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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9083703" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I have many thoughts on this topic. Firstly, &quot;tactical&quot; is always taken to mean &quot;combat specific&quot; which I think is a huge mistake. Dividing out combat as its own sphere that deserves more action specificity than the rest of the game leads to the rest of the game being comparatively anemic. Skills should be lists of actions, spells and techniques should exist that do things with both martial and pacific applications.This makes me frown every time, because I think it puts player expression on the wrong axis. The interesting bit about having specified actions is in picking how and when they are deployed; there's plenty of creativity and choice in deciding on a strategy by stringing fixed actions together. Once you allow an indeterminate set of actions that will be designed on the fly instead to be declared, it's no longer possible for a player to express a tactic or strategy in that way; you simply cannot know as a player whether there was a set of words you could say that would resolve the problem immediately, or if your choice of action ultimately led to a better or worse resolution than some other choice might have.That, and it's not hard to write a quite broad set of still defined actions, especially if you start with relatively atomic systems like object interactions (hitpoints, hardness, resistances, etc.)I want players to have tools they understand and can deploy in surprising and unexpected ways, and I want them to feel empowered to leverage those tools against the world.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9083703, member: 6690965"] I have many thoughts on this topic. Firstly, "tactical" is always taken to mean "combat specific" which I think is a huge mistake. Dividing out combat as its own sphere that deserves more action specificity than the rest of the game leads to the rest of the game being comparatively anemic. Skills should be lists of actions, spells and techniques should exist that do things with both martial and pacific applications. This makes me frown every time, because I think it puts player expression on the wrong axis. The interesting bit about having specified actions is in picking how and when they are deployed; there's plenty of creativity and choice in deciding on a strategy by stringing fixed actions together. Once you allow an indeterminate set of actions that will be designed on the fly instead to be declared, it's no longer possible for a player to express a tactic or strategy in that way; you simply cannot know as a player whether there was a set of words you could say that would resolve the problem immediately, or if your choice of action ultimately led to a better or worse resolution than some other choice might have. That, and it's not hard to write a quite broad set of still defined actions, especially if you start with relatively atomic systems like object interactions (hitpoints, hardness, resistances, etc.) I want players to have tools they understand and can deploy in surprising and unexpected ways, and I want them to feel empowered to leverage those tools against the world. [/QUOTE]

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