The decline and fall of strategy in games and theory about how Strategy and Tactics are created in RPGs.
Strategy is dead and tactics has killed him…them? It? Hmm… Strategy in games has long been on the decline. This doesn’t mean it is dead, in fact far from it. People seem to crave it and many huge hit games of the last 10 years have been Strategy centric. People are still doing maths to work out the optimal strategy for making money in Stardew Valley, Speedrunning is alive and well, city builders and Real Time Strategy games are having a small bit of a renaissance right now. That said, the overall trend has been down, and right now in RPGs I think we are witnessing a change that came to video games 15 years ago: the death of strategic gameplay (Again, it never “died” but oh boy did it shrink from its heights to almost nothing over night)
What is strategy here? For those that don’t know Strategy is the long term “Macro” side of player choice. It’s making long term choices, choosing the direction you will go from start to finish. What makes a long term choice can be variable, but generally speaking I mean having games which focus on long term planning. Shooting for a goal from a long distance and working toward that goal. The “Micro” of this is tactics. This is why the “combat as war” v. “combat as sport” always annoyed me. It’s combat as strategy v. combat as tactics. Clearer, easier to understand. Perhaps loses some of the modern meaning as it has broadened like most thing do over time.
So what evidence do I have to say there’s some tectonic shift underway in the RPG space towards tactics and away from strategy. Well, the first piece of evidence is that it’s been happening a long time. That’s always a good sign that it is a trend that is headed somewhere. RPGs have shifted this way on a big scale since 2000 when the Neo-Trad play culture began picking up steam. Overtime this shifted more and more and the entire industry shifted with it. A large number of NSR games or POSR games do exactly this. We’ll get into why later. For now, just know that there is a very good and understandable reason for this. However, the watershed moment I think where this slow grinding of massive play culture against massive play culture suddenly slipped and sent shockwaves around the world was the OGL crisis of about this time last year.
Since the OGL crisis multiple people have announced their own games. RPG Kickstarters are cropping up one after another trying to get out from under the shadow of Hasbro. Most of the largest of these have one thing in common: Total removal of strategy from the game. OK, that is not totally true which brings us into the first large topic I want to talk about.
Where Strategy?
In the Modern Neo-Trad play culture strategy lives in player builds. It is the last bastion and people like strategy. They really like it. This is my explanation as to why people are so scared to let it go. Why a 5e player looks at B/X and goes “But there’s no depth here”. Which is a good catch. Strategy is exactly that, a huge amount of depth. Here’s the thing. Strategy works in a weird way. It is a huge amount of depth, nearly unmeasurable. Though some games have plumbed to the very bottom of their strategy wells like can be seen from “Classic WoW” where totally optimal strategy saw the game which most people didn’t ever beat in 2 years demolished in days after launch, and every single tactical moment totally erased by the perfected strategy. This depth though has a weird caveat: as you make the game more simple something magical happens, you cross and invisible line and suddenly it’s all gone. It is all or nothing, and finding that niche where you are as simple as possible but still have a lot of strategic choices to make is really what “Elegance” often means.
Strategy outside of the neo-trad and trad space tends to exist outside of character builds and instead be the central focus of the game. That is especially true of the OSR which I would describe as “Strategy RPGs” in the same way that a game might be a “Strategy Game”. Tactics still matter in these games, but strategy is the king of the show/the reason to play. It is found in how dungeons work: often rewarding players for learning to map effectively and create short cuts. You can see it in the tracking of torches, rations, durability, etc. Putting an emphasis on hirelings, domain play, reputation and faction play. The NSR/POSR space has changed this, shifted the location of Strategy and, to be totally fair, lost a lot of it.
Tracking a specific number of torches, days of rations, treasure, taxes, and so on creates strategic game play in a way that abstracted systems cannot. Abstracting these systems always crosses that magical invisible line, and just like that poof it’s gone. You had a strategy game and now… you still have a strategy game. Wait a minute. How is that?
How Strategy?
These NSR/POSR games are not inherently strategy games, at least that’s what I am arguing here. They are instead leveraging very simple design systems in their adventures and rulings to put back strategy into their games. Often these designers found making strategic environments was just easier than tracking all of these disparate pieces and individual non-abstracted systems. They could get a huge amount (though no all) of the depth while maintaining strategy.
The problem with this is design intent v. actual use. The Five Room Dungeon, or really just any formulaic non-strategic dungeon design is a great example of this. Narrative location based adventures are just poor conduits for strategy. While this works in a game like OD&D, B/X, or AD&D as written it falls apart when you start stripping out the strategic systems and also substitute in these modern location designs. This is what I mean by How Strategy. Strategy has a what, a where, it also has a how.
