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  1. - Top - End - #91
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    There wouldn’t be a gouged trail of destruction. They would take the easier path, namely roads. They would find said roads via drones. Yes, the army has drones too. That’s likely how they would find the city as well. Which they would do within a couple of hours unless they are dumped far far in the wilderness.
    Again, all of this depends entirely on initial conditions.

    And see above for how easily drones can be dealt with.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    Why are you assuming Silverymoon?
    Why not? The OP specified a large city, Silverymoon is a large city, and happens to be one of the cities I’m most familiar with in the setting.

    As for Silverymoon’s rather famous High Lady, I’m deliberately leaving her out, since a 24th-level archmage is a wild card the OP didn't ask for. I’m also not including the mythal and wards, again because that isn’t typical.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    Because yeah, there is no contest that optimized 3.5 would win. It is way too OP. It also has little to no bearing on what Faerun is like when you look at pretty much any of the official media involving Faerun. Such as books, video games, or even the D&D books like Volo’s Guide to Monsters.
    To my knowledge I haven’t even touched on optimization, just thoughtful ways to use spells and abilities. I seriously doubt that anything I’ve said here could be considered “OP” in any possible way.

    As for “official media involving Faerun,” I’m pretty sure there are plenty of novels set in the 3.5 era, so this objection seems like dividing by sea cucumber.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    You drastically overestimate the intelligence networks in Faerun. They aren’t nearly as alert as you are saying.
    I would say that you’re underestimating the potential for information sharing in a widespread community of people who can talk to animals and become animals, to say nothing of their ability to speak with fey and other magical creatures.

    As soon as the modern soldiers appear, they’ll be noticed by everything from grackles to grigs, and word will travel fast. Again, this depends strongly on initial conditions, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that a military force unlike anything ever seen before will draw immediate attention.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    For that matter, why are you assuming 3.5 rather than the current canon state of Faerun?
    You make it sound like referencing 3.5 is somehow a bad thing—but since 3.5 is the edition I’ve played the most, that’s the system I’m used to thinking of when considering the Realms.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    Remember how Aliens is a fictional story that has no relation to how actual soldiers act? The fact that the untrained civilian out performs the marines in every way is a pretty big hint about that.
    So my question to you is the same as to Aotrs—can you provide examples of how actual military units have reacted when coming into contact with new and unexpected adversaries?

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    So my question to you is the same as to Aotrs—can you provide examples of how actual military units have reacted when coming into contact with new and unexpected adversaries?
    If I can butt in, the first example I can think of is the introduction of poison gas in the First World War. It shocked and terrified the soldiers at first, but they rallied, looked to their training, and succeeded in taking back the initial gains. Both sides adapted and gas proved inconclusive, save to causing more horrific casualties than the other weapons of war were already causing.

    Another example would be the Japanese Zero fighter of WWII, and this is an extremely good example. The Zero was essentially a big bag of NOPE in the first part of the war. It could out-turn, out-speed, and pretty much out-anything their American counterparts could do. For approximately a year they slaughtered their American adversaries.

    But it didn't last.

    As a first step, the opposing pilots learned to pit their strengths against the Zero's few weaknesses. The main one was that the F4F wildcat was faster than the zero in a dive, because it was a heavier lump of metal. They stopped trying to dogfight zeroes. Instead they would hit them from above, dive away to escape, come around and do it again.

    They also developed better, co-operative tactics such as the Thach Weave . One fighter against a zero was easy meat, so they stopped fighting them one on one. Instead they'd pair up, and when one fighter picked up a tail he'd weave so his buddy could shoot the Zero off. This was aided by the fact that American fighters carried radios, and thus were able to coordinate more effectively than the Zeroes, who often took them out to save weight.

    They also found a glaring weakness: In order to get their fantastic maneuverability, speed and range the Zero's designers had stripped off all armor. The result is that if an allied pilot did manage to put a bullet in one it would go up like a firework.

    These efforts, coupled with training, turned the tide in the air. In another two years better aircraft (The P-38 Lightning and F6F Hellcat) arrived with better engines and speed to exaggerate their ability to fight using boom-n-zoom tactics. No one ever did manage to dogfight a Zero, but they didn't have to. Instead they used what they had and adapted to their adversary.

    Or another example would be the introduction of submarines in WW1, and submarine wolf packs in WWII. Although they met with initial success, the allies countered with better tactics (convoying), better technology (radar, leigh lights, homing torpedoes) and better ships (escort carriers, destroyer escorts). The combination of these things shut down the submarine offensives against the allies.

    There were other technological innovations faced by the allies. Jet Fighters. Radio-guided bombs. Ballistic missiles. In each case, the allies faced a technologically superior foe. And in each case, they overcame these obstacles by adapting and using what strengths they DID have against their enemy's weaknesses.

    Tactics and weapons are effective in the short term. But in the long term of a war, victory goes to the side which is better organized, better equipped to logistically support its army, and better equipped to adapt to the enemy more quickly than the enemy can adapt to them. That will almost always be a modern country, not a medieval one, even if that medieval one has wizards.

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    Last edited by pendell; 2020-09-18 at 07:12 PM.
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  3. - Top - End - #93
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    So my question to you is the same as to Aotrs—can you provide examples of how actual military units have reacted when coming into contact with new and unexpected adversaries?
    Doing so skirts forum rules at best. There have been numerous examples in Earth history of military units in this case: usually when one culture crosses an ocean an unlocks contact with a culture that they have previously known little to nothing about. Generally in such cases the technologically superior force utterly obliterates the technologically inferior one, often despite overwhelming weight of numbers.

    The issue of a 21st century military force invading a fantasy world is that, while the overwhelming technological advantage is quite clear versus the roughly early-15th century technological level most such worlds seem to be generally placed at (and it only gets more overwhelming if you go earlier), it's very difficult to quantify the impact of magic.

    If you drop a modern force into a no-magic or very low-magic fantasy world they simply run wild as long as their supplies last. The anime series GATE, already mentioned in this thread several times, is campy and light-hearted but still serves as a pretty reasonable example of the utterly overwhelming difference in power modern combined arms possess compared to medieval military capabilities. Even unreasonably large creatures or low-level magical abilities are largely irrelevant to the power balance of the order of battle.

    So with the modern world vs. Forgotten Realms comparison everything depends on the capabilities of a small group of high-level casters and high-hit dice monsters with natural magic abilities (this includes dragons, which are powerful casters in their own right). The Forgotten Realms has around 100 million inhabitants (if you go and add up all the regional population numbers in the 3e FRCS that's about what you get), though obviously this is only a fraction of the population of Faerun as a whole (Shou, as fits the historical parallels, has a larger population than the Realms). Out of that 100 million, only a few thousand beings at most matter: Tier I casters of level 10+, dragons of adult age or above (there are a lot of them, the Dragons of Faerun appendix has hundreds of entries), high-magic monsters such as Phaerrims and Sharns and Beholders, powerful outsiders on the material plane for whatever reason, and a few miscellaneous others. It's important to recognize that this remains true regardless, the balance of the population of the Forgotten Realms, the 99% of that world, are totally and completely irrelevant to that world's power balance. They contribute nothing in terms of ability to face an existential threat from beyond.

