#RPGaDay2025 - Day 27 - Tactic

Day 27 of #RPGaDay, "Tactic" is the word of the day.  

I love my group, but my two wargamers love to fly through scenes when they should plan, and try to formulate a thesis on twenty seconds of combat that are actively occurring.    And knowing their play styles as wargamers, I can usually shoot down most of their “my character would have second-guessing” 

I'm in no way some brilliant tactical genius, but I was playing wargames as a youth well before D&D crossed my radar, and my preferred focus has been skirmish games with more meat on the bones than most fantasy games.  

In our 5e game, now many moons ago, by Elf Barbarian Falgor focused not on accuracy or damage but pure speed, allowing him to swing on ropes from one ship to another, climb a mast, and kill someone in the crow's nest before others had taken a first step.  

In the lone 4e session I got to play, my lowly fighter was expected to be the frontline tank.  I stalled as much as I could and then finally dashed down a side passageway, working my way around to the rear of our enemy and wiping them out.  While the others were playing checkers, I was playing 3-D explosive cannibal chess, and stalling to ensure I wasn't metagaming something for fighter, when we had perfectly good rogues in the group as well. 

Random Encounters will throw off the best tactics. 

ADDENDUM!   After settling on the small post above, I actually attended a much-belated #FreeRPGDay event at my FLGS.  

After 19 years, Pathfinder has finally caught me, and I played a promotional 2-hour game, high level characters, so I had pages of abilities, skills, feats, or whatever they replaced the 3.5 terminology with.  

My tactics were sound against an armored cave bear.    Against a dragon, with reach, I ran into some trouble, as I failed my roll, the dragon made theirs, and I was almost eaten.