Would Napoleonic warfare even be possible in a fantasy setting...

>Wouldn't long lines of people with guns not function against magic users?

If it works against cannons loaded with shrapnel, it will work against wizards as well. By the way, the whole point of the line is not to make you make less vulnerable, but to allow you to mass your unit's firepower.

>This discussion again.

Damnit people.
Truthfully it all depends on the enemy forces.

The Hobgoblins in 5e study in the school of the Devastator, which is a Secret University where the magically apt hobgoblins are brought after being kidnapped as children.
The Devastators are well oiled squads or mobile and sneaky artillery, with literally zero anything that is not blowing shit up.

Why on Earth does this pic make my penis harder than plascrete?

Gun lines, partially, were used to counter artillery (cannons), since it limited the number of casualties inflicted by the bouncing cannon shot. Since the infantry "square" was used to counter calvary, there would be a game of cat and mouse with the calvary trying to trick the infantry into "squaring up" so that the cannons would be at their most effective or forcing the infantry into lines so that the calvary could more easily overrun the position.

As conjectured, Blaster Mages serving the same role that cannons used while Generalist Mages would serve support roles as suggested.

Because you are Virt?

>Foot soldiers would be literally irrelevant. They would be phased out quickly and replaced by armies of entirely wizards.

Eh, yes and no. Quantity has a quality all of its own, and the wizarding population is likely to be small - anyone can serve in the army (that's the entire point of basic training, which has a success rate of better than 90%) but only 1/4th of the people pass muster to serve in your hypothetical wizard marines.

An army is going to be better off by using combined arms, as it were - every platoon has a wizard or two (and clerics, for that matter) as part of it, but the bulk of a platoon is still going to be made up of non-magical folk.

>Would medieval warfare even be possible in a fantasy setting?
>Wouldn't long lines of people with bows or pikes not function against magic users?

You're not even trying.

Well if the world even a little D&D like, even without completely bonkers wizards, high level heroes gonna wreck armies. They are not completely untouchable but a group of fighters can go through almost anything that Napoleonic time armies can through at them like a hot knife through butter.

That's a human female, user.
Virt's thing is with elves.

Why don't we ask the magic users that exist in real life what they objecticaly can and can't do?

*objectively
too mad to type straight

High level heroes are rare, though. If we go to 3.5, which was the only one to ever really publish rules for how to generate the exact population of a given D&D settlement and all their classes, then around 93% or so of the population of a typical D&D planet is level 1. Of the 7% that are higher, half of them are level 2, and so on in that fashion, with anyone above level 6 or so being vanishingly rare. Still present in any one given city of appreciable size, but not nearly enough to build an army or so.

magic takes years to master.
Bows likewise take a lifetime
guns that months to produce and become adequate with
there is a reason why one out stripped the other
if crossbows are available then so are guns.
line troops might not be viable, then again if formations of pike are viable then so are guns and more so.
likely you'll end up with those spanish pike and shotte formations and then when you hit rifles then you'll Napoleonics

check out "mr norrell and jonathan strange" for ideas for magic during napoleonic area..It's literally about that.

It could be the other way round: that the introduction of gunpowder makes magic weaker. Or that it is its own kind of magic. Which I believe is how the gunpowder revolution starts under the Elf Emperor Mordred in Flintloque/Slaughterloo.

>Wizard marines

More like wizard aeronauts. With flight, they would be capable of a level of mobility not to be seen for hundreds of years otherwise, and combined with fireball and they can be used as bombers, with anti-wizard wizards being fighters.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)

A group of fighters were originally supposed to /represent/ a field officer of a Napoleonic time army.

Sure, just don't play DnD. Most fantasy settings don't make the fucking stupid mistake of making becoming a wizard exactly as difficult as learning to swing a sword good, AND have no downside to its use AND let it do basically anything far beyond the ability of nonmagical folk to keep up.

In pretty much any other setting, magic is either so rare and difficult as to be only rarely encountered, so costly that using it on the level of a war will ruin you, or simply not strong enough to impact the war in the first place beyond a few specific tricks.