    Consequently, everything with regard to this question depends on how much power you assign those few thousand high-powered magic-using entities and how much cooperation you're willing to assign them with regards to facing an external threat. Existing narrative evidence, taken from Forgotten Realms novels, assigns those beings a power level far lower than their actual stats allow for. It also says that their ability to cooperative is functionally negative. In the Tuigan invasion plotline (functionally a FR version of the Mongol invasions of Europe), the forces of Thay, and the mages who rule them, collaborated with the Tuigan Horde against the rest of the Realms for their own advantage. During the Return of the Archwizards the nominal anti-Phaerrim alliance (and the Phaerrim clearly represented an existential threat, as they tried to drown the Realms via magically-induced climate change) split at least four different ways and expended at least as much effort against itself as it did their newly arrived enemy
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  4. - Top - End - #94
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Again, all of this depends entirely on initial conditions.

    And see above for how easily drones can be dealt with.



    Why not? The OP specified a large city, Silverymoon is a large city, and happens to be one of the cities I’m most familiar with in the setting.

    As for Silverymoon’s rather famous High Lady, I’m deliberately leaving her out, since a 24th-level archmage is a wild card the OP didn't ask for. I’m also not including the mythal and wards, again because that isn’t typical.



    To my knowledge I haven’t even touched on optimization, just thoughtful ways to use spells and abilities. I seriously doubt that anything I’ve said here could be considered “OP” in any possible way.

    As for “official media involving Faerun,” I’m pretty sure there are plenty of novels set in the 3.5 era, so this objection seems like dividing by sea cucumber.



    I would say that you’re underestimating the potential for information sharing in a widespread community of people who can talk to animals and become animals, to say nothing of their ability to speak with fey and other magical creatures.

    As soon as the modern soldiers appear, they’ll be noticed by everything from grackles to grigs, and word will travel fast. Again, this depends strongly on initial conditions, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that a military force unlike anything ever seen before will draw immediate attention.



    You make it sound like referencing 3.5 is somehow a bad thing—but since 3.5 is the edition I’ve played the most, that’s the system I’m used to thinking of when considering the Realms.



    So my question to you is the same as to Aotrs—can you provide examples of how actual military units have reacted when coming into contact with new and unexpected adversaries?
    Well if they are any where close to a city I imagine they won’t be causing much environmental damage.

    Also your plan against drones requires some pretty sophisticated knowledge of what drones are. It would work only if they knew that the drones were safe to approach, could only see from particular angles and that they were something that needed to be dealt with at all.

    Because Silverymoon is far from typical. It is actually one of the more atypical cities.

    It is optimized because the characters don’t use those tactics. The fact that there are 3.5 books is the proof that the characters don’t fight or behave that way. Again, we’ve seen how the world reacts to an interdimensional threat. That is basically the plot of Return if the Archmages. Which hey is also about high level spellcasters. Which don’t fight in the way you describe at all.

    I feel you overestimate how much druids care about cities. Again Silverymoon is atypical in that it actually has druids. Most cities don’t and druids range from neutral to actively wanting to destroy cities. Protecting them is abnormal unless it is an elf city or well Silverymoon.

    I don’t like it because canon has moved on from it. The world has changed and there are things like Dragonborn that didn’t exist in 3.5 Faerun. Also 3.5 doesn’t represent the world that well so I get annoyed when people take it as the default.

    I’ll have to get back to you on the military example, I don’t imagine that will be easy to dig up for modern military.
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  5. - Top - End - #95
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
    There are a couple of potential countermeasures I see:
    1) This is only really useful if the regiment stays in one place for an extended period of time. Being able to tunnel somewhere at a walking pace isn't going to be terribly useful in a mobile campaign. Though it would have some application in stalemated WW1-style trench warfare.
    I think it could be good if a city knows where the enemy is and the probable routes it may take, for example to flood them, or to create traps for vehicles to fall in here and there. This however also brings us to another question, which is how mechanised our regiment is, and how they travel.

    Working through the environment would be a great option. I don't know if there are terraforming spells in D&D, but even just control weather can be really strong. Think of causing fog to rise while the enemy vehicles are on the road, or a torrential rain on the mountains. It has a huge range, and could be cast without danger by a druid masquerading as a tiny viper.

    About druids, I think that there is another very good spell that could be cast by an unassuming bat, and that's Transmute metal to wood. It can be cast from hundreds of meters away and has area effect. Even with composite materials, it still would destroy electronics and cause huge damage to vehicle engines.
    2) This has been attempted in the modern world without magic . It looks to me like the kind of trick that would work once. Afterwards, the regiment will adapt audio equipment to listen to, say, the noise of thousands of ankhegs tunnelling under their feet. That's assuming they don't already have dedicated sonar intended originally for finding land mines. From there it's a matter of isolating where they are, and either countermine or simply collapse their tunnel with explosives. Mining and countermining have been a part of nonmagical warfare since ... I guess the Trojan War? The Siege of Ambracia, at any rate.
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    Last edited by Vinyadan; 2020-09-18 at 08:10 PM.
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  6. - Top - End - #96
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Jeivar View Post
    I don't know why, but I suddenly started wondering: Obviously modern soldiers would slaughter an ordinary 15th Century force of knights and footmen, but how much of a game-changer is D&D magic? If, say, an infantry battalion attacked one of the larger cities of Faerun, or a regiment went to war with one of the notable nations, what would happen? I'd say bullets beat magic missiles, but getting into less straightforward combat, then magic can pull of some neat tricks, like mind control, teleportation, and summonings, just to name a few.

    If a spellcaster summons something that can only be harmed by magic, then the modern soldiers aren't going to have any way of dealing with it. But just how common is medium-to-high-level magic in the Forgotten Realms, anyway? How would enchanted plate fare against rifle rounds?

    Basically, how do you think these scenarios would play out?
    Depends heavily on their equipment.

    If they use regular bullets against plate armor, they're in for a very bad surprise. As demonstrated in multiple videos (that gun lovers such as myself watch to the point of addiction) even armor piercing bullets do minimal damage to full plate, and would take several rounds to make an actual penetration.

    Tanks, grenades, Bazooka and other mostly explosive equipment of that caliber does the job though. But those would probably be considered (statistically) as +5 weapons at least.

    On magic... well, on an all out war between a 3.5 LV 20 spellcaster and the entirety of the modern war forces in a hypothetical allience, the Wizard still wins. A lower level Mage allience, still has a very big advantage though, 'cause the variety of tricks up their sleeves is too versatile. Mind reading, dominated spies, teleportation for surprise attacks, invisibility. Too many things that are just too good on a theoretical battlefield.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    I'd also note that it depends heavily on the city they land near... Silverymoon, they likely get someone coming out with a Tongues spell to talk to them. Somewhere in Thay? It's gonna go a bit different.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    After thinking about it, my solution to this scenario is simple. Were I Caster of sufficient power and having no moral quandaries with killing a hell of a lot of people -- I'd spread a disease, or rather diseases. It wouldn't be hard, Faerun has numerous plagues - many absolutely debilitating if not outright lethal - and D&D has spells specifically for inflicting them if you're so inclined.

