Thoughts on Elven warfare

[Zombimode]

2) if magic IS important, elves are the one stronger then humans in most setting.

What settings are we talking about? Because for the Big Three of the the D&D setting this isn't true.

Let's go over them!

Forgotten Realms:
In the FR the elves are really adept at magic, with their mythal, High Elven Magic, good densitiy of spellcasters and number of high level spellcasters. Humans learned magic from the elves - and proceeded to equal them in short notice. Even surpassed them one could argue, since the likes of Netheril, Narfell and Halruua employed ridiculous ammonts of over-the-top magic.
In modern day FR, there are nummerous nations that could qualify as magiocracies or are otherwise highly saturated with magical power. And the highest level spellcasters of the setting are humans.
So, in the Forgotten Realms the elves at least have to share the titel of Master of Magic with the humans.

Greyhawk (Flanaesse, really):
Elves are certainly described as a magic using race, but nothing indicates that they are better at it or that it is more common than with humans on average. Depending on the nation and time human's aptitude at magic ranges between having no tradition of magic at all to showing astounding feats of magical power. The most powerful magical effects in the known history are are human-based (the Twin Cataclysm, and more recently, the Flight of Fiends).
Of course the true masters of magic of the setting are the Spellweavers, but their time is long gone.

Eberron:
Elves have a couple of Dragonmarks, and their necromantic arrangement at Aerenal is admittedly impressive. But their warrior-caste (the Valenar) are rather unmagical.
Humans on the other hand have the highest saturation of Dragonmarks of all races, magic in many forms is a regular feature in warfare (including whole units of magic-wielding soldies, called wands), and elemental binding seems to be an exclusive thing of humans and gnomes.

So, again, what settings are you talking about?

[King of Nowhere]

Not to confuse this with the real world thread, but fantasy types always need to be careful about "but hah! Guerrillas! Sneakiness! Winning! No one can fight guerrillas!". In reality, guerrillas suffer from a few major problems.

1) Despite the common image of a successful ambush and unexpecting regulars being mowed down by our heroes of choice, real guerrillas tend to have poor exchange rates. It comes from the fairly obvious problem of fighting large bodies of people when you have small groups of people. What guerrilla warfare is really useful for is limiting the overall casualties to a rate you can tolerate, rather than engaging in wholesale slaughter your society can't/won't support and you can't win. In the preponderance of cases, the guerrillas lose far more people overall.

2) At some point, the non-guerrillas can still march into the town/village/great cultural site/magic springs/whatever without many losses. Because if you wanted to inflict enough losses to stop the army, you'd have to mass a lot of your own people. So many, in fact, that you would no longer be guerrillas and end up in a battle. Otherwise, ask the Native Americans, Boers, and so forth what happened to their people and population centers. And, incidentally, how well the war went for them after their populations were displaced, placed in special camps, or just killed. Unless the other side is restrained for reasons you can't control, this can end badly.

3) In a large part because of 2), actually sustaining a guerrilla force is hard. It is extremely hard in a pre-industrial world. The movies where our heroes always have enough arrows, freshly repaired armor, good horses, are disease free and plenty to eat...is well, not consistent with the experience of the rural guerrilla.

yes and no. guerrilla does not mean ambushing the greater army with arrows from the trees. that has the downsides you mention.
guerrilla means attacking supply lines and unprotected targets of opportunity, most of all. after all, the bigger the army, the more it needs to eat.
it also means staying away from the main army. the enemy invades, you don't try to stop him. instead, you turn around and go pillage his homeland, that is left unguarded. only if the enemy split up, you regroup and attack one of the smaller detachments, with numerical advantage.
guerrilla also goes together with scorched earth tactics: you don't ambush the advancing enemy, you burn everything that he could use and try to smother them with logistic problems.

incidentally, guerrilla does not mean a bunch of desperades and irregulars fighting a real army. that cannot end well - the best the militia can hope for here is being annoying.{Scrubbed}
no, a proper guerrilla means having your own army. it just means you cannot face the enemy in a pitched battle.

{Scrubbed}

so, elves using guerrilla does not mean that there's two dozen elven archers trying to whittle down an army one arrow at a time. it means the elves could field almost as many troops as the invaders, and they would defend strategically important (and defensible) locations, and they would try to hit on the enemy supply lines, and avoid attacking the bulk of the army.

