I've been trying to balance writing the military in my setting. Making them too competent would remove the need for the party, making them incompetent begs the question of how the country they're in hasn't fallen to the various threats yet. I've opted for the competent but stretched too thin route, how do you handle the military in your game?
Depends what you want the party doing. If you want them to be doing military stuff then do a medieval deal where army sizes are quite small, most troops are peasant levies with a small number of full time knights, and so mercenaries (like your party), who are full time combatants, are in demand, without wholly supplanting the xneed for local troops.
If your party is doing non-military stuff like raiding tombs or carrying out assassinations and what have you, then they aren't occupying the same niche anyways and it doesn't matter.
It depends on the setting, if we're talking medieval fantasy has it basically covered. Can you tell us a little about what period we're talking about here, and what you plan on the party to be doing? If I'm doing a Cyberpunk game where the party is a bunch of criminals the military they encounter are largely incompetent weekend warriors that have the fanciest toys, but aren't trusted to go out into real conflicts. If we're doing something Edge of Empires space fantasy stuff, they're a absolute menace that the party comes in on them absolutely destroying allies that were set up as reasonably powerful.
It's all in what you want the party to be doing. If they're working with the military, have them competent, trustworthy, but understaffed, and overfunded. Against them as a main antagonist, reverse that. Are they stealing a tank to use for another job? Reject benchwarmers. ect.
> Can you tell us a little about what period we're talking about here, and what you plan on the party to be doing?
It's set in a world that's about at the early 1700s technology wise with some steampunk elements. Things are still themed for high fantasy but basic guns and airships (incredibly rare) exist. The goal of the party currently is that here
the gist is that they were hired by a Mayors steward in the town they started in to help solve some problems in the area. They're in a frontier town in the far west of the country but there is nearby a local garrison staffed by some members of the military (about 30 a number I had to adlib when they asked). They don't get jobs directly from the military but I did have a mission where they needed to ascend a nearby mountain since there were reports of a wyverns and they requested military aid so 5 soldiers were sent with them though I had the steward go against the idea. My goal is to get them interested into why the steward seems to be anti military and have them find out the plot to under mine the royals to see what they'd do from there before I go planning too far ahead. We're only a few sessions in (Level 6) and I'm hoping if either they B line to the capitol and we get to see that the struggles the frontier faced weren't unique and mercenary adventurers were hired all over, but also if they sit on the information too long eventually a coup would take place and they'd be caught in the middle of a civil war. If that civil war story beat happens I'm trying to balance how I could make the military both imposing as a threat if they side against them or not as strong as expected if they side with them if that makes sense.
You need mercs (such as your players) when you're understaffed, when you require deniability, or when the mercs are somehow the cheaper option.
>You need mercs (such as your players) when you're understaffed
This is sort of where I want to head I think. I'm having them work as mercenaries more than adventuring for the moment to build up a plot that a member of the governments council has been paying for mercs in order to try and make the military/royal family look bad in a play for power. We're only a few sessions deep though so still in the "local monster slayers" category of stories. Trying to find a solid hook to get them interested in the why of it all.
Or a more expedient option. Military action could be delayed by bureaucracy.
I think there's something about this in the AD&D DMG.
If you are playing during the middle ages there are no standing armies, ranks and organization are loose, formations are ad-hoc, and soldiers supply their own weapons and armour, many are paid in loot or expect to be paid in loot. The more centralised a kingdom, the more likely it is to have a standing army and uniformed equipment, and paid in cash.
Mercenaries typically follow the motto of "spend and have fun today, for tomorrow you might be dead". This result in being constantly switching between periods of wealth having earned gold by looting and pay, and periods of being vagabunds or outright bandits only to be hired again for the next war in a neverending cycle. Even knights could fall to this with many knights becoming robber knights during peacetime after a period of war and causing trouble.
Adventurer parties should be specialists. No regular military man is trained to wander a cursed forest, delve into an evil cavern, slay a far off monster, identify magical items, etc, all in a days work. Numbers should actively work against you here as well. You don't just throw three hundred pikemen into a hole that opened up in a lake.