    Unlike other potential magical strategies, you aren't relying on temporary arcane effects or burning your spell slots in costly ways to accomplish this. This is using the natural diseases of your world, you're just using magic to weaponize them effectively.

    Want to accelerate the spread? Or you've used this tactic already and this foreign military has caught on and are engaging in quarantine measures? Use basic enchantment magic to "request" your victim pull a Typhoid Mary.

    Toril obviously has Clerics and others with simple healing magic, and much of your population have built-up resistances to native diseases, so it's relatively low risk for your own people.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander View Post
    But Fireball doesn't do that in most editions of D&D. Getting with with a Fireball doesn't set off your vials of alchemist's fire (on instantly blow-up your gunslingers in fire-arms allowed D&D games, e.g. PF1), so it's not going to set off modern ammunition, either. (If you roll a nat 1 on your reflex save and take item damage AND that item happens to have explosives in it, you might get unlucky.)
    For attended objects, you are correct.

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    Quote Originally Posted by HandofShadows View Post
    Magic protection is designed to protect a person from arrows and swords. They are not designed to protect against something moving almost 3000 feet per second. .
    Going by the rules we have, guns attack Touch AC. Rings of Protection raise Touch AC.

    Speaking of, we know roughly the power of modern-ish guns, at least going by Pathfinder rules, which set part of 1 Adventure Path during WW1 era Russia. A Maxim M1910 machine gun does a whopping...2d8 damage. A Frag? 4d6. A Mortar, between 6d6 and 8d6.

    Damage scaling wouldn't have gone much higher over time, if any; fire rate and reliability are, to my understanding, the largest advances made in modern standard issue military weaponry, not stopping power.

    So now we have a solid baseline: a mortar is at most equivalent to a single shot from an 8th level Wizard casting Fireball. A vehicle mounted machine gun is slightly better than a Greatsword wielded by a peasant with 10 Str.

    A gun is...largely worthless compared to the HP values of a standard person of 5th level and up. Especially if they have DR and a good touch AC. Send in the armies of werewolves or something and there's a solid chance a bullet bounces right off of them. Or, more realistically, send in the armies of summoned creatures. The Realms have something we don't: entirely expendable troops. Start summoning hordes of Lantern Archons (available to most relatively low level spellcasters) and they can start ripping through soldiers; debuffing them all the while, softening them up for maybe one big spell from the high level character in the town.

    Or send in the troops, bolstered by mass castings of Protection from Arrows; another low level spell.

    You don't necessarily need the big flashy spells to turn the tide here.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Kitten Champion View Post
    After thinking about it, my solution to this scenario is simple. Were I Caster of sufficient power and having no moral quandaries with killing a hell of a lot of people -- I'd spread a disease, or rather diseases. It wouldn't be hard, Faerun has numerous plagues - many absolutely debilitating if not outright lethal - and D&D has spells specifically for inflicting them if you're so inclined.

    Unlike other potential magical strategies, you aren't relying on temporary arcane effects or burning your spell slots in costly ways to accomplish this. This is using the natural diseases of your world, you're just using magic to weaponize them effectively.

    Want to accelerate the spread? Or you've used this tactic already and this foreign military has caught on and are engaging in quarantine measures? Use basic enchantment magic to "request" your victim pull a Typhoid Mary.

    Toril obviously has Clerics and others with simple healing magic, and much of your population have built-up resistances to native diseases, so it's relatively low risk for your own people.
    That's not a novel idea, it's been used lots of times in human history. I don't think it's necessarily and "I win" card. Indeed, the Faerun city may be more vulnerable to the tactic than the military unit is. The city will have a fixed location, with an identifiable water source. Its citizens will not be subject to military discipline - they'll eat what they have instead of relying on rations. If we are assuming Faerun diseases will be more lethal to earth people because of lack of resistance, then the same must also be true in reverse. While clerics can cast cure disease or similar, the would only have sufficient spells to help a small proportion of the population - intuitively I imagine their casting would do less to prevent the spread of disease than the earth-humans improved sanitation and understanding of quarantining and how diseases spread.

    I find often in these scenarios, people make unstated assumptions - usually in favour of the fantasy world. They assume the military unit would simply rock up and start shooting with its guns, whereas the fantasy forces will be much cleverer and use their advantages with great foresight and knowledge to get the better of the earth military. The idea of disease spreading is an example of that.

    Really this scenario comes down to what the rules are. Real world rules (the way things work in the actual world, not how they are represented in D20 games) are not consistent with game rules. For example, the poster before me points out that guns are represented as doing D10 damage, and concludes that "A vehicle mounted machine gun is slightly better than a Greatsword wielded by a peasant with 10 Str". Maybe true by game rules, when a low level person wielding such a gun does one attack per round, but in real life a vehicle mounted machine gun fires thousands of rounds per minute (hundreds per 6 second round) - we are talking about probably more than a thousand damage per round, for each gun. Even more relevant is dealing with the sorts of magic that prevents harm - lots of spells or creature types render people immune to physical damage of varying types and degrees, but these are clearly not contemplating modern weaponry - how do these things interact?

    In my view, this scenario turns on how you resolve the interaction between magical game concepts, and real world technology. If, as the general assumption seems to be, that magic prevails, then the magical force wins. And vice versa.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    By the way, 3.5 weather can make use of ranged weapons impossible, and impose a -4, -8, or outright deny siege weapons. In practice, any column of foot soldiers would be a sitting duck, waiting to be disarmed by a wizard and trounced by horsemen (or even just angry peasants with polearms), especially in forested terrain, where they wouldn't be reachable by vehicles with heavy weapons.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    This has honestly turned into a ludicrous contest of who can theorycraft the best. Are we really at the point of super secret stealth wizards infiltrating the world so completely that inside a month they are taking over nuclear subs around the world and forcing us to nuke ourselves? Really? This has gone way past what the casters of faerun have done and is deep into territory of "Well supermans laser vision has been used to do this, therefore even though in 60 years he has never done this he should still be able to do "that" therefore I say he does." In all the forgotten realms reading I have done, involving mid to high level casters as well, they have NEVER acted with such supreme special forces skill that maximizes effort and reward in such a fashion. yes, theoretically, with full knowledge of both worlds and how everything could possibly interact, they could technically find a way to pull off "x" but that doesnt mean they actually would because we have never really seen anything like that outside of your personal campaign with a permissive dungeon master. Not that the infantry side are much better as they keep getting given everything the full force of the military has on offer and the capability of utilizing it on the enemy to maximum effect.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Liquor Box View Post
    That's not a novel idea, it's been used lots of times in human history. I don't think it's necessarily and "I win" card. Indeed, the Faerun city may be more vulnerable to the tactic than the military unit is. The city will have a fixed location, with an identifiable water source. Its citizens will not be subject to military discipline - they'll eat what they have instead of relying on rations. If we are assuming Faerun diseases will be more lethal to earth people because of lack of resistance, then the same must also be true in reverse.
    Except soldiers don't regularly engage in biowarfare these days -- not in inflicting it at any rate. The diseases the soldiers naturally have will not be as deadly as someone purposefully engineering a scenario where others get sick then fermenting it further, and the vectors for infection are far fewer when you don't have literal magic to use to infect people.

