Tactics and Strategy, and Strategy and Tactics

Back on the essay train. I’ve got a lot of thoughts, and you people are gonna hear about em. Several months ago I was chatting with a few OSR folks I’m fond of about the modern incarnation of D&D, resource management, and the lack of strategy in said modern incarnation. People are spending their encounter/daily features in a fashion that’s still quite similar to 4th edition, going to sleep, and getting back up for the next 15 minute adventuring day. That’s the pace of the game, there’s no strategic element to the combat, they’re too balanced.

Nonsense, I said! The party’s resources must be managed appropriately in response to encounters, and parties who overextend in response to combat and other obstacles are punished. I said these things like an idiot; because this is not strategy. This is tactics, as I was then helpfully informed.

See, tactics is the element of managing an individual set of obstacles, and the resources (or lack thereof) you expend to overcome it. But in the earliest iterations of D&D, combat was a thing to be avoided! I was admittedly dumbstruck. There are a lot of elements of OSR gaming I implement in my games (more as of recent), so I always interpreted differences in style and design as being right of center/left of center. This really threw me for a loop, though. I always saw combats as a thing to eventually prosecute. I’m way more cautious than the rest of my gaming group when it comes to “can we take this on?” in sandbox games (mostly as a counterweight), but I rarely think to say “Let’s accomplish x goal without fighting at all.”

Makes sense, 5e is about killing monsters. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

But man, this intrigued me. See, the mindset of “The point is to fight them” is how tactics butt out strategy, especially as players get higher level. You become less and less afraid of fights, and therefore the element of danger is inherently diminished. Right?

Well, it depends on your game. And I don’t mean style (but also yes) at your table, I literally mean the design of the game. See, what we have to discuss is how resources are regained and how frequently, how permanent the consequences of fights are, and the scale at which these fights take place. I’m going to start with the low hanging fruit, because it’s the least noodly, the most concrete. I really don’t think anyone would disagree with what I’m about to say.

Expanding the scale of conflict ensures strategy is always present within your game. Players aren’t as afraid of fights in dungeon crawls? Their hirelings find themselves in more dangerous situations. Hirelings improve enough to hold their own? The players have to worry about mercenary companies, militias, and standing armies they can’t hope to fight alone. The players can take on a dragon? Doesn’t mean their boat or airship can. Players have a nice standing force? They need a place to garrison those forces. That place can be attacked. The players can expand their domain, and have good incentive to do so. Other people can make the same conclusion, about the players’ domain.

You can maintain a sense of strategy in your games by giving your players assets they can’t protect via round-by-round combat. Even if the players regain their HP by finishing a long rest (they shouldn’t, more on that later), their assets don’t. Let’s start out with my favorite; vehicles. My ever growing love for sword and planet along with spellpunk has led me to force tons of vehicles into my games. Steam based trains, magical and engineered airships, spelljammers, boats, you name it. I’m still looking for a good excuse I mean opportunity to put tanks in. These things need to be repaired! They’re not on a daily/encounter/at will timer for their resources, they need to be supplied, maintained, and repaired. Not asking the players to bust out spreadsheets mind you, this stuff can be reduced to a simple gold or resource cost at regular intervals. Making my players manage how many cannons had how much ammo for how many months and replaced to increasingly volatile gunpowder how often would actually hurt the strategic element of the game, because the players would stop engaging with it. For good reason! Don’t they have a lieutenant or first mate to pass this stuff off to? Give him the gold and have him handle it, there’s loot out there waiting for our greasy, soot-stained, and blood-soaked embrace.

Provided an asset like a vehicle is an object of convenience, desire, and/or purpose for some larger goal, the players will get attached to it. The players will approach threats to the asset to some degree on the asset’s terms. Even if they decide “We’re going to basically sacrifice our ship pursuing the dragon”, the decision will come after deliberating on the long term consequences of that choice. The players must stick to travelling via rail lines if they want to avoid wilderness encounters. They’ll be at a disadvantage facing flying creatures. What are they going to do with the crew? It doesn’t matter that between rage, a haste spell, several potions, and the aid of his +5 greataxe +10 vs dragons +1d4 cold damage the barbarian could solo the dragon, if your game supports that sort of thing. Engaging in combat at this scale will have effects felt days, weeks, or even months later.