Now, of course guerrilla does not guarantee victory. otherwise everyone would use it. it's just a military strategy like many others; it is the appropriate strategy in some circumstances, not in others.
but the elves don't seem too reliant on heavily anthropized terrain; they can afford to burn their cities and fields for a while. they also have excellent mobility and scouting, and their night vision makes them great at fighting in darkness (i surmise that if the elves were forced to fight, they would retreat at first, and only engage after dusk, when they can still see well but humans cannot).
all things considered, the elves have several advantages to fighting guerrilla-style, and at least one major disadvantage (slower population growth making it harder to recoup losses) to fighting normally.

[Dienekes]

King of Nowhere got there before me. But if we decide guerrilla may not be the best term because of modern connotations, Fabian may be the better term.

[Elves]

What settings are we talking about?

It's not hard to categorize. There are 3 pretty clear archetropes of elves: superhuman elves, magic-using elves, and dextrous/agile (often nature oriented) elves.

Then there are 2 different height categories: shorter than human stature or equal-to-or-greater-than-human stature.

Mix and match. Superhuman elves for obvious reasons aren't used much in RPGs. And there's a mythological category of more spirit-like elves that's not used much today either.

Your magic elves are going to fight with magic. Your dextrous elves are going to be your skirmish/ambush fighters. The superhuman Tolkien-style elves are going to be the ones forming shieldwalls. In RPGs the idea of warrior elves tends to get shafted because it's seen as too much for one race to be good at being a caster, an agile fighter and a straight-up melee fighter. 4e did it ok, with Elven Accuracy and Dex/Wis/Int feat requirements making those stats more valuable for Str meleers.

[KineticDiplomat]

Fabian then. Still, a Fabian strategy has many similar issues for elves, if less extreme. The most famous muscle powered Fabian strategies have some similar threads. And particularly for a low population density people like elves. Let’s use the initial portion of the Peloponnesian war, Fabius himself, Alfred the Great, the French in the Hundred Years’ War since most people know them.

1) The invader has no real way to strike the Fabian side’s center of gravity. {Scrubbed}

Elves are not classically known for their fortified towns or castles, and most fantasy armies have some sort of siege capability equivalent to the late medieval/early renaissance.

2) While they look quite clever in hindsight, they are politically unpopular, what with all the devastation of the homeland. Especially in cultures with a premium on martial values. Which often leads to battles. {Scrubbed}

For legendarily haughty and proud elves, many with a religious devotion to sacred lands of some sort, you’ll probably run in to the same problem when armies come marching.

3) The Fabians almost always have a large population and often economic advantage. They can afford to sit still and let some pillaging happen, and they can count on replacing their losses. You can get legions slaughtered, allies occupied, towns taken, farms burnt, the cream of French nobility mowed down and still be able to keep up the fight. And when you bleed out a few dozen men over a foraging scrap, you’ve got more.

Classic elves of any kind rarely have the population for it, at least after their mythical past. A dead elven farmer hurts; {Scrubbed}. On top of which, compared to elves, everyone breeds like rabbits. A hundred squalid fights hurts a population that has low birth rates and needs decades to mature far more than one that is happily pumping out children who you’re putting into service in their teens.

4) The successful fabians have a large support structure outside the ability of the invader to really affect. {Scrubbed}

Classic elves usually have one or two big enclaves, maybe a nation.

[Dusk Raven]

The other thing about guerilla warfare is that, by itself, it doesn't win wars. Winning wars requires taking and holding territory, and guerilla warfare just makes it very expensive for the enemy to do so. Now, preventing the enemy from winning has its own value, but ultimately the guerilla force will have to transition to conventional warfare in order to truly win.{Scrubbed}

Now, on a tactical level guerilla warfare might serve elves well, trying to cut off an army's logistics and frustrate their efforts to actually eliminate the elves, but if we work under the assumptions that elves are tied to nature and have lower populations, than they'd best be able to do this in places that are fundamentally hostile to conventional armies, like mountain ranges or deserts, and/or remote areas where it's harder to get supplies to. If it's just a big forest that other races are trying to conquer, than they could theoretically chip away at the forest until the elves don't have room to maneuver. But, in places like rough mountains or desert, there's not much humans can do about that, while elves might be so adapted to their locales that terrain is not even a factor for them. As an example, one factor (so I'm told) in the{Scrubbed} were so adapted to the desert that they could move armies through places you weren't supposed to be able to move armies through, and could even retreat into the desert where other armies would have a hard time following them.

