Domain Rules

[jt]

I had a nice realization - whatever single number things roll up to for operational scale battles should be the same thing as the CR-equivalent for tactical combat. They both have the same definition: some curve of percent victory chance that's 50% chance of victory when the two numbers are equal.

[*] Flyers
[*] Infantry
[*] Cavalry
[*] Archers
[*] Monsters

Frank wrote this as a minimum list of things everyone should have. My notes had a remarkably similar list (mine adds artillery, that's it), which I thought was enough to cover every type of unit, just with different stats and special rules. Things like mage circles are artillery-type, even if they're casting Mass Entangle instead of Mass Fireball.

I don't really know how monsters work. It seems obvious that a lone cloud giant is a very different thing from two dozen orcs. It also seems obvious that two dozen cloud giants is just a much better version of two dozen orcs. Dragons turn into flying cavalry if you get enough of them. Is that sort of transformation true of every monster? The exceptions I can think of are things like oozes, gelatinous cubes, and ropers, which don't turn into any recognizable military unit no matter how many you get, but also aren't things I think people expect to have available in their mass combat games. (I mean, nobody is going to turn down a fight against the Ooze Lord, but that's something you do because you can.)

[RelentlessImp]

Get enough oozes or gelatinous cubes and they're siege weapons best suited to dissolving away walls.

[Username17]

My conceptual preference would be that Monsters are similar to Artillery. That is, they have an outsized effect on the opposition for how 'tough' they are. That taking actions to neutralize enemy Monsters has a larger impact on the enemy offensive capacity than taking actions to neutralize enemy heavy infantry or whatever.

The core insight is to ask what you want heroes to be doing in order to cause large swings in the battle. And I think tactical strikes on enemy Hydras is a very good use of heroic screen time. So making it practically similar to setting fire to enemy trebuchets is reasonable.

my terminological preference is the word 'Ravage.' Monsters and Artillery Ravage the other side and cause a lot of casualties if they are not prevented from doing so.

-Username17

[Username17]

The battle system difficulty as I see it is that you want to be able to scale between a force with forty troops and a force with forty thousand troops while still being able to care about tactical choices. You want to be able to do Agincourt with 8,000 troops versus 20,000 (as historical), but you also want to be able to do the battle with 200 versus 500 troops or with 40,000 versus 100,000.

The key then is to have a finite number of moving parts that can have highly variable numbers of dudes in them. And also that you want to be able to fill the cohorts with very different kinds of troops. That is, your cavalry units might include wolves or giant rats or something if they can keep up; but they presumably wouldn't want to include a Stone Golem even if it is your best dude.

My thought is then that you have different types of cohorts that check for different kinds of contributions from prospective troops. Thus you put the Stone Golems into the same cohort as the Heavy Infantry and not into the same cohort as the Goat Riders. But you might put the Goat Riders into the same cohort as your Elvish Silver Helms. The Goat Riders are slower, but no as much slower as the Golems and also they add significantly to the shock values that you got the Silver Helms for in the first place.

-Username17

[merxa]

Logistically, supporting a band of 40 is an entirely different, even trivial, problem over 40,000.

I'd probably just look at putting unit sizes into tiers and cap out at some amount that's still within human comprehension, which is probably planets worth of armies having galatic battles.

Shooting from the hip
1-39 tier 0 / aka PCs, skirmishes
40-3900 tier 1 / fuedal, militias
4000 - 399k tier 2 / city states, provinces
400k - 39mil tier 3 / nations, regional conflicts
40mil -3.9 bil tier 4 empires, world wars
4bil+ tier 5 / galatic, planar

[deaddmwalking]

Logistically, supporting a band of 40 is an entirely different, even trivial, problem over 40,000.

I'd probably just look at putting unit sizes into tiers and cap out at some amount that's still within human comprehension, which is probably planets worth of armies having galatic battles.

Shooting from the hip
1-39 tier 0 / aka PCs, skirmishes
40-3900 tier 1 / fuedal, militias
4000 - 399k tier 2 / city states, provinces
400k - 39mil tier 3 / nations, regional conflicts
40mil -3.9 bil tier 4 empires, world wars
4bil+ tier 5 / galatic, planar

It's not possible to rigidly define tiers. When you have an army of 400k and the enemy refuses to send an army and instead sends a single Tarrasque the rules have to be able to handle it. Choosing 'tier 0' since there is one Tarrasque is silly; choosing 'Tier 3' only works if a Tarrasque has numbers that make sense in that tier.

