Interesting Tactical Choices in RPGs

[high_castle]

Dragon Age gives a lot of tactical choices, especially if you're playing as a mage. I built a character that's aggressively focused on crowd control spells; within five seconds of entering a room all of my enemies are either stunned, knocked down, paralyzed, asleep, or on fire (or some combination of the above). It's great fun, but if you're not careful you can also take out yourself or the rest of your party along with them. Contrast that with an arcane warrior build, where the mage is essentially a spellcasting tank, or a healer/support build, where you stand at the back of the line and buff everybody while they deal and soak up damage for you.

The game also offers a downright sadistic variety of traps. When your rogue has the opportunity to prepare a battlefield before the enemy shows up, you can be pretty insidious about it all. Definitely a fun game for tacticians.

I was thinking the same thing. The rogue and mage classes provide lots of different in-class tactics, and the prestige classes available mean you can really custom-tailor your class to your play style. Personally, I like to be a damage-dealer/smooth talker. When I played my mage, I dumped my first 4 skill points in Coercion and focused on crowd-control spells. I went Arcane Warrior/Shapeshifter and focused on trying to talk my way out of fights. If that didn't work, then I brought the pain. I like being able to disable lots of enemies at a time, then pick 'em off one by one. So Sleep/Waking Nightmare was a great combo, as was Sleep/Horror. Now I'm working on a healer build mage, and the play style is already very different.

Same goes for rogues. My first one was built to open everything in sight, disarm traps, smooth talk enemies, and sneak around the battlefield. Now I'm going for an assassin/duelist type who's basically a very nimble warrior.

 

[Enigmers]

in Tales of Vesperia, the abilities you equip greatly affect how your character functions in battle; whether you want to add more hits to a combo attack, equip/upgrade the ability to black or sidestep attacks, which "artes" (magic attacks basically) you use, they can all affect your gameplay. Of course, the game is probably easy enough to just button-mash through, but if you know what you're doing it's a lot less frustrating. It's a much more fun battle system than any other jRPG I've played; in many Final Fantasies, for instance, a battle is decided before it's even begun (depending on what level you are and whether or not you use a strategy guide to tell you what specific armor to equip to protect yourself against specific status effects or elements and how long you spend grinding levels).

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

Actually, my question hasn't really been addressed. I'm interested in specific examples of interesting tactical choices that can be made in RPGs.

Fine. To get 10 in all your SPECIAL really easily: Avoid buying any perks for it, until the one that raises them all up to 9, then go aroudn collecting the Bobbleheads for them, to raise hem to 10. Result? No SPECIAL perks chosen (aside from 1) and you're at 10 anyway. You also have more freedom to choose other perks.

 

[TheEndlessGrey]

The Last Stand mode in Dawn of War II has some really good tactical choices. Your character doesn't have any innate abilities by itself. Different pieces of gear grant different abilities, while some grant no abilities but bigger numbers. Your equipment determines your role more than your class, but no class has gear for every role.

You start leaning towards strategy more than tactics when you talk about your squad organization - say equipping a mekboy for ranged damage and debuffing, a farseer for crowd control and support, and a space marine for up close hack and slash business - but there's that too.

 

[FROGGEman2]

I always choose rouge, I always regret it.

Anyone else get this?

 

[lenneth]

is building intricate combos that annihilate your enemies

Big part of the fun in the Disgaea series

 

[Sebenko]

I always choose mage, then use swords. Because I don't like restricting my choices. I don't actually take a battlemage class or anything, just a mage equipped with swords and armour. For the fun of it.

 

[steelyglint]

Actually, my question hasn't really been addressed. I'm interested in specific examples of interesting tactical choices that can be made in RPGs.

Fine. To get 10 in all your SPECIAL really easily: Avoid buying any perks for it, until the one that raises them all up to 9, then go aroudn collecting the Bobbleheads for them, to raise hem to 10. Result? No SPECIAL perks chosen (aside from 1) and you're at 10 anyway. You also have more freedom to choose other perks.

This, and many of the other posts, refer to strategic/character building decisions. Not that they're not interesting too, but what I was really interested in is what makes combat fun AFTER your character is already built and equipped.

I always choose rouge, I always regret it.

Anyone else get this?

Yeah, maybe you should stick with mascara or lip gloss.

Indeed, but DAO still has a shitty combat system.
You can still be tactical and have real time combat. I'm sick of RPGs having such shitty combat (I'm looking at you Bioware(Except for Mass Effect) and anything from Japan).

I'm somewhat ambivalent about the combat system in DAO, though I do think it's a step up from from the one in Baldur's Gate (even though I do love that game, so don't flame me... I played through the expansion with just my main character). Hobbit, what kind of gameplay do you think would make a turn-based RPG combat system fun? What if full-3d tactical positioning was not an option?

One of my favorite combat systems was from the Temple of Elemental Evil, which was otherwise a buggy and mediocre game.

 

[steelyglint]

Does anyone else have any comments? This didn't quite turn into the productive discussion I was hoping for.

 

[Eskimo_In_Egypt]

Actually role playing characters keeps things interesting fro me. While most games make this hard to do. It still enriches the experience for me. Example: Instead of balancing a character, I'll leave them with one huge handicap and dump all stats into another class. Fallout is a good example, hilarity ensued when I played a character with awesome stats, but a luck of 0. Enemies always crit-ing me, always failing speech challenges, breaking every lock, I thought it was funny as hell.

 

[SirusTheMadDJ]

steelyglint
Fallout 3 gives an example of what's NOT an interesting choice: why would you ever not aim for the head in VATS? There's practically no reason to aim for the limbs or torso, unless you're a sadist. In Fallout 2 the chance of hitting the eyes was low enough that you shouldn't attempt it unless you were extremely skilled or close to the target, so I'd say the Fallout 2 targeting system was a more interesting choice than VATS.

Incorrect. Headshots affect how accurate your opponent is, but other than that, rarely hits that much harder. Going for the gun or arms prevent, say a missile launcher armed mutant, from giving you a headache, and trying that shot out of "Hack Mode" is usually too much of a risk if you miss.

The one thing I don't like people banging on about is abusing VATS. Yes, the game is aiming for you, but often enough it'll miss shots the player can hit. Yes it's a free hit, or faster fire rate, but is it worth missing the odd sitter of a shot just because you're being lazy?

Interesting choices only go as far as plot line decisions, party line up and assorted tactics, equipment and basic skillset. Combat then merely becomes three things. In front with heavy armour, at the sides or the rear to crit or increase damage, or as far away as possible firing ranged weapons or using attacking or healing magic.

The brainwork comes from putting off the above without getting worked.