Hello all, DM here with a little under a decade of experience. Love 5e. Recently though I started using a homebrew supplement from Matt Coleville of MCDM productions called Steongholds and Followers... and I'm so dissapointed in it.
Am I using it wrong? Am I not understanding the combat rules? I'll give examples below:
In my current Saturday game the characrers have a pirate ship now, and two army units in it. More and more our Dragonborn fighter wants to use the army to do everything. After finishing most of a dungeon, the party was going to leave, he had an army unit sweep the place for valuables and to kill monsters... what was I supposed to do??? There is no reason why his unit would refuse, as there is no specific number of dudes in a unit of any size, there could be 4 guys in a soze 1d4 unit, there could be 100!
Later on in the session they fought off an army of Kobolds and Lizardmen... it was so boring!! The combat is broad, simple and vague to the point where no one can think of how to make what is happening sound cool, especially when the dice roll so low that neither side is capable of hitting the other for any damage! I decided after the party killed the enemy general to have the other sode start to roll at disadvantage, when that didnt speed things up I just had the other amy retreat... it sucked to bad...
Last occurance of issue in that session. The party knows where a green dragon is, they go to negotiate with it, thinking it is leading the army that attacked the town. And the Dragonborn brings an army unit with him!!! What am i supposed to do??? Say no? That makes no sense! There could be 4 or 100 dudes in a unit, more people means dead dragon! Gods!
It didnt come to that, though they failed negotiations. But im at a loss. This player, while its his actions that slow things down (for 5 sessions he kept using 5 NPC followers he rescued in battle, slowed things down to a snails pace as now i had to keep track of 5 more attackers than normal in a fight) he has highlighted the crippling problems in the Stronghilds and Followers supplement. Should I scrap it from the game? I don't want him to lose his character (he has suggested leaving and taking his army so that part of the game can end). Any advice? No one else in the group likes using the Army battle rules...
The warfare rules are mainly meant to apply to attacking or defending a keep, not just bolstering the party's ranks. Think about being a feudal lord, you don't just have a standing army of professional soldiers that are always in uniform and awaiting command. You hear the enemy will soon be at the gates, and you conscript forces from the population of your keep/fiefdom/whatever. This conscripted soldiers fight the battle and if you win, they go home afterwards, back to their lives. You don't have a 'standing military the way nations would today, therefore your players may need to go to extra lengths to procure armed units for an extended campaign away from home base.
As far as adventuring around with two armed divisions; how many supplies does the group carry with them? How do they keep the men fed or rested? How fast are they able to travel? When moving an army far from their home keep, these concerns become exponentially more important. The reason war was so ridiculously slow-paced before the advent of the internal combustion engine and modern aviation was the fact that soldiers in large numbers take a lot of resources to support and take a loooong time to transport. If their go-to solution for every problem is to send troops at it (disregarding paragraph #1 concerns of just where these troops are coming from), track everything. Track their food, their morale, their water, track the time it takes them to get there.
If the players don't plan sufficiently, then have soldiers desert when the supplies run low, or mutiny when they've been away from home too long for no good reason. If they take forever to get to their destination, then pose time concerns. Maybe the players need to cover ground as fast as possible to achieve a time sensitive goal and therefore leave the men behind. Or maybe a s they're transporting their units, enemy spies see them and report their movements back to the bad guy, so instead of a single green dragon, they're now fighting the army of goblinoids who owed the dragon a favor, since the dragon had plenty of warning and time to mount a defense. Or maybe if your enemy is *really* conniving, maybe the players and their army arrives to find no dragon at all, only to recieve word that their keep is under attack by a dragon and their cohorts now that the lords are away and their forces diminished. Basically, impose consequences for the players losing the element of surprise or speed, that they'd have more of if they simply traveled as a party.
One question: what level game are you running with these rules? The Strongholds and Followers rules are mainly intended for like tier 3 gaming (lv 10 and up) where threats are larger and more consequential to the world. It sounds like either you're playing with an encounter philosophy of tier 1-2 gaming where the threats are kill these thugs or occasionally kill this boss, OR you're actually in those tiers (lv's 1-9) where the players should be for the most part on their own but you've given them access to these resources way to early in the game.