    On the Caster's end, they don't even have to use a deadly disease to begin with. Infect the invaders with, say, a disease that causes blindness as its chief symptom (as I believe exists with the 5th edition Contagion Spell), and you've got an overwhelming advantage. Even if the majority of your population is infected with the same disease it doesn't matter as long as you can focus your healing magic on your soldiers and send them out to slaughter theirs.

    Quote Originally Posted by Liquor Box View Post
    While clerics can cast cure disease or similar, the would only have sufficient spells to help a small proportion of the population - intuitively I imagine their casting would do less to prevent the spread of disease than the earth-humans improved sanitation and understanding of quarantining and how diseases spread.
    Curing a disease is a 2nd-level spell, and the clergy is far more numerous than combat wizards. Relative to what you could lose in asymmetric warfare against a vastly more well-equipped and well-trained military army and it's a far cheaper trade on your end.

    Besides, Faerun isn't unfamiliar with tackling epidemics, as has been outlined in the Forgotten Realms wiki. They don't reach Black Death levels of mortality despite several of these diseases seemingly being much worse because they - the clergy - know how to respond, and there's several descriptions of quarantine and other basic medical procedures they've used through numerous epidemics.

    I mean, the level of knowledge in how to prevent the spread of diseases wasn't actually that bad in our history at the same period that Forgotten Realms anachronistically takes its cues from despite presumptions otherwise.

    I find often in these scenarios, people make unstated assumptions - usually in favour of the fantasy world. They assume the military unit would simply rock up and start shooting with its guns, whereas the fantasy forces will be much cleverer and use their advantages with great foresight and knowledge to get the better of the earth military. The idea of disease spreading is an example of that.
    Eh, I don't think any modern army would immediately attack on sight. You'd have reconnaissance and careful strategizing at minimum, I'd imagine. Probably a lot more than what would be reasonable in a mundane military operation on Earth, given the new context.

    In fact that would be something of a problem, because magical methods of assessing your enemy are much, much better.

    You can turn invisible, change yourself into an innocuous animal, change your appearance to match another's to an uncanny degree, see magical power with a glance, create surveillance which cannot be perceived while from within your stronghold, understand every language spoken without effort, read minds, charm someone into telling you what whatever you want, ask literal gods for their opinion... and that's off the top of my head.

    It's a whole game-world designed to make these things extraordinarily easier than our own, because it'd be extremely laborious and tedious for the player to do it the mundane way and you're not generally in an army where the tasks can be delegated to many people but rather a small party facing unknown threats constantly. You don't have the liberty of bringing in experts to disable traps. 99% of Creatures in the world have been purposefully designed to be an immediate existential threat and chances are you'll be the one who has to kill them immediately if you happen to face them. In Faerun you can't even presuppose what you're seeing actually exists in reality, because there's several branches of magic that exists just to screw with your senses and many of these Creatures can use them innately.

    So, no, it's not a stretch to suggest that the mundane Earth army would take a lot, lot longer in this respect. This isn't a problem in the real world because the impact of an individual is far, far, less relevant than an organized group working in concert with a chain of command and a coherent strategy that understand the situations.

    Now, would my fellow people jump on my disease plan? I don't know. I mean, maybe? It's not like there aren't civilizations in Faerun outside of Silverymoon to which such an Evil plan would be considered. That and there's a literal spell for it. which suggests someone on that plane had the idea. It's not exactly conjuring a nuclear bomb or whatever. Besides, you only need one mage to think of it an enact it, as it's not that complex or intricate a strategy to carry out at the beginning anyways.

    Buuuuut~ even if I - as this theoretical merciless necromancer a-hole - did nothing, ya'know these soldiers will be infected anyways. Why? Because that's what happens in every other case where two groups meet over such distances. Just that one side has never had an absolute panacea against all ailments altogether before, since that's fantasy.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kitten Champion View Post
    Except soldiers don't regularly engage in biowarfare these days -- not in inflicting it at any rate. The diseases the soldiers naturally have will not be as deadly as someone purposefully engineering a scenario where others get sick then fermenting it further, and the vectors for infection are far fewer when you don't have literal magic to use to infect people.

    On the Caster's end, they don't even have to use a deadly disease to begin with. Infect the invaders with, say, a disease that causes blindness as its chief symptom (as I believe exists with the 5th edition Contagion Spell), and you've got an overwhelming advantage. Even if the majority of your population is infected with the same disease it doesn't matter as long as you can focus your healing magic on your soldiers and send them out to slaughter theirs.
    It's true that nation state soldiers don't engage in biowarfare these days, but that is largely because it is prohibited by international convention. Your post was on the basis that you has no moral quandaries. Are you suggesting different rules of warfare should apply to each side.

    The 3rd edition contagion spell is (i think) a touch spell, is 5ed the same?. Casting touch spells strikes me () as difficult against a military force with powerful ranged weapons. I would have though conventional methods of delivery might be more effective for both sides. What do you think?

    Curing a disease is a 2nd-level spell, and the clergy is far more numerous than combat wizards. Relative to what you could lose in asymmetric warfare against a vastly more well-equipped and well-trained military army and it's a far cheaper trade on your end.
    Sure, but even if you have 100 cure disease spells learned, will that be enough? As most of us should know from our current real world situation, diseases tend to be infectious before clear symptoms show. By the time a citizen of the city presents at the temple with their disease, they are likely to have infected several others.

    Besides, Faerun isn't unfamiliar with tackling epidemics, as has been outlined in the Forgotten Realms wiki. They don't reach Black Death levels of mortality despite several of these diseases seemingly being much worse because they - the clergy - know how to respond, and there's several descriptions of quarantine and other basic medical procedures they've used through numerous epidemics.

    I mean, the level of knowledge in how to prevent the spread of diseases wasn't actually that bad in our history at the same period that Forgotten Realms anachronistically takes its cues from despite presumptions otherwise.
    Maybe you are right about that - maybe their knowledge (combined with their healing magic) does make them less susceptible than we were historically. Do you think less susceptible than we are currently though?

    Eh, I don't think any modern army would immediately attack on sight. You'd have reconnaissance and careful strategizing at minimum, I'd imagine. Probably a lot more than what would be reasonable in a mundane military operation on Earth, given the new context.
    Probably right

    In fact that would be something of a problem, because magical methods of assessing your enemy are much, much better.

