My Life As A Gamer: Hannibal Barca Is A 5th Level Fighter

My friends in the #OSR and especially in the #BROSR should be spending as much time reading or watching documentaries about military history as they do reading or watching adventure fiction and playing the game.

Below comes from one of the many military history channels on YouTube, and this summary of Cannae during the Second Punic War ought to have players thinking.

Hannibal Barca, in AD&D terms, is a Fighter. By this time, you might even consider him Name Level, and this is Domain and Patron level play.

By this time, Hannibal had already hex-crawled across the Alps, defeated several NPC tribes, recruited others to replenish his ranks--Charisma is NOT a dump stat--and began rampaging in the rear of his targetted enemy: Rome.

He had good intelligence gathering and knew how to read his opponents--Intelligence is NOT a dump stat either--so he knew what to do to get the fight he wanted and he had the means to make it happen. He suckered the enemy leaders into fighting his battle on his terms, lead them into his trap, and then pulled on a never-seen-before manuever to guarantee their annihiliation: Double Envelopment.

#BROSR players are already aware that you don't need to be a Name Level Fighter to pull this off. It just helps. What you do need is to know the Henchmen, Hireling, and Morale rules; your Henchmen become your reliable subordinate officers, your hirelings the core of your army, and their Morale is key to making or breaking your military adventures.

Oh, and it also helps to know exactly how many attacks your Fighter can make in a round, especially against opponents with less than a full Hit Die. Suddenly that "boring" fighter ain't so boring anymore, and tales like Sparticus--which is as Zero To Hero as it gets--start looking like everyday campaign play.

Now add in what Clerics, Magic-Users, and Thieves can do and you start to see why D&D today is so lacking compared to this peak. The dropoff became apparent with AD&D 2nd Edition, and that right there was a steep one.

You are not meant to scour dungeons forever, fighting ever-bigger rats for ever-bigger sacks of cash and plusses to your sword and shield. You are meant to be somebody, a mover and a shaker, a player on the board, and the secret is that you can start doing this early on- right away if you're ambitious enough. You are not guaranteed to succeed. That is wholly on you, and you cannot control all variables, so you need to learn Risk Managament.