If it's the first thing, where players are 10+, then you just need to make your encounters 10+, not just in CR but in scale, strategy, and difficulty. Try following MC's advice on building encounters with these elements in mind.
If it's the second thing, where the players have access to lv 10+ resources at level 5, then all I can say is that level 1 to 9 characters should not have an army at their backs yet. If you don't want to retcon it, then you should still up your encounter game, but specifically balance difficulty *against* the party to account for the huge boost you gave them.
As mentioned, units are very much meant to be used in the warfare 'sub game' and not intended to trot around with the party. I use S&F in my campaign and here's how I do it:
The strongholds are treated as bases of operations for the players
Units awarded by strongholds can do one of three things
Maintain control of the stronghold
Engage in warfare
Accomplish missions that are viable for a unit*
* One such example of this was when the players sent a unit exploring a jungle region to find a hidden temple. The unit wouldn't actually explore the temple because that's more an adventurer's job, but they could lay the groundwork of cutting through the jungle and once they got there, they were able to set up a forward operating base for the party to teleport to.
The best way to view S&F is that it's two separate games played alongside D&D; you've got the Stronghold game, which is about building up and defending your keep to earn benefits, and the Warfare game, which is about mustering units to fight other units.
You do have to very much build a campaign around these features, Strongholds & Followers is not a supplement you can drop into any campaign without at least some planning
In ye olden days it was common for PC's to hire up to 20 NPC's for a journey to a dungeon and back. Torchbearers, Houndmasters, Miners and what not. Meaning that the PC's had to pay them and organize an entire expedition and all that comes with that. If you want your players to be able to have an entire army with them. That means you need to upscale that by... A LOT. The logistics of moving an army around is immense. And armies move slowly. Also a unit in Stronghold and Followers has a specified size to it. There can't be a 100 in a unit. Units aren't that large...EVER. Not even in real life. A group of 100 is made up of several units.
Next to that the Stronghold and Followers are meant to play out large warfare. Wars across entire battlefields. You won't even get them unless your PC's have a keep. Spend time at the keep to roll monthly on the table to see what troops and how many join their forces. Gradually building up an army that is partially permanently stationed at the keep. Partially out and about doing all sorts of chores in the world. Others living their lives until called upon. You won't even get them properly until AFTER your PC's also defended their keep in at least one large scale battle. So I have no idea how your players even have a troops with them to begin with.
On the morale front, it also sounds like their Dragonborn leader doesn't "lead from the front." In the instance of the green dragon, how much of a cut of the dragon hoard did the army get for you know, doing the job? Or did the Dragonborn presume the party just got the spoils. If the latter was the case, there'd be desertion if not an outright coup back at the stronghold (maybe using some of the magic in the horde the army didn't turn over as tribute to their liege. War's costly, that's why in the genre leaders tend to dispatch small groups of adventurers to deal with something like a dragon rather than muster an army to mount an expedition.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
In my current Saturday game the characrers have a pirate ship now, and two army units in it. More and more our Dragonborn fighter wants to use the army to do everything. After finishing most of a dungeon, the party was going to leave, he had an army unit sweep the place for valuables and to kill monsters... what was I supposed to do??? There is no reason why his unit would refuse, as there is no specific number of dudes in a unit of any size, there could be 4 guys in a soze 1d4 unit, there could be 100!
Nope, you're not supposed to use the units like that. The army is not meant to do things in the regular course of a D&D game. Army combat ("warfare") is done in an abstract way to mimic battles and is not supposed to be used to explore dungeons. I'm also using S&F to do unit combat, and if the party wants to make a stronghold, we'll use it for that too. My rule on using units is, you can only use them against each other. So you can't send a platoon into the dungeon to fight goblins unless there is an S&F unit worth of goblins in there for them to fight. The unit is utterly powerless against, say, a single NPC. There are no rules for how it would engage them, so it just can't. I agree with Davedamon's rules on how you can use units -- you can't use them to do the things PCs could and should do -- you use them for things the PCs can't do, like fighting an entire army.