I kinda like the worldbuilding implications of that. Elves, in the above model, are not found in any old forest, but at the metaphorical ends of the earth, in the most hostile terrain imaginable - from scorching deserts to the arctic, where few humans can survive, much less encounter them. They become steeped in mystery, with a reputation for hardiness and unconquerability. A bit closer to their mythical roots, perhaps, than D&D elves which are often seen in civilization.

The way I personally imagine elves, though... is that their "baseline" is much higher than humans. In D&D terms, a human hero of 10th level is no weaker or stronger than an elf hero of the same level... but given the long lifespans of elves, they're pretty much all veterans, and many are heroes by human standards. Your standard human soldier is a first-level warrior. Your standard elven soldier is maybe 4th-6th level, and quite a few have PC classes. Their commanders are even more powerful, and some of whom might be able to take on small groups of soldiers single-handedly and win. Their power compared to humans isn't actually based on racial traits, except for their age which translates to experience (and experience points!). There's nothing a elf can accomplish that a human can't, but elves are far more likely make those accomplishments than a human. On a battlefield level, that means that elves are more likely to use small unit tactics, especially in the aforementioned places where armies become logistical nightmares. But then again, humans would probably turn to using small-unit tactics against them, gathering experienced veterans and adventurers to deal with the elves.

(Of course, how much that experience actually matters depends on the system being used, and can be considered part of a "depends on the worldbuilding" issue with this thread)

To say more would probably mean talking about my own interpretations of elves that may differ significantly from this thread's premise. For example, I don't imagine elves as having a low birthrate because of low fertility (at least, not significantly worse than humans), I think of them as having to consciously limit their population growth. If they take casualties from war, therefore, their restrictions are gone, and their population would rebound faster than one would think. Now, replenishing experienced elves is another matter, and one in which humans have an advantage. When human armies fight, they get valuable battlefield experience. When elven armies fight, they lose veterans, unless elves are willing to commit younger troops to battle.

[Slipperychicken]

Fabian then. Still, a Fabian strategy has many similar issues for elves, if less extreme. The most famous muscle powered Fabian strategies have some similar threads. And particularly for a low population density people like elves. {Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

1) The invader has no real way to strike the Fabian side’s center of gravity.{Scrubbed}

Elves are not classically known for their fortified towns or castles, and most fantasy armies have some sort of siege capability equivalent to the late medieval/early renaissance.

2) While they look quite clever in hindsight, they are politically unpopular, what with all the devastation of the homeland. Especially in cultures with a premium on martial values. Which often leads to battles. {Scrubbed}

For legendarily haughty and proud elves, many with a religious devotion to sacred lands of some sort, you’ll probably run in to the same problem when armies come marching.

3) The Fabians almost always have a large population and often economic advantage. They can afford to sit still and let some pillaging happen, and they can count on replacing their losses. You can get legions slaughtered, allies occupied, towns taken, farms burnt, the cream of French nobility mowed down and still be able to keep up the fight. And when you bleed out a few dozen men over a foraging scrap, you’ve got more.

Classic elves of any kind rarely have the population for it, at least after their mythical past. A dead elven farmer hurts; {Scrubbed} doesn’t. On top of which, compared to elves, everyone breeds like rabbits. A hundred squalid fights hurts a population that has low birth rates and needs decades to mature far more than one that is happily pumping out children who you’re putting into service in their teens.

4) The successful fabians have a large support structure outside the ability of the invader to really affect. {Scrubbed}

Classic elves usually have one or two big enclaves, maybe a nation.

1. Elves generally live in villages designed to be hidden and unknown to outsiders, inside of thickly-vegetated environments that reduce visibility, which further are enchanted to misdirect outsiders and lead them into traps, while elven warriors watch totally unseen and ready to ambush the whole time. They do not have any fields to protect, and even reaching their settlements means penetrating powerful and ancient illusion. The natural environment is the elves' castle.

