D&D 5E World Building: Army building

[AmandaBarbarian]

World Building Question 2 Army building

So I asked for general DM advise, because hello I am new to Dming. However I would like to start a series of specific posts asking about different parts of world building. This isn't a plus thread per say, but if you think I should not world build that is not very helpful.
Also Warning, I ramble when I am excited even in text.

(if you want to see part 1 https://www.enworld.org/threads/world-building-commerce-and-gold.698360/)

Okay, so wind up to question 2: Soldiers and War

When your games involve wars and kingdoms forces how do you build them?

I have seen DMs build full PCs like fighters Rangers Wizards ect. And then fill them out after that with NPC stats from the MM. I have also seen DMs just take monster or NPC stats.

My personal thought is based on something I found here online. Take the NPC or Monster stats and add 1 or 2 class like features.

However I then worry when is too much too much? Like if I take guards and knights and other NPC stats and add human or elf or dwarf to them, then give them action surge and second wind that sounds like a cool "champion" or "commander" but I would not want a legion of 100 of those (tracking those action surges would be a nightmare).

Then because for my world I am using a lot of Divine magic I started to think about spell slots. I wonder if there is a good way to limit those.

As I am typing this I wonder how much can be hand waved. Like I can call an army of paladins an army of paladins the players don't need to know if they have smite or lay on hands unless they are part of an encounter, and at least at low level those encounters need to be small or it will TPK.

Then I am wondering, do I just story point who wins if I have 2 NPC armies fight, or should I 'roll it out' in between games to be able to tell the players it was 'fair'

I also have seen many times here and elsewhere online that enough commoners can take down a dragon. How much do I need to worry about army sizes?

If I want to throw numbers around as intelligence about 1 feudal lord or another what are sane numbers? Like if someone owns 3 towns and 2 castle/keeps and a bunch of farm land and the DM told me they can field 200,000 troops I would be highly skeptical, but if they have 20,000 is that too much? What about 10,000?

How does caster change this? Like If 1 lord can field 5,000 spear men and 2,000 archers with 500 light cavalry and a dozen siege weapons, but there enemy can bring 400 spear men, 100 archers, 50 light cavalry and 60 level 5+ wizards and 100 level 3-4 wizards and that side has 30 clerics/healers it seems like the casters are a major force multiplier.

Also monsters. Like if one side has ogres and the other side has goblins that skews things too.

 

[Asisreo]

So, D&D isn't a true wargame where you're supposed to emulate real-world warfare.

Generally, if a war is happening and it doesn't directly influence the main focus that the party is going through, it gets handwaved in a sentence or two. "The Ilustian army is in war with the Crote army." At that point, its minor worldbuilding.

I wait until the players decide to pivot to where it's relevant before building on the war. If they visit either countries, they'll see the impact of the war on the nobility and citizens.

Now, if all of the players want to engage in full-on warfare for one side or another as part of their emergent story, then I handle it like this:

When they're "footsoldiers" on the frontline, I give them an encounter day where they likely will have 4-6 combat encounters in a relatively short amount of time. Everything else gets handwaved and, since the party is the main characters, their results directly impact the battle's results.

So, rather than making specific armies with specific stats, numbers, and supplies, I'm making the armies a setting itself.

If they're commanders, I tend to make them do contested intelligence rolls with the enemy commanders and narrate the results. So if they succeed on their plan to distract the enemy and hit their supply caravans to the target location, they resolve that in a roll or two and I narrate that after a few days the target location for the caravans fall due to lack of supplies.

But ultimately, I ask my players and feel out how deep they really want to go with it. I can try to make the war very immersive and engaging but if the players don't want to deal with all that, then I handwave it all away.

 

[jmartkdr2]

My own theory: in a world with DnD-style spellcasters, they replace heavy cavalry as the core of the armies of the world. Whoever can bring the most wizards to the fight usually wins, so each kingdom is always looking for ways to get wizards (or other full casters) on their side.

The easiest way is to just pay them a lot of money and not bother them when you don't need them for warfare.

