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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9270848" data-attributes="member: 18">The confusion is one you seem to have manufactured for yourself.Your example has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game has "tactical combat" or not. It merely details an extremely simulationist/process-driven approach to doing damage in a game. Such a game might or might not have "tactical combat". It's an entirely separate axis of design from simulationism. They don't interrelate any more than a car being a convertible and having an automatic gear box interrelate.For example, generally speaking, Cyberpunk 2020 had a more simulationist and detailed approach to gun combat than say, early editions of Shadowrun, to the point of determining damage individually to every bullet in a spray of machinegun fire, each one being possible to hit a different bodypart with different armour, etc., but various rules in Shadowrun 1-3E meant that in combat situations, Shadownrun tended to play out a little more "tactically" - i.e. with people thinking about what they're doing, using cover, manuevering, taking advantage of the Chunky Salsa rules, using spells carefully, and so on.Millennium's End, back in 1991, was probably the first attempt at making a "tacti-cool" RPG, and attempted to combine the overcomplicated rules of a lot of RPGs of the era with actual tactical combat, with the players making genuine decisions about how to use cover, where to aim and so on, because you used little acetate overlays to determine where you hit. Was it tactical? Just about - certainly more than most games of the era, but it was mostly "tacti-cool", wherein modern weapons, weapons accessories, ammo, and body armour are essentially turned into fetish objects (in all senses of the word fetish).Weirdly I'd give Champions/HERO a shout-out here. It was never, ever a good superhero game, despite people managing to run good superhero campaigns in it (an inappropriate system has never entirely precluded a good campaign!), but it was a weirdly decent game for like, small-unit combat, with the hexes and way the timings of turns worked. You could have quite interesting tactical combat with it.Personally I'd rate 4E as easily having the best tactical combat of any game I've played. It's fun, it's engaging, it's reasonably fast (for tactical combat), your decisions matter, teamplay and coordination matters a ton, terrain and where you are is hugely relevant, and so on. No other edition of D&D is even close to this - and I don't hate those other editions, certainly not - but what they offer is absolutely not on the same level, tactical combat-wise. Including 3.XE/PF, which, like Peter here, seemed to confuse complex rules and needless detail with "tactical".</blockquote>

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