2. Living in the same place for hundreds or even thousands of years has a way of making people want to not give it up, especially to a people who are wholly alien, have no comprehension of the local culture, and may commit genocide. Numerous indigenous peoples IRL have fought similar conflicts to preserve their ways of life

3. The 5e dnd book says that when invaders enter elven forests, they often can retreat somewhat and literally wait the invaders out. It's clear that while they wouldn't tolerate huge losses of life, there's little urgency in repulsing enemies who will often leave on their own when they waste resources on a campaign only to find abandoned villages and quiet woods.

4. Invaders can rarely disrupt the natural processes or magics which allow elves to live as they do. Elves hunt and forage, eliminating any need for fields and most of the need for traditional supply.

If it's just a big forest that other races are trying to conquer, than they could theoretically chip away at the forest until the elves don't have room to maneuver.

Even with modern technology this is not feasible. Deforesting a region is a hard enough job when there's no opposition and you have things like chainsaws and incendiary weapons. When you have to go at it on foot, one tree at a time with an axe, with the best archers in the world shooting at you the whole time, it's just not going to happen. The invaders would run out of loggers and money long before the elves run out of trees.

[Beleriphon]

I think the "elves are weaker than humans" bit came from the assertion that elves are lighter than humans. Which Legolas demonstrates by walking on the surface of the snow while the rest of the Fellowship trudges through waist-high drifts. Does that really mean elves are lighter, or just that they have the ability to walk on semi-solid surfaces without sinking?

Legolas is so fleet of foot that he can move across snow cover without leaving a trace. There's no suggestion that he has the physical density of a typical whiffle ball. It is a function of elves being better,

Being lighter than humans then leads to lower momentum for similar speed, and thus not having the physical mass to repel a charging force with a shield wall. Which then leads to the assertion of elves being weaker than humans, which is NOT one of the attributes of Tolkien elves.

It really comes down to are elves just less dense than humans? Or do they just have the ability to walk across semi-solid surfaces?

No, Tolkien Elves are inherently magical to the point that they are just better at everything than Men. Except dying, Men are better at dying. In a philosophical sort of way not any literal sense (although they are something better at that too).

[KineticDiplomat]

So, yes, there is the classic “Wood Elves” interpretation. Essentially a mythical, post-historical narrative, version of the northeastern American Indian tribes on steroids. Friends to the land, impossibly at home in nature, untrackably destroying armies with bows and silence while the Bad Guy blunders about.

And if you need your protagonists to win by virtue of being cool-dude-awesome, sure. It works. But anyone can win with cool-dude-awesome. It is in the power of authors to make it so; once you accept plot armor, all tactics are brilliant.

Presumably the point of the thread is to think beyond Plot-Needed victory, so what happens when we take Mary Sue away?

The “wood elf” interpretation gets ground down under the weight of population and numbers. They ambush a column, and if it goes right they lose a few. If it goes wrong they lose a lot. They can’t really afford either. They REALLY can’t lose many at all, because if they’re subsisting on hunting and foraging they will be literally orders of magnitude smaller than even basic agricultural societies: let alone ones in the typical Fantasy Early Renaissance.

And, without Plot Armor shielding their villages, their villages go away. {Scrubbed}

[Missing]

Not to confuse this with the real world thread, but fantasy types always need to be careful about "but hah! Guerrillas! Sneakiness! Winning! No one can fight guerrillas!". In reality, guerrillas suffer from a few major problems.

2) At some point, the non-guerrillas can still march into the town/village/great cultural site/magic springs/whatever without many losses. Because if you wanted to inflict enough losses to stop the army, you'd have to mass a lot of your own people. So many, in fact, that you would no longer be guerrillas and end up in a battle. {Scrubbed} Unless the other side is restrained for reasons you can't control, this can end badly.

{Scrubbed}

I'm not saying that the elves have an auto-win button but I am saying that they would be effective at defending their lands and the guerrilla tactics are likely thier best option.

[Dienekes]

Fabian then. Still, a Fabian strategy has many similar issues for elves, if less extreme. The most famous muscle powered Fabian strategies have some similar threads. And particularly for a low population density people like elves. Let’s use the initial portion of the Peloponnesian war, Fabius himself, Alfred the Great, the French in the Hundred Years’ War since most people know them.