When wars do happen, wizards don't show up by themselves - they'd be expected to bring their own bodyguard at least, and that could be up to 100 troops if the wizard can afford that. If the wizard was paid in land, they might also be expected to provide levies from the farmers working the land and pay for their training and equipment (padded vests and some pikes, for example). They might also be expected to fund or help fund free companies of professional soldiers such as cavalry (light and heavy) to fill out the force.

Over time there's be a lot of overlap between the nobility and wizards - magical bloodlines would drift upwards, and nobles' children would be sent to magic school.

The exception is low-magic settings: if each kingdom has only one full caster, the army looks like a late medieval/ early modern army. Which is a vague statement so when it actually shows up it might be a lot of things.

In actual play: armies are not enumerated. "An army marches past you" is most of the description they'll get, unless the players want to join and/or lead a army. Then I detail that army, with some decisions being guided by what would make a fun game.

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

Oh boy is this a hard one. The new Dragonlance book has a board game to handle army to army stuff but I don't know anyone happy with it. Not saying there aren't just not in my groups.

My best advise is keep everything vague. Giving details gives too much of a shot at calling BS on things happening.

So "This lord has more forces then that lord" is good, "this lord has 2,000 of this and 3,000 of that" is going to cause people to look too much into it.

however the difference between hundreds and thousands is most likely vague enough. So "this lord has thousands of troops and this other lord has only a few hundred" still works.

I am not sure if my best example of this will side trek this so I am going to put this in a spoiler explaining that this is something I saw as a player and caused issue at a table in real world use of D&D.

Spoiler: The problem

we had a game that was going for about 8 months. we spent a lot of time in both the human and elf kingdom, and did work for lords in both. We knew the elves had a "elven high magic council" that had almost 80 archmages (like using the cr 12 archmage) with some modification each... and each of them had at least 3 but some had a dozen 'underlings' that were useing the mage stat block with some modifications, and each of those had at least 1 apprentice. Several of these were warmages of one kind or another (but not all) they also had a school for wizards that was more not counting this... they had a 'high table of lord knights' that had about 2 dozen 'knights' were all bladesingers, and he used the archmage as the base but added str or dex and a weapon attack and the bladesong and extra hp and magic light armor. They each had 2-3 squire/apprentices that were mage modified to be bladesingers... he also hammered home time and again that elves had the best archers and 1 elven archer was the eqaul to 3 human ones...

the humans where all not casters, they had 1 or 2 wizard towers but the believed in military might and there war college had knights with some cool add on stuff but not magic.

so when we were told that the human kingdom with 10,000 footment and 10,000 archers backed by 3,000 heavy lance and 1,000 light lance and 2 war wizards attacked the elves we called it suicide...
when we got the fact that the first battle went against the elves no one batted an eye... a surprise attack will do that. However when he said half those blade singers back with a dozen high mage counslers brough 500 footmen and 2,000 archers we felt SOOO sorry for the human army. When he said the humans won we derailed his game by going to investigate how and not excepting "we had the numbers'

yeah too many archmages, we want to find how they shut down that much magic without any magic of there own... we thought we were following his plot looking for some secret anti magic weapon... we even theorized they had something that created temporary dead magic zones or something.
The DM got mad. He was new to us and when we explained D&D magic was too powerful, and that archmages calling fire from no where was too much for an army of 24,000 soldiers to stop, and the archmages aren't alone, by your own account those 2,000 archers would be eqaul to 6,000 human ones.

TLDR if that DM had left the sides more general "a few thousand solders with archers footment heavy and light lance with some magic support" against "an elven defense force of half or less that size lead by a few blade singers" no one would have batted an eye.

 

[Celebrim]

So, D&D isn't a true wargame where you're supposed to emulate real-world warfare.

I would dispute that. Treating D&D as a game where warfare occurs off stage and is color is a valid choice but isn't the only choice. It's perfectly valid to have a mass combat minigame where players control units on the battlefield and we simulate warfare at a very granular level if that's what the group gets excited about.

 

[AmandaBarbarian]

Oh boy is this a hard one. The new Dragonlance book has a board game to handle army to army stuff but I don't know anyone happy with it. Not saying there aren't just not in my groups.

I know about the board game but I don't have it... I may have to look into it. Does anyone know how customizable it is?

