What makes a combat system "tactical"? (and maybe some system comparisons)

[Amidus Drexel]

Spinning off from a discussion in the thread about system guardrails (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?663458-Guardrails-avoiding-unexpected-breakage-vs-preventing-exploits). I have a lot of thoughts but don't really want to drag that thread any further off-topic, so here I am (and here you are, if you're reading this).

Most of my TTRPG experience is with D&D and its various clones (of many, but not all, editions, including some clones that date back to TSR-era D&D), and what other systems I've played have either lacked combat entirely, or play everything out in theater of the mind. I don't have a lot of experience playing other "crunchy" (for lack of a better word) TTRPG systems, but I do have a fair amount of experience playing "crunchy" non-TTRPG strategy games (of many kinds, including games I'd call "tactical"). It baffled me to hear that some people think D&D sits at (or perhaps beyond) the threshold of "not being tactical" (or, at the very least, only scratching the surface of what's possible for a tactical combat system).

I'll quote a few people here, not to call anyone out, but to establish that there's consensus that disagrees with my experience:


There just isn't the depth of options to support tactics in current D&D once you're past which spells to cast in what order. Melee walks to the closest enemy to smash, archers shoot whatever is dangerous, casters drop the same patterns of "conc buff/cc + nuke/cc & repeat" basically every single encounter.
[...]
If they were a D&D 5e group the approach would always be the same "walk up for SMASH while the cleric casts bless and the sorcerer casts haste" like the previous year of D&D we played.

Basically what Telok said. I play a lot of wargames and have achieved a few 3rd place finishes in nationals in different systems. I’ve also flamed out in more than a few tournaments too. Which is to say I’m not consistent enough to be a top tier wargamer but I know my way around a TTMWG. D&D has close to zero tactical depth or breadth. A good example of a RPG which has decent tactical combat is Cyberpunk.

True, but (heavily version-dependent statement inbound) I think that the tactics in D&D are either a) incredibly obvious and general or b) tightly bound to a specific build.

I saw more tactical advice around 4e, which upped the tactics more than previous games, than around other editions. (Defining "tactics" as "movement/positioning/etc." vs. "abilities to use in order").

While I disagree with these quotes, I think the questions they've raised for me are interesting, so before I give my answers to those questions, I put it to you, reader:

What makes a combat system tactical?
What kinds of system mechanics encourage tactical play?
What kinds of scenarios encourage tactical play?
What are examples of tactical systems that you like? What do you like about them?
What are examples of tactical systems that you don't like? What don't you like about them?

----
On Combat Systems

I posit that the following are necessary for a combat system to have tactical depth:

Positioning matters (and not just in a superficial way).
Each unit/figure/character/creature/etc. has meaningful choices to make on its turn.


Positioning matters - In essence, for a combat system to be tactical, it needs to care about the position of the combatants. This more-or-less disqualifies "theater of the mind" style games; though they might still have some of these elements, they typically don't model them at a meaningful level of specificity. Here are some examples of mechanics a system can model that indicate it cares about positioning:

Movement speeds and movement modes (e.g. flight, swim, climbing, short-range teleportation, burrowing, etc.)
Relative positions of multiple combatants (including backstabs, flanking, being surrounded, firing ranged attacks into melee, etc.)
Terrain effects (height, hazardous zones, moving terrain, etc.)
Cover and line of sight (including partial cover, mobile cover, visibility rules, etc.)
Different effective ranges for different attacks/abilities (including modifiers for excessive range or point-blank range)
Area effects, both temporary and permanent, static and dynamic, fixed and mobile


Meaningful choices - For any system to have any depth, it needs to provide meaningful choice, and tactical combat systems are no exception. This means that systems or characters can't have a dominant strategy (e.g. it's more-or-less always correct to move to the nearest enemy and attack). Some of this comes down to scenario design (see below), but frequently this will be baked into a system. Some examples of meaningful choice in an action for a combatant:

Enemy combatants at different ranges or positions.
Choice of which enemy combatant to attack - if their positions are meaningfully different, this can matter even if they're all otherwise identical.
Purely defensive actions, including not attacking at all. (cowering, taking a defensive stance, attacking cautiously, using mobile cover such as a tower shield or riot shield, etc.)
Helping an ally (feinting, healing, team buffs, covering fire, etc.)
Action denial or movement denial (including lockdown effects, crowd-control, destroying enemy gear, and suppressing fire)
Forgoing attacks or defense to reposition or retreat.
Forced movement (pushing, pulling, being thrown, etc.)
Actions that mess with turn order, in systems that track it strictly. (delaying, readying an action, waiting for an ally to act first, etc.)



In essence, I think this because it's trivial to do most of the above. More or less every version of D&D supports most of the examples above in the core rules. Even 5th edition, which is well-known for handwaving a lot of those things, does several of them explicitly.

It's certainly possible to build D&D characters that are utterly inflexible and can't contribute to combats outside of their specialty, but in ~15 years of actual games I've run or played in, I've only ever had one player make a character that didn't have multiple ways to meaningfully contribute to a fight.

Let's take D&D 3.5 as our example. (It's probably the most popular on the boards here, and I'm more familiar with its minutia than I am TSR's various D&Ds, or 4e or 5e). I want to challenge the assumption that tactics only (or even mostly) arises from build choices:

Movement speeds and modes: Charging (a risk/reward tradeoff) or taking 5ft steps (a safe, but underwhelming move) are special movement options that are available to anyone. Anyone can trade a standard action for a second move. While movement speeds are largely decided at build time, there are plenty of limited-use and permanent effects that anyone can use during the game to change movement speeds or gain new movement modes. Short-range teleportation is very cheap at mid levels and very useful.
Relative positions of combatants: Modifiers for flanking and firing ranged attacks into melee are build-independent, as is the soft cover granted by someone being in the way of your ranged attack (or melee attack, if you have extra reach). Weapons with extra reach are readily available, as are short-to-medium-range weapons that can be used at either melee or range (e.g. spears, daggers, and throwing axes).
Terrain effects: Modifiers for height advantage, difficult terrain (extra movement costs), and hazardous terrain (fall damage, spikes, caltrops, grease, traps, water, ice, etc.) are all build-independent and frequently available at low levels. While spellcasters get more of these effects, you can get plenty of them from items too.
Cover and line of sight: largely build-independent. Depending on what's blocking visibility, build or items might help there.
Effective ranges: mostly fixed by the system, though builds can change stuff slightly. Most PCs can and should have multiple weapons to engage enemies at different ranges.
Area effects: many are build-dependent if you're not a spellcaster, but PCs can get these effects from items too. At low levels, these are alchemical items and splash weapons.
Forced movement: technically available to everyone, but usually this is going to be build-dependent if you want to be effective (grapple, bull-rush, or various movement spells).
Movement denial/punishment: AoOs are available to anyone with a melee weapon (and have serious tactical implications - 3.5's combat can be very sticky because most movement is punished by free attacks), but if you want to lock someone down consistently without magic you'll probably want to build for it (grappling, tripping, maneuvers, crowd-control spells, etc.). It's also possible to build to avoid this (via tumble skills, feats, spells, or otherwise). Nets are worth mentioning, as they only require a ranged touch attack and can be used effectively even without proficiency by more traditional fighting characters.
Defensive options: "Total Defense" is an action available to anyone who needs extra AC this turn. Withdrawing lets you reposition without taking AoOs. Casting or fighting defensively is a risk tradeoff that can be built around (but still matters at lower levels).
Helping an ally: Aid another is build-independent, and while it's often terrible in combat, it comes up sometimes.
Special timing actions: Readying and delaying both allow you to wait for more information before you act, and are build-independent.



---
On Combat Scenarios

Here's the crux of it - a lot of combat scenarios in a lot of systems are terrible. Scenario design is hard. If you line up the good guys and the bad guys (who can only attack in one way) on opposite sides of a featureless 40ftx40ft room and roll initiative, your combat is not going to have many meaningful decisions. It might still be fun, but most of the decision-making will be "which one do we kill first", and that decision will get made on turn 1 when the two sides connect.

Which things in scenario design are effective at making combats more interesting is going to vary from system to system, but here are some of the things I like to include to make combat tactics more interesting:

Unusually-shaped environments (including very large areas, very small areas, segmented combats that spill into multiple rooms, etc.)
Lots of cover variety (including partial cover, chest-high walls, narrow cover, cover only from certain angles, etc.)
Dynamic terrain (conveyor belts, magic platforms, steam traps, doors that can be closed or opened, rope bridges begging to be cut, etc.)
Multiple kinds of enemy combatants
Effects that mess with visibility (smokescreens, mist, darkness, enemies with light sensitivity, enemies with non-sight senses they depend on, etc.)
Very large numbers of enemies acting in a coordinated fashion (crowding even in large spaces, increased viability of AoE effects, enemies helping each other to land hits, etc.)
Enemies with multiple action types (melee, ranged, AoE, buff/debuff, etc.)
Risk/reward payoffs (enemies too dangerous to attack in melee for more than a turn or two, dangerous terrain protecting something vulnerable, risking sniper shots by running out of cover to return fire, etc.)

[Telok]

Tactics are the choices made in battle. The tactical depth of a game system relies, in my opinion, not on the total number of potential choices, but on the actual choices made during play.

That's why I consider D&D 5e to be light on tactical choice. If you have a strength & plate armor fighter your choices are to walk up and hit stuff. Grapple, shove, everything else is a minor sideshow. The vast majority of the time the choice made by the player is "hit with stick". Likewise in actual play the casters will mostly cast the same sorts of spells. Opening with fireball or cone of cold against fire & frost giants isn't a meaningful tactical choice. The choice was in casting a direct damage spell instead of control, illusion, or buff. If you can look at a character sheet and predict generally what a player will do in more than half the combats then its likely due to a lack of tactical options.

Its systemic. D&D 5e with point-buy stats and feats gives strong heavy armor fighters massive disincentives to anything but walking in and swording stuff. They're terrible at archery, have middling charisma and talky skills at best, and wrestling doesn't defeat anything in D&D. Likewise casters typically cycle through a small handful of spells and cantrips for almost all their encounters. If you can predict the party sorcerer is going to cycle through haste, synaptic static, and a medium-large direct damage spell in almost all combats then, even if the order of spells changes sometimes, they're acting like thay have no real tactical choices.

Compare a casual player I know across two systems:

In D&D he plays a dwarf cleric. That gives him heavy armor and cleric spells. He'll either throw out an upcast bless spell and then go poke with a magic spear while tossing heals or cast shapechange into a dragon turtle. Thats what he does in probably 2/3 of combats anyways, but if he has a 9th spell slot and is faced with a big foe it'll be the turtle. And its never anything but the turtle. Thats... pretty much it. His wisdom isn't maxed so he avoids save spells, and bless is about the most useful generic combat buff available. When I play D&D with him I know what he'll do, becuse those are his effective choices that have real results in almost all fights. Casters, demons, dragon, shadows, indoors, outdoors, underwater, on a boat, its all about the same.

In DtD40k7e he's a half-demon heavy weapons guy. The class requires him to be good at brawling and shooting skills, has easy acess to charisma improvements and technology skills, and his demon bits give him two buff spells. He could cast a personal buff & go in for brawling, could pull out a machinegun and do suppressing fire, could pull out some explosives, he's gone in for very effective grappling attacks on occasion, and sometimes he overcasts a spell to intentionally trigger dangerous wild magic effects. When I'm GMing for him I can't tell, beyond vague generalities like "will grapple casters but not dragons", what he'll do in a fight. The character is effective at all of those things. If he buys two advances in charisma (takes about 3 game sessions) he'll be a strong social actor too with a really nasty intimidate roll. Which, because the system has social conflict rules, he could leverage into shutting down combats by being very scary. He has multiple different options that are roughly equally effective.

As a GM you can add tactical options to any fight through terrain, special features, secret weaknesses, etc. Thats true in the vast majority of game systems, so I consider it a wash. Best practices is what I call my "no empty rooms, no dumb brutes" rule for encounters. There must be interactive scenery, hazardous terrain, exploding barrels, bottomless pits, the building on fire, the ship sinking, etc. There has to be something interesting and useful about the place. The combat must not be about dumb melee brute monsters that exist only to be pounded into mush. Throw in any critters you want for any reason except stuff that the characters will only interact with by standing around trading basic boring atacks until its dead.

[Vahnavoi]

Consider the problem of squaring a circle using compass and straightedge.

Literally cannot be done, but showing why it cannot be done is non-trivial. At the same time, it looks doable, and there are many ways to try. That's why it occupied mathematicians for, what, two thousand years? And still occupies amateur mathematicians who aren't in on the joke.

If you want a deep game that encourages tactics, you want that kind of quality. Actually being unsolvable isn't a requirement, but non-triviality is.

Almost any mechanics can be used to set this up, and there are likely uncountable ways to do it. It is even possible to have two games that look nearly identical, using the same kind of mechanics, where one has the necessary quality and the other does not. I definitely believe variations of D&D are in this bin: it is possible to set up a deep tactical scenario with a B/X retroclone, but it's equally possible to set up a scenario that simplifies to a coin flip.

It's easy to name some common pitfalls, though. Games and systems often fail to be tactical when:

1) they are too random. Virtually anything a player could attempt reduces to a coin flip, so the overall game is just Snakes & Ladders. Can still work with young players or people who really are present just to watch funny math rocks go brrrr. Systems with universal dice resolution are most suspectible to this.

2) they are too confined. The system promised five-in-a-row, but the game master set up the grid for tic-tac-toe.

3) they ignore players playing against each other. You've all heard the standard mantras: "b-b-but roleplaying games are co-operative!", "adversarial game master is a bad game master", "there are no winners and losers", yadda yadda. It's all BS. The reason why simple abstract strategy games sometimes manage longevity measured in centuries is because intelligent, motivated opponents trying to beat each other naturally keep producing variants of a game's base problem class, to the limit of its move space. Removing honest competition tends to leave much of a game's potential unexplored.

4) they are afraid of players failing. Almost a subset of above, but bears mentioning separately. You've all heard this one too: "the player characters are the protagonists! The heroes! They can't die in the middle of the story!" Yeah, how about letting gameplay decide that? No? Okay then. It should be obvious why this pushes a game towards triviality and hence lack of tactical depth.

5) they front-load all the choices. Basically a paraphrase of Telok's criticism of D&D above: the game has a huge initial pool of strategies to pick from, but once picked, that strategy dictates gameplay unusually far into the future. There is theoretical depth, but the practical experience is that of doing the same thing over and over.

6) they have too many combinations to ever test, so to make game balance feasible, they engage in a bit of mathematical sleight of hand to ensure most of those combinations are functionally identical.

7) they have too many combinations to ever test... yet players insist on playing the same ones. Twenty years of Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, Cleric, not even Fighter, Fighter, Fighter, Fighter for a change

[Pauly]

For me what makes combat 'tactical'
1) Meaningful options on what to do, not how to do it. For example in D&D the melee fighter's option is to walk up to the enemy and whack him with a beatstick. Choosing between using power attack or flurry isn't a tactical choice. In Cyberpunk a player's choices might include taking an aimed shot, shooting on the run, throwing an explosive grenade or throwing a smoke grenade.
2) Significant interaction with the terrain. In D&D a lot of the magic attacks tender terrain close to meaningless. Perversely this encourages low terrain combat because it is the martials who get disadvantaged by terrain, exacerbating the linear fighter -v- quadratic wizard issue. In Traveller cover makes a big difference in combat.
3) Having sufficient mobility. A lot of tactics rely on moving to advantageous positions, repositioning in response to the enemy. If the movement rates are so slow players are effectively stuck in their deployment positions they can't use tactics.