1) The invader has no real way to strike the Fabian side’s center of gravity. {Scrubbed}

Elves are not classically known for their fortified towns or castles, and most fantasy armies have some sort of siege capability equivalent to the late medieval/early renaissance.

2) While they look quite clever in hindsight, they are politically unpopular, what with all the devastation of the homeland. Especially in cultures with a premium on martial values. Which often leads to battles. {Scrubbed}

For legendarily haughty and proud elves, many with a religious devotion to sacred lands of some sort, you’ll probably run in to the same problem when armies come marching.

3) The Fabians almost always have a large population and often economic advantage. They can afford to sit still and let some pillaging happen, and they can count on replacing their losses. You can get legions slaughtered, allies occupied, towns taken, farms burnt, the cream of French nobility mowed down and still be able to keep up the fight. And when you bleed out a few dozen men over a foraging scrap, you’ve got more.

Classic elves of any kind rarely have the population for it, at least after their mythical past. A dead elven farmer hurts; {Scrubbed} doesn’t. On top of which, compared to elves, everyone breeds like rabbits. A hundred squalid fights hurts a population that has low birth rates and needs decades to mature far more than one that is happily pumping out children who you’re putting into service in their teens.

4) The successful fabians have a large support structure outside the ability of the invader to really affect.{Scrubbed}

Classic elves usually have one or two big enclaves, maybe a nation.

You're right that Fabian strategies is not an automatic win button. But it is regardless still the best strategy available given the constraints of the OP.

However, I do think you are missing a few key points.

1) This is a defensive strategy used to survive an invasion. While elven kingdoms are usually just one or two heavily populated (often secret or hidden) centers it is within a rather sprawling forest. Often a forest as large a kingdom. Ancient and medieval armies do not move particularly quickly. {Scrubbed} was able to get something like 60 to 70 miles per day on roads by having his army march through the night. This also exhausted his army so badly they couldn't fight for over a week afterwards. But regardless, far more common was for the army to march somewhere between 15-30 miles per day usually on roads. Going through a dense wood where they cannot keep columns? I'd be impressed if they can keep their army together enough to move 5 miles a day. This means that the damage the enemy army is capable of implementing is much more limited than in a normal human war. Yes, losing every elven "farmer" is bad, but there will be much more warning, especially with the whole keener senses thing the elves have.

2) This also means one of the key means of sustaining an army in enemy territory: raiding and foraging will not be as effective for anyone invading elvish territory. Sure there is a lot of sustenance to be found in the woods, but getting it requires more work than the usual raiding of peasants and farmland neatly lined up for the taking. This should mean that the invading army has a much longer supply train, and a longer supply train means either a big exploitable weakness for our elves, or a weakening of the vanguard force and even slower movement of the army as a whole. Both of which are good for the elves overall strategy.

3) The political backlash is a problem, but mostly when the culture has a reputation for honor based martial combat, mostly among the leadership. {Scrubbed} The government was essentially an extension of the military, with various ranks only able to be achieved with some military honors. And while over time these restrictions relaxed they were still very much present during the {Scrubbed}. {Scrubbed} I don't often see elves having this command structure in fiction. They tend to be led by mages and philosophers first (though it does depend on the source, Tolkien actually has the elves led by mages and artisans first, soldiers second, I'm sure D&D worlds have their own weird command structures). Furthermore, the whole "we can notice the genius of the strategy in hindsight" is a lesson the elves would have probably lived through. They're ancient. They would have seen the strategy's effectiveness first hand. Maybe the first time or two that it was used would have ended in a Cannae. But after a while it would likely become common knowledge and basic practice. Partially because the elves cannot put forward a conquering army so these defensive actions will be just about all of their military doctrine.

Now again, I'm not trying to make this strategy sound unbeatable. It's not. If an army large enough, strong enough, with the right logistics, and support structure that will remain loyal and eager to keep sending in men and coin for probably decades of fighting. They can do it. But that is a tall order.

[King of Nowhere]

and this time it's diekenes beating me. on the plus side, he's saving me from having to write that all.