    You can turn invisible, change yourself into an innocuous animal, change your appearance to match another's to an uncanny degree, see magical power with a glance, create surveillance which cannot be perceived while from within your stronghold, understand every language spoken without effort, read minds, charm someone into telling you what whatever you want, ask literal gods for their opinion... and that's off the top of my head.
    Much, much better? I don't really think it is obviously so.

    It is tough to assess though, without knowing more detail about the scenario. In particular, how much do the different forces know about each other before beginning their reconassaince.

    For example, it might be reasonable for a mid-level wizard, on discovering the presence of the potentially hostile earthmen to become invisible and fly over the camp for a look (meaning they would also not be heard). But if the battalion was operating some sort of radar, then this may well detect the wizard, and the wizard may be killed (depending on what other precautionary spells had been cast, and how effective they are in the present scenario).

    Magic does open up opportunities, but don't underestimate those of the battalion. They will be able to observe from a distance at which they are imperceptible with telescopic vision, take photos (or videos) which can be assessed at leisure from camp, as I think someone else mentioned they will have surveillance drones which allow them to survey large tracts of land for enemy movement and like the magic forces they can also create surveillance within the stronghold which cannot be perceived. They can communicate in an instant - not just those few casters who might happen to have long distance communication spells memorised, but every single soldier, all day long.

    They also have another tactical advantage - the city is stationary and filled with citizens. The military unit is mobile and military only. Despite charms and illusions, I don't think the military camp will be more easily infiltrated than the city.

    The asking the gods point leads me to an interesting query around the interaction between the rules of the two worlds. The battalion will presumably have one or more chaplains. In a world where there are gods who interceded in the affairs of men, will the chaplain have divine power that they may not have in the real world?

    It's a whole game-world designed to make these things extraordinarily easier than our own, because it'd be extremely laborious and tedious for the player to do it the mundane way and you're not generally in an army where the tasks can be delegated to many people but rather a small party facing unknown threats constantly. You don't have the liberty of bringing in experts to disable traps. 99% of Creatures in the world have been purposefully designed to be an immediate existential threat and chances are you'll be the one who has to kill them immediately if you happen to face them. In Faerun you can't even presuppose what you're seeing actually exists in reality, because there's several branches of magic that exists just to screw with your senses and many of these Creatures can use them innately.

    So, no, it's not a stretch to suggest that the mundane Earth army would take a lot, lot longer in this respect. This isn't a problem in the real world because the impact of an individual is far, far, less relevant than an organized group working in concert with a chain of command and a coherent strategy that understand the situations.
    Not sure I follow here. Is the logic that the gameworld has given us magical intelligence gathering powers because it would be boring to gather intelligence conventionally (or alternatively because it would require a team effort)? That may be so, but i don't think it necessarily leads to the conclusion that the magical world's techniques are better. I mean they may be better for the role player. But perhaps not better in practice than the military.

    Now, would my fellow people jump on my disease plan? I don't know. I mean, maybe? It's not like there aren't civilizations in Faerun outside of Silverymoon to which such an Evil plan would be considered. That and there's a literal spell for it. which suggests someone on that plane had the idea. It's not exactly conjuring a nuclear bomb or whatever. Besides, you only need one mage to think of it an enact it, as it's not that complex or intricate a strategy to carry out at the beginning anyways.
    Oh, I don't deny that it's plausible they might try it. But like the existance of the spell in Faerun, the existence of biological agents in the real world suggests it might spring to mind. Which leads me to wonder whether it would be an effective strategy for either side, and if so, why for one more than the other.

    Buuuuut~ even if I - as this theoretical merciless necromancer a-hole - did nothing, ya'know these soldiers will be infected anyways. Why? Because that's what happens in every other case where two groups meet over such distances. Just that one side has never had an absolute panacea against all ailments altogether before, since that's fantasy.
    Your absolutely right about both sides being likely to face sickness.

    See my earlier point on why I don't think cure disease would be that useful. Am I missing a spell that could be applied widely and give immunity to disease in advance (like a vaccine), because that would indeed be useful.

    Quote Originally Posted by Vinyadan View Post
    By the way, 3.5 weather can make use of ranged weapons impossible, and impose a -4, -8, or outright deny siege weapons. In practice, any column of foot soldiers would be a sitting duck, waiting to be disarmed by a wizard and trounced by horsemen (or even just angry peasants with polearms), especially in forested terrain, where they wouldn't be reachable by vehicles with heavy weapons.
    I good example of my earlier post about there being an unspoken assumption that the rules of the real world give way to the game world's rules.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Liquor Box View Post
    I good example of my earlier post about there being an unspoken assumption that the rules of the real world give way to the game world's rules.
    To each his own rules for simulating the imaginary invasion of Fairyland, I guess.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    OP specified an infantry battalion, which probably won’t have jets. Helicopters and drones are another matter, but that depends on the OP.
    But the battalion wouldn't have immunity to MAE's or protective spells against them, so they'd be vulnerable to illusions, mass hold monsters, et cetera. There's also that nothing stops the spellcasters if they have sufficiently high level casters from improved invisibility, teleport, timestop, and then setting up a delayed blast fireball to go off in an ammo dump or cache and then being long gone by the time it goes off.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Arcane_Secrets View Post
    But the battalion wouldn't have immunity to MAE's or protective spells against them, so they'd be vulnerable to illusions, mass hold monsters, et cetera. There's also that nothing stops the spellcasters if they have sufficiently high level casters from improved invisibility, teleport, timestop, and then setting up a delayed blast fireball to go off in an ammo dump or cache and then being long gone by the time it goes off.
    Basically why it can't be 3.5

    It can be Faerun running on 3.5 rules, because the wizards don't fight like that in the books, but it can't be 3.5 as piloted by the players and DMs from this forum.

    I think 5E would actually be interesting to look at though. But I suspect then there would be too few high level characters for whatever Faerun city is selected to win.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    It's honestly difficult to say how things would shake out. On the one hand, even assuming 3.5 mechanics, while there's quite a few relatively powerful casters floating around, they're not exactly optimized - their builds are trash and they mostly get by on having way more levels than everyone else. On the other hand, part of why some of these people can get away with being crap for their level is because they are in-universe protagonists. There are actual explicit Greater Powers That Be pulling strings to keep the likes of (for example) Elminster from losing long-term. The drow as a species should've murder-suicided themselves to extinction out of paranoia and backstabbery millennia ago, but Lolth keeps interfering when he pet species gets threatened.

    The actual mages of Faerun, it's questionable how well they'd take over our world - Halaster runs Undermountain with an iron fist, but he doesn't run Waterdeep. The bigger issue with a war between worlds is going to be the cosmology. The fact that in one particular edition, mages with ideal understanding of both worlds could absolutely wreck everything matters less - this isn't the 3.5 subforum, this is general media discussions, so for all we know this is being asked from an AD&D idea of what Faerun is like. But that still will have our real world having to deal with the various Groups Of Interest scattered around the Planar Wheel. Sure, Elminster won't lose cuz blah blah Chosen Of Mystra, but he won't take over the world either...but Asmodeus could probably do it.

