might as well not use it.
And if you need a die roll of less than 20 to hit, you're better off rolling more times, than using aid another.

The one case where this falls apart is a situation, where you can use aid another, but are not in a position to attack yourself. Note that this is a more broad statement than the general rule (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/specialAttacks.htm#aidAnother) - "If you’re in position to make a melee attack on an opponent that is engaging a friend in melee combat, you can attempt to aid your friend as a standard action." If you can attack anything, even if it's not the same target - unless there are extra tactical considerations as to which target must be focused.
One example that subverts the general rule, as you pointed out, is the Commander fighter variant (from Dragon #310). However, once again, due to the limited usefulness it's pointless to make every participant a commander.
The best use case of a commander is a small fraction of them in each squad/encounter, granting the ability to focus strategically important targets without repositioning.

Another case of aid another outside the above is where the expected damage output of the aided exceeds those that aid them enough to make up for the lower to-hit - creating an elaborate version of power attack.

Now, let's zoom out a little.

When looking at including war in your campaign, you must first consider what type of war you want your setting to support. Have you heard of the Tippyverse? It's a classic thought experiment in examining the logical conclusions to which certain rules, taken to the extreme will lead. You must engage in something similar.

This thread has already detailed a lot of the implications of various rules and their interactions. My point is that you can do it the other way around - decide what type of warfare you want to see, and alter the rules to support it. I suppose you can do it as you go, or you can adopt a more systematic approach and examine how each of the six warfighting functions (https://www.nap.edu/read/18321/chapter/9#153) is affected by the various rules and spells in D&D.

Here are some examples from my setting. Overall I wanted to support classic medieval warfare in some form or another, with the option to "Tippyfy" things in limited situations.

1. ALL spells that create objects and have a Duration of Instantaneous now cost XP equal to 1/5th of the object's GP value or 20 XP per cu. ft. of volume, whichever is higher. Some spells have increased in level - e.g. Create water is now L2 instead of L0. And in general, I've tried to eliminate any instances of getting "something for nothing". Like a conservation law.
2. Scry-and-die is a popular and effective tactic, and I've tried to mitigate it. Security in the real world isn't about making something foolproof. It's about making an attack expensive or difficult enough to deter all but the most determined attacker. The same principle can be applied to a d&d setting. For example, lead sheets in the walls are standard practice when erecting most castles or any important building. Any more prosperous city features city-wide teleport wards, preventing or otherwise messing with teleport magic targeted within its borders. The entire world itself is littered with wandering dead magic and wild magic zones, which I've ruled require the keeping and continual updating of "teleport maps", without which, any teleport spell over long distances becomes anything from unreliable to mortally dangerous.
3. Flight, in its many forms, is one of the greatest strategic assets in a D&D world, and inspired by this little comic (https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2011-05-28), I have several rules to address it. Like casting spells requiring concentration.
4. There's high-level magic, but it's rare or isolated. Magical talent is a thing and demographically, few people are born with the ability to become even wizards. Places where high level magic exists in abundance might be extraplanar locations or other exotic places. Fielding magic users as part of battle is a standard, but limited practice. They are strategic assets or special forces - force multipliers, rather than main battle strength.

The natural state of D&Dland is one of extreme stratification, where high level characters have no natural reason to interact with low level ones. There are wars that are fought with armies with modest magical support, and there are armies that are fought with teleporting ninja squads, but those are very rarely going to be the same wars.
I really like this wording, and it sums up my thoughts as well.

Yup. That's why a lot of GMs go with the Thanatos Gambit (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThanatosGambit) headcanon, where basically to do the ritual lots of people had to die nearby. BBEG doesn't care if they are his horde, or the defenders of the vale. If enough die, he gets the ritual to work. Being, you know, evil, he doesn't bother to tell even his Wyrmlords this truth, so they have no idea their deaths are considered just as good as them killing others.

That turns it from kind of dumb to actually a pretty clever idea.
It just doesn't quite finish before enraged, leveled-up PC's come crashing down the door, unless said PC's are too cautious or get distracted and wander off.
I have no original thoughts it seems.

Elves

2022-02-06, 02:37 PM

Yup. That's why a lot of GMs go with the Thanatos Gambit (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThanatosGambit) headcanon, where basically to do the ritual lots of people had to die nearby. BBEG doesn't care if they are his horde, or the defenders of the vale. If enough die, he gets the ritual to work. Being, you know, evil, he doesn't bother to tell even his Wyrmlords this truth, so they have no idea their deaths are considered just as good as them killing others.
This is what I did when I played it and I may have posted it in Saintheart's thread. The priests of Tiamat gave every soldier a Red Hand tattoo on their hand as their "initiation" into the Horde. It turns out this was actually a ritual mark that contributed their soul to the Tiamat ritual upon their death. So the Battle of Brindol was a win/win proposition for Azarr Kul -- whether he took the town or not, he would receive the influx of power he needed to begin the ritual's final stage.

I think it's a great tweak.
- It explains why Azarr bothered marching out that land army.
- It explains why he didn't wait until the ritual was complete before commencing his invasion.
- It explains why the ritual just happens to be nearing the final stage after the Battle of Brindol.
- It makes the Red Hand motif in the title a more prominent part of the story, starting from scene 1.

It could even be seen as a calculated slaughter: his war will diminish or eradicate the hobgoblin tribes, making way for his new empire of draconic creatures.

In any case, aid another is actually not very good. It is only helpful in very limited circumstances.
Which is why you take the trait or the feat to make it better. And the aid will be most effective when focused on higher-level NPCs who have higher attack and damage.

Say your professional soldier corps is 500 1st level fighters (commander variant) with Improved Aid, and to receive the aid, 100 ~5th level veterans with a baseline +10 to hit (5 bab, 3 stat [15 from elite array +1 ASI), 1 mwk, 1 Weapon Focus).

That's 100 attacks at +30 -- between 95 and 75 hits for the typical AC range, instead of 30 hits from nat 20s if they were all attacking. And all the hits do 5th level damage instead of 1st. Miss chances affect both proportionately.