I just want to add that you correctly point out the limitations of a fabian strategy. and that the actual capacity of the elves to defend themselves would really change by the setting. are they just one enclave of a few thousand people in a huge world? is their average soldier level 6? or perhaps closer to level 3 or 2?
and sure, with some of those assumptions the elves won't make it.

but regardless, a fabian strategy is still their best chance. if they don't have large numbers nor high levels, don't have the capacity to breed fast, don't have a large support structure... well, then they are doomed, but it still makes more sense for them to try a fabian warfare than to just engage in a pitched battle. the latter will simply see them dead by the end of the day; with the former, they can always hope that the enemy will decide conquering isn't worth the effort.

[NigelWalmsley]

Even under those circumstances, you wouldn't have to rely on Fabian tactics, because there is an alternative: alliance. If you can't survive on your own, hitch your wagon to a larger and stronger power. Elven warfare might be primarily small groups of elves serving as auxiliaries to large forces of humans (or dwarves, or halflings, or whatever species they happened to ally with). Not to mention that it's quite possible that the particular way magic works might make Fabian tactics a non-starter (notably, D&D magic is enormously effective against small forces that rely on mobility, far more so than it is against armies).

[Tvtyrant]

Even under those circumstances, you wouldn't have to rely on Fabian tactics, because there is an alternative: alliance. If you can't survive on your own, hitch your wagon to a larger and stronger power. Elven warfare might be primarily small groups of elves serving as auxiliaries to large forces of humans (or dwarves, or halflings, or whatever species they happened to ally with). Not to mention that it's quite possible that the particular way magic works might make Fabian tactics a non-starter (notably, D&D magic is enormously effective against small forces that rely on mobility, far more so than it is against armies).

I came to say this. Elves are in most settings fantastic artisans and craftsfolk, why would they sacrifice their 300 year old veteran special forces when they can pay off enemies or hire mercenaries? I imagine most elven armies consist of mostly Orcs, Goblins and/or Humans stiffened by a small army of the finest troops on the planet.

If losing a soldier lost 100 years of investment minimum, paying Ogres tribes to invade their lands to get them to withdraw is great sense. Standing mix-species auxiliaries as line infantry while the Elves are horse and casters, paid for by trade and superior craftsmanship. Buy Hyperion! Wait...

[KineticDiplomat]

{Scrubbed}
And, if we’re being honest here, when the US decides to re-settle villages in strategic hamlets, no one could really stop it.

So - if we mean to say the elves are capable of sustaining a fight where they usually lose far more than they kill, have a center that cannot actually be struck, don’t mind fighting for decades, realize that there will be extensive parts of their own land and people that are completely at the mercy of the other guy for those decades, can afford to launch and fail at maj or battles reasonably often, are being supplied by another power and have an intense willingness to bleed, while to the other side it’s just a war of distant foreign policy...

{Scrubbed}

But unless the typical Elven strategy is to enter long people’s wars against foes who have no material interest in actually settling on their lands, while being willing to die by the dozens to kill a few humans/orcs/whoever...probably not the basis of their tactics. Elves have trees and are good guerrillas is a recipe for the Elven race to cease to exist{Scrubbed}
———

@Dienekes

1) The giant forest point is one of those where you generally have to ask how much Plot Armor is in effect. Besides the fact it means the elves never wage offensive wars outside their forest, one wonders what the goal of the encroaching army would be?

Presumably settlement and territorial expansion. Which basically means plopping settlers on the edge and clear cutting new plots. The elves now face the same logistical problems (come to think of it, how is the forest feeding all these elves once we take away Plot Armor? Lembas is made of...something?) to come to the edge. If they march an army out - they may be more familiar, but they’re marching through dense woods that they cannot forage enough to support many. Even if in their infinite superior physiology they only require half the calories, bands of more than a couple hundred will quickly find they cannot possibly feed themselves through hunting and gathering while remaining together.

If they just send war bands, we play the colonial experience over again. Yes, they burn a homestead and ambush a patrol. And they bleed out over a thousand sultry fights while the humans annex their land one farmstead at a time.
.