Since D&D posits monsters that are worth hundreds of troops individually, a few dozen of those troops need to be equivalent to a few thousand 'standard troops'.

[DrPraetor]

The tiers need to overlap.

So if you have 30 guys on each side, you need to be able to resolve the battle as either a skirmish or as an engagement and the rules need to give roughly the same result either way. So, perhaps counter-intuitively, if you are engaged in distributed gang warfare ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twbuT1V5mFE ), you can resolve 9 battles as engagements (tier 1) and only the battle in which the PCs participate as a skirmish (tier 0).

Of course, even-perhaps-especially at tier 4 (which should be somewhat smaller than 40 million, I think) the tier 0 battle in which the PCs fight the boss monster should always have some outsized importance, with cascasding tactical modifiers and suchnot.

[jt]

One of the things that I was surprised about when researching hex and counter games is that they only track numerical advantages in whole number ratios like 1:2, 1:3, and 1:5. Most subtle ratio I saw was 2:3. And this is a really grognardy realism-obsessed genre, so if it's good enough for them it should be good enough for anyone.

If you combine big whole number ratios with 3E-esque 2-level doubling CR, a military unit's fighting strength is (half its average CR) + Log2(number of soldiers). Where the base 2 log is of course a table lookup.

So 20000 first-level fighters is 1 (CR) + 14 (Numbers), a lone Tarrasque is 10 (CR) + 0 (Numbers), coming up 5 short, so the English need ~30 Tarrasques to defeat the French at Agincourt. Or 15 Tarrasques at a 2:1 disadvantage.

Heck, take those numbers and add 1d4 and you've got a pretty reasonable guess who wins.

[Omegonthesane]

(presumably as a simplifying assumption, any entity capable of properly organising a strength 10 military unit is also capable of negating any hard counters that higher CR foes have to cause infinitely many tiny men to not pose a threat.

Unless we write this for 5E where they deliberately have no such hard counters.)

[Username17]

To the extent that you're playing a game that is appended to a fantasy RPG rather than just separately playing World in Flames in between RPG sessions it is that it should genuinely matter that you have Unicorn Cavalry or whatever as a consequence of the story events in the RPG. As such, I think it would genuinely be a feature if a Tarrasque was simply immune to arbitrarily large numbers of basic spearmen and required sterner measures to deal with.

-Username17

[Dean]

I think it's a huge mistake to try to design a mass battle game as a subset of the domain game. No one has successfully modeled a good domain game and no one has successfully modeled even a functional mass battle game and trying to do both at once is delusional.

I get that every mother fucker is gonna tell me that a domain game needs a wargame or it won't feel complete and that a mass battle system is really a simple matter of making numerical comparisons and other vague bullshit but that's drivel. The domain conversation at this point is very grand and I would be extremely interested (with a bit of pessimistic doubt) if Frank could make even a rough alpha style model of it. There's a number of moving pieces that I'm not sure how they would interact but Frank is a very talented designer and seeing them in even a rough model would really help in seeing how it would work and what the strengths of the hex/council domain idea being proposed are.

That being said I would move from hopeful skepticism to open derision at the idea of someone making an even moderately functional mass battle and domain system simultaneously. That's like Babe Ruth pointing at the stands and THEN unzipping his fly to try to hit a homer with his cock.

I think the only sensible engineering approach is to have your domain generate armies but that the particulars of what that means is a big question mark for now and to assume those outputs will be made into a functional system later and just to tackle every other domain design problem first.

With that being said I'll mention I like the idea of domains having their building effects derived from their biggest building in any given category. That allows a person to care about every building they make. I can genuinely imagine caring about my domains first shrine, then temple, then grand temple, then great monument. I can not imagine giving one shit about ordering 22 temples to be build across 30 counties. The assumption should be that if you have 1 grand temple that you have many temples, and if you have 1 castle you have many forts. Smaller towns within larger domains can be assumed to have one development level lower than your top level building, and that makes you actually know about the particular buildings you've made that are valuable. It makes you have your own Temple of Artemis or Hanging Gardens of Babylon or whatever. Buildings you care about that have narrative weight because that particular thing gives you an effect. This same model could work for moving from specialized troops to generally available troops. Where having a unit of Harpy Archers only gives you that one unit but having any Harpy Archers at all lets you unlock the Flight Commander position and build Eyries and once you've done both of those your entire army as a whole is assumed to have Harpies.