I'm NOT saying this army will stand up to counterstrategies from another army in a high magic setting. But in response to OP's question, the Improved Aid + commander fighter combo is a way to make a mass of mundane mooks something that could theoretically harm mid/high level PCs. 600 soldiers become equivalent to 100 natural attacks from a high level monster. They have low defenses, but without AOE it's tedious to eliminate them all. AOE can at least be mitigated since they're able to spread out and still aid.

It's not like the PCs can't win by pulling out their tricks, but this forces them to put in a modicum of effort rather than everyone knowing they're invincible.

Palanan

2022-02-06, 02:48 PM

Originally Posted by Elves
Which is why you take the trait or the feat to make it better….

Say your professional soldier corps is 500 1st level fighters (commander variant) with improved aid and 100 5th level soldiers who are focused on damage output and have +10 to hit.

Where is the commander variant for the fighter? And the trait and/or feat to improve Aid Another?

Elves

2022-02-06, 04:42 PM

Where is the commander variant for the fighter? And the trait and/or feat to improve Aid Another?

Improved Aid - OA
Commander - Dragon #310

There is a wrinkle here it looks like: Improved Aid only works when aiding melee attacks. That makes the strat significantly worse because engaging PCs in melee is an extra level of risk and limits how mobile you can be.

I guess you want your archer aid recipients to be kenku, who get +3 instead of +2 for every ally who aids them. The downside: only a 50% boost instead of a 100% boost. The upside: no one needs to take any feats.

Empyreal Dragon

2022-02-06, 07:19 PM

Don't know if this helps much, but going off of the demographics chart, assuming a relatively Large kingdom, maybe one large city and twice as many settlements of each size down.

You end up with roughly 1508 sorcerers and wizards on an even split, best numbers possible. So not nearly enough to field an army, but enough to field maybe a large battalion.

But let's put those numbers in perspective, at least 48 soldiers are high enough level to utilize 5th level spells. Which is at least 48 people capable of performing binding or ally spells, at least 48 who can potentially access Teleportation magic, and of those 48, a dozen of them have 6th or 7th level offensive magic.

At least 8 Casters with 9th level spells.

Just the level 1 casters mean you can field almost 900 casters with wands.

So... I'm sure we can finally the numbers, but if we go by the demographics chart alone, we'd need a truly immense population to support a professional army of casters. But.... 8 casters with 9th level spells in a single metropolis is already a gargantuan amount of power to throw around.

Seward

2022-02-06, 08:10 PM

I have no original thoughts it seems.

I got the idea from a RHOD advice thread after I played it and was looking into running it. I can't claim it was my idea, but I happily stole it.

Regarding aid-another on the battlefield - I'm in the "have more conscripts fishing for natural 20s with ranged attacks" school of thought. The one basically described in the OOTS Azure Army sergeant talking to Haley right before the big battle. A PC in the open targeted by an army in bowshot better have sufficient DR to simply ignore mundane arrows/crossbow bolts/etc, because otherwise he or she will be a very dead pincushion.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-06, 08:32 PM

So... I'm sure we can finally the numbers, but if we go by the demographics chart alone, we'd need a truly immense population to support a professional army of casters. But.... 8 casters with 9th level spells in a single metropolis is already a gargantuan amount of power to throw around.

That's why I'm not especially fond of using the demographics tables as your source of truth for this sort of thing. You get a world that has a relative dearth of low-level casters, but enough high level casters to blow up the game several times over. I'm not of the opinion that "as close to medieval reality as possible" is a desirable goal for D&D combat, but when an appreciable percentage of the world's spell-power is tied up in a small number of characters, it's hard to justify why you have armies at all instead of just those dudes duking it out (or you get epicycles like "all NPCs are terminally dumb"). IMO, better to start from Mentor/Apprentice. That gives you a much more workable distribution of magic, and gives you a natural explanation for the role of state capacity in organizing armies.

Palanan

2022-02-06, 09:15 PM

Originally Posted by RandomPeasant
IMO, better to start from Mentor/Apprentice. That gives you a much more workable distribution of magic, and gives you a natural explanation for the role of state capacity in organizing armies.

Can you go into this a little? I’ve never used Mentor, so I don’t have any sense of how it could influence magical demographics.

Yahzi Coyote

2022-02-06, 10:04 PM

To say 3.5 is not made for mass combat is a gross understatement.
Generals of Prime (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/218006/Generals-of-Prime)is a system that turns a group of common soldiers into a single creature, and then uses regular D&D rules to handle the combat. I've used it in my campaign recently and it works pretty well.

However... if you have 15th level characters, then warfare does not look like medieval warfare. The soldiers are there to mop up, perform sentry duty, and keep the commoners in line and paying taxes. If the opposing side does not have 15 CR threats of its own, you don't have a war, you have a police action.

Keep in mind that high-level combat is rocket tag: whoever strikes first probably wins. So both sides send out their common soldiers to duke it out, and only intervene when their side starts losing (because they know it means letting the other side strike at the high ranks first).

In the world of Prime, XP is a tangible resource, like gold; so the ruler of a wealthy and large kingdom will also be high-rank. Which is why you can't walk up to his tent and obliterate him. His rank is why he is king.

No other approach makes any sense.

Mechalich

2022-02-06, 10:26 PM

That's why I'm not especially fond of using the demographics tables as your source of truth for this sort of thing. You get a world that has a relative dearth of low-level casters, but enough high level casters to blow up the game several times over. I'm not of the opinion that "as close to medieval reality as possible" is a desirable goal for D&D combat, but when an appreciable percentage of the world's spell-power is tied up in a small number of characters, it's hard to justify why you have armies at all instead of just those dudes duking it out (or you get epicycles like "all NPCs are terminally dumb"). IMO, better to start from Mentor/Apprentice. That gives you a much more workable distribution of magic, and gives you a natural explanation for the role of state capacity in organizing armies.

