I was playing Final Fantasy X again and it occurred to me that it was a little unusual that the three party members are able to defeat Sin even though armies could not. Thinking back, this kind of thing is a common feature of many RPG games. Now of course, it's done for gameplay reasons - the game would be boring if the military stormed the last boss without you - but I can't help but feel like this is lazy storywriting to some extent.

So I put it to you: under what circumstances might a small party be perfectly suited to solving the kind of threats present in RPGs where a large organisation is inadequate.

So far: if a small group was needed for stealth reasons or they were a small group fighting against the large organisation I could see it making sense.

So what do you think?

Frodo and Sam are the perfect example of this. A large army would have been annihilated entering Mordor, but two hobbits can enter unseen.

That's a fantastic example actually. In fact a large army nearly was annihilated if I remember rightly.

@A Brain in a Vat: That's where the stealth comes in. ;-)

Other than stealth, I think a big part of it is that these heroes are the best of the best. The "regular" army either doesn't have magic to protect themselves, or not enough magic. I agree that it could be written better. Like having it so the army engages other enemies while you take on the big bad guys with the special magic/weapons/sacred items that you have.

This doesn't apply to most games, but covertness is another reason to send in small groups. I contrast covertness to stealth in that stealth involves conducting the mission in an unseen manner for the success of the mission, while covertness involves secrecy for other reasons such as politics or the fact that the activities are illegal.

Scarcity of talent and resources.

I have a story I'm writing on a lark where some people - a small group - goes into the woods with rifles, which are a new thing. They take some time to load, have some cost, and not easy to master, and there's only a handful of people in the city who bother because they want to go into the woods.

Later on some bullcrap happens and the city now needs to defend itself from some invaders and there's a very short timescale and a lot of untalented or untrained individuals...

Archery isn't good for training either and they're scrawny people. So they gather a large quantity of people, puke out some crappy muskets and train them with that.

Only the small 'field teams' go into the woods, however, with the rifles and difficult to produce fireproof cloaks for protecting the guns from rain while loading.

With the scales present, that means about a dozen people.

In short; a talent scarcity and\or resource scarcity means only a minority are going to be the special forces.

Your three heroes aren't just the special forces, they're the special special special forces!

As a second point, an army might not have tried nor be appropriate. Armies can't fail without... Failing! Why'd they fail? Whatever reason it may be, your three heroes probably don't apply. If they're going at the bad guy with machine guns and the bad guy is some kind of a god, maybe it's just that you need to fashion yourself a god just to be worthy in the first place.

Finally and most obviously, we're often talking of super badasses who have rare material, high power levels and know what to do with it all compared with some conscripts with machine guns who might have 0 chance in any numbers.

FINAL final finally, you can do it the old fashioned way and expose your team to handwavium.