[Kurald Galain]

Right. So your post doesn't specify which edition of D&D you're talking about, and that makes a huge difference here.

I'd say it's pretty likely that you're talking about one specific edition and the people who disagree with you are thinking of another one.

[rel]

Tactical combat requires the ability to make meaningful decisions in combat. There need to be multiple things to do, and which choice is best shouldn't be obvious.

If a player could realistically pre-plan all their actions at the beginning of a fight (e.g. shoot arrows at weakest enemy. rinse. repeat.) with no great loss of effectiveness, your system isn't very tactical.

In D&D, how tactical the combat is, and under what conditions varies from edition to edition.
For example 4th edition combat was consistently tactical under most circumstances. But that edition is something of an outlier.

For the other editions of D&D, combat is usually tactical as long as you can cast spells, or have equivalent powers. Or if the game is at a very low level where everyone gets access a few useful powers via gear and generic special moves like wrastling which tend to lose effectiveness at higher levels.

[stoutstien]

I think the vast majority of TTRPGs aren't striving for tactical play as much as just imulating it enough to tickle that part of our brain. Instead they lean heavily on the logistics side of things. The introduction of the concept of a "default" action has definitely expose this but it's always been there.

[GloatingSwine]

A broad range of options that extend beyond "make enemy HP less", which are powerful and reliable enough to be regularly useful, are not confined to a subset of characters, which have reliable counterplays, and which are used by both sides.

[Lacco]

I'd only like to make a distinction between tactics on individual level ('do I swing my sword or kick the guy down the stairs...?"), encounter level ("if I move here and the mage casts wall of force there, we can limit the amount of enemies that attack us at once to manageable number") and the logistic level ("I will buy a greataxe because 1d12 is better than 1d8"; "I will memorize these spells because they cover most potential threats").

One of the tests for the individual level is to make the whole combat theater of the mind (no map, no minis). That will quickly show if it's tactics on individual level or on encounter level.

Another thing that would be fun to check: 'remove all OOC planning and limit communication to IC'. Although that is a completely different thing.

[Alexander Atoz]

I spent a lot of time on this question. My feeling is that it can be made tactical, if the DM sets up the terrain and such to properly challenge the players, but that it's hard to do, and that most DMs probably don't manage to pull it off so often. (I'm assuming, given how hard it is to do. Obviously, I have no way to rank all the DMs in the world, and thereby pull out an average.)

I would like to mention that I've started a website/blog to help out with that. I'm going through all the monsters in the monster manual, and suggesting ways to play them so that they have tactical depth. You can view it at dragonencounters.com if you're interested.

[Jakinbandw]

I do want to note, as someone who has been working on an RPG that is fairly tactical, that I found that I needed to make sure that brainless play by a given player isn't harmful to the party and can be somewhat effective. I have a core group of 3 RPG players that enjoy tactics, so one GMs and the other two play. That leaves us usually bringing in from one to two other players. Most of the time, these new players aren't interested in learning tactics, and often just want to attack without having to think. As time goes on they tend to start experimenting more, but that can take months. Until then, they can't be making situations worse for the rest of the party, and they need occasional moments where they feel cool to keep engaged.

So while tactics are really fun I think that most people don't actually want tactical games. They just want to feel like they are contributing, and that they are succeeding. They want a light edge of danger, without having to actually stress about what the best actions to take on their turn are.

[Kurald Galain]

So while tactics are really fun I think that most people don't actually want tactical games. They just want to feel like they are contributing, and that they are succeeding. They want a light edge of danger, without having to actually stress about what the best actions to take on their turn are.

That is very true. Most tabletop roleplayers don't want tactics, and that is why D&D has been reducing focus on tactics more and more ever since 3E/3.5, and why almost much no TRPG on the market (except for D&D clones) is even remotely tactical.

[Amidus Drexel]

[...]
Its systemic. D&D 5e with point-buy stats and feats gives strong heavy armor fighters massive disincentives to anything but walking in and swording stuff. They're terrible at archery, have middling charisma and talky skills at best, and wrestling doesn't defeat anything in D&D. Likewise casters typically cycle through a small handful of spells and cantrips for almost all their encounters. If you can predict the party sorcerer is going to cycle through haste, synaptic static, and a medium-large direct damage spell in almost all combats then, even if the order of spells changes sometimes, they're acting like thay have no real tactical choices.

Compare a casual player I know across two systems:

In D&D he plays a dwarf cleric. That gives him heavy armor and cleric spells. He'll either throw out an upcast bless spell and then go poke with a magic spear while tossing heals or cast shapechange into a dragon turtle. Thats what he does in probably 2/3 of combats anyways, but if he has a 9th spell slot and is faced with a big foe it'll be the turtle. And its never anything but the turtle. Thats... pretty much it. His wisdom isn't maxed so he avoids save spells, and bless is about the most useful generic combat buff available. When I play D&D with him I know what he'll do, becuse those are his effective choices that have real results in almost all fights. Casters, demons, dragon, shadows, indoors, outdoors, underwater, on a boat, its all about the same.

In DtD40k7e he's a half-demon heavy weapons guy. The class requires him to be good at brawling and shooting skills, has easy acess to charisma improvements and technology skills, and his demon bits give him two buff spells. He could cast a personal buff & go in for brawling, could pull out a machinegun and do suppressing fire, could pull out some explosives, he's gone in for very effective grappling attacks on occasion, and sometimes he overcasts a spell to intentionally trigger dangerous wild magic effects. When I'm GMing for him I can't tell, beyond vague generalities like "will grapple casters but not dragons", what he'll do in a fight. The character is effective at all of those things. If he buys two advances in charisma (takes about 3 game sessions) he'll be a strong social actor too with a really nasty intimidate roll. Which, because the system has social conflict rules, he could leverage into shutting down combats by being very scary. He has multiple different options that are roughly equally effective.


Yeah, perhaps that's an issue with 5e's generally fuzzy math that gives roughly everyone the same chance to succeed at their combat specialty of choice, and then balancing the encounter math around that. In 3rd edition (to some degree) and prior (to a larger degree), it was fairly easy to be effective with multiple kinds of weapons at multiple ranges, even as a fighter that specialized in melee. (Ranged weapons tended to drop off in effectiveness at higher levels, but you got more attacks as a fighting-man or full-BAB character, so you could make up for that by just shooting more against most enemies).

I see where you're coming from now - you're looking at the variety of specific abilities that a character can use (and not just the amount of them, but the actual viability of those options). One of the later replies here called that "individual tactics". I was thinking a level of abstraction higher than that ("encounter-level tactics", as termed below), which asks a different set of questions to the players (Where do you move? Who do you target? What kind of risks are you willing to take by standing here or moving there? Can you manipulate the battlefield in a meaningful way to change where/how your opponents might stand or move? and so forth). There are games where that level of abstraction just isn't modeled (any game that uses theater of the mind combat categorically doesn't care about encounter-level tactics like that), but D&D definitely does model that (sometimes in a trivial way, admittedly, but that's typically just lazy encounter design).


Consider the problem of squaring a circle using compass and straightedge. [...]

4) they are afraid of players failing. Almost a subset of above, but bears mentioning separately. You've all heard this one too: "the player characters are the protagonists! The heroes! They can't die in the middle of the story!" Yeah, how about letting gameplay decide that? No? Okay then. It should be obvious why this pushes a game towards triviality and hence lack of tactical depth.


Agreed that non-triviality is important to keep decisions interesting.

This is a pretty common tactical failing of a lot of games I've played. It's a hard balancing act to make, though; If a system expects PCs to get into fights often, and it expect them to lose those fights with some regularity, a full party wipe is a statistical inevitability rather than something brought on only by a string of bad decisions and terrible luck. That makes it hard to keep continuity for an adventure. Perhaps that means adventures end early in systems like that, but from experience players don't typically have a lot of fun losing characters - even if they find failure interesting.

I know systems that handle that in a few different ways:

Failure that isn't death - this comes down to scenario design, mostly, though I'm sure there are games that actively avoid having death be a likely failure state at all.
Resurrection is cheap - death just isn't that big of an obstacle in the system. BG3 hands out resurrections like candy, Paranoia actually advises GMs to kill a PC during the opening briefing (and dead PCs just get replaced by a clone as soon as it's convenient or funny), and high-level D&D in certain editions might even expect mid-combat resurrections.
Death is expected - i.e. the game communicates to the players early on that their PCs are going to die, and sets up scenarios where even a full party wipe doesn't end the campaign. Kingdom Death does this, some OSR games do this, as do early-era TSR D&Ds. It's possible to build this into the adventure design in basically any system, but generally I've only seen it in ones where character creation is fast and the differences between experienced and new characters is small.



7) they have too many combinations to ever test... yet players insist on playing the same ones. Twenty years of Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, Cleric, not even Fighter, Fighter, Fighter, Fighter for a change

I do have fond memories of a 2-man cleric+cleric party, though you could argue that our summoned creatures filled in some of the other expected roles most of the time.


Right. So your post doesn't specify which edition of D&D you're talking about, and that makes a huge difference here.

I'd say it's pretty likely that you're talking about one specific edition and the people who disagree with you are thinking of another one.

That was intentional! Despite all of my complaining, I didn't really want to make D&D the focus of the post - it was just what sparked me to comment. Frankly, I'm most interested in examining what makes the tactics of a game system more interesting (especially what other people think about it!), as I occasionally dabble in game design and want to get better at it.

That's probably true. I'm guilty, to some extent, of 3.5-centrism (which was once common on the internet), but it hasn't been the latest version of D&D for 15 years now, so I suppose I should catch up with the times. I might need to adjust my assumptions of what people mean by "D&D" forward a decade or so.


Tactical combat requires the ability to make meaningful decisions in combat. There need to be multiple things to do, and which choice is best shouldn't be obvious.

If a player could realistically pre-plan all their actions at the beginning of a fight (e.g. shoot arrows at weakest enemy. rinse. repeat.) with no great loss of effectiveness, your system isn't very tactical.


Agreed that uncertainty makes scenarios more interesting (it's why most games use dice!), though I'm not sure what the threshold for "obvious" is here. What's obvious to me (with a heavy math background), and what's obvious to my wife (a writer with almost no background in math) are very different.

It sounds like you're saying "choosing a strategy at the start of the fight removes some of the tactical depth from a combat scenario". Am I reading that right? Does the scenario become less tactical if I try to execute a strategy like "kite the enemy with arrows, shoot the weakest one I can see" or "push past the front line to attack the squishy back line in melee, then clean up the survivors"? Both of those strategies are simple enough that I could plan out my actions multiple turns in advance, even if something goes wrong partway through, but I see both of them as being quite tactical (and certainly more interesting than "I walk up and attack").

----
On a related note, how interesting is hidden information in a tactics game? My experience playing tactics-focused video games (like, for example, Into The Breach, or even BG3) and in running tabletop games, is that hidden information makes things less interesting - the more information I have, the more fun I have trying to solve the tactical puzzle, and that hidden "gotchas" complicate things in a way that mostly results in players defaulting to very simple behaviour (whether that's risky, safe, or just boring depends on the person).


For the other editions of D&D, combat is usually tactical as long as you can cast spells, or have equivalent powers. Or if the game is at a very low level where everyone gets access a few useful powers via gear and generic special moves like wrastling which tend to lose effectiveness at higher levels.

As much as I like to rag on low-level D&D for the fragility of PCs and the swingyness of combat (at least in 3.5), it definitely has way more viable combat options baked into the combat system that aren't build-specific.

One of the things I've found useful in making the game have more tactical depth is to include items that give players more options. They're (usually) build-independent, they can be passed from PC to PC as needed, and they let me tailor the kinds of abilities the party has if I find they're coming up short somewhere. That might be a little heavy-handed for some groups (or difficult to do organically in some systems), though.


I'd only like to make a distinction between tactics on individual level ('do I swing my sword or kick the guy down the stairs...?"), encounter level ("if I move here and the mage casts wall of force there, we can limit the amount of enemies that attack us at once to manageable number") and the logistic level ("I will buy a greataxe because 1d12 is better than 1d8"; "I will memorize these spells because they cover most potential threats").

One of the tests for the individual level is to make the whole combat theater of the mind (no map, no minis). That will quickly show if it's tactics on individual level or on encounter level.


Perhaps I've been conflating the individual-level decision-making with the encounter-level decision-making. Looking at my examples in the OP, there's a bit of both in every list, but certainly some systems focus on one or the other in more detail. I remember a B/X clone that had little in the way of individual tactics, but was still interesting to play out encounters because melee combat was frequently very lethal - so PCs were incentivized to constantly fall back and find cover to stay out of striking range. (It also had the classic attrition element that changed tactics over time as resources got lower - eventually you run out of arrows and can't take certain kinds of fights).

Yeah, I think a lot of the decision-making in games like D&D happens at the strategic/logistical level. Ultimately, most attrition games (like D&D) have their roots at that level of abstraction, so the toughest decisions tend to be "do we turn back, or do we press on - and in what manner?", where time, noise, and resources are the biggest constraints.


Another thing that would be fun to check: 'remove all OOC planning and limit communication to IC'. Although that is a completely different thing.

While I don't typically set up those scenarios as a DM, I've played in a few and had a lot of fun. I feel like you'd probably need to limit each player to six seconds of talking per round if you want to do that in combat, though.


I spent a lot of time on this question. My feeling is that it can be made tactical, if the DM sets up the terrain and such to properly challenge the players, but that it's hard to do, and that most DMs probably don't manage to pull it off so often. (I'm assuming, given how hard it is to do. Obviously, I have no way to rank all the DMs in the world, and thereby pull out an average.)

I would like to mention that I've started a website/blog to help out with that. I'm going through all the monsters in the monster manual, and suggesting ways to play them so that they have tactical depth. You can view it at dragonencounters.com if you're interested.

I know I don't manage complex tactical setups for every combat - maybe about 50% - as the game I'm running right now is more focused at the strategic/logistical level (where attrition matters) most of the time. Some of that is compounded by the party mostly having low movement speeds, which limits where they can actually get to during a combat encounter.

I'll be sure to check it out! A quick skim of the titles already has my interest.

[kyoryu]

Mostly what makes games feel to me is a sense of "stickiness" of position combined with position mattering, in some ways position being the primary concern.

GURPS does a fairly good job of this. Since you can't move very much and attack effectively, you end up having to choose between movement and combat, and movement while fighting is fairly slow. As such, you can reposition, but at a cost.

Ineffectiveness of opportunity fire/attacks also plays into this - if I can run across an open field without worrying about what happens? A lot of those tactical decisions fade. In D&D, it's pretty easy to ignore even a lot of opportunity attacks due to hit point bloat, making movement even more fluid.

If it's too easy to move in a game, then the impact of positioning beyond the bonuses I get this turn is minimized. That's why I pointed out that most of the "tactical" aspects of D&D tend to focus on "how many bonuses can I get this turn?", though I didn't specify that I'd prefer to see a longer-term impact on positioning, or more robust ways to effectively control/limit movement.