Military is doing big war in background and PC group are small military specialist detachment/special mission taskforce who are too specialised/ valuable to be spent in big offscreen war like regular grunts. While big background war is important, PC missions add up to overall war effort.
Here's a helpful real-world numerical heuristic. When we deploy, we almost always do it as a Brigade Combat Team (5 or so Battalions of 500 soldiers each) and a Battalion-sized deployment (4-5 companies of 100 soldiers each) is considered so small as to almost never happen. So if the conventional military is involved, we're literally never sending in less than 500 guys anywhere for any reason.
If we're talking about Special Operations, a Company is 12 people, so, with 4 companies, you're still looking at 50 people as the absolute smallest number.
Anything that doesn't reach the threshold of requiring 50 of the best-trained and best-equipped warriors in the United States, or at least 500 conventional soldiers, is not (yet) a military problem.
t. 82d Airborne
the main military in my setting is currently in a civil war, its an easy out to create a world in need of heroes and explain why just now is the perfect time for said heroes.
The militaries in my games are often too busy directly protecting the kings/empresses/etc, and patrolling their designated routes to go on adventures.
It's all about logistics baby. Few armies can afford 100% of their ammo and rations. Just say they are good when supplied but they aren't always fully supplied.
I stole faction mechanics from Stars Without Number and Reign.
Campaigns where players operate as soldiers under a chain of command suck donkey dick. I don't recommend them.
>Campaigns where players operate as soldiers under a chain of command suck donkey dick
It works fine if they get objectives but some freedom in how to pursue them. Speaking from experience of a pretty recent campaign I ran.
Broadly speaking, it's far easier to defend territory than take it, both in terms of strategy and logistics.
Like obviously if you've got 1000 soldiers, it's a lot easier to have those soldiers fortify a location near a city, rather than marching into another country and doing everything there. Because marching somewhere not only means that those soldiers are going to be more exposed to ambushes, but they also need far more support troops to haul food and water, and those support troops also need their own food and more soldiers to defend them, etc, etc. Far simpler when all of your guys are in one place close to home.
To that end, if there are a lot of threats around, then even if the military is competent, they might not end up with orders to just send all the troops to bumrush a major threat, because that would leave them open to other threats, on top of the time it would take to mobilize.
Odds are there will be plenty of work that those in charge of the military have determined is either low-priority or simply not worth the hassle, which is where the party and other mercenaries come in.
If it's a medieval setting there is the simple matter of numbers, along with the fact most of those numbers are actually just peasants with a pointy stick. Only a few hundred fighters per feudal tittle would actually be full time retainers. This also runs inti the problem that the longer those feudal levies are away, the longer they aren't tilling fields, the more risk of famine due to missing harvests becomes a factor.
In my current solo campaign the last pc is a farmboy taken in by bandits who through misadventure are contracted as mercenaries in return for pay and waiving of bounties. Meanwhile the enemy country next door is supplying and paying for hobgoblins to attack an outlying city responsible for the duchies grain harvest. Even if the seige fails rallying the duchies or kingdoms troops to deal with it also costs food harvested for the winter, weakening them for an invasion later
If its a 5e group than it's usually Don't Ask Don't Tell.
The starting region in my game is a semi-autonomous vassal state of a larger empire. Militarily it's a mix of local peasant levies defending their own communities, imperial veterans and petty nobles settler-colonialists, a chain of frontier forts manned by token garrisons, and the Grand Duke's personal retinue. There are also legions that could be sent to repel any major threats, but the Duke (correctly) fears that the empire would annex his duchy if they marched troops in and is therefore only willing to call them if all other options have been exhausted.
The party has mostly been in the wildlands. Out here it's just militias defending their communities and forts as safe bases. Once they went to the capital with a caravan, where the military kept the ducal palace safe but didn't protect them in the city streets and wasn't fast enough acting to rescue the duchess before the party.
I guess this is the same competent but stretched thin route. In general unless your players are opposing the state it shouldn't be responsible for and competent at whatever they're doing.
my way of writing them is "Mostly competent leaders but stretched thin with very little good material to work with"
That and
"Competent but hard to muster due to a feudal system"