Chaotek Thoughts

Whether you’ve every played an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or not, there are lessons to be learned from them that can greatly improve your success in D&D and other pen and paper RPGs. Many of these same lessons also come from multi-player first person shooters (FPS). Given the universal application of these strategies in computer games, it should be obvious that the lessons apply to pen and paper games as well. These tactics have evolved over the years as they are very effective in reducing party death, party wipes, and speed of game play.

Reduction in Forces

This strategy is to reduce the number of opponents as fast as possible. This is generally accomplished by attacking the minions first, then finish the boss(es). At all levels, there are limits to how many actions can be done in a single turn. More opponents means more actions to be used against you. Blindly ignoring the minions to attack the boss can leave a lot of extra attacks against your group. In many cases, the minions are very underpowered compared to the boss, and can be killed very quickly—leaving a single boss to face many opponents. This turns the number of actions advantage in your favor instead of your opponents.

Concentrated Fire

This is perhaps one of the most effective strategies I’ve seen in both gaming genres. The idea is for all allies to attack a single opponent, kill/disable them, then everyone moves on to attack the next opponent and so on. This is the most effective way to accomplish the Reduction in Forces strategy as you will eliminate your opponents faster, and reduce the number of actions they can use against you.

Know Your Role

I’ll talk about this more in Part 2 of this article, but this concept is basically to know how you best function in a group. MMOs give us 4 roles to focus on: tanks, strikers, blasters, and controllers. To be the most effective, pick one role and focus on it. This doesn’t mean you can’t change from a striker to a healer mid-battle if you need to save an ally from death, but it means you should focus on how you best help the group. Most classes fit into more than one of these roles, so you can work with your group to split up the roles between two similar characters. For example, you can have a wizard and a sorcerer in the same party. Both would generally be viewed as a blaster, but one could act more often as a controller with mind and terrain effecting magic while the other focuses on direct damage spells.

Stay Together

There is no way this can be said too much. Staying together is always the key to surviving a tough adventure. Unless the adventure forces a split, like a random teleporter, you should always stay together. Wandering off alone will likely get you killed, or at least leave the group vulnerable. In MMOs and D&D, many encounters are scaled to a certain challenge level. Splitting the group allows for running into an encounter scaled for 4 people with fewer people there to handle it. Even if you are all in the same room, moving away from the group is very dangerous. For one, you are now open to attack from all sides, whereas you might only be open to attack from a limited direction if you are standing together. Also it limits the ability to assist or be assisted. If you are off on your own, there may not be a healer or tank nearby to help you. Also if you are away from the group and they get into trouble, it will take much longer for you to get back to them.

Manage the Enemy Casters

While reading the reduction of forces and concentrated fire tactics, you may have thought—why attack the minions, shouldn’t I attack the mage first? Perhaps yes. You should always go for the easiest kills first, and in many cases that will be the squishy mage (or other lightly armored, low HP enemy). If an enemy caster is not your group’s current target, then you will still benefit greatly be managing their ability to cast spells, etc. Keeping a spellcaster from casting spells greatly reduces the challenge while offering the same reward. They best mechanism to accomplish this in D&D is the readied action. Pick a blaster (strikers work, but are less desirable because it might split your group up) and let them know their job is to keep the caster busy until the rest of the group cleans up the rest of the encounter. That person now focuses on keep them from casting spells. It doesn’t matter if they cast defensively if you readied an action—you can still interrupt their spell. Once your readied action has occurred, you now benefit from sharing initiative with that person—once again you can interrupt them every round because your actions occur simultaneously. You’ll almost always disrupt a few spells, or at least deal significant damage to them while you wait for your party to catch up to you.

Protect your Healer (and squishy mages)

Above all else, do not let the healer die. If they healer dies, you are looking at a party wipe, or at least you’re done adventuring for the (in-game) day. While the healer comes first, protecting the light armored casters comes in at a close second. Keeping them alive will keep the party alive.

Conclusion

It may seem like these strategies may contradict, but they are complementary. Concentrate fire to reduce the enemy forces. Manage the enemy casters while the rest concentrate fire. Stay together to protect your allies (healer). Know your role so that you know where you should be and what you should be doing to help the party be successful.
Beware though; intelligent foes may use these strategies as well.