what does army-scale combat look like in 3.5?

[Velaryon]

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

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

[RandomPeasant]

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

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

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

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

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

[Maat Mons]

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

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

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

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

[Elves]

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

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



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

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

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

[Velaryon]

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

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

[Melcar]

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

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

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



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



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

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


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

[Mnemnosyne]

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

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

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

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

[Vaern]

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

[Max Caysey]

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

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

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

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

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

[King of Nowhere]

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

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

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

[Berenger]

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

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

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

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

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

It's a mess.

[RandomPeasant]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Seward]

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

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

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

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

[Xervous]

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

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

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

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

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

[Max Caysey]

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

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

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

It's a mess.

We know Ioulaum is real, and that He is level 41… try doing The calculation from 41!

[Berenger]

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

[Telonius]

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

[TalonOfAnathrax]

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

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

[RSGA]

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

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

[bekeleven]

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

[Seward]

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

[Elves]

So whoever wins initiative...instantly wipes out the majority of the enemy army before they even get to act

Remember that people still act one at a time. It's not one side goes then the other.

[D+1]

We know Ioulaum is real, and that He is level 41… try doing The calculation from 41!

Why? A single 24th level character would already require a population in excess of the current real world population of Earth.

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

...or 1 for about every 140,000 Earths.

[RandomPeasant]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Seward]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why you want Warlocks for your army.

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

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

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

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

[TotallyNotEvil]

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

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

How common are outsiders? Spirits of nature? Undead?

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

[Mechalich]

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

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

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

[Seward]

Something else to consider....

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

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

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

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

[Doctor Awkward]

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

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

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

[Seward]

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

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

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