Hot take, but the actual straight tactical gameplay in modern games (Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, et. al.) is fairly dull.
It ends up being not that big a deal, because of the tactical infinity involved. You can literally think outside the box. That's not a drawback—the dullness. But there are certain instances where someone thought it was fun to give opponents 400 hit points and attacks that do an average of 8.5 damage. In a disassociated ruleset that nullifies all the tactical infinity options, no less.
The early 2000's were a wild time.
It makes me think, you know, now that we are seeing so much content from people, that the vast majority of it is, well, pretty derivative and mid. That isn't an insult. It's a statistical necessity.
Is it ok, even allowed, to say the very basic fact that there are organic limitations to life? For example, I do not possess the ability to process oxygen from water, whereas a fish does. This is something that is very disturbing to think about.
All life is related. If you go back far enough we have a common ancestor with every creature that walks, lives, or crawls. We've developed different capabilities, but the divisions, our divisions, are artificial. They are not objective. They are decided by learned people in the field of taxonomy.
And we don't always agree which animal belongs where. It's not clear. Because every single creature is a unique soup, patterned, but varied, by its parents to better take advantage of its environment.
And they are all you. All life is you.
But in-group out-group dynamics split us based on purely visual and cultural divisions, before we even get into species level differentiation. There are a lot of pitfalls people make about this, I think. It's very clear life has value, regardless of externals. It takes a very shriveled kind of self-hating misery to say that because externals are different it indicates some kind of hierarchy or difference in value.
On the other hand, you commit genocide of bacteria every time you rinse your mouth out with mouthwash.
"Dread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same."
We can, in fact, continue to ignore this reality until all of humanity is extinct of course, whether that happens in the next 150 years or sometime millions of years in the future. There's no end; there's no way off the ride. We are all here till the end.
We will be dealing with talking machines, talking animals, aliens, and more. Can we speak to another alien species when a quarter of our population is unable to participate in society? After over twenty years of working within the United States medical system, I've discovered that there are a large number of people who's general assessment of functioning is too low to live in society without aid. As the foresters say, there's considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human.
These are questions without answers. Fantasy leans into it, manifesting our psychological fears in physical form-The lich, representative of unending, undying authority, the werewolf, for the man who works during the day and under influence of the (alcoholic) moon become a beast-reinvented for the modern society of the 90's. . . the 1890's as Dr. Jekyll, to address new insecurities. Zombies for consumerism and overpopulation. Vampires for rape and metaphors about nobility and blood. Dragons for greed.
It's healthy to slay your fears.
But the real world, well, it's less clear cut. The tactical approach of murder a big evil isn't appropriate for cyberpunk. You can't murder a lack of empathy.
A non-trivial reason why modern games are less common than fantasy games, is that there is just more. Cell phones, newspapers, video, instantaneous communication, transportation. Add in magic or some sci-fi, and it can become pretty overwhelming rule-wise quickly.
So let's talk about how I fixed the action economy.
Design talk for game design nerds
So I got to make a game from first principles from scratch. I eliminated all decision paralysis by deciding to create an homage to Shadowrun. What kind of dice? D6's with pools. What kind of character creation? Priority.
I looked at the historical issues with the dice system in Shadowrun, and the chain of solutions that have evolved to deal with that. I didn't want to go the route of "hero points", because I want the game to be focused on the choices the player makes diegetically, not mechanically.
Issue 1: Getting to play the ever-loving actual game.
My personal experience isn't true facts—but I've been running versions of modern games for a long time. I have a few thousand hours of play Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and various World of Darkness games. In my experience, we spent an
awful lot of time talking about how to prevent agency removal during transition.
This is my experience form both sides of the table. It's the classic example of not getting in the fucking car to go to get the mission all the way to being concerned about driving across town. You're going to be exposed, there's no defense, eventually you'll just be screwed through no fault of your own.