[Telok]

I see where you're coming from now - you're looking at the variety of specific abilities that a character can use (and not just the amount of them, but the actual viability of those options). One of the later replies here called that "individual tactics". I was thinking a level of abstraction higher than that ("encounter-level tactics", as termed below), which asks a different set of questions to the players (...). There are games where that level of abstraction just isn't modeled (any game that uses theater of the mind combat categorically doesn't care about encounter-level tactics like that), but D&D definitely does model that (sometimes in a trivial way, admittedly, but that's typically just lazy encounter design).

I'd disagree that theater of the mind doesn't care. Things like making a bottleneck, a character delaying one monster while the rest kill the other monster, or throwing down a suppressing fire zone to keep casters from poking their heads out, they are all things I've seen and done in theater of the mind combats. Some even in D&D (1e AD&D up through 4e).

I consider the encounter level stuff to be reliant on the GM, and thus effectively system independent. It may be harder to do some specific things in some systems, requiring more system & tactical mastery to implement if the system gives characters fewer tools and/or less capability. But a tactical encounter like "while exploring the fire swamp you find a pool of quicksand, as you dodge another fire jet coming out of the ground you see a dozen giant dire rats just on the other side of a huge tree, one seems to be curious about the recent flare near you" is completely dependent on the GM or module writer. In most D&Ds & D&D-likes there's nothing particularly tactical about a fight with some mindless undead you can't outrun that appear when the party reaches the middle of a huge and effectively featureless room.

But if you want to promote tactics in a combat the easiest thing to do is add exploding barrels. Tell the players that their characters know the barrels (technically whatever is in them but trope with it) will explode. You'll immedately see them trying to "enemy + barrel + boom = yes" in all but the least pyromaniac parties. Just go with a self rule of "no boring empty rooms" for your encounters and the rest pretty much falls into place as much as your game system allows.

[Xervous]

Movement of 3.5e or 5e D&D tends to be of low tactical depth. Cover offers middling bonuses, weapon ranges eclipse not only the typical movement rates but often the size of the play area. Melee combatants that are immensely terrifying tend to be an exception rather than the rule.

Look to XCOM and cover is vital, engagement ranges more closely map to weapon effective ranges, and melee enemies are hyper lethal. Overwatch and suppression further influence movement and encourage interaction.

Glance to Battletech, the usable portion of range brackets tends to stay smaller than the play area. A weapon having even 1 hex more range than another is a big deal you can exploit to set up a favorable exchange. Locational damage and facing are definitely far too detailed for many people, but there’s so much to be said about gunning for the thin back armor, focusing a side to blow off a mech’s main gun, or turning to shield with your left side after the right takes a focused beating. Difficult terrain and intervening cover make the maps into tactical mazes for fast units to navigate and slower units to secure ground in.

D&D? Probably within 100ft, GM doesn’t have that big a map. You either see the dude and probably can’t move enough to negate his cover, or you can’t see the dude. If any special tomfoolery is wanted, better have picked a caster or you’re stuck auto attacking most likely.

[Vahnavoi]

This is a pretty common tactical failing of a lot of games I've played. It's a hard balancing act to make, though; If a system expects PCs to get into fights often, and it expect them to lose those fights with some regularity, a full party wipe is a statistical inevitability rather than something brought on only by a string of bad decisions and terrible luck. That makes it hard to keep continuity for an adventure. Perhaps that means adventures end early in systems like that, but from experience players don't typically have a lot of fun losing characters - even if they find failure interesting.

It's not hard to invent ways to keep continuity in an adventure or campaign despite player character regularly dying and being replaced. Tabletop roleplaying games are just late to the party for inventing and utilizing them because they've married themselves to a narrative paradigm where a character's continued existence is presumed to be vital before play even begins. I personally refer to this concept as predestination of heroism, but you could just as well call it narrative predestination: a character's purpose is presumed to fulfilled across a god-awfully long time (namely at least a whole adventure and often a whole campaign) and so the tactical landscape of the game has to be distorted to keep that character from being lost. The opposite, again, is letting gameplay decide what a character's purpose is.

Example of how to build narrative continuity that transcends the individual, is to instead focus on groups or events. A good non-game example of this would be Sotaromaani / Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) by Väinö Linna. Instead of having a single protagonist or central character, it follows an entire machine gun company through war. The author makes a point of showing rich internal life of characters who die early on and are mostly forgotten soon after. Some of the most memorable characters show up halfway through and become more central, while characters with prominent presence early on get killed and focus shifts to the survivors or replacements.

Even limiting yourself to D&D design paradigms in other ways, it would be dead easy to copy such conventions to an adventure or campaign. So, the whole party died - how does that affect their retainers? Their families? Their enemies? There ought to be a host of secondary characters surrounding the original party, who can now be brought in as viewpoint characters. The causal chain of events connects all of the viewpoint characters, creating a meaningful big picture for the players.

Nowhere is it required that losing characters is fun. To the contrary: the fact that it isn't fun is one of the reasons for players to use better tactics - negative reinforcement through playing well to remove undesired outcomes. By making it too hard to fail, any such potential for motivation is lost.


On a related note, how interesting is hidden information in a tactics game? My experience playing tactics-focused video games (like, for example, Into The Breach, or even BG3) and in running tabletop games, is that hidden information makes things less interesting - the more information I have, the more fun I have trying to solve the tactical puzzle, and that hidden "gotchas" complicate things in a way that mostly results in players defaulting to very simple behaviour (whether that's risky, safe, or just boring depends on the person).

There are both tactically healthy uses and tactically pathological uses.

Healthy uses lean into some core of a guessing game, where it is possible to acquire information and deduce what is being hidden.

Pathological uses are typically some terminal unknown unknowns - it's not possible to guess what is hidden and if the hidden thing is triggered, it's game over.

It's worth noting that sometimes the only difference between healthy use and pathological uses is whether the player is allowed to try again. This goes hand-in-hand with the point about failure and continuity. After all, one of the three basic modes of learning is trial and error. This is also why computer games, with fast save-and-reload functions, manage to get away with more "gotchas!" than tabletop roleplaying games.

It's also worth noting that hidden information can be the sole thing that keeps a game from being trivial. Consider rock-paper-scissors. The game famously has no dominant strategy, but the reason it has no dominant strategy is because picks are (reasonably) simultaneous: neither player knows what the other will pick before a throw is made. If one player is instead forewarned, they can always make the winning pick, and the game becomes trivial. In the same vein, it can be noted that the prime reason why several perfect information games are not trivial is because no-one can actually process all the information: nothing is hidden in theory, but in practice entire strategies can exist beyond predictive horizons of the players due to mathematical chaos.

As a corollary, if you can just set it up, it may be worth it to test a scenario or game mechanic both with and without hidden information, to see if this causes a big difference in behaviours. For a D&D-like game, one of the simpler versions of this is preventing players from seeing mechanical character information (up to and including information on their own character), unless they use a game move or resource to find them out (lifting rocks to see how strong you are, using detect spells to figure out alignment, etc.) - contrasted with a version where everyone sees everyone else's character sheets (up to and including the enemies').

[Lacco]

On a related note, how interesting is hidden information in a tactics game? My experience playing tactics-focused video games (like, for example, Into The Breach, or even BG3) and in running tabletop games, is that hidden information makes things less interesting - the more information I have, the more fun I have trying to solve the tactical puzzle, and that hidden "gotchas" complicate things in a way that mostly results in players defaulting to very simple behaviour (whether that's risky, safe, or just boring depends on the person).

'Combat as puzzle' approach usually means that all information is out in the open and the interesting part is putting it all together.

However, when discussing how to make the combat system tactical... part of tactics is also covering the unknown variables: the potential reinforcements and their entry paths, changing situation during the course of combat and having a way out if you get overwhelmed. So I'd say having unknown variables - not 'gotchas' by design - is a good thing.



While I don't typically set up those scenarios as a DM, I've played in a few and had a lot of fun. I feel like you'd probably need to limit each player to six seconds of talking per round if you want to do that in combat, though.

In D&D, yes. In other games, depending on how the round is set up. I usually limit communication between players to breaks between individual clashes - when swords are swinging around your head, you often don't have time to look around and discuss the situation.


Mostly what makes games feel to me is a sense of "stickiness" of position combined with position mattering, in some ways position being the primary concern.

This is what I find to be missing in most systems - for me - a dynamic combat. I miss characters moving around because they are dodging and weaving and attacking and retreating. While a skilled combatant can and should be able to pick which way they move most of the time, the more skilled one of the two fighting is the one who usually 'leads' - and thus no position is 'static' unless the character focuses on staying at one place.


I'd disagree that theater of the mind doesn't care. Things like making a bottleneck, a character delaying one monster while the rest kill the other monster, or throwing down a suppressing fire zone to keep casters from poking their heads out, they are all things I've seen and done in theater of the mind combats. Some even in D&D (1e AD&D up through 4e).

I completely agree.

While the simplest way to test for depth of the 'individual' tactical level for me is going all theater of mind (removing strict positioning on a grid, the 'chess' style play), ideally with a single character, it's not the same the opposite way.

I think if we want to test the 'encounter' tactical level, the simplest way is to check the impact of entering a combat with a plan vs. just blindly going in for a default frontal attack.

[Vahnavoi]

As a comment on "theater of mind", it works fine given that at least one person at the table, hopefully the game master, has good spatial imagination and eye for detail. This is a skill that can be practiced, taught and tested for, so it's not an impossible basis for a tactical game.

[kyoryu]

Look to XCOM and cover is vital, engagement ranges more closely map to weapon effective ranges, and melee enemies are hyper lethal. Overwatch and suppression further influence movement and encourage interaction.

I think XCOM is actually a realllllly good example, as it could easily be converted to a tabletop game (it's fairly similar to D&D 4e in a lot of ways).

XCOM absolutely feels tactical. Cover matters. Getting hit matters. An area with a lot of overwatch is something I can't just ignore if I don't want to lose soldiers. There's enough mobility to allow for movement, while not so much that it makes positioning irrelevant. There's probably something in there about "typical range of weapons compared to movement speeds" but I may be digressing.

My decisions in XCOM are all about where my people go, how they're exposing themselves, and how their positioning is in comparison to the enemy. I worry about balancing movement and aggression with exposing myself and isolating units. I worry about overextending myself, and also worry about clumping too much and making myself subject to getting flanked and subject to area attacks.

This all feels tactical to me. I'm not saying D&D can't do that, but in general it doesn't. What I get from D&D is "how do I get the most bonuses this turn" and "how do I best position myself for my special abilities". Those are interesting, but they're not necessarily what I look for with "tactical".

Part of the problem, I do think, is that it's generally idiomatic in D&D to not really take advantage of the players and their positions, so as to avoid TPKs. Which gets me back into "permadeath should not be the default loss state", as that is a strong reason for the GM to not play as "hard" as they can. In XCOM, obviously, there's no such meta.

[GloatingSwine]

Part of the problem, I do think, is that it's generally idiomatic in D&D to not really take advantage of the players and their positions, so as to avoid TPKs. Which gets me back into "permadeath should not be the default loss state", as that is a strong reason for the GM to not play as "hard" as they can. In XCOM, obviously, there's no such meta.

Most RPGs are going to fall into this to some extent. There's just a massive asymmetry in the price of failure between players and GM. The GM is fighting for his dinner, the players are fighting for their lives.

That doesn't necessarily impinge on things like permadeath, but that players should have more counterplays for the various strategies the GM can apply.

In D&D as is, for instance, proficiency tends to mean that PCs will have stronger saves than monsters. But saves are passive resistances and so they don't feel "tactical" (active options will feel moreso).

[Amidus Drexel]

I'd disagree that theater of the mind doesn't care. Things like making a bottleneck, a character delaying one monster while the rest kill the other monster, or throwing down a suppressing fire zone to keep casters from poking their heads out, they are all things I've seen and done in theater of the mind combats. Some even in D&D (1e AD&D up through 4e).

Something about this I'm still stuck on, but I'm not sure if we're just defining "tactical" slightly differently, or if there's something meatier there to discuss that I'm just struggling to put into words.


Mostly what makes games feel to me is a sense of "stickiness" of position combined with position mattering, in some ways position being the primary concern.

GURPS does a fairly good job of this. Since you can't move very much and attack effectively, you end up having to choose between movement and combat, and movement while fighting is fairly slow. As such, you can reposition, but at a cost.

Ineffectiveness of opportunity fire/attacks also plays into this - if I can run across an open field without worrying about what happens? A lot of those tactical decisions fade. In D&D, it's pretty easy to ignore even a lot of opportunity attacks due to hit point bloat, making movement even more fluid.


RE: opportunity fire - One of the things I found interesting in Chainmail was "passthrough fire" - units with ranged attacks could make those during the movement phase of the round if an enemy unit was in their cone of fire at a certain point during its movement, even if it wouldn't end its turn in range. When I first read and played with it, it seemed like a clunky rules patch (to fix archers being unable to do much about highly mobile light cavalry), but in the context of this discussion I've noticed that it definitely adds tactical depth to the battlefield whenever archers are present.


If it's too easy to move in a game, then the impact of positioning beyond the bonuses I get this turn is minimized. That's why I pointed out that most of the "tactical" aspects of D&D tend to focus on "how many bonuses can I get this turn?", though I didn't specify that I'd prefer to see a longer-term impact on positioning, or more robust ways to effectively control/limit movement.

That's an interesting point - constraining possible actions can add choices. Not being able to move and attack (effectively) on the same turn adds a real choice between, well, moving and attacking.


3.5e or 5e D&D [...] weapon ranges eclipse not only the typical movement rates but often the size of the play area.

Look to XCOM and cover is vital, engagement ranges more closely map to weapon effective ranges, and melee enemies are hyper lethal. Overwatch and suppression further influence movement and encourage interaction.

Glance to Battletech, the usable portion of range brackets tends to stay smaller than the play area. A weapon having even 1 hex more range than another is a big deal you can exploit to set up a favorable exchange.

It seems like there's some tension between "long-range weapons add tactical depth by enabling effective suppression zones" and "long-range weapons remove tactical depth because positioning becomes less important". For example, if your machine-gunner's effective range is shorter than a melee bruiser's movement, you're getting (at most) one round of shots off before he closes the distance and squashes you. If the gunner's effective range is too large, though, then the melee bruiser can't close effectively without pulling out his own ranged weapon - at which point the fight devolves into "who can kite more effectively".


Example of how to build narrative continuity that transcends the individual, is to instead focus on groups or events.

While in hindsight this is obvious, I still appreciate you spelling it out for me.


As a corollary, if you can just set it up, it may be worth it to test a scenario or game mechanic both with and without hidden information, to see if this causes a big difference in behaviours. For a D&D-like game, one of the simpler versions of this is preventing players from seeing mechanical character information (up to and including information on their own character), unless they use a game move or resource to find them out (lifting rocks to see how strong you are, using detect spells to figure out alignment, etc.) - contrasted with a version where everyone sees everyone else's character sheets (up to and including the enemies').

I would find that infuriating as a player, but my players might think differently. Perhaps I'll try that experiment when next I run a one-shot in some simple system.