My best advise is keep everything vague. Giving details gives too much of a shot at calling BS on things happening.

So "This lord has more forces then that lord" is good, "this lord has 2,000 of this and 3,000 of that" is going to cause people to look too much into it.

however the difference between hundreds and thousands is most likely vague enough. So "this lord has thousands of troops and this other lord has only a few hundred" still works.

Okay, that is interesting it also makes sense in world... no one is standing there counting enemy forces "How many knights?" " A lot, at least a few hundred maybe a thousand"

TLDR if that DM had left the sides more general "a few thousand solders with archers footment heavy and light lance with some magic support" against "an elven defense force of half or less that size lead by a few blade singers" no one would have batted an eye.

thank you for that example that is something I need to keep in mind to avoid. My example would be I totally love the idea that David beat goliath, but if 10 Davids went against 10 Goliaths I would question if all 10 Davids walked away, and assume there was some level of trickery... if after investigating I find that those davids had AR 15s against the Goliaths great swords and great axes, that would make sense, the sling not so much.

 

[greg kaye]

D&D warfare would have more similarity to modern warfare than warfare in Medieval or Ancient times due to the potential for AoE magic. The similarity of AoEs to the effects of cannon fire, and bombs would mean that close formations of troops would present a serious risk. Phalanx formations would not happen.

As others have said, the sides that can retain the strongest contingent of spell casters will have great advantage, and this is where propaganda can come in.

A side that can develop good strategies and capacities for threatening and killing enemy spell casters will discourage the spell casters from joining the enemy side. Issues like mobility among some units can be key.

D&D warfare is one where there are certainly cannons, only the cannons may be made of glass and opposing sides may try to take them out as quickly as possible.

On propaganda, see my thread Skywrite: a weapon of mass communication/coordination. Armies are lied to and an information war could may also take place.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would dispute that. Treating D&D as a game where warfare occurs off stage and is color is a valid choice but isn't the only choice. It's perfectly valid to have a mass combat minigame where players control units on the battlefield and we simulate warfare at a very granular level if that's what the group gets excited about.

While that's fair, no edition of WotC D&D has included mass combat rules in anything remotely like the core rules, and AIUI they weren't core in any TSR edition either (but I welcome correction if I am wrong.)

While it is perfectly valid in the sense that you can do almost anything you want if you put your mind to it...in a very meaningful sense, what people mean when they speak of "playing D&D" does not refer to wargaming.

 

[greg kaye]

...
When wars do happen, wizards don't show up by themselves - they'd be expected to bring their own bodyguard at least, and that could be up to 100 troops if the wizard can afford that. If the wizard was paid in land, they might also be expected to provide levies from the farmers working the land and pay for their training and equipment (padded vests and some pikes, for example). They might also be expected to fund or help fund free companies of professional soldiers such as cavalry (light and heavy) to fill out the force.
....

I agree that wizard-type spell casters would show up by themselves but I think they'd be much more likely the ones with the expectations with demand for the resources to secure their own protection. That protection also might need to be tough and, in whatever way, mobile.

 

[Celebrim]

When your games involve wars and kingdoms forces how do you build them?

This is generally not a question a novice GM needs to answer since it usually only comes up like years after you start playing when you've reached high levels of play and the PCs have become lords with kingdoms, and that might not even be the style of your first campaign but something you take on as a novelty after playing more traditional adventure paths.

However, the way you set up for that question is to firmly establish at the beginning of play what the demographics of your society actually are. That is, what does an "average" NPC and an "average" population look like. If the PC's run into a city guard, what are his attributes? What is his class? What is his level? Or if guards are monsters, what are their HD and abilities? What percentage of the population is classed and what are the distribution of levels?

I could go into a long description of what choices I've made about levels and demographics, but that wouldn't I think the details would be particularly useful. The important thing is that my choices are designed to make NPCs competent but not heroic and they are not focused as some demographics are on stopping high level PCs from dominating the environment. As a result, PC and NPC lords can recruit competent and effective armies, but those armies won't be filled with campaign changing heroes. No units of 10th level fighters or entire companies of youthful willing patriotic 5th level wizards.

