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The Tactics of Hack'n'slash

By The Creator

In Blades of Exile, under the options menu, there’s a thing called ‘Overall Party Statistics’. If you have a look at that, you’ll see the total amounts of damage given and taken and the number of kills your party has racked up. Have a look at this thing.
Chances are your party has a victim count well into the tens of thousands. This brings into focus a very important part of the average scenario: Combat.
Putting it simply, there’s a heck of a lot of it. When was the last time you wandered into a scenario and didn’t kill masses upon masses of enemies? Zankozzie’s Big Mistake, probably.
The veteran BoE player has killed millions of monsters. After the first thousand or so, they get very similar and very boring. Custom graphics spice them up a bit, but in nearly every scenario I’ve played, all the fighting causes the one emotion that a designer fears more than any other: Boredom.
Outdoor combat is especially boring — there is essentially nothing you can do to make it more interesting. Because of this, I HEAVILY recommend having outdoor combat ONLY where it is demanded by the plot. Anyone who throws in a few fights to make the game ‘more interesting’ is doing his scenario a grave injury.
The same applies to the fill-in hack-up-the-henchmen fights you get in the average dungeon. Avoid them whenever possible. The player has had enough fights for the sake of fights — spare him. He’ll love you for it.
Now, I’m not saying combat is always bad news — only gratitous and unnecessary combat. There will always be fights in scenarios, and this is far from a bad thing. However, plot-necessary fights often suffer from the same problem that frivolous ones do — boredom. What’s the average final fight like? Big, tough, and usually dull. The problem that most designers seem to have is they think tough is equivalent to good. While a good challenge is necessary, that isn’t what makes a good fight.
There are some great fights out there, especially final showdowns — look at the end of Brotherhood of the Hand. You have to fight a guy who turns into a huge Shadow Drake halfway through. To top it off, to win the scenario properly, you have to have enough spell points left over to cast Ritual of Sanctification right afterwards! Or The Hut of Baba Yaga — how many times did the sides switch around? Or An Apology’s rune fight. All of these are tough batles, but the difficulty isn’t what holds the interest. It’s the novelty and originality. Fights get to be all the same, so make yours different!
Falling Stars is a great scenario, but it has one of the worst final battles I’ve seen. Special Spells have been used so often that they have no novelty value anymore, unless they are very unique and original. They only add to the challenge, and that fight had challenge to burn.
But immediately before that intensely tedious fight, there’s a great one! You’re in a crowded corridor (with maybe half a dozen NPCs), your main enemy is surrounded by a physical shield of henchmen and to top it off, there are deadly Wraiths coming through the walls on either side! It was a difficult fight, but it was fun because it was unusual. Why Alcritas decided to follow it up with what amounted to nothing more than a big room with big monsters is beyond me.
Another thing that annoys me about many battles is often the only way a designer can find to make the fight tougher is to boost monster statistics or add more monsters. At best, this adds some challenge to the situation. At worst, it just drags a boring fight on longer. To really challenge a player, hit him with something he’s not expecting! Most players are used to tough monsters and know how to handle them. Doing something different not only adds spice, it actually makes him think about the situation.
My scenario Deadly Goblins could be regarded as a catalogue of ways to make tough fights with weak monsters. Here are some of the techniques I used in that scenario.
  1. Sneak up behind them: A lot of parties have the tough bruisers up front with spellcasters bless/hasting them from the back. But stick a couple of fighters right next to the mages halfway through the battle, and suddenly the player has to work to find a way to keep his PCs alive!
  2. The first hit: Why does the party always get to go first? Why not let their opponents have a turn? You’d be amazed how much difference this can make.
  3. Negative effects: Being slowed and cursed right before a fighter gets into your face and starts chopping away can be a very hard thing to deal with, even if the said fighter is, say, a goblin.
  4. Nowhere to hide: It’s usually easy to find a corner to hide your spellcasters behind or to duck around when your turn ends if you have a 1PC party. Remove this, and the party is vulnerable.
Do these things, and you’ll do your villians a favor at the same time. Any power-hungry mage can have legions of troops and loads of brute strength, but the ones you remember are the ones who can outwit you — nearly. It’s a snowball effect. Good fights help make good villians, that help make good plots, that help make good scenarios.
Don’t expect decent battles to automtically make your scenario a joy to play, but considering the time a party spends in combat mode, it’s an aspect of design worth mastering.
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