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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Think of the nazguls as leaders and special ops. They're good one on one fighters, and can serve as force multipliers when leading troops (through inspiration or terror), but in the north, they're in enemy territory.

Our gamer minds have been infected by RPGs into seeing power scaling by orders of magnitude, your hero starting as a level 1 with tens of hitpoints and finishing at level 99 with tens of thousands of hitpoints and no reasonable numbers of lvl 1 characters could even come close to representing a serious threat to it. But Tolkien probably had something more like Dark Souls scaling in mind, where super powerful characters are a couple of times more powerful than starting characters, but even beginning trash mobs in the right situation and in the right numbers can still be a credible threat. Aragorn is a powerful fighter and would be almost guaranteed to win a 1 on 1 fight against any other characters weaker than the Lich King or an ancient elf. But I don't think Tolkien had in mind that if, say, 10 average gondorian guardsmen surprise attacked Aragorn their swords would essentially bounce off of him because they're too weak and he's too powerful. Or that he could solo the entire Shire in an open fight. Or think of Boromir's fate; he was supposed to be one of the most powerful human warriors out there, and I think it's probably fair to assume he would have been at least a match for one nazgul that isn't the Lich King, as that was the point of opposing 9 members of the Fellowship to the 9 riders. He was killed not in a fight against another "unique" named enemy, but just tens of orcs/uruk hai.

So your nazguls, if they didn't act covertly, would risk facing a couple of hundred strong hobbit militia, and that's just wasteful use of elite special forces or officers.