Monster Teamwork!

How well do the creatures in this combat encounter work together?

1. No teamwork! The creatures barely even notice each other.
2. Awful teamwork! The creatures don't have any unified plan of attack and barely communicate.
3. Bad teamwork! The creatures have a poor plan, and/or poor communication.
4. Basic teamwork! The creatures have a solid idea of what they're doing and can work together.
5. Good teamwork! The creatures prioritize working as a group more than individual actions.
6. Great teamwork! The creatures have actually practiced working together before.
7. Excellent teamwork! The creatures intuitively know how best to assist their team members.
8. Flawless teamwork! The 'creatures' are just different bodies run by the same intelligence.

Amusingly enough, robots, drones, constructs, and undead are really common RPG enemies that are found in both category one and category eight. 

So, RPG player characters have a magical power that's very hard to work around: their players are all sitting around freely talking to each other. Essentially, anything one PC knows is effectively known by all PCs, unless the first PC wants to keep it secret or your GM is super strictly against metagaming. But NPC combat encounters have an even bigger power: they're all being driven by a single omnipotent intelligence a.k.a. the GM.

What this means is that both sides of a conflict can perform incredibly well coordinated maneuvers with impeccable consistency, despite one group being a handful of goblins with INT 3, and the other group being a bunch of level one PCs who've known each other for five minutes. Let's be real though, I love that. It's half the fun of the game!

If you're a GM looking to make your encounters stand out, however, one easy way is to change how they use teamwork. For example, have a bunch of conscripts or bandits might sit at category 3 on the above chart... but if they've got a big scary disgraced former knight leading them, that knight could push them up the scale to category 5. A group of mindless undead will act very differently to those exact same undead operating under the direct control of a master Lich.

You don't need to go to a lot of difficulty here. Just ask yourself something like "Would these kobolds/bandits have the tactical foresight to sacrifice warriors to lead the party into a trap"* every now & again when designing encounters. Keep a rough scale. Think about how one encounter might respond to the death of their captain by fleeing, but another might respond with berserk fury. 

And then once you've figured out some cool tactical maneuvers, TPK everyone with a dozen CR 1/8 kobolds.


* I'd say the bandits would NOT, but the kobolds would for SURE.

Party Leaders & Group Leaders

Let's say you've got a big gaming group. Everyone's talking over each-other all the time, debates take forever. Here's a real-quick rules-light solution.

• Whenever the party is reasonably safe, they can choose a Party Leader (PL).
• If the party can't decide what to do in-character, the PL is the deciding vote. 
• If the group can't decide on what to do out-of-character, the PL's player has the deciding vote. 

Choosing a PL should require an out-of-character vote from the group (ties broken by the GM), and can be expressed in-character as simply as "Hey [PC], you take point" or "I know how these bandits operate, follow my lead." The party does have to be reasonably safe before you can switch the party leader, but as long as that's the case you can swap whenever.

Ideally, you want your party leader to be the PC with the skill-set most relevant to the current challenge. In the real world, you'll also want the PL's player to have a basic understanding of the rules and be able to make sensible decisions. Switch your party leader often so every player that wants to can try out the role.

So why bother with this mechanic? Because I've been in plenty of session that have stalled out because nobody wants to take the responsibility of stepping on toes by saying 'we move to the next room.' I've sat through even more sessions where everybody thought they had the only solution and insisted that only their plans were used. If your group is bad at reaching a decision, then having them take turns to play tiebreaker is a pretty simple, primary school, talking-conch style solution just to make sure that you all get to actually play a game instead of being paralyzed by indecision.