Sources of Tactical Depth

[RobbyPants]

The attempt to write rules to cover everything is not only impossible, but also stupid, because the more rules you write, the more balance problems you can potentially create.

How does leaving it to someone to make a decision on the fly affect balance? If anything, it seems leaving it up in the air leaves even more room for error regarding balance.

That's it. While it's often not necessary to know what happens when a troll decides to copy his ogre magi body and take up wizarding or what happens when a dragon decides to try his hand at goldsmithing, it's important to know what would happen if the situation came up.

Is it really? If you have a polymorph spell PCs can use, then it's important to define what that does. Though keep in mind the spell doesn't have to reference the creature you're copying, it can just apply numerical modifiers.

The nice thing about D&D is that most of it is arbitrary. A high level human with a sword really can do more damage than a dragon's claw, so obeying things like realism isn't really all that important. Just being big doesn't mean you'll necessarily be a tougher combatant in a fantasy game. Making a swashbuckler bigger may in fact screw him over.

I think you're mixing up realism and verisimilitude, here. Lago's not arguing that the results have to be "realistic". He means he wants them applied to the world in a way that makes sense. He didn't say that a high level fighter can't do more damage than a dragon's claws. These are two separate issues.

[LR]

I think you're mixing up realism and verisimilitude, here. Lago's not arguing that the results have to be "realistic". He means he wants them applied to the world in a way that makes sense. He didn't say that a high level fighter can't do more damage than a dragon's claws. These are two separate issues.

But verisimilitude is for grognards. If two-bit flavor text isn't enough for you, then that's your fault for being so unreasonable.

[Swordslinger]

How does leaving it to someone to make a decision on the fly affect balance? If anything, it seems leaving it up in the air leaves even more room for error regarding balance.

That's why a table that gives suggested damage basically ensures you have some degree of balance, or at the very least, that the effect is doing what you want it to do. If you make the attack do more damage than what a monster of that level should be doing, you know you're making a very powerful attack.

Take a falling rock example for instance. You have a dragon drop a boulder on someone. Using a specific rules system where falling objects have their own specific rules, it's quite possible that crunching the numbers to find out how much damage that rock does either produces a trivial result or produces something that's overwhelmingly powerful. It all depends on the falling object rules subsystem, because that doesn't necessarily interact with the level of the opponent and consider what damage it should be doing to make a balanced encounter. In fact, in 3.5, falling object damage was overpowered, and I believe you had random crap like a table used as an improvised melee weapon being better than a greatsword. And that's exactly what you can expect from a bunch of unrelated subsystems. You don't use them much and there's a high probability there's going to be imbalance the more of them you add.

On the other hand, going 4E-style you look at the number based off the monster's level, and choose a Strong limited attack (I make it limited because it can only carry one boulder at a time, if the boulder was such that it could carry multiple, then I'd make it a standard attack). You'd probably apply a -2 penalty to its attack roll because a falling rock sounds pretty clumsy and inaccurate. You now no longer have to worry about your attack being ridiculously overpowered, because it's using the same basic guidelines that all monsters use.

[RobbyPants]

How does leaving it to someone to make a decision on the fly affect balance? If anything, it seems leaving it up in the air leaves even more room for error regarding balance.

That's why a table that gives suggested damage basically ensures you have some degree of balance, or at the very least, that the effect is doing what you want it to do. If you make the attack do more damage than what a monster of that level should be doing, you know you're making a very powerful attack.

Take a falling rock example for instance. You have a dragon drop a boulder on someone. Using a specific rules system where falling objects have their own specific rules, it's quite possible that crunching the numbers to find out how much damage that rock does either produces a trivial result or produces something that's overwhelmingly powerful. It all depends on the falling object rules subsystem, because that doesn't necessarily interact with the level of the opponent and consider what damage it should be doing to make a balanced encounter. In fact, in 3.5, falling object damage was overpowered, and I believe you had random crap like a table used as an improvised melee weapon being better than a greatsword. And that's exactly what you can expect from a bunch of unrelated subsystems. You don't use them much and there's a high probability there's going to be imbalance the more of them you add.