I've sat with this for a long time, because, as previously noted, I have been diagnosed with and treated for paranoia. But often these situations were me as the Dungeon Master/Storyteller making explicit claims that, "yes, Virginia, you can turn over your firearms before you talk to the Johnson in the club and it'll be fine."
Secondly, it was the early 'oughts, and illusionism was all the rage. Lie to your players. Invalidate their choices. Make your story happen to them. It was the child of the 2nd edition Dragonlance and Skills & Powers era, having grown and crystalized within it's cocoon of the loss of TSR into the butterfly of the new goth clique. Be a cool powerful person of the night. Also: Girls play RPGs now.
Thirdly, the games are literally about this. Shadowrunners get screwed during missions by the corps. The cult has already won in Cthulhu, it's just a question of when you'll go mad. The Vampires can't maintain the masquerade, Gaia is dying, the Technocracy is winning.
Much like the 70's, the 00's are filled with a lot of 'get fucked' media. Which, you know is cool!
But not so much to my taste at the table with (ostensibly) friends.
So of course that was the tenor of the games. It was the explicit instruction given to the people running them, and the players used every defense they had against it. Defenses which, well, weren't in the rulebook.
Issue 2: What do you want to actually *do* in combat?
I've not only played an absurd amount of Dungeons and Dragons combat in
literally every edition, but I've done so for thousands upon thousands of hours in various Dungeon and Dragons video games, (
Baldur's Gate,
Kingmaker,
Wrath of the Righteous,
Temple of Elemental Evil,
Neverwinter Nights.)
Straight combat is very swingy, which is very good for tabletop, and very bad when you just sort of have to kill a lot of enemies. I don't feel that this is a controversial statement. One of the most entertaining things they've done in Baldur's Gate 3 is allow out of combat shenanigans.
You can't just indiscriminately kill in the modern world. This is a game about iconoclasts doing the hard work of anti-anti-utopianism. History says violent revolution takes two centuries to recover from. I know there's madmen out there who ignore the thousands of years of evidence that substantial change and advancement can happen without violence. (Did we have to kill anyone to adapt soap? Enter the space age?) Often violence is involved: not as a goal, but as a byproduct of a dysfunctional situation.
You know who's a 'bad guy' in the modern world? No one. There are damaged people, sick people, ill people, but no evil people. We have killed whole kinds of people, extincted species, destroyed cultures, and obliviated entire gene-lines. Seems like it never solved anything to date, so maybe we should just, I dunno, give up on it?
This is so true, that the idea of a racist is synonymous with losing. You brand yourself as a racist and a totalitarian, you become a laughing stock to the rest of the world. E.g. the confederacy, nazi's, communists, North Korea, et. al. It's been well studied how those power structures are unstable. Race, in the way a racist would use it, doesn't exist scientifically or genetically. There's no significant variation in the current human species that differentiates you from any other human. We are all, in a very literal sense, the exact same race.
We almost certainly had a role in the end of our other cousins, Rudolfensis, Antecessor, Floresiensis, and the eighteen others (
that we know of). Since there's no genetic difference in homo sapien, just normal variation in expression, it's . . . well, race is whatever someone says it is. It doesn't exist. You can't run a lab to determine it in any way that racists might find useful and meaningful.
So every time you found a society on that, the ingroup gets smaller and smaller, and the outgroup gets larger and larger, and then. . . well, then you take on your destiny as a loser.
I make it clear in the book—these character's aren't Sinless because of an inability to function in society, but rather as a rejection of it, and they become the agents of change.
So, how do we design around that?
Cognitive Overhead
I started with cognitive overhead. I wanted a 'playable' system. Generally the average person can track about 6-7 different things. This is the average and goes down when people are tired, or stressed, or distracted. This creates a conflict with cyberpunk tropes of gear and upgrading your character.
Having played a lot of Shadowrun, putting this complexity in the target number of a d6 is a huge cognitive load. I use an A4 white sheet with tiny writing front and back to assist me with all my calculations from my Shadowrun 3rd edition days. Entirely too time consuming and complex.