Depending on the assumptions regarding optimization the number of high-level casters needed to blow up the game can be a distinct: one. This is absolutely true if Epic Spellcasting is allowed. And, D&D does in fact have a setting where a since high-level caster did in fact blow up the setting, Dark Sun (yes there was still a setting left over afterwards, but its missing some big pieces and a massive chunk of the world map in completely uninhabitable).

At the same time there's also the counter-problem that, in the absence of high-level spellcasting the monsters win forever and the world falls apart that way (this is especially true of powerful intelligent monsters with DR, which can't be brought down by massive crit-fishing arrow barrages).

In order for large numbers of otherwise ordinary people to matter, you need to place a ceiling on the power level of the mightiest individuals. 5e, it's worth noting, went and did this. It did so rather imperfectly by playing with the math, but the utility of armies is clearly much greater in that edition.

3.5 is the edition of D&D in which the powerful people (and monsters) are the most powerful, and it's not even close. It's a fantasy superhero setting, which is fine, but the problem is the general fluff fails to recognize and acknowledge this and none of the settings were built as superhero settings. There's also the issue that, as designed, D&D settings have been superhero settings since the Stone Age and that's a real challenge. Most modern superhero settings cheat by assuming society proceeds as normal until Date XXXX, at which point suddenly super powers, but D&D really can't do that.

Bohandas

2022-02-07, 12:00 AM

As you note, throwing low-level conscripts at high level characters is unlikely to accomplish much of anything. Throwing Commoners, or Warriors, or even low-level PC classes into the face of cloudkills, bound Outsiders, or Dragons is a waste of human (or Elven) life on par with the worst engagements in WWI. So nations presumably don't do that.

Well against targets without damage reduction you can expect to deal 4.5 damage per round per twenty surviving conscripts (with crossbows) due to a roll of 20 always hitting

martixy

2022-02-07, 07:03 AM

Which is why you take the trait or the feat to make it better. And the aid will be most effective when focused on higher-level NPCs who have higher damage figures and may already have >5% to hit.

Say your professional soldier corps is 500 1st level fighters (commander variant) with improved aid, and to receive the aid, 100 ~5th level veterans with a baseline +10 to hit (5 bab, 3 stat [15 from elite array +1 ASI), 1 mwk, 1 Weapon Focus).

That's 100 attacks at +30 -- between 95 and 75 hits for the typical AC range, instead of 30 hits from nat 20s. And all the hits do 5th level damage instead of 1st. Miss chances affect both proportionately.

Oh, you were talking about stacking Aid Another. For some reason I thought you couldn't, even though it explicitly says you can. That does change things.

Improved Aid - OA
Commander - Dragon #310

There is a wrinkle here it looks like: Improved Aid only works when aiding melee attacks. That makes the strat significantly worse because engaging PCs in melee is an extra level of risk and limits how mobile you can be.

I guess you want your archer aid recipients to be kenku, who get +3 instead of +2 for every ally who aids them. The downside: only a 50% boost instead of a 100% boost. The upside: no one needs to take any feats.

Improved Aid Another - Dragon #323; Not limited like the version from OA.
So pick your poison OA 3.0 or Dragon magazine material.

Regarding aid-another on the battlefield - I'm in the "have more conscripts fishing for natural 20s with ranged attacks" school of thought. The one basically described in the OOTS Azure Army sergeant talking to Haley right before the big battle. A PC in the open targeted by an army in bowshot better have sufficient DR to simply ignore mundane arrows/crossbow bolts/etc, because otherwise he or she will be a very dead pincushion.

You do realize you need not rely on your gut feeling and "schools of thought", right? A bit of math can give you a definitive answer, one that does not rely on opinion and feelings.

The spreadsheet I already linked contains the most relevant math. Admittedly it omits certain effects, such as the possibility of aid another to fail or critical hits, but these effects have negligible influence on the final results and are therefore pretty safe to ignore. Though a complete examination wouldn't be that hard to do, just a bit tedious. High-school algebra and basic statistics are entirely sufficient to explore the question exhaustively.

If anyone is unsure how to use the tool I've provided, they can instead give me any arbitrary situation and we can explore the implications together.

That said, things get more murky on the build and demographics side of things. I'm in the camp of playing it pretty loose with the ludonarrative consistency, for many reasons even beyond most of it being hidden from the players.

In my setting usually only children are L1 commoners, adults are generally L2-4, and certain experts, masters and exceptional individuals reach L4-7. Training is usually modelled as substituting commoner levels with more specialized classes - e.g. warrior for militia and rank and file soldiers, expert for bureaucrats, adept for priest. A trained soldier might be a L3 warrior, a conscripted peasant after a week in boot camp might be L1 warrior+L2 commoner. (This just makes the most sense to me, but is probably not the only valid approach.)

The aid-another shenanigans of your 600-strong soldier corps could easily be re-fluffed as their particular brand of overwhelm tactics for dealing with strong foes.

I spent a bit of time working out how to utilize aid another. It depends (because it always does), but here's the takeaways: If you want to go that route, you really want improved aid, the normal +2 makes your "return on investment" significantly worse - getting the same bonus requires more helpers, which can be targeted by AoE, take up space and supplies, etc.

Apart from that, there are situations where you want to stack aid bonuses, and ones where you want to simply roll more - and you want the flexibility to choose the most optimal on a round by round basis. Disregarding issues of DR, the best composition in this case would be squads of melee veterans with heavy hit builds, backed up by commander archers. The archers don't need precise shot or other archery feats since they will be playing for nat20s only.

These can then be deployed as standalone units of 30-40 man platoons. For a ground battle of medium-sized creatures, one enemy can be surrounded by at most 8 melee (non-reach) fighters. Something like 20-24 archer-aiders and 12 melee veterans (8 for a full surround, and a few in reserve). Then, depending on the situation you might be using aid another spread out, over many of the veterans, or stacked on fewer, or not at all, just going for extra rolls. Attaching a Dragonfire Inspiration bard to each platoon would also boost its effectiveness - damage is almost universally worth more in these degenerate game states, where the system's dice math is twisted beyond its normal limits.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-07, 08:25 AM

And, D&D does in fact have a setting where a since high-level caster did in fact blow up the setting, Dark Sun (yes there was still a setting left over afterwards, but its missing some big pieces and a massive chunk of the world map in completely uninhabitable).

