#RPGaDay2025 - 27 Tactic

 

What is a tactic more than a tool for control over a situation? This applies whether you are referring to combat tactics, political tactics, or social tactics. Each is a part of a toolkit that helps its user gain advantage in a situation. Other terms could include stratagem, trick, ruse, or scheme. I guess that generally, most of my recent game designs have used skills and abilities this way. Each of these is not a self-contained chance of achieving a specific type of task, but rather a tool that can be used in a variety of different ways and situations, mixed and matched to apply leverage to different activities as needed.

This kind of reflects the way I’ve seen things unfold in life. There are some people who have a limited range of techniques that they apply to the world around them, and maybe those techniques work for them reliably, but it’s just as likely that they just don’t go beyond their comfort zones, only sticking to the types of activity where they know their tactics will have a high enough degree of impact on the situations where they find themselves. Other folks might have a much wider range of tactics to cover a wider scope of activities, this gives them more versatility across the places they find themselves… then you find people with a certain range of tactics that simply aren’t useful in the situations they find themselves at all. In this last case I’m thinking of folks who might be combatants in a world of high intrigue politics, or con-artists and manipulators trying to solve scientific problems. Many tactics are right in some situations, and some are right in many situations, but none are right in all situations.