Let’s use an example I’m less familiar with across play but has some literary precedent I can lean on. I’ve recently started re-reading the Chronicles of Amber a few weeks after I finished the 10 book series, but I’ve skipped the first book on this second pass (in spite of it being a masterpiece). The princes of Amber are all heroic in their talents and abilities, you can easily consider them mid to high level characters. But let’s say (and I’m keeping everything spoiler-free) these princes go at it with one another not just one on one, but with armies? One prince may well win a duel with the other, even several! But what happens when the stronger brother’s force is still defeated? Well, the stronger brother is still defeated. He can get captured, be executed. Even if he gets away, the man just lost an army! Will he be able to raise another force, now that he’s lost this prior fight? Will he be able to do it on the run from his enemies? It almost certainly won’t be a bigger force, with these additional complications. How does he tip the odds in his favor?

It doesn’t matter that the stronger character is stronger on an individual basis, because the conflict is on a vastly bigger scale than what he can deal with individually. Is this a daily/encounter/at-will problem? Even in a game with those mechanics, strategy reigns supreme the second the game scales upwards. I should also note before moving on that the larger scale actually allows the GM far more leeway in reacting and adapting to the players’ actions. It doesn’t matter what your game’s skill system is or how you implement it, you’re not learning the enemy’s troop movements, secret alliances and patrons, and special units off of a perception check. What’s more, the resolution of larger scale conflicts tends to take more time to resolve in the fiction of the game, meaning events have more opportunities to be introduced (improvised). A volcano exploded, another domain decided to invade, supernatural storms are cropping up, all sorts of modifiers you can’t really bust out in a dungeon crawl.

It’s also important to note a wider campaign scope doesn’t make progress as a simple party moot. There’s no reason you need an army to find out the enemy wizard has been feeding virgins to a demon a few hexes away for unlimited* spells. Nor do you need an army to find out where that demon is! The new scale doesn’t make dungeon crawling as players useless at all. Expanding the scope of conflict correctly modifies (not nullifies) the individual scale, providing an endless series of hooks for your players to chase and conquer.

Was that long enough? Don’t worry, I don’t think I have nearly as many thoughts on the other points.

Next up: how permanent are the consequences of a fight? This is tricky and it has some overlap with the final question, but I have a way around that. Obviously, players generally have access to or can retrieve resources which allow them to mitigate or fix the consequences of a fight. So, the question of when they get those resources and what they look like is important. But, first is figuring out what those consequences are, on which the final question rests.

So, what are some consequences that are more long term by nature? I’ll steer away from examples of assets being destroyed, as I think we all understand those to be long term. Your castle wasn’t built in a day, we get it. So, we move to more personal examples. Best one? Save or die. Save or die is everything it says on the tin; you’re threatened by an effect or attack, you make a saving throw, and if you fail, you die. Pretty damn permanent! There are some attacks and effects the measure of your heroism isn’t relevant to. Either you got out of the room, or the arc pylon turned you to ash. Even if you have things like resurrection (which only idiots say cheapens death by default), there’s a good chance they’re not getting resurrected during the event that killed them. How fares the party down a man in combat?

Poorly.

In fact, this is a pretty large category of consequences to deploy. Consequences the party can probably deal with after they’ve cleared the obstacle but not before. they’ve dealt with the obstacle. You may at this point be saying “But wait! We’re trying to discourage the players from treating all obstacles as problems to be solved, rather than avoided.” You’re right, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten. See, if getting your arm lopped off across the course of combat is about a 1 in 5 chance, you’ll start looking at options other than direct confrontation. Ditto for save or die, or getting teleported away from your party, or losing your magic item or….you get the idea. See, it doesn’t matter if you can fix the things I mentioned after dealing with the obstacle, because they make it exponentially more likely you won’t beat the obstacle. That’s the basis of strategy over tactics. it’s just that many devs never considered how to retain it beyond 3rd level, when folks started getting ballsy thanks to hitpoint inflation. Know what doesn’t care about hitpoint inflation? The ankheg with a 20% chance to lop off your leg when it hits an attack. “Oh, but there are prosthetics in Uruzaki, we can get him a new one!” Lotta good that does you in the third level of a dungeon slowly filling with water.

Roll to doggy paddle.

Bottom line is, obstacles need to inflict consequences that generate a death spiral. The players may escape the death spiral, but its effects need to be felt before the party can fully recover. Moreover, they need to ensure the next death spiral will reach its final conclusion without some fantastic luck. Maybe the party survives an encounter in which two characters fail a save-or-die, and another character loses a limb. Maybe those characters are even brought back to life, and the party has to spend a bunch of resources to get them ready for another fight. Think they’re rearing to go at another, similar obstacle? If they are, they’ll learn, provided the game is willing.