So in your specific case, use the army to sweep the dungeon. "They don't find anything." End of story. How? What's the army unit's perception? Oh, it doesn't have one. That means it can't roll perception. What's it's stealth score? Doesn't have one. What's it's investigation score? Insight? Nope, none of those. Thus the unit cannot perform any actions that would require those skills.
The unit is there to fight unit combat for them. Not to do their dirty work that they are too lazy to do. So no, the army wouldn't refuse to do what he ordered -- or rather, try to do what he ordered. They just would utterly fail at doing it. It's like trying to use a sledge hammer open a pickle jar. Oh, you got the jar open all right... and smashed all the pickles flat, and got them mingled with broken glass, rendering them inedible.
Later on in the session they fought off an army of Kobolds and Lizardmen... it was so boring!! The combat is broad, simple and vague to the point where no one can think of how to make what is happening sound cool, especially when the dice roll so low that neither side is capable of hitting the other for any damage! I decided after the party killed the enemy general to have the other side start to roll at disadvantage, when that didnt speed things up I just had the other amy retreat... it sucked to bad...
You need to go back and re-read the book -- no offense meant here, but this is explained. The way Colville wants you to do combat is, as you did, have the party fighting a party-level battle against a few big bad guys, and then have the armies fighting "on the side." Players control individual units from their side, and you control the kobold units and so forth. If one side wins the party-level fight, then per the S&F book, that side's army also wins the day on the battlefield. You're not supposed to keep the battle going.
This is explained on p. 243: "If the enemy leader is defeated, the army immediately disbands." -- i.e., don't keep the fight going.
Now, that said, I do agree with you that the units can have a hard time hitting and "doing damage" to each other but, remember, the main point of the combat system in this book, which is not the warfare book (that's coming later on) is to help you deal with attacks on the fortification, and to add some war flavor to a regular encounter. It's not a self-contained wargame!
Last occurance of issue in that session. The party knows where a green dragon is, they go to negotiate with it, thinking it is leading the army that attacked the town. And the Dragonborn brings an army unit with him!!! What am i supposed to do??? Say no? That makes no sense! There could be 4 or 100 dudes in a unit, more people means dead dragon! Gods!
It sounds like you need to talk to the players. In particular, I would ask the Dragonborn's player if he/she really wants to play D&D. It sounds like that player in particular wants to use the army as a giant "I win!" button. If that's the case, then why play D&D at all?
Additionally, I would ask what kind of a leader is this Dragonborn and why would this army follow him? It sounds like he views them as slaves/grunts ("go clean up this dungeon I'm too lazy to finish up myself") or canon-fodder (or in this case dragon-fodder). In general, armies do not take kindly to having leaders like this, and he would probably face a mutiny in short order.
Another thing to consider: while their army unit is out being dragon-fodder, no one is back at the stronghold guarding it. If it's me, as DM -- since they are abusing the units and not using them in the spirit with which they are intended -- I am going to have them return to a castle with holes in the walls, smoke rising from the crumbled keep, several dead bodies, and all the rest of their non-combatant servants run off. And maybe a bunch of orcs or something appropriately difficult in charge of it. Even if they take it back, they will have a heck of a time recruiting craftsman, servants, etc, back now that the word is out that these lords do not protect their holding.
This player, while its his actions that slow things down (for 5 sessions he kept using 5 NPC followers he rescued in battle, slowed things down to a snails pace as now i had to keep track of 5 more attackers than normal in a fight) he has highlighted the crippling problems in the Strongholds and Followers supplement. Should I scrap it from the game? I don't want him to lose his character (he has suggested leaving and taking his army so that part of the game can end). Any advice? No one else in the group likes using the Army battle rules...
Your player needs to cut it out. He is repeatedly doing things that destroy the session. I don't care if he thinks it is realistic. As a matter of courtesy we do not do things that bog the game down and ruin sessions for everyone else. I would have an OOC chat with this person. No, you don't have to get rid of your character, but you have to stop bringing NPCs along. It's bogging down the game. And it is HIS job as player to find RP reasons why he would NOT bring the army. Not your job as DM.