[Username17]

I get that every mother fucker is gonna tell me that a domain game needs a wargame or it won't feel complete and that a mass battle system is really a simple matter of making numerical comparisons and other vague bullshit but that's drivel.

I get what you're saying, and it's true that it's easy to get lost in the weeds making mass battle rules. But I do actually think it's pretty easy to make a mass battle ruleset that is a net benefit for an attached RPG. That probably sounds boastful and contentious, so I'll put up rather than shutting up:

Imagine for the moment that your military just has two kinds of things: Troops and Specials. Troops have a number, and bigger numbers are good. Specials act as force multipliers and are thus providing a larger absolute bonus the more Troops you have. And then when it comes to battles, the bigger number wins.

That provides value added for an RPG because it gives defined benefits for doing D&D monster hunts to take out the Specials of enemy factions. How many of the enemy Dragons you need to take out before you'll be able to beat the army of the Lich King is a defined amount and thus the various bug hunt missions against enemy dragons have purpose.

There is a lot you can add to that toy minigame. And it's easy to imagine adding bells and whistles that don't add net benefit to the game. But I can also easily seeing epicycles that add value. Like, a rule that determines how many casualties you take or a rule that gives battles between closely matched foes a randomized outcome.

The main insight is that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the entire armies clashing minigame is for making the RPG tactical combats and domain production have meaningful outputs into wars. It's not there so that you can play Squad Leader instead of D&D.

-Username17

[Username17]

To bang on about this a little bit more, mass battle system of BATTLESYSTEM™
or An Echo Resounding or anything like that (very much including the aborted attempt K and I made to go down that route in the Tomes) can't work. They can't work for two giant flaming reasons:

• Whether your "stands" or "blocks" or "squads" or whatever the fuck are 10 troops, 100, or some other number you haven't really broadened the amount of troops the game can handle. You've just created a flavor patch and another equivalently narrow band of playability.
• Your D&D design priorities are going to be centered on the tactical minigame, so when your mass battle minigame is an imitation of the tactical minigame it is necessarily a pale imitation. A poor cousin that gets less playtesting, attention, and content.

This means that an X:1 scale-up of the basic D&D combat is always going to be bad. It's not going to stand in for a significant amount of the battles you'd want to use it for and also too it's not going to play particularly well. A shoddy copy of the tactical combat game that can't even be made to run many of the large battles you'd want to use it for.

What the mass battles game is for is to give contextual meaning to world affecting actions. Both world affecting actions on the personal RPG scale and world affecting actions on the domain scale. So when you kill one of the enemy Dragons your mass battle game is there to tell you how that shifts the balance of power between Team Good and Team Bad. When you train a bunch of Dwarven Crossbowmen, the mass battle game is there to tell you how that shifts the balance of power between Team Good and Team Bad.

Essentially the core issue is Red Hand of Doom. There are various things you do to undermine the Goblin army and there are various things you do to improve the defenses of the Human city. And after a bunch of adventures, the clash happens... and that's where you do the fucking clip show of showing how all the shit you did changes the outcome of the battle. Now in the actual adventure that clip show is hidden information and therefore bullshit - the things you do that impact the battle or do not are arbitrary and in some cases counter-intuitive. But if you had a defined system such that the players could talk about what their own contributions had been and take actions based on the knowledge that they would end up mattering if they worked, that would be better.

And what that means is that the only purpose of distinguishing a Dwarven Crossbowman from a Dwarven Hammerhand is the degree to which it creates interaction points where player actions can make differences. So if you can turn the battlefield into sloggy mud that gives the Crossbows more chance to do damage or you can create a windstorm that makes the Crossbows much less effective, that creates a reason that you might want to train Crossbow Dwarves or Hammerhand Dwarves. Troops are different not because of their D&D stats, but because of how their contribution to a battle can be force multiplied or negated by player actions.

-Username17

[Username17]

Having established that the Mass Battles can add value while being almost comically minimalist, the question is thus what additional value can be had from making the Mass Battles be more than "Troops times Specials, biggest number wins."

