Good RPG rulesets for tactical battles with miniatures

[malak]

I've mainly played 3.5e, 4e and 5e D&D, Pathfinder and DSA.

Other than those, what RPG rule sets can you recommend for interesting tactical battles on a minimap?

[Blasted]

None. Interesting battles on a minimap is much better handled by wargames at a large scale and boardgames at a small scale. The majority of which at least give a nod to the idea of balance and player involvement.

There is a wide collection of dungeon crawler boardgames which do a better job of interesting tactical battles than any RPG I've known. I'd be more inclined to take, say, Descent and slap an out of combat action resolution on.

[OgreBattle]

Mordheim and Necromunda are made for campaigns. A community driven rebalancing of Mordheim can be found at http://www.coreheim.com/ since GW no longer supports it (original can be found here: http://www.hong-crewet.dk/Mordheim/Rule ... _rules.pdf )

Same thing with Necromunda at http://www.poisonousmonkeys.co.uk/Necro ... lebook.pdf

On TGD, the game "Warp Cult" was created to be a better version of Necromunda: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=71420

All of these games use miniatures and measuring for movement.

Descent is a skirmish/dungeoneering board game with its ruleset free to look at:
https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.c ... ok_ENG.pdf

It uses 'zone' movement.

These are all skirmish games though so they don't support stuff like canoodling at the royal ball and building castles.

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What are you looking for in 'interesting' tactical battles though? What did you like about the games you've played?

[PhoneLobster]

Mordheim and Necromunda are made for campaigns.

Competitive campaigns.

And competitive campaigns have gigantic balance issues that any game dealing with them would need to deeply address in complex and innovative ways.

The solution of any and every GW product to the balance issues of competitive campaigns has always been "ahahhahaha fuck you guys!"

Also, Necromunda wasn't even a game, it was a complex disagreement generation system devoted exclusively to causing fist fights between teenage boys in the late 1990s.

Descent is a skirmish/dungeoneering board game with its ruleset free to look at:

Okaaay... the 2nd edition changes to dice mechanics really lost me, and the 1st edition campaign mode addons were borked five ways on a Sunday but... okaay...

It uses 'zone' movement.

... whut?

[brized]

When you say, "interesting tactical battles on a minimap", "interesting" is going to differ from person to person. What do you enjoy most about the systems you're playing, and what are they not delivering for you?

A few issues I found with running Descent (2E anyway):

1) In TTRPGs, generally speaking the GM's job is to make sure everyone has fun and set up situations that players can interact with to make fun(ny) stories. In Descent, the Overlord's job is to win. The Overlord is incentivized to win. This can create problems for groups that are used to playing TTRPGs, especially if only one person in the group is tactically savvy.*

2) Vanilla Descent 2E's scenarios are all almost entirely objective-based, and there aren't any tools for removing the objectives and just having a simple dungeon crawl*. If your TTRPG group is happy with simple encounters where they just kill everything that moves, they may not enjoy having to evaluate when it's best to attack enemies and when to bypass them and focus on the objectives.

*The Forgotten Souls expansion apparently addresses both these issues, providing a dungeon crawl game mode like in Descent 1E, with an AI script for NPCs instead of an Overlord player. Haven't tried it yet.

3) This relates to my initial question, but I didn't like the lack of diversity in options relative to TTRPGs. Descent 2E feels like D&D 4E, but even more limited. You can't chokeslam anything. I need chokeslams to be a thing in my games, at least implicitly.

[malak]

What are you looking for in 'interesting' tactical battles though? What did you like about the games you've played?

When you say, "interesting tactical battles on a minimap", "interesting" is going to differ from person to person. What do you enjoy most about the systems you're playing, and what are they not delivering for you?

I like the tactical positioning (Flanking, Cover), spells to modify the battlefield (fog cloud, stinking cloud), conditions...

Also, the system should feature mechanically different, customisable characters and a wide array of enemies (a monster manual, not just like 10 enemy types).

[momothefiddler]

If the computation doesn't get in the way of your fun, I'd actually recommend GURPS 4 for this (4 specifically not because I prefer it to other versions for this; just because that's all I know).

1-second rounds, hex grids, a comparatively large variety of maneuvers even before individual character options come into play, targeted shots... I personally have absolutely loved the depth of tactical combat, and it's something that's emerged in multiple games I've played, as opposed to D&D 3.5/4/PF, all of which in my experience boiled down to "maybe a little bit of positioning to start, but then stand where you are and hit the dude repeatedly, unless you have spells. (And if you have spells, suddenly you're looking at higher mana costs for larger areas, range penalties on sniping, etc)

Of course, this all comes with the overhead of playing GURPS, which you probably won't find worth it.

[Foxwarrior]

Having tried either GURPS 3 or 4, my experience of the battles in it was that they tended to last the same number of rounds as D&D battles, but because they're only 1 second per round you get to do a lot less moving, prepping dynamite, and that sort of thing, it ended up being all whirling blender, final destination. But then, in both RPGs, there's a lot of responsibility on the DM for setting up a good battle that takes advantage of the tactical decisions the game can support, so maybe it's just that we didn't do enough fights for the DM to find any sweet spots.