RPG a Day #3 Tactics

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

I had to think about this one because tactic really implies you’re using minis in your game. I have done this; I actually default to this more often than not. I think with minis using tactics is easier and far more expected. 

However, because of 2020 I ended up playing a lot of RPG’s over discord. Because of this we tried a lot of different games and systems. This ended up causing up to play games without using minis. Paying things like Star Trek Adventures, Blades in the Dark, and Quest forced us to try play by picturing the games in our heads. 

At first this made thinking tactically difficult. It got easier over time, but I missed having the nicely set up map and all of the figures set out to show me where everyone was. When you start playing theatre of the mind though you have to give a lot of things to faith. You need to rely on the other players to give some leeway into where everyone is. 

Part of this is that sometimes you’ll have different ideas of where your characters are standing. It’s easy to say my character runs across the hall and ducks behind cover. However did you mean they stepped into a doorway or ducked behind a trash can? Because of this there’s the chance you’ll all have very different ideas about what’s going on in a scene. 

I found that the players need to be more specific when describing action. This helps remove most of the confusion. But, sometimes there will still be a few moments where something goes wrong. For my group we found striking a happy middle ground seemed to work the best. Okay, you did duck into a doorway but the guy shooting at you would instead fire at someone he has a better shot at, moved first, or chose a different weapon. 

I still love minis based combat. There are some games where that sort of thing is just perfect. Through the Breach, X Crawl, and D&D work great with this sort of combat. Tales from the Loop, Blades in the Dark, and 7th Seas work well with theatre of the mind. However, I would believe if someone told me the exact opposite. 

What do you think?

I’ll see you all tomorrow for weapon.