What TTRPGs have the best tactical combat rules?

[Argyle King]

I've found that crunch isn't necessarily synonymous with complex (especially when it comes to tactical play).

If the rules of a game are intuitive and create outcomes that largely "make sense," I've found that it's easier to teach, learn, and work with a game.

I've played low-crunch games that I felt were more difficult to play than high-crunch games due to un-intuitive design or a design that produced cognitively dissonant results.

For example, when teaching a group of new players, a lot of what I accept as common in a D&D game is difficult for someone new to rpgs to absorb because the game assumes tropes and in-game playstyle that doesn't always make sense outside of D&D.

•"Why can't I aim for the eye of the Beholder?"
•"I want to grapple the wizard and hold his hands so he can't cast spells."
•"I want to play as a valiant knight on horseback."

 

[Thomas Shey]

I guarantee there's an indie out there which is, but my knowledge of the indie sphere is insufficient to identify if specifically. Honestly you could just tack a very low-crunch squad combat design on to an RPG as @loverdrive shows. The combat and non-combat rules of many RPGs don't necessarily interact that much.

I'm just unconvinced that the three criteria--1. Low crunch, 2. Tactical, and 3. Not dependent on the GM are actually possible in combination, but am willing to have it proven to the contrary.

It's obviously trivial to provide reverse examples - i.e. high-crunch combat-centric RPGs which aren't very tactical - the vast majority of high-crunch of RPGs would fall into this category. What's interesting for this thread is that a lot of medium-high crunch RPGs are quite tactical. Like, whilst Champions/HERO has a lot of rules and complex rules flexibility, I would put it as like an 8/10 crunch RPG (or even a little lower) where something like Rolemaster is 10/10, and vastly less tactical.

Well, the arrow of causality absolutely doesn't need to point both ways; what you've done with your crunch can absolutely not be tied up in making the combat (or, far as that goes, though less commonly, other elements) tactical That just proves that when you've got a bigger bag what you stuff in it can vary.

You can see this in the wargame/boardgame sphere too - BattleLore, for example, is an extremely pared-down wargame, but if you've played it you'll know it often involves more actual tactics than WHFB did. And much as I'm loathe to admit it, 40K 3E paring down the rules massively from 2E 40K made it drastically more about what actual tactics you were using, rather than just what horrible OP characters/items/units/vehicles you'd brought to the table.

Well, with a wargame you often have the advantage that you can constrain the--operating sphere?--in certain selective ways while still leaving it pretty tactical within that sphere. And of course, if you're scale is controlled, almost all the crunch you have can be about tactics. An RPG does not have that luxury.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've found that crunch isn't necessarily synonymous with complex (especially when it comes to tactical play).

Well, sometimes you get the simple issue that as soon as you're not throwing everything into the GMs lap, breadth of coverage in a game demands a certain amount of crunch even if its not complex. This is even more true if you have a lot of exception based design; technically there are a number of those that are not complex, but they're still crunchy as can be because they're so special-case intensive.

 

[loverdrive]

I'm just unconvinced that the three criteria--1. Low crunch, 2. Tactical, and 3. Not dependent on the GM are actually possible in combination, but am willing to have it proven to the contrary.

Would you consider chess to be a tactical game? It does require a lot of thinking about positioning, so it counts at least in my book.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Would you consider chess to be a tactical game? It does require a lot of thinking about positioning, so it counts at least in my book.

See my comment about wargames two posts up. Chess does not have the scale an RPG has, so its not working under the same limitations. Same for some other wargames which heavily constrain their scope.

 

[TheSword]

I’ve been reading the Imperium Maledictum rule and saw an interesting way of handling encounter locations.

Interestingly they divide a combat area into zones rather than measuring things by distance. On the basis that measuring squares is unnecessarily fiddly and doesn’t convey the shift In combat.

Zones average about 10 meters square and have certain traits.

So for instance Zone A may be the floor of the temple. Zone B the Dais. Zone C a raised balcony, Zone D the corridor outside.