The first thing that comes to mind is outcomes. Winning is obviously better than and distinct from losing, but it would be valuable if the battles gave outputs that could in turn be inputs into the domain game and the RPG. Do you take over the silver mine? Capture the bishop? Save the livestock? Take heavy losses? Any of those could potentially be a big deal, and it would be nice to have the rules output answers to those questions rather than to rely on drip and suck from the MC.

So post battle resolution is something that could add value. It's easy to imagine getting lost in the weeds of assigning captives and casualties, but something simple where the battle generates a score for both sides and you select off menus or roll on charts to spend those scores until the meter is empty for both sides seems like it would do it.

The second thing that the Mass Battles game can do is validate the outputs from the RPG and domain minigames. That is, getting an army of loyal fire giant cataphracts has no meaning in the RPG minigame other than to say that you've apparently won D&D. But if that army "has stats" in Mass Battle, it's therefore important that you have Fire Giants mounted on Raze Boars rather than Ogres on Rhinos or just a bunch of normal dudes on normal horses.

It's easy to get caught in minutiae here. It doesn't have to be that there's enough granularity that the game notices when you swap hide armor for scale mail or whatever. It just has to be enough that the players can see the benefit of getting access to "better" troops or denying superior troops to the enemy. And ideally it should be complex enough to make training or acquiring through quest rewards one kind of troop different from training or acquiring another - but not more than that.

And finally, we got the most demanding of all: the fact that players want to make choices on the battlefield and have those choices matter.

Ho boy. There is no limit to the crazy minutiae you could clog the game up with on this front. My thought is that especially with the access to fantasy bullshit that you want to be able to distinguish between a battlefield which has been plunged into magical darkness (screwing over archers in favor of swordsmen) and a battlefield that has been filled with magical entangling vegetation (screwing over swordsmen in favor of archers).

That's where I'm coming from with the idea of "cohorts." You can have a cohort of Archers that can be a mixture of Halfling Slingers, Dwarven Crossbows, and Elvish Longbows - but it's collectively an Archery Cohort and it has simple numbers. The fact that it's an Archery Cohort means that it gets jerked around by Darkness and gets a bonus for difficult ground (whether magically induced or not). Alternately you could have an Infantry cohort that is made up of Goblin Pikeneers, Dwarvish Hammerhands, and Elvish Blade Dancers, and it just has simple numbers again. And the fact that it's an Infantry Cohort means that it's jerked around by things that screw over Infantry and not by things that screw over Archers.

-Username17

[maglag]

That's where I'm coming from with the idea of "cohorts." You can have a cohort of Archers that can be a mixture of Halfling Slingers, Dwarven Crossbows, and Elvish Longbows - but it's collectively an Archery Cohort and it has simple numbers. The fact that it's an Archery Cohort means that it gets jerked around by Darkness and gets a bonus for difficult ground (whether magically induced or not).

But dwarves have darkvision.

And elves like drow would have even better darkvision.

And devil archers would have infinite range darkvision.

[Username17]

A design is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

This simple truth is often forgotten when dealing with RPGs because the infinite expandability is much of the point of the medium. Nevertheless, it still applies. It's not that you shouldn't differentiate the Orcs of Kor from the Orcs of Thar, it's that there are an awful lot of things you could end up writing rules for that aren't going to matter.

Consider all the different ways troops might fail by not doing what they are told. They might be too cowardly to advance. They might be too stupid to follow orders. They might be bad at working together and be out of formation. They might be too eager for battle and run ahead of where they are supposed to be. And so you can see why early Warhammer gave troops a Cool value, a Leadership value, Willpower value, an Intelligence value, and so on and so forth. Obviously if you find yourself writing all those psych values for every kind of troop you need to rethink your life choices. But you can certainly see how you'd get there.

Now personally, I think it would be a good thing to be able to do various psychological stuff to enemy armies. But I don't think that would be good enough to justify giving separate discipline and bravery stats to individual troops. My personal preference would be to have Morale for cohorts and to have all other trickery and failures of discipline be based on the cohort's commander, who is an RPG character that you could presumably bribe or fool.

But dwarves have darkvision.

And elves like drow would have even better darkvision.

And devil archers would have infinite range darkvision.