    If we're trying to look more at small-scale confrontations, and we are focusing on 3.X as our measuring stick, it might be useful to look at the Pathfinder adventure "Rasputin Must Die", which is about PCs from Golarion taking on late 19th/early 20th century equivalent soldiers. The PCs are 15th lvl and have to run roughshod through a russian warcamp. There's a few scattered magical enemies, but a lot of the bread-and-butter there are rifleman squads and snipers and occasionally tanks.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Vinyadan View Post
    To each his own rules for simulating the imaginary invasion of Fairyland, I guess.
    Indeed, but it makes it difficult to discuss who would win without a shared frame of reference.

    It does seem that if you use rules like soldiers being able to shoot one bullet per round (for D10 damage) with shooting being impossible in bad weather, or blocked by spells like protection to missiles, it seems very likely the fantasy world would win. If instead you use real world rules, it seems very likely to me that the soldiers would win.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Liquor Box View Post
    Indeed, but it makes it difficult to discuss who would win without a shared frame of reference.

    It does seem that if you use rules like soldiers being able to shoot one bullet per round (for D10 damage) with shooting being impossible in bad weather, or blocked by spells like protection to missiles, it seems very likely the fantasy world would win. If instead you use real world rules, it seems very likely to me that the soldiers would win.
    The major problem with 'run on real world rules' is that it also makes the fight a non-issue, because it doesn't matter how much damage a bullet does to a dragon if that dragon has suddenly collapsed and died because of the square-cube law, and all magic stops working due to violating conversation of energy.

    So you have to decide exactly how much real-world physics vs. fantasy-world game rules apply, and selectively where, and we end up right where we started. -arguing for parameters that support our preferred outcome.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    The major problem with 'run on real world rules' is that it also makes the fight a non-issue, because it doesn't matter how much damage a bullet does to a dragon if that dragon has suddenly collapsed and died because of the square-cube law, and all magic stops working due to violating conversation of energy.

    So you have to decide exactly how much real-world physics vs. fantasy-world game rules apply, and selectively where, and we end up right where we started. -arguing for parameters that support our preferred outcome.
    I feel like the books are the 'real world rules'. Where getting stabbed through the chest is a big deal, no matter what level you are, and injuries can actually be deliberating rather than something to be ignored until you suffer critical existence failure.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    The major problem with 'run on real world rules' is that it also makes the fight a non-issue, because it doesn't matter how much damage a bullet does to a dragon if that dragon has suddenly collapsed and died because of the square-cube law, and all magic stops working due to violating conversation of energy.

    So you have to decide exactly how much real-world physics vs. fantasy-world game rules apply, and selectively where, and we end up right where we started. -arguing for parameters that support our preferred outcome.
    Seems simple enough for the most part, magic works like it does according to the game rules, the army works like it does in the real world. Now, maybe you want to argue about game world versus book world for faerun. As someone else said, in the book world, a sword to the chest is going to seriously injure you even if by game rules its, i dunno, only 1d8 damage. Obviously each option is more likely to favor one side over the other.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Originally Posted by pendell
    If I can butt in, the first example I can think of is the introduction of poison gas in the First World War. It shocked and terrified the soldiers at first, but they rallied, looked to their training, and succeeded in taking back the initial gains.
    Really excellent post overall. Just to comment on this portion—poison gas is a good example and one I hadn’t thought of.

    I’m not familiar with the details, but you say that it shocked and terrified the soldiers at first. I’m assuming that the shock and fear lasted for days or weeks, not just minutes—please correct me if I’m wrong on that point. But if the shock and fear was a matter of days or longer, then I think this is a good parallel to what I’m thinking of for a battalion of modern soldiers being simultaneously hit with a barrage of deadly spells.

    Originally Posted by pendell
    Another example would be the Japanese Zero fighter of WWII….
    Excellent example and very good summary of the evolution of combat tactics against the Zero.

    I would just add that in the later years of the Pacific war, the U.S. gained near-complete air superiority over the Zero primarily because of the F6F Hellcat, which was designed around the Zero’s flight performance based on the captured Zero which crash-landed in the Aleutians, and which was subsequently repaired and put through extensive flight testing.

    Originally Posted by pendell
    But in the long term of a war, victory goes to the side which is better organized, better equipped to logistically support its army, and better equipped to adapt to the enemy more quickly than the enemy can adapt to them. That will almost always be a modern country, not a medieval one, even if that medieval one has wizards.
    Certainly agreed, and again, I’m basing my comments on the OP’s scenario of a single battalion attacking a large city in Faerûn, rather than an entire modern army against the entire military of a nation in the Realms.

    Originally Posted by Mechalich
    The Forgotten Realms has around 100 million inhabitants (if you go and add up all the regional population numbers in the 3e FRCS that's about what you get), though obviously this is only a fraction of the population of Faerun as a whole (Shou, as fits the historical parallels, has a larger population than the Realms).
    Just to focus on this bit, what’s your source for the population of Shou?

    On p. 98 of the FRCS, the population of Faerûn is given as 68 million. If Shou has a larger population than Faerûn, that would argue for a combined population of 140 million or above, but I can’t find a population estimate for Shou alone. Do you have a source for that?

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    Also your plan against drones requires some pretty sophisticated knowledge of what drones are.
    My plan was “drop from above and club it to pieces.” No sophisticated knowledge at all.

    Vinyadan’s suggestion of Transmute Metal to Wood is more elegant, and would be more effective against tracked vehicles and weapons. I don’t know how much metal is in the typical drone, but as Vinyadan says, if we’re including the electronics, then converting the shiny bits of a circuit board to wood should cripple the drone instantly.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    The fact that there are 3.5 books is the proof that the characters don’t fight or behave that way.

    ...

    It can be Faerun running on 3.5 rules, because the wizards don't fight like that in the books, but it can't be 3.5 as piloted by the players and DMs from this forum.
    I really can’t make any sense of your syntax or your logic here.

    Originally Posted by Forum Explorer
    Which hey is also about high level spellcasters. Which don’t fight in the way you describe at all.
    Except I haven’t been describing anything about high-level spellcasters. I don’t think I’ve referenced a single spell above fourth level, and most of my druid examples have been fifth- or sixth-level casters. Not what the Playground usually calls “high level spellcasters.”

    Originally Posted by Vinyadan
    Working through the environment would be a great option. I don't know if there are terraforming spells in D&D, but even just control weather can be really strong. Think of causing fog to rise while the enemy vehicles are on the road, or a torrential rain on the mountains.
    Another option would be Ice Storm, perhaps combined with Sleet Storm. Ice Storm is only one round, but a 40-foot-diameter column of giant hailstones can really frag your day, and Sleet Storm will just about guarantee that everyone in that area is prone at the end of it.

    And that’s not including all the ice and snow options from Frostburn. If modern mass media helps you fight magic on other worlds, let’s hope everyone’s seen Frozen.

    Originally Posted by Asmotherion
    As demonstrated in multiple videos (that gun lovers such as myself watch to the point of addiction) even armor piercing bullets do minimal damage to full plate, and would take several rounds to make an actual penetration.
    Really? That would certainly make paladins with +1 mithral plate a little more relevant.