On the other hand, going 4E-style you look at the number based off the monster's level, and choose a Strong limited attack (I make it limited because it can only carry one boulder at a time, if the boulder was such that it could carry multiple, then I'd make it a standard attack). You'd probably apply a -2 penalty to its attack roll because a falling rock sounds pretty clumsy and inaccurate. You now no longer have to worry about your attack being ridiculously overpowered, because it's using the same basic guidelines that all monsters use.

You basically cited a bunch of examples of bad rules being bad, and having a table for suggested damage (also a rule) being good.

So, basically, bad rules are bad and good rules are good. How does this factor in to what I initially asked? How does leaving it to someone to make a decision on the fly affect balance?

[Swordslinger]

You basically cited a bunch of examples of bad rules being bad, and having a table for suggested damage (also a rule) being good.

So, basically, bad rules are bad and good rules are good. How does this factor in to what I initially asked? How does leaving it to someone to make a decision on the fly affect balance?

The more rules you have, especially obscure subsystems, the more bad rules you'll have. There's no avoiding that. RPG writers just don't have tons of money to dump into playtesting to the point that they can do super complex rules and get them all right. It's better to use a KISS principle with RPG rules, because there's less that can go horribly horribly wrong.

And you're leaving someone to make a decision using guidelines, not so much just pulling something completely out of their ass. And as long as they follow those guidelines they're more or less safe. I really can't see how someone using the table in 4E is going to produce a worse result than some of the absurd brokeness possible from the bad 3E rules.

Therefore table based guidelines are superior.

[sabs]

I know, we can just go back to when we were 6 and playing Cowboys and Indians, or Magical Tea Party.

[RobbyPants]

How the hell are tables more safe than rules? Falling damage being dumb isn't an issue of too many rules. It's an example of someone just not running any math on the rule. It's not like it's a weird interaction; someone just got lazy.

[LR]

In fact, in 3.5, falling object damage was overpowered, and I believe you had random crap like a table used as an improvised melee weapon being better than a greatsword.

You're referring to this? Using rules written by Andy is really unfair. Ed and Andy are responsible for almost every fault introduced by 3.5. The rules before CW were "10' range increment, 2X crit, use your heart to determine the damage." Table Mastery was only available to Drunken Masters and they only did 1d6 damage with them.

As for your other complaint, I'm not sure why you think damage that scales worse than bullrushing someone off a cliff and doesn't have any rules for adjudicating hits and misses is overpowered.

[Swordslinger]

How the hell are tables more safe than rules? Falling damage being dumb isn't an issue of too many rules. It's an example of someone just not running any math on the rule. It's not like it's a weird interaction; someone just got lazy.

That's what happens when you have tons of rules and subsystems. Somewhere somebody forgets to do their math right, and you end up with something broken.

The issue isn't that tables are better than rules, it's that one table is better than dozens of pages of rules, simply because you can ensure that table is better proofread and playtested (since it's more commonly used). An obscure rule may never even come up in playtesting at all.

[LR]

That's what happens when you have tons of rules and subsystems. Somewhere somebody forgets to do their math right, and you end up with something broken.

The issue isn't that tables are better than rules, it's that one table is better than dozens of pages of rules, simply because you can ensure that table is better proofread and playtested (since it's more commonly used). An obscure rule may never even come up in playtesting at all.

You can do that, but that's not making your game any better, just easier on the devs. If your development team is competent, then you don't need to do that and you can do full system-world integration. I don't really understand why you're doing apologetics for lazy design.

[Swordslinger]

You can do that, but that's not making your game any better, just easier on the devs. If your development team is competent, then you don't need to do that and you can do full system-world integration. I don't really understand why you're doing apologetics for lazy design.