As DM it is time to rein this in. Your player is a boundary-pusher. This kind of player starts small and when the DM lets the boundaries be nudged, the nudges more, and more, and more. It's very hard to deal with this as a DM because each push is just a little bit past where the boundary used to be, but over time, the cumulative effect is as you see -- a single PC running roughshod over the campaign bringing massive armies into the dungeon to wipe it out. This is not in the spirit of the game and it needs to stop.
The fault here is not with S&F. It's with the boundary pusher -- and your need to stop him from pushing those boundaries.
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This is amazing since I was only just recently reading up about S&F and wondering if it was balanced enough to implement in future games or ask my DM to put it in to his for the next campaign. That issue with boundary pushing with one of the players definitely sounds like something of the fellow players in my group might end up pulling, so I'd have to bring this up to give some awareness.
I believe BioWiz and DaveDamon gave proper answers, but I'll add my two cents.
The units are quite limited in that they have d4, or d6 or d8 size, but that is in relation to other factions units. The units are intended to be used in a mini-game running within D&D. It is my theory that you didn't share the book with them but explained the high points to them and they believe the 'system' allows them to employ the men in ways not intended. I think you should read the whole book again and then let your players read it too. Following that, have a discussion about how to interpret these rules.
For my part, I would want to see if my DM would allow me to use the soldiers in the unit as messengers. It is my hope that having riders that could carry daily messages to my ally wouldn't break the game. I would think as a landed gentleman I would be expected to report regularly on the events in my demense.
Concerning the particulars of your players requests, even outside the S&F guide, I would not let that sort of behavior by the players generate the result they expect. Sending in a band of men from a pirate ship to sweep the area for undiscovered treasure would not generate any treasure. "No sir, we didn't find any treasure." Trying to use a unit as an army would require the players to feed and pay the army. With some calibration this becomes a lose-lose proposition for the party. They cost more money in upkeep than the treasure they find and the party doesn't get any XP. I would generally have the 'army' find and kill small bands that could have been managed by the party, and then the loot doesn't cover the upkeep.
Remember that behind the curtain all the downtime activities are intended to yield less treasure than just adventuring, so don't make non-adventuring more profitable than adventuring.
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I think you should read the whole book again and then let your players read it too. Following that, have a discussion about how to interpret these rules.
This is the key. Discuss it with them.
I have introduced unit tactics (we used them in the first sessions) but although I let the players control a unit of priests and a Roman century unit, they did not own or in-character command the units. They just controlled them for the battle for flavor. (And I controlled the attacking Zombie Horde unit). This allowed me to introduce the system to the players and let them see how it worked, without them owning anything. So now they know how unit combat works using S&F.
I do think the OP is right that there is a certain tedium to it, and often the units hit but do no "damage" to each other (i.e., not a sufficient level of damage to force a size reduction). And my guess is I might need to tweak that part of the rules so we don't have so many rounds of essentially a draw. But these will be minor tweaks -- I think the system overall is solid and simple enough to deal with.
However, before allowing them to hire retainers and especially whole units for their stronghold, we are going to lay out ground rules. I will explain that the spirit of S&F is not that the army now does the adventuring for you, or that you now do stronghold management instead of adventuring. The idea is that you continue adventuring to amass the treasure to pay your retainers/soldiers and upkeep the stronghold, and you leave the stronghold in the hands of your senschal, and maybe I'll roll up some random things that happened to the stronghold while you were away. But the retainers and the units are tied to the stronghold, and serve under the premise that they are its servants and/or defenders. They came here because you built it, and they will help you protect it, but they're not going to go marching off to the Halls of Montezuma or the Shores of Tripoli and leave the stronghold behind. They defend the hold with you against other armies. All other D&D things (adventure, negotiation, boss fights, etc) happen as normal.
BTW if you want to see how Colville handles this, watch his Chain of Acheron series. In that series, the 5 PCs (played by Anna, Thomas, Thom, Phil, and Lars) are the senior officers of the Chain, and they have at the start 100+ followers and by about episode 6 are down to maybe 30 or 40... but the players do not have the soldiers doing stuff for them. Their stronghold ends up basically being a large Astral ship and they generally leave the soldiers to attend to it. They don't bring the entire chain with them all over the city.