And you will note that this setting is an AD&D setting, not a 3e one. Similarly Planescape (which takes "infinite outsiders of arbitrary power" at face value) and Spelljammer (which is basically "the Prime went Tippverse, you're at the leading edge of exploration") are AD&D settings. This notion you have that 3e was somehow uniquely gonzo is just not accurate. The only real difference between 3e and AD&D is that 3e has a bunch of infinite loops, but those are mostly ignored in these discussions anyway. Even 4e is in some ways more gonzo than 3e, with "become a demigod" being a thing you can just do as a 21st level character, no questions asked.

In order for large numbers of otherwise ordinary people to matter, you need to place a ceiling on the power level of the mightiest individuals. 5e, it's worth noting, went and did this. It did so rather imperfectly by playing with the math, but the utility of armies is clearly much greater in that edition.

Or you can just accept that when a 20th level character shows up in a conflict between large numbers of 3rd level characters, he wins. You know, like most of the fantasy genre does. When the Lord Ruler is confronted with the prospect of a mass peasant revolt, his response is not "oh no, I am undone by the will of the people", but "god, killing you lot is going to be tedious". Smaug explicitly drives out an entire city of dwarves, despite them presumably not wanting to be driven out, and is defeated only by the actions of named characters.

The reason 20th level characters don't go around upsetting 3rd level applecarts isn't because they can't, it's because they don't care. But if a 20th level character shows up to upset that appplecart, it gets well and truly upset. And that's okay. If sometimes a country gets ruled by dragons or a mage-tyrant, that's okay. More than that, I would submit that it is in fact much cooler than simply having everything be medieval Europe forever.

Generals of Prime (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/218006/Generals-of-Prime)is a system that turns a group of common soldiers into a single creature, and then uses regular D&D rules to handle the combat. I've used it in my campaign recently and it works pretty well.

"Combat works, we can make a mass combat system by combining little dudes into big ones" can work, but it's not always going to be satisfying. Armies don't really fight like individuals, and I think on some level people just want battles to feel different from personal skirmishes. I'm not saying it can't work, or that someone who enjoys it is wrong, but IMO it's not an ideal solution.

Can you go into this a little? I’ve never used Mentor, so I don’t have any sense of how it could influence magical demographics.

It's in the DMG 2. You get apprentices, and they gain levels when you do. That allows you to turn a single mid-level character into a number of low-level ones. This gives you a (IMO) much more compelling set of demographics where there are a modest number of mid level characters, a large number of low (but not 1st) level ones, and a small number of high level ones. Basically, there's a hard cliff at 5th (the highest you get off Apprentice), then a soft one at ~10th (where you get enough resources to retire to luxury off the back of your own magic), and t hen a trickle of really high level characters who just aren't willing to retire.

martixy

2022-02-07, 10:41 AM

The reason 20th level characters don't go around upsetting 3rd level applecarts isn't because they can't, it's because they don't care. But if a 20th level character shows up to upset that appplecart, it gets well and truly upset. And that's okay. If sometimes a country gets ruled by dragons or a mage-tyrant, that's okay. More than that, I would submit that it is in fact much cooler than simply having everything be medieval Europe forever.

Tactically and statistically optimized masses of mooks can punch pretty high up the food chain, but not without limit. Generally you can go up around 5-10 levels depending on the game's power level.
This has been my experience.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-07, 10:58 AM

Tactically and statistically optimized masses of mooks can punch pretty high up the food chain, but not without limit. Generally you can go up around 5-10 levels depending on the game's power level.
This has been my experience.

To a degree, but a big chunk of that is because high level characters usually aren't optimized to kill a bunch of low level mooks. A Wizard who has a spell loadout, PrC choice, and feat selection based on an expectation of facing 3-6 encounters at an EL roughly equal to his level probably doesn't have much to protect himself from massed arrow fire or a good way to kill hundreds to thousands of troops, but that doesn't mean that a Wizard who was built from the ground up for breaking armies can't (especially since the real way a Wizard beats armies is by delegating).

Xervous

2022-02-07, 11:04 AM

Tactically and statistically optimized masses of mooks can punch pretty high up the food chain, but not without limit. Generally you can go up around 5-10 levels depending on the game's power level.
This has been my experience.

Far enough to overcome differences in numbers but liable to get smothered by mook culling effects or high level You Must Be This Tall... type checks. Mixed foes with exotic DR or regen, energy drain, cloudkill blasphemy etc.

Anything that checks against HD or demands adventurer grade wealth generally

martixy

2022-02-07, 11:18 AM

To a degree, but a big chunk of that is because high level characters usually aren't optimized to kill a bunch of low level mooks. A Wizard who has a spell loadout, PrC choice, and feat selection based on an expectation of facing 3-6 encounters at an EL roughly equal to his level probably doesn't have much to protect himself from massed arrow fire or a good way to kill hundreds to thousands of troops, but that doesn't mean that a Wizard who was built from the ground up for breaking armies can't (especially since the real way a Wizard beats armies is by delegating).

Well, Wiz is T1. They get to pick and choose their loadout and break the game into itty bitty pieces.

You got any mid-level build (7-12) we can try to challenge with an army?

Far enough to overcome differences in numbers but liable to get smothered by mook culling effects or high level You Must Be This Tall... type checks. Mixed foes with exotic DR or regen, energy drain, cloudkill blasphemy etc.

Anything that checks against HD or demands adventurer grade wealth generally

I was thinking on that. The exponential wealth requirements really put a damper on large-scale equipment.

Promethean

2022-02-07, 11:21 AM

I think one thing that breaks the "high level casters do their own thing" thought process is the necessity for Money, spell components, and crafting components.

Many of the best spells(especially at high-level) require some form of material component that has an actual GP cost or a number of unnamed items with a generic GP cost given. Since in-world, a wizard needs a functioning economy in order to acquire these(unless they plan on going on a small quest for Every expensive material component), non-high level workers become a necessity.