Players can move within a zone for for free and can move to an adjacent zone by spending their move.

Ranges are immediate (in melee), short (same zone), medium (adjacent zone) or long (two zones away).

Where it comes into its own is that zones can have features like degrees of cover, objects that can be interacted with, and bonuses and penalties associated with the area. I quite liked it.

 

[loverdrive]

See my comment about wargames two posts up. Chess does not have the scale an RPG has, so its not working under the same limitations. Same for some other wargames which heavily constrain their scope.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by scale here. In many (if not most, honestly) games combat is basically a self-contained minigame that only vaguely conforms to the fiction.

If anything, it's often the opposite, where fiction is heavily influenced by constraints of the combat minigame: the reason there are goblins in the dungeon and not molepeople is because goblins have premade statblocks while molepeople don't

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by scale here. In many (if not most, honestly) games combat is basically a self-contained minigame that only vaguely conforms to the fiction.

Two things:

1. Even when its a minigame, its often dealing with more moving parts conceptually than something like Chess or Go do, which have reduced what they're representing to a small (in the latter case, virtually atomic) level. They do not have to answer a question like "What if someone runs across the room and shimmies up the trellis to get a better angle of fire?" There's no trellis, nor angle of fire.

2. Frequently there's only a limited constraint on the "board" involved, so handling the issue of what to do when someone exits the immediate tactical space is a non-question. Normally in RPGs doing that strongly is either frowned on or flat out not accepted except under special circumstances.

If anything, it's often the opposite, where fiction is heavily influenced by constraints of the combat minigame: the reason there are goblins in the dungeon and not molepeople is because goblins have premade statblocks while molepeople don't

Yes, but in the RPG you can just back out of the dungeon or do any number of other tactics that are unavailable in a simper wargame for no reason beyond "they're unavailable."

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

2. Frequently there's only a limited constraint on the "board" involved, so handling the issue of what to do when someone exits the immediate tactical space is a non-question.

A counterpoint, I've played many wargames and minis rules sets that do have to address whether the map/tabletop is bounded or not, and not just in the very limited sense of "exit VIP from far side of the map" win conditions. It's most common in naval and starship combat games, and the difference between playing in a fixed area or a "floating map" is usually big enough to require the rules to address them. You do not want to play Star Fleet Battles against a Federation force using a Kaufman Retrograde (flying backward while sniping, for the uninitiated) on a floating table, but the ploy is hard to use on a fixed one. Similar for Full Thrust, where having ships suddenly vanish off a fixed table edge due to a movement miscalculation produces a different result than using a floating table, or an ACW riverine engagement where you have to worry about the river ending at a table edge in addition to banks and sandbars and the like.

Still less open for creative ideas than even simple, abstracted TTRPG combat is, but not all non-TTRPGs have their play space rigidly bounded.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A counterpoint, I've played many wargames and minis rules sets that do have to address whether the map/tabletop is bounded or not, and not just in the very limited sense of "exit VIP from far side of the map" win conditions. It's most common in naval and starship combat games, and the difference between playing in a fixed area or a "floating map" is usually big enough to require the rules to address them. You do not want to play Star Fleet Battles against a Federation force using a Kaufman Retrograde (flying backward while sniping, for the uninitiated) on a floating table, but the ploy is hard to use on a fixed one. Similar for Full Thrust, where having ships suddenly vanish off a fixed table edge due to a movement miscalculation produces a different result than using a floating table, or an ACW riverine engagement where you have to worry about the river ending at a table edge in addition to banks and sandbars and the like.

Still less open for creative ideas than even simple, abstracted TTRPG combat is, but not all non-TTRPGs have their play space rigidly bounded.

That's fair, but I'd argue in most of those, that's because the battlespace is often relatively shapeless; what I mean by that is, barring atolls or asteroid belts, a lot of sea/space maps are not meaningfully different from others, so the sliding map only had minimal effect (note the qualification here, but even ones with some interruptive terrain are often far simpler than land battlespaces).