For my part, I would want to see if my DM would allow me to use the soldiers in the unit as messengers. It is my hope that having riders that could carry daily messages to my ally wouldn't break the game. I would think as a landed gentleman I would be expected to report regularly on the events in my demense.
I personally would not allow it. I would instead recommend that you recruit a messenger retainer (a single NPC who does this) or perhaps I might allow you to recruit a very low-health, low-damage, low-morale "messenger" unit, but it would be near-useless in combat.
S&F units don't have a movement speed and at least in principle should not be subdivided to do tasks for the players. That is outside the scope of how you use the units that are listed on the unit card. I don't object to having a messenger as a single retainer but I would not allow you to use grunt soldiers in an infantry unit as messengers. Not because they couldn't do so in character, but because that is not how they are supposed to be used in terms of the mechanics.
Remember that behind the curtain all the downtime activities are intended to yield less treasure than just adventuring, so don't make non-adventuring more profitable than adventuring.
I completely agree with this.
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Hello all, DM here with a little under a decade of experience. Love 5e. Recently though I started using a homebrew supplement from Matt Coleville of MCDM productions called Steongholds and Followers... and I'm so dissapointed in it.
Am I using it wrong? Am I not understanding the combat rules? I'll give examples below:
In my current Saturday game the characrers have a pirate ship now, and two army units in it. More and more our Dragonborn fighter wants to use the army to do everything. After finishing most of a dungeon, the party was going to leave, he had an army unit sweep the place for valuables and to kill monsters... what was I supposed to do??? There is no reason why his unit would refuse, as there is no specific number of dudes in a unit of any size, there could be 4 guys in a soze 1d4 unit, there could be 100!
Later on in the session they fought off an army of Kobolds and Lizardmen... it was so boring!! The combat is broad, simple and vague to the point where no one can think of how to make what is happening sound cool, especially when the dice roll so low that neither side is capable of hitting the other for any damage! I decided after the party killed the enemy general to have the other sode start to roll at disadvantage, when that didnt speed things up I just had the other amy retreat... it sucked to bad...
Last occurance of issue in that session. The party knows where a green dragon is, they go to negotiate with it, thinking it is leading the army that attacked the town. And the Dragonborn brings an army unit with him!!! What am i supposed to do??? Say no? That makes no sense! There could be 4 or 100 dudes in a unit, more people means dead dragon! Gods!
It didnt come to that, though they failed negotiations. But im at a loss. This player, while its his actions that slow things down (for 5 sessions he kept using 5 NPC followers he rescued in battle, slowed things down to a snails pace as now i had to keep track of 5 more attackers than normal in a fight) he has highlighted the crippling problems in the Stronghilds and Followers supplement. Should I scrap it from the game? I don't want him to lose his character (he has suggested leaving and taking his army so that part of the game can end). Any advice? No one else in the group likes using the Army battle rules...
The warfare rules are mainly meant to apply to attacking or defending a keep, not just bolstering the party's ranks. Think about being a feudal lord, you don't just have a standing army of professional soldiers that are always in uniform and awaiting command. You hear the enemy will soon be at the gates, and you conscript forces from the population of your keep/fiefdom/whatever. This conscripted soldiers fight the battle and if you win, they go home afterwards, back to their lives. You don't have a 'standing military the way nations would today, therefore your players may need to go to extra lengths to procure armed units for an extended campaign away from home base.
As far as adventuring around with two armed divisions; how many supplies does the group carry with them? How do they keep the men fed or rested? How fast are they able to travel? When moving an army far from their home keep, these concerns become exponentially more important. The reason war was so ridiculously slow-paced before the advent of the internal combustion engine and modern aviation was the fact that soldiers in large numbers take a lot of resources to support and take a loooong time to transport. If their go-to solution for every problem is to send troops at it (disregarding paragraph #1 concerns of just where these troops are coming from), track everything. Track their food, their morale, their water, track the time it takes them to get there.
