Namely that under no circumstances should you be running your encounters in open, white rooms that are utterly disconnected from one another, with perfect lighting and fire lines. Because dynamic combat and strategy are the name of the game.
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| That's initiative! Go! Go! |
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"Tactical" is in The Title, After All
When you sit down to design a game, you build in certain assumptions of play. For example, if you make a high fantasy game where magic is commonly available, then part of the challenge rating of your encounters assumes that players will have access to spellcasting, magic items, and so on. If a Game Master decides to then restrict the availability of magic, that's going to throw off the game's balance and challenge because players are now being forced to participate with one hand tied behind their backs in a way that the designer never intended.
The same thing will happen if you try to run Army Men in an open field where two lines of enemies line up, and keep rolling dice until one side or the other is dead.
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| Cover! Where is my damn cover!? |
When I sat down to create Army Men, I wanted to make a version of the DND 5E ruleset that had more options when it came to combat tactics. From a morale system, to expanded rules for cover, to a wider variety of weapons, there's a lot of stuff in here... but one of the assumptions that I made was that Game Masters would create dynamic encounters that put a lot of different battlefield conditions into play in order to get the most out of the game. It's why there are so many rules for all of these different aspects.
And it's why I would strongly recommend that Game Masters use those rules! Because tactics and strategy is a big part of the challenge your squad will have to face, so remember to consider:
- Lighting Conditions: None of the resinous peoples have darkvision without the aid of gear.
- Cover: A huge concern, everything from trenches and sandbags to trees and chest-high walls.
- Height: Higher ground has always been desirable.
- Ammunition: From the Hollywood Guns rules where you don't bother with ammo tracking at all, to low-ammunition situations where every round is valuable, this is a big deal for challenge
- Time: When a mission is time sensitive, you can't spend days raiding, retreating, and resting.
- Alerting The Enemy: Gunfire travels, and if your squad opens up that's going to attract more threats to their position.
And in addition to all of those reminders, Army Men's first supplement Threat Assessments recently dropped, which is full of additional enemy types with their own, unique abilities that can cause serious problems for your squad (in case you needed more tools to do so).
It Helps To Think Big Picture
When designing encounters in most games, but particularly for Army Men, it's important for a Game Master to look down at the full map, and ask what might go right or wrong when determining challenge for their squad. Because too often we just end up looking at a creature's CR, and plopping them down on the map without utilizing their full breadth of abilities and stretegies that makes up that challenge.
Which is why so often your encounters end up feeling too easy, or you have to bulk up enemy hit points or numbers just to challenge your players. Because this time it's the monsters who have one hand (or other miscellaneous limb) tied behind their backs.
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| What do you MEAN it's still up?! |
As an example, many of the vespoids (the huge, insectoid creatures that are one of the prime antagonists in Army Men) have a hive mind feature. This means that whenever your squad attacks, that information is immediately conveyed to the hive, and it can make decisions based on its available data. That might mean that your squad has 1d6 rounds before more enemies show up. Even if they manage to ambush these bugs and kill them before they know what's going on, their deaths will still be registered to the hive mind... they just won't know the precise nature of the threat.
That feature is a large part of what makes these specific kinds of vespoid such a threat to a squad, because if you fight one of these creatures, you're fighting all of them. There is no way to take out an individual cluster of drones or soldiers without putting all of the others on high alert unless it's done at a range where they're not connected to the rest of the hive. They can act in perfect coordination, and even worse for a squad, hive minds are often immune to fear... which means that the squad has to struggle with Morale effects, while their enemy does not.
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| Consider, if you will... |
It helps to picture a mission from a bird's eye view, and to see all of these separate encounters not as disparate, unconnected events, but as parts of a whole. What a squad does, and how well they succeed or fail, should organically effect the rest of their mission in important ways.
For example, say your squad was tasked with dealing with a criminal syndicate who has been stealing ordnance from the military, and trafficking those arms. If your squad poses as corruptible members of the military, and makes the right overtures to sell additional weapons, they might get in close with the customers. If they pass all the social checks, they might even be able to get everyone drunk enough at a post-sale celebration that they pass out, or are severely hampered. This puts the enemy at an extreme disadvantage when the squad starts cuffing the criminals to hand over for prosecution.
Strategy carried the day in this example, without a shot being fired.
However, say your squad instead snapped up a criminal contact and squeezed them for the information about who was buying guns. Yes, they might get the information about who is behind these crimes, where they are, etc., but that contact going missing could put the gun runners on high alert. And if the squad chooses to go after the war profiteers with their fingers on their triggers, now they're facing a group of people who are ready for a fight, and who have prepared themselves accordingly with a booby trapped and reinforced warehouse where they store their merchandise, body armor, heavy weapons, and other threats that put the squad at a dangerous disadvantage. This version is much more difficult as far as challenge goes, but that challenge is a direct result of actions taken (or not taken) up to this point.
The enemies in question didn't change in both scenarios. All the NPCs you had at the beginning are still there, as are all the weapons, armor, traps, etc., that could have been brought to bear agaisnt your squad. But what options the players chose, the strategy they used, and how well their dice rolled (as they would have a serious fight on their hands if their cover was blown while they were in the middle of enemy territory, and the gang had to get rid of them) all play a part in how events go down.
This is the sort of mindset a Game Master should adopt in order to make their games feel more organic, and to give as much power to their players as possible. Think of the mission as a clock. You choose the pieces, you fit them together, and you set it in motion... from that point onward, you're just watching what your players do, and making sure that all the moving pieces act in accordance to the abilities and strategy they bring to bear. Everything should be connected, because that's what's going to lead to an overall better game.
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