Army Logistics

[Schylerwalker]

Feeding an army in D&D is expensive! :smalleek

If your troops can't forage/raid, you're going to be giving EACH of your soldiers the equivalent of a days' rations. Every day. Let's say you have a hundred first level warriors, and you're embarking on a month long campaign.

Day's rations = 5 silver pieces

5 silver pieces x 100 soldiers x 30 days = 15,000 silver pieces, or 1,500 gp

This is JUST to feed them. This is not including, say, a longsword, dagger, studded leather armor, light wooden shield, and 3 javelins for each bugger. And a waterskin. EACH.

Spare supplies, such as rope, ladder, tools for repairing armor and weapons. Oh, wagons to carry all of that. Horses (Or at the very least, mules) to drag those wagons around. Feed and water, as well as tack and harness for your beasts.

Also, each soldier will want at least 3 silver pieces a day. So that's another, what, twelve hundred gold pieces?

It'd be cheaper to hire a bunch of high level adventurers to storm a stronghold rather than outfit an army for it!

[Sstoopidtallkid]

It'd be cheaper to hire a bunch of high level adventurers to storm a stronghold rather than outfit an army for it!

And more effective. Large numbers of mooks are basically useless against one well-placed Cloudkill.

[herrhauptmann]

There's a reason why armies mostly just lived off of forage until close to the Napoleonic wars.
Don't forget, if you're taking a castle, you're likely laying siege to it. So now you gotta include the cost of siege engines, and siege engineers used to cost way more in pay than a simple soldier.

[Dervag]

Aside from any issue about the usefulness of mooks in combat, the catch is that all these prices are based off the ones in the DM guide, which:

-Ignore the possibility of bulk discounts
-Ignore the fact that a "day's rations" includes quite a bit of pre-cooked food*, whereas food for a large number of people need not.**
-Are calibrated to the standard of what merchants will charge dangerous wandering violent guys in an inflationary economy where said violent guys are constantly bringing treasure into the economy.
-Ignore the possibility of barter: if I have an army, and there are farmers around, I can use the army to collect food from the peasants directly without actually bothering to pay them.*** Conversely, peasant lads may join my army to eat reliably, even if I don't pay them very well, because my army will always have food to eat... because it takes food away from the remaining peasant lads. This isn't a happy social dynamic, but it definitely works.

*In a world without refrigerators, imperishable, ready-to-eat food is always worth more than perishable food. Especially to adventurers who have more money than they know what to do with, but usually don't know how to cook.
**if you're feeding a large group people, you can afford to have a baker and butcher on staff who take (for instance) flour and live pigs and converts them into bread and pork chops every night. This is a subset of "bulk discount," because it lets you get away with spending less to buy unprocessed food, in exchange for having someone on retainer who will process it for you.
***If I'm naughty, I call this a "not being stabbed in the face tax." If I'm nice, this is called "not being stabbed in the face tax," but with the implication that I am preventing others from stabbing you in the face and need food to do it, rather than simply taking food in exchange for the service of not stabbing you in the face myself.
__________

As for the effectiveness of mooks in combat, the key is that just as PCs only seem to run into level-appropriate encounters, mooks are used for things that are level-appropriate for them. Small squads of mooks are good for deterring casual raiders of ECL ~1 or 2, for scouting the countryside, for oppressing peasant villages, for collecting food to feed the Mook Army, and things like that. Large armies of mooks are not effective against a leveled spellcaster who is their nominal equal in ECL, but this does not always matter; you'd have to be a complete idiot to send them to fight such a spellcaster.

This is the origin of the classic fairy tale scenario in which the hero has to go off and fight the evil monster/wizard/witch by overcoming the Terrible Curse and all that. Sure, the local ruler has guards, and the guards are great for keeping random hoboes from becoming random bandits and pillaging the outlying villages. But they're no use against strong magic or enormous monsters.

[Akisa]

Pfft I'm not paying adventurer price for common soldiers. A day's wage for unskilled labor is 1 silver, are you saying vast amount of people are only eating 1 out of 5 days? Lets say the preparation for a day's ration raises the cost, it likely only double in price.

So it's closer to 2 silver pieces x 100 soldiers x 30 days = 6,000 silver or 600gp

[Innis Cabal]

Lets also remember, if your doing it like a sensible army man, you have a well trained army, and the rest is made of farmers and other lay men who have jobs outside of killing. Should cut the cost down quite a bit. Espcially with a siege.