We come to our final question; how often does the party get the resources back? My buddy Matt’s second campaign was a mixed bag for me. Had a slow start, but once it picked up (about halfway), man did things absolutely take off. Shot into domain level play, mass combat, tons of loot, and a fairly epic story (even I can enjoy those). Something that imprinted a feeling of levity (and resulted in what became the most lethal campaign we’d experienced up to that point) was an optional rule in the 5e DMG. Basically, you didn’t get HP back once you finished a long rest. You had to spend hit dice to get your HP back, which you can spend on a short or long rest. You get half of your total hit dice back when you finish a long rest, but it was still brutal on the party. We cleared out a tower of vulture riders, having expended literally all of our spells and hit dice to regain most of our HP. After we ignored my suggestion we rest in the fortified tower with a drawbridge, sturdy doors, beds, etc before traveling, we hit the road. Along the road we failed our perception checks, got ambushed by gnolls, and almost had a TKP. We had the fear of God after that, one of the few 5E campaigns where everyone was in agreement; we need to be careful, or we’re dead. Usually in agreement. Mistakes were sometimes made. In any case, whether your game grants your players their most important resource (hitpoints) back on a long rest, or whether they have to use other means to get it back, changes how players approach situations. The funny thing is, you can introduce multiple different ways of regaining HP when this happens. Resting at an inn or similar civilized locale? That gets you to full HP, congrats. Visiting a whorehouse? Regains half HP and half of your hit dice, provided you take a long rest afterwards (very important). Hey! Stay on topic.

Let’s take another element of resource management; spells. Spells usually come back on a long rest, and I’m honestly not inclined to change that as of yet. Maybe it’s something an optional rule could impact, but that’s for another time. See, spells can be and should remain a way to overcome obstacles with ease, provided they work. You hear me, everyone? Provided they work. Where am I going next?

I’m not going to get into the type of resource management or how it would work, but given that spells produce lots of effects, what if there were harsher consequences (and hopefully, better rewards to balance things out) for spells failing? Spell reversal has enticed me ever since I read an excerpt from Cudgel the Clever(? Maybe it was Jack of Shadows) where attempting to encyst someone beneath the earth accidentally unearths everyone ever affected by the spell. Beautiful. What an extra twist of drama when someone fails their save-or-die! Be a real shame if the cleric or pontiff failed their roll. Bigger shame if they fail and the spell reverses. Now you’re two party members down.

More importantly, the presence of this mechanic means the party’s means of fixing their problems after the fact suddenly isn’t as reliable, and could actually turn out worse while prosecuting their endeavor, makes them less likely to attack whatever obstacle it is they’re thinking about! “I’m out of diamonds, guys, Maybe we sneak around this one? Just in case? I don’t know what’ll happen if you get cut in half again.” You don’t need to keep spells from coming back on a long rest (let them stay there, I think). Just introduce a secondary resource management system (which is preferably material in nature, definitely doesn’t come back on a long rest) to prevent spells from producing catastrophic failure. Spells are still cool? Oh yeah, even cooler. Spells are an “I win button?” They weren’t, but definitely not now.

So, let’s wrap everything up into some simplified principles you can pursue TTRPG design with, provided you want strategy to remain competitive with or even dominant compared to tactics. First, increase the scale of your game. Introduce assets that take lots of people to produce, maintain, and repair. People that are hard to get back if things go tits up. These would be hirelings, vehicles, businesses, strongholds, combat units, kingdoms, etc. They’re not coming back at the end of a long rest, so your players don’t want to lose them, so your players are more likely to avoid certain conflicts if it means losing them. Second, give monsters features (or play something that does this for you) that inflict permanent or “pemanent unless someone __” consequences for attempting to fight them. Ditto for traps and curses. Even if your players can fix it afterwards, they’ll be scared to death there won’t be an afterwards. If they choose to fight anyway, you’ll know it wasn’t just because it was the next fight on the list, and it may well be there last. Third and finally, ensure resources don’t just come back to the players on a long rest, or require some additional expenditure to function properly. Things like health should require more work to get back than just taking a nap (still a big fan of the bordello providing HP and hit dice). Spells should have a chance to reverse or harm the caster when they fail, unless they spend something to avoid that scenario. That thing they need to spend should be in finite supply, and whether the player has it should directly impact their enthusiasm to go up against a fire giant or something.

“Cast a spell, keep us safe from the fire!”

“I asked you for three fucking weeks if we could get a single fucking mandrake root, and you said no. No time, you said! Either the spell works, or we’re going to be extra crispy.”

All of these are incentives for players to choose their battles, and pursue goals other than fighting for the sake of it.

Goals like, dare I say it, exploration.