When I have a spare moment, I have been enjoying watching this guy's actual plays of the old game, Terror from the Deep.
It got me wondering whether anybody had experimented with running D&D as a kind of tactical wargame, meaning in other words a one-on-one campaign between a DM and a single player controlling an entire party of PCs exploring dungeons and hexmaps and so on.
I often have players create two PCs in a D&D campaign, so that there are 'spares' on hand when PCs (inevitably) die. But I have never gone beyond that. It strikes me that it might be fun.
There's a whole genre of dungeon-crawling skirmish games (e.g. the Song of Blades and Heroes expansion Song of Gold and Darkness or Nordic Weasel's Dungeon Scum). And the boardgame Descent basically turns D&D into an opposed wargame between players and DM. You could make a good case for Space Hulk being a sleek and streamlined example of this genre.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best afternoons of gaming I've had in the past few years was when I laid out a dungeon using D&D dungeon tiles and got my kids to explore it. We used the Whitehack take on OD&D; while they could see the whole layout, they had no idea what was in any of the rooms, and lots of fun and excitement was had with a regenerating D&D troll (released when they raised a portcullis). Each of them had two or three PCs; we rationalised the visible layout through the PCs' possession of a treasure map.
I've had lots of nice tactical situations in my two lockdown Keep on the Borderlands campaign; the grown-up version has had one evening which was a straight-up tactical fight between the orcs of the caves and the PCs and their hirelings; I did my best to slaughter them, taking full advantage of the looping tunnels, but a well-timed sleep spell and some good tercio-type tactics saved their bacon.
In general, I think there's a gap that's tricky to bridge between a good skirmish wargame and a good RPG, and it's all about PC survivability. But once you lose attachment to specific characters, it's easy enough to whip up a nicely savage dungeon skirmish.
There was that old Warhammer game, of course, that was a bit like that bridge between skirmish wargane and RPG...I want to say Warhammer Quest was the name of it?
DeleteYes! We played of ton of that back in the day. They've released some new versions that are more tightly guided (Silver Tower) and more sandboxy that require a DM(Blackstone Fortress and Shadows over Hammerhall) I've only played Silver Tower. It was fun. Very focused and more specially atmospheric than the original, but I missed the random feel and the nutty between town events.
DeleteYeah, it's one of the ways to make 4e manageable. Run it straight up rules as written as a tactical game with players controlling squads.
ReplyDeleteI can buy that.
DeleteMy schedule gives me few opportunities for gaming, so I am usually stuck with just one player, or a maximum of 2, who are available when I am. So the party is usually one or two PCs and a handful of NPCs. (We actually also did this as teenagers, since we played whenever possible with whoever was available, and if all we had was a DM and one player we weren't going to let that stop us.)
ReplyDeleteMy game has been particularly lethal for the last couple of years, so the PCs tend to try to attract as many NPC adventures/henchmen/men-at-arms as possible (I draw the line at a party size of 9 combatants, though). Those without an agenda often end up being replacement PCs.
I run the NPCs outside combat, but I usually let the player(s) run them in combat and only intervene if there is something going on that they don't know about.
You are right, it is fun as a tactical exercise. But it is also fun on the roleplaying side, since the PCs get more time on stage, and you can really develop the campaign around them. My campaigns are often character driven, and that is probably why.
That last point is also interesting - I can see how that would work.
DeleteIn primary school I played in a one-on-one campaign set in a fantasy future with orcs and elves. It was absolutely mission-based, I gained XP for fragging enemies and completing objectives, and advancement was partially through acquiring better gear with the money I got for the missions. It was extremely tactical, and at some point I got a companion as well. It was a fun game!
ReplyDeleteI've run XCOM style tactical games in D&D to good effect, but always with one player to one character. Never occurred to me to have a single player who controlled the whole squad.
ReplyDeleteThere are a shit ton of board games that treat dungeon crawling like tactical combat. However, they're generally cooperative with the monsters obeying really simple rules for what they do. They're generally pretty boring, they're basically an RPG with the fun bits removed. My sons used to LOVE them but now refuse to play any after I ran them through seventeen (and counting) sessions of Caverns of Thracia. They'd probably be more fun if, like you say, they weren't cooperative.
ReplyDeleteI think cooperative games are kind of the pits, to be honest.
DeleteI've been thinking along the same lines recently, trying to devise a basic ruleset for a fairly tactical RPG version of Space Hulk. "Psst, why not just play Space Hulk?" Because, for me at least, it's so much harder to bring a boardgame to life like an RPG session. Boardgames tend to dissolve into mechanics, but I'm after the horror/visceral action feeling of a squad clunking through a hulk in terminator armour. Any ruleset suggestions are welcome.
ReplyDeleteCP:2020. Has to have been tried by somebody.
DeleteCheers, I'll check it out.
ReplyDeleteI have run a simplified setup in a tournament campaign thing that would probably fit what you're describing. It was fun, but it would take more play testing to really get it right.
ReplyDeleteEach player had a squad of PCs that had various skills to work their way through the dungeon. Each week we alternated between a difficult cooperative dungeon with all players vs me and competitive dungeon with players racing to find treasure. We kept a leaderboard of several running stats comparing the squads.
One key thing that worked well was to change the general mechanic of rolling to do actions be rolling to make progress on actions. The basic roll combined making progress and suffering potential damage in return all in one roll. Turns were rapid, simultaneous resolution style once everyone committed their actions.
We stopped playing now, but it lasted a while. I think it had potential, but it was pretty rough around the edges.
In the 4e era my little brother and I would draft monsters our of the MM, draw some crazy terrain together and then battle. It was fun!
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