As a comment on "theater of mind", it works fine given that at least one person at the table, hopefully the game master, has good spatial imagination and eye for detail. This is a skill that can be practiced, taught and tested for, so it's not an impossible basis for a tactical game.

I would suspect that most, perhaps all persons at the table would need those skills for it to be particularly effective. A few of my current players have struggled with imagining dynamic spaces without some kind of visual aid, and it's very easy to think that you're on the same page with another person while imagining two very different environments. Not to say that it's impossible, but I don't think my current group could handle it, even though a few of us do have fairly well-developed spatial reasoning skills.

[Satinavian]

Most RPGs are going to fall into this to some extent. There's just a massive asymmetry in the price of failure between players and GM. The GM is fighting for his dinner, the players are fighting for their lives.I think part of the problem is how trivially easy it is to heal in combat or even get downed characters back into the fight.

In many other RPGs a downed character is no longer a treat. Sometimes even e severely wounded character is no longer a threat. That instantly makes it a bad tactical decision to waste further moves against them if an antagonist wants to win the fight.

And that in turn makes it easy for the GM to play enemies trying their best to win, taking out PCs with good positioning, ganging up, cheap tricks, attacking vulnerabilities ... and still no one dies if the PCs are triumphant in the end. And even if they were to lose to go for prisoner scenarios instead.


But in D&D, unless a PC is really dead, they might rejoin back in the fight. Sometimes even if they actually are dead. That mean tactically enemies have to go for the kill to actually make any progress towards winning.

[Xervous]

It seems like there's some tension between "long-range weapons add tactical depth by enabling effective suppression zones" and "long-range weapons remove tactical depth because positioning becomes less important". For example, if your machine-gunner's effective range is shorter than a melee bruiser's movement, you're getting (at most) one round of shots off before he closes the distance and squashes you. If the gunner's effective range is too large, though, then the melee bruiser can't close effectively without pulling out his own ranged weapon - at which point the fight devolves into "who can kite more effectively".


On a featureless plane yes, but both XCOM and Battletech play out on maps littered with obstacles. (And notably they give each player multiple units.)

A clear shot at a melee alien in XCOM could be unavailable due to buildings, a large segment of cover, or because getting the angle would expose your unit too much. It might not be your easiest shot or the best choice when higher priority targets are around. The 1v1 massively favors the unit with the gun, but that’s not how the game plays. D&D and company tend to only give the player one unit, you need to be running the whole party by yourself to really have a finger on the tactical depth available.


Battletech, being a wargame wherein every unit is built atomically from the ground up and priced accordingly, has you pay for what you get. The weapons with 3/6/9 range brackets cost proportionately less than the ones with 4/8/12. If you want a sniper capable of flinging 40 damage with 8/15/25 range you’re talking about a far more expensive investment than a melee unit that hits for the same or better. When ranged builds and switch hitters in 5e are putting up similar numbers as melee builds for both damage and durability there’s something wrong with the stat budgets.

Between the various evasion bonuses and sprawling terrain it’s much easier to deny the advantage of a 8/15/25 sniper in Battletech than it is to deny a bow user in 3.5e or 5e. With 30ft typical movement, pushing into the 100ft+ threat range of the bow requires multiple rounds and you probably want total cover as the +2/+4/whatever from lesser cover only cripples trivial enemies. And then if you finally get there you either instantly overkill them by a loan shark interest rate percentage (3.5) or start trading shin kicks comparable to the ranged hits they were doling out (5e). 3.5e is at least merciful enough to not make it take forever and a day for excessive “I stand and roll all my attacks”, “I’ll show you, stand and return fire!” But in either case it’s brain = off once melee is joined.

[kyoryu]

It seems like there's some tension between "long-range weapons add tactical depth by enabling effective suppression zones" and "long-range weapons remove tactical depth because positioning becomes less important". For example, if your machine-gunner's effective range is shorter than a melee bruiser's movement, you're getting (at most) one round of shots off before he closes the distance and squashes you. If the gunner's effective range is too large, though, then the melee bruiser can't close effectively without pulling out his own ranged weapon - at which point the fight devolves into "who can kite more effectively"..

Well I think it's more like "do tactical positions present concerns that must be addressed".

Like, realistically, you don't charge a machine gun nest because you'll probably die. This means that the area covered by the machine gun becomes a no-go zone.

In D&D, that's often not true. You can absorb a round of fire without really worrying about it, which weakens the importance of that. We don't want people to die, of course, so that's a hard balance to strike. You could let the covered area restrict movement, institute a "stun/wounds" style system and say that "reckless" moves mean attacks to straight to health, etc.

IOW, the value of positioning is proportional to how much you can be "punished" for bad position.

[Vahnavoi]

While in hindsight this is obvious, I still appreciate you spelling it out for me.

If it was obvious going in, we'd have more games already working that way. Ironically, there's some historical evidence for earlier and older school games working that way, but it didn't stick because they didn't sufficiently spell it out.

An example of this coming up, was a review I saw of a compilation old Call of Cthulhu modules. All modules in the series are linked to a central mystery, but as the reviewer observed (paraphrased): "there doesn't seem to be hooks for any particular characters to be involved, instead [the compilation] relies solely on the appeal of the mystery to the players to motivate them from going through all of the material."

Well, yeah. It's Call of Cthulhu. The genre is Lovercaftian cosmic horror. It's somewhat the point that individual (human) characters are meaningless and liable to be removed from the game (due to death or insanity). So it makes more sense to hook the player and then leave it up to the player to invent a new character motivated to continue the work of a failed character, rather than tying everything up in personal stakes. But this is an observation one can make, rather than something the material explicitly tells you, so it's easy to think of it as a bug rather than a feature.

The same thing can be seen in early AD&D material. AD&D stresses the importance of the milieu (setting) invented by the dungeon master, far more than it stresses motivations of individual characters. (Mega)dungeons such as Castle Greyhawk exemplify this: player characters can come and go, die and be replaced by their retainers, so on and so forth, but the structure itself remains and evolves. Continuity is formed around maps made, notes written, spells invented etc. that become fixtures of that setting and carry on into the future even after individual players and characters leave the game.

None of that fits together with the notion that player characters are, not just heroes, but the heroes, who are also true companions to each other, and the world will end (literally!) if they fail.

[NichG]

Well I think it's more like "do tactical positions present concerns that must be addressed".

Like, realistically, you don't charge a machine gun nest because you'll probably die. This means that the area covered by the machine gun becomes a no-go zone.

In D&D, that's often not true. You can absorb a round of fire without really worrying about it, which weakens the importance of that. We don't want people to die, of course, so that's a hard balance to strike. You could let the covered area restrict movement, institute a "stun/wounds" style system and say that "reckless" moves mean attacks to straight to health, etc.

IOW, the value of positioning is proportional to how much you can be "punished" for bad position.

This gets into a bit of game design theory which I like a lot, which is that you can build in mechanisms for players to know the outcomes of their actions in order to have things have weight without needing that weight to actually come down on anyone. For example, if it's a fairly low-level ability to have all suppressed zones actually be displayed on the map, or if there are metagame things which let you take back an action that would immediately get you killed or have a sufficiently above-threshold consequence some number of times.

Like, I could imagine an urban combat system where all sniper-exposed areas are explicitly shown on the battlemap and you literally can't have your character walk through them until that area has been covered or until the sniper has been taken out or forced to move. It's not 'oh if you move here there's a 50/50 chance you die' because that encourages either avoiding all sources of random chance, or just embracing that as what the system seems to expect you to live with. Instead you have the system explicitly say 'a sniper on overwatch will 100% of the time kill the first target that enters their firing area, you know this in and out of character, if you want to move through this zone without cover you are either sacrificing a character to do so or you have to come up with some other way'.

[Vahnavoi]

Back to imperfect information variants:

Amidus Drexel, have you played Mafia, Werewolf or other social deduction games?

Using hidden alignment in D&D-like game, you can incorporate a social deduction game into the whole (not unlike divination spell rules incorporate guessing games into D&D). This of course has implications for tactics, since different characters now have different strategies and it isn't obvious who is on what team.

[Pauly]

Some other things that make a game tactical.

- Serious consequences for making bad decisions. I often refer to combat in Cyberpunk as ‘stupidly lethal’ i.e. if you do something stupid you will die. Which isn’t to say that if you take the sub optimal choice you should be punished, but that if you make a really bad choice, like charging a machine gun nest with no cover, no covering fire or something distracting the machine gun next you should get poked full of holes unless you are supremely lucky.

- the opponents have a variety of choices too.

- A limited palette. Some of the most tactical wargames are based on civil wars where each faction has only very small differences between each other. The more things you try to cover in a rules set the more abstractions you have to make to fit everything in. This is why melee combat in a 3 Musketeers type game can be much more tactical and challenging than melee combat in a system like D&D which also has to cater for more variety in ranged attacks and a wide range of different magics. The same way that in Twilight 2000 the combat system sets getting creaky when you add in armored vehicles, artillery and air strikes.


- Tactical choices being more important than character creation and equipment choices. If a player who is great at character design but average at tactics can consistently beat a player who is average at character design but great at tactics then the game is no longer tactical. Some wargames, especially Warhammer and 49K, fall into this bucket.

[kyoryu]

- Serious consequences for making bad decisions. I often refer to combat in Cyberpunk as ‘stupidly lethal’ i.e. if you do something stupid you will die. Which isn’t to say that if you take the sub optimal choice you should be punished, but that if you make a really bad choice, like charging a machine gun nest with no cover, no covering fire or something distracting the machine gun next you should get poked full of holes unless you are supremely lucky.

Both NichG and I hit on this, so fully agreed.

That's the idea that I was using for vitality/wounds, and non-covered attacks go straight to wounds - if you're in cover, then we still have some pacing, but if you forego that then you're taking the brunt of it.



- Tactical choices being more important than character creation and equipment choices. If a player who is great at character design but average at tactics can consistently beat a player who is average at character design but great at tactics then the game is no longer tactical. Some wargames, especially Warhammer and 49K, fall into this bucket.

I think this is actually the #1 thing, above and beyond everything else. Are the tactical choices the primary thing that determines how the battle goes? If so, then it's probably going to feel tactical. If not, it's going to feel like something else with a touch of tactical spice thrown in on top.

[Pex]

Conjecture on my part, but I think if a given player is heavily into tactical combat play he'll be into wargaming miniatures rather than an RPG. In an RPG it would, in my opinion, be boring if all you do is "I attack". In 5E even warlock players don't only want to cast Agonizing Eldritch Blast over and over and over. However, an RPG is more than just combat even if that's the favorite part for a player. The more robust the combat, the less the game cares about why the combat is happening to the point you end up with wargaming miniatures. It can matter to the players they're reenacting a famous battle to be "Wow! Cool!", but the fun in playing is the combat tactics and strategies being tried.

This doesn't stop an RPG from having heavy tactical play, but there the game is niche. The circumstances for the combat is more important than just reenacting a famous battle, but the players would be heavily into the genre of those circumstances. RPGs that tend to want a broader player base will have more simple combats. A game is not wrong for having whatever tactical level it has. It's only a matter of a player's personal taste for which level he prefers or willing to play anyway because he can still have fun with it.

A minor but relevant issue is what those rules are. Is the game playable? Are the choices that are available fun to use? Does the math work out? A game's rules can be great or terrible regardless of its tactical level.

[Catullus64]

Call of Cthulhu deserves, I think, special attention for being not just non-tactical, but actually anti-tactical. I'm going off 6th Edition as my point of reference, but combat is so swingy with die rolls and so lethal that I've never seen combat tactics in a CoC have a meaningful impact on combat. This is, to be clear, a point in the game's favor; if it were possible to triumph in combat encounters through superior tactics, it would really cut against the core themes of the game. If you enter combat against anything non-human, and against most humans unless you have overwhelming firepower, you've already pretty much failed.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2e) and its sister-system Dark Heresy are my gold standard for a fun tactical RPG, though much of that comes down to subjective taste. Simply put, base success chance is sufficiently low for most tests (even stuff your character is trained for) that basic tactical conditions like surprise, outnumbering foes, maneuvering, charging, etc, all feel impactful when you achieve them. There are a lot of different actions available to all PCs regardless of build, and that goes a long way to encouraging tactical play.

The Mouse Guard RPG, of all things, is an interesting example of a fairly tactical system that doesn't track positioning. Instead, tactics are all about knowing which action types counter others, and gambling on the right order for your party to take actions to counteract the enemy based on their most likely approaches. It's tactical in the same way as a round of poker.

[rel]

Tactical combat requires the ability to make meaningful decisions in combat. There need to be multiple things to do, and which choice is best shouldn't be obvious.

If a player could realistically pre-plan all their actions at the beginning of a fight (e.g. shoot arrows at weakest enemy. rinse. repeat.) with no great loss of effectiveness, your system isn't very tactical.

In D&D, how tactical the combat is, and under what conditions varies from edition to edition.
For example 4th edition combat was consistently tactical under most circumstances. But that edition is something of an outlier.

For the other editions of D&D, combat is usually tactical as long as you can cast spells, or have equivalent powers. Or if the game is at a very low level where everyone gets access a few useful powers via gear and generic special moves like wrastling which tend to lose effectiveness at higher levels.



Agreed that uncertainty makes scenarios more interesting (it's why most games use dice!), though I'm not sure what the threshold for "obvious" is here. What's obvious to me (with a heavy math background), and what's obvious to my wife (a writer with almost no background in math) are very different.

It sounds like you're saying "choosing a strategy at the start of the fight removes some of the tactical depth from a combat scenario". Am I reading that right? Does the scenario become less tactical if I try to execute a strategy like "kite the enemy with arrows, shoot the weakest one I can see" or "push past the front line to attack the squishy back line in melee, then clean up the survivors"? Both of those strategies are simple enough that I could plan out my actions multiple turns in advance, even if something goes wrong partway through, but I see both of them as being quite tactical (and certainly more interesting than "I walk up and attack").

----
On a related note, how interesting is hidden information in a tactics game? My experience playing tactics-focused video games (like, for example, Into The Breach, or even BG3) and in running tabletop games, is that hidden information makes things less interesting - the more information I have, the more fun I have trying to solve the tactical puzzle, and that hidden "gotchas" complicate things in a way that mostly results in players defaulting to very simple behaviour (whether that's risky, safe, or just boring depends on the person).


Not uncertainty, but multiple different valid choices. Chess is tactical for that reason, (points in the game with many different viable moves to make) despite a complete lack of uncertainty beyond the decision of who goes first.

That's what I was trying to draw attention to with my hypothetical scenario of a player pre-planning their moves; if there is only one meaningful choice to make, usually because said choice is vastly better than all the others, then it isn't really a choice at all.
If that is a common situation in combat, then the number of real choices a player gets to make is limited. If the number of real choices are low enough, a player could realistically pre-plan all of their actions without much loss of effectiveness.

Sadly this hypothetical actually comes up in most editions of D&D under the conditions I described above; The character build lacks spells or equivalents, and the character level is high enough that generic options like grappling are ineffective enough they can be ignored.

As to the related point, I agree; in my experience, hidden information makes the game less tactical. The more information you have, the more effectively you can evaluate your available choices.
Although it's worth noting that providing too much information can leave a player paralysed with indecision.

