What makes a combat system "tactical"? (and maybe some system comparisons)

[Amidus Drexel]

I think the important point is less whether character creation is more important than the situational reality of the battlefield, and whether character advancement is. In an RPG a wizard is probably going to fill a different battlefield niche than a knight, one wants to stay at a distance and lob spells of some nature, one wants to quite literally charge things and smack them with a stick. Regardless of the battlefield situation, that's just what those characters are going to be best at doing. But that even of itself doesn't invalidate battlefield tactics, anymore than tanks filling a different niche than howitzers does. Having different roles in many ways creates tactical richness.

Where you start to get problems is when your character build starts to overwhelm the particulars of the battlefield as you advance. A not uncommon decay loop for this sort of game is to have a system for flanking or whatever that grants a fixed bonus. At low levels this can be super powerful, because the bonus is very large relative to the defenses and attacks of the characters. At high levels you get a situation where the defender type characters have so much defense they don't care about it, the general attackers have so much attack they don't need it, and the flanker type gets such a huge damage bonus out of building into flanking they 100% depend on it - except of course for the entire arsenal of abilities and other situations that give them Flanking, so they can press their build button and have a good time.

Basically the issue is that the generally goofy math of RPGs rewards hyper-specialization, but hyper-specialization flattens the battlefield situation into "do your hyperspecialized thing." If you do 1d6 damage, kicking an enemy off a ledge for 2d6 damage is good, which means that suddenly that ledge becomes important. But if you just plain hit for 5d6, the ledge no longer matters. For most intents and purposes, the battlefield with the ledge and without the ledge play exactly the same. This is usually where the canard about how high level play should be epic and fundamentally different from low level play comes in, and the problem is that the DM just needs to introduce more appropriate challenges to keep things interesting but also they can't just be, like, turbo-ledges that do 8d6 damage because that's just low level play with higher numbers. One may appreciate that this may be a difficult needle to thread. Perhaps a better system, at least for preserving battlefield relevance, is one that essentially caps effectiveness. It's not even difficult to do, roll N dice, keep the best one (or sum the best two or three) effectively does this, and is pretty easy in practice.

That explanation makes sense to me, and is much better put than what I wanted to say. I agree, more or less, with this entire comment.

And, yeah, games that have a scope encompassing many levels/tiers of play (for example, various editions of D&D promise zero-to-hero-to-demigod, even if some of them fudge the top or bottom of that a little) outgrow certain kinds of challenges, and the kind of challenges need to change to keep up with the party. It's true that pits and snares lose their relevance as the power level goes up, but isn't that the point? I'm running a 3.5 game right now where the players have recently gotten to 9th level, and the same soldiers and bandits they were fighting a few levels ago are just fundamentally outclassed in every way now (so it doesn't matter that they get to stack piddly +1s by ganging up on someone, because they don't live long enough to take advantage of it) - but at the same time, the party isn't planning to fight just a handful of those guys at once anymore - they're dealing with moving armies around and breaking people out of prisons and capturing strategic points instead. They took a short jaunt into some of the lower planes for an adventure, and dealt with bizarre gravity, looming darkness, and hostile natives accustomed to both.

I think you can preserve the tactical relevance of the battlefield into higher-power gameplay, both by expanding the scope of what kinds of scenarios you can use, and by making existing obstacles more intense. You're (very lightly) criticizing "turbo-ledges", but it's a legitimate approach to scaling up the power of the battlefield. The same goes for adding "explosive barrels du jour", damaging hazards like toxic gas or lava, and other such things. Sure, certain kinds of characters might be able to circumvent those obstacles in the same way they circumvent low-level obstacles of that nature (you're not scaring off the guy with flight by dropping him off of a slightly taller cliff, after all), but I think that's fine, in general. If only one person has flight, turbo-ledges still are a real consideration for everyone else. Even if someone can shrug off getting dropped from orbit, if they can't get back into orbit to continue the fight right away, getting knocked down still matters.

Changing the scope of the battlefield is also important. In D&D, that's largely what the outer planes were intended for (as adventure locations). Fierce, unpredictable winds; intense and inconsistent gravity; perpetual darkness; acidic air; an entire plane of angled ground with no real flat places to stand anywhere; angry demons with at-will teleportation and mind control - you name it, someone came up with a way to screw with the landscape in a way that makes high-level characters break cool stuff out of the toolbox and engage with the battlefield differently. When every single person in the combat has flight, you don't stop placing obstacles - you just stop putting them on the ground, and place them where they'll actually get in someone's way (how about a honeycombed island of extra-dimensional rock that messes with teleportation?). At high levels, being in someone's line of sight is deadly - so cover and concealment gain a lot of value that isn't as present at mid-levels. Battlefield control spells really take off in mid-levels and let you capitalize on chokepoints - and so having countermagic available also becomes important.

I do agree that if you want to hold onto the battlefield relevance of low-level threats and obstacles, then you can't have the kind of power scaling D&D is known for - probably requiring using a system that doesn't scale power in the same way (or maybe even at all), or just arbitrarily choosing a low level to stop at, in the way that E6 does.

[warty goblin]

I don't think it's so much that power negates tactics as it is that power changes tactics, and TTRPGs generally don't do so hot at scaling things to capture this. A modern soldier is vastly more powerful than Grog the caveman, this doesn't mean modern infantry combat isn't tactical, or that stone age warfare was more tactical. They're just different. If you were to make Cave Tactics the game, you'd probably care enormously about things like vegetation levels, tracking, and rules for close combat. You wouldn't need rules for breaching and clearing or trenches or tanks anymore than the modern combat game would need rules for whether your blood trail attracts saber toothed tigers.

The snag is that, to exaggerate a good deal, the level 1-20 you become a demigod advancement track starts you as Grog with a tactical system that makes sense for Grog. But at some point you're definitely not Grog anymore, and the system still kinda thinks you are. Or at least does a mediocre job of creating interesting obstacles for your new reality. The game is still stuck at saber toothed tigers and rules about arrow retrieval and the vision range of torches, you have an M-16 and night vision goggles.