See this is the kind of shit that you mostly don't have to worry about at all. Dwarves and Droaw see in the dark but they don't see in magical darkness and in any case the 3e D&D darkvision ranges are so short that they essentially don't matter on a Mass Battlefield at all. Devil archers are so rare that it wouldn't be surprising to just never encounter them at all. There's Erinyes and Marrashi, and that's pretty much it. It's sufficiently obscure that them having a hard counter to battlefield darkness can just be a weird special rule they have. If someone wants to build up a whole lot of piety in a domain with Gnollish Heretics in order to recruit an entire cohort of Marrashi in order to put out the sun in a major battle and have one sided archery supremacy - they deserve to win that fight. And if it takes some weird calculations and head holding to resolve that situation, I regard that as acceptable.

In any case, I think Infravision is stupid as hell and Darkvision is only a little better. My preference for a new edition would be to remove the assumption that everyone and their dog can see in darkness and just put glowing fungus in big sections of the under realm.

-Username17

[maglag]

But dwarves have darkvision.

And elves like drow would have even better darkvision.

And devil archers would have infinite range darkvision.

See this is the kind of shit that you mostly don't have to worry about at all. Dwarves and Droaw see in the dark but they don't see in magical darkness and in any case the 3e D&D darkvision ranges are so short that they essentially don't matter on a Mass Battlefield at all. Devil archers are so rare that it wouldn't be surprising to just never encounter them at all. There's Erinyes and Marrashi, and that's pretty much it. It's sufficiently obscure that them having a hard counter to battlefield darkness can just be a weird special rule they have. If someone wants to build up a whole lot of piety in a domain with Gnollish Heretics in order to recruit an entire cohort of Marrashi in order to put out the sun in a major battle and have one sided archery supremacy - they deserve to win that fight. And if it takes some weird calculations and head holding to resolve that situation, I regard that as acceptable.

Wait, it's super magical darkness that covering the whole field?

Then aren't you falling into the "caster rulez, everybody else droolz" field? How exactly is magicless general supposed to keep up with the mage general casting battlefield-wide super darkness that can only be countered by magic?

In any case, I think Infravision is stupid as hell and Darkvision is only a little better. My preference for a new edition would be to remove the assumption that everyone and their dog can see in darkness and just put glowing fungus in big sections of the under realm.

But nighttime factions that shun the burning light are a pretty big staple of fantasy all around.

[merxa]

The better power for devil archers is teleportation at will.

[Username17]

Then aren't you falling into the "caster rulez, everybody else droolz" field? How exactly is magicless general supposed to keep up with the mage general casting battlefield-wide super darkness that can only be countered by magic?

Battlefield wide super darkness wouldn't be something that shows up in a normal spell slot. It wold be the kind of thing that you did by unveiling an artifact or having a giant monolith in your province or possibly as a Prestige ability. In short, none of the paths to getting battlefield darkness are closed to Paladins or Berserkers. You could open the Cask of Shadows whether you're a cloth-wearer or not.

But more to the point, battlefield darkness hinders ranged troops and boosts scary troops. And in the Mass Battles minigame, that's it. Which means that being a Calendar Keeper and arranging for the battlefield to happen in heavy fog or being a tactical genius who arranges the battle to happen in dense woodlands would have a similar effect on archers.

The ability to turn the battlefield dark with a magic word is extremely powerful in the tactical RPG combat minigame, but the Mass Battles minigame plays out in a six mile hex or maybe in an adjacent hex on a day or night somewhere in a relevant month of domain actions. Turning day to night or vice versa is absolutely equivalent to completely non-magical Mass Battle strategy actions like ensuring the battle is fought during the night or day in the first place.

The better power for devil archers is teleportation at will.

Giving all the outsiders Teleport Without Error at-will is a horrible mistake in D&D. There are probably some outsiders that should move around like that, but making it a general and common ability is just one of the many ways in which the outer planes of AD&D were extremely retarded.

But yes, there should be 'mounted archer' style cohorts that do horrible damage to cohorts that can't match them in speed or ranged firepower. Whether those have special movement like teleportation or flight is almost beside the point. Mongols are a thing you'd want to be able to represent even if you didn't have Centaurs and Pegasus Riders that were fantasy versions of Mongols by default.