[kyoryu]

Not uncertainty, but multiple different valid choices. Chess is tactical for that reason, (points in the game with many different viable moves to make) despite a complete lack of uncertainty beyond the decision of who goes first.

That's what I was trying to draw attention to with my hypothetical scenario of a player pre-planning their moves; if there is only one meaningful choice to make, usually because said choice is vastly better than all the others, then it isn't really a choice at all.
If that is a common situation in combat, then the number of real choices a player gets to make is limited. If the number of real choices are low enough, a player could realistically pre-plan all of their actions without much loss of effectiveness.

Sadly this hypothetical actually comes up in most editions of D&D under the conditions I described above; The character build lacks spells or equivalents, and the character level is high enough that generic options like grappling are ineffective enough they can be ignored.

As to the related point, I agree; in my experience, hidden information makes the game less tactical. The more information you have, the more effectively you can evaluate your available choices.
Although it's worth noting that providing too much information can leave a player paralysed with indecision.

We can get into a little game theory territory here, and point out that, if you have perfect information, theoretically every game is completely solvable.

Practically, you need some hidden information - and the easiest is "what the other player is going to do". Theoretically in a sequential perfect information game that's insufficient, but for some games the possibility space is large enough that they haven't been solved.

But either way, it's easier to make decisions that aren't "solvable" by adding hidden information - either randomness, simultaneous turns, truly hidden info, etc. Most of us aren't good enough at game design to make a Chess or a Go. And when you add in build possibilities, it's doubly easy to overwhelm the importance of the tactical decisions with the build decisions - since build decisions in most cases seem to favor maximizing a few tricks so that they can be used in all cases.

[Pex]

Not uncertainty, but multiple different valid choices. Chess is tactical for that reason, (points in the game with many different viable moves to make) despite a complete lack of uncertainty beyond the decision of who goes first.

That's what I was trying to draw attention to with my hypothetical scenario of a player pre-planning their moves; if there is only one meaningful choice to make, usually because said choice is vastly better than all the others, then it isn't really a choice at all.
If that is a common situation in combat, then the number of real choices a player gets to make is limited. If the number of real choices are low enough, a player could realistically pre-plan all of their actions without much loss of effectiveness.

Sadly this hypothetical actually comes up in most editions of D&D under the conditions I described above; The character build lacks spells or equivalents, and the character level is high enough that generic options like grappling are ineffective enough they can be ignored.

As to the related point, I agree; in my experience, hidden information makes the game less tactical. The more information you have, the more effectively you can evaluate your available choices.
Although it's worth noting that providing too much information can leave a player paralysed with indecision.

D&D tactics come in based on the situation. I was in a game where the party was trapped in a wizard tower storeroom. Doorway blocked by Prismatic Wall. Iron Golem guard attacking. Room filling with poisonous gas.

Playing a barbarian I grappled the golem, made it prone, and kept it there. That allowed the rogue to kite rolling with advantage to hit and sneak attack. Me pinning the golem gave the cleric the freedom to cast his spells to break through the Prismatic Wall without interference. The fighter helped with ingredients and items in the storeroom. The druid was free to wildshape into an earth elemental in hopes of digging us an alternative way out. The monk, being immune to poison, was able to crawl through the vents to disable the device that was producing the poisonous gas. The druid was able to dig the tunnel before the Prismatic Wall came down so we escaped that way with the golem finally destroyed. That was an absolute blast to play out.

D&D PCs do have their default standard operating procedures, which are fun to play, but the DM is key to making a fun encounter where PCs have to do something else for a change.

[Telok]

D&D PCs do have their default standard operating procedures, which are fun to play, but the DM is key to making a fun encounter where PCs have to do something else for a change.

I obviously wasn't there but that doesn't exactly sound like there was much of anything tactical. Like the only tactics question is if trading the barbarian's attacks for attempts to prone the golem is better than just beating it down (I assume just shoving the bloody thing through the prismatic wall wasn't an option for some reason). Everything else sounded like general exploration "interact with the environment" bits. Did the rogue have any tactical choices to make in regards to the combat? The rest of the party didn't even engage in the combat so... no tactical stuff there? It comes across as a fairly typical D&D combat of walking in and beating down the hit points of an enemy in a room, then getting back to doing the interesting things.

I'm pretty jaded though. I've seen a couple decades of D&D fights that amounted to "walk up, roll attack & damage, repeat until out of hp". Sure, every map there's a lava pit, zappy thing, acid pool, or whatever in a corner or even the middle of the map. Maybe a pit, chasm, wall, or balcony between the party's start position and some archers or casters. Occasionally a timer of some sort or additional enemies appear. But it always boiles down to archers just standing around shooting, melee walking up to the closest thing and smacking it, and the casters getting actual tactical choices between buff, control, or damage. The main tactical options of the non-casters was which opponents to engage and maybe which magic weapon to use, which was often only a choice if they were archers or had extremely high mobility for a D&D character.

Of course I'm remembering AD&D strength base melee warrior-type characters that were equally good with lances, swords, halberds, and almost as good as that with bows & thrown darts. Where the difference between bonuses from strength and dexterity was two or three points and magic another point or two, which was strongly overshadowed by the the character's level bonus. Or maybe late 3.5 Tome of Battle melee characters who could get all around good saves and choose between having great offense, defense, or mobility on a round to round basis. And then compare to my experience with D&D 5e melee characters where at 15th or so level we blew all our money on dragon slaying arrows only to have the fighter and barbarian miss every single shot and be useless until the casters moved the dracolich near them where they could finally walk up to hit it with swords.

Even the party level tactics seem constrained by D&D's limitations on melee warrior classes having to walk up within arms reach of an enemy. Everything squad level tactical feels like it revolves around getting the melee to the enemy (haste or fly or buffing saves) or controlling the enemy so melee can reach them (immobilizing or cutting line of sight). The other way is having a bunch of casters and archers which allows you to use cover, range, stealth, ambush, etc.

And again, a good GM can invent stuff to add tactical options to any game system on an encounter by encounter basis. Or a GM add character options to any game system that add tactical options. But I like it when that burden is lifted from the GM's shoulders.

[Pex]

No one even thought to shove the golem into the wall. D'oh!

The point is the party didn't use standard operating procedures. I didn't attack for damage this combat, just held the golem down and let someone else do it. The rogue was the best candidate for that as she did the most damage with sneak attack. Specifically to the point I was responding to grappling proved not useless just because we were high level. It absolutely was more important for me to stop a creature from moving than just attacking it for damage. The fighter could have helped the rogue and killed it faster, but she felt it was more important to get rid of the prismatic wall as fast as possible doing Use An Object action instead of attacking. Me and the rogue made the golem not a threat. The cleric went all offense on the wall instead of crowd control, buffing, and healing. The druid and monk did utility.

A D&D DM should not shut down a PC's modus operandi all the time, but occasionally it's fine. I already said D&D is not heavily tactical, but that's not the same thing as having no tactics at all. In a current campaign playing a paladin, while yes I still do "I attack" when I was in a slave pit fight, I found cause to have cast Magic Weapon and Wrathful Smite. I would never had thought I would ever want to cast Magic Weapon, but there it was. My opponent wasn't even resistant to non-magical weapons, but the extra +1 to hit and damage made a difference. That was cool for me. It was simple. It was boring "I attack", but that desire to do something new and different made it all the more fun.

[Telok]

Specifically to the point I was responding to grappling proved not useless just because we were high level.

Right-o, my mistake then. I totally missed that. Yeah, D&D 5e grappling is ok at being a moderate debuff on non-caster opponents on the general small to large sizes at most any level, and the opportunity cost for strength base characters is small.

[Xihirli]

If the iron golem was prone and the rogue was kiting, the rogue should have been firing with disadvantage, not advantage.

[Pex]

If the iron golem was prone and the rogue was kiting, the rogue should have been firing with disadvantage, not advantage.

She was a Swashbuckler. She comes into melee, attack with advantage and sneak attack, then move away without an opportunity attack. When it's the golem's turn after a failed attempt to break the grapple since I'm the only one there it would attack me, but I'm raging so taking half-damage while having lots and lots of hit points. I love bear barbarians. No one else gets hurt. The party loves me so much too.

It was a great campaign. I miss it terribly.

[Amidus Drexel]

My decisions in XCOM are all about where my people go, how they're exposing themselves, and how their positioning is in comparison to the enemy. I worry about balancing movement and aggression with exposing myself and isolating units. I worry about overextending myself, and also worry about clumping too much and making myself subject to getting flanked and subject to area attacks. This all feels tactical to me.

On a featureless plane yes, but both XCOM and Battletech play out on maps littered with obstacles. (And notably they give each player multiple units.)

A clear shot at a melee alien in XCOM could be unavailable due to buildings, a large segment of cover, or because getting the angle would expose your unit too much. It might not be your easiest shot or the best choice when higher priority targets are around. The 1v1 massively favors the unit with the gun, but that’s not how the game plays. D&D and company tend to only give the player one unit, you need to be running the whole party by yourself to really have a finger on the tactical depth available.

That's the real issue, I think, from a game-design perspective. Having one guy pinned down and unable to contribute until the sniper is dealt with isn't an issue if you have 5 more space marines under your direct control who can go deal with the sniper. No matter how many options a single character has, they can't literally be in two places at once (well, not usually, at least), so games that give each player a single character to control (generally) try to avoid requiring that. If that one character gets knocked out of the fight, someone is sitting on their hands for a while (even if the character isn't out of the game permanently), where games that give each player multiple units to move around can be a little more aggressive about taking individual units out of the fight (for any reason).

The lethality of XCOM seems like it maps fairly well to low-level D&D in older editions (i.e. a single lucky hit could down a character, and most characters can't survive more than a few hits in total), where a few archers with a readied action might actually lock down the area in their line of sight. That's definitely something that drops off to some extent for newer editions of D&D (where HP tends to outscale damage), especially as PCs reach higher levels.


And again, a good GM can invent stuff to add tactical options to any game system on an encounter by encounter basis. Or a GM add character options to any game system that add tactical options. But I like it when that burden is lifted from the GM's shoulders.

What are some ways that a combat system might encourage that? What are some combat systems you're familiar with that do (and how do they accomplish it?). You've mentioned DtD40k7e, but I got more of a "the system gives players lots of buttons to push" vibe instead of a "system helps the GM make positioning and movement matters" vibe from your first comment about it earlier in the thread.

[kyoryu]

That's the real issue, I think, from a game-design perspective. Having one guy pinned down and unable to contribute until the sniper is dealt with

That's incredibly black and white. There's lots of things where you can restrict options while avoiding the binary of "can do everything" and "can't do anything".

The easiest and most obvious version of this is area denial - there are certain places you effectively can't go until a sniper is dealt with. You can still go anywhere else, and do anything else - it doesn't have to be effectively stunlocking one player.

[Telok]

What are some ways that a combat system might encourage that? What are some combat systems you're familiar with that do (and how do they accomplish it?). You've mentioned DtD40k7e, but I got more of a "the system gives players lots of buttons to push" vibe instead of a "system helps the GM make positioning and movement matters" vibe from your first comment about it earlier in the thread.

Thats kind of funny because I think of movement options as buttons to push. I'm not sure that any system natively "makes position and movement" matter much in individual humanoid combat (vehicles & starships absolutely). That's baseline on the encounter area which ia often dictated by the GM.

That said, in DtD40k7e its trivial to have characters that are quite competent in both melee & ranged combat. Running movement distances range from 24 meters per round (10 to 15 seconds as I run the game) to easily 100 meters per round, and ranged attacks on runners are at -5 to hit. Melee damage is kept up with ranged options by having damage more easily boosted, smoke grenades being relatively easily acessible, and the stronger ranged weapons having a few drawbacks like low ammo or recharge times. On the other hand ranged is pretty sweet with the sniper rifles, machine guns, rocker launcher, and laser cannon (yes all available to starting characters) having 500 meter or longer ranges and enough damage you don't want to get tagged. The simple hit locations make cover and the choice of called shots vs basic attacks matter. With a modest allocation of starting points you can start with (or buy it later) needler guns with tranquilizer darts, webber or net guns, and unarmed combat is legitimately more likely to knock people out from inflicting fatigue than killing them through hit point loss. Suppressing fire works too, both a reasonable hit point/damage balance making getting hit unpleasant and a morale check make it a real threat to normal people and animals. Oh, and you can start the game with a tamed tyrannosauris rex to ride and a couple retainers to look after your "Mr. Floofers", who is capable of 70 kph sprints and completely demolishing a cargo van in two bites.

So thats the characters, but the same options are open to npcs. The first combat I ever ran was along a beach with the opening shot being a frag rocket to the face at almost 200 meters (high constitution ork melee types being fairly tough) and ended with the attackers getting mowed down in melee (specifically involving a decapitation crit delivered by said ork). Several assassins (someone took the Enemy drawback) have recently used smoke grenades and either blind fighting or sonar cyber-ears to very good advantage. The main point here is that the ranges and styles of engagements are much more diverse, partly due to the modern/future setting, than many fantasy dungeon crawlers and people care about cover & firing arcs when you break out the flamethrowers.

[Xervous]

Battletech gets its depth from movement and positioning in the following ways.

1. The way damage gets applied depends on facing. This makes backstabs lethal and allows units to turn to protect a damaged side.

2. Turning costs movement, you can’t backpedal as fast as you can move forward.

3. Most units are not innately harder to hit. Any unit that moves enough hexes will be harder to hit in that given round.

4. The round structure resolves all units’ movement, then all fire. There’s no “I go first and alpha strike so you don’t get a turn.” And there’s no endless anime teleport 2 man conga line of backstabs.

5. There are elaborate (some optional) rules for (everything including) when units are in forced withdrawal, mission killed, destroyed outright, have their morale broken, etc. Establishing these reference points allows a system to provide early departure branches from a fight where players and the GM can ask “how invested is this character in the fight?”

[Pauly]

That's the real issue, I think, from a game-design perspective. Having one guy pinned down and unable to contribute until the sniper is dealt with isn't an issue if you have 5 more space marines under your direct control who can go deal with the sniper. No matter how many options a single character has, they can't literally be in two places at once (well, not usually, at least), so games that give each player a single character to control (generally) try to avoid requiring that. If that one character gets knocked out of the fight, someone is sitting on their hands for a while (even if the character isn't out of the game permanently), where games that give each player multiple units to move around can be a little more aggressive about taking individual units out of the fight (for any reason).


What are some ways that a combat system might encourage that? What are some combat systems you're familiar with that do (and how do they accomplish it?). You've mentioned DtD40k7e, but I got more of a "the system gives players lots of buttons to push" vibe instead of a "system helps the GM make positioning and movement matters" vibe from your first comment about it earlier in the thread.

Part of the sniper problem is that it is very difficult to program how snipers actually operate onto a TT game. Snipers don't interdict entire zones, they interdict a very small selected area at any one time. The process goes something like observe the whole area, choose a target location to interdict, set up their rifle for the specific range, wait for the right target to expose themselves, take the shot. In TT games all of that gets reduced to 'I put my sniper on overwatch'. The second issue is that irl snipers will reposition after their first shot, or maybe their second, but will never take a 3rd shot from the same position. In a TT game snipers can keep plinking away from the same position until the cows come home.
The more realistic you make sniping in a TT game the more boring it is for the players, the more playable you make sniping the more overpowered it becomes.