Likewise, my demographic choices is that all "people" are classed and leveled like PCs and are not monsters the way you'd typically see in 1e or 4e or 5e. I have that preference because I got really frustrated with NPCs and PCs use different rules back in 1e and was moving away from that choice in my own play by giving monsters explicit Dexterity, Constitution and levels (if they were "people" like Elves or Goblins) already in 1e. So 3e moving fully to that was something I embraced strongly as already being my preference.

Once you've established your demographics, then you have three choices. Either you can absolutely ignore that completely and just treat battles as pure story and decide for yourself by fiat how the battles go. Or you can use a tactical combat determines the outcome of strategic combat model using a methodology similar to Pendragon's "Book of Battles". Or you can go all the way to translating the individual characters into some sort of battle system where the figure stats determine in some faction the unit stats. The simplest way to do this if you have combat that is similar to the real world would be to have 1 figure stand in for 100 figures and run it like tactical combat except that death if 1 figure means that like 50 NPC die and the rest scatter or something of that sort. However, you are going to get into complexities when 100 2nd level archers fight a single old red dragon that will require some sort of complex battle system. I'm not aware of a good choice for 3e, though we did use 1e Battle System back in the day with some degree of success.

If I want to throw numbers around as intelligence about 1 feudal lord or another what are sane numbers? Like if someone owns 3 towns and 2 castle/keeps and a bunch of farm land and the DM told me they can field 200,000 troops I would be highly skeptical, but if they have 20,000 is that too much? What about 10,000?

Generally, it depends on the culture and need, but with a typical medieval economy standing professional armies tend to be less than 1 combatant per 1000 population. Levied armies that can be mustered for a season tend to be about 10 times larger than that, but after a few months they have to go home. At Hastings in 1066, the future of the 2+ million inhabitants of England was being determined by about 10,000 defenders - about 0.5 combatants per 100. Note that "barbarian" cultures typically have lower population but can muster warbands that approach 100% of the fighting age male population owing to the lack of need to take care of farms to sustain their population.

Fantasy cultures tend to have standing professional armies approaching the size of modern professional standing armies in terms of percentage of population owing to the fact that most people don't care about yield of wheat per acre and other detailed simulation when writing a story. I personally tend to use 0.8 combatants per 100 population, and 8 combatants per 100 population for levied troops.

How does caster change this?

Very much depend on whether you have rules for fighting in formations and how common spells like fireball are and what the range of spells are. I have deliberately modified the rules of my game as well as the demographics of my world to make spellcasters on a battlefield less impactful than you might expect. I'd done things heavy infantry effectively gets evasion versus attacks like fireball because I have rules for shield walls and turtling up, and I've nerfed the range of spells relative to missile weapons that leave spell casters exposed to ranged attack, saving throws versus spells are easier than RAW, and I also have bonus hit points (based on size) at first level that mean the damage from low level spells is less impressive than you might expect. Combine this with the relative expense of something like a wand of fireballs, and the scarcity of young able-bodied wizards who are relatively high level and willing to fight in anything but a defensive action, and you get magic isn't unknown on the battlefield but it doesn't dominate it. If an army might have 1 combatant per 200 population, then it might have 1 war wizard per 20000 population which is enough to use wizards as special forces but not enough to field units of wizards that totally dominate the battlefield. Your hypothetical of 60 5th level wizards in my campaign looks like 60 senior citizens 6 CON and 6 DEX each mustered in an emergency to defend a kingdom of a million citizens. And it better be an emergency, because they won't be happy about it and it's a bad idea even for a king to meddle in the affairs of wizards without good reason. "Some other ruler might take the throne" isn't an emergency. It needs to be something like, "Everyone is going to be turned into mindless undead or eaten by a dragon unless you do something."

If you don't give some thought to this you might want to consider a world where warfare as we understand it doesn't exist, because if fighters are tier 7 combatants that don't even do fighting well, then it's likely armies consists of monks (if no weapons are just as good as weapons, monks are much cheaper to field than fighters) and spellcasters (if casting spells is more powerful than martial attacks, then armies of casters are better than armies of martials). My biggest problem with that is that the less like the real world your fantasy world is, the harder it will be to imagine it and make it consistent.