Everone always assumes that magic would be in competition with scientific progress, but there's no reason the two can't work together.

Depends on the setting.

This picture will never not make me mad. If you're going to make fap bait at least have it be tactically sound. Battlefield executions of that kind does nothing but show you off as a pompous cowardly prick in front of your own army, wastes bullets that would be better served shooting actual threats, and encourages enemy forces to not surrender as they'll be under the impression you'll just kill them anyway.

And on top of that, a royal or officer that looks like that would work much better as a hostage to serve as leverage against your foe or as a wife to sell off to a neighboring kingdom for financial and political gain.

0/10, would report executing officer to higher authorities.

Because its an easy conflict to set up thematically. Science vs mysticism, etc etc.

The problem is that if magic is reproduceable, its science. That's just how science works. Take cold magic, enchant some metal plates to always be chilled, invent the refrigerator thousands of years ahead of time. Repeat for a dozen other inventions.

Once you start blending magic and science, you only have a few centuries before you end up with something that looks a hell of a lot like a science fiction setting, everything just has harder to pronounce names and the aesthetic is weird.

Which seems cool when you think you are, like, totally the first person to ever have this idea ohmygod you are so SMART. But its actually really fucking boring, because by combining the powers of magic with the reliability of technology, you sort of don't really have any problem you can't solve anymore. Stories and conflicts thrive on limitations. If I can just make a pot that always is full of delicious food, and its not that hard to make, now the very concept of farming ceases to exist. Farming is replaced with different kinds of food production magic. Repeat with anything and everything that can be made by magic, and BOY doesn't this sound a lot like star trek now?

Came here to say this. Book is good, know nothing about the show.

You know whats even worse? Its a small, clearly not very powerful pistol being aimed at the back of someone still wearing a metal breastplate. There are good odds she would survive the shot, which just makes the guy look even MORE incompetent.

And that's before you get into the clearly fetishy setup of this beautiful woman getting 'taught her lesson' by big strong men. Men who are, conspicuously, wearing military uniforms that DON'T include armor.

So we are presented a situation where the following is true:

> firearms are a thing, which makes the physical strength of the user largely irrelevant as long as you are not too weak to aim a gun
> the side not wearing armor that was effective against early firearms won, and the side wearing armor lost

At that point, the fact that she's a woman shouldn't matter. In fact, based purely on what we can see here in the picture, she is the one better prepared for this fight.

The show is a well done adaptation of the book. It just doesn't have time to dwell on all of the little details, because its only 6 episodes and you can't do footnotes that sprawl 3 pages on TV.

With regards to firearms, mobility and staying out of sight is better than armor. There is more to warfare than simply carrying a weapon.

With regards to the execution, that armor's not going to be thick enough or angled well enough to stop the bullet. What's more likely to save her life is it hitting her spine, shattering both it and the bullet and perhaps buying her a bit of time at the cost of ever moving most of her body again. We don't know enough to know if killing her is a good idea or not. If she is perceived as evil, then her execution would be well received by the firer's supporters.

Show is solid. I didn't even know it was a book till someone pointed it out to me. It comes across as a really good:

>Sorcerers vs. Wizards : The Mini-Series

Had a lot of fun with it. Would recommend. Is the book good too?

I dunno. It doesn't look much thinner than the armor Ned Kelly made from scrap, and its going up against hundreds of years less sophisticated firearms tech.

I'm not saying she'd be unharmed at that distance, just that it's less likely to be lethal than if he just shot her somewhere else like he had a functioning brain. Or even just took off the armor first.

I'd argue that, given the apparent shape of the armor and the way the executioner is hold the gun, it's entirely likely that he's aiming just above where the armor protects, which could very well mean the bullet will penetrate and, assuming it doesn't hit ribs, bounce back off the frontal armor back into her abdomen. Of course, that's assuming the bullet would have sufficient velocity, but even the the bullet might not kill her outright. Having a prisoner slumped on the ground crying as she coughs up blood would be even worse for morale, assuming that

A) The army we're dealing with isn't completely evil

or

B) The situation isn't like that of the French Revolution, where people effectively became animalistic in terms of who gets executed how

>Wouldn't long lines of people with guns not function against magic users?

good thing they had skirmishers too...