It's not lazy design, only realistic design. Bigger projects take more playtesting to iron out the bugs. A bug can potentially ruin the game, therefore yeah, eliminating bugs makes for a better game.

If you had a huge playtesting budget then maybe you could design a more complex rules set, but I'm still not convinced that this would produce a better game in the long run. Does having to do a formula for falling object damage make the game better in a level based system? I don't think so.

The fundamental principle of a level based system is that higher level stuff hits harder, I don't really see why things like falling objects should have separate rules from that derived from real world statistics like weight. I'm not determining how much damage the fighter can do by his body weight and the weight of his weapon, but more because he's level 15.

If you're trying to make a game that's based around realism and hard science than sure. If you want an unrealistic game where people fight things the size of houses and possibly kill them in one hit, you probably don't want to get bogged down when you can just let a general purpose rule handle it.

[Draco_Argentum]

The point is, all this is done so that by the time the shit hits the fan, everybody knows their roles and what to do in particular circumstances without having to think about it too much (which increases combat effectiveness).
However, steps taken towards this direction seems to detract from this thread's/forum's definition of "tactical depth".
And I'm not necessarily gonna argue with that. What it does do, however, is add a layer of sophistication in the RP, and perhaps a certain level of strategic depth .... which, in my experience, can add to the story immersion (which, of course, has its own set of rewards).

And heres the disconnect. The military wants to reduce tactical depth. If they could answer every situation with 'air strikes until they surrender' they would do just that. Their objective is to complete an objective with minimum resource expenditure. Dropping to a single tactic would facilitate that by making incorrect tactical choices impossible.

We're trying to have a fun roleplaying experience. Plans have to be broken immediately. The moment my plan survives a round I may as well wander off to get a drink form the fridge instead of stay at the table.

[Murtak]

That's what happens when you have tons of rules and subsystems. Somewhere somebody forgets to do their math right, and you end up with something broken.

The issue isn't that tables are better than rules, it's that one table is better than dozens of pages of rules, simply because you can ensure that table is better proofread and playtested (since it's more commonly used). An obscure rule may never even come up in playtesting at all.

This argument is bullshit. You still need rules. When your dragon drops a boulder on the party it is still a rule - a houserule created on the fly. And the odds of fucking up are much greater when you just make up stuff on the fly.

All other things being equal, everything should have premade rules. But of course all other things are not equal. Adding more rules makes your rulebook bigger. Adding sensible rules is sometimes at odds with adding rules that are fast and easy to remember. But those you should only ever consider which rules get printed and how well your rules work with the rest of the game. You crop to get your rulebook down to a manageable size and you simplify to make the mechanics easy to understand. You can scrap rules for falling object damage because they don't come up often enough to matter. You can provide a table with guidelines because you can't work out mechanics that are both simple and appropriate. But not that the guideline is strictly inferior to sensible mechanics. Guidelines should only ever get printed if writing actual rules is too hard.

[Murtak]

As to thread topic:
We want to find ways to get tactical depth into our games. Presumably we also want to keep the rules of the game simple or at least somewhat simple. So what we really want is emergent complexity - tactical depth arising from the interaction of individually simple subsystems. And that in turn means that we need multiple such subsystems affecting each other. Or, to put it differently, we want each subsystem to matter. Any time we get to ignore movement, resources, fatigue or whatever subsystems our game has, we reduce complexity and thus tactical depth.

Our subsystems can entirely arbitrary, but here are some:
Movement: Who can move? Where to? When?
Positioning: Where is that guy positioned in relation to that other guy?
Resources: What abilities can that character use?
Damage: How do you disable characters?

DnD for example uses most of those. The actual numbers are pretty badly done, but the setup is quite decent. Moving matters, for most characters at least. Even the order in which you move matters. Positioning matters - it largely determines who you can attack at all, and how well. Determing the best position to move to and who to attack is not trivial, or rather would not be trivial, except that DnD characters die way too fast, rendering most of these points moot.