Haven't Leadership doesn't solve this problem. It Amplifies it. The caster now has to maintain rulership over what amounts to a small kingdom of their own with all the headaches of border control, trades, diplomacy, economics, and worker health that come with the job.

Casters can only fully leave the shackles of diplomacy after they gain access to 9th level spells, because that when they gain access to genesis and wish(or their equivalents). This in turn means that many of the high level caster god-kings would end up leaving the prime material(with or without their country in tow), as living in a paradise world with infinite resources is just a better alternative to having to negotiate trade deals with prince whines-a-lot or dealing with your gem miners unionizing.

Brackenlord

2022-02-07, 11:53 AM

-snip-
This in turn means that many of the high level caster god-kings would end up leaving the prime material(with or without their country in tow), as living in a paradise world with infinite resources is just a better alternative to having to negotiate trade deals with prince whines-a-lot or dealing with your gem miners unionizing.

I would like to see them, mindless zombie miners, trying to unionize :smalltongue:

There's usually plenty of savage lands for a god-wizard-king to claim and turn into a isolated bermuda triangle-esque nation. Staying clear from the rest of the mundane world and petty wars.

That's a lich dungeon waiting to happen in some hundreds of years.

Seward

2022-02-07, 01:33 PM

You do realize you need not rely on your gut feeling and "schools of thought", right? A bit of math can give you a definitive answer, one that does not rely on opinion and feelings.

As somebody who professionally worked with data analytics and statistics for over 30 years, yeah, I know that.

Hence my opinion. 5% chance to hit is all you get vs most PC type characters past level 8 or so, with any mook force. Against those who invest in AC or simply take cover and go prone, that drops to as low as 4th level. Inspiring courage is worthwhile, because some of those PC's MIGHT have AC lower than "hit on a 20 no matter what we do" or do something stupid like stand in the open or fly or something and not get any cover or prone benefit. Also it does more damage on all those nat 20s.

This doesn't take a spreadsheet or statistics. It takes arithmetic and knowing how ranged combat works in D&D. The only defense against a nat 20 is miss-chance or enough DR to ignore it, and miss-chance is still helped by throwing more arrows at the problem, not by adding +2 to hit (or +4 or +6). While the cheapest defense against an army of archers is an obscuring mist, if they know what square you are in, you'd better actually have solid fog, or wall of stone or something under that mist because 50% miss chance doesn't get it done against an army-worth of arrows.

With something like an elite archer squad backed by arcane and divine buffs, the post somebody else said "punch up about 5 levels" is fairly accurate. That's how much you can supercharge a well designed martial with buffs to pretend to be somebody EL appropriate on offense (and the defense for said martials is that there are a lot more of them if they are punching up than if you bring in EL-appropriate martials without buff support and with ranged combat you can scatter them around to avoid aoe spells or a melee martial's full attack/cleave type stuff from finding extra targets when they turn whatever they do target into a fine mist)

Most parties have some kind of plan for a dangerous ranged threat and several are pretty good vs armies, although most prevent you hitting back. Obscuring mist (or massed smokesticks), pyrotechnics, sleet storm, leomund hut, invis sphere, fog-cloud et-all help, wind wall pretty much just works, wall of ice isn't enough but wall of stone or force is, solid fog works, and anything that messes with line of sight works once the PC's can move and they lose track of what square you are in.

RandomPeasant

2022-02-07, 01:39 PM

Far enough to overcome differences in numbers but liable to get smothered by mook culling effects or high level You Must Be This Tall... type checks. Mixed foes with exotic DR or regen, energy drain, cloudkill blasphemy etc.

DR is a good counter to mooks, but spells like blasphemy aren't as effective as you'd think, because the AoE is just not very large (cloudkill is a bit better because it moves). blasphemy hits a a 40ft area centered on the caster and takes a 7th level spell slot. It kills mooks super dead, but so does a CL 5 fireball, and that does it at extreme range for a 3rd level slot. Traditional spellcasting is a fairly inefficient way of dealing with armies, because it gets a huge amount of overkill. If you want to kill an army with spells, you either need to get them at will (typically by being some sort of monster) or you need to cast spells with really huge AoEs like control weather.

You got any mid-level build (7-12) we can try to challenge with an army?

That's a pretty wide range, and at many of those levels you wouldn't expect someone to be able to beat an army. Using the "not a meaningful challenge, no XP" entries in the DMG as a guideline and assuming an army of mostly 2nd to 5th level characters, you wouldn't really expect anything less than a 13th level character to be able to wipe the floor with an army. How they'd do that varies, and I don't think a specific build is terribly useful since, just as in the real world, military tactics are going to involve a great deal of co-evolution. The basic tactics I'd expect you to need to deal with are "suddenly, there is a hurricane right on top of your army" and "a bunch of demons teleport in and start blasting people", though just as I'd expect armies to start less sophisticated than the kinds of coordination suggested in this thread, casters might start with something like "drop a cloudkill on the army camp" or "buff yourself up, with a special emphasis on counters to low-level spells and DR".

Many of the best spells(especially at high-level) require some form of material component that has an actual GP cost or a number of unnamed items with a generic GP cost given. Since in-world, a wizard needs a functioning economy in order to acquire these(unless they plan on going on a small quest for Every expensive material component), non-high level workers become a necessity.

Why would I need to gather resources from low-level workers? If I'm a high-level Wizard who wants a bunch of rubies or something to cast a spell, I'm not going to go find some random settlement of 3rd-level Dwarves and buy rubies off them. I'll just go to the Elemental Plane of Earth and buy them from Dao, who can swim through stone and pull rubies directly out of the ground. It'd probably even be cheaper (setting aside the fact that these things are given in fixed GP values, because it apparently requires less diamond to raise someone from the dead if the economy is undergoing inflation).

And more than that, the basic "go retire" plan doesn't require much by way of expensive components. You need wall of stone to build the gross structure of your home, planar binding to staff it (and with staff that don't eat), fabricate to make household goods, and maybe wall of iron for easy raw materials. Maybe a couple of castings of permanent image to make it look nice, but you can make something that is orders of magnitude nicer than anything available in the medieval societies D&Dland is patterned off on a one-time budget of less than 5,000 GP.