>mfw will never be a jager capping enemy wizards with my buddies.

>Not function against magic users?
What the fuck are you talking about? If I put shotte through a magician's torso, he dies. If I put shotte through a mundane man's torso, he dies.
>Combat magic
What the fuck is that? Magic is a scholarly and esoteric study that's far too inefficient to have ever seen mainstream combat use. Same reason why we don't have geneticists on the front lines.

It happens all the time in the Middle East and Japan did it enough times to warrant bombing them into rubble.

>Would Napoleonic warfare even be possible in a fantasy setting
Yes, please see the following on how, respectively, Wizards and Dragons might fit nicely into Napoleonic warfare.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Strange_&_Mr_Norrell
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temeraire_(series)

Depends on the wizards.

Dragonlance pretty much put spell casters as high power, however casting was exceedingly stressful on the body, and eventually they would exhaust themselves. Its takes many years to train a good wizard. It takes a couple months of blaming bad crops on magic users before the local militia is surrounding the tower with torches.

Long story short, the wizards in dragon lance just decided to blow up the towers and fuck off.

I think it's because it's a powerful woman in an honorable uniform crying like a little girl and about to be executed.

It's the ultimate power removal.

If wizards had the same spells then war would look different. Napoleonic style warfare is stipl simple in a low magic setting. Or even more grim styled. Magic is used for vague or incredibly specific divination or maybe it can be used for subterfuge or to influence minds

Imo guns are easy to make, learn to use, and are effective. in a war setting with magic and such involved I think small unit tactics would quickly be developed and the people who could use magic would be taught only how to counter other magic or research would go into how to generate anti magic fields. and if guns exist then so do cannons, and cannons have a far greater range than magic users use (as far as D&D is concerned at least. a competent general could easily have as much chance to win with just guns, pikes and swords against an army with magic in it. and who's to say there won't be magitek

take the Obsidian route. Magical shields are ubiquitous, but they can't stop guns. Suddenly guns dominate the battlefield.

I'm more of the opinion that this girl's body could start a revolution.

Let me eat her cake.

I'll powder her primer.

And make her lose it like Waterloo.

I could go on.

They have that show on netflix. It was very captivating and could easily be tranferred to simple spells or setpiece magical events. Ot also highlights an interesting divide between a wizard and a sorcerer. Someone obsessesed with magic between the brittle pages of dusty tomes and one who wishes to delve into the blackened depths of the sea of magic to find its treasures hidden in the depths

he's about to blow a new hole in that body

I think the only real problem that would prevent "Napoleonic" warfare would be that a revolution is entirely unviable. In reality all humans are more or less equal, with nobility being entirely arbitrary. In a fantasy world where powerful magical bloodlines exist, the nobility would be justified in its existence even after the collapse of the feudal system and rise of centralization.

>It's the ultimate power removal.
And that's why it disgusts me. It reveals what she really is behind all the pomp and circumstance: a spoiled fuckhole.

Depends on how the setting handles magic, pure and simple.

The more common magical abilities are, and the more potent they are, the more redundant conventional weapons becomes.

For example, say you take your 2nd/3rd edition D&D setting. For the most part, yeah, Napoleonic Warfare is possible, because warfare is a matter of the masses and most wizards/sorcerers are low level.

There are wizards strong enough to cast Immunity to Normal Missiles (which, in 2e at least, did make you immune to bullets) and cast huge explosive spells, but these guys are rare and are essentially armies in their own right.

They're not out on the battlefield, they're the people everyone else is carefully tiptoeing around so as to avoid pissing them off. You can wage all the war you like with normal soldiers, but irritate the epic wizard-kings, and you're gonna burn.

This.

There is settings where humans with swords and spears genocide races of technologically advanced wizards with nothing but said swords, buttload of people, a demigod, 12 ubermensch and magical zyklon b.

