Variety Through Consistency

'MORE VARIETY' IS A COMMON REFRAIN when looking for advice on how to spice up combat in TTRPGs. Change the enemies, spice up the environment, introduce multiple objectives and so on - the obvious solution to the frankly awfully boring D&D combat system is to bedazzle your players with lots of fancy toys so that they don't notice that there is no intrinsic value in the activity.

I think this is somewhat backwards. Tactical videogames like XCOM, Into the Breach and Gears of War: Tactics tend to have a limited number of units, and a somwhat restricted selection of maps (or at least some standard map features that get reused a lot). There is something to be said for the technical limitations of videogames as a medium here, but ultimately I think that's misguided: I believe that these limitations aren't a necessary evil, but rather a selling point for those games' combat systems. I believe that variety should never come at the expense of consistency.

To be clear, I am not talking about game titles that have shied away from combat, or that try to minimize its role in gameplay or the rules. Excising combat as an activity is a valid alternative, and making it akin to blackjack (high stakes gambling with quick resolution) is a good idea for certain designs. However, I find it telling that "combat as sport" is a somewhat derogatory designation when we, as a species, love both combat and sports.

Here's a case study: in D&D 3.5's supplement Races of Stone there were a bunch of halfling feats dedicated towards fighting giants. They were quite powerful, and inspired some cheesy builds leveraging reduce person as a buff spell, but beyond that they were largely useless. Why? Well, it's fairly obvious: have you ever looked at a Monster Manual? How many giants does it have in it? How many other things? If a DM is pursuing variety, what percentage of encounters could you seriously expect to fight a giant in?

Here's another case study: XCOM 2 has a character class called Specialist which can hack mechanical enemies. This action has a very low chance of success against any reasonably sized enemy (barring shenanigans), yet it almost always works against drones -- the easiest enemy to fight by far, almost useless, often flies around on its own as well. You could dispatch drones by literally walking up to them outside cover and hitting them with a gun a few times. They probably wouldn't retaliate meaningfully. They're quite pitiful.

Except that you very often find lone drones flying around during your stealth missions, and hacking doesn't break concealment, so having a Specialist take over a drone and using it to scout ahead while simultaneously getting your team in a great position for a quick alpha strike against the enemies before they are alerted to your presence is extremely valuable.

What's the difference between those two scenarios? It's not in the power of the ability, it's in the context in which it lives. A limited cast of enemy units produces a consistent meta where abilities may be balanced against each other. A giganting monster manual full of 'variety' leads players to optimize their builds for broad scope utility and hard numbers.

It's really unfair to the game designers to expect them to be able to balance every character build against every other character build in a vacuum. It's also really unfair to players to ask them to build a character that could work against any of the infinite possible encounters a DM might come up with. And it's really silly and non diegetic to ask a DM to build encounters with the characters' abilities in mind: oh you learned how to fly? Better put in some flying monsters. You wouldn't have had to fight them if you didn't learn to fly, but now that you can, let's make you use that ability!

So here's a suggestion: create a consistent and small cast of enemies for each of your game's factions. Stick to it. Warn your players about what they might face, and then allow them to make choices in their advancement that make them particularly effective against those enemies. Reward them for it. If they end up learning some of these units' exact stats? That's great. That's awesome. That's them learning to fight against these guys after having beat them so many times. Don't shy away from that, don't mix up the stats, don't try to keep things a mystery -- keep things consistent.

Will that get boring? It depends. It could, if you let it; but consistency brings a whole lot of variety on its own. The more your players (and you as a DM) learn to play with and around these units, the less overhead you'll have when fighting, the more space you'll have to play around with everything else. If you don't need to explain what's happening because everyone knows the Tyr Paladins can cast Scorching Light, you can focus your attention budget on handling a fight where the Paladins are using that spell from a fortified position overhead which needs to be busted open. If everyone knows the Black Swamp Roaches explode into a cloud of poison gas when killed, you can use that to build an encounter with civilians that need to be saved: push the roaches back before you kill them or the bystanders choke to death.

This kind of attitude would shine with a game built around it: character options that allow players to customize their fighting style to the campaign they're playing in, growing their skills organically to face the enemies they have to beat rather than some unspecified hypothetical gestalt of all possible monsters; crunchy bits that are unafraid of getting hyperspecific and niche, because there are going to be campaigns where that niche is exactly what you need and picking those abilities will be rewarded; factions that start with a consistent cast of units and, through play, may upgrade them or gain new ones, changing the campaign's meta and therefore the choices of the players in response... The possibilities are near endless.

Ultimately, I believe that more enemy variety is a patch on a broken system that ends up reinforcing the problem it aims to solve: if you encounter an endless variety of enemies, your tools to fight them must be near universal, and that in turn makes fights boil down to spamming repeatable, reliable effects over and over. Here's an orc: hit it with your sword. Here's an undead ooze: hit it with your sword. Here's an aberration from beyond the veil of death: hit it with your sword.