    Originally Posted by Liquor Box
    Indeed, the Faerun city may be more vulnerable to the tactic than the military unit is. The city will have a fixed location, with an identifiable water source.
    A very identifiable water source—Create Water.

    Originally Posted by Liquor Box
    They assume the military unit would simply rock up and start shooting with its guns, whereas the fantasy forces will be much cleverer and use their advantages with great foresight and knowledge to get the better of the earth military.
    In this case, the fantasy forces have divination spells that can look into the future, which I think is a fairly significant advantage over Team Oorah.

    Originally Posted by Liquor Box
    The 3rd edition contagion spell is (i think) a touch spell, is 5ed the same?. Casting touch spells strikes me…as difficult against a military force with powerful ranged weapons.
    In 3.5, Contagion is a third-level druid spell.

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    —Or, if the soldiers are a little brighter and more paranoid, then a wizard’s hummingbird familiar zings in, pecks a soldier, and zings out before anyone can react.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    It's true that nation state soldiers don't engage in biowarfare these days, but that is largely because it is prohibited by international convention. Your post was on the basis that you has no moral quandaries. Are you suggesting different rules of warfare should apply to each side.
    They don't spread biological diseases but they do train to defend against biological diseases. Back in the 80s we fully expected countries to deploy bioweapons in a full scale war. That's where the "B" in "NBC" comes from.

    There others are nuclear and chemical, respectively. Thank God that didn't happen. Western Europe would be uninhabitable.

    Which raises a point someone else brought up: Why would any attacker want to make a place like Silverymoon or Waterdeep a wasteland? The whole point of a conquest is to get more out of it than you put in, and it's hard for a charred moonscape to ever pay off.


    Another factor in the battle is that wizards will have very different effects IF they have prepared the optimal spells for the day. But they won't do that, not at first. Even with mindreading, that doesn't mean you'll fully grasp the concepts of the minds you're reading in a day. Both sides have a lot to learn about the other. Which means, rather than the mages simply preparing the optimal spells on day 1 and winning on day 2, there is going to be a lot of trial and error before the conflict as resolved. And as I said, a real-world military in this situation will not allow itself to remain defenseless against magical attacks forever. They will be doing all they can to recruit mages, train their own, or buy up magical items.

    There's a cool story that could be told here, but I don't think it's an auto-win for anyone.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    The major problem with 'run on real world rules' is that it also makes the fight a non-issue, because it doesn't matter how much damage a bullet does to a dragon if that dragon has suddenly collapsed and died because of the square-cube law, and all magic stops working due to violating conversation of energy.

    So you have to decide exactly how much real-world physics vs. fantasy-world game rules apply, and selectively where, and we end up right where we started. -arguing for parameters that support our preferred outcome.
    Yes, I agree. If you go hard to the real world rule, then there is no magic, so wizards are meaningless. I'm not sure about the dragons - there were of course large animals in earth's history, but you may know more about biology than me, so I'll take you word for it.

    But the same is kind of true for the fantasy world rules. There are a few lowish level spells that seem to make it a near insta-win (for example, protection from missiles).

    It does seem to me that there may be something in between, where you allow for magic and the existence of magical creatures, but also allow for the magic to not effect modern tech the same way it does bows and arrows. AvatarVecna referred to a pathfinder scenario where this happens - where taking on a squadron of troops is a reasonable challenge for a 15th level party. We probably can't agree on where the line is, but I think choosing either real world rules or the bare rules of the fnatasy world renders the discussion almost meaningless.

    Quote Originally Posted by Traab View Post
    Seems simple enough for the most part, magic works like it does according to the game rules, the army works like it does in the real world. Now, maybe you want to argue about game world versus book world for faerun. As someone else said, in the book world, a sword to the chest is going to seriously injure you even if by game rules its, i dunno, only 1d8 damage. Obviously each option is more likely to favor one side over the other.
    I agree, that's a good starting point. It avoids silliness like restricting a soldier with a gun to a single bullet per round. It gets a bit more challenging when those rules contradict one another though.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    A very identifiable water source—Create Water.
    Is that actually how water is generally created for cities in Faerun? That would require a high number of spell casters dedicated to simply creating water. In 3.5 you can create 2 gallons for spell level. Given people drink half a gallon a day, that means 5000 spell casting levels (druids and priests) for a city of 20,000 just for drinking water for humans (so excluding horses or dragons or the other fantastic beasts people are envisaging), and none left for bathing or cooking.

    In this case, the fantasy forces have divination spells that can look into the future, which I think is a fairly significant advantage over Team Oorah.
    So I take it you are assuming divine magic works as it does in Faerun. Fair enough. In such a world (which clearly differs from our own in terms of divine magic), can the army chaplains also see into the future?

    In 3.5, Contagion is a third-level druid spell.

    Look! ItÂ’s a bunny! Oh look, the bunny is hopping over. ItÂ’s a friendly bunny, heÂ’s eating clover right out of my hand. And slobbering a bit, but itÂ’s just bunny slobber, no big deal.

    —Or, if the soldiers are a little brighter and more paranoid, then a wizard’s hummingbird familiar zings in, pecks a soldier, and zings out before anyone can react.
    Both seem risky - the troops may well shoot and eat the druid/bunny (which is not itself infected through the contagion spell is it), or simply kill the pesky bird that stings them (the before anyone can react point seems an unreasonable assumption to me). It also assumes the soldiers don't yet know that magic can make animals not what they appear, but the plan does seem to assume that the faerun folk have some foreknowledge of the earthfolk (eg, lack of disease protection, or indeed lack of suspicion of bunnies and hummingbirds). Even if neither of those things happens, it still seems to me to be a more complicated, resource intensive, way of going about things than using more traditional vectors. And if it works, the soldier who gets infected may well simply be able to enter the city and infect the populace.

    Again, I think we are making assumptions that the fantasy world folk are much cleverer than the invaders, and their plans all go off without a hitch.

    Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
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    They don't spread biological diseases but they do train to defend against biological diseases. Back in the 80s we fully expected countries to deploy bioweapons in a full scale war. That's where the "B" in "NBC" comes from.

    There others are nuclear and chemical, respectively. Thank God that didn't happen. Western Europe would be uninhabitable.

    Which raises a point someone else brought up: Why would any attacker want to make a place like Silverymoon or Waterdeep a wasteland? The whole point of a conquest is to get more out of it than you put in, and it's hard for a charred moonscape to ever pay off.


    Another factor in the battle is that wizards will have very different effects IF they have prepared the optimal spells for the day. But they won't do that, not at first. Even with mindreading, that doesn't mean you'll fully grasp the concepts of the minds you're reading in a day. Both sides have a lot to learn about the other. Which means, rather than the mages simply preparing the optimal spells on day 1 and winning on day 2, there is going to be a lot of trial and error before the conflict as resolved. And as I said, a real-world military in this situation will not allow itself to remain defenseless against magical attacks forever. They will be doing all they can to recruit mages, train their own, or buy up magical items.