Seward

2022-02-07, 01:49 PM

I don't think a specific build is terribly useful since, just as in the real world, military tactics are going to involve a great deal of co-evolution.

Indeed. In an actual campaign I had, the country we were based in had periodic troll invasions.

Trolls are a hard stop to most mundane armies, able to heal through all incoming damage and eventually win. (these were trolls that were military trained, with spellcasters and used other humanoids as light auxiliary skirmishers)

This country had both a standing army and a militia, and what even the lowest grunt militia was issued was a backpack with 10 flasks of oil, a tindertwig and a flint and steel. Anybody regular army or a NCO or better in militia also had alchemist fire and a couple acid flasks (for the troll clerics/druids or anybody else who had resist fire running after you beat them down). And absolutely everybody was trained to finish off downed trolls, even if it meant ignoring an active troll tearing your buddy in half.

Adventurers who joined the Prelatal Army got those backpacks, and were often comically overequipped with splash weapons, although most were of the cheap lamp oil variety. Still when on a cliff bombarding bee swarms tormenting your party scout, and the GM asks "how many of those flasks do you have anyway?" the answer was always "enough".

(that was one of my first adventures in Living Greyhawk, right after my character joined the army....swarms at EL2 was a thing you encountered. My first adventure in the campaign an intro mod had one of those army guys explaining trolls to me and tossing a couple acid flasks my way when we went into the Troll Fens after an escaped convict. Thankfully we did not encounter any actual trolls at EL1. The acid flasks sadly were not useful against the devils we actually encountered...).

martixy

2022-02-07, 03:30 PM

yeah, I know that.

Yea, the remark addressed aid another shenanigans. And here you jumped to general build and tactics instead. I have nothing against it, and heck it's useful for the potential theorycrafting I'm interested in, but we're talking about 2 different things.
(Also that "somebody else" you mentioned is actually just me again. :smallbiggrin:)

P.S. I asked for a build mostly in the interest of performing a thought experiment with it. It seemed like a better (and TBH lazier) idea that devising my own biased by ideas of how an army should beat it.

As far as levels go, for one, I never really used XP, so never paid attention to those tables. And I was thinking in terms of high-OP characters. But it is conceivable for particularly low-OP (the kind that the designers were usually envisioning when making the game and those tables) to be threatened by bigger level gaps.

And there's of course degrees of threat - from none (can obliterate or ignore) to delaying tactic (must get thru, but won't be harmed) to nuisance (chip damage, hp or spell slots) to credible threat (severe bodily harm or objective obstruction).
On the army side, there would also be degrees of preparation/verisimilitude - from general tactics, developed to fight powerful enemies, to intelligence gathering or DM fiat, with adapted tactics to fight a particular enemy, to prescient tactics (what I'd consider mook TO), laser focused at opposing a specific build.

Xervous

2022-02-07, 03:51 PM

DR is a good counter to mooks, but spells like blasphemy aren't as effective as you'd think, because the AoE is just not very large (cloudkill is a bit better because it moves). blasphemy hits a a 40ft area centered on the caster and takes a 7th level spell slot. It kills mooks super dead, but so does a CL 5 fireball, and that does it at extreme range for a 3rd level slot. Traditional spellcasting is a fairly inefficient way of dealing with armies, because it gets a huge amount of overkill. If you want to kill an army with spells, you either need to get them at will (typically by being some sort of monster) or you need to cast spells with really huge AoEs like control weather.

A bit more elaboration and context then. I was mainly referring to monsters who obtained these various gear or HD checking qualities at will.

Various class based options exist for warding multiple War4 archers against energy damage, bolstering their saves, and padding them with THP. Blasphemy is being noted for occurring on creatures that will generally be picking the time of their engagement and demand specific material properties that can’t be sustained 24/7 (Align Weapon is the big culprit at 1min/cl). The Balor covers the 1000ft archer range in 3 rounds if we ignore teleport. The number of low level clerics you’d need for Aligning arrows sufficient to always be ready is frankly absurd. The logistics of distributing those arrows quickly forces each squad into a nice Blasphemy shaped area.

Saves can be bolstered, longer term energy resistance and THP supplied to the point that a fireball chucker wouldn’t be getting ideal kill counts on the critical support units. Blasphemy is just an off switch waiting for the right opportunity to deterministically decapitate each squad. It’s packages like these that set the monsters out out of reach through Wealth + EL barriers.

Palanan

2022-02-07, 05:33 PM

Originally Posted by Seward
With something like an elite archer squad backed by arcane and divine buffs, the post somebody else said "punch up about 5 levels" is fairly accurate.

I’ve done exactly this against a party in one of my campaigns, using a squad of low-level archers supported by a fifth-level cleric with a whole stack of scrolls.

One combo he used was stacking Blessed Aim, Guiding Light and Elation to give an additional +5 to the archers, which ended up being very effective. They had the party right where they wanted them, and the first few rounds were pretty dire. It took weeks of prep work for the DM to set up, and hours of gaming time to lure the PCs to the ambush site, but it made for some intense gaming as it all played out.

Seward

2022-02-07, 06:24 PM

The Balor covers the 1000ft archer range in 3 rounds if we ignore teleport.

Yeah, a Balor is a problem, starting with its DR.

You need both cold iron and aligned and no army is going to get that in sufficient numbers to kill it before it can act. (unlike a typical PC party, where a CL-appropriate moderately optimized archer can often one-shot a Balor in a full attack, assuming he's coped with the DR as he should at that level). This sort of thing falls into "punching up has limits".

Any of the "CR Cold iron" demons can be dealt with easily by an army, if the person whose job it is to identify threats tells the horns to signal "shoot the cold iron" or "Silver" special arrows at the weird thing....

Alignment DR is one of the things that stops armies and tends to put you into the "Send a hit squad after it" territory. Although I guess enough L1 clerics with the Glorious Weapons feat could get it done if scattered among enough archers. But that's like the "troll killing backpack" infantry situation - something an army would only adapt to if it fought outsiders as a regular auxiliary or threat vs sending in a Seal-team-adventurers equivalent which is the more normal practice.