Depends if you go bloodline magic or book magic. Gives me ideas for my worldbuilding. Maybe the elven kingdom uses books and knowlede for their magic while the human/dwarven kingdom is more clerical but can employ a group of more neutral humans who have sorceror bloodlines for their needs

>bard takes a level in druid.gif

>if crossbows are available then so are guns.
Guns replaced crossbows as the armor piercing direct fire option. Crossbows replaced slings for the same. Cannons replaced bows for indirect fire. Motorcycle gangs replaced cavalry for riding across the battlefield looking like hoodlums. Motorcycle gangs were later replaced with scooter gangs.

>tfw you'll never get the chance to ride a military scooter.

eh?

Brian Mclellan's 'Powder Mage' series is literally about Napoleonic revolution in a fantasy setting.

They kill all the wizards first.

Also, there are gun wizards.

No one could muster the taxes necessary to make the napoleonic strategies viable.

See,
Brewer, The Sinews of Power.
Nye, War, Wine, and Taxes.
Mathias and O'Brien, 1976. "Taxation in England and France 1715-1810" J. of European Econ. History
O’Brien, 1988. “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660-1815” Economic History Review.
Besley & Persson, 2010, "State Capacity, Conflict, and Development," Econometrica
Dincecco & Prado, 2012, "Warfare, Fiscal Capacity and Performance," Journal of Econ Growth

Brewer book is pic related, more incoming.

...

...

...

>whole regiment of imported convicts
>hardened criminals made harder by being shipped to New South Wales (God have mercy on those who face the ones from Van Dieman's Land)
>the all duel wield cavalry pistols or carbines
>All armoured like ol' Ned here
>Motto is "Fight me cunt"

I need this.

Long story short, the army that you field is entirely dependent upon the capacity of your bureaucracy to not fuck up tax collection, which, because of principal agent problems, is actually really hard to do.

Even though gunpowder was around for a long time and there were troops that used it, it wasn't until the state could muster enough people in one place that the massive tactics became possible. And the only way they could muster so many was through a powerful, competent bureaucracy.

Depends on the fantasy, but this is a good example of it done right.

Basic conceit:
>there be dragons

Of course.

I wouldn't waste my wizards in battle though. Warfare is so much more than shooting.

Any type of magic that let you see the battle from above like in games would invalidate Cannae. A surprise flanking would be possible, but require a lot of skill, speed or an attached mage casting invisibility focused through the company's standard banner-staff.

Imagine telepathy or similar magic. A commander could dictate orders beyond line of sight and runner delay. The sort of genius and discipline needed to march an army divided into several columns would become trivial.

I have many cannons with mile-long reach and warm bodies to dispose of. Wizards are usually few and valuable in a setting.

I don't want to spy the enemy with divination. I want to see what my subjects failed to account into their taxes. Even death won't save them from paying if one has necromancy. Raising undead to fight? Bah! I will kill prisioners and turn their corpses into perpetual motion engines, engineering laborers and railcart pushers. It isn't slavery if they don't have a soul.

Industrialized necromancy is a horrifying thing to behold.

If the people are angry enough, they don't care that the magicians are better than them. If anything, that will only harden their resolve as they can claim that the magicians are inhuman X-men style and then procede to outlaw them and force them into hiding, severely dampering their quality of life in the process.

Some said the same of the Industrial Revolution. I say it is better to exploit the dead than the living.

Seriously? I find it uncomfortable and unsettling. Like you I guess

Reading it at the moment, can recommend so far.
Literally about magicians during the Napoleonic wars.

>stop it boner!

DEPENDS
ON
THE
SETTING

It's clearly a public execution in a victory celebration. They're throwing petals around and the executing official is clean and well dressed.

The girl is abused and battered, but that's not unheard of. Prisoners, especially leadership were often dragged around in a parade before their execution. See the Romans.

She may be, no, likely is a part of the royal family or ruling class. Look at how well kept she is and how frail her body. Yet she wears a golden, ornate armor, that is nevertheless completely impractical. (exposed belly, shaped breasts)

This may be a French or Russian revolution style eradication of the royal family. In which case diplomacy is irrelevant and morale is helped by such an execution.