If the players don't plan sufficiently, then have soldiers desert when the supplies run low, or mutiny when they've been away from home too long for no good reason. If they take forever to get to their destination, then pose time concerns. Maybe the players need to cover ground as fast as possible to achieve a time sensitive goal and therefore leave the men behind. Or maybe a s they're transporting their units, enemy spies see them and report their movements back to the bad guy, so instead of a single green dragon, they're now fighting the army of goblinoids who owed the dragon a favor, since the dragon had plenty of warning and time to mount a defense. Or maybe if your enemy is *really* conniving, maybe the players and their army arrives to find no dragon at all, only to recieve word that their keep is under attack by a dragon and their cohorts now that the lords are away and their forces diminished. Basically, impose consequences for the players losing the element of surprise or speed, that they'd have more of if they simply traveled as a party.
One question: what level game are you running with these rules? The Strongholds and Followers rules are mainly intended for like tier 3 gaming (lv 10 and up) where threats are larger and more consequential to the world. It sounds like either you're playing with an encounter philosophy of tier 1-2 gaming where the threats are kill these thugs or occasionally kill this boss, OR you're actually in those tiers (lv's 1-9) where the players should be for the most part on their own but you've given them access to these resources way to early in the game.
If it's the first thing, where players are 10+, then you just need to make your encounters 10+, not just in CR but in scale, strategy, and difficulty. Try following MC's advice on building encounters with these elements in mind.
If it's the second thing, where the players have access to lv 10+ resources at level 5, then all I can say is that level 1 to 9 characters should not have an army at their backs yet. If you don't want to retcon it, then you should still up your encounter game, but specifically balance difficulty *against* the party to account for the huge boost you gave them.
As mentioned, units are very much meant to be used in the warfare 'sub game' and not intended to trot around with the party. I use S&F in my campaign and here's how I do it:
* One such example of this was when the players sent a unit exploring a jungle region to find a hidden temple. The unit wouldn't actually explore the temple because that's more an adventurer's job, but they could lay the groundwork of cutting through the jungle and once they got there, they were able to set up a forward operating base for the party to teleport to.
The best way to view S&F is that it's two separate games played alongside D&D; you've got the Stronghold game, which is about building up and defending your keep to earn benefits, and the Warfare game, which is about mustering units to fight other units.
You do have to very much build a campaign around these features, Strongholds & Followers is not a supplement you can drop into any campaign without at least some planning
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In ye olden days it was common for PC's to hire up to 20 NPC's for a journey to a dungeon and back. Torchbearers, Houndmasters, Miners and what not. Meaning that the PC's had to pay them and organize an entire expedition and all that comes with that. If you want your players to be able to have an entire army with them. That means you need to upscale that by... A LOT. The logistics of moving an army around is immense. And armies move slowly. Also a unit in Stronghold and Followers has a specified size to it. There can't be a 100 in a unit. Units aren't that large...EVER. Not even in real life. A group of 100 is made up of several units.
Next to that the Stronghold and Followers are meant to play out large warfare. Wars across entire battlefields. You won't even get them unless your PC's have a keep. Spend time at the keep to roll monthly on the table to see what troops and how many join their forces. Gradually building up an army that is partially permanently stationed at the keep. Partially out and about doing all sorts of chores in the world. Others living their lives until called upon. You won't even get them properly until AFTER your PC's also defended their keep in at least one large scale battle. So I have no idea how your players even have a troops with them to begin with.
On the morale front, it also sounds like their Dragonborn leader doesn't "lead from the front." In the instance of the green dragon, how much of a cut of the dragon hoard did the army get for you know, doing the job? Or did the Dragonborn presume the party just got the spoils. If the latter was the case, there'd be desertion if not an outright coup back at the stronghold (maybe using some of the magic in the horde the army didn't turn over as tribute to their liege. War's costly, that's why in the genre leaders tend to dispatch small groups of adventurers to deal with something like a dragon rather than muster an army to mount an expedition.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Nope, you're not supposed to use the units like that. The army is not meant to do things in the regular course of a D&D game. Army combat ("warfare") is done in an abstract way to mimic battles and is not supposed to be used to explore dungeons. I'm also using S&F to do unit combat, and if the party wants to make a stronghold, we'll use it for that too. My rule on using units is, you can only use them against each other. So you can't send a platoon into the dungeon to fight goblins unless there is an S&F unit worth of goblins in there for them to fight. The unit is utterly powerless against, say, a single NPC. There are no rules for how it would engage them, so it just can't. I agree with Davedamon's rules on how you can use units -- you can't use them to do the things PCs could and should do -- you use them for things the PCs can't do, like fighting an entire army.