I’ve done exactly this against a party in one of my campaigns, using a squad of low-level archers supported by a fifth-level cleric with a whole stack of scrolls.

I've had it happen about as often as party caught in a lance charge situation. Those are two ways parties can get into a lot of trouble fast and find themselves in rocket-tag at lower levels than usual.

I also had to playtest an EL16 encounter where what was supposed to happen was the PC's would negotiate an army unit that had survived 2 years in a magical disaster wasteland to become allies, and maybe a little battle-of-champions for fun, but if they really piss off the org, the entire army (which is arrayed so they can all see, the party is in a kill pit kind of like when Tarquin decided to kill the OOTS) will attack.

Any EL16 party that isn't completely unlucky can disengage, but standing and fighting proved surprisingly risky. The army had 5th level clerics, a few bards and 7th level arcane support, plus a few unusually tough martial leaders, but the average grunt level was about level 3. It turns out that readied evard's tentacles and fireballs, readied bowshots by division, with dispel magic spammed to clear away cheap barriers that can be created without spellcasting or by a mutt-martial, the casters had a bit of trouble getting going, and were sometimes unconscious before their action came. The martials coudn't win it alone, so what typically happened if a powerful caster didn't get first initiative and pull the party out or pull out a defensive spell powerful enough to stop most of the incoming BS (think prismatic sphere, wall of stone, or even forcecaging the party till they were ready) is that somebody would be woken up right before they got an action by a durable character using a potion or similar, they'd take a massively destructive action (think Holy Word, or Fire Storm) and wipe out 1/5 of the army then get caught in the rescue loop until somebody else got an action.

I think only one playtest had anybody die, but it was one of the more dangerous EL16 encounters I've playtested and that playtest also was a near tpk, the party was just good at keeping going with most of them down but not quite dead. The action economy of an army is rather huge and we were all convinced these guys could really have survived the hostile environment they were supposed to (the kind of place where large air elementals just wander in and start whirlwinding...) and that those levels had probably been earned the hard way. In actual play, no PC group was willing to test the army, even the pretty arrogant EL16 group I GM'd for. Killing them all wasn't the objective after all, and most high level PCs in in that campaign were pretty task oriented.

Now in a straight up fight, the EL16 party could kill them with only moderate effort and in an ambush situation they could probably kill it with no risk to themselves. For an army unit to be a threat to a party that powerful, they had to be in a kill box with limited prebuffing (at best 10 minute/level stuff was running, given the length of negotiations to let them in and that any indication of spellcasting would cause the PCs to not be admitted)

martixy

2022-02-08, 07:03 AM

I’ve done exactly this against a party in one of my campaigns, using a squad of low-level archers supported by a fifth-level cleric with a whole stack of scrolls.

One combo he used was stacking Blessed Aim, Guiding Light and Elation to give an additional +5 to the archers, which ended up being very effective. They had the party right where they wanted them, and the first few rounds were pretty dire. It took weeks of prep work for the DM to set up, and hours of gaming time to lure the PCs to the ambush site, but it made for some intense gaming as it all played out.

You missed one of the greatest strengths of mook archer squads - the Missile Volley teamwork benefit. It's only real limitation is the maximum squad size of 8, but that's still an untyped +8 to attack for each member.

Spell Barrage is the other powerful teamwork benefit. Arm a bunch of casters with reflex blasting wands and even high level PCs will start having trouble saving after the 4-5th spell. By the 8th cast you're saving at -16. Enough to put anything without a tall buff stack in the negatives. The most obvious tactic here is to start with cheap wand spells and graduate to your heavy hitters by the 6-8th cast.

Seward

2022-02-08, 11:09 AM

I feel constrained to note that my EL16 party playtest was in about 2003, right when 3.5 came out, the only sourcebooks were the 3.0 basics and in a campaign where they were working out the kinks of allowing basic gear to be purchased (WBL had been sorted, but item access was iffy). If you didn't craft it yourself, you couldn't be sure of a good item mix.

Most PC's prioritized offense with what favors they had, so you got EL16 characters with shockingly low AC (especially light infantry/barbarian types and folks who specialized in ranged combat - arcanists and archers) and you could not assume that if there wasn't a medic/support type cleric in the party that freedom of movement would be a given in that situation (and if the divine caster only had one or two prepped, they might not have cast it, or if they did, might have cast it on a less than ideal party member. In that situation, getting an Evards and a Silence spell dropped on you (the latter with a readied action timed to interrupt a spell) is a real problem, especially since if you let the archers see you, they will also interrupt spells until no casters seem to be left.

In the actual game I ran, one of the characters was a dedicated crafter cleric, who fought like a martial cleric in combat but his main contribution to the party was a portable hole filled with mid-tier stuff (armor, shields, special material weapons, +2 stat items of every type, +2 rings of protection, +3 cloaks of resistance, you get the idea) to fill in the gaps of his other party members, then backed it up with magic vestment and GMW spells where needed. He had so much wealth (delayed progression from casting+the sudden jump in cash at EL14 per adventure) that he had nothing else to do with it. So at his table, the weaknesses were less apparent. But also, as I noted, my party wasn't stupid enough to pick a fight. It probably helped that one of them had heard a rumor about the near TPK in the playtest.

A late campaign (2008 or so) post Complete splatbooks and with some MIC, PHBII and Spell Compendium coming online...well the kinds of players who made it to EL16 tended to have more system mastery than in 2003 (even my own two low AC characters had managed to up their game a bit after level 12, when mitigation for such started seeming inexpensive) and they had a lot less uneven item access and just all kinds of options that didn't exist then (as an example, if my arcane archer got free of the silence+evards he could benign-transposition the dude with Holy Word out of the evards, and escape again with his own str+bab)

For an average Charop (ie not that optimized) group, especially one that didn't level from 1-16 but started at high level with players not terribly familiar with the challenges of the "teens" an army could still be problematic, if it was trained to deal with adventurer-types and caught them at a disadvantage. For a somewhat higher op party who learned from their L1-12 experiences, most could extract themselves at much lower level (and part of their experience was to know this was a "bug out" or "put up serious defenses first" kind of situation rather than "kick ass without thinking")

Elves

2022-02-14, 03:26 PM

Something I didn't factor into the aid another bit is Rapid Shot, which doubles the nat 20 fisher's returns, making it draw even with the aid group twice as fast as AC increases.