Functionally, the Horse Archer cohort is something that has a big defensive advantage against slower melee troops, meaning that it's very strong against Infantry cohorts and much less impressive against Cavalry or Archer cohorts.

-Username17

[maglag]

Then aren't you falling into the "caster rulez, everybody else droolz" field? How exactly is magicless general supposed to keep up with the mage general casting battlefield-wide super darkness that can only be countered by magic?

Battlefield wide super darkness wouldn't be something that shows up in a normal spell slot. It wold be the kind of thing that you did by unveiling an artifact or having a giant monolith in your province or possibly as a Prestige ability. In short, none of the paths to getting battlefield darkness are closed to Paladins or Berserkers. You could open the Cask of Shadows whether you're a cloth-wearer or not.

But more to the point, battlefield darkness hinders ranged troops and boosts scary troops. And in the Mass Battles minigame, that's it. Which means that being a Calendar Keeper and arranging for the battlefield to happen in heavy fog or being a tactical genius who arranges the battle to happen in dense woodlands would have a similar effect on archers.

The ability to turn the battlefield dark with a magic word is extremely powerful in the tactical RPG combat minigame, but the Mass Battles minigame plays out in a six mile hex or maybe in an adjacent hex on a day or night somewhere in a relevant month of domain actions. Turning day to night or vice versa is absolutely equivalent to completely non-magical Mass Battle strategy actions like ensuring the battle is fought during the night or day in the first place.

You keep bringing the underdark up as something central to the minigame, and lava flows/fluorescent fungus don't turn off every dozen hours or so.

The better power for devil archers is teleportation at will.

Giving all the outsiders Teleport Without Error at-will is a horrible mistake in D&D. There are probably some outsiders that should move around like that, but making it a general and common ability is just one of the many ways in which the outer planes of AD&D were extremely retarded.

But yes, there should be 'mounted archer' style cohorts that do horrible damage to cohorts that can't match them in speed or ranged firepower. Whether those have special movement like teleportation or flight is almost beside the point. Mongols are a thing you'd want to be able to represent even if you didn't have Centaurs and Pegasus Riders that were fantasy versions of Mongols by default.

Functionally, the Horse Archer cohort is something that has a big defensive advantage against slower melee troops, meaning that it's very strong against Infantry cohorts and much less impressive against Cavalry or Archer cohorts.

-Username17

Thing is, horses have big troubles with walls/hard terrain and whatnot.

Fliers don't care about those. Adding flying units to the equation did change the way we wage war drastically.

Up in the surface at least. On the underdark flying may be pretty useless depending on just how low the cavern ceilings are.

[Username17]

You keep bringing the underdark up as something central to the minigame, and lava flows/fluorescent fungus don't turn off every dozen hours or so.

Conquest and development in the underworld is certainly a thing you might want to do. And yes, the Grimlocks will sometimes poison the glow fungus in order to achieve a competitive advantage by plunging the battlefield into darkness. And this is a thing they will do without having access to any sorcerer lords. It's just a thing they might be able to do with a Maser Gardener or something.

The Grimlocks are all spooky and none of them have any Archer Cohorts, so putting out the lights is going to be a thing they'd like to do every battle.

Thing is, horses have big troubles with walls/hard terrain and whatnot.

Fliers don't care about those. Adding flying units to the equation did change the way we wage war drastically.

Flying units have different things that make them sad. High winds, for example. Or the fact that they are normally incapable of having cover from archery and using their flight to avoid melee attacks at the same time.

Another thing to remember is that while migratory birds can fly at high altitude, most birds fly at lower than 150 meters. Mosquitoes fly at less than fifteen meters. Meaning that with rare exceptions, 'flight' doesn't meaningfully protect you from arrows and in many cases doesn't really protect you from melee weapons. The idea of riding a Pegasus is that you can make a series of quick flight-jumps and fire arrows from out of horizontal reach - just like a regular light horse archer but faster rather than meaningfully higher.

Pegasus Riders are mostly the tactical equivalent of jeeps rather than helicopters or battleships. Their ability to go around static defenses is pretty cool, but they aren't able to float outside of weapon range and shell targets.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Another thing to remember is that while migratory birds can fly at high altitude, most birds fly at lower than 150 meters.

Surely that's because they don't have any reason to, though, and would fly higher if they (or their riders) were aware of arrows likely to come up at them?

