One of the things I’m getting tired of in miniatures gaming is what I call “the clump.” I feel like I don’t even have to explain this thing, because anyone who has been playing tabletop role-playing games for more than two years will instinctively know what it is. You can see it in your mind, right? The Otyugh advances, the Dwarf fighter and the paladin step up to meet it, and the spot where they meet becomes the focal point for the next forty minutes of play. A second Otyugh shuffles out of the trench and joins the fight. The thief sneaks around the melee and attacks one Otyugh from behind. The cleric joins the fight too. The magic-user is the only one who remains fifteen feet behind. So you have six miniatures clumped together, and that is dreadfully static. Nothing will move until both monsters are slain… or until the party decides to flee.
To combat and prevent “the clump,” I tried several methods over the years. Most of them didn’t work or backfired. Here is a quick overview of those failures.
Having the characters “appear” in different locations in a big enough cave or room works pretty well, especially if the monsters are equally scattered — but sooner or later you still end up with two or three mini-clumps forming around the Dwarf, the paladin and whoever rushes in to protect the magic-user. So you broke off that tumor in three smaller parts, but the cancer remains.
I once ran a short campaign where I didn’t allow any fighters in the party. It was a monk, a thief, a druid and a sort of sorceress-alchemist. But it didn’t work. The monk became the de facto tank, and they just hired more henchmen. We ended up with the clump again, but an even more tedious clump, because I, the DM, had to roll dice for the monsters and the NPCs.
Putting the characters on moving pieces of terrain can work. Like small islands of shattered rock floating around in some pocket dimension; each PC is on a different island with a different monster to fight — or flying monsters who can go from one island to the next in two rounds. But you can only ever use this trick once or twice with each group of players before it gets old.
So yes, my quest failed.
But there are tons of non-fantasy role-playing games to choose from. Games where mass melee is pointless, redundant, or just too deadly to even consider. Investigators in Call of Cthulhu want to stay at a distance, because it would be insane to engage a Formless Spawn of Tsathoggua in melee. Agents in the James Bond 007 role-playing game would rather shoot to kill rather than engage in hand-to-hand combat. And most characters in Cyberpunk prefer to snipe or hack their way to victory instead of fighting Wargs mano a mano.
Fantasy is built for melee. There is no way around it.
“The clump” is also present in 40K. Sure, there’s quite a lot of maneuvering and hiding behind pieces of crumbled buildings and firing gauss reapers and all, but once you charge or become a charge target, things get instantly bogged down, possibly until the end of the game: the overrun fight rule and the pile-in move make sure of that. A unit can fall back without triggering the dreaded opportunity attacks standard to D&D, but still, the clump is painful and static while it lasts.
Next I’m gonna run Gaslands, but as a role-playing game. Cars in post-apocalyptic arenas have to keep moving, right? That’s the whole point, isn’t it? But I cannot force my players to move around the arena and chase each other; they might park all of their cars in opposing corners of the arena with as much cover as possible, and patiently fire away until only one player remains. It wouldn’t be the clump, but still pretty static and, to be frank, boring.
So I guess I’m not as anti clump as I really am anti boredom.
It is here that our study of melee will take a little detour into the Land of Optimization.
Because in my experience, players aim for “optimal” rather than “crazy and fun.”
In 2024 I gave a Deck of Many Things to my AD&D party, and nobody drew a single card. Not one. “The odds are not good enough,” they said. One player told me that if it had been 75% good effects and 25% bad effects, he would have given it a shot.
This is why I’m not 100% sure about Gaslands. Expert optimizers will look at whatever arena I set up on the table, find the one angle or corner with the best cover, park it there, and wait it out. “Why move around? I’d just be exposing myself there.”
Optimizers shall optimize — that’s what they do. Optimizers won’t head towards White Plume Mountain with just a loincloth, a helmet, a pair of boots and a spear, like the guy in this classic Erol Otus back cover. That was the eighties. That time is long gone.
So there you have it. You could say that from here on out I’ll be aiming for movement in tabletop gaming. How do I keep things moving? Moving constantly? Moving in every direction?
It ain’t gonna be easy. I know.
Let’s move on.
Afterword (Totally Unrelated)
Blogging in the age of AI is weirdly pointless. You’re just giving away your time and energy to help train these machines that you won’t even be allowed to access come 2030 unless you pay for a subscribtion. And your work might also be stolen by regular folks, too.
Once in a while I come across a YouTube video that talks about some aspect of tabletop role-playing games, narrated by an AI, with AI images from beginning to end, and I go, “wait a minute, I think I remember those words; wasn’t this a blog post I read back in the day on Hill Cantons or Sword +1 or Roles, Rules & Rolls?” But I might be hallucinating, and I certainly do not have the time or energy to go back and reread five hundred blog posts just to see if I can find a couple paragraphs that happen to have been lifted straight from an old blog and reused as-is for someone’s AI video. That would be a full-time job.
And that’s what the AI companies are counting on: the sheer volume is just too overwhelming to be policed or monitored at all.
Years will go by and stuff like this will happen more and more often, because it’s inevitable. If you’re writing anything today or if you have ever written anything in the past, your are simply giving away free material for somebody else’s AI holofeed in 2040.
So yes, I’m going to write a few more posts on this blog and pretend it’s 2014 and have fun with it, and when I decide it’s no longer worth it I’ll just leave everything sitting here so that someone a few years down the line can paste it all into their preferred thingy and make their nice little slop.
Your move, AI bros.