Shadowrun on the other hand hardly has positioning. Consequently movement in relation to other characters matters much less. Movement in relation to terrain still matters though.

[Murtak]

If I'm having to sacrifice strategic depth and sophistication for the sake of some concept of "tactical depth", then that discourages prior planning, and inhibits story immersion. If I'm playing an intelligent (or even semi-intelligent) character (especially one whose job it is to search out baddies and kill them), then I'm gonna recognize the value of FRAGPLANs and SOPs; I'm gonna value the principles encompassed in a SPOT Report (even if done hastily in the moment -- as SPOT reports are continually "updated" even as you actively engage the enemy). If I have to forgo that in order to satisfy some concept of what makes an "interesting" encounter, then my work and planning is not being rewarded -- which necessarily detracts of story immersion.

In game terms, those FRAGPLANS are an attempt to solve the game - what Frank refers to as scripting. And if that is possible, the solved part of the game disappears. It still has to rolled and calculated, but all the decisions are gone, only the work remains. And that is of course not desirable. So being able to script battles is bullshit and ruins combat. If you want battles to matter, you necessarily have to remove the scripting minigame, no matter how fun it might be.

What may be possible though, is to recreate that element during battles, at least partially. You do want to have battles that are varied enough to not have a single grand battle plan, but in any given battle there can and should be various strategies that should be recognizably good or bad. And while those strategies should not be simple enough to be scriptable, you can probably at least outline some of them. Slap a catchy acronym on your rough plan, and there you go - now you have a sergeant yelling "CODE CENTER" in mid-battle when he recognizes the enemy relies on a single powerful unit. It is perfectly fine if your plan "center" roughly outlines what everyone should do - but it is critical that both deciding how to react to the situation and how to execute the plan are non-trivial and non-scriptable.

[RobbyPants]

This argument is bullshit. You still need rules. When your dragon drops a boulder on the party it is still a rule - a houserule created on the fly. And the odds of fucking up are much greater when you just make up stuff on the fly.

This is basically what I've been getting at. For some reason, swordslinger seems to think that if you try to codify rules, having more of them makes balance issues harder, but somehow, if you leave shit all vague and let MC fill in the pieces, it always works out. Like, somehow, having MC do stuff on the fly will magically be more balanced and interact with all the other little subsystems better.

Whatever.

[violence in the media]

Also, as a point against MTP rules, am I the only one that has commonly experienced the player attitude that it is the MC's responsibility to remember, consider the ramifications of, and consistently apply rulings they've made in the past?

Throughout my life, I've most frequently gamed with people that are my friends--not random collections of people at game stores, conventions, or game sites--and they wouldn't put up with the sort of inconsistent rules bullshittery that Swordslinger is espousing from whoever had the MC hat. They (and I) are certainly not going to appreciate someone recanting a ruling that was made on the fly and, because the MC didn't think through the consequences, doesn't like the results that have emerged. Playing by Rule 0 has almost always been viewed as vaguely dirty pool, even when it's necessary.

Now, none of this means that someone like Swordslinger is a bad person, but it does mean that the type of people I typically game with wouldn't elect him to be MC. Given the choice between Magic the Gathering and Magic the Tea Party, I'll personally pick Magic the Gathering every time.

[Plebian]

the funniest thing about all this is that Swordslinger is arguing that a single streamlined set of rules for improvising damage, with the example used being 4e's chart devised for just that purpose, is far better than having a half-dozen different things to look up just to know what damage this exact rock is going to do

but people don't get that and instead it's all this retarded talk about magical tea party which is an extra level of hilarious because that is seriously what D&D is even if you play it strictly RAW. it's a bunch of (usually) grown-ass people pretending to be elves and dwarves and shit while one of them decides how they're going to pretend today.

all D&D is magical tea party.

[the_taken]

OK, I just skimmed through the whole eleven fucking pages of this thread. Other than a few insightful posts on what not to do, I have seen nothing on what to do! So I'm going to ask: When you make a game, what do you do to add tactical depth?

