Infinite Couterplay

I previously wrote about favouring Tactical Counterplay over Strategic Counterplay.

In short: I like games where you can counter and counter-counter your opponents through decisions in play rather than decisions that happen before the game begins.

Now that was in the context of miniature wargames, but I think RPGs present a slightly different situation.

In a wargame, if one side is heavily invested in archers and the other has an “immune to arrows” special rule across all their units, that can feel bad. There are a few factors here:

• Taking the smart approach of “I withdraw my forces and try an alternative approach” typically isn’t an option. We’ve laid out the armies to fight, so we’re at least going to give it a try.

• Army building isn’t done in isolation. When you’ve bought, assembled, painted, and found storage for 100 archers it can suck to realise they’re useless against your friend’s units.

• Typical GM-less wargames don’t allow opportunity to adjust to a hard strategic counter. I’ll come back to this.

Now some of this example is hyperbolic. An army-wide “immune to arrows” rule feels like a bad bit of design, but even if it was a milder “arrows get -1 to hit you” rule the point still stands. 

Does this carry over to TTRPGs? Do I think it’s bullshit if gelatinous cubes are immune to arrows? 

Well, no. There are a few factors I think apply here.

• Tactical Infinity means that you always have the option to do other things beside shooting arrows pointlessly into the cube. Lure it into a trap? Run away and come back with more appropriate weapons? Just sneak past it? Work out some way to modify your arrows to work against the cube? Start a fire? These typically aren’t options in a more rigid wargame.

• In the types of RPG I play, a single combat isn’t going to take up the majority of a night’s gaming. It matters less if we hit a single combat where some of the players feel like they’ve been hard countered before the fight begins. For most miniature games that one combat is the entire session of play. 

• With “theatre of the mind” style play a player can adjust their character’s gear, or even their entire character, without needing to buy, model, paint, and store a bunch of new miniatures. In fact, usually this process of equipping yourselves and preparing for an adventure occurs as a group, rather than as a solitary activity, so the team can plan for potential counters together.

So yeah, bring on weapons that ignore armour, shields that block all ranged attacks, and ghosts that ignore non-magical weapons. In an RPG there’s always a tactical counter.

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