[Solaris]

***If I'm naughty, I call this a "not being stabbed in the face tax." If I'm nice, this is called "not being stabbed in the face tax," but with the implication that I am preventing others from stabbing you in the face and need food to do it, rather than simply taking food in exchange for the service of not stabbing you in the face myself.

Best tax ever.

[Sliver]

Stuff

I really like this approach. Is there some collection of articles to handling such army stuff for those of us that are uninformed?

[arguskos]

I really like this approach. Is there some collection of articles to handling such army stuff for those of us that are uninformed?

Logic helps a great deal. There's also some stuff in the Arms and Equipment Guide about buying mercs, who are fairly easy to procure, all things given. They also have listed prices, which I find handy.

[Eldariel]

Obviously all armies have Cleric support making food for them as they go. One level 5+ Cleric per a dozen men. Or just a wagon with a resetting Created Food trap. That'd make for quite the interesting target for sabotage missions

[Storm Bringer]

The historical answer to this problem of feeding the troops, before the indroduction of a regular logictics arm in the 30 years war (where i'm told the swedes had a proper chain of supply bases set up), was to not centalise foraging, but let the sub units deal with it, so each company had a few blokes who in dnd terms had very high survival skills and spent a lot of their time hunting/stealing food form elsewhere

they might subedise this with mass produce bread (whats the price for a pound of flour vs a pound of hard bread in the PHB? get a few cooks along and you can give them somthing to eat, even if it's a little lacking).

of coruse, this doesn't account for the efforts of the huge number of hangers on an army on the move attracts, in the form of opportunistic merchants selling everything from beer, to swords, to their own daughters virginity. i've seen accounts where the combat arm of an army was outnumbered two- to one by it's own baggage train (most of it hangers on)

[Ormur]

I think one of the few things in D&D warfare that wouldn't be totally different from medieval warfare is the logistics. Barring expensive magic items like flying castles and teleportation rings you're still using horse drawn carriages and river barges and that's expensive, especially land transport. Before railroads and paved roads land transport was ridiculously expensive, transporting bulk goods like food over short distances inland multiplied their price.

It's not the food and equipment in itself that's expensive, as other said they'd be less expensive in bulk than in the DMG, it's transporting it. You need a whole fleet of carriages, not only for the food the soldiers will eat and equipment but maybe also for the horses that they ride and use to pull the carriages.

[Radiun]

Armies of humans?
Please, to raise a competent DnD army you need about 100 slaves and 1 wight under your command.
The one wight raises a small unit of 101 wights within the hour. Raid some small settlements to reinforce that number, with the "head wight" remaining behind as he is your most valuable asset, and well, you now have a town's worth of equipment for your wight army to wear.

After that you establish a Wraith battalion (the wights keep you effective during daylight hours)

[Oslecamo]

-Are calibrated to the standard of what merchants will charge dangerous wandering violent guys in an inflationary economy where said violent guys are constantly bringing treasure into the economy.

You're forgeting that merchants in the D&D world are all retired dangerous wandering violent guys wich don't really have contact with each other due to wandering monsters in the trade routes, so it's quite hard to stablsih something as a country wide economy.

Ormur:A lot of armies got around that by making the soldiers themselves carry the food as part of their package. There would be supply carriages yes, but those would be to feed the officers and nobles who wouldn't carry their own food. Meanwhile you would raid enemy villages for recharging your reserves.

In the siege of Lisbon, for example, the first thing the king Afonso Henriques did was a quick raid to capture the storages of food outside the city walls, where the local farmers would normaly put their production. Then he didn't need to worry about food for a lot of months.

On the other hand, too many carriages will slow you down, and that may prove fatal, as a burdened moving army can be easily outmaneuvered. A lot of comanders discarded rations during their campaigns so they could gain a "burst" of speed and reach an objective before the enemy. Altough when that failed, they would be pretty much screwed. On the other hand, this could be used as moral boost for your troops. We have no more food. Capture that enemy fortress at all costs, or we all starve to death.

[Krrth]

Don't forget that those prices are the cost to buy off the shelf. Governments (in DnD) aren't going to do that. They'll have alternate means of acquiring, including simply making it themselves.