So in your specific case, use the army to sweep the dungeon. "They don't find anything." End of story. How? What's the army unit's perception? Oh, it doesn't have one. That means it can't roll perception. What's it's stealth score? Doesn't have one. What's it's investigation score? Insight? Nope, none of those. Thus the unit cannot perform any actions that would require those skills.
The unit is there to fight unit combat for them. Not to do their dirty work that they are too lazy to do. So no, the army wouldn't refuse to do what he ordered -- or rather, try to do what he ordered. They just would utterly fail at doing it. It's like trying to use a sledge hammer open a pickle jar. Oh, you got the jar open all right... and smashed all the pickles flat, and got them mingled with broken glass, rendering them inedible.
You need to go back and re-read the book -- no offense meant here, but this is explained. The way Colville wants you to do combat is, as you did, have the party fighting a party-level battle against a few big bad guys, and then have the armies fighting "on the side." Players control individual units from their side, and you control the kobold units and so forth. If one side wins the party-level fight, then per the S&F book, that side's army also wins the day on the battlefield. You're not supposed to keep the battle going.
This is explained on p. 243: "If the enemy leader is defeated, the army immediately disbands." -- i.e., don't keep the fight going.
Now, that said, I do agree with you that the units can have a hard time hitting and "doing damage" to each other but, remember, the main point of the combat system in this book, which is not the warfare book (that's coming later on) is to help you deal with attacks on the fortification, and to add some war flavor to a regular encounter. It's not a self-contained wargame!
It sounds like you need to talk to the players. In particular, I would ask the Dragonborn's player if he/she really wants to play D&D. It sounds like that player in particular wants to use the army as a giant "I win!" button. If that's the case, then why play D&D at all?
Additionally, I would ask what kind of a leader is this Dragonborn and why would this army follow him? It sounds like he views them as slaves/grunts ("go clean up this dungeon I'm too lazy to finish up myself") or canon-fodder (or in this case dragon-fodder). In general, armies do not take kindly to having leaders like this, and he would probably face a mutiny in short order.
Another thing to consider: while their army unit is out being dragon-fodder, no one is back at the stronghold guarding it. If it's me, as DM -- since they are abusing the units and not using them in the spirit with which they are intended -- I am going to have them return to a castle with holes in the walls, smoke rising from the crumbled keep, several dead bodies, and all the rest of their non-combatant servants run off. And maybe a bunch of orcs or something appropriately difficult in charge of it. Even if they take it back, they will have a heck of a time recruiting craftsman, servants, etc, back now that the word is out that these lords do not protect their holding.
Your player needs to cut it out. He is repeatedly doing things that destroy the session. I don't care if he thinks it is realistic. As a matter of courtesy we do not do things that bog the game down and ruin sessions for everyone else. I would have an OOC chat with this person. No, you don't have to get rid of your character, but you have to stop bringing NPCs along. It's bogging down the game. And it is HIS job as player to find RP reasons why he would NOT bring the army. Not your job as DM.
As DM it is time to rein this in. Your player is a boundary-pusher. This kind of player starts small and when the DM lets the boundaries be nudged, the nudges more, and more, and more. It's very hard to deal with this as a DM because each push is just a little bit past where the boundary used to be, but over time, the cumulative effect is as you see -- a single PC running roughshod over the campaign bringing massive armies into the dungeon to wipe it out. This is not in the spirit of the game and it needs to stop.
The fault here is not with S&F. It's with the boundary pusher -- and your need to stop him from pushing those boundaries.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
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This is amazing since I was only just recently reading up about S&F and wondering if it was balanced enough to implement in future games or ask my DM to put it in to his for the next campaign. That issue with boundary pushing with one of the players definitely sounds like something of the fellow players in my group might end up pulling, so I'd have to bring this up to give some awareness.
