RADIANT TACTICS

Today, we’ll look at how Radiant Tactics adds flavor to its tactical battles through their consequences for other game systems. This is the fourth and final article in a series looking at how great tactics RPGs use their game systems to add to tactical battles.

Here is a short recap of initial findings:

1. Game Systems Empower Players to Personalize, Author, and Invest in Tac Battles. System interactions can empower players to personalize battles, with authorship amplifying investment. Giving players tools isn’t automatically empowering them, however. Scenarios and tutorials need to make players conscious of how they might use tools given
   
2. Game Systems Nudge Players to Play Tactical Battles in Fun Manners. System interactions can narrow or broaden the range of tactics a ‘strategic-optimizing’ player employs in battle. Broadly, tactics RPG designers should create incentives for players to play in fun manners and disincentives to play in unfun. 

3. Tac Battles are Instrumental to Fun in Other Systems. Tac battles are made more exciting through what becomes possible in other systems — exploration, crafting, class abilities, strategic map position, story and lore unlocks, and so on.

Let’s dig in!

Why Tactics RPGS need Multiple Game Systems

If tactical battles are fun in themselves, why add more? Across arts, much solid advice for composers recommends keeping works focused: ‘less is more’, ‘cut needless words’, ‘pick a limited palette’, ‘get to the point’, and the like. Whether you’re a writer, artist, cook, musician, or hobbyist game designer, such advice is sound. 

Since adding complexity would seem to depart from good advice, let’s talk about why great Tactics RPGs do it. Broadly, there are two reasons why a game might favor adding game systems to a tactics RPG, despite the challenges. 

Tactics RPGs are RPGs

A Tactics RPG will need game systems outside battles if it is to more fully support the fun of roleplaying.  A good reason for tactics RPG to add instrumentally fun game systems, like crafting, survival, squad maneuver, regional economics, is because this supports a broader range of roles for players to experience. For example, there’s not much to being a smith without smithing, so some game system for making equipment from materials. It’s the same for many roles players might want to roleplay — merchants without trade, tactician without squad tactics, explorer without survival and navigation, etc. Well designed additional game systems can make roleplaying more varied and robust.

Consequences add Flavor

Stake, consequence, progress, meaning: secondary game systems can imbue tactical battles with additional ‘flavor’. Often, this occurs through the contrast between players’ immediate goals, ‘capture the objective on this tactical maps’, and long term goals, ‘discover the entrance to Heim Arribold’. Choice of battle, and choices in battle take on new significance: pick the wrong battle or tactics, and your short term victory ends up a setback to your long term goal.

Secondary game systems create both new incentives and disincentives for players, which can influence both their behavior (how they play the game)  and feelings (how they experience the game.)

Common Effects of Adding Something to Lose

• Players plays more safely and conservative. 
• Players deploy best units. 
• Players feel pressure not to make mistakes. 
• Players feel tense, frustrated, cheated, or clever.

Common Effects of Adding Something to Gain

• Player plays more risky, push advantage, snowball. 
• Player deploy units that would benefit most from bonuses. 
• Player pressure to make most of opportunity (FoMO).
• Player feel powerful, lucky/unlucky,  greedy/prudent, or rushed.

By anticipating how secondary game systems influence player experience, a really talented scenario designer, like a book’s author, a might control for pacing, rising tension, and catharsis.

That’s an advanced topic though — we’ll just plant the seed of the idea here and discuss it in a future article. For now, it’s enough to appreciate how secondary systems can change the ‘flavor’ of tactical battles, (for better and worse)  and why that can be a reason to add complexity.

Four Pitfalls of Unharmonized Games

There’s a reason ‘less is more’ is solid advice for composers: thoughtless additions can ruin the dish. Even though tactics RPGs benefit from secondary game systems, designers need to integrate them artfully. How exactly do additions ruin the dish, a and what can be done about it? Here are four dynamics found in unharmonized games.

1. Fun Imbalance. A family of problems emerges when one game system is more fun the others. Imagine a tactics RPG focused on battles and crafting. The fun of maneuvering units to win tactical battles is different from the fun of uncovering powerful new equipment from crafting. Yet, players enjoy different things, and typically want to spend less time doing the less fun activity. In the worst cases, one system delays the fun of another, causing players to resent it: they feel forced to grind, drag out battles for sake of crafting, put off by post-battle material sorting, and such.
   
   Great tactics RPGs find ways to make delayed gratification feel like earned gratification.
   
2. Practicality. More game systems can lead to more busy work. You can craft and equip effective items? Great, but do you now also need to spend play- time managing your inventory, outfitting each unit, sorting through unlocked materials, and navigating combination potentials?  You’ve won the climactic tactical battle, your opponent no longer a risk? Great, but do you now need to spend another hour+ chasing down remnant squads and backdoor towns to actually meet the region map’s ‘win’ conditions?
   
   Great tactics RPGs minimize the play-time stolen by tasks outside their focus experiences.