[Gamerlord]

1. Who says the army needs to march, some casters prep up teleport and BAM!
2. A army can just requisition food and supplies from villages and towns, and pillage enemy towns to weaken them and strengthen you.
3. And who says that in the world, low level warriors are always fighting someone high level? Do standard soldiers fight the general of the hostile organization all the time?

[Oslecamo]

3. And who says that in the world, low level warriors are always fighting someone high level? Do standard soldiers fight the general of the hostile organization all the time?

No, but this is D&D land. All kind of hungry and/or psychotic monsters roam the wilderness, including:

Spoiler

Show

Dinossaurs!

[jmbrown]

AD&D has an entire section about players raising an army because it was assumed that PCs would eventually build a stronghold and, well, raise an army. I'm bored, so I'm going to build and supply an army using the recommendation from the AD&D 2E DMG.

250 light infantry 250gp
50 heavy infantry 100gp
100 longbowmen 800gp
75 light cavalry 300gp
25 heavy cavalry 250gp
1 master artillerist 50gp
10 artillerist 40gp
1 master engineer 150gp
1 master armorer 100gp
5 armorers 50gp
1 master bladesmith 100gp
5 bladesmiths 50gp
1 master bowyer 50gp
1 bowyer 10gp
1 master fletcher 30gp
1 master of the hunt 10gp
8 huntsmen 40gp
10 grooms 10gp
20 skilled servants (baker, cook, etc.) 40gp
40 household servants 40gp
1 herald 300gp
1 castellan 300gp

2,970gp per month.

Now, lets outfit our soldiers. Soldiers were typically expected to outfit themselves. Those without equipment were given basic goods. For this example I'm going to pretend that all of my guys basically come to me naked.

Light infantry will have javelins (4) and a shortspear. Heavy infantry (Roman type) were armed with a short sword, 2 javelins, and chainmail (I'll give them longspears as well for setting against charges). Light cavalry carry shortspears and shortbows. Heavy cavalry will be equipped with breastplate (plus scalemail barding for their horses), lances, and heavy maces. The huntsmen need crossbows and I'll order up 6 ballista and 2 catapults.

(D&D 3E prices used)

1100 javelins 1100gp
325 shortspears 325gp
50 short swords 500gp
50 longspears 250gp
50 chainmail 7500gp
75 shortbows 2250gp
100 longbows 7500gp
25 breastplate 500gp
25 scalemail barding 5000gp
25 heavy warhorses 10000gp
25 lances 250gp
25 heavy maces 300gp
8 light crossbows 280gp
6 ballista 3000gp
2 light catapults 1100gp
320 crossbow bolts 320gp
7,000 arrows 7000gp

Total 47,175gp!
or 12,267gp in raw materials + 10,000gp for warhorses

Now I'm going to put my craftsmen to work. To do this I'm going to look at their weekly wages per month (half check * 4). I'm going to assume the basic craftsmen are level 1 experts with max ranks, 11 intelligence (using common array), and skill focus feat. I'm going to assume the master craftsmen are level 5 experts with max ranks, 12 intelligence (common array +1 int for level 4), and skill focus. Everyone rolls an average 10 on their d20.

master artillerist 44gp
artillerist 160gp
master engineer 44gp
master armorer 44gp
armorers 80gp
master bladesmith 44gp
bladesmiths 80gp
master bowyer 44gp
bowyer 16gp
master fletcher 44gp

Total 600gp month average in crafting

Finally I've got to feed these guys. I'm going to assume my hunters are level 1 (level 5 master hunter), have max ranks, skill focus in survival, and 11 wisdom (12 wisdom for the master hunter). One pound of flour makes about a loaf of bread (and bread takes about 4 hours) and I think a loaf can feed 4 people adequately a day. Let's say 1 chicken adequately feeds 8 people a day (2 drumsticks, 2 breast halves, 2 wings, 2 thighs), 1 pig adequately feeds 16 people a day and 1 cow adequately feeds 32 people a day. I have to feed my 25 horses + 608 mouths.

hunters - feed 32 people a day
master hunter - feed 7 people a day
1lbs flour - feeds 4 people
1 chicken - feeds 8 people
1 pig - feeds 16 people
1 cow - feeds 32 people

Flour's cheap so I'm mostly going to be feeding my guys through flour. You can feed all 600 people using these calculations on about 2gp worth of flour per day. Meat will be a luxury thing to improve morale and I can't forget to include the average drink.

