Makin' and spinning various tactics ttrpg shit in my head.
and of course, tuned in different ways each statement can be the reverse and all that.
Intentionality and tone and all that.
anyways tactics
If the enemy outnumber the players, the players are going to have a bad time if every enemy can hit them.
It's lanchester's law. The moment you're outnumbered, AND the enemy can rock your shit inimpeded, you're gone. It's joever. It's why every roguelike has the hallway strat. Its what you do against the d100 troglodytes, you funnel them into a 10x40 hallway, form rank with spears and arrows, and rock their shit.
Finding that spot, or finding a way to create it, is a form of desirable fun.
I fuckin' love scrambling to a better position when I'm spotted in Cogmind.
Somewhat inverted, if the party outnumber the enemy, the party WILL win.
Once the enemy isn't outnumbering the party, that's the wincon. Unless your luck is awful, you win. Your damage, your gunfire, your greater HP relative to their damage output, you win on those numbers.
Target the healer first
it's actually been fucking forever since I fought a healer. Or a buffer.
Having a sense of "I need to GO HARD to kill this one thing" hasn't been a thing I needed to do in ttrpgs for a while.
You can balance out the numbers advantage through non-physical obstacles
If the party is outnumbered but the enemy is distracted, or duty-bound to a specific job, or etc, that counts as “not able to hit the PCs” by other means. The Arrogant Overlord making “psh, haha, don’t worry about it my first wave will deal with them” gestures and forbidding their reinforcing guard from joining the fray is another form of funneling hallway; the squad leader who smirkingly tells her elite polycule “no…. Let Lauren get chewed up first… then we shine” is a form of locked gate.
If the party outnumbers the enemy but has to play the objectives - they have to rescue captives before the water gets too high, and can’t be sure that they’ll defeat the opposition with enough breathing room (literal) left, or there’s an escorted valuable, or they have to each stand on the appropriate mystical crest in order to halt a ticking doom clock while the overlord’s forces can move freely, that’s an effective reduction in the party’s number, or at least, in their ability to bring that number to bear. Get creative with your encounters when you can!
…BUT NOT FOREVER
Eventually, the gimmick will break; your players will find a strategy, or a weak spot, or outlast the delay, or you’ll be faced with the narrative “ok but WHY has the overlord sent in only 3 waves when the rest of their forces are RIGHT THERE”. You cannot stall things out indefinitely; tactical dramatics lose their flair and their tension along dramatic lines as well.
Do not be frustrated by this. Instead, embrace it. This is part of the game, let the balance sway and the story with it.
i keep fuckin' forgetting the like, synthesis.
The Fight Is Made To Be Won
ya know, unless you want a fight to be one of those "maybe the players win or not, this'll be a turning point but I got Jailbreak RP lined up".
You're setting up dominos for your players to knock over and form a beautiful pattern.
For the players, it's fun to pilot the mech in crunchier or gamey-er games. For more narrative peeps, it's fun to spin prose about how you're bawling your eyes out as you cast Gigabeam on your sister, who's turned to Darkness and refused your aid.