I believe BioWiz and DaveDamon gave proper answers, but I'll add my two cents.
The units are quite limited in that they have d4, or d6 or d8 size, but that is in relation to other factions units. The units are intended to be used in a mini-game running within D&D. It is my theory that you didn't share the book with them but explained the high points to them and they believe the 'system' allows them to employ the men in ways not intended. I think you should read the whole book again and then let your players read it too. Following that, have a discussion about how to interpret these rules.
For my part, I would want to see if my DM would allow me to use the soldiers in the unit as messengers. It is my hope that having riders that could carry daily messages to my ally wouldn't break the game. I would think as a landed gentleman I would be expected to report regularly on the events in my demense.
Concerning the particulars of your players requests, even outside the S&F guide, I would not let that sort of behavior by the players generate the result they expect. Sending in a band of men from a pirate ship to sweep the area for undiscovered treasure would not generate any treasure. "No sir, we didn't find any treasure." Trying to use a unit as an army would require the players to feed and pay the army. With some calibration this becomes a lose-lose proposition for the party. They cost more money in upkeep than the treasure they find and the party doesn't get any XP. I would generally have the 'army' find and kill small bands that could have been managed by the party, and then the loot doesn't cover the upkeep.
Remember that behind the curtain all the downtime activities are intended to yield less treasure than just adventuring, so don't make non-adventuring more profitable than adventuring.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
This is the key. Discuss it with them.
I have introduced unit tactics (we used them in the first sessions) but although I let the players control a unit of priests and a Roman century unit, they did not own or in-character command the units. They just controlled them for the battle for flavor. (And I controlled the attacking Zombie Horde unit). This allowed me to introduce the system to the players and let them see how it worked, without them owning anything. So now they know how unit combat works using S&F.
I do think the OP is right that there is a certain tedium to it, and often the units hit but do no "damage" to each other (i.e., not a sufficient level of damage to force a size reduction). And my guess is I might need to tweak that part of the rules so we don't have so many rounds of essentially a draw. But these will be minor tweaks -- I think the system overall is solid and simple enough to deal with.
However, before allowing them to hire retainers and especially whole units for their stronghold, we are going to lay out ground rules. I will explain that the spirit of S&F is not that the army now does the adventuring for you, or that you now do stronghold management instead of adventuring. The idea is that you continue adventuring to amass the treasure to pay your retainers/soldiers and upkeep the stronghold, and you leave the stronghold in the hands of your senschal, and maybe I'll roll up some random things that happened to the stronghold while you were away. But the retainers and the units are tied to the stronghold, and serve under the premise that they are its servants and/or defenders. They came here because you built it, and they will help you protect it, but they're not going to go marching off to the Halls of Montezuma or the Shores of Tripoli and leave the stronghold behind. They defend the hold with you against other armies. All other D&D things (adventure, negotiation, boss fights, etc) happen as normal.
BTW if you want to see how Colville handles this, watch his Chain of Acheron series. In that series, the 5 PCs (played by Anna, Thomas, Thom, Phil, and Lars) are the senior officers of the Chain, and they have at the start 100+ followers and by about episode 6 are down to maybe 30 or 40... but the players do not have the soldiers doing stuff for them. Their stronghold ends up basically being a large Astral ship and they generally leave the soldiers to attend to it. They don't bring the entire chain with them all over the city.
I personally would not allow it. I would instead recommend that you recruit a messenger retainer (a single NPC who does this) or perhaps I might allow you to recruit a very low-health, low-damage, low-morale "messenger" unit, but it would be near-useless in combat.
S&F units don't have a movement speed and at least in principle should not be subdivided to do tasks for the players. That is outside the scope of how you use the units that are listed on the unit card. I don't object to having a messenger as a single retainer but I would not allow you to use grunt soldiers in an infantry unit as messengers. Not because they couldn't do so in character, but because that is not how they are supposed to be used in terms of the mechanics.
I completely agree with this.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.