The easiest way to make dungeons have a strategy is simple: Backtracking (pause for audible gasp from a 2024 JRPG fan). Yes, backtracking is a way to add strategy into a space. People for some reason think this is a dirty word, with a lot of reviews lambasting JRPGs and Metroidvanias for daring to include such “archaic designs”. Backtracking rewards understanding layout, danger, and can be tied into systems like time tracking and faction play. Faction play being another great way to add tactical depth to a dungeon, though it is more complex than “the enchanted gem that opens this door is located on the other side of the dungeon”. It is, like so much of this, well worth that cost.
This goes beyond just location design though. Referees that try to overbalance combat to ensure players always have an easy way to win similarly remove strategic choice from the game. If all you ever fight are singular goblins, the resources and danger of combat hardly deter exploration and present an annoyance rather than a strategic consideration. Rulings that hand wave a series of tactical choices are essentially rulings that elide over strategy. This is what has lead to the huge up tick in games without strategic systems (Such as MCDMRPG, who’s primary selling point is the removal of such systems).
Games which remove these systems run this risk. NSR and POSR games do not always fall into this group, but it’s a recent and growing trend (Errant by Ava Islam, Cinco by Traverse Fantasy, Prismatic Wasteland by Prismatic Wasteland, and more). Not to re-litigate last week’s post, but this is fine. Giving up this little bit of strategy allows for going much simpler without losing a huge amount of depth. It’s a trade off, but a really clever one. As I said, usually it’s all or nothing, but by breaking down the different designs that add depth and removing the least valuable ones you end up with a much simpler game at a very low price of cost.
Resurrection
People love strategy. Have I said people love strategy? People really love strategy. It is fun to do, it’s fun to watch, it’s fun to debate. Maybe someone out there can’t stand it, but I just can’t believe this. A lot of strategic systems have become taboo in both Video Games and TTRPGs, but time and time again people cling to whatever little bit of strategy they have left. Can we bring strategy back into the main stream? Maybe. As I said it has never really left, but I think it’s important to look at why it left before considering how to bring it back.
“Solved Games”. I talked about this briefly before, but here I’ll say, I think this is the number one cause of death for strategy in video and analogue games. Once a game has been solved, the strategy is gone. There’s the way to play it and that’s the end. In a globally connected world where a thousand minds can work on a totally insignificant problem, very quickly it becomes boring. You look up the guide, you put your points in where it tells you to and at the table/game time you do the tactics they said to do to the best of your ability.
This of course is almost always false. Huge errors are made in deciding what is “the best” and bias and human want to remain forever unchanged can leave ineffective strategies at the top for years. Outside of a few rare examples very few games have been totally solved. People find new things all the time, and these solutions are almost always way way way over the top. Like the 3.5 wizard who goes up to his room at the inn, meditates, sends an invisible eye to the dungeon, casts spells remotely to kill everything inside. Gather all the loot on a floating disk with mage hand, and bring it to his eager friends drinking and celebrating their victory over their foe. This, of course, shouldn’t work, but in Video Games it really often does. Leading to remakes being utterly demolished without a second of hesitation by people who read a guide on it yesterday.
Tactics do not have that issue as they require in the moment thinking and skill. You can’t outsource it, so it becomes the default solution. TTRPGs though don’t really have this excuse. At least not outside of character builds. Which are still losing their strategy as they normalise builds so that you don’t have to do the thinking and solving or look up a guide, you can just pick what sounds cool.
Work Work. Strategy needs complexity and some of that can be really tedious spreadsheet stuff. Tracking rations, torches, and so forth is the most common of these in TTRPGs and is the biggest one people are attacking today. I will say this work is really much lighter than it is made out to be, and the depth that comes with it is almost always worth it, but of course the extreme end of this is a paradox game or eve online which I cannot even. Nope. Noooo. I don’t want to do black and white thinking though. There can be very solid middle grounds. Just because I do not prefer the extreme end does not mean any amount is bad.
This is my focus. I want to find ways to make this easy. To remove that friction and make book keeping worth doing and an important part of the game rather than something people see as a chore. A lot of OSR players know it isn’t a chore, but I want to convince the unconvinced. I want to encourage people making their own POSR games to keep these systems in and adjust them rather than remove them.
For now my solution has been retainers. If you hire retainers who’s job it is to handle book keeping and pay them quite a bit more than the average cost of actually doing the book keeping you can ignore the book keeping. This is treated as the default, and thus working towards doing it yourself is a task you can take on that should save you about 1/3rd of the gp cost of going on an expedition, but you have to do it yourself. I hope to keep working and find better solutions and make this solution more popular.
Conclusion
This post really has no thesis statement. It’s an exploration of a topic. I’m not trying to prove anything or make it out that something is bad or good. Trends are trends. Times will change. Thanks for reading
Fae Errant 
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