I have similar thoughts on things like additional objectives -- it's annoying to have an escort mission when none of your abilities relate to protecting someone, but if you could spec into bodyguard feats or whatever, and were reliably tasked with defending innocent bystanders, then wouldn't that turn into a mechanically relevant part of the game? Wouldn't picking up skills for defusing bombs matter more if your enemies consistently made you disarm explosives? Wouldn't having a swim speed be more satisfying if you could count on your environments almost always having water in them?

Consistency is the key to unlocking build-related satisfaction, and variety feels more meaningful when there is a baseline to move away from, rather than the limitless possibilities of 'anything goes, so long as it has HP'.

Towards a better understanding of consequences in TTRPGs

THERE SEEMS TO BE a consensus in certain TTRPG circles that character death is the only consequence that truly matters. That's a provocative and no doubt controversial statement, but bear with me: I do not make this observation lightly.

I'm sure you've all heard the extreme version of this a number of times: the game is meaningless, some say, if the DM fudges dice rolls, or goes easy on characters on death's door, or doesn't enforce the falling rules to their fullest extent and so on and so forth. It takes away the pleasure of a hard earned victory, if you know that failure was never an option.

I agree with that sentiment. Somewhat. I just think that failure should not be equated to death.

It doesn't escape me that many proponents of the lethal systems that "let the rolls decide" the fate of characters do in fact know that failure can mean lots of things, and not just death. Dismemberment tables are a neat idea, for example! Yet those too are so closely tied to the character's body, force the price of recklessness to be paid in flesh and gore.

I postulate that the reason this attitude is so firmly established is because character death impacts the player. I don't just mean it in terms of the time and effort you have to spend to make a new character - though there definitely is that too. If you play as a character, if you try to embody them in the fiction, then consequences that impact your character naturally impact you as a player. It's a form of bleed, and it's natural. Expected. Exploitable.

But the focus on the body and the flesh, on mortality, on lethal consequences, is a byproduct of the frankly excessive focus on the dungeon as the adventure location. It is natural to default to physical consequences if your understanding of the hobby is through the lens of 6 feet square rooms and 6 miles wide hexes. It is, by and large, the only thing your players will care about.

I don't care if village #3 in hex 13.A is destroyed by the rat plague. Why would I? Why would anybody? If you play as adventurers with little to no ties to the world, frontier-bound, with more greed than common sense and the narrative support of a disinterested super-partes DM who made a sandbox for you to play with and then took a step back, then this is the default. Can you care about stuff in such a world? Sure. Is that supported? Expected? Rewarded? Debatable.

Have I ruffled enough feathers yet? Let's keep going: plot based adventures have greater breadth of stakes and thus better support player expression. The idea that player skill should be rewarded has been somewhat tied up with the idea that you shouldn't prep plots, and let characters run wild in a scenario where you limit yourself to enforcing the rules and portraying a realistic world. This in turn limits character involvement in the setting and thus limits the DM to a handful of possible consequences, such as death. It is natural then to feel like taking away such a big consequence would let the game spiral out of control.

I am here to tell you that if your players buy into the world more, if you work to establish a coherent narrative and put forward reasonable stakes, then it is possible to run a campaign that is just as interested in player expression and enforcing terrible consequences than if you run a highly lethal dungeon crawling campaign. In fact, it's easier: there are so many more levers you can pull and so many more interesting rewards and punishments you can use. You don't need to kill a character to make them suffer; it's ridiculous to even think that. Letting them live, knowing full well that the ambush that killed their little sister was something they stumbled into because of their carelessness, works just as well if not better. If a player is properly bought in to your shared world, then death might be the least worrying consequence of all.

Of course this requires a degree of tolerance for narrative based mechanics - aka dissociated mechanics. It is possible to run a campaign with fully diegetic non-deadly consequences, but imagining the mechanical support for such a thing makes my head spin. There is space for a system that keeps the narrative components behind the DM screen and fronts only realistic outcomes to the players, but that's a fine line to walk and one I'm ultimately disinterested in - mostly because I cannot for the life of me comprehend how one can look at a fictional world and not see the seams. I digress.

The point is, I am not claiming that the perfectly coherent dungeon-heavy hexcrawling POSR mode is ineffective at what it does. I am merely saying that consequence-heavy games that prioritise player skill don't need to be sandboxes. They can be narrativist games about prepared plots, with planned story beats and involved character backstories. All you need for that to be possible is to make sure players care about the world beyond their own body.

So go forth, and play a campaign where you invest yourself in the characters' fate, flat out disallow character death, plan setpieces and dastardly plots... but still reward ingenuity, build rocks and hard places, and let the dice kill their relatives, their friends, their wards and mentors, their favorite barkeep, their dignity, their honor, their will to live.