[mean_liar]

It's easy in theory, hard in practice. My own big three would be:

1. Choices must matter.
2. Every action has risk.
3. Every action has a counter.

[echoVanguard]

Tactical Depth is a measurement of how many options a player has at any given time which:
A) can meaningfully and differently affect the game, and
B) do not have a clear heirarchy of optimization.

In general, what this means for game design is highly subjective based on what sort of game you want to play, how many players you have, how long a turn should take, and so on. It's less of a design tool and more of a QA tool, however.

echo

[K]

Now, none of this means that someone like Swordslinger is a bad person, but it does mean that the type of people I typically game with wouldn't elect him to be MC. Given the choice between Magic the Gathering and Magic the Tea Party, I'll personally pick Magic the Gathering every time.

Yeh, the philosophy of "there might be some bad rules, so lets not have rules" is not very productive. I don't even know why you would do that because some of your houserules are going to be bad too.

Rules-light is bad by default. Magic Tea Party is just awful.

[Swordslinger]

This argument is bullshit. You still need rules. When your dragon drops a boulder on the party it is still a rule - a houserule created on the fly. And the odds of fucking up are much greater when you just make up stuff on the fly.

I think you're mixing up the idea of a rule and a ruling.

When a dragon drops a boulder, I make a ruling as to how much damage I think it should do. I'm not making a general purpose rule to define falling object damage, I'm just ruling on: "how much damage does this specific boulder do when dropped by this dragon?"

Ideally, that ruling is not something pulled out of my ass, but rather based on guidelines provided to me by the rule system. And because it's a handy table, I can have it right on my DM screen. No page flipping, no stopping the game, I just reference the table, and there's my damage roll.

But that ruling is only going to be particularly relevant should that exact situation come up again. The same monster is carrying the exact same sized boulder and dropping it. I don't think I have to say how unlikely it is that that ever happens again in the same campaign. Even if it did happen say 2-3 adventures later, even if the DM's ruling the next time is slightly different, it's just not a big deal to make me care. So the boulder happens to do "Medium" damage on the table instead of "high" damage.

Why is that such a huge deal that a harpy rock dropper in one adventure deals slightly more damage than the previous one? Are PCs even likely to actively realize the difference between 2d10+6 or 2d12+10? If your PCs are that into the numbers, then you probably should be wargaming, not RPing, since they should be focused on the story, not calculating the damage range they expect the monster to do.

To me, that's like the DM forgetting the name of a village the PCs passed through once two adventures ago. You just make up something new and move on. If you have PCs that are that anal about stuff like that, I'd consider finding a new group. It sounds like they're not very fun people to be around. If your group is that rules anal, maybe you really should be playing Magic: the Gathering instead of D&D.

Rules are for commonly used actions, not special case nuances.

[Winnah]

What if instead of a big rock, the Dragon drops a sack of rocks? Or a flaming ball of pitch? A cart full of meticulously warded copper peices? A pile of bloated and diseased corpses?

A damage by level table will only provide a bland, homogenised list of outcomes.

A pile of source material may take longer for an inexperienced person to reference, but is more likely to produce a satisfactory result. In the event the whole scenario needs to be MPT'ed, you are also likely to have a list of effects to draw a reasonable comparison from.

[Swordslinger]

What if instead of a big rock, the Dragon drops a sack of rocks? Or a flaming ball of pitch? A cart full of meticulously warded copper peices? A pile of bloated and diseased corpses?

A damage by level table will only provide a bland, homogenised list of outcomes.

As the choices probably should be.
A bunch of rocks might be an area effect but moderate damage.
A flaming ball of pitch would do low damage + ongoing fire.
A cart of copper pieces maybe moderate area damage but attack Fort instead of Ref?

Also, you seriously want written rules ahead of time for all that stuff? Wow. That rulebook would be ridiculously huge. That's nuts dude.