    There's a cool story that could be told here, but I don't think it's an auto-win for anyone.

    Respectfully,

    Brian P.
    Completely agree with all you've said here. Particularly your point that the exact scenario matters and your point that we cannot assume the wizards have the particular spell they happen to need (either memorised or at all).
    Last edited by Liquor Box; 2020-09-19 at 07:52 PM.

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Can you cast animate object on a tank? It could be hilarious in many ways (Tank! Roll over!). With permanency, you could steal it away forever. And animated objects explicitly get trample. I wonder what the strength score on a tank would be.

    Animate object would also be an instakill on any aircraft, as you could just tell it to fly into the ground if it's manned, and to fly as high as possible if it's parked; once the spell ends, it would crash.
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
    I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    Really excellent post overall. Just to comment on this portion—poison gas is a good example and one I hadn’t thought of.

    I’m not familiar with the details, but you say that it shocked and terrified the soldiers at first. I’m assuming that the shock and fear lasted for days or weeks, not just minutes—please correct me if I’m wrong on that point. But if the shock and fear was a matter of days or longer, then I think this is a good parallel to what I’m thinking of for a battalion of modern soldiers being simultaneously hit with a barrage of deadly spells.
    For the first effective gas attack? The panic lasted 1 day. On the first day it was used, it broke the line held by the French. The next day it was used again, and despite causing heavy casualties, the Canadian forces countered attacked through it regardless to actually win the battle in question.

    The day after that, (so the third day after the initial attack) soldiers used urine soaked cloth to try and protect against the gas which helped save their lives but made fighting much harder. Despite that, and taking horrible casualties, the Allied forces still managed to hold onto the town of Ypres.

    By July (1-2 months later) effective gas masks had been distributed to Allied forces, though admittedly, they had trouble using them.

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    My plan was “drop from above and club it to pieces.” No sophisticated knowledge at all.

    Vinyadan’s suggestion of Transmute Metal to Wood is more elegant, and would be more effective against tracked vehicles and weapons. I don’t know how much metal is in the typical drone, but as Vinyadan says, if we’re including the electronics, then converting the shiny bits of a circuit board to wood should cripple the drone instantly.



    I really can’t make any sense of your syntax or your logic here.



    Except I haven’t been describing anything about high-level spellcasters. I don’t think I’ve referenced a single spell above fourth level, and most of my druid examples have been fifth- or sixth-level casters. Not what the Playground usually calls “high level spellcasters.”
    Your plan involved carefully avoiding the vision of the drone so they wouldn't know what destroyed it.

    Let me try and reword it then. There are books about Faerun running on 3.5 rules. In those books we see that their behavior and tactics does not match anything you are saying. For example, I've never, ever, seen an example of a druid casting transmute metal to wood. Or even using the feat that lets you cast spells as an animal.

    That's what I'm getting at when I say as piloted by the players and DMs of this forum. Even that most basic level of optimization...is not present in the books. The characters as we see them throughout the canon of the various stories are far less effective than the characters you would run them as in your games. They have no optimization at all, they don't know every option available to them and they certainly aren't telling each other what tricks they have up their sleeves.

    They also aren't unified, or even particularly paying attention to the world around them. Things frequently catch them by surprise, because wizards and clerics don't spend all day divining things. What happens to one town might take weeks or longer for the news to spread to the next. Let alone for an effective response to be sent out. And organizations certainly do not share knowledge that well with each other. In fact, they often actively sabotage each other whenever possible. If druids do decide to attack the army for whatever reason, they'll almost certainly do so without any coordination with other forces. In fact, they'll probably never mention to the factions in the city that they ever attacked at all.

    Like a different poster said in an earlier post. When Faerun was confronted with a interdimensional threat (or even just their equivalent of the Mongol Horde), they almost immediately fell into bickering and backstabbing. They did not have a unified response of druids and wizards magically spying on the enemy and watching their every move.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
    The Realms are pretty famous for having high-level casters hiding under every bush. That’s an overstatement, of course, but simply flipping through a few random pages of the FRCS gives me mid- to high-level casters on nearly every page.* And those are just the named characters.

    Your infantry battalion might hold out for a while in a less-populated area, but if they’re throwing themselves against even a moderate settlement, then it’s flaming spheres and thoqquas setting them on fire and cooking off their ammo, interspersed with lighting, flame strikes, and drifting clouds of poisonous gas.

    The only way these guys could survive is to go native—first by making the mental adjustment that this is really magic, and then by somehow managing to get some for themselves. But that would be a steep, steep learning curve, and if they’re under any kind of concerted attack, the only survivors will be the ones who ran first…and that’s if the werewolves don’t get them.


    *Plus one Ftr20/Rog3/Wiz7, of all things, but that's the Realms for you.
    That's the thing. That's the named characters. The setting of Faerun highly implies that if they don't have a name? They're not a high level character. Barring exceptions made by DM's. There are very few high level characters in Faerun, but if they do happen to run into one, they're going to be in for a rough time.
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    Quote Originally Posted by AvatarZero View Post
    I like the "hobo" in there.
    "Hey, you just got 10000gp! You going to buy a fully staffed mansion or something?"
    "Nah, I'll upgrade my +2 sword to a +3 sword and sleep in my cloak."

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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    Quote Originally Posted by Palanan
    Really excellent post overall. Just to comment on this portion—poison gas is a good example and one I hadn’t thought of.

    I’m not familiar with the details, but you say that it shocked and terrified the soldiers at first. I’m assuming that the shock and fear lasted for days or weeks, not just minutes—please correct me if I’m wrong on that point. But if the shock and fear was a matter of days or longer, then I think this is a good parallel to what I’m thinking of for a battalion of modern soldiers being simultaneously hit with a barrage of deadly spells.
    Not so much hours as it did the first attack. In the Second Battle of Ypres. In the initial assault . the allied troops didn't know how to deal with it and had no choice but to fall back.

    After that , they knew what to expect and adopted extremely primitive countermeasures. a WWI battlefield was already a pretty terrifying place to begin with. By this point they were used to risking their lives.

    The side that started with the poison gas lost the battle. It didn't give them enough of an edge . As with almost all WW1 attacks , initial success fell apart when they weren't able to hold ground against the inevitable counter-artillery barrage coupled with counterattack, resulting in nearly the same lines as before the battle.

    That's the problem I have with the panic scenario; real battles are pretty terrifying. Most training goes to making soldiers into people who don't do the rational thing when they're having bombs dropped or machine guns fired at them , which is to run away at speed. Once that basic lesson is learned, a new horror just doesn't have the same impact as it would on untrained civilians.

    Respectfully,

    Brian P.
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    Default Re: Modern soldiers vs. Faerun. What do you think happens?

    OK, I'm sorry to say this, but this thread is actually built around a false premise. As it turns out, the soldiers would become harmless as soon as they entered the Realms, because the god Gond forbids gunpowder, nitroglycerin, and other such compounds to burn or explode. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheEdVers...73434047553536
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
    I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).

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