Lines of dudes with guns, even primitive ones, will be more effective against magic users than lines of dudes with swords and bows and shit, and the latter are all over the place in fantasy, so why the fuck not?

>This may be a French or Russian revolution style eradication of the royal family
That's what disgusts me. The French weren't people during the FR, they were animals. The Russian revolution was just as bad for different reasons.

Sounds like something a monarchist would say.

You aren't a monarchist, user, are you?

Don't act like the title 'Reign of Terror' was unjustified.

>And that's why it disgusts me. It reveals what she really is behind all the pomp and circumstance: a spoiled fuckhole.

You know, sometimes I find great lines on Veeky Forums. On other occasions, I deeply wonder at the fate of this board's collective unconscious.

Humiliation, comeuppance, submission, defeat. All very sexy things my friend

Wait, how does it make him look like a pompous cowardly prick? What's the difference between this and putting someone on a firing line with no blindfold?

Britbong here.
Our current system means we Jew the Royal family out of about 95% of their income, while the properties they own remain independent of Big Corp and always have incredibly reasonable prices by paying them a Stripend each year while all the rent from their properties goes to the Government in turn.
They're basically a non-profit organization by this point.
That's a hell of a lot better than getting price gouged by someone that's going to see the money they make. If we did that shit to the 100 richest families in the world then can you even comprehend how much wealth it'd free up?

Yes, I agree my fellow revolutionary! We need to free ourselves by offloading our shackles of oppression on those who choked us with them for too long!

Liberté, égalité, fraternité! Viva!

Wizards generally aren't main combat forces, or large portions of the population. The range of wizard spells in your system of choice will probably play the largest role in determining how much wizards give a shit about guns, more so than the power level of the wizard, though that of course plays a huge role as well.
The only wizard which invalidates a musket line is a hyper prepared Veeky Forums styled d&d wizard of naturally the perfect level for all of the spells needed to invalidate them. Or on a more general note a wizard from a system or setting where any other archetype would also invalidate the musket line (such as in a super's game, which incidentally if you've never played historic fantasy supers, you're missing out).

I generally play savage worlds, and considering it absorbed deadlands, and contains a myriad setting which mix magic/psychic powers with guns without an issue, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Just use kane or rippers as a base.

Kelly's armour was made from farmer's steel ploughs. It weighed 44 kilograms (97 pounds in burger-units). There's no fucking way a girl like that is wearing a 44kg steel breastplate.

Maybe there's some of these still floating around in Russia. I mean hell, they found some F-17's in Afghanistan, and the Syrians are fighting with all sorts of shit from WW1 and WW2.

Shut up you fucking French. Bunch of idiots with cannons is what you are.

>Prussian orcs
>Able to take a volley of shots and keep on marching
>Close with Pistol and sabre

You enjoy that current nice setup because you had your very own revolutionary wars too. It's just that at the end of it all, you ended up with a constitutional monarchy that was beholden to the state, not the other way around.

Russia had the Tsars who were autocrats in every sense of the word. France had rulers who personified the idea of absolutism. It's small wonder that their respective populations, when they did rise up, did so in unbelievably bloody ways. It's not to say they were justified in killing thousands or millions of people, just an explanation as to why they felt so strongly.

It all comes down to the power of the magic users. Warfare is all about the basic infantry unit - without your most basic infantry, you can't take, hold or challenge territory, you can't take objectives, you can't do much except skirmish. Support items like artillery, cavalry or, presumably, magic users, are only there to support the infantry and help them to defeat the other sides infantry. Thats pretty much what you can boil all wars down to - helping your infantry defeat the enemies infantry (and stopping your enemy from producing more infantry, presumably).

At certain points in history, support technology makes a leap, and it changes warfare. The next infantry revolution after the napoleonic wars probably comes in the Franco-Prussian war - where repeating arms and machine guns mean that its no longer possible to deploy infantry in formation.

