Tactics outside of combat
One of the things that I love most about Storytelling is listening to my players speculate about what’s going on, making wild guesses — sometimes startlingly accurate ones — and then coming up with plans for accomplishing this or that. It’s fun and sometimes I get a heads up about what they’re going to throw at me, which lets me prepare for it.
This time, I received advanced warning that my players are going to try something I didn’t expect. One of my NPCs has been struck ill by a supernatural disease. It inspired me to add a last-minute scene, but also set the stage for a confrontation with the local vampires. The PCs have been informed that the vampires may have caused the disease, but also might be able to provide the cure.
Of course, when my player characters met with them, the vampires tossed evidence at the PCs’ feet that they had killed one of the vampires. Now, the players know that they didn’t murder anyone, not even a vampire. They suspect that the evidence was planted, and even have a guess as to who might have done it. But the vampires pulled weapons and we ended just before starting the combat.
And here’s where my players were sitting around, discussing all this, throwing around theories on who could have planted the evidence and what they were going to do about it. To my surprise, their plan is not to fight the vampires. Quite the opposite, actually.
To prove their innocence, to win a chance to speak and present rational arguments, they are going to throw down their weapons, even if it means letting the vampires try to kill them.
Interesting! Okay, I can deal with this. If they had pulled this out next session, only once I asked them to roll initiative and with no warning, then I would have had to create a crisis on the spot. But because I got to enjoy their idle speculation, now I get to plan the crisis instead.
Bye-bye battle, hello crisis.
We’ve already written about on-the-spot crises and how to replace combat scenes with a crisis, so what I want to talk about here is what struck me about this scenario I’ve set up — my tactics-loving combat-monkey players weren’t just okay with throwing a fight, it was their idea.
One of my players in particular is all about the tactics. He loves the number crunching and all his characters are combat-oriented in build, even if his concept was originally something else. If he’s playing a diplomat, I can be sure that he will come up with a reason for this diplomat to be a skilled fighter. If he’s an engineer, same thing. He plays combat characters with different hats on for flavor. Nothing wrong with that, and combat is a staple of most RPGs. As long as he’s happy and we can agree that his reasoning is sound, I’m happy too.
What we’ve got going on in this scene is tactics that lie outside the realm of combat, but that still seem to satisfy that need for my most tactically-minded players. Rather than setting up flanking positions, targeting vital organs, or going for cheap shots, they have a chessboard of politics to play on. A court of vampires blames the PC team for murder, which could draw their own court into a war with the vampires. They already have a demon enemy that’s been launching tangential attacks against their court and other allies, so they just know this is one of the demon’s gambits.
Fighting the vampires risks reinforcing the false evidence that’s framed them for murder. Instead, they’re going to be passive, risking their lives to prove that they aren’t the vampires’ enemy — fighting back against the demon’s schemes by refusing to play his game.
The NPC who fell ill was part of a rival team that I had set up to be kind of frenemies with the PCs, to be a jerk and make their lives a little harder, and to give them some people to one-up. But tactically, they realized that fighting back — even on a social level with allies — would only make those NPCs into enemies. They refused to play the game then, too, opting instead to encourage and support their rival, building friendships with him and his allies.
There was also a scene where I placed one of my player characters in the middle of a fight between the vampires and someone else, just daring him to choose sides. Again, I put him in a situation where he could start a war with one or both sides, but he managed to walk a political tightrope that got his adrenaline up as much as any fight scene would have.
Maybe it works because potential violence is not so different from combat. Instead of rolling attacks, dealing damage and taking hits, my story is a demon’s ploy to weaken the land’s protectors and make them ripe for conquest. The “attacks” are spies, assassins, framing the PCs for murder, spreading rumors and lies — and my players “fight” back by winning allies and talking down enemies. It’s a combat scene at a macro level, where positioning their court to maintain its defenses against a demon’s schemes is the fight.
My story will have some combat — there’s just bits in which attackers are trying to kill the PCs, and there’s no obscure political goal — but I’ll be on the lookout for players dodging fights in the future. I’m okay with that. Heck, I’m even proud. My combat-loving players are having a great time fighting a war of intrigue that doesn’t involve firing a single bullet or throwing a single punch! That kind of creative thinking and problem-solving is what role-playing is all about.
