Fantastic Tactics
At its core, tactics in a sword fight are not terribly complicated. The pointy end goes in the other man, and victory has been achieved if your pointy ends go into their men before their pointy ends go into your men. Everything else pretty well boils down to making sure that neither your bellies nor the pointy ends of your sword are where your opponents expect them to be. But in a fantasy adventure game, it is expected that there will be more to it than that. Because while a real world sword fight has all the athleticism and split second reactions of a basketball game, actually
planning a single character's actions in such a scenario has all the gripping suspense of designing a basketball play. So players have substantially deeper options than a choice of where to stand followed by their characters trying their best to stick their swords into their opponents while blocking or avoiding any blows coming the other way.
The player is not actually running in and stabbing their opponents or using their twitch reflexes in any way. They are more akin to the
coach of a basketball game than any of the players. And while the
head coach has all kinds of stuff to do, a player in a cooperative storytelling game is only coaching one participant, so they need to have more and deeper options than yelling “Shoot the ball! Shoot it with your arms! Try to get it in the basket and score points!” And that is why characters in a fantasy tactical minigame need to have deeper options available to them – like as many as Pikachu seems to have in the Pokemon
cartoon (which is a lot more than the four an electric mouse would get in the video game).
So what is it that characters
do in a swordfight? Well, unlike the inhabitants of the city of old in the next valley over, or the cultural specifics of the serpent people that are showing up this week, tactical options really do have to be fairly well standardized in advance of actually playing the game. This is because players are making tactical choices and planning several moves in advance, which means that the information on whether an individual action is high or low risk has to exist. Otherwise the players don't really have a game to play. They just get to make random selections in a Humian Hellscape where past events do not inform future ones. So there has to be a firm set of
rules about what can and can't happen in response to certain events. For example: no one is going to respond to any combat action by setting off a nuclear bomb or firing off an AK-47, but that's just a question of genre conventions. Far more important is the raw accounting of the process: if a target is “fire vulnerable” then a fire-based attack should have enhanced effect against them. If a target is “cold resistant” then it should have a reduced effect from a cold-based attack against them. The back end of the combat system needs to be fairly transparent and the available options need to be fairly available.
So what are the available options?
- Move Just as happens in the real world's sword fights, characters have the option of holding their ground, walking around, jumping, swimming and running. But there is more than that in a fantasy setting, as seen below.
- Flight Birds fly, but a fantasy setting has horses and humans with wings on their back or their feet than can fly. It's important that flight be treated coherently and consistently, so that players can react sensibly to their characters either flying or being menaced by flying enemies. Flight also needs to have weaknesses and limitations or ground based terrain will cease to have any meaning as everyone and everything takes to the air.
- Teleportation Creatures in a fantasy setting can change their location without moving through intervening space. Like Flight, this is potentially incredibly destabilizing, and it needs to have consistent rules on how it works, what it can and cannot do, and most importantly of all: its limitations. Partly this is important in combat, in that if enemies and allies can teleport in and out of every location without restriction, then locational choices cease to matter. But also it's important for the world at large. Players need to know whether areas can be teleported into, and they need to know whether and how enemies can teleport ambush them and also how to stop enemies from escaping by those means.
- Tunneling Sand worms and mole machines may not be terribly common in fantasy, but they exist at all, which is a bit more than they do in the real world. Tunneling has to have rules on how it works, otherwise it becomes a very real question as to how “things” stay standing. The classic of course is Dune, in which the conceit was that tunneling sandworms could tunnel through sand, but not stone, and thus buildings were built on stone and the sand was left empty.
- Phase In a fantasy setting, some creatures have the ability to one degree or another become non-corporeal. Perhaps they turn into a gas, or become some kind of spiritual essence. Whatever the special effect, it is important that the methods that one would use to keep an incorporeal creature out of a room, to fight against it, to spot it, and track it all be relatively explicable. It's no good if a single incorporeal monster can defeat entire armies.
- Attack Enemies Ultimately, the goal of battle is to put the pointy end of the blade into the other man. And that still holds true in a fantasy game. But there are more options on how to go about doing that than to simply “do your best.”
- Area Attacks Fantasy worlds may or may not have actual explosives in them, but they generally have magical effects that do something similar, which just like in the real world act as a strong incentive to avoid close formations on the battlefield by assaulting all targets in any area.
- Mental Attacks Fantasy worlds have access to attacks that really select a specific opponent rather than throwing a force through space. It's important to have guidelines for how these attacks work. Do they require visual identification? Empty space between the attacker and the target? Can they be fooled into hitting a different target? If so, how? This kind of information really needs to be well established so that battles can be fair.
- Loyalty Attacks It is possible in a fantasy setting to temporarily (or permanently) cause one opponent or another to attack their own erstwhile allies. These attacks are very powerful, and need to be balanced against the most deadly of attacks. Because an enemy that has stopped trying to stick his sword into your allies is a defeated enemy. That they are attacking your enemies now is a cherry on top. And likely a substantial one. It is important to note that these sorts of thing have no true parallel in the real world, and it is hard to overestimate their effectiveness. The real world has confusion and fog of war, but it's really not the same.
- Visibility Attacks Just as the real world has smoke clouds and bright lights, so too does the world of fantasy adventure. But fantasy has shapeshifting and realistic holograms. That's... different. And it needs rules that the players can understand, because if there's no rhyme or reason to whether anything they see is really there, the game is basically unplayable. Remember that the players aren't actually there, so the descriptive text they hear is all they get to help them imagine the world. If they can't rely on that, the game kind of grinds to a halt.
- Battlefield Control Characters can do things that change the battlefield. Sometimes this is as direct as cutting rope bridges and the like, but it can be quite a bit more elaborate than that. Whole walls and brambles can be conjured. There need to be limits to these sorts of activities, so that tactics can have consistent meaning.
- Healing In the real world, people basically don't perform medical operations in the middle of swordfights, because the timeframe involved just doesn't leave that as a practical action. But in a fantasy setting, it is generally considered traditional that characters do exactly that. This is a tradition basically created by Dungeons and Dragons. But it's pretty firmly ingrained. And Healing is pretty problematic. It doesn't make you win, but it does keep your from losing, and that's mostly the same thing. Healing can lead to battles that do not end (which is boring) and they can lead to battles that have no long term consequences (which is unengaging). On the other hand, the availability of magical healing helps explain why characters can be involved in action sequences one after another without being crippled and destroyed. Still, it genuinely needs time-related limitations to keep it from unraveling the game.
- Curses and Buffs Characters in a fantasy setting can perform actions that do not directly contribute to victory but which make further actions contribute more towards victory. In principal this is no different from taking time to move to a more advantageous position, but like doing that there is substantial question about fairness. Remember that time spent staking out a good position does not have an equal cost if it is taken when the enemy is already on the field firing arrows vs. taking it before the enemy arrives. Limits need to be in place thus, to keep the benefits of ambushes from being too great. Not because it is necessarily unrealistic or an ambusher to get a large benefit, but because it makes the game unfair.
- Summoning Characters in a fantasy world can often do things that bring extra units onto the battle on their side. This is sometimes analogous to training a pack of hunting dogs or hiring mercenaries to fight on your behalf. The economy of actions is something that needs to be considered, although this is not by itself sufficient to discount the idea of fielding summoned troops (or even large numbers of summoned troops). The key is that tactical decisions made about individual summoned units should be simple decisions so that the game doesn't drag on.