There’s a lot of shooter video games out there these days, Call of Duties, Gears of War, Uncharteds, and yes, even my beloved Mass Effect. Most of these use some sort of cover system popularized with the original Gears of War. Gone are the days of just jumping around like a coffeed up Tigger in Unreal Tournament and Doom to avoid enemy fire. Cover shooters allow you to take cover behind a wall, or a pillar, by pressing a button when you’re near acceptable cover. (The under appreciated shooter Eat Lead even lets you target cover from across the room, like you would an enemy, press a button, and you’ll move to that cover.) Once hunkered down, you could blind fire to force the bad guys into to fire, or pop up to take better controlled shots. Gears used this to try and simulated actual firefights, it encouraged a bit of tactical thinking to pin the enemy down and flank them.
The down side to this, of course, is that it’s pretty obvious when you’re going to have a firefight. You’ll be walking along in a panaromic view, your NPC teammates and/or mission control having a conversation with you, then you enter a boxy room, full of waist high walls just tall enough to duck under, a bunch of crates or vehicles that would make excellent cover, and an obviously sealed door at the far end.
Which, if you squint just hard enough, sounds like a normal 4E session. Do some rp, here’s a skill challenge, oh, time to switch gears and have a fight. I’m not saying that’s bad (And next week’s article is actually about how ME2 blends these to some degree), in fact, it’s a source of inspiration for setting up terrain for good combats.
This is something easily shown, here’s a video from one of the recruitment missions. It’s about 3 minutes long, but make sure to pay close attention right around the 1:25 mark. (Spoilers for those who haven’t played it yet). Kal’Reegar and the Collossus
Your back? Good. Now, can you imagine a 4E combat on similar terrain. You have the solo artillery at the back center. You have three paths to it, the center you face the artillery, but little to no minions. The right, elevated is some artillery and some minions. The left is no artillery and all minions. Add a few tweaks, skin the monsters to what ever campaign you’re in, and boom, you have a scenario that allows players to choose their path based on their play style and team makeup. Do the PCs move as one group down one of the specific paths, or pair off into two smaller teams going two paths? Or, as is possible in Mass Effect 2 as it is at your table, do they use a fourth option? Or a fifth option?
Coming up with unique terrain, something that’s more varied then the 20 x 20 square room chessboard is a task for DMs running their own campaign. Sure you can just drop some tiles down and be done with it, but a great encounter has fun terrain and fun characters. Games like ME2 can give you a great starting point to set up your tactical encounters.
I found that when you talk about gaming in combat that all your players and you assume every other table playes with tactics. I have yet to run for a group that when it comes to a fight they work together . Instead they all individualy attack each and every monster on the table. Even taken a moment to suggets doing a team attack, take them down one at a time, i suggested but no. Then when it goes wrong they expect the Healer to do his job.
How could this be controlled. Teach then how to think like a Soldier. This is what it seems like your asking of players.
Good post. Terrain is definitely a good way to make encounters more interesting and unique. In addition to video games, fight scenes from movies and tv are full of great ideas for terrain and how it can be used to gain advantages.
@symatt To borrow from the Kal’Reeger video again, in ME2 the marine, an NPC gives the player advice over the scene, his scouting report. In a table top game the same could be true, a rescued NPC at the start of the combat can do a quick info dump on the situation, saying things like, “If we focus fire at close range, we can take down the beholder construct” or, “I can hold open the portal on the right, diverting its attention, but you all will need to hit it on the left side at once, or it’ll be for naught.
Sometimes you need to be as blunt as a anime hammerspace hammer.
@Glimm I always try to make the terrain an extra NPC. It doesn’t take stats (usually), but it deserves as much respect and attention as the makeup of the NPCs do.