Tactical Systems are Tacky

RPG writers should never facilitate tactical play, or any use of tactics. Instead, they should minimize tactics at every turn, because tactical play is inevitable, and worthless.

I spent too long writing that summary line, and it still looks bad. Maybe a more format structure will look more clear.

Tactics Mean Bad Design

  • P1: Highly tactical games mean some people cannot play well.
  • P2: RPGs should not stop people from playing well.
  • C: Therefore, RPGs should not be highly tactical.

By definition (or thereabouts) a 'tactical' means that some people will play better, and others worse. We can plot a linear scale, by looking at the importance of luck vs skill.

  • Snakes and ladders relies completely on luck. A chess wizard will lose to a 3-year old half of the time.
  • Chess is maximally tactical; you can't hope to win against a chess wizard just because you 'got lucky'. The outcome of a game is fixed by skill, unless two players show similar levels of ability.
  • Poker lies in the middle, where skill can add some chance of success, but even a perfect poker-playing computer will lose games regularly.

If we take an RPG game, and shift it towards the 'tactical' end of the spectrum, then players who like doing little sums in their head will see more success. To put it another way, tactical RPGs means that if a player doesn't like doing little sums in their head, their character will tend to fail. Designing an RPG system like this isn't a challenge...in fact it's so easy that it feels tacky.

Imagining a Perfectly Tactical RPG

Just to clarify the picture, let's imagine an extremely 'tactical' system. Imagine an RPG which uses the word-game ghost to resolve combats. Imagine some system wrapped around the word-game, so that losing to the word-game means you've lost a HP, while a challenge means you either gain or lose 2HP. Imagine characters with a Strength score of 'F', which means that opponents receive double Damage when they finish a word which begins with any letter before 'F'. Imagine, somehow, a complete RPG system which represents characters' fighting skill just as well as any other system, but only using the word-game ghost.

You don't need to imagine this for very long to see what a complete, and utter disaster the night would become, because people have wildly different results when they attempt to play this game. Some people struggle due to inability, and others struggle because they find the word-game tedious and dull. At best, this word-game can become a secondary interest to some players, who would enjoy the word-game challenge while they play the game; but at worst the word-game becomes a second barrier, as everyone must enjoy engaging with the first game's elements (the narrative, emergence, exploration, et c.), and the sub-game's elements (finding words which begin with a set of letters).

Imagining this tactical RPG become nauseating after a while. It sounds like an awful evening, even for those who enjoy word-games. Such an RPG would be so bad that it would speak badly of anyone who enjoyed playing it.

All RPGs are Tactical

  • P1: Any system allows for optimal actions (i.e. 'tactics').
  • P2: RPGs are a system.
  • C: Therefore, any RPG can be optimized.
  • C2: Therefore, designers do not have to take pains to add 'tactics', but may take pains to reduce the amount of tactical play possible.

Give a Mathematician any system - any game, or shopping list, or other well-defined objective, and they can show the perfect way to play the game, or how to optimize buying things. Some RPGs may seem like they have 'a lot' in the way of tactics, but they really just have lists. Once you take a look at what an individual character can do, calculating the optimal move becomes trivial.

The World of Darkness games may seem to have tactics, because you can elect to a 'headshot' by taking a +3 difficulty, in return for +2 Damage dice; but the Maths shows that you should never take this move when you have a dice pool greater than 3, and always take this move otherwise. D&D iterations with special Feats for fighters may seem to have tactics, but the correct answer is almost always to use the most powerful attack you have against the biggest creature, then vanish. The various 'build systems' which seek to make optimized characters are indeed tactical, but each 'move' only occurs when the character gains new abilities; this makes the campaign 'tactical', but not the weekly game session.

Nobody can design around this - every game, every activity, every system (in every sense) remains vulnerable to pedantic Mathematicians; and every new rule the designer creates lead to more potential for sneaky Mathematicians to raise their chances of success above the average. RPG designers can't solve problem with a pure Snakes and Ladders approach - the system exists to represent every meaningful facet of a world, so they must adjust the dice in some places, but not others, and every new rule means an opportunity for pedantic Mathematicians. The real challenge is not making a 'tactical game', but in avoiding tactics as much as possible.

Cracks in the Kludge

When D&D's 3rd edition came out, the designers wanted to avoid anyone running up to an opponent, making an attack, then running away, so they created the 'attack of opportunity'. But the fix just made more problems: getting an 'attack of opportunity' is good, so everyone would have the incentive to maximize their chances of getting one, and might end up making 10 attacks in a single round, if they can somehow force 10 people to move towards them or past them.

The rules for making an 'attack of opportunity' grew and grew to adjust to 'tactical' abuses, becoming more abstract with each layer. And players enjoyed finding those cracks in the system, and exploiting them.

That's a great part of the game - when you figure out that Magic Missile will let your character detect invisible walls, or use a Cure Wounds spell as a makeshift 'Detect Undead' spell by casting it on a suspected vampire.

No Prize is Too Small

Players who enjoy finding these little exploitable cracks in the system will enjoy the experience no matter how small the prize. Using 'Cure Light Wounds' to find out if someone is a vampire won't be very useful most of the time, but players will still feel happy with the result, even if they only do it once.

And if someone stews over numbers all night, and figures out how to get +10% average Damage with a particular weapon and combat manoeuvre, or how to add a +5% chance to hit small creatures, just by moving once every two turns, or a +2% Damage average by performing the YMCA before battle...if that player finds some advantage, then they will be happy with the solution, even with small gains. They will feel happy with their +2% accuracy Bonus because that means the character has been optimized, and it also means that player is a very clever person, and they can help the rest of the party with their hard-earned conclusions.

Back to the Start

RPG system designers should never facilitate tactical play, or any use of tactics. Instead, they should minimize the potential for tactics at every turn, because tactical play is inevitable, and worthless.

Hopefully that makes more sense now. 'Tactical' games seem like a good thing, because some players like them. But making an optimal move is usually easy, which makes it cheap. And making a 'tactical' game is unavoidable, so it's also cheap (and tacky). Instead of 'adding tactics', designers should minimize tactical play as much as possible, leaving the number-lovers to happily spot all of the designers mistakes (and steal some small advantage), and leaving the other players to get on with the actual RPG.