0. Preliminaries

Combat is a central aspect of almost every RPG, but most GMs are not as familiar with Tactics and Strategy as the forces they command within a game would be.

That’s a problem, but the situation becomes even more untenable when GMs become aware that a basic knowledge of tactics can broaden their repertoire of challenges, their palette of choices – both in terms of environment and in terms of opposition.

I can’t help but think that broadening the options available for the GM to select between will inevitably make the game more challenging and more interesting for players.

So that’s what this article… Field Manual…. is intended to provide – an education in basic Tactics and Strategy.

Before we get started, though, I need to mention the terminology that I’m going to use. Most discussions of this type refer to “Strength” as an abstract measure of combat capability or as a form of attack or defense that a particular individual or group of individuals can utilize particularly effectively, such as in “Meet Strength with Strength” or “There’s Strength in Numbers”. That works fine most of the time, but RPGs have usurped the term to refer to an individual’s Muscle Power specifically. So this article will use the term “Might” where you would normally read “Strength” in the non-muscle-power senses of the word: “Meet Might with Might”, “There’s Might in Numbers”, and so on, just to avoid any possible confusion with the Stat.

1. Tactics Vs Strategy

So let’s start at the very beginning: What’s the difference between Tactics and Strategy?

Tactics is small-scale – “winning” one skirmish or encounter. Sometimes a Tactic is even smaller, aimed at achieving some intermediate goal that it is believed will enhance the chance of victory in the long term, or which might even be necessary to create the opportunity for victory.

Tactics are what you use to win one hand of a card game, or one round of a board game – or to lose only the hands/rounds that you don’t care about.

Strategy is large-scale. It usually consists of a series of tactics and assignments that attempt to cause the achievement of a specific goal.

If Tactics are about winning one hand, Strategy is an approach to winning the game.

Right away, you can see that there’s a lot of overlap and fuzziness about the differences.

In RPG terms, you can think about Tactics as the combination of maneuvers and actions that permit a collective “you” to have the maximum impact on the enemy in a single round of combat, while Strategy defines the terms of engagement (when and how you can attack, when you should withdraw, etc), the overall objective, and how you will use tactics to achieve it. It might dictate that one particular enemy be rendered ineffective as a priority, for example, as a critical step in defeating a group of enemies.

Notice that I didn’t say “defeat” in that last sentence; it’s often enough to simply neutralize or minimize the effectiveness of the target.

2. Tactical Fundamental 1: Attacks

There are two fundamental tactical considerations that have to be considered if you are to be tactically effective. The first of these is the concept of an attack. The general rule to achievement of victory is to Apply Might against Weakness.

Every force has some attack mechanism that is its most effective choice within the terms of the tactical environment. Identify each attack mechanism and what the enemy can do to resist that mode of attack and compare the differences between these pairings. Identify the biggest difference and you have chosen the basic tactic that you will employ – or would have done, if that was all there is to it.

3. Tactical Fundamental 2: Defense

The second consideration is the other end of the longsword: defense. Your tactical choices should restrict the enemy as much as possible to a selection that causes the enemy to apply Might Vs Might, or better yet, Weakness vs Might. This is often the most difficult part of combat to achieve – so much so that most amateurs don’t even consider it, simply pulling out their biggest gun and pulling the trigger.

Often, you may need to apply a series of tactics to remove attack options from the enemy, or even from both sides, one at a time, before actually engaging in direct combat. If you aren’t all that effective in an attack mode, you probably won’t miss it.

4. Tactical Fundamental 3: Response

Both sides in a conflict want to “win,” though “winning” might have very different definitions for each side. Furthermore, both sides are assuming that the other will oppose their achievement, their “win”. This can often be a false assumption, but the assumption is considered valid until proven otherwise by both sides; many conflicts are actually unnecessary, were the two sides able to discuss their mutual goals. Such communications are frequently impossible, because knowing what an enemy is trying to achieve is a significant advantage in trying to defeat them, not something that should be given to a potential enemy lightly.

So it is that assumed conflicting goals produce combat. It’s always intelligent to assume that the opposition have their own plans for achieving their goals, and will set about implementing those plans even while you are doing the same thing. Again, they will probably disguise their objectives as best they can so as to keep you in the dark.

Part of what the commander of any military force actively engaging the enemy in either the strategic or tactical sense is to anticipate what the enemy might do, and how to counter those actions, and to be able to react and alter your own planning if the enemy does something that you haven’t anticipated.

It is sometimes said that “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, so prevalent is the need for such reaction. It would be more correct to say “no inadequate planning survives contact with the enemy” but that admits to a tactical failure which is not easily made; the common formulation of the aphorism is offered as an excuse by the amateur.

5. Conditional Variations

No rules can be hard and fast, no tactics will be universal. The environment plays a huge role in determining outcomes. So much so that one source suggests “the winner of any conflict or military engagement will usually be the faction that best utilizes the environment to their advantage, all else being reasonably close”. Note, not equal, even “reasonably close” is good enough.

• Conditions can minimize, mitigate, or cap the might that the PCs can bring to bear.
• Conditions can minimize, increase, or cap any vulnerability that the PCs enemies might wish to exploit.
• Conditions can minimize, mitigate, or cap the might that the PCs enemies can bring to bear against the PCs.
• Conditions can minimize, increase, or cap any vulnerability that the PCs might wish to exploit.

Any one or combination of more than one of the above might be present in any tactical situation.

It’s not enough to simply contemplate an environment, you need to translate that into a tactical awareness, an appreciation of what those conditions will do, and what they can do, to the tactical determinations already discussed (in sections 2, 3, and 4).

5.1 Relative Tactical Grading of Might

It’s going to keep coming up unless I address it, so let’s briefly contemplate a Relative Tactical Grading of Might. I’ll be drawing on some limited wargaming/boardgaming experience for this (RPGs don’t often go into it because they are more focused on the individual). As a general rule:

• 5:1 is decisive, higher is more so.
• 4:1 and 3:1 are strongly advantageous and will probably result in victory for the stronger side, only the cost in lost lives will vary.
• 2:1 will probably bring about a costly victory, but there’s room for luck to reverse the results
• less than 2:1 can go either way.

Defensive Structures and Terrain and other environmental factors act as Force Multipliers, effectively increasing the Might of those who have them. How large a multiplier is more subjective on the part of the game designer and historian. For example, some historians rate castles as 4x multiplier, others as 5x; and some say that unless you can achieve at least 10:1 force ratio, the castle will not fall, adding the concept of a threshold to the mix.

I think that’s probably getting too complex for this discussion. Let’s just call it a 4x multiplier and see where that gets us.

In effect, that means that:

• to be decisive, you need at least 20:1.
• between 20:1 and 12:1, you will probably win eventually, but will lose a lot of your force in the process.
• between 12:1 and 8:1, you will probably achieve a costly victory (i.e. losing more than 2/3 of your forces), but there’s room for luck to reverse that result – and if it does, the other side will have their losses reduced by the force multiplier from 2/3 to 2/12, or 1/6. Which means they won’t be weakened very much at all.
• between 8:1 and 4:1, the battle can go either way.
• less than 4:1, the advantage and likely victory go to the other side.
• If they have 25% more force than you are attacking with, the defenders will score a decisive victory, and your forces will be probably be routed.

That all seems reasonable, so it can now be used as a yardstick. A steep hill might be worth x2 to the force atop it. So might a fortified wall. A palisade might be worth x1.75. A gentle slope, x1.5. How much might a moat be worth – one just enough to create sticky, clinging mud underfoot? The purpose of a moat isn’t to stop enemies, it’s to slow them down enough that archers can fill them full of holes, while preventing the use of siege towers (which are basically boxes full of attackers at the height of the walls). I could entertain arguments for effectiveness of everything from x4 to x10, but would probably say x6 or x7.5 is most reasonable – assuming there’s a castle wall on the far side to use as an archery platform!.

5.2 The GM’s advantage

The GM has a huge advantage – he creates the tactical situation that he wants to be present. The players have to adapt to whatever the GM provides them, unless they can somehow change it.

If the GM is an “honest” administrator of his game, he will adhere to a couple of ground rules:

• The tactical situation has to make sense, in terms of the surrounding environment;
• The choices that any NPC forces make have to be consistent with the tactical and strategic expertise of the NPCs and their general level of intelligence;
• The NPCs objectives should reasonable, given the culture to which they belong, and achievable – if everything goes their way, at worst;
• The Effective Might of the NPCs, taking the tactical situation, environment, and the enemy they expect to confront (which might not be the PCs) should be as close to reasonable as they can manage.

But, bearing those restrictions in mind, the GM has huge latitude to make things interesting – and to make things “interesting”. And that permits the formulation of a couple of really simple tactical guidelines.

6. Weaker Enemies

If the enemies that the PCs are to confront are weaker than the PCs in some respect, use conditions, terrain, and tactics to increase the effective might of the enemies and/or weaken the PCs.

7. Stronger Enemies

If the enemies that the PCs are to confront are stronger than the PCs in some respect, use conditions, terrain, and tactics to restrict the effective might of the enemies and/or strengthen the PCs.

8. Force Projection

Take your GM’s hat off for a moment, it’s time for a little more applies-to-everyone theory.

Military planners use the term “Force Projection” to describe the capacity of a military body to be effective outside of their territory. For RPG purposes, I use the term to refer to the effective damage that can be inflicted after everything is taken into account and relative to the enemy’s capacity to absorb that damage. So:

Chance of successful hit (%)
× number of strikes in a time period
× average damage / successful strike
÷ individual target’s average capacity
÷ number of targets
= Force Projection within 1 time period.

This yields a simple number that compares combat effectiveness of different tactical choices. It’s often more work than it’s worth if performed at the gaming table, but if done as part of prep, can yield useful information. In particular, the difference between your force projection and that of the enemy can be illuminating.

Let’s try it with some actual numbers and see what we get.

A character has a low-damage +2 weapon or a medium-high damage non-magical weapon. The enemy has an estimated 20 hit points and there are 6 of them. With the low-damage weapon, he has a 60% chance to hit, gets 5 strikes a minute, and does an average of 4 points of damage; with the high-damage weapon, he has a 50% chance to hit, gets 3 strikes a minute, but does an average of 12 points of damage. Which is his more effective choice?

Low-damage weapon: 60×5×4/20/6 = 300×4/20/6 = 1200/20/6 = 60/6 = 10 per minute.
High-damage weapon: 50×3×12/20/6 = 150×12/20/6 = 1800/20/6 = 90/6 = 15 per minute.

The high-damage weapon is more effective.

But wait – what if the high-damage weapon couldn’t be used until the targets were within arm’s reach, while the low-damage weapon could be used at range at a reduced chance to hit?

Well, it depends on what the specific values for range and accuracy drop-off (also known as range interval) are. But I find it more useful to abstract the situation a little more and instead of actual ranges, to think in terms of range intervals, which are defined as causing -10% chance to hit, cumulative.

Since the base chance to hit with the low-damage weapon is 60%, that defines 50%, 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% as the range intervals.

10×5×4/20/6 = 50×4/20/6 = 200/20/6 = 10/6 = 1.6667 per minute.
20×5×4/20/6 = 100×4/20/6 = 400/20/6 = 20/6 = 3.3333 per minute.
30×5×4/20/6 = 150×4/20/6 = 600/20/6 = 30/6 = 5 per minute.
40×5×4/20/6 = 200×4/20/6 = 800/20/6 = 40/6 = 6.6667 per minute.
50×5×4/20/6 = 250×4/20/6 = 1000/20/6 = 50/6 = 8.3333 per minute.
(60×5×4/20/6 = 10 as previously calculated.)

Add all those together, and you get force projection of 25 before the high-damage weapon can even strike. What’s more, the less-important numbers are the first to drop off, so even if the enemy starts at only the 30% range, you’re still going to get 20 of that 25.

Switching to the high-damage weapon at close range might require you to forego the 50% round. That’s a fairly large hunk of effectiveness to give up; to replace that lost force projection, the battle has to last 8.333 / (15-10) = 1.6667 minutes after all forces are within melee range. That’s minutes, not rounds!



Image by SilviaP_Design from Pixabay, background by Mike

There are a lot of variables involved, but on this basis, you could map out a fairly effective combat strategy for this character. It’s “use the low-damage rapid-fire weapon until the targets are two range intervals away. Assess the number of remaining enemy; and estimate how long it will take to defeat them in melee with the heavier weapon; if the answer is less than two, continue with the rapid-fire weapon.”

What if the rapid-fire weapon couldn’t be used once the character was engaged? Well, for a start, you would have to say that the game designers had never seen the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, to have included such a stupid game rule. But let that go, and assume that they have done it for game balance reasons – which, in my book, beats realism seven days a week and twice on game day. If that’s the case, then the 10 vs 15 comparison was comparing apples with oranges, and is no longer meaningful. In fact, the “10” becomes strictly hypothetical, because the weapon can’t be used at that range. The true maximum force projection of the weapon is 8.3333; any enemy still standing when you reach that will have to be taken out with the heavy melee-weapon.

Mobility clearly becomes a factor. If you can move enough to give an extra shot with the low-damage weapon at the 50% range, that’s clearly worth doing. If you can move enough to keep that distance between you and keep peppering the enemy from a distance, that’s even better – especially if they don’t have ranged weapons. All movement rates are relative to that of the enemy.

That’s the way to handle Force Projection: start as simply as possible and incorporate one complicating factor at a time, refining the tactics that result.

A lot of the time, you can more or less proceed on instinct. For example, it’s always better to weaken an enemy if it can be done at little or no cost; so if the enemy don’t have a ranged attack and you do, take advantage of it, but make sure that your forces are ready and waiting when they get into melee range.

9. Put Yourself In Enemy Shoes

Putting the GMing hat back on, how can you use what you’ve just learned? Well, you can determine the most effective tactics for your NPCs to use with a little more insight, for a start. Equally usefully, you can determine what will be the most effective approach the PCs can use in the situation – be that to charge and close to melee as quickly as possible, or to respond with counter-fire, or some combination. You can assess what each member of the party is bringing to the resulting combat equation, and identify any weak links that you can exploit.

Remember the two tactical guidelines that I offered earlier? You can target your use of conditions and circumstances to alter the relative might of the forces that the PCs have to confront – remembering that intelligent enemies will choose the most advantageous combination of positioning and strategy that they can, given what they may or may not know about what the PCs can do.

10. Range vs Melee

There are other tactical considerations to think about, as well, in terms of altering the tactical situation. I’ve already touched on the first of these – range. If you can hit the enemy and they can’t hit you, you’re likely to win the fight. If you can hit the enemy more often than they can hit you, that’s generally good too, even if the damage that you inflict is less. Understanding force projection enables you to determine whether or not a greater damage delivered in fewer hits gives one side or the other the advantage – and hence whether or not range gives one side or the other a strength or a weakness.

11. Unexpected Axes Of Attack

This is always a good one when you can pull it off.

It generally requires hidden forces and a sacrificial group of NPCs to act as “bait”. As soon as the “bait” sees the PCs, they start to fall back, raking the PCs with ranged attacks as they go; if the PCs pull out ranged weapons of greater force projection than the NPCs can muster, they turn and run.

Most PCs will be inclined to pursue; and that can leave them vulnerable to a surprise attack dropping from the ceiling on ropes, or using blowdarts from the river, or simply hitting the PCs from both sides and behind as soon as they have oriented themselves for a frontal attack.

Quite often, this is most effective when it is targeted at a PC who represents a specific point of vulnerability – in D&D terms, that’s often the mage, occasionally the rogue or cleric. Aim to remove a key point of strength from the enemy, or exploit a point of weakness.

12. The Role of Mobility

I’ve also touched on this already, but it bears thinking about. A more mobile force has an inherent advantage over a less mobile force – so if the PCs are more mobile, luring them into a tactical situation that reduces that mobility can be an effective tactic. If the NPCs are more mobile, think about how they would exploit that mobility.

Of course, there are three elements to mobility: speed, terrain, and maneuverability.

• Speed is obvious and the simplest element, so much so that the others are often ignored.
• Terrain can be handled in either of two ways, or as a combination of both: it can cap the speed that can be brought to bear, or it can reduce the speed that can be utilized effectively. Especially slippery or clinging mud, or broken ground with lots of treacherous-but-small elevation changes, or slopes, or ice, or buried vines that can be pulled tight by hidden reinforcements, or something that limits visibility, or smoke (which limits both visibility and respiration – it’s hard to fight effectively when you’re coughing uncontrollably). There are lots of choices here, so think very carefully about Mobility. Special attention should be paid to creatures who fly, and who are therefore unaffected by the terrain that ground forces have to contend with. Webs and vines can impair these creatures mobility, however – which can make a more powerful creature vulnerable to the PCs. None of this should happen by accident.
• The third element of Mobility is Maneuverability – the ability to change direction more quickly than the enemy. You can see this element on display in all football games regardless of code, and often in conflict with greater speed.

There are often secondary considerations to contemplate – size and weight.

• Sometimes bigger characters have the advantage – if they can get up to speed, they may be able to bull their way through light resistance. At other times, space will be confined, and smaller characters will have the advantage. Contemplate a series of 4′ deep pits, just large enough for a goblin to get into; now equip those goblins with spears and cover with a camouflage. Large characters can get themselves trapped in such a pit, giving the goblin in the pit room to slash at the PC with a knife but otherwise taking them out of the battle; those who don’t fall into a pit can be attacked with spears with relative impunity because the goblins are below out of arm’s reach unless you’ve got a pole-arm; only a small character can hope to dive into one of these holes to fight it out, mano-a-mano, with the creature inside.
• Greater weight is never an advantage unless coupled with both mobility and with increased size, when it can help in the “bulling through” mentioned previously. The rest of the time, it slows a character down, costing them mobility. Lighter characters, on the other hand, may be able to cross weakened bridges and the like that will simply collapse under the weight of a typical PC.

13. Many attacks vs few attacks

When people write about there being “Might” in Numbers, what they are really talking about is there being Might in the number of attacks. More attacks are better then less, all else being equal, is what they are trying to say, and one way of getting more attacks is to present the enemy with greater number of attackers.

If you have ten enemies who can attack in a given period of time, and they have a 60% chance of hitting, that means that in any given period of time, six of them can be expected to hit the target. If they are dividing their attacks against two targets, that’s three each. Are they dividing their fire? Or would it be more effective to target a single threat and hope to remove it from battle?

I once divided a goblin raiding force who knew that they were going to be attacking these specific PCs, who divided into five squads (one per PC) and proceeded to develop plans targeting each individual – in a coordinated strike. So they threw nets over the fighters, employed smoke grenades against the mage, used lassos to disarm the cleric while hurling sling bullets from multiple directions at him, tossed an immobilizing glue on the rogue, and I forget the tactic used on the fifth character. Three were captives in one round, the fourth was down two rounds later, and the fifth almost made a narrow escape only to be stopped by knife-blades at the throats of the rest of the party. Of course, it wasn’t too long before the captives broke free and created all sorts of havoc amongst the raiding force, who made the fundamental mistake of letting the PCs communicate with each other and coordinate an escape plan, but it shows the value of tactics – and of multiple attacks.

But here’s another way to think about the whole question: “Many” attacks can be dispersed and have cumulative effects; “Few” attacks need to be specifically targeted. If you have limited opportunities to strike, you need to target the most effective targets to strike at. This is the whole concept of a “surgical strike” in a nutshell; it avoids (to the maximum extent possible) the collateral damage that results from a more generally-dispersed attack. In anti-personnel mines and terror attacks, the priorities are inverted; you want more generalized damage.

It follows that you should always prefer many-attack modes unless you can identify and attack specific targets to achieve a specific purpose – all else being equal.

13.1 The Lightness Of Numbers

There can be a natural inclination, when attacking a small group with a greater number of attackers, to divide the attacks amongst the target. Doing so might yield 5 or 6 attackers per PC, for example. This is a tactical mistake. Greater numbers of combatants for a given collective power level require each to be a less-effective combatant, so 5-6 attackers might not be enough to bring a PC down; this enables the PCs (who will generally be able to take out a combatant each in a round) to reduce the attacking force by 6. The next time, it’s 4-5 attackers per PC – which in many cases still won’t be enough to bring a PC down. So another 6 attackers fall, and now it’s 3-4 attackers per PC, and most PCs for whom this sort of fight is fair and balanced still won’t go down. Next round, the attackers are down to 2-3 per PC, about 1/3 of the original force, having achieved (relatively) nothing – a morale check is certainly warranted at this point, and the battle only goes downhill from there.

It’s far more tactically sound to accept that every PC you don’t target will take out an NPC and to use the entire force to bring down one or two PCs in the first round. Let’s say two go down – that leaves three. So the next round, instead of 25-30 attackers, you have 22-27. That’s still enough to take down another PC. The other two PCs take out two more of the attackers, leaving 20-25. That’s still enough to take down one of the PC heavy-hitters, though it might take a couple of rounds – so 4 attackers down, and 1 PC. That leaves one single PC to fight off 16-21 attackers; and it’s the PC who should probably be facing a morale check.

What counts is the number of attacks that the PCs have, collectively, relative to the number of attacks doing average damage it will require for the PCs to remove a single enemy from the battle – and vice-versa. If you’re facing an enemy with 140 hit points and you only do 3.5 on average per attack, that’s 40 attacks to take them down. If you have 20 attackers trying, with one attack a round, and they have a 25% chance of hitting, that’s effectively 5 successful attacks in a round. So it will take eight rounds to take down the PC even if you don’t lose a single attacker while doing so.

In those eight rounds, the PC will probably get 2-3 attacks a round, for a total of 16-24. If he’s got a 70% chance of success, say, that’s effectively 11-17 attacks (roughly), and if it takes three hits on average to take out an attacker, that’s 3-5 or maybe 6 attackers. Then there are all the attacks by other PCs; these are likely to do between half and 3/4 as much, each, assuming none of them are fighters. If there are three other PCs, that’s 3-6×0.5-0.75 x 3, or 4.5-12. Adding in the original 3-6 gives 7.5-18, or an average of about 12. It will cost more than half the attackers to take out the front-line fighter if you only start with twenty, and one attack a turn.

But that’s still a heck of a lot more effective than 2/3 of the attacking force wiped out for NO PCs down.

Of course, the reality in combat is a little different. Each PC would ‘pin down’ one enemy, preventing them from attacking the target (but enabling them to attack that PC). When the PC took the ‘pinned’ attacker down (by getting enough attacks on them), they would proceed to ‘pin’ a second attacker, and so on. So in reality, the attacking force would be even less effective than the theoretical one described, luck notwithstanding. Conclusion: Twenty attackers with one attack a round each is not enough to threaten this party, but there are too many of them for this to be a quick fight – which makes this a fairly tedious and boring fight.

40 attackers, and two attacks a round? That’s twice as many and twice as many attacks per, and probably boosts their chances of a successful hit by 5 or 10% as well. So they would be a smidgen more than four times as effective, and that eight rounds is suddenly 2 rounds, maybe three. If luck goes their way, they might take down the entire party by focusing their attacks on one target at a time; if they only do average well, two badly-wounded PCs will be left at the end of the fight, desperately trying to save the lives of the rest of the party, if they can. This indicates slightly more than a fair fight, the balance has swung markedly in favor of the attackers. “Fair” is probably 32-34.

The lesson to take away is that there is only weight in numbers if you have enough numbers to create weight, and that if you’re relying on the weight of numbers, everyone should pile on as much as possible. “United we stand, divided we fall” – unless each division is enough to take out their target before they are killed off in turn.

How many? Just to get a sense of the numbers required, we need 32 to reliably take down our 120-HP fighter. If there are two more characters at roughly 3/4 of that combat effectiveness, that’s 32×2×3/4, or 48 for the pair. One more character at about half the effectiveness of the fighter is another 16. That’s 96 attackers before the “split up amongst the party” becomes effective. You might get away with fewer, but it would be taking a chance of failure. 96 vs 32 is 3:1, so the “divide attacks amongst the party” is 1/3 as effective as focused targeting.

As GM you can exploit this – if pitching a weak foe at the PCs, give them a unified target; if throwing an encounter at the PCs that’s stronger than they are, divide it’s attention amongst the PCs at least some of the time, and you effectively weaken it considerably.

14. Hidden Resources

PCs fighting a bunch of slightly weaker NPCs is a lot of fun for the PCs – until the NPCs pull out a potion of mass healing or some such other hidden advantage. It’s all well and good for the PCs to have access to such things, but not half as much ‘fun’ when the enemy uses them, too. Or maybe there’s a magical field that grants everyone who is wearing one of “these” armbands a bonus to hit – at least for a while. Or the enemies have hidden allies who are casting healing spells in their directions.

Most GMs find tracking ammunition usage to be too much work – see He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Servomech: User-friendly Encumbrance in RPGs for a more practical way of doing so – but an ammo cache is practically the very definition of “hidden resources”.

15. Knowledge

Not all knowledge can be translated into a combat advantage, but when knowledge does have tactical benefits, it tends to be a game-changer. Knowing that three rounds after the volcano gurgles, burning mud will erupt from certain fissures and cracks, is definitely a combat advantage.

Probably the most useful knowledge in tactical terms is knowing what alterations your forces have made to the combat conditions – where the hidden pits and tripwires are, and so on. The next most useful knowledge is what the opposition’s goals are; being able to frustrate those ambitions if you’re going to be defeated anyway is a quite satisfactory form of spite.

Using knowledge in a combat situation is a two-fold problem.

First, what knowledge might confer an advantage?
Second, what advantages can the attackers wrest from the situation they find themselves in?

As a GM, these are always useful things to have thought about in advance because what’s good for the goose is sauce for the gander – if the PCs have appropriate skills or knowledge, they should receive the appropriate benefits.

16. Dirty Tricks

Unless you start invoking “rules for the conduct of combat” – which are appropriate to some genres and not others – there are limited things you can do that might fall into the category of “dirty tricks”. Deceptions and subterfuge, of course, always qualify – making it look like there are a lot more of you than there actually are, for example. I once made my players totally paranoid with a group of giants cloaked in illusions of being Halflings – they lured the PCs in by looking relatively helplessly outmatched, baited the hooks by swallowing flasks of water, and releasing the illusions. The PCs were convinced that they had used potions of polymorphing, and that they were still Halflings on the inside, and that the transformations would wear off in time. This deception placed them at a number of tactical disadvantages.

Outside this range, all dirty tricks are designed to do one of two things in the tactical sense:

• Delay and occupy the PCs while the enemy maneuver and attack; or
• Delay and occupy the PCs while the enemy attack and maneuver.

There’s a subtle difference between the two; the first is all about getting into position to attack more effectively, while the second is about attacking and then retreating to a position where you can defend more effectively.

Finally, there’s confusion. The side that is less confused (because they know what’s causing the confusion) is always at a tactical advantage.

17. Tactical Diversity vs Focused Development

What is it better to have: a well-developed diversity of attack options of lesser effectiveness, or a relative paucity of options but greater effectiveness with the few options that you do have?

The combat effectiveness of “superior” enemies in most game designs does not increase at the same rate as overall combat capability because some of that effectiveness is diverted to greater diversity of tactical options. This is as true of point-based constructions as it is in games like D&D.

While it’s generally more accurate to think of the stack of abilities by effectiveness as a pyramid, with the total combat effectiveness represented by a fraction of the total area of the pyramid. It’s often easier to understand if you “lean” the pyramid so that one side is vertical, as shown to the right. Note, too, that not all these are combat abilities; the main ability at the base of the pyramid probably is, but the others are generally more diverse.

I think of such stacks as “Swiss army knives”, a tool for most every need. The trick is always to choose between them when the pressure is on (my advice in that regard: slow down and take your time; you aren’t the monster and don’t have to pretend to be as familiar with what it can do as it would be). This is a foe that is rarely without something that they can do in any given situation, but they will probably have to do it multiple times to be effective.

The alternative is to focus on a narrow group of abilities. This makes you more effective in a limited range of situations and more likely to be helpless outside of that range.

Now consider these alternatives in a tactical sense. The first character can try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else; they can keep characters guessing about what they will be hit with next. Tactics for such encounters are about preserving options and maintaining flexibility, not getting pushed into a corner (physically or metaphorically). The second character is about altering the tactical situation until it matches one of those limited group of options.

18. The Bigger Picture

By now, most people will find that their head is buzzing with details in swarms, and the big picture has become almost completely obscured by fogs of confusion, forgotten.

GMs should never make a tactical decision without reviewing it before it’s final for its impact on the bigger picture.

I don’t care how many d6 you can inflict on the fighter; if that doesn’t advance the primary goal, forget punishing the meat-sack punching bag and pick something else to do that does advance your primary goal – unless the attacker is of a species that is prone to losing it’s temper or getting caught up in the moment, of course.

19. The Value Of The Temporary Imbalance

“Timing is everything” or so they say. When applied to tactical conditions in an RPG, this provides interesting opportunities to the GM:

• additional strength conferred in a temporary manner;
• protection to a vulnerability that only lasts a short period of time;
• windows of vulnerability…

There are all sorts of potential twists waiting to be explored!

As for how and when they should be explored and exploited, I employ the Ultimate Tactical Blueprint.

20. The Ultimate Tactical Blueprint

How do you apply and employ all these thoughts, ideas, and principles? You have to keep in mind the bigger picture that lies beyond even what the combatant wants to achieve, and that is the metagame objective that you have, or should have, as GM: to entertain, and be entertained.

Think of combat as a story that has yet to be written, and ask yourself, “how can I make this fight more interesting? How can I make it more dramatic?”

Everything else is just a means to that end, a detail that can be exploited on occasion to achieve these objectives. Making weaker foes more significant through tactics makes them more interesting and more viable. Making stronger foes more available for encounters increases the variety of encounter that you can present, making the game more interesting by incorporating more interesting things in it. And everybody wins when you achieve that.