The aid another combo is better the lower the target AC and the higher-level your "point guys". And the big thing is it lets people move, whereas Rapid Shotters are stationary.

An advantage of the Rapid Shot strat is you can do it with 1st level human warriors instead of 1st level fighters, which is 1.7x more damage if measured CR-for-CR. But since the massed combat will take place when these combatants don't award XP, CR doesn't matter.

Bucky

2022-02-15, 01:25 AM

Once mid-level magic is in play, low-level members of the army should act more like they're on a highly lethal modern battlefield than a medieval one.

Specifically, they use stealth. The individual warriors stay out of sight whenever possible, toss smoke sticks to conceal their movements, or simply rely on Hide checks. They spread out so that AoEs aimed at a single detected member won't hit the rest of the formation. And they mitigate their opponents' superior AC by catching them flat-footed.

Seward

2022-02-15, 01:37 AM

Once mid-level magic is in play, low-level members of the army should act more like they're on a highly lethal modern battlefield than a medieval one.

Yes. Everybody is a skirmisher, you don't clump up in formations, because the artillery is more dangerous than the cavalry that all those formations are intended for.

Although you might be in foxhole-dispersed mode only until the casters run out of spell slots/ammo. Then it might revert to older-style formation fighting. Think 30 years war era, where cannons were starting to become effective but tercio infantry formations (very slow but unstoppable by anything except another one and immune to cavalry charges) still ruled the battlefield in most encounters, unless you had a critical mass of cannons, good logistics and a clear field of fire.

It's all about where the danger lies. Large infantry formations in close contact existed in modern warfare as recently as Napoleon, because cavalry was still more dangerous than artillery/small arms fire, and an infantry formation even without cavalry could still overwhelm a line of people with firearms with a dense-enough bayonet charge.

By the 1850s this was no longer true, although nobody seemed to realize it (see Crimean war Charge of Light Brigade, Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and many other bloody encounters) since when critical mass of formed riflemen supported by artillery wasn't present the older rules still seemed to apply, plus fluke wins involving morale etc were seen a proving the opposite until machine guns in ww1 put paid to the whole idea of formations on a battlefield.

Fantasy combat is harder to model though, because the power is so densely concentrated. You don't need a logistics train and 40 guns firing in a volley to destroy an infantry square with 20% casualties, one dude with an intense enough fireball can do it with 100% casualties. Five times. Then he has to go home and rest, but he'll be back tomorrow, rain or shine. We don't have a sense of that...it is more like an airstrike where they have a few bombs/rockets and have to keep going back to base to get more, with really long refuelling sessions.

I would expect though that default would be old-style combat, because that is what you have to do 23 hours and 45 minutes of every day. For the 15 minutes when the spellcasters show up, you have to use different training.

Berenger

2022-02-15, 03:55 AM

It'd probably even be cheaper (setting aside the fact that these things are given in fixed GP values, because it apparently requires less diamond to raise someone from the dead if the economy is undergoing inflation).

So... wait... if I research a bunch of low level spells with material compenents like "a bowl of grain worth a total of at least 1 sp" or "a barrel of salted herring worth at least 7 gp", I can do instant global market research with that?

martixy

2022-02-15, 01:30 PM

Yes. Everybody is a skirmisher, you don't clump up in formations, because the artillery is more dangerous than the cavalry that all those formations are intended for.

Although you might be in foxhole-dispersed mode only until the casters run out of spell slots/ammo. Then it might revert to older-style formation fighting. Think 30 years war era, where cannons were starting to become effective but tercio infantry formations (very slow but unstoppable by anything except another one and immune to cavalry charges) still ruled the battlefield in most encounters, unless you had a critical mass of cannons, good logistics and a clear field of fire.

It's all about where the danger lies. Large infantry formations in close contact existed in modern warfare as recently as Napoleon, because cavalry was still more dangerous than artillery/small arms fire, and an infantry formation even without cavalry could still overwhelm a line of people with firearms with a dense-enough bayonet charge.

By the 1850s this was no longer true, although nobody seemed to realize it (see Crimean war Charge of Light Brigade, Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and many other bloody encounters) since when critical mass of formed riflemen supported by artillery wasn't present the older rules still seemed to apply, plus fluke wins involving morale etc were seen a proving the opposite until machine guns in ww1 put paid to the whole idea of formations on a battlefield.

Fantasy combat is harder to model though, because the power is so densely concentrated. You don't need a logistics train and 40 guns firing in a volley to destroy an infantry square with 20% casualties, one dude with an intense enough fireball can do it with 100% casualties. Five times. Then he has to go home and rest, but he'll be back tomorrow, rain or shine. We don't have a sense of that...it is more like an airstrike where they have a few bombs/rockets and have to keep going back to base to get more, with really long refuelling sessions.

I would expect though that default would be old-style combat, because that is what you have to do 23 hours and 45 minutes of every day. For the 15 minutes when the spellcasters show up, you have to use different training.

I feel like caster support would be significantly less one-sided than this.

Provided we are not talking about some extreme caster superiority, where your army is the casters, and instead they are deployed as strategic assets such as cannons, or cavalry, etc.
1. You'd be expecting enemy casters
2. Terrain and stealth would be important to casters as well. If you can out-tactic the enemies, rather using invisibility, fly or wind walls, you get more slots for blasting. Otherwise you risk your casters being pin cushions.
3. This one has already been said, but the sheer size of big armies outstrips the normal scale over which most D&D spells operate.
4. And maybe not in default D&D demographics, but in a world with more than 1st levels as soldiers fireballs would certainly not be 100% effective.