DealRuel wrote:your distance is completely absurd. No one in the bronze age fought a war against someone 500 miles away from them, that's insane. That would be like picking a fight with someone the entire way across the UK, the long way. No one would do that. So I will assume a distance of 100 miles at most.
This is almost a fair point, but let's be real here, no one in the Bronze Age could cast spells either. Teleport has a range of 900-2000 miles and Greater Teleport has no range limitation. In D&D world, it is entirely plausible that someone from the other side of the world decides to enter into a conflict with you and completely fucks you up because they can project power onto your front lawn while you have no ability to reciprocate.
An important question is how is Kingdom B gaining the services of a level 9 Wizard as a permanent feature.
Most likely King B is the Wizard because D&D supports political systems where the guy in charge is also the most powerful guy in the kingdom.
But I think that it complicates the scenario so I left it out.
The wizard can skirmish them and launch fireballs into their ranks and kills dozens of orcs per blast, probably hundreds by the time the orcs reach the city.
And this is exactly what the Wizard would not do. If the Strategic Goal here is to Stop the Army, he's going to go straight for the Head. He doesn't even have to kill the guy. He can Mind Control him or replace him with Illusions or something.
Now, he might have to go after the casters within the horde before he contronts the Warlord and that may delay him for a day or two. Other tactics might be to target supply trains or to drop cloudkill on officer tents, but I don't see those as being necessary.
The point is that the Horde has almost no way to stop the Wizard from completely running or ruining its shit within a couple days.
Ice9 wrote:The scenario isn't "a high-level Wizard vs a horde of Orcs" though. It's "a high-level Wizard plus a horde of Orcs, vs a high-level Wizard alone". And in that scenario, the horde would be quite useful.
DeanRuel wrote:I don't know what your talking about. The scenario presented immediately above is one wizard vs a horde of orcs. With no second wizard mentioned.
It's actually both. I outline the first scenario (Horde vs. Wizard) and then followup with the second scenario as a slight variation of the first (Horde + Wizard vs. Wizard).
Tussock wrote:You've actually said that 90% of the population is inconsequential and food is not strategically valuable. Which implies High Level means you watch the world burn and make smores, settling down into your little "points of light" existence afterward.
No, it actually implies that high level Wars have less collateral damage than low level wars. Peasants aren't forcibly conscripted into Armies, just to be slaughted en masse by Officers all Dynasty Warriors style. No one gets raped and nothing gets burnt down because there aren't any large troop movements that plow through farmlands.
Unless your goal is genocide, in which case there will be a lot of that stuff.
MGuy wrote:If it came down to war, yes the only people that 'matter' between low level infantry and high level casters are the high level casters because after one side loses their high level caster the other side has an advantage so extreme that the remaining low level mooks might as well just give up lest they can find someone else who actually matters.
Exactly. The closest real world analogue to this is Air Superiority. But like you mentioned above, Magic is ridiculously more versatile than Air Power so whether or not it can win a conflict by itself isn't really debatable. Magic also requires far less overhead in terms of resources and manpower. It's also less vulnerable because there are no magical parallels to SAM Sites or Early Warning Systems. Hard Counters to high level magic also tends to be very expensive or impractical. It also provides itself with Intelligence via the Divination school of magic so there's that too.
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TL;DR: Magic is fucking overpowered. We Know This.