What does military logistics look like in DnD5e?

[OgreBattle]

The old logistics and dragons thread is for other editions, so what’s it like in 5e?

Hand waved? Do clerics still fulfill all logistics roles?

[RobbyPants]

Bring enough food for your necromancer platoon, and they command your skeleton archer battalion?

[JigokuBosatsu]

You probably have to have a proficiency in signal flags or those little minis you move around a battle map. 5e sklils, I can't even.

[Username17]

5e's skill system is so incoherent and incomplete that meaningful discussion about what is required to accomplish anything in particular is essentially impossible. Proficiency with ledgers maybe? Proficiency with supply trains? I don't know. No one knows. No one can know, because there's no bottom to that rabbit hole. It's stupid all the way down.

But the larger point of course is that "military" excursions in 5e D&D are like... a couple dozen people. I mean, there are some creatures at like CR 5 that can chew through essentially limitless numbers of 1st level spearmen and swordsmen, but there are basically no threats of any level that are likely to win a battle against fifty skirmishers with bows.

5e posits monsters that threaten cities and nations that in turn can be repelled by the marines on a single boat. And I don't mean a 200 meter warship, I mean a fucking boat with a crew of sixty or so. The armies and navies of 5e are incredibly tiny. You might seriously personally know more SCA people than the entire armed forces of a kingdom.

We are forced to assume therefore that 5e's "kingdoms" are basically villages. The Orcish Kingdom has forty five men under arms, so it's presumably less than a thousand total people. The next "kingdom" is probably less than ten miles away and you could walk there in three hours or so. With so few mouths to feed, figuring out where the supplies come from just isn't that interesting or hard. Everyone in any effective military is basically a skirmisher with a bow, so most armies can probably just forage for most of their food needs.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

5e Logistics and Dragons is just regular logistics. The secret to winning in 5e is exactly the same as the secret to winning in regular pre-gunpowder warfare: Have lots of men who are as well-equipped and well-disciplined as possible. Not well-equipped as in "blinged out with magic," but as in "get their AC real high." Not well-disciplined as in "have them do push-ups until they can cut mountains in half," but well-disciplined as in "make sure they don't run when their formation starts taking casualties." Dragons can't stand up to the archer formations of any decently large army, let alone various non-dragon creatures, so you really don't care if you have manticore cavalry or whatever. If you have a level 5+ Cleric for every 12-ish people in your army then sure, they can be your supply train, but you probably don't have that many Clerics and anyway you can also just use a regular supply train.

[Ferret]

bunch of dudes with the ability to cast Goodberry, Create Water, and Mending. Now the only question is how many dudes with bows do you want to bring to solve your problem.

[WiserOdin032402]

If anywhere in 5e states how to get a friendly golem having a single clay golem will deal with 90% of the problems in the Monster Manual.

[Echoes]

If anywhere in 5e states how to get a friendly golem having a single clay golem will deal with 90% of the problems in the Monster Manual.

That's actually a thing - the manual of golems in the DMG allows you to craft a golem that's loyal to its maker. The MM even helpfully points you to the item in question. You don't want Clay (or Flesh), as they still have the whole "go bugnuts and murder everything around them" thing, but Stone and Iron Golems are hard d'core, with Iron being particularly impressive against the nastiest beasts, being healed by fire damage and all.

It depends on getting a magic item (so DM Fiat for the most part in 5e), but the rules do actually exist for making and controlling them.