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

[Amidus Drexel]

Spinning off from a discussion in the thread about system guardrails. 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?

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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.)

Spoiler: Why D&D is tactical and has tactical depth, um acktually

Show

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.

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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").

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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.