3. Challenge Imbalance: Too Easy. When one system makes play in the other significantly more or less challenging, another family of problem arises. Let’s start with the issue of too little challenge. At the extreme, a system that has too little challenge is pointless to engage in. Perhaps  your crafted equipment makes tactical play too easy— crafting trivializes combat. Or, you don’t need to craft ever, because crafting adds too little advantage to tactical battles—there’s no point to crafting.
   
   Great tactics RPGs need to balance unlocks making battles too trivial and unlocks have enough impact to feel like a reward, not a wasted effort. 

4. Challenge Imbalance: Too Hard. Now let’s flip the issue. What happens when one system makes the other more difficult? Typically, it puts pressure on the player to gain advantage in the difficult system by playing battles with specific units and tactics. For some players, discovering efficient play is itself a kind of fun, akin to solving a puzzle. However,  players may also experience it as a loss of agency — to progress, they are forced to play the game in a particular playstyle, possibly one poorly fitting with intended roleplaying.
   
   Great tactics RPGs find room for optimizers and roleplayers, or bravely choose their audience.

Five Countermeasures for Scenario Designers

Now, mindful of the pitfalls, let’s explore some techniques used to mitigate these issues. The list is loosely ordered from simpler to more difficult to implement techniques.

1. Informed Opt-In. Sometimes, the difficulty or crafting experience is the scenario focus.The scenario just won’t be for tastes of crafting-lite.  When a hobbyist scenario designer opts to stick to their vision, the best thing they can do to help players is to clearly communicate the designed scenario experience. “Players, this is a crafting emphasized scenario!”  Good communication lets players  make informed choices, and, if opting to play anyways, go into the scenario with appropriate expectations.
   
2. Strength of Win Bonuses, Alternative Win Conditions. For some players, the difference between feeling forced vs opting in to difficulty or playstyle can make all the difference. Strength of win vs bonuses, like ‘Hold out 3 turns for N reward, Hold out 8 turns for M reward’, can allow players to opt-in to a skill-appropriate challenge level, while rewarding them for their choice. (However, watch out for rewards different in kind, not quantity: completionists may feel coerced when the only way of collecting an item is to slog through an insufferable difficulty.) Alternate win conditions are similar — when in doubt, trust the players to pick what is right for them.
   
3. Variety as Reward. Consider the Dark Souls and Super Smash Brothers series. In Dark Souls, some weapon drops aren’t simply ‘better or worse’ than current equipment. Rather, unlocks enable different playstyles all together. The same can be said about character unlocks in Smash Bros. These games illustrate how rewards aren’t just constituted by being ‘better’ — sometimes, new playstyle count as rewards too.
   
4. Masterful Pacing. A talented scenario designer uses periods of high and low challenge like an author uses dramatic tension, a musician the contour of melody, or a cook spicing to create variety across dishes with same main ingredient. A masterful hobbyist designer knows there are times and places for very easy and very hard battles. After a difficult and focus-intensive sequence? Too easy is a relief. After jumping through hoops for new equipment and mastery? Old battles now being too easy is how a power-up should feel.
   

Conclusion: Responsive Roleplaying?

We’ll end the article (and series!) with a theoretical technique, one that goes beyond what we’ve seen in the great Tactics RPGs reviewed so far. 

A careful reader may have noticed that most of our ‘pitfalls’ have to do with how systems make players feel about parts of the game. A careful reader might ask, are ‘pitfalls’ so called because of ‘negative’ feelings elicited? And a careful reader might prepare a critique: ‘Wouldn’t a more masterful artist not avoid eliciting feelings in her audience. Wouldn’t she rather ensure that audience felt emotions harmonize with story or subject depicted —part of experiencing a good tragedy being  feeling sadness at right times and objects? For, isn’t it sometimes said that what makes great works of art great, be the literature, drama, film, etc, is their capacity to let us experience, so understand, a character’s frustrations, confusion, sadness, joy, etc, without us actually having to live through the conditions of that experience?

We concur with the careful reader in the case of roleplaying games focused. While not all games need to aspire to greatness so conceived, there’s something contradictory about roleplaying games that seek to minimize, rather than artfully direct, its players’ emotional responses. Maybe it is internal to the genre —roleplaying games seem to us centrally about creating a character, occupying their point of view, and even learning from that experience.

Where tactics RPGs might improve as roleplaying games is in more tightly connecting the feelings elicited by game systems, feelings like frustration, puzzlement, or boredom, with the player’s invention of roleplaying character. As players, we’ve done this ourself — we remind ourself that these battles are harder and different because we’ve chosen to play a ‘battle smith’, so restrict tactics and options. We imagine that how we feel is how our character might feel. Yet, we’ve not seen a game excel in doing so, a game that anticipates how players will feel and connects that to their character, choices, and broader narrative.

Can that be done? Is this theoretical countermeasure opportunity or folly? Time will tell! (Though, please send us examples if you have seen games do this well!)

And that’s it for today! Today’s article was also the end of our series on how tactics RPGs use game systems. We’ll turn to another topic next month.If you like this blog, consider signing up for updates, likes, or sharing content! Happy gaming!