This article was originally written in 2000-01. It has never been published. It is a companion piece to Monstrous Tactics: Mimics.

The mimic has long been the bane of adventurers. Their penchant for using their natural shapechanging abilities to disguise themselves as desirable objects – most commonly, treasure chests – often serves as the lure which has led many to their doom. Tough, strong, tenacious, and crafty, the best way to beat a mimic is to simply keep your distance.

HELPFUL TIPS

• Find the mimic before it finds you
• Keep your distance
• Use ranged attacks to wear it down
• Don’t be afraid to bargain

PREPARATION

GRAPPLE: Mimics are coated in a thick, poweful adhesive which they will use to every possible advantage. If they succeed in hitting you with one of their pseudopods, you’ll quickly find yourself stuck fast in a slimy grapple. So if you know you’re entering the lair of a mage who loved his mimics, you’d better be prepared for grappling: This means spells with casting times less than 1 action, light weapons, and so forth. The Escape Artist skill is particularly invaluable.

SPELLS: Freedom of movement will help you free anyone who gets caught by the mimic. You’re also going to want to prep ranged attacks, while avoiding attack spells which require you to touch the mimic – shocking grasp becomes a serious liability when you’re dealing with the fantasy equivalent of a tar baby.

EQUIPMENT: Strong alcohol breaks down the mimic’s adhesive, so you might want to bring a couple of bottles along. If you don’t end up using them, you can always use them for the victory celebration afterwards, after all.

SKILLS: The best way to defeat a mimic is to detect their presence before they can surprise you. This means you’re going to need sharp eyes, and a high Spot skill.

TACTICS

USE THE ROGUE, LUC: As noted above, your best bet against a mimic is early detection with your Spot skill. Not only is this a class skill of the rogue, but the mimic’s preference for assuming the shape of a treasure chest makes it likely that you’ll be sending the rogue in to check for traps, anyway. The rest of the party should consider the rogue to be their first line of defense against a mimic – and the rogue himself should always make sure to run Spot checks on suspicious objects before closing in to detect the traps: It does you no good to know that the chest is really a mimic, if the mimic is already sitting three inches in front of your face.

BARGAIN: Mimics are more intelligent than many adventurers give them credit for, and are actually able to speak Common. If things are going badly – or if you just aren’t interested in facing off against a mimic at the moment – don’t be afraid to bargain with them. Most mimics are more than willing to let you walk away with your lives… in return for some food or treasure, of course.

KEEP YOUR DISTANCE: Mimics are at their most dangerous when they have you within reach – at a distance, their threat is negligible. Another factor to your advantage is the mimic’s relatively slow speed (about one third that of a human). Spread out, keep your distance, try to avoid or escape tight quarters, and pepper the mimic with ranged attacks.

AVOID SWORDS: The mimic is coated in a strong adhesive – if you hit it, your weapon will most likely become stuck fast. Instead, as has been said, you should keep your distance – peppering it with disposable range weapons (such as arrows) and spells. (Note that the adhesive will dissolve once the mimic is dead – allowing you to retrieve your ranged armament without any problems.)

This article was originally written in 2000-01. It has never been published.

The most basic of all mimic encounters (the mimic disguised as a treasure chest) is the ultimate moral message: Don’t be greedy. Used properly, though, mimics can be a constant and pervasive threat – and a DM who knows how to use them well will always have his players just a little bit unsure of whether or not what they see is truly what they see.

ORGANIZATION

Mimics were supposedly created by a wizard long ago with the sole purpose of guarding treasure. Although their creator is long dead, they live on – a solitary species, whose natural predilection for things precious have led them into many unusual circumstances. Mimics can be found anywhere and everywhere, as anything – literally.

PREPARATION

BASICS: A mimic’s basic tactics are simple enough: Assume a shape which will attract attention, wait for their target to draw near, ensnare them with adhesive pseudopods, and then pummel them to death. The most common shape for them to assume when adventurers are in the area is that of a treasure chest – coming to life when someone attempts to open them. Mimics are at a severe disadvantage in ranged combat, so they will typically prefer to lair in enclosed spaces.

GUARDS: Mimics were created to guard treasure, and many of them continue to fulfill that role even today. Mimics can be found watching over the lich’s foul tomes of magic (disguised as a book or even an entire bookshelf), the king’s treasure (as one chest among many), or the weapon’s of an orc tribe (as a spear, perhaps). Mimics typically fall into this line of work as an effective way of earning “room and board”. Other mimics have been known to let their protective desires become covetous – amassing their own hordes, which they guard preciously s extensions of their own personality.

THE THREAT WITHIN: Once your PCs are familiar with mimics, you can begin throwing some curves at them. One of the simplest is a dislocation of the danger: Instead of having the mimic imitate the form of a chest, have the mimic place itself inside the chest – disguised as some ordinary object, or merely lying in wait for the first unfortunate to open their lair. Some of these chests have been known to have false bottoms – allowing the mimic to enter and leave the chest without disturbing the surrounding environs.

FALSE LURES: PCs are who see a treasure chest sitting unguarded in the middle of an empty room are instantly suspicious. Mimics, however, are aware that the unusually easy access to the wealth they promise sets many on their guard. Some mimics have taken to setting up false lures to set their prey at easy. For example, setting out actual chests in the middle of empty rooms – so that they are, again, merely one among many.

THE UNEXPECTED THREAT: While some mimics attempt to make their unusual appearance in plain sight merely seem like one unusual occurrence among many, other mimics choose to hide in plain sight without arousing suspicion: For example, it is relatively easy for a mimic to assume the form of the walls or floor. Let the PCs enter a small room, and then have the floor come to life beneath their feet!

NATURAL WONDER: Because they prefer enclosed spaces, mimics are typically found underground. However, some mimics have learned to enjoy the outdoors. Some go to the forests and disguise themselves as trees (waiting for prey to pass beneath their boughs before ensnaring them). Others will slip into farmer’s fields, disguise themselves as part of the crop, and wait to trap the farmer as he passes near them.

IT’S HUGE!: It is easy to forget that larger mimics exist. If the PCs can be surprised by a treasure chest coming to life, imagine their horror when the fifteen foot tall golden idol comes to life and flows towards them!

TACTICS

Mimics have a limited tactical repertoire – with their primary advantages as combatants coming in the preparation they put into their attack.

LURE THEM IN: The mimic’s primary tactic is to wait for someone or something to draw near, and then come to life – ensnaring them in their pseudopods. Mