With A Little Help From My Friends

Here’s the next installment of Roy’s RPG Tactics! As promised, this session will cover some basic small unit tactics. It’s mostly common sense, but often the ideas presented are overlooked. The examples used are meant to get one’s creative juices flowing for designing an encounter, and hopefully they will do just that.

When you’re attacking or defending with more than one person/unit in a game, you would do well to read the writings of past great generals. Erwin Rommel and Sun Tzu spring readily to mind for ideas as well as mindset. Playing games such as the Total War series of games will give you even more ideas on how to handle larger engagements, if you plan to win.

One of the biggest points these things will teach you is that your surroundings are your best weapon. Hiding in the woods and firing your weapons at the enemy is far favorable to jumping out onto the road for an epic hand to hand fight. If the enemy can’t see you and you keep moving from place to place, they may think you have far more resources than you really do. When this happens, they’re more likely to quit the fight and retreat or surrender.

If you don’t wish to fight your enemies directly, run them into unfavorable conditions, or wait for them to encounter them on their own. Run them into the desert, or force them into a narrow passage of some kind. If the enemy is constricted, they have fewer choices in how to fight back or retreat. Consult the rules for your favored game, and see what they have to say about rough or cluttered terrain. Use those rules to your advantage.

Terrain can be the big factor in determining the winner of a tactical battle; bottlenecking corridors, wide rolling grass fields, and heavy growth forests all dictate the movements of the combatants differently. It’s harder to use long ranged combat (say, a crossbow) from the rear of a melee in a narrow dungeon hallway than on the open field of battle. Aimed magic could be impossible to use in such a tight space without hitting your fellows, while having a pike could mean you have no way to defend yourself if the enemy gets past the point of your weapon.

Fighting in and around a graveyard or similar place would be a nightmare for an organized force; the enemy can crouch behind headstones for cover, or hide an entire unit behind a temple or mausoleum. The ground is frequently uneven in the stereotypical graveyard, which can lead to injuries and losses for fast moving combatants. Low hanging trees or funerary decorations can block effective missile fire and prove to be an obstruction to ground movement. The same basic ideas could be applied to mecha combat in an urban or suburban setting. The varying amounts of cover make such settings ideal for hit and run and long ranged attacks.

That pretty much covers it for this session. I hope this series has been of use to those of you out there who take the time to read this blog. I’m not sure what I’ll be pontificating about next time, but it should be interesting. Tell a friend, and come back often!