Cyberpunk and Traveller encourage tactical combat through a number of ways. Firstly is that the PCs generally aren't one trick ponies. They can melee or they can shoot to varying degrees of competence. PCs have access to a range of purchasable equipment such as smoke grenades, grappling lines, comms/hacking gear that give them viable options other than 'I deplete the enemy's HP'. Most scenarios aren't written as combat encounters. They are written as objectives to be achieved, and killing all the enemy is rarely a win condition for the encounter.

[Telok]

In TT games all of that gets reduced to 'I put my sniper on overwatch'. The second issue is that irl snipers will reposition after their first shot, or maybe their second, but will never take a 3rd shot from the same position. In a TT game snipers can keep plinking away from the same position until the cows come home.


Those issues are easily handled by defining that overwatch style prep/actions cover only a limited area, require you to stay out, and that enemies suppress the sniper once their position is known. For that though you need some concept of facing (though it need not be universal or always on) and focus (can't take other actions during this without breaking it and give advantage to those not in the focus zone). Plus stuff like when enemies know a sniper is present they check if they have weapons capable of going around (grenades go over) or penetrating (rocket launcher FTW) any cover the sniper is using.

These things aren't really all that [i]difficult[/] once you know what you want the rules to do. But it is another rule/action on top of the common "ready action to foo" action. Not all games or designers want that, but it means the game won't natively support that activity. So when someone wants to add it they often do something like add a new class or skill option and thats often... well the D&D 5e assassin is a bit of a poster child of this sort of thing, a generic stabby thief with its own special rule that kinda sort of maybe works ok but not all that well.

I think its this cross of "lets write less rules" + "add a new thing to cover the missing rule" that's often the problem. Especially when it gets spread out over multiple (and especially if unrelated) books and different writers.

[kyoryu]

Part of the sniper problem is that it is very difficult to program how snipers actually operate onto a TT game. Snipers don't interdict entire zones, they interdict a very small selected area at any one time. The process goes something like observe the whole area, choose a target location to interdict, set up their rifle for the specific range, wait for the right target to expose themselves, take the shot. In TT games all of that gets reduced to 'I put my sniper on overwatch'. The second issue is that irl snipers will reposition after their first shot, or maybe their second, but will never take a 3rd shot from the same position. In a TT game snipers can keep plinking away from the same position until the cows come home.
The more realistic you make sniping in a TT game the more boring it is for the players, the more playable you make sniping the more overpowered it becomes.

Sniping shouldn't really be a "combat" thing IMO. At least not in how we normally think of combat. It's area denial, and is really its own sort of challenge.

That said, I think you could do a reasonable approximation of it with a few rules.

1. The sniper can "lock down" a geographical area, and take a shot at anybody that enters it. Through <system specific rule shenanigans>, this attack has a high percentage chance of being deadly. (todo: make the first shot from the sniper not necessarily kill to make the act of discovering we have a sniper to deal with feel "fair").
2. The sniper's location is unknown to start. Each time that the sniper fires, a token is placed in a randomized position around teh sniper's actual position, indicating sound/etc. that would help pinpoint the sniper. The inaccuracy needs to be sufficient that a single data point doesn't really give you enough information to launch an effective attack (though if there's only one reasonable hiding spot, well, poor choice Mr. Sniper).

Boom, done. If you want to put in more rules around time to aim first, be my guest. Sounds something like "1 turn to set aim, then after that you can take a sniper shot". Deadliness, to emulate "real world", needs to be sufficient that people don't want to just ignore the sniper and aren't willing to just eat the bullet to charge through.

This also makes an incentive to keep moving (enough tokens around the position will eventually give the position away), while not making it a hard rule. That makes moving an interesting choice, which is always a good thing.

While this seems very specific, a general overwatch mechanic would make a lot of sense for a firearms-focused game. That could neatly encompass covering fire as well, with snipers and covering fire being specializations of the generic rule, possibly even just based on different math numbers rather than separate rules.

This does end up looking a lot different than standard hit point attrition combat. But, for heavily firearm-based games, that might make sense. I don't know that hit point attrition is a great model for firearms.

[gbaji]

But if you want to promote tactics in a combat the easiest thing to do is add exploding barrels. Tell the players that their characters know the barrels (technically whatever is in them but trope with it) will explode. You'll immedately see them trying to "enemy + barrel + boom = yes" in all but the least pyromaniac parties. Just go with a self rule of "no boring empty rooms" for your encounters and the rest pretty much falls into place as much as your game system allows.

I get what you are saying in principle, but a part of me objects to this on the simple point of "why are we fighting in a room full of exploding barrels in the first place?". If you have to contrive that much additional terrain effects to make the combat tactical, then it's a good indication that the game maybe isn't terribly tactical all by itself (or by default). Yes. You can certainly inject tactics into a combat by adding hazards into said combat, but that's really kinda avoiding the point.

It might be a good test of how tactical a TTRPG is by examining how many options are present when there *isn't* any terrain involved. And I think a few people brought up some really good points about not just options at build time, or outfit time (or spell selection time, whatever), but also right in the moment in the middle of the combat itself. If, right now, in this fight, in this round, there is one and only one "best option" to make (and it's obvious), then that would seem to lean in the direction of "less tactical" to me. If, however, I have multiple combat options, which themselves have slightly different effects, but all of them provide a "route to victory (maybe)", and it's not always perfectly clear which is best (but could be as the combat progresses), then that's leaning into the "more tactical" direction.



It seems like there's some tension between "long-range weapons add tactical depth by enabling effective suppression zones" and "long-range weapons remove tactical depth because positioning becomes less important". For example, if your machine-gunner's effective range is shorter than a melee bruiser's movement, you're getting (at most) one round of shots off before he closes the distance and squashes you. If the gunner's effective range is too large, though, then the melee bruiser can't close effectively without pulling out his own ranged weapon - at which point the fight devolves into "who can kite more effectively".

Yup. Which actually raises the question of whether a game system should value realism versus "fun to play". Because realistically, what you describe is exactly how things work in real combat. I have a friend who drove a tank in the Gulf war, and he directly described the tactics: Our effective range is X, their's is Y (which, conveniently was less than X for this particular comparison). So keep them in a range closer than X and farther than Y. For an M60 vs T72 comparison (for example), that's about 300-400 yards thick of "doughtnut" you want to keep the other guy in. So yeah. Basically, using kiting tactics (sorta). Of course, there is the pesky issue of terrain...

But yeah. That may not be terribly fun to play out.

There are also elements of this that most games don't really simulate well (especially turn based RPGs). As someone else mentioned, in the real world, most opponents are focused on a single specific area they are looking at and therefore likely to spot and target someone entering. But most games just simulate this as "this ranged opponent can hit any location within range and LoS". This can have the effect of overpowering the concept of ranged opportunity fire. Another effect which is not well simulated is the concept of taking time to both change focus/target area *and* the concept of changing magazines/belts/whatever. In a turn based game, the fixed position gunner just has their weapon, and can fire it each turn, and (perhaps) get opportunity fire as it's made available. But in real combat, the idea of "wait until the machine gunner changes ammo/barrels/whatever and charge" is a very very real thing.

A lot of games manage this by making the combatants tougher to such weapons than they might otherwise be. Which, I suppose, maybe evens things out (again, how "real" do you want your simulation to be?). There are also lots of accounts where continuing to advance forward, even in the face of machine gun fire and mortars was the correct choice. There's a great scene of this in the series "Band of Brothers" (seriously like the best film or series set in that conflict/period, made all the better in that it's based on real events), where they're walking down a road towards Carentan, and come under fire as they approach the town. Initially, they all duck and try to take cover (more or less in ditches on the side of the road). But Winters realizes that the enemy just now spotted them, so they're only taking fire from whatever gunners happened to already be positioned to watch that approach to the town, so the longer they linger there, the more time the enemy will have to reposition their weapons, eventually just pining them down with machine guns, and then blanketing them with mortars (which would be really really bad). He orders the men up, in spite of bullets flying at them, and forward. They lose some men, but get into the buildings at the edge of town, and are then able to succesfully engage building to building from that point on.

Again though, that's really hard to realistically simulate in a game. Even dedicated war games have a hard time doing this well. I don't normally expect a RPG to do so (and the focus on individual characters alone makes this problematic). I suppose this may be why I tend to gravitate towards more fantasy setting games. It's maybe easier for me to picture tactics using magic and thinking "that makes sense", than tactics using actual military technology (and not have some "that really doesn't make sense" moments).


Call of Cthulhu deserves, I think, special attention for being not just non-tactical, but actually anti-tactical. I'm going off 6th Edition as my point of reference, but combat is so swingy with die rolls and so lethal that I've never seen combat tactics in a CoC have a meaningful impact on combat. This is, to be clear, a point in the game's favor; if it were possible to triumph in combat encounters through superior tactics, it would really cut against the core themes of the game. If you enter combat against anything non-human, and against most humans unless you have overwhelming firepower, you've already pretty much failed.

Yeah. The "tactics" in CoC is more or less "get the drop on the other guy(s)". Combat is typically brutal and short, and hopefully initiated by your side. I've seen some people try to make CoC into a more combat focused game, but it requires a heck of a lot of custom tweaks to work, and honestly it just doesn't fit what I see as the theme of the game in the first place. Trying to simulate actual "even" gunfights, and then rely on some tactical choices after combat start to determine who wins just doesn't fit at all. Most NPC initiated combats (well, unless the PCs just royally screwed up), will be (hopefully) somewhat wimpy creatures/cultists leaping out of the shadows at the party while they're wandering through creepy tunnels or whatever. And the "tactics" usually just involve "do I shoot with my pistol, or my shotgun (or if I've got time/distance, blast with dynamite). Anything tougher than that initiating combat on the party is a fail, not just because you're likely to die right there, but also because if the bad guys know enough about you (and have the time) to assemble an offensive force against you, you've likely lost the scenario anyway.

Used to play that game all the time. Loved it. Very very different playstyle from most games though, and required a significant shift of thinking about how to play. Was often quite amusing running CoC in tourney play. You could absolutely spot the players who were just accustomed to D&D style dungeon crawl adventures. They fully expected "show me a bad guy for me to fight", and often had a hard time with the whole "No. You really want to keep a low profile while asking questions and doing research, and only act once you know what is going on and know what to do about it". It's kinda like playing a game of clue. Once you think you have the correct answers, you make your move. If you're wrong, you will lose. Of course, if you wait too long, you'll lose too...



Part of the sniper problem is that it is very difficult to program how snipers actually operate onto a TT game. Snipers don't interdict entire zones, they interdict a very small selected area at any one time. The process goes something like observe the whole area, choose a target location to interdict, set up their rifle for the specific range, wait for the right target to expose themselves, take the shot. In TT games all of that gets reduced to 'I put my sniper on overwatch'. The second issue is that irl snipers will reposition after their first shot, or maybe their second, but will never take a 3rd shot from the same position. In a TT game snipers can keep plinking away from the same position until the cows come home.
The more realistic you make sniping in a TT game the more boring it is for the players, the more playable you make sniping the more overpowered it becomes.

Ah yeah. This is where I saw this mentioned. Kinda touched on that earlier. Agree 100%. You *can* increase realism in the game simulation, but there is a point of diminishing returns in terms of "fun to play".

My personal opinion is that "close enough" is usually good. And that playability does often trump realism. Um... That doesn't mean that there aren't advantages and methods to make games have more tactical options available to them. Those options can be abstracted a bit from "realism" though, which can work just fine. Even if it's "I can play red, green, or blue" with those having little or nothing to do with "real world" choices, still works as long as each of them have different game mechanic effects and they all interact together in the rules, and all have actual reasonably balanced utility/power.

Obviously, if you can inject tactically balanced choices into a game, and also make them at least "mostly realistic", that's great. Sometimes, that's just hard to do though.

[Telok]

I get what you are saying in principle, but a part of me objects to this on the simple point of "why are we fighting in a room full of exploding barrels in the first place?". If you have to contrive that much additional terrain effects to make the combat tactical, then it's a good indication that the game maybe isn't terribly tactical all by itself (or by default). Yes. You can certainly inject tactics into a combat by adding hazards into said combat, but that's really kinda avoiding the point.

The exploding barrels thing is just the easiest and (I think) most fun was to jumpstart some tactics in un-tactical games. But specifically and importantly, which I now realize I didn't mention, everyone needs to be able to reasonably interact and trigger whatever hazard the GM adds.

Everyone interacts with exploding barrels, hit it and it goes boom. But something like cliffs to push people off aren't enough in a game like D&D. The D&D I get to play the only people who can use cliffs or zone hazards or such is the barbarian, fighter, and warlock. The barb & fighter aren't giving up 30-40 damage a round to do 10d6 falling damage to a mook enemy with 100 hp, resist to nonmagic damage, and might fly. The warlock tries it but the GM has a 2 dex save house rule, one for going over and another to catch the edge (its leftover from lower levels when the party wasn't all flying and having 80+ hp). Even if it was worth it the clerics, ranger, and sorcerer can't use it because their strength is low and we fight large and huge stuff a lot. So last fight with a 80 foot cliff that had lava at the bottom, but the cliff effectively didn't exist for the purpose of tactics.

So that bit of my post wasn't about whether or not a game is tactical or to what extent. I've said I think the "GM can homebrew a fix to anything" is a weak excuse so GM action isn't part of innate game system tactics. But for sticking in easy things to prompt tactics and keeping gameplay fun the "no empty rooms" is important. Like I've run even good tactics games through modules with empty rooms (and places that are effectively empty) and it sucks the tactics right out. Those get to the point of describing the situation, ask players what they're doing, and have them roll a group fight check to see how much ammo gets spent. Just to get that **** out of the way and back to the real game.

Heck, I did that this weekend. A big dangerous critter busted out of a cage on a shuttle boosting to orbit. But they've got two characters capable of keeping it basically immobile, its already wounded, the party still had the tranq dart guns (partly because those are legal open carry on that planet and PCs hate being relatively "unarmed" even if they punch as hard as a shotgun slug). So despite the theoretical possibility of the critter getting to the cockpit or tearing open a door at mach 2, effectively they've got it trapped in a small room. I could see it would be a boring fight, just trading attacks. Skip setting up the map or anything, just roll to fight and move on.

[gbaji]

Right. I get all of that. And yeah, I did just write about "playing fun" versus "playing realistic", but while I think terrain is a good thing to have and should have some effect on the combat, it should not be there just for the sake of being there and having an effect on combat. It should also make sense that this room/location/whatever, with this "stuff" in it, is where the combat happens. If there's a room full of exploding barrels (who keeps those lying around?), then either the bad guys set them up in the room, and lure the party in (or require that they go through it to be to them), and then attack them. Or the party knows and does the opposite. My point is that someone presumably has to actually choose "the room with the exploding barrels" to have the fight, and that side would only do so if the exploding barrels created an advantage to them in the fight. Otherwise, it's just a really dumb place to decide to have a fight.

Also, I think there's value in focusing on terrain as something other than yet another damage source for the combat. Terrain should be about blocking line of sight, or allowing stealthy folks to get closer to ranged enemies (or the exact opposite!), or slowing down or blocking movement. Those actually introduce tactics into the combat. Walls that create bottlenecks work well. Mud or steep slopes that slow down movement also work. To me, terrain based tactics is mostly about positioning so that one side or the other has an advantage, not just that the terrain itself causes damage.