[a_flemish_guy]

jacksons LOTR shows elves as this ultra-disciplined force which while looking really cool isn't how tolkien wrote them
each elf is a great warior and knows it and their leaders know it
IMO elves don't have regiments or commanders, each elf that wants to fight just turns up on the battle and charges when it's time to charge
imagine if you will an entire army of beowulfs, you don't tell beowulf what to do, let alone when he ought to do it, if you tried to do that he'll fashion your arms and stomach into a wardrum (elves will just ignore you)
so yeah, despite how much I despise that scene elves jumping over a dwarven shieldwall makes perfect sense

elven warfare looks like gallic/celtic warfare, huge emphasis on personal combat, resistance to centralised or even localised command, quickly shifting allegiances and wariors that can take on everyone else in personal combat but get brought down with discipline and teamwork

[Peelee]

The Mod on the Silver Mountain: Friendly reminder that real-world politics are not a valid topic of discussion.

[redwizard007]

{Scrubbed}

[Dusk Raven]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I plan to stay here - this place is helpful for mechanics discussions - though worldbuilding becomes difficult if I'm not allowed to make historical references to anything that might conceivably be connected to the modern day...

[redwizard007]

I plan to stay here - this place is helpful for mechanics discussions - though worldbuilding becomes difficult if I'm not allowed to make historical references to anything that might conceivably be connected to the modern day...

{scrubbed}

[Bohandas]

3) In a large part because of 2), actually sustaining a guerrilla force is hard. It is extremely hard in a pre-industrial world. The movies where our heroes always have enough arrows, freshly repaired armor, good horses, are disease free and plenty to eat...is well, not consistent with the experience of the rural guerrilla.

A level 1 adept could mitigate many of the more likely issues via mending, cure light wounds, create water, purify food and drink, etc.

purify food and drink also eliminates the need for a cooking fire which might be spotted

[Keltest]

A level 1 adept could mitigate many of the more likely issues via mending, cure light wounds, create water, purify food and drink, etc.

purify food and drink also eliminates the need for a cooking fire which might be spotted

Even without specific D&D rules, your "classic" wood elves generally have a pseudo-magical rapport with the forest such that they get more and better quality resources than any invading army would. An elven fletcher doesn't need to cut down a tree branch for arrow shafts, they wake up one morning and find the tree has grown a new branch for them that happens to split perfectly into a dozen quiverfulls of arrow shafts on its own.

[Bohandas]

{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I've had extreme difficulty with both of these issues as well.

I recommend EN World/Morrus RPG News. They seem to have a decently active forum. And it loads well (depending on browser).

Plus the threads there don't have a tendency to end up looking like a document from the game Paranoia or like one of the SCP articles the way they do here, because EN World's forum doesn't have a ban on discussing mythology, or medieval history, or any other topic that's required reading for fantasy RPGs.

[Dienekes]

{Scrubbed}

[Sapphire Guard]

Legolas is capable of killing 42 orcs at Helm's deep before he ran out of arrows. He's probably an above average fighter, but he's not Elrond or Feanor.

In sniping terms their accuracy is good enough that arrows through eyeslits and such are viable strategies. Dislodging them from woods is going to be very expensive at that exchange rate, and if you succeed, all you've got is a worthless patch of forest.

I expect they'd stay hidden and bleed the enemy forces.The normal weaknesses of these tactics don't really apply, as they could just move their villages to avoid attempts to occupy them and arrows are not going to be in short supply when everyone has been making the things for centuries.

[Bohandas]

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Again. Try EN World. They have a decent userbase and they're allowed to talk about history and myths.

That said, I too would like to be informed if anyone knows of any additional good rpg/fantasy forums to try

[Max_Killjoy]

I've had extreme difficulty with both of these issues as well.

I recommend EN World/Morrus RPG News. They seem to have a decently active forum. And it loads well (depending on browser).

Plus the threads there don't have a tendency to end up looking like a document from the game Paranoia or like one of the SCP articles the way they do here, because EN World's forum doesn't have a ban on discussing mythology, or medieval history, or any other topic that's required reading for fantasy RPGs.

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[Bohandas]

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Where specifically?

[Max_Killjoy]

Where specifically?

For now, to the worldbuilding subreddit. Reddit is not an ideal platform for in-depth discussion, but the rules are about belligerence or disrespect, rather than about subject matter, and it's far harder to accidentally cross a wavering line.

[KineticDiplomat]

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