The concept of luck has far too much influence in the writing of wargames rules. It reached its peak under DBMM and its off-shoots where an entire battle could be decided by a lucky roll of a six sided dice.
Luck in modern rules creates an illusion that a bunch of Judaic riff-raff armed only with daggers will roll over the top of an undisordered pike phalanx or that (as in Fog of War) Roman Praetorian Guard can be fragmented by light infantry armed with boulders.
The idea that ancient and medieval battles were often decided by luck is attractive because it makes history feel dramatic, simple and faintly magical. A king might fall from his horse, a storm might break at the wrong moment, a messenger might misunderstand an order, or a commander might die just when the line began to shake. The whole battle is remembered with Fortune leaning over the field, bored of spinning her wheel, and flicking one side into the mud.
Ancient writers encouraged this habit. Greek and Roman historians frequently invoked Tyche or Fortuna to explain sudden reversals. They knew that war contained accident, uncertainty and human blindness. Polybius, for example, often recognised fortune as a factor in events, but he wanted readers to examine causes, resources, decisions and institutions. For him, Rome’s rise was not just a run of lucky throws. It was supported by political structure, manpower, discipline and strategic endurance. Luck might explain the turn of a moment. It did not explain the machine that survived the moment.
The same applies to medieval warfare. Chronicles loved providence, omens and miraculous turns because these made battles morally legible. God favoured the righteous, saints intervened, sinners were punished, and inconvenient military realities were wrapped in theology because apparently mud requires a doctrine. Yet when we look more closely, the supposed miracles usually sit on top of practical causes. A hungry army fights badly and a tired army breaks sooner. A commander who chooses bad ground has already made Fortune’s job easier.
Agincourt is the obvious example. It is often presented as the great triumph of English pluck and French misfortune, with rain and mud playing the role of cosmic prankster. But the mud only mattered because of the tactical situation. The French advanced across a confined, churned field under arrow fire, while heavily armoured men struggled to keep formation and momentum. Henry V’s army did not win because it had luck alone. It won because terrain, weather, defensive preparation, longbow fire, French overconfidence and battlefield compression worked together.
The myth of luck survives because battles are often remembered from the perspective of the loser. Defeat prefers accident to responsibility. “We were unlucky” sounds better than “we marched exhausted into a trap,” “we ignored the ground,” or “our noble cavalry were twats and went off to raid the baggage train.” Medieval aristocratic culture made this worse, since honourable defeat could be softened by blaming treachery, fate, bad weather, or divine judgement. Anything was preferable to admitting that a cheaper, dirtier, better-positioned enemy had understood the battlefield more clearly.
None of this means that chance was irrelevant. Pre-modern warfare was filled with uncertainty, since commanders often had only a partial view of the battlefield and had to rely on poor signals, unreliable messengers and fragmentary reports. Dust, rain, smoke, fear and rumour could distort what men saw and heard, while horses panicked, units misunderstood orders, reserves arrived too late, and disease often weakened armies before battle had even begun. Clausewitz, writing much later, described war as a realm shaped by uncertainty and friction, and his observation applies perfectly to ancient and medieval warfare. In such conditions, chance was always present, although it rarely acted alone.
Another factor is that luck is more likely to effect an individual but even out when larger numbers come into play. A single archer can miss their individual target but a group of archers are going to hit a certain number of people pretty much all the time.
Chance should not be confused with pure luck. It becomes decisive only when one side is prepared enough to exploit an unexpected opening and the other is too weakened, disorganised or badly placed to recover from it. A commander’s sudden death, a violent storm or a mistaken order matters most when morale is already fragile, formations are under strain, leadership is uncertain, or the ground has already begun to work against an army. Fortune rarely creates victory out of nothing. More often, it sharpens advantages that already exist and exposes errors that were waiting to become fatal.
Very few ancient or medieval battles were decided by luck. They were won or lost through discipline, supply, leadership, terrain, morale and tactical judgement. Wargames rules should reflect this by pushing chance into the places where uncertainty actually mattered: morale, disorder, command confusion, fatigue, and the moment when troops first moved into contact. Charging ancient cavalry were not going to ride through formed good infantry simply because someone rolled well. They could break weak, tired or badly trained infantry because such troops might panic when faced with armoured men and horses coming straight at them. Skirmishers, too, should be treated realistically. On an ancient battlefield, they could harass, disorder, screen a movement or make life miserable for troops already in difficulty. They should not be able to stand in front of ordered elite infantry and fragment them with a handful of rocks.
The same principle should apply across the battlefield. A Celtic warband charging a Roman legion might cause serious trouble if it hit hard enough to disorder the line at once. If it failed to do that, the odds should begin to turn against it. If the Romans absorbed the shock, the warband would be pushed back once or twice, and lose heart and run. A phalanx in good order should be almost impossible to shift from the front, because that was the entire point of the thing. The player should have to do what real commanders had to do: disrupt it, tire it, disorder it, or hit it where it was vulnerable. If the answer to every tactical problem is “roll a six,” the game has stopped being a battle simulation and become snakes and ladders after hours of painting.
Sources:
Polybius, The Histories, especially Book 1.
Vegetius, De Re Militari.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, chapters 3 and 7.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of Agincourt.”
Christopher Allmand, The De Re Militari of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages.
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