D&D 3.5 pikes and polearms and such

[Templarkommando]

I'm curious why D&D stipulates that polearms only reach 10 feet when historical pikes tend to be much longer? For example, the wiki article on pikes says that pikes could be as long as 25 feet. I don't think this this means that you have 25 feet of reach out of a weapon like that, but you might manage 20.

Here's what I'm thinking - I want to create a vaguely realistic infantry battle as background for a future adventure, but it would require that the pikemen 3-4 ranks back be able to get reach on a target. What I would do is change the reach value on the pikes in the 3rd and 4th ranks so that hits could be generated. I don't actually plan to use these pikemen, but on the off-chance that my party decides to engage them, I want for this to be workable.

Would you have a problem with this in a campaign you were playing in even if it's mostly supposed to be flavor?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(weapon)

[BWR]

I don't think the proposed change would do much either way for my games. While melee people might not want to close with a wall of pikes, those pikers (hah) are fireball bait.

D&D weapons are weird. You can either spend a lot of time overhauling them to work better and more 'realistically' or you can just shrug and play the game. I've so far stayed with the latter, despite strong leanings towards the former.

[Greenish]

Pikes are for armies on the field. Running around forests and dungeons and what-not with a small group of people, some of whom want to stand way away from the fighting, some of whom want to turn into bears, etc., doesn't really lend itself for 20 ft. pikes. And as the system's designed around adventurers, no one gets pikes (except awlpike from Dragon Comp., which has 15' reach).

[goto124]

*wields a pike as a weapon*

*pike as in the fish*

[Cazero]

Pikes are for armies on the field. Running around forests and dungeons and what-not with a small group of people, some of whom want to stand way away from the fighting, some of whom want to turn into bears, etc., doesn't really lend itself for 20 ft. pikes. And as the system's designed around adventurers, no one gets pikes (except awlpike from Dragon Comp., which has 15' reach).

Exactly this.
Find a 15 feet pole, and a sibling willing to part in an experiment. Ask the sibling to defend himself against your pole-bashing. You will quickly realise that your pole gets useless as soon as your sibling gets close enough. He can trivially get the same grip on it that you do. Factor in armor allowing to ignore anything but the pointy end, and the fact that with a longer weapon the same problem appears from a further distance.
Long reach weapons are useless outside of thick ranks of soldiers protecting each other with more long reach weapons. The pike is lethal against cavalry charge because the poor horse impales itself on a succession of 4 to 12 pikes, rather that one or two shorter spears. In actual melee, you better have an alternative to your excessively long weapon that don't allow a proper use of it's heavy weight.

[Templarkommando]

Basically, it would be specifically for large formations of soldiers in my hypothetical session. I also firmly agree with the notion that tight formations are fireball bait - however when your wizards capable of casting fireball are severely outnumbered by a column of a thousand soldiers. Even if a wizard filled up all of his available slots with fireball - he might have a difficult time with that much fodder.

As an aside, my setting is early renaissance, so there are going to be a few artillery pieces lobbing cannonballs across the field. My plan though is not to focus to hard on the battle going on, but rather the objective that the party has to snatch from the jaws of an enemy army. I do plan to have sort of a background narrative going on, so if there's ever a lull in the party's action, I'll say something like: "Miller's long guns land a grazing shot against Reynolds' lines. Fifteen pikemen just died." or "Duchess Tessa hurls ball of fire at Calis's Lancers - stopping them in their tracks."

[Deophaun]

Basically, it would be specifically for large formations of soldiers in my hypothetical session. I also firmly agree with the notion that tight formations are fireball bait - however when your wizards capable of casting fireball are severely outnumbered by a column of a thousand soldiers. Even if a wizard filled up all of his available slots with fireball - he might have a difficult time with that much fodder.

Boreal wind.

And this highlights a common misconception: You don't bring a wizard to an army fight. You bring a druid.

[Thurbane]

FWIW, Dragon Compendium has the Awl Pike with 15 ft reach.

[Coidzor]

I'm perfectly fine with formation fighting giving an extra 5, 10, or 15 feet of reach as a natural function of formation fighting as a houserule.

[Xerlith]

Make it a Teamwork Benefit for the NPC soldiers, not the weapon's property and you're good.

[Incorrect]

Just 'brew it.
Longpike, 1d6 x2, 20ft reach, can be braced.