Around here I lost my train of thought...

Yeah, raising (and keeping) a standing army is expensive and it's little wonder why long term military campaigns have historically crumbled. The sheer amount of organization is ridiculous and like most things in history they fall apart from weakness and betrayal within, not from forces outside.

As far as an armies effectiveness, D&D 3E screwed over traditional armies due to the incremental power of magic. AD&D's wizards were weaker and the game itself expected players to gather together groups of hirelings for grandiose tasks like taking over kingdoms and ousting barons. Cloudkill, for example, could be affected by the wind (gust of wind = automatic cloudkill killer) and it broke up in heavy vegetation. When assaulting wizards in AD&D, armies usually dug treches to contain the eventual cloudkill or they hid in forests while pelting the wizard's stronghold from afar. This generally isn't the case in 3E because wizards have extra-dimensional bull**** and what have you.

As others have pointed out, armies foraged for goods, conscripted locals, practically forced businesses like blacksmiths and stables to hand over whatever goods they had, and they raided everything. Supplies were always a problem, people went on half rations to make it by, and life in general just sucked.

Armies in 3E just aren't profitable or worth it, though, because goods cost too much and by 10th level adventurers can wreck entire kingdoms by themselves.

[Gamerlord]

No, but this is D&D land. All kind of hungry and/or psychotic monsters roam the wilderness, including:

Spoiler

Show

Dinossaurs!

Good point, but what I meant to say is that warriors aren't always fighting PCs.

This is one of many things that doesn't make any sense in the D&D world(Going off-topic here) :

We have hundreds of creatures with absurd CRs, from 1/10 to 30+.....
HOW THE HELL HAVE THE HUMANOIDS LIVED THIS FAR?

[jmbrown]

Good point, but what I meant to say is that warriors aren't always fighting PCs.

This is one of many things that doesn't make any sense in the D&D world(Going off-topic here) :

We have hundreds of creatures with absurd CRs, from 1/10 to 30+.....
HOW THE HELL HAVE THE HUMANOIDS LIVED THIS FAR?

Because pretty much everything above CR 10 is either an outsider who have restrictions against freely entering the prime or they're so rare that they could very well be considered extinct.

[Gamerlord]

But even something with a CR like 3 could massacre a battalion of troops.

[Yahzi]

There's a reason why armies mostly just lived off of forage until close to the Napoleonic wars.

Ahem. Ceaser would like to have a word with you.

The D&D medieval technology is not the limit of development you can get before modern science. It's called the Dark Ages for a reason; people achieved less with the same resources than their ancestors (like the Romans) had.

This is something often overlooked in D&D games. Part of the reason life was so hard was because people were actually stupid. Social technology - courts, hospitals, standardized weights and measures, stable currencies, etc. - were worse in 1200 AD than they were in 300 AD.

Not that you can get players to understand this. The next time your players want to revamp an inefficient social structure, try telling them the populace is too superstitious, traditional, and uneducated to make it work. Good luck with that.

Armies in 3E just aren't profitable or worth it, though, because goods cost too much and by 10th level adventurers can wreck entire kingdoms by themselves.

So true.

The real model of D&D is not medieval, but Iron Age: a few heroes, with a small retinue of loyal henchmen, travel around killing and looting, meeting whole new societies (with strange magic and customs) no one in their home city has ever heard of, and encountering monsters so terrifying they would destroy their entire home city in an afternoon. The role-model for D&D is not Lancelot; it is Hercules.

Raising an army in this scenario is counterproductive. D&D actually punishes you for trying to do that. Running an empire is impossible by the D&D rules. And it's supposed to be.

[dspeyer]

This whole hunter thing doesn't work that well. If you're truly marching through wilderness, you'd better march fast or you'll run out of game. There's a reason even nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes don't get as large as armies. If you're marching through settled land, the concept is less "hunt" and more "steal". This means being surrounded on all sides by enemies, who may be commoners but can still provide information and hiding places to enemy armies (and all have scythes ready to coup-de-gras you in your sleep). Also, robbing the peasants into starvation will likely cause any positive-channeling clerics to leave your army or lose their powers.