Putting a really low ceiling would help game balance immensely, but (excepting the Underdark), would seem hard to justify in universe.

[maglag]

You keep bringing the underdark up as something central to the minigame, and lava flows/fluorescent fungus don't turn off every dozen hours or so.

Conquest and development in the underworld is certainly a thing you might want to do. And yes, the Grimlocks will sometimes poison the glow fungus in order to achieve a competitive advantage by plunging the battlefield into darkness. And this is a thing they will do without having access to any sorcerer lords. It's just a thing they might be able to do with a Maser Gardener or something.

The Grimlocks are all spooky and none of them have any Archer Cohorts, so putting out the lights is going to be a thing they'd like to do every battle.

By D&D standards, being able to shut down enviroment special properties is magic. There's no official gardener skil/class for mundanes, it's druids and shit that get to make plants static natural beings be better or worst.

The topic that mundanes work better in a onthly scale of action is nice to say and all, but I see zero reason why it can't be scaled back to normal D&D scale.

If the domains general can gather armies, why can't a regular fighter just go "yeah I had called some grunt reinforcements beforehand and they arrive now"?

If the domains general can decide where and when their army fights, why can't the regular fighter change party positioning at initiative or something?

If the domains gardener can identify and change plants static natural beings, why can't a fighter with ranks in profession (gardener) do anything useful with that at all?

Thing is, horses have big troubles with walls/hard terrain and whatnot.

Fliers don't care about those. Adding flying units to the equation did change the way we wage war drastically.

Flying units have different things that make them sad. High winds, for example. Or the fact that they are normally incapable of having cover from archery and using their flight to avoid melee attacks at the same time.

Another thing to remember is that while migratory birds can fly at high altitude, most birds fly at lower than 150 meters. Mosquitoes fly at less than fifteen meters. Meaning that with rare exceptions, 'flight' doesn't meaningfully protect you from arrows and in many cases doesn't really protect you from melee weapons. The idea of riding a Pegasus is that you can make a series of quick flight-jumps and fire arrows from out of horizontal reach - just like a regular light horse archer but faster rather than meaningfully higher.

Pegasus Riders are mostly the tactical equivalent of jeeps rather than helicopters or battleships. Their ability to go around static defenses is pretty cool, but they aren't able to float outside of weapon range and shell targets.

-Username17

Jeeps are still stopped cold by walls or a big enough hole in the ground, they're not the tactical equivalent of fliers at all.

Speaking of which being able to quickly jump behind walls is cover by itself. Normal cavalry can chase horse archers, but they can't chase pegasi archers that can fly-jump behind a wall/ravine/whatever.

Plus this thing called gravity means that shooting downwards is much easier than shooting upwards. Archers crawling in the ground will have a much harder time harming pegasi riders even "just" 150 meters in the air up while the pegasi's own arrows will be harming the dirt vermin much easier. Specialized anti-air guns had to be developed to even be able to threaten flying units in the real world. Now D&D rules don't give much of a bonus for being higher, but then D&D rules means pegasi riders can just drop normal rocks for buckets of damage with laser precision out of the range of any bow.

[Grek]

It's not so much that birds can't fly that high, as that it takes birds literal days to do a full climb. The bar-headed goose, which has the fastest climbing speed of any migratory bird, can only ascend at a rate of about 30 feet per minute once it gets above its normal non-migratory altitude. A flying horse carrying an archer isn't going to get anywhere near that level of performance. While going down is relatively easy, flying out of archer range is hard enough that it might as well not happen at all in combat time.

[Whipstitch]

@maglag

Look, I get it. Realism gets unduly shat upon by many gamers. Discarding verisimilitude shouldn't be done lightly because anything that makes intuitive sense to the players is one less thing you need to explain and hash out as a DM. But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that most fantasy fans aren't so invested in faithfully recreating the vagaries of long range deflection shooting and indirect fire that they're totally willing to rule out ground bound archers having competitive shootouts with flying archers of the same tier. There's enough demand for bad ass fantasy archers with absurdly fast projectiles traveling along absurdly flat arcs to justify some deviation from Earth-1218 physics. I'd happily be down for a setup where Tier 2 Pegasus Skirmishers roflstomp tier 1 Crossbow Militia with their magical flying pony bullshit but can expect casualties when bombarding Deadshot Minotaurs.