But I think the number one thing to consider about terrain is the bit I mentioned at the top. It has to make sense, and it should be used by whomever is setting up and/or initiating the fight. The bad guys should not attack the party on the edge of a cliff with lava below just because the GM thinks that will create more tactical options for the players. They should only do so if it creates a tactical advantage for the bad guys. If they are all low strength mooks, and the party has big strong fighters, or has members who can fly (and they don't), then it's a really poor choice. If the NPCs have a room full of exploding barrels, then they should be hiding on one side of the room, hidden behind normal (ie: not exploding) barrels, while the party enters from the other, with a good number of exploding barrels around them (the NPCs know which ones explode, and the PCs do not). Now, a small number of archers with flaming arrows (or whatever will set off the barrels), and some minor obstacles to movement, and maybe a few decent fighters just to hold up anyone who does make it across the room, becomes a major problem for the party. The party has to walk through a literal minefield of barrels being set off all around them, while they have minuses to hit the enemies (cause they're hiding behind non-exploding barrels). Heck. Spread some oil on the floor, and put a pit trap somewhere about 2/3rds of the way across the room, right along the most obvious somewhat barrel-free path between them, and you're really getting somewhere.

You also have to think about why something would be there in the first place. Does this group of bad guys manufacture exploding barrels and sell them on the exploding barrel market or something (not saying that's not a possiblity of course). It's just that things have to make at least a little bit of sense (unless that's the whole theme of the setting I guess). If the NPCs are bad guys (and let's assume they are), and the've been doing bad things, but have never once in all their robbing, looting, pillaging, murdering, or inside trading, ever used any sorts of explosive devices or weapons or materials of any kind, but then, when the party goes to their hidden lair, they run into a room full of exploding barrels, that's going to seem really contrived and out of place. And if the bad guys attack them in that room, but the barrels seem to be just as much of a problem for them as the party, it's going to be a real head-scratcher.

[warty goblin]

In a straight forward combat scenario, I think tactics boil down to one question: how to maximize the force applied to the enemy while minimizing the force they can apply back. Because the enemy is trying to do the same thing back, generally in a complex environment, a lot of tactics are directly about responding to what the enemy is doing and where they are doing it. I think that is what makes a game feel tactical, if why I'm doing something is specific to what the enemy is doing and where they're doing it.

For example, an enemy is behind cover in XCOM. I move around and shoot from a flanking position. Feels tactical, in a small way, because the enemy did something in the environment to minimize my ability to hurt them, and I responded by engaging with the world to negate that.

Something that doesn't feel like tactics so much as optimization. I'm playing a game called Miasma Chronicles, which is basically XCOM but with real time stealth bits. If you kill a lone enemy in one shot, they don't raise the alarm. My character with a silenced sniper rifle has an ability that massively raises her crit chance for one shot, which lets you more or guarantee one shots on much tougher enemies than otherwise possible. Fun and rewarding, but it doesn't really feel tactical because it doesn't care about the environment and isn't about what the enemy is actually doing. It's pressing a button on my character sheet to make a number go up.

I think that difference between responsive, world-facing tactic and static, self-facing optimization is where RPGs generally fall down. You can't flank an enemy if they don't have cover, you can always press your character sheet button. Because the major feedback loop in a lot of rpgs is centered on character advancement and distinct character rolls, they're really good at giving you lots of buttons to push, so you can look forwards to new buttons and have your buttons be different from everybody else's.

But that exists in direct tension with world-facing tactical play. For one thing environmental factors can negate some character builds, e.g. if difficult terrain stops charges there's an upper limit on how much of it you can have before charger builds become a bad idea and Bob the Barbarian's player starts to get cranky. To maximize player expression through character optimization you end up needing to minimize the ability of the environment and the enemy to *actively* interfere with your build choices. At the limit case you get something like Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, where there is no terrain, only numbers, and a cursed island floating in a hellish sea where it rains blood is effectively the same as a frozen temple or a field on a warm spring day. None of these fights feel tactical, they're optimization problems about showing up with big enough numbers on your character sheet and deciding whether a given fight is worth spending a button press to activate your build's resource dependent utterly bonkers nonsense.

So I think for an RPG to feel tactical, it needs to matter what the enemy does, and where they are doing it. And whatever upgrades you get can't simply make the tactics problem go away, if they solve one sort of problem the setting needs to push back with another.

[gbaji]

Well. I think that's why a lot of people talk about tactics in a RPG in the context of numbers of viable options available at any given time, and the degree to which those different options can operate differently in different situations, and thus have advantages and disadvantages depending on the specifics of the situation.

If a character has one "best option", and the environment at hand really just adjusts how effective that "one best option" is, then it's not really tactics, it's just a matter of how restrictive the GM is making the environment be for that encounter.

If a character has half a dozen more or less equal options, and the environment at hand provides advantages to some, and disadvantages to others, then tactics can be employed in the form of the player making choices about which options to use in response to said environmental conditions. In this case, the GM is using those factors to force/allow the player's choices to make a difference in the outcome of the encounter. Additionally, the PC may have incomplete information, which may affect how effective the option choices are initially, and introduce a learning curve into the encounter as well. All of which are "good things" IMO.

But yeah. All of this is contingent on a game system that encourages/allows for character builds to employ multiple different options that are close enough in base effectiveness that a disadvantage applied to one, makes switching to using another worth doing. As has been pointed out a number of times, one of the problems with D&D (specifically its melee combat system) is that it is almost always going to be the "best option" to use the same attack/weapon/whaatever even if there are minuses due to some specific thing going on, then to switch to some other option. This is largely due to the fact that bonuses tend to be feat based and apply to specific weapon/feat combinations, while other effects in combat tend to be "global" (meaning that if you have plusses or minuses due to some effect on you or your opponent, or as a result of a combat action decision, it applies to anything you do). As a result, the melee character in D&D will always be better making full attacks with his best weapon, and making defensive attacks while weilding the same weapon, and (insert any other combat action option here) with... you guessed it... the same weapon.

Most of the tactical options in D&D comes from decisions about spell and ability use. But even then, most of the time the choice about what to use at any given time is pretty obvious. But yeah, it is an area where the GM can at least craft encounters that may have some decent tactical considerations.


I tend to think that, at least in terms of character development over time, game systems that encourage and reward "broad growth" instead of "deep growth" will tend to also encourage greater tactical flexibility in the resulting characters. And once again, the problem with D&D is that due to the way CRs scale with level, and this affects difficulties for pretty much everything, players are strongly encouraged to "go deep" with their abilities (and in some cases will arguably be gimping themselves if they don't). As a result, as characters gain levels, the greater the gap between the "things I've focused my build on" and "everything else" grows. And that means that the conditions at hand have to create an absolutely massive penalty to the character's "best ability/skill/weapon/whatever" to make them ever choose to use something else instead. The result is relatively one dimensional characters with few actual options to use during play (and often really relegated to their "role" in the party itself too).

I've played a lot of both D&D and RuneQuest, and there is a stark difference between the two game systems in this area. RQ almost "accidentallly" generates characters that tend to develop lots of breadth over time. The skill and experience system just naturally causes characters to become really good at a whole variety of things over time. We've also added custom house rules to the game system which (maybe not even intending it at the time) makes for even more tactical choices in the game (and especially in combat). I added reach, AoO, and close combat rules to the system, which gives characters significant reasons to chose to use different weapons in different situations. We introduced an "advanced martial arts" system, that provides significant differences and effects when using different weapon combinations with regard to how offensive or defensive someone is (and also making different choices based on how skilled versus how powerful/damaging the opponents are). And even the base rules system, due to its use of active defensive skills, means that there's a massive swing in terms of combat results depending on combat option choices made at any given time. The delta between various options in D&D may be a few points worth of plus/minus on to-hit or AC, which may create a slight difference in terms of average damage done versus average damage taken over time during the duration of a combat. In RQ, the difference between making or missing that defensive skill right now, in this one round, can be "I take zero damage" and "I'm incapacitated and out of the fight until healed". The base decision of which defensive option to take and when can make a huge difference even if both would be successes. Weapon combinations actually really matter, as a function of the weapons and combat system itself, and not just due to "I have a feat that gives me X when using Y type of weapon" type things.

So yeah. There are absolutely some game systems that encourage more tactical choices and variation than others. That's not to say that less tactical games aren't also "fun" (I've rarely *not* enjoyed playing D&D). But... if you are really looking for tactics to matter, I do think that a lot of that can stem from the basic experience and advancement methodologies employed by the game system itself. And I suppose how detailed the combat system is (though, to be fair, too much detail can drag as well).

[Pauly]

One thing D&D and D&D derived systems do is they tend reward specialisation over having multiple abilities. For example generally speaking a party of a level 10 fighter and a level 10 wizard will outperform a party of two 5/5 fighter/wizards. This creates a feedback loop which reduces the number of tactical options a player will have. The obvious exception being level sipping where a character can gain game altering benefits for a small number of levels into a different class than their main class.

Classless systems tend to reward breadth of skills over depth of skills. So the feedback loop often leads to more varied tactics as players have more options in how they will deal with a given situation.

[Grim Portent]

I think it helps not only to have varied utility actions that are worth while, like supressing fire, grenades that bypass cover, but also to be unable to spam one action over and over easily.

My frame of reference for this comparison is Dark Heresy and it's companion RPGs, a lot of weapons are defined by having the ability to deal lots of damage but either having short ranges or long reload times to compensate. You get twenty turns of firing a standard LMG equivalent, the Heavy Stubber, before you have to spend 2 turns reloading. For those two turns you either have to take no actions at all, or swap to a different weapon, and even swapping to a new weapon costs part of a turn by default, not to mention you need to take time to set up a heavy stubber before firing it, so you can't just kite with it, once you pick a machine gun nest you're kind of stuck there without a particular skill.

Obviously most fights don't last twenty turns, so for big machine guns the issue doesn't come up all that often, but it does come up constantly for other weapons like missile launchers, shotguns, autoguns and so on, which forces you to consider the relevance of sidearms like pistols and swords. This also applies to the enemies, many of whom have sidearms in their statblock, even if it's just a knife, so you can take cover, lay down suppressing fire and wait out the enemy bullets if there's no safe way to engage them in an active firefight or storm their position. Grenades to flush enemies out of cover (with risks, because grenades scatter), flamethrowers to do the same, gas weapons to blind, stun or drug the enemy, destructible cover (admittedly rather barebones.) It's actually quite easy to wind up with a lot of characters within a certain set of types playing semi-realistically for people in a multi-person gunfight. Rifles, heavy weapons, pistol sidearms, melee weaponry and grenades all being situationally useful for multiple characters when the chips are down and a fight gets hard.

Where this breaks down is with the three broad character archetypes that have no incentive to change tactics, durable or fast melee characters who just rush in and stab,* gunslinger types who just free reload their pistols and spray bullets or fire plasma blasts from short range, and snipers who only need to look at other weapons on the rare occasion the GM can be bothered to use a genuine swarm of enemies that makes only firing one shot per turn an actual disadvantage. These characters rarely interact with the other options in the game because they generally negate the need for them, so their tactical choices boil down to killing before being killed, rather than deliberating over things like throwing one of a limited number of grenades, or choosing to reload a primary weapon instead of drawing a backup.

*Mostly an issue when jump packs enter the particular system. Normal movement is slow, and all but the toughest and best armoured characters don't want to rush in like loons if the enemy have good guns and the range to use them, because 2-3 turns of getting shot at without cover is a big risk, but a jump pack basically quadruples your movement and makes closing the distance trivial.

[Jakinbandw]

I'm writing a system, and my co-designer is running a game in it for me, and a couple other players right now. I don't know if it counts as a tactical game, but I did pull off something that made me feel like a tactical genius last session.

We were fighting a monster in a large open cave with a rock pile that could be used for cover in one area. This is a zone based game, so we had three zones: The rockpile, the cave ceiling, and the cave itself. The monster could fight best when it was at the rockpile, but round 1 we managed to lock it down to prevent it from moving there. Then turn two came, and I made a suggestion. The monster had high non-attack rolls, and we'd gotten lucky on the first round. I suggested that the PC that was at the rock pile move back to the larger cave, and then used magic to knock down a few rocks to make it easier for him to fight in the larger cave while shifting the rock pile so that it allowed us to shoot in, while preventing anyone from attacking out of it effectively (making it a killbox).

All turns in the system are planned before any dice are rolled, and are somewhat planned in secret (players can talk obviously, but the GM usually is done making their plan before the players finish deciding on a team plan). So when the dice hit the table, the monster rolled high enough on its non-attack check to go first, remove the condition stopping it from moving, and pounced into the rock pile, with it's last action being an AoE attack. Then the party's actions resolved, and the monster found itself alone in a zone that it couldn't attack out of. This normally wouldn't be a problem for it, as you can usually take a move towards your foe as part of resolving your first attack each round, but....

When we rolled attacks, the monster rolled high and tied with 2 players, but one pc rolled higher. Turned out that their attack inflicted a temporary stopped condition. Suddenly the monster couldn't get it's free move action, and took damage. Two PCs moved into it's zone with their attacks and proceeded to kill it.

If I hadn't have trapped it by out thinking it, it would have done damage to the entire party, and we would have been in a much worse position in the long run. Guessing the series of moves that would likely happen and then making a plan to counter them and prevent a ton of damage to the rest of the party? That made me feel like a genius (even though it could have gone wrong and I did get a little lucky).

[Vogie]

One thing that I've noticed in the attempts to make TTRPGs "tactical" is that characters on either side rarely act as though danger exists. Even if there's robust cover options, there isn't the feeling that they are worried in the slightest about the potential dangers around them. All creatures, whether player- or GM-driven, mostly just stand around. The first time I've seen it in D&D-likes, for example, was just recently, in the Guns & Gears expansion of Pathfinder 2e. In that, there are 2 actions that are introduced -

Hit the Deck! - where the player can react to an incoming ranged attack by jumping in a direction, increasing their AC for that attack then landing prone
Cover Fire - a small damage increase but adds the caveat that, before the player rolls to hit, their target can choose to duck. If they do, when the player attacks, they have higher AC, but their ability to attack is also hampered.
We've already been talking about these types of things - this is the previously-mentioned suppressing fire type of battlefield condition, on either side. These options are very realistic inclusions but, in true D&D fashion, were implemented poorly. Those options are only available for the gunslinger class, and even then, are feats that the players could choose to include, rather than updating the rules to make all creatures act that more realistic manner.

In my eyes, the way you make a game tactical is by giving players a palette of action options and the ability to interact with the encounter in manners to puzzle out or otherwise "unlock" the situation they find themselves in. It's a game design mechanic that we see more and more in other mediums, particularly video games, but hasn't really clicked with TTRPGs. Part of this is likely the use of visuals as a way to communicate things incredibly quickly (which is difficult or impossible for GMs to do) and how players interact with the mediums through expectations. It's perfectly natural for players of WoW or Elden Ring to tackle a fight dozens of times or more until they understand the mechanics and can successfully finish the fight. That way the bosses of a game like Tears of the Kingdom can all have a sort of schtick that either augments the "Damage vs Hit Points" part of a fight or replaces it completely - besides, there's only a dozen of them. Even in games where everything happens in about the same location or limited series of locations (League of Legends, Overwatch, CSGO, Killing Floor etc), those handful of maps have a diverse collection of options where any one interaction to occur. It would be like designing a singular megadungeon where all possible combinations of interactions could occur, and then spinning them around (now that I think about it, that describes Gloomhaven pretty well).

