"Do We Know Too Much?" Topic

One of the problems with historical wargaming is that we often know too much military history.

We know where the enemy is. We know when reinforcements will arrive. We know which attacks historically succeeded and which ended in disaster.

Even worse, we sometimes import ideas from later periods into earlier ones.

I've seen medieval commanders who keep a substantial reserve, refuse one flank, conduct a fighting withdrawal and then launch a perfectly timed counterattack. Splendid generalship perhaps—but it sounds suspiciously like a twentieth-century staff-college exercise!

The worst excess from my own experience concerns the 95th Rifles in Napoleonic games. These admittedly elite troops are often used more like twentieth-century SAS than Napoleonic light infantry by gamers infused with modern military thinking… and probably inspired by Sharpe.

The result is that historical battles can become strangely ahistorical. We often make better decisions than the real commanders because we possess perfect hindsight and decades of scholarship.

So my question is this:

How much of historical wargaming is really a contest between two generals and how much is a contest between two historians?

And can we ever truly recreate the uncertainty and ignorance of the original commanders?

Honestly that is why I prefer lesser known battles or hypothetical battles to well trodden battles. I have played well known battles where GMs have set the battle up in ways to make it nearly impossible to deviate from history. That is not enjoyable to me. I can read history, replaying it as a railroad is not for me. I have also played historical battles where the GM allowed deviation and then heard grumbling by the players after that it was ‘not historical' implying that the game was flawed as a result.

I like to run lesser known battles so that players can't rely on years of reading and playing to guide their game, or hypothetical or ahistorical battles that are representative of the period but not fait accompli. I realize this puts me in a minority to the majority of historical miniature gamers, but I am ok with that.

It's a real problem, and there is no real solution for fighting historical battles. Both commanders know when and where every reinforcement will arrive for Antietam and Gettysburg--highly unhistorical knowledge. But if we use randomized arrivals, we get unhistorical events.

Best I can say is that this matters much more in some battles than in others, and if you're looking to refight historical engagements, you should keep that in mind.