Hence, the power of wizards would have to be theoretically equal to the power of machine guns in order to make napoleonic warfare impossible - if magic users can just levitate every stone within a half mile radius and slam it into an enemy formation with no effort, or stand on a hill and throw insanely destructive fireballs without fireballs, or there was no feasible method of magically limiting the effects of the enemy magic users, napoleonic warfare is impossible, infantry would simply adapt and, presumably, hide in trenches.

If, however, magic use is insanely taxing on the user, or is rare enough that its limited to a few individuals in a generation, or it can be effectively countered, napoleonic warfare is possible.

Actually our 'revolution' came in the form of the Magna Carta, an agreement between an unpopular King and a group of rebel Barons.
Not, very specifically, from the rise of the Common Man against the state.

If you're talking about the English Civil War that was a matter of a radical against an idiot, but I can understand where you're coming from. As for the Ruskies and Frogs, I can dig it, the more you step on someone the harder they'll push back when they rise up.
But saying that Robespierre and the Scooby Gang were anything but a bunch of ideologues that didn't comprehend the fire he was sticking his dick in is a foolish concept.
Not to sound like an elitist but when the Common Man is forced to grab his knife and start slitting throats, it never goes as well as when the Upper Class Cunts do something that benefits everyone peacefully.

>The French weren't people during the FR, they were animals.
Where do I even begin...
How about 1789, when the French king was dragged out into the streets and... no wait, that didn't happen. The French occupied the Bastille, armed themselves, basically said "we want a constitution or shit will go down" and they got a constitution. An excellent constitution by the way, which preserved the authority of the king. It did abolish the nobility, but only in as far as privileges were abolished and noble titles were no longer acknowledged by the state. It was not like in Russia, where the Romanovs were actually butchered on sight.

>B-But Louis still died! He dindu nuffin, he a good boi goin to church gettin' his life on track need mo money fo' dem nobles
That constitution I mentioned gave about as much power to the king as the president has today, including the right to veto. This was important when the Duke of Brunswick (and allies) threatened to invade France unless they abolished the constitution and returned to the pre-Bastille status quo. Parliament passed a bill to tax the church's estates (which included villages and plots of land they themselves taxed, btw) -proposed by clergyman Sièyes-, and the king veto'd it. Parliament passed a bill to form a national guard to support the military in the case of an invasion, and the king veto'd it. Parliament obviously was getting sick of the king actively sabotaging the security of the nation, so they compiled a new constitution that would limit the power of the king. A constitution that was never passed, because Louis was caught trying to flee abroad (most likely Austria).

>See? T-they still killed him! They are animals, they tore him to pieces!
He was given a trial before the entire Assemblé and assigned one of the best defense lawyers in all of France. He was almost unanimously declared guilty. Only after that he was executed in a manner more humane than the injections America still uses today.

Get rekt.

>an agreement between an unpopular King and a group of rebel Barons.
Which was promptly ignored by all parties.

>Not to sound like an elitist but when the Common Man is forced to grab his knife and start slitting throats, it never goes as well as when the Upper Class Cunts do something that benefits everyone peacefully.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror
Yeah....nah. Nah. Things usually don't escalate because one side is reasonable and wants to talk things out and the other is really, really mad.

It's not that they killed Louis, that prick had it coming. It's that they killed Louis, his wife, his cousins, his friends, his tailors, his butlere, and his janitors. And then when those ran out they killed the police, the firemen, most of the doctors, the bakers, the masons, the other tailors, and then most of themselves. Remember that scene in The Dark Knight Rises, in the 'Courtroom' where Scarecow condemns half the city just for being civil staff? Imagine that on the scale of a country, but with decapitation as the main form of execution and riots through the streets every other day.

Guns were invented as an anti-magic tool. I like Wizards of the more drudic and witchy origins, so it's pretty easy for a wizard to deflect arrows and the like, but stopping bullets traveling faster then the eye can see doesn't.

Wizards are still used in warfare, but most of the time they just turn into a wolf to drag your enemies out of their tents into the screaming forest, not help out so much on the actual battlefield.