When it comes to TTRPGs, on the other hand, there's a bit of a different power dynamic. There aren't groups of encounter designers and writers that can collaborate and balance the average fight, or to create the number of battlemaps you might see in an XCOM environment... there's just one dude who does this in their spare time. He or she has a job that isn't GMing that system. This is probably the main limiter on how 'tactical' a system can possibly be - regular people are going to be running the universe against a number of players. Things need to be simple, be grasp-able, be varied (but not too varied) for a single person to create scenarios of variable levels of challenge for their variable numbers of players. On top of that, the average person playing any TTRPG isn't expecting these fights to be like each other - each combat encounter is expected to be different, and any one group might run into the exact same setup maybe twice in their gaming lives.

Once you've gotten your system at that point where the GM can handle it, your players need to be able to actually influence or otherwise interact with the situations they find themselves in. Battlemaps (even when in TotM) are often lacking dynamic elements not only because they're hard to plan, but also because the act of describing the area changes the area. Some systems will have quantum terrain (Schrodinger's Crate - "Is there a place for me to hide?" Roll! "I fail" then there isn't; vs "I succeed" You see a crate...) or the like, but otherwise there is no set way to quickly generate if there is anything around. This is because if those things are always included you get the following response:

"why are we fighting in a room full of exploding barrels in the first place?"
Which is an honest criticism. You can certainly get creative with the "exploding barrels" in any given map - they're venomous snake pits in the plains, they're shelves full of corrosive materials around the mad scientist, puddles of ooze/slime in a dungeon, hornet's nests in the forest, cars made of flashpaper on the post-apocalyptic highway, et cetera - but ultimately, any system that involves a list of guaranteed obstacles aren't going to mesh with all situations. There's a reason most historical battles were on relatively flat, open land - it's hard to plan for that. That leaves the ability of the Player characters' to interact with their world almost completely in the hands of the inter-creature options: Their combat skills, their non-combat creature effecting skills being used in combat, and the like.

On top of that, there's the player expectation issue. You could build a system where the best way to deal with monsters is to restrain them somewhat, for example - Doesn't matter if it's with magic, with mundane gear like rope or manacles, or just a buff dude holding onto their arm/leg, as long as it's happening - for the party to deal lethal damage to the target. It sounds great, in theory, but the perceived value of each action will still be based on the player - this was one of the problems we see in recent D&D editions. In 4th edition, casters were overwhelmingly in the "controller" category, which shifted their contributions to the fight away from the "damage go up, enemy go down" part of the encounter. Similarly in 5th edition, casters have plenty of interesting spells, but most pale in comparison to "Cast Haste and Holy Weapon on the Barbarian or Paladin with PAM & Sentinel " - they're still optimized, but not in a satisfying way. Others have complained about the same issues on this very thread. The application of these types of steps towards a victory, however, burdens the system - which is why we'll often see them flattened in some way.

In 5e, this was modeled by flattening almost every condition into just one execution - there are ton of different ways to impose conditions, but almost all of the conditions just create disadvantage for the target, advantage for those attacking it, or both. Advantage or disadvantage is a binary - there is no "double disadvantage" or "advantage 3", and when both advantage and disadvantage are present in the same roll, they cancel each other out.
Pathfinder 2e created a bunch of different conditions, but stuck them into three categories: Item, circumstance and status. Because of this, the value of the conditions rarely stack - if someone is frightened 1, your ability to grant them Clumsy 1 wouldn't actually do anything, as they're both status penalties - one condition might be slightly more sticky (longer lasting) than the other, but they won't stack. If the target already flat-footed, there's no way to make their feet flatter. For each category for penalty (or bonus), the only way to increase them would be to apply a larger number to them.

I've found that traditional dice pool systems give the largest amount of variables that can be adjusted in any given roll. Dice in the pool can be added or removed, Numbers of success can be increased or decreased, the target number for success (or failure) could be adjusted, the size of the dice could be manipulated.

Ultimately, the goal of a tactical system would be

To always have multiple options of what to do at any point, always with at least one being impactful at any given moment
One that encourages the use of those options, as opposed to being forced to mix up their tactics for unnatural reasons (by arbitrary anti-spamming rules)
Having different variables being able to impact the decisions of the player, such as positioning
Having this multiple-specialty paradigm implemented all the way down to character creation
A myriad of tools for Gamemasters for quick-generation of interesting enemies and locales that are both challenging and easy to track.

[Jason]

IMO

The Goals of a Good Tactical System should be:

To make choices made on the battlefield the primary reason a battle is won, rather than choices made in character generation or in equipping, or rolls of the dice.
To make maneuver and range significant.
To allow for both offensive and defensive tactics be effective, with no one tactic being always clearly optimal.
To make fighting in different terrains significant. Battles underwater should have different optimal strategies from battling in a cave.
To make fighting different opponents significant. Fighting a dragon should require different tactics than fighting a horde of kobolds.
To make other outcomes than "one side fights until it is utterly destroyed" both plausible and common.


My choice for "most tactical system ever" is probably 4E GURPS with all of the optional combat rules in the supplements place, but it's a bit too much for even me. Approaching a happy medium would probably be Traveller or The One Ring. "Not very tactical at all" would be games like Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia.

D&D 3.5 is more " tactical" than D&D 5, and D&D 5 is probably on the "light" end of the "Tactical" spectrum but not at the extreme.

[Lord Torath]

SnipVery good points!

This makes me think of Shadowrun a bit. You have two damage tracks, physical and stun/mental, and the decision is which to target? Targeting a single track means you'll take the enemy down more quickly, but spreading your damage between the two tracks will impose heavier penalties, making them less likely to hurt you back. So there's always the question of which type of damage to focus on.


IMO

The Goals of a Good Tactical System should be:

To make choices made on the battlefield the primary reason a battle is won, rather than choices made in character generation or in equipping, or rolls of the dice.
To make maneuver and range significant.
To allow for both offensive and defensive tactics be effective, with no one tactic being always clearly optimal.
To make fighting in different terrains significant. Battles underwater should have different optimal strategies from battling in a cave.
To make fighting different opponents significant. Fighting a dragon should require different tactics than fighting a horde of kobolds.
To make other outcomes than "one side fights until it is utterly destroyed" both plausible and common.


My choice for "most tactical system ever" is probably 4E GURPS with all of the optional combat rules in the supplements place, but it's a bit too much for even me. Approaching a happy medium would probably be Traveller or The One Ring. "Not very tactical at all" would be games like Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia.

D&D 3.5 is more " tactical" than D&D 5, and D&D 5 is probably on the "light" end of the "Tactical" spectrum but not at the extreme.Not an expert on 3.5, but my understanding was that it pretty severely violated your first point about battlefield tactics being more important that decisions made in character creation.

[Jason]

Not an expert on 3.5, but my understanding was that it pretty severely violated your first point about battlefield tactics being more important that decisions made in character creation.
In some ways, yes, but 3.5 seemed overall more tactical than 5th Edition does to me. 4th edition perhaps even more so, though my group didn't much care for 4th, so we didn't play it much.

[warty goblin]

I think the important point is less whether character creation is more important than the situational reality of the battlefield, and whether character advancement is. In an RPG a wizard is probably going to fill a different battlefield niche than a knight, one wants to stay at a distance and lob spells of some nature, one wants to quite literally charge things and smack them with a stick. Regardless of the battlefield situation, that's just what those characters are going to be best at doing. But that even of itself doesn't invalidate battlefield tactics, anymore than tanks filling a different niche than howitzers does. Having different roles in many ways creates tactical richness.

Where you start to get problems is when your character build starts to overwhelm the particulars of the battlefield as you advance. A not uncommon decay loop for this sort of game is to have a system for flanking or whatever that grants a fixed bonus. At low levels this can be super powerful, because the bonus is very large relative to the defenses and attacks of the characters. At high levels you get a situation where the defender type characters have so much defense they don't care about it, the general attackers have so much attack they don't need it, and the flanker type gets such a huge damage bonus out of building into flanking they 100% depend on it - except of course for the entire arsenal of abilities and other situations that give them Flanking, so they can press their build button and have a good time.

Basically the issue is that the generally goofy math of RPGs rewards hyper-specialization, but hyper-specialization flattens the battlefield situation into "do your hyperspecialized thing." If you do 1d6 damage, kicking an enemy off a ledge for 2d6 damage is good, which means that suddenly that ledge becomes important. But if you just plain hit for 5d6, the ledge no longer matters. For most intents and purposes, the battlefield with the ledge and without the ledge play exactly the same. This is usually where the canard about how high level play should be epic and fundamentally different from low level play comes in, and the problem is that the DM just needs to introduce more appropriate challenges to keep things interesting but also they can't just be, like, turbo-ledges that do 8d6 damage because that's just low level play with higher numbers. One may appreciate that this may be a difficult needle to thread. Perhaps a better system, at least for preserving battlefield relevance, is one that essentially caps effectiveness. It's not even difficult to do, roll N dice, keep the best one (or sum the best two or three) effectively does this, and is pretty easy in practice.

[Amidus Drexel]

I think the important point is less whether character creation is more important than the situational reality of the battlefield, and whether character advancement is. In an RPG a wizard is probably going to fill a different battlefield niche than a knight, one wants to stay at a distance and lob spells of some nature, one wants to quite literally charge things and smack them with a stick. Regardless of the battlefield situation, that's just what those characters are going to be best at doing. But that even of itself doesn't invalidate battlefield tactics, anymore than tanks filling a different niche than howitzers does. Having different roles in many ways creates tactical richness.

Where you start to get problems is when your character build starts to overwhelm the particulars of the battlefield as you advance. A not uncommon decay loop for this sort of game is to have a system for flanking or whatever that grants a fixed bonus. At low levels this can be super powerful, because the bonus is very large relative to the defenses and attacks of the characters. At high levels you get a situation where the defender type characters have so much defense they don't care about it, the general attackers have so much attack they don't need it, and the flanker type gets such a huge damage bonus out of building into flanking they 100% depend on it - except of course for the entire arsenal of abilities and other situations that give them Flanking, so they can press their build button and have a good time.

Basically the issue is that the generally goofy math of RPGs rewards hyper-specialization, but hyper-specialization flattens the battlefield situation into "do your hyperspecialized thing." If you do 1d6 damage, kicking an enemy off a ledge for 2d6 damage is good, which means that suddenly that ledge becomes important. But if you just plain hit for 5d6, the ledge no longer matters. For most intents and purposes, the battlefield with the ledge and without the ledge play exactly the same. This is usually where the canard about how high level play should be epic and fundamentally different from low level play comes in, and the problem is that the DM just needs to introduce more appropriate challenges to keep things interesting but also they can't just be, like, turbo-ledges that do 8d6 damage because that's just low level play with higher numbers. One may appreciate that this may be a difficult needle to thread. Perhaps a better system, at least for preserving battlefield relevance, is one that essentially caps effectiveness. It's not even difficult to do, roll N dice, keep the best one (or sum the best two or three) effectively does this, and is pretty easy in practice.

That explanation makes sense to me, and is much better put than what I wanted to say. I agree, more or less, with this entire comment.

And, yeah, games that have a scope encompassing many levels/tiers of play (for example, various editions of D&D promise zero-to-hero-to-demigod, even if some of them fudge the top or bottom of that a little) outgrow certain kinds of challenges, and the kind of challenges need to change to keep up with the party. It's true that pits and snares lose their relevance as the power level goes up, but isn't that the point? I'm running a 3.5 game right now where the players have recently gotten to 9th level, and the same soldiers and bandits they were fighting a few levels ago are just fundamentally outclassed in every way now (so it doesn't matter that they get to stack piddly +1s by ganging up on someone, because they don't live long enough to take advantage of it) - but at the same time, the party isn't planning to fight just a handful of those guys at once anymore - they're dealing with moving armies around and breaking people out of prisons and capturing strategic points instead. They took a short jaunt into some of the lower planes for an adventure, and dealt with bizarre gravity, looming darkness, and hostile natives accustomed to both.

I think you can preserve the tactical relevance of the battlefield into higher-power gameplay, both by expanding the scope of what kinds of scenarios you can use, and by making existing obstacles more intense. You're (very lightly) criticizing "turbo-ledges", but it's a legitimate approach to scaling up the power of the battlefield. The same goes for adding "explosive barrels du jour", damaging hazards like toxic gas or lava, and other such things. Sure, certain kinds of characters might be able to circumvent those obstacles in the same way they circumvent low-level obstacles of that nature (you're not scaring off the guy with flight by dropping him off of a slightly taller cliff, after all), but I think that's fine, in general. If only one person has flight, turbo-ledges still are a real consideration for everyone else. Even if someone can shrug off getting dropped from orbit, if they can't get back into orbit to continue the fight right away, getting knocked down still matters.

Changing the scope of the battlefield is also important. In D&D, that's largely what the outer planes were intended for (as adventure locations). Fierce, unpredictable winds; intense and inconsistent gravity; perpetual darkness; acidic air; an entire plane of angled ground with no real flat places to stand anywhere; angry demons with at-will teleportation and mind control - you name it, someone came up with a way to screw with the landscape in a way that makes high-level characters break cool stuff out of the toolbox and engage with the battlefield differently. When every single person in the combat has flight, you don't stop placing obstacles - you just stop putting them on the ground, and place them where they'll actually get in someone's way (how about a honeycombed island of extra-dimensional rock that messes with teleportation?). At high levels, being in someone's line of sight is deadly - so cover and concealment gain a lot of value that isn't as present at mid-levels. Battlefield control spells really take off in mid-levels and let you capitalize on chokepoints - and so having countermagic available also becomes important.

I do agree that if you want to hold onto the battlefield relevance of low-level threats and obstacles, then you can't have the kind of power scaling D&D is known for - probably requiring using a system that doesn't scale power in the same way (or maybe even at all), or just arbitrarily choosing a low level to stop at, in the way that E6 does.

[warty goblin]

I don't think it's so much that power negates tactics as it is that power changes tactics, and TTRPGs generally don't do so hot at scaling things to capture this. A modern soldier is vastly more powerful than Grog the caveman, this doesn't mean modern infantry combat isn't tactical, or that stone age warfare was more tactical. They're just different. If you were to make Cave Tactics the game, you'd probably care enormously about things like vegetation levels, tracking, and rules for close combat. You wouldn't need rules for breaching and clearing or trenches or tanks anymore than the modern combat game would need rules for whether your blood trail attracts saber toothed tigers.

The snag is that, to exaggerate a good deal, the level 1-20 you become a demigod advancement track starts you as Grog with a tactical system that makes sense for Grog. But at some point you're definitely not Grog anymore, and the system still kinda thinks you are. Or at least does a mediocre job of creating interesting obstacles for your new reality. The game is still stuck at saber toothed tigers and rules about arrow retrieval and the vision range of torches, you have an M-16 and night vision goggles.