I'm aware of the issues with the static target number resulting in unengaging or exciting play (due to the regularity of success with huge pools). You should know I had this in mind when I was making these choices.
You are rolling between 1 to 12(ish) dice, A target number of 4 means half will succeed. 5 is 1/3 of the dice will succeed, and 6 is 16.bar. The operation for success is comparative, which is a low complexity operation, and chances based on how many dice you roll are very clear to both the Agonarch and the players.
"I am rolling 8 dice with a target number of 6, I know that I am likely to get one success"
Half of those dice come from the player and their level of skill, and the other half, from the gear. Integrating the gear into the core system like this—making it an expectation of the core math—means that a non-trivial amount of complexity in managing those upgrades is hidden. This is not the limit of the gear system but does make having appropriate gear a core part of gameplay.
It's not that the player can't take on something more complex. It's that the game is benefited by making things clear, because the choices aren't about the mechanics. It's about the action taken in the game, and clarity and simplicity in the mechanics enhances that.
When is a tactical decision engaging?
Interesting tactical games like Battle Brothers, Warhammer 40k, Delta's Book of War, Chainmail, Song of Blades and Heroes, Final Fantasy Tactics, and countless others structure your entire gameplay loop around the strategic engagement.
I'd like to caution against trying to implement game loops from computer games into the tabletop arena. You do want a flow of play, but 'game loops' involve satisfactory activates that cause you to further engage with the tactical level. A role-playing game can have both a satisfying tactical and strategic mechanics, but you don't want it to be about 'grinding' through to make your numbers go up.
Role-playing games use platonic solids to augur though a dark curtain to the reality of unseen realms. Let's auger something interesting, no?
So the reason those games are interesting isn't really the combat, it's due to the secondary goals in the combat. In Battle Brothers and BattleTech, you pick apart your enemy trying not to damage your loot. In Final Fantasy Tactics, you earn JP during the fight to craft your characters. In Warhammer 40,000 you draw cards every round to represent the dynamically changing goals of the battlefield.
This is similar to my favorite way to run a megadungeon. Encounter distance can be up to 360' away. While the players explore, the board is filled with more and more monsters, till it's time to get out.
I've played other heist games and found the 'reverse justification' as a functional, if not lazy, way to handle the complexity of a heist. The flashback from Blades in the Dark or Leverage. I like when the players plan. And if they plan well, I mean, they avoid a fight, right?
So tactical play is divided into two phases. First is the infiltration portion. This is where a group with good planning, a low profile, and skilled operatives can move around on site, without drawing attention. As the players act, alert rises. A group can specialize in managing alert and get very good at avoiding fights.
But the players can't have all the information. There are 24 different pieces of relevant information about operations. A veteran operation will find they can discover most of the information (with a target number of 4 for their information gathering skills) while on a prime mission, they might only get three or four pieces of information (with a target number of 6 for those same skills).
As an Agonarch, you just have to be objective. Did they not know about the guard dogs? Man, that isn't your fault. They got to choose what information they wanted.
So, in spite of their best attempts, they will raise alert. As they raise the alert, new obstacles are triggered that make it harder to not raise alert. Mistakes can cascade. Once someone fires a gun or alert pops, we move into heat.
The thing about action movies, right? You have to go, because the cops are on their way.
So in the future, when portals open to dark realms, and Deodands and Alzebo hunt men, we have high threat response teams. The heater teams. They are a hammer. They kill everyone dead and if they want to know something, they will ask your corpse.
So. . . they are on a timer. What is that timer? Well: It's the tactical game.
Tune in tomorrow to find out the exciting conclusion, of me stringing your attention along for capitalist algorithmic optimization purposes. (I mean it isn't my fault that you're 95% more likely to read two 1200 word essays than one 2400 word essay. Fuck it, I'm just tryin' to live here. I'm writing them in the same session. You just won't read the second half if I don't put it in another separate post.)
