Romance of the Three Kingdoms also resolved about half of battles by commanders' duels, after which the loser's army routed or ceded the field. (Most of the rest by one of the opposing commanders coming up with a clever trick or maneuver.)Lago PARANOIA wrote:
The fuck do you mean, unnecessary? Romance of the Three Kingdoms operated at the hundreds of thousands scale.
Which was one of the few realistic things related to ancient Chinese warfare in RotTK (well, relatively ancient, RotTK is roughly based on 14-15 century realities).
The core truth of pre-firearms combat in almost every period for close examination of which we have enough sources (thus antiquity is largely ruled out) is that quality trumps quantity super hard. It was mainly the matter of morale. Underequipped rable simply broke and routed in the face of better-armed, better-trained, more confident combatants - it is all good and well to say that a hundred conscripted Chinese peasants can mob down a dude who was rich enough to do nothing but practice with weapons his entire life, but in the real life all of those hundred will be asking themselves: who will go first and die to buy victory? And most likely answering: not me. More often than not battles were actually decided by clash of a few dozen of elite warriors (and note, than in the real life even Chinese armies were much fucking smaller than they appear in fiction). The only way to maintain a remotely noticeable portion of population in fighting shape was having them live a life where armed violence was a constant everyday threat. And even those who lived in societies like this, say, vikings were usually recruited of the wealthy elite of society (rich household owners, usually with numerous clients, servants and slaves in case of vikings).
Fuck, even today warlord forces whose real battle strength does not exceed a few hundreds men with AKs can and do lord over populations in tens and hundreds of thousands.
The problem with DnD society as depicted in 3.X is that it is way too capable of defending itself for no particular reason. Cities of the size that would be majorly threatened by, like, a robber baron and his twenty thugs in the real life, can field a sizeable force of superhuman characters. This is a flaw because heroes, after all, defined by being stronger and better that the rest of the people on their side, overabundance of high-level NPCs constantly threatens adventurers' spotlight.
And that is also the reason I don't like practically all iterations of DnD's mass combat so far. They are all guilty of pulling absolutely bullshit force numbers and strengths out of nowhere with no apparent reason than to make PCs less relevant. Red Hand of Doom, which is supposed to depict a minor fucking conflict, presents an enemy army numerically on the level of maximum mobilization effort of largest medieval states, just so that PCs would have no time to pick it apart with hit-and-run/leadership elimination tactics.
What a mass combat system should do in a world, which basic assumption itselves faciliate resolution of armed conflicts by small elite groups is to present a manageable mook squad system. Anything more is not really necessary. It is low fantasy games that have more pressing need for mass combat capable of handing large scale battles.
It does, considering that army sizes were in low thousands, and most of those were servants, squires and other chaff. Well, that, and field battles with armies clashing together were really rare. Warfare mostly consisted of raids, sieges and minor skirmishes. That applies not only to Europe, of course.Lago PARANOIA wrote: Hell, even if we're just during fantasy Dark Ages Europe a few hundred isn't cutting it. If your mass combat minigame can't handle armies of thousands clashing together then you can't use it for L&D.
