D&D 5E Some thoughts on Warfare in DnD

[Krachek]

I went out of subject in another thread, but I think this worth sharing.

How do you imagine warfare and battle in your setting?

In french historical medieval nobles train and equip themselves.
When the king call them they form a huge unit of heavy cavalry composed of thousands of knights.
In DnD we can use the Knight npc to recreate this.
It can be fine to recreate historical battle or handle low magic setting.

What if...
Nobles train in magic and become potent mages, as the Mage npc?
When the king call his nobles, he got an army of thousand of mages.
What kind of battle and war would that create?

What if...
each noble house specialize in one class, and thus the king nobles army will be composed of potent npc around level 7-10 of diverse classes.
The nobles will match themselves into small party and go to battle, to face horde of trolls, giants, dragons or demons.
I can’t imagine those npc line up in rank waiting to be butchered. The war tactics will tend to match party’s tactics.
It’s easy to me to imagine that the overall stability of such an army in war and after war can be a great problem. Historical king were having a great deal to control their nobles, imagine a nobility composed of wizards, rogue, fighter, ranger, warlock....

What if ...
A democratic kingdom instead create academies to train potent npc of various classes. It will create a more focus and obedient army that can replace totally or partially the noble house power. It may look like actual military power.

What if ...
some classes regroup themselves to create additional structure.
We can imagine paladin and cleric in a military order that create their own army and share a part of the military power.
Druid can be pacifist and rarely participate in warfare.
Some classes such as warlock and sorcerer may be considered too suspicious to be include in warfare. They train and work underground.

Of course ...
We can have fallen noble, fallen religious, fallen military that create ideal mercenaries and adventurers. Adventurer can also came from non military background, but military background is too common to be ignore.

 

[Fenris-77]

Warhammer Fantasy tabletop is kind of my default. It fits, mostly, but I'm also really familiar with it. If you tack on some notions from DBA to account for the scale of units it works for me.

 

[practicalm]

If the world is a fiefdom (and I usually run them this way) all the chains of loyalty run up to the king.
Armies are expected to have warriors (fighters, barbarians, calvary knights, scouts, lower level warriors), and maybe a few other specialists like mages, clerics and bards. Specialists would be like siege warfare specialists from history.

Smaller city states would have smaller armies but magic will have an effect.

 

[Tonguez]

Small high skilled strike teams, lots of artillery fire (magic).

I’ve always considered Adventure Parties to be Mercenary Companies and that most DnD mass combat would be between such mercenary groups rather than army v army

 

[Umbran]

What if...
Nobles train in magic and become potent mages, as the Mage npc?

This raises metaphysical and demographic questions that the game rules don't answer.

How does each form of magic work? Can any person just go and study and become a mage? It is merely a matter of book learning, or does a person need to have some ineffable quality beyond memorizing things in books?

Even given all the opportunities in the world, not everyone's mind is suited to say, doctorate-level mathematics. This goes for any class, really - not everyone can be an Olympic athelete, so not everyone's apt to make a good fighter or rogue.

When we start talking about war, we start talking about statistically relevant fractions of the population. If you decide the nobles can send their kids off to become Mages in significant numbers, that starts having impact not just on war, but on every other aspect of life.

That academy that trains mages doesn't just impact war. It impacts everything else, because not all those mages are going to go to war, and they are gong to do things when there's no war going on....

 

[pogre]

The ideas and concepts you put forth for what would happen in a D&D war make sense.

My problem is I love the old rank and file units, charging cavalry, and war machines. Sadly, those things do not work well in D&D mass combat.

Almost any D&D mass combat in the sense I presented requires some major changes to magic.

One look at a couple of spells has foiled my attempts to run mass combat.

Fireball - Range 150' - 20 foot radius sphere - 8D6 damage
Counterspell - Range 60'

Wizards, Sorcerers, Druids, and Clerics just don't play well with massed troops!

You can change the rules to make it work, but it is a little sad to me that a game derived from a mass combat miniatures game can no longer produce a satisfactory mass combat experience.

My solution, and I will admit it is not completely satisfactory, is that mages are pretty rare in my game and few would lower themselves to serve as mere artillery in a war. If a mage does get involved it can lead to other mages declaring a Wizards' War and hunting down the culprit,

 

[Oofta]

My current campaign started as people from a variety of backgrounds paying their standard "taxes". Everyone that is able bodied of a certain age has to serve as part of the guard because my city is very much in a "points of light" era at the moment. In some areas there are special schools established to train people, the kids sent there are either sponsored or there on a form of scholarship debt.

For the current campaign the group of people chosen for special missions because of their natural talents. As they advance in level they will have options to gain political stature as well as titles. Assuming they stick with the special assignments now that they have enough wealth to hire replacement mercenaries.

So yes, magic and spellcasters are thrown into the mix of warfare. Truly high level wizards are fairly rare, and in mass combat a fireball is great but there simply aren't enough wizards to turn the tide of combat in most cases. That and anyone who casts a fireball instantly becomes a target to enemy snipers.

 

[Rabbitbait]

I still think the 3e module 'The Red Hand of Doom' is the best example of warfare as a D&D campaign. Lots going on, but the party are generally on specific strategic missions on the edge of battle - stuff that will turn the tide. It's playable on a character level but you still feel like your efforts have a direct input to how the war goes.

Red Hand of Doom (3e) - Wizards of the Coast | Dungeons & Dragons 3.x | Dungeons & Dragons 3.x | Dungeon Masters Guild

Red Hand of Doom (3e) - Note from the Admins: This is a new Print on Demand version of Red Hand of Doom built from the original digital files. P

www.dmsguild.com

 

[Krachek]

This raises metaphysical and demographic questions that the game rules don't answer.

How does each form of magic work? Can any person just go and study and become a mage? It is merely a matter of book learning, or does a person need to have some ineffable quality beyond memorizing things in books?

Even given all the opportunities in the world, not everyone's mind is suited to say, doctorate-level mathematics. This goes for any class, really - not everyone can be an Olympic athelete, so not everyone's apt to make a good fighter or rogue.

When we start talking about war, we start talking about statistically relevant fractions of the population. If you decide the nobles can send their kids off to become Mages in significant numbers, that starts having impact not just on war, but on every other aspect of life.

That academy that trains mages doesn't just impact war. It impacts everything else, because not all those mages are going to go to war, and they are gong to do things when there's no war going on....

I know that rules and most setting don’t handle this.
Noble able to train and equip was very rare in medieval world.
maybe around 1:1000, I’m not a specialist.
but for large kingdom with millions of people it can make thousand of mage.
I see training of magic as a « family » legacy, that is kept jealousy inside the family.
we can imagine a society of Noble wizard, that trade between them and shun common people and keep them in ignorance and povrety.
A large Drow style Kingdom can look like that.

 

[Flamestrike]

Is any default DnD setting medieval though? Most feature defined nation states, taxation, a merchant class, social mobility and so forth not seen till the Renaissance or even early industrial age.

In virtually all of them, magic is quite common with magic guilds and spellcasters in every villiage.

Magic replicates or even surpasses modern medical, agricultural and technological innovations.

Nations would have clerics, wizards and so forth in their hundreds on the payroll.