How often do you actually have encounters in "interior" spaces - dungeons, ruins, indoors in an urban setting, etc? A recent thread suggested that facing and being the "frontliner" in a combat was the best way to make sure foes attack you versus your party members.
While I agree that "squishy" characters should get out of the way, most encounters I design for my homebrew games are in exterior, open-air spaces. If the encounter begins in the middle of a clearing or forest meadow, on a road with multiple ambush spots, at range across a river or as the PCs realize that several members of the market crowd are actually mites in disguise, how do you make sure that the paladin or the barbarian is the "frontline" versus the monsters forming up around the old guy in the back, leaning on a staff with robes and a conical hat?
Please help me understand if I'm the outlier and most people design encounters with obvious fronts and backs, in interior spaces, etc.
Hi Mark, you're not an outlier. In the situations you describe it is probably best to have the highest perception character at the front and the tank at the back. The wizard should still be in the middle.
The party radar has the best chance of detecting a threat if they are at the front and the tank has the best chance of surviving an ambush. Attacks on the middle suck if there are not enough bodies to protect the flanks.
I don't think most encounters should have a "front" or a "back", but terrain should always add layers and options to an encounter.
Heavy underbrush, a cliff face or a river can all serve as a type of barrier to put between yourself and your opponents. As long as you've got one sort of wall or another, you can form a typical Gygaxian "marching order", with the more fragile characters closest to the barrier and the more rough-and-tumble ones further away.
It won't work all the time--at least it shouldn't, if the GM knows what they're doing--I had a player who insisted his wizard was "in the back" all the time. Then a few cockatrice waited in ambush until the party had all marched by before they jumped out and attacked the nearest character and promptly turned the wizard to stone.
I like what you're both saying, thank you. Runey Hugs - in theory this will let the party align itself correctly, but the game's mechanics work like this if I understand it:
1. PCs get within visibility range of their enemies or vice versa; everyone rolls Perception checks modified by distance
2. If some of the PCs fail their roll but all of the villains make theirs, like if the PCs are tromping through the forest and come to the edge of a meadow that the enemies are hiding around, then there is a Surprise round where anyone that made their Perception check can act (barring class abilities/feats that allow action even in a Surprise round)
3. If the foes win initiative in the Surprise round and have enough movement on a single Move action, they can use a Partial Charge action and dart right over to someone that looks, on the surface, to be the easiest target for the foes to collectively hit with such an action
So if the PCs roll poorly in the Surprise round, they might find the wizard on the "frontline" while the tanky martial types need to swing around to support later. Eventually these bruisers form up on the melee line but it's not some automatic the players can count on based on "marching order."
Agent Q: I agree, as do my players. The player in 2 of my groups that always plays an arcane caster/squishy type always contends that he's "in the back" as well. Several encounters in a row in my upper-level game the PCs have been going over highlands and down through a large swamp - the monsters, with movement types like Fly and Climb, have been able to ignore some of the terrain obstacles so they have circled around and vital striked or full attacked the Investigator/Wizard
This of course frustrates this player but when these are intelligent or semi-intelligent monstrous humanoids, dragons and demons that were forewarned of the PCs in advance... how would they NOT use these tactics? Trying to get at the druid means going through her freaking BATTLECAT Animal Companion she's always riding, and the other 2 PCs are a brutal half-orc barbarian and an equally savage skinwalker(scaleheart) bloodrager/brawler/fighter tank.
Having them hone in on the squishy little ratfolk in leathers with a bow and some spells? This seems smart to me.
Even in my one megadungeon game there's been 2 encounters in chambers so large and high-ceilinged that the monsters I added, with Climb speeds, were able to kind of surround the PCs and pick the targets they wanted. They were terribly pitched battles so the tactics didn't really count for much, but it just makes me think that the old "marching order" tactics may not be as much of a thing anymore.
Yeah, I think it was more of a centralized concept back when the game was primarily an offshoot of table top war games. The more it became its own thing, the less static it became, the less stuff like this mattered.
I think you should almost always strive to throw a wrench into your players plans. Whatever there standard operating procedure is, whatever tactics they feel are most effective, you should design encounters to force them out of that sequence.
Just don't force them out of their backup plan; even veteran players struggle with that.
Quixote wrote: Yeah, I think it was more of a centralized concept back when the game was primarily an offshoot of table top war games. The more it became its own thing, the less static it became, the less stuff like this mattered.
I think you should almost always strive to throw a wrench into your players plans. Whatever there standard operating procedure is, whatever tactics they feel are most effective, you should design encounters to force them out of that sequence.
Just don't force them out of their backup plan; even veteran players struggle with that.
So let me get this straight, as a DM, with both unlimited knowledge of the characters capabilities, and "insider knowledge" of the player's tactics, you purposefully use this knowledge to screw up their plans...
Hostile DM vs player relationship anyone?
...
As far as marching order and planning not being important because of it being "less static" - go look at real world tactical manuals for small unit combat. People have been thinking about this kind of thing for a long time. It does become more complicated with a) less people to fill roles - a typical squad is 10 -13 troopers, not 4, and b) much fancier capabilities by way of movement (climb, flight, earth glide...) and stealth (invisibility, illusions, etc...).
pad300 wrote: So let me get this straight, as a DM, with both unlimited knowledge of the characters capabilities, and "insider knowledge" of the player's tactics, you purposefully use this knowledge to screw up their plans...
Hostile DM vs player relationship anyone?
First: that was rude. Please do not make accusations, explicit or implied, about my character or my storytelling/game mastering ability.
Second: no, I am not suggesting that anyone abuse their knowledge of specific characters to "screw up" their plans. Allow me to delve a bit deeper; say you have some sort of big tough warrior-guy, a mage of some sort, another warrior gut who also has some magic, and an archer or an opportunistic combatant. That's a pretty standard party of four, yeah?
So then imagine you've got this encounter lined up with two ogres on a mountain path. What does this standard, theoretical group of PC's want to do?
Well, the two warrior types probably want to form up between the ogres and the other PC's, engaging them in melee while the mage-guy casts spells and the archer arches. Pretty straightforward. Nice and clean. And boring.
There's nothing really interesting happening in that encounter; in every great movie/novel/comic/story around the campfire with good, exciting action bits, things almost never go exactly as planned. The battle of Helm's Deep is a perfect example. If the wall had held and the elves and Rohorrim just got to rain down arrows all day...it would have been boring.
So let's go back to the two ogres in the mountains. Lets put a 15ft wall on one side of this mountain path and a 30ft drop on the other, to limit mobility. Then we can put one ogre on the wall to drop rocks down on their victims as his buddy beats them with a dead tree.
Now, the party has to split their resources a bit; do the warrior-guys take out the ogre in front of them as the second one rolls a boulder onto their not-so-tough friends? Do the mage and archer focus fire or direct their attention to the most immediate threat to themselves?
Now we can add in some fog and slick patches of half-frozen slush; such elements will make the party's original plan harder, but will offer up some other options if they're attentive and clever.
So, no. No "hostile DM vs player relationship" here. Just someone who wants to up his storytelling game and deliver consistently engaging, interesting, memorable encounters that make his players feel like resourceful, never-say-die heroes instead of something in Gauntlet Legends or Diablo II.
Tactics (for both sides) is determined by terrain.
Intelligent enemies use the terrain to their advantage AND to the disadvantage of the opposition.
If my NPCs spot the PCs and are not spotted themselves, they try to set up an ambush. This doesn't mean a surprise round. It means a killing ground.
Predators do the same thing in a lot of different ways. Watch a nervous zebra head down to the watering hole. Is there or is there not a crocodile there this time?
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