[Ormur]

Ormur:[/B]A lot of armies got around that by making the soldiers themselves carry the food as part of their package. There would be supply carriages yes, but those would be to feed the officers and nobles who wouldn't carry their own food. Meanwhile you would raid enemy villages for recharging your reserves.

In the siege of Lisbon, for example, the first thing the king Afonso Henriques did was a quick raid to capture the storages of food outside the city walls, where the local farmers would normaly put their production. Then he didn't need to worry about food for a lot of months.

On the other hand, too many carriages will slow you down, and that may prove fatal, as a burdened moving army can be easily outmaneuvered. A lot of comanders discarded rations during their campaigns so they could gain a "burst" of speed and reach an objective before the enemy. Altough when that failed, they would be pretty much screwed. On the other hand, this could be used as moral boost for your troops. We have no more food. Capture that enemy fortress at all costs, or we all starve to death.

If the army manages to live of the land providing supplies becomes less expensive. I'm probably thinking of warfare later than medieval times, post 30 year wars. But still if you're marching long distances, with tens of thousands of men and planning on sieges logistics might become a major headache but that's probably not the norm in most D&D campaigns except for perhaps the evil empire (and that's ruled by the DM ).

[jmbrown]

But even something with a CR like 3 could massacre a battalion of troops.

Like what? The general assumption is that the higher the CR, the rarer the monster. A "band" of ogres is 5-8. A band of elves is 30-100 1st level warriors + 3-10 3rd level warriors + 5 5th level warriors + 3 7th level warriors.

Which band is likely to win in an assault or defense?

[Oslecamo]

But even something with a CR like 3 could massacre a battalion of troops.

It's assumed that humanoid breed REALLY quickly, so you've got battallions to spare, while the nonhumanoid monsters have an harder time recovering from their losses.


Kobolds for example. No matter how many you kill there's always another thousand waiting at the corner

Of course, nobody is really interested in dying, so people prefer to hire adventurers to slay said monsters.

[jmbrown]

It's assumed that humanoid breed REALLY quickly, so you've got battallions to spare, while the nonhumanoid monsters have an harder time recovering from their losses.


Kobolds for example. No matter how many you kill there's always another thousand waiting at the corner

Of course, nobody is really interested in dying, so people prefer to hire adventurers to slay said monsters.

Another basic D&D assumption. The longer lived the race, the slower their maturation/gestation. An elven family might have 1 child in their entire life while medieval humans had an average of 4 children. kobolds pop them babies out like rabbits but live half as long as most races.

[Gamerlord]

Then why haven't orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and kobolds just taken over the world?

Besides, a hundred beholders can wipe out any humanoid army.

[lvl 1 sharnian]

Don't know about the others, but kobolds are miners first and foremost, they'd rather stay content with mining and building traps for the rest of their lives than trying to conquer the world. Coupled with their weak and frail structure and light sensitivity, their main enemies are gnomes. That's right, gnomes.

As an aside, there's always gonna be a minimum of 4 people, human or otherwise, that grow at a rapid exponential rate, commonly named "PCs."

There's also no guarantee there's any number of high level wizards in the world since 1) NPCs do not know the XP exists so they wouldn't actively hunt down monsters to level up and 2) Think of the typical wizard, sitting up in his little tower, studying musty tomes and dusty books, he's not gaining much XP at all 3) High Level Wizards make great villains, good or evil, atleast one quest is going to involve killing some random innocent wizard

[Oslecamo]

Then why haven't orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and kobolds just taken over the world?

For the same reason insects haven't conquered ours: lack of coordination. Kobolds/orcs/goblins fight other races, but with some trickery you can turn them against each other and keep your small but organized kingdom running for a lot of time.

Besides, a hundred beholders can wipe out any humanoid army.

Funny stories:
1: beholders are highly xenophebic even of their own so good luck geting 100 of them togheter whitout they killing each other.
2-Beholders can't affect anything more than 150 feets away.
3-Beholders can only move 20 feets per turn and cannot run, altough they can double move.

So if a beholder goes out there on a world conquering spree, he just gets peppered by arrows from afar untill it dies. Sure he has DR10, but an army will surely have some composite longbows to penetrate that.

He's basicaly invincible on his underground lair, but out in the open he's a very nice target for an army.