In my vision of D&D large scale battles:
Formations of pikemen are indeed fireball bait (and charge bait). They are also really cheap! Because then there will be no more fireballs left when the elite units attack.
Sure, spend your valuable spells on level 1 commoners with pointy sticks. My army will spend its spells on killing generals and countering enemy casters.

[tyckspoon]

Basically, it would be specifically for large formations of soldiers in my hypothetical session. I also firmly agree with the notion that tight formations are fireball bait - however when your wizards capable of casting fireball are severely outnumbered by a column of a thousand soldiers. Even if a wizard filled up all of his available slots with fireball - he might have a difficult time with that much fodder.

It can be really, really difficult to get those thousand soldiers to maintain formation once the fireballs start landing and killing 40-foot spheres worth of your comrades in an instant. And once your pike formation breaks ranks it's easy pickings for a cavalry charge or loose-order foot soldiers that are equipped for individual combat.. you don't have to Fireball every single soldier. Just enough of them that they either break morale or you open a hole in the formation so that they no longer benefit from using pikes.

[Templarkommando]

A forty foot sphere is still only a couple of dozen men maybe. If a high-level wizard flings his daily allotment of third level spells (maybe 5ish fireballs) He might route a single column of 1000 men, but the battle that I'm planning is actually quite a bit larger than that. It's certainly possible to route the entire army, but you'd have to have more than one high-level wizard which is all that is fighting on the side that doesn't have artillery. The side that does have artillery doesn't have any wizards in play in this battle. By my reckoning the sheer blasting power of 32 cannons ought to even out against a single high level wizard over the course of a full battle (especially if the cannons have enough ammo for the whole day. There are some tricky things that the wizard can do, but it's going to have to be something more impressive than fireballs).

I do want my wizard to be able to do some impressive things in the combat though, so if you have other suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

[Flickerdart]

A forty foot sphere is still only a couple of dozen men maybe.

A person is roughly 2.5ft wide, shoulder to shoulder. Let's say that in a tightly packed formation, there are 4 men in an average 5ft square. A 40ft radius circle covers 46 squares, or 184 men. History suggests that defeated armies that routed lost a total of about 16% of their men, so even if we're charitable and say that all of these men were lost before the rout (which will definitely not be the case) then every fireball routs the thousand men it lands in.

For other ideas, yeth hounds from summon monster IV have a 300ft radius bay that panics victims. Great for routing an army.

[tyckspoon]

A forty foot sphere is still only a couple of dozen men maybe. If a high-level wizard flings his daily allotment of third level spells (maybe 5ish fireballs) He might route a single column of 1000 men, but the battle that I'm planning is actually quite a bit larger than that. It's certainly possible to route the entire army, but you'd have to have more than one high-level wizard which is all that is fighting on the side that doesn't have artillery. The side that does have artillery doesn't have any wizards in play in this battle. By my reckoning the sheer blasting power of 32 cannons ought to even out against a single high level wizard over the course of a full battle (especially if the cannons have enough ammo for the whole day. There are some tricky things that the wizard can do, but it's going to have to be something more impressive than fireballs).

I do want my wizard to be able to do some impressive things in the combat though, so if you have other suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Depends on how high-level you're talking about. Now, most D&D magic is designed for at best squad-level combat, not mass battles, so even high level magic tends not to have a huge absolute area of effect. The main exception is weather spells; a Control Winds or Control Weather with a high enough caster level can do very nasty things (Control Winds is more applicable mid-battle, Control Weather is something you might deploy if you're the attacker in a siege or you know where your enemy is camping on the night before you expect to join battle.) There are some really nasty snow and wind related spells in Frostburn, although I don't recall which ones are accessible to Wizards. Wall of Fire is actually pretty handy in a large battle, because its duration is Concentration + caster level in rounds, which means you can drop it for an instant effect and leave it or just hold it there for as long as you need it if you're trying to defend a position or block off an area of the field (say to prevent enemy reinforcements from joining a particular combat.) Works better if you have multiple sources of magic, such as lower level casters or distributing scrolls to capable users, tho - you don't want your one higher level resources sitting around doing nothing but holding up that wall.

Field manipulation is pretty good if you're attacking/defending a fixed location; spells like Earthquake and Disintegrate can make a mockery of fortifications, while various Walls, Move Earth, and permanent or long-lasting illusions can reinforce existing locations or rapidly create a fortified location from nothing. If you have time and money to prepare with, various Symbol spells can create a nasty minefield or even be deployed offensively (you can also use Glyph Seals, but these things can be cheesy as heck and you may not want to introduce that idea to your players.)

For straight up offensive spells, counter-battery fire may be the best use; a loadout of Fireballs might not kill enough infantry to win the day, but I bet it can ruin the enemy's cannons with some mix of killing all their trained artillerists, destroying their powder supplies, and wrecking bits of the cannons themselves. The cannons may not take much damage from the fireballs (depends on how seriously you take the claim that a fireball can melt metals with a 'low melting point' - many cannons were cast from bronze until iron and steel metallurgy got good enough to make something that would survive setting off explosions inside it) but they are likely moved and cradled in wooden carriages.

[Templarkommando]

A person is roughly 2.5ft wide, shoulder to shoulder. Let's say that in a tightly packed formation, there are 4 men in an average 5ft square. A 40ft radius circle covers 46 squares, or 184 men. History suggests that defeated armies that routed lost a total of about 16% of their men, so even if we're charitable and say that all of these men were lost before the rout (which will definitely not be the case) then every fireball routs the thousand men it lands in.

For other ideas, yeth hounds from summon monster IV have a 300ft radius bay that panics victims. Great for routing an army.

In D&D, you tend to put one person in one 5 ft square, not four. Is there somewhere in the rules that talks about cramming 4 guys in a 5 ft square for infantry tactics? I was actually thinking that a loss of about 10% would be a rout.

I do like the summon monster idea.

[ExLibrisMortis]

WBL for NPC casters around level 5-6, capable of casting fireballs, is 4.300-5.600 gp. That's enough to buy a wand of fireball, CL 5, for 11.250 gp, between three casters. In a battle decided by magic artillery, you can basically decide that each caster is throwing about 23 fireballs (17, 17 and 16 each from the wand, and then 7, 6 and 6 from spell slots). After the barrage of fireballs - each kills two dozen soldiers, so we're talking about 1650 deaths for such a three-caster team - they retreat, and spend their fresh new bags of xp on a new wand, and attack again the next day or so.

Edit: if you use the above estimate of 184 soldiers affected per blast, and 100 of those dying, you're actually getting around 7000 deaths per three-man team.

Even better, your casters are actually artificers UMDing the wands, and they craft their own personal wands. Now you can afford a wand per duo of casters.

Or, it's actually an eternal wand, and you have a bunch of sorcerer/marshal/something flying (because monster npcs get WBL too!) hit-squads running flying about, firing nine fireballs before disappearing for 24 hours (3 base spell slots, +1 for 16+ charisma, +3 for Versatile Spellcaster (5 base slots +1 bonus from cha), +2 for eternal wand). Your army is losing some 200 men per day from each of these teams (or 900 using the other estimate), and you can't catch them, with the whole pegasus-with-motivate-mobility thing going (and you can just bet this marshal is multiclassed into white raven crusader and bard, just in case).


The solution here is to use mobile troops, ideally with evasion, operating in small groups. Maybe one guy with a tower shield can provide cover for two crossbowmen, but with a 600-foot range on those fireballs, it's going to be a pain to take out any casters, and I'm not sure you can counterspell a caster you can't see, which is an issue at that range (this is where the idea of a spyglass with a spellcraft bonus came in).

[Flickerdart]

In D&D, you tend to put one person in one 5 ft square, not four.

That's because in D&D, you don't fight in shoulder to shoulder formation. Pikemen spread out that loosely would crumple under the impact of an attack.

[Gullintanni]

That's because in D&D, you don't fight in shoulder to shoulder formation. Pikemen spread out that loosely would crumple under the impact of an attack.

Fell Draining fireballs. Wait 24 hours. Watch enemy lines disintegrate. Also, reconvene in 24 hours to discuss the strategic ramifications of unleashing the Wightpocalypse as a solution to invading armies.

[Alent]

In D&D, you tend to put one person in one 5 ft square, not four. Is there somewhere in the rules that talks about cramming 4 guys in a 5 ft square for infantry tactics? I was actually thinking that a loss of about 10% would be a rout.

The closest thing you'll find I believe is homebrewing some custom Swarm Rules. (I think proper swarms start at 10 creatures?)

To make the pike tactics favorable you would need some kind of tactical benefit that it brings. EG: historically it was the perfect answer to cavalry and a murderball of pikes was life-expensive for infantry to break into. The reason pikes became so long was basically because the easiest solution to the murderball of pikes was to have a murderball with longer pikes.

To simulate that, you'd basically have a swarm of the size of a pikeman murderball with a designated kill area that you took damage for stepping into, reflex halves. Throw in shield wall formations and resist energy potions and you'd have a reasonably tough nut to crack.

I think I agree with the suggestion that a teamwork feat be a good choice here. Set it up so that the feat lets someone join the swarm of pikemen.

Also, there might be some moral issues with it, but it does seem to me like having undead pikemen at the front of the swarms would be better than having to give double pay to people who aren't going to live to spend it.

[Coidzor]

The closest thing you'll find I believe is homebrewing some custom Swarm Rules. (I think proper swarms start at 10 creatures?)

There's some homebrew involving the Mob template that introduces the upgraded Unit template version.

[Templarkommando]

You guys are technically right about how crazy the advantage that a wizard has over standard troops, but there's a bit more going on than just obliterating an army. If that was the only worry, I think that my lone NPC caster could probably take care of the opposing soldiers with no problem. Let me try to enumerate my difficulties:

1.) Narrative - I want this to be part of an unfolding story. If my NPC casters rush in and solve the problem after (23 fireballs times 6 seconds/ round works to about) 138 seconds - so two minutesish - that's going to be a little anti-climactic shall we say. I don't want to run out of exciting battle narration before the party gets out of the second room of the dungeon.

2.) Strategy - Spoilers on the off chance that my party reads this thread

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There are other things going on outside of this single battlefield. There are other battles being fought, there are people getting stabbed in the back, and there are puppet masters pulling strings. I say this because wizards are a fairly precious commodity - to such a degree that a single level 10 wizard could possibly mean the difference between winning or losing an entire war if he can manage to stay alive. There are other threats that my wizard has to take into account:
a.)She(my NPC wizard) is one of three possible heirs to the throne. If she gets killed because she's filling all of her spell slots with fireball and spending all of her money on wands of fireball and not contingencies for emergencies, it has more far-reaching consequences than "Well, go back to the wizard store and pick up another one."
b.)The entire campaign world is controlled in large part by extremely manipulative dragons(this is not common knowledge). My wizard knows this though, and doesn't want to draw a lot of attention to herself. The dragons won't get involved in a battle for just any old reason, because it will make them vulnerable to dragons from the other side, but if they can blind-side their enemy's main wizard(s) in a war, they might be convinced to come out and play - which is something that she wants to avoid if possible.
c.)Even if we're not worrying about dragons, both sides have to play their cards fairly close to their vest because both sides have a few high level characters that get used to snipe major league problems. This selection of characters includes a variety of classes, but it should suffice to say that she's not the most powerful character in the world and it would suck for the forces of good to suddenly be out an heir and a wizard because they couldn't maintain their poker face.

3.)Tactics - If I'm commanding a force that is getting overwhelmed by a single wizard, I'm going to scatter and withdraw my soldiers anyway. We'll run until we can either engage an enemy that isn't supported by said wizard, or until we can link up with an ally that can keep the wizard occupied while my cannons and pikes can at least stand a chance of winning an engagement. My second plan (since my general is an evil SoB) is to send a message further down the line and have my allies commit a few atrocities to draw my wizard problem out of position as she's a well-known goody two-shoes and would probably leave if she thought she could keep a few villages from getting burned to the ground.

[Verikus]

First off, it seems your question about pikes was answered, 25ft pike is fine...in a battle.

The key with introducing non-historical elements into the way things were done historically is how would smarter generals have already thought of how to fight magic?

Would they pack soldiers in tight knowing the devastating effect of magic, such as fireball? I would say not likely.

Would they utilize more archers where wizards might be? Would they have their own non-historical advantages if they don't have wizards (such as anti-magic items, resistance items, scrolls of teleportation for shock troops, magical beast support, their own "company champions" that can hinder magic users)?

It would be like introducing wizards in a war we have today: Probably less low flying helicopters, or flying anything thanks to weather magic. Likely a large investment of governments without wizards to attain anti-magic anything.

Generals and leaders in your setting should be no different, tactics should reflect what the enemy is throwing at you. If there aren't a lot of calvary there won't be a huge need for pikes, man-at-arms and other foot mobile swordsmen work better (flanking, not as heavy equipment). It just depends on how well the scouting goes for either side how they prepare, and what they decide to bring/hold back.

Edit: Using atrocities to lure away the most dangerous is also a very good strategy

Too bad that army doesn't have illusionists, that would be the most effective magic in a battle as far as I'm concerned. Waste enemy spells on imaginary foes, make your own artillery all but invisible, etc.