"What Fantasy Gets Right About Warfare" Topic

Fantasy games sometimes get dismissed by historical gamers—obviously unfairly.

What do fantasy rules actually get right about warfare?

Things like:
Clear battlefield roles (line troops, shock, skirmishers)
Readable unit distinctions
Decisive moments (charges, breakthroughs, morale shocks)

In some ways, they arguably model battlefield function more cleanly than many historical systems.

So—what does fantasy do better than historical gaming?

Way too broad a proposition.

Fantasy is a lot of things, implemented in different ways.

"Getting things right" is a specific, contextual criterion.

And ultimately, the milieu is not as important as the intent in rules, stats, and scenarios.

Fantasy does fantasy better than most historical syatems. It does not have to try to reflect any historical realities, yet it borrows heavily from historical examples: lines, columns, wedges, armored knights, pikes, archery, ad nauseum.

I'd have said it was easier to devise a simple, balanced, "fun" game devising a battle from the beginning, and not having to worry about real life ranges or odd troop types. HOTT hasn't been subject to the constant stream of revisions, new troop types and revised army lists which keep hitting DBA.

It's SF rather than fantasy, but OGRE/GEV has outlasted a lot of moderns rules.

Fantasy games handle elves, orcs, and dragons much better than historical games.😜

+1 Col Durnford

SF is basically fantasy anyway. It's all made up too. I don't see how Fantasy rules can do better doing historical battles. But one can do massive fantasy battles very well with historical rules. Any Game of Thrones battle can use ordinary medieval or ancients rules. Without dragons, of course. The Blackfyre Rebellion battles had no dragons.
Helm's Deep? Pelennor Fields?

Fantasy can "get things right" because gamers can make up anything they want and not be wrong. That does not mean that they have done a better job of modeling warfare.

Fantasy can "get things right" because gamers can make up anything they want and not be wrong.

Completely agree:

Balrog – AC:10, HP: 2, THACO: 35, Fire Whip: 1d4 DG
Hobbit – AC:-10, HP: 25,476, THACO: -1, Finger Flick: 10d20 DG

Yes, it's true you can make up anything you want in fantasy, but OTOH I think most fantasy wargamers would want their forces to behave more or less as they do in the novels and films.

That is, if you think about it, not much different from what historical gamers do when basing games on the historical accounts.

Of course that makes life interesting when for example, the latest research indicates that there was not actually any battle at Wakefield in 1460. So all those historical gamers who have been refighting the Battle of Wakefield on the table top have in fact been indulging in fantasy …

On that one I draw the line. MajorB. I was a History grad student, wore Intel brass for 15 years and contracted beyond that. There's a serious difference between "best current analysis" however wrong it may prove to be later, and "we just flat made it up." The latter involves a lot fewer long nights and work with frustrating sources--and, as noted, can never actually be proved wrong.

There's an interesting overlap here between "it's made up" and "it reflects sources."

Fantasy players often try to match how armies behave in fiction (LOTR, etc), while historical gamers try to match how armies behaved according to the best available evidence- primary sources and archaeology.

In both cases, you're interpreting a source and turning it into tabletop behaviour.

The difference might be less about "real vs made up" and more about how constrained the source material is—and how much freedom you have to resolve gaps.

Which might explain why fantasy tends to produce cleaner battlefield roles, while historical rules spend more effort on friction and uncertainty.

Ochoin, that might be another way of saying "reality is messier and more complicated than the stories we tell ourselves" and I'd agree. I think we already covered how constructing a game is easier when you don't have to correspond to a complicated reality. A designer of fantasy rules who doesn't get it right has a lot less excuse.

Fiction is also sometimes more fun, as my bookshelves testify. But as a pure tabletop battle--not an RPG--the lack of narrative results (for me at least) in less connection.

(As regards your "both cases" bit, I'd like to point out that most fantasy rulesmiths lean toward the Barker/Warhammer approach--avoiding copyright and licensing problems by stealing from everyone, so the author can just leave out whatever he doesn't like or finds difficult to reconcile. This is frowned upon in the historical and analytic communities.)

I just had a thought. I have GMed a GASLIGHT game, a "historical" 🙄set of rules with a Sasquatch and a Lakota shaman controlling him. So, "fantasy" fit right in. At a historical convention! It confounded the 7th Cavalry fer shure!
I haven't carried that thought through to dragons and lightning bolt spells, but it seems doable. Ask Arthur C Clarke about that, but he has passed… 😢
Hey. Whatever consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes is fine with me. I guess I'm a Libertarian!
Just don't do it in public and frighten the horses.

Awhile back I conducted a brief experiment where I used the same two armies and vought them with 3 different rules sets – 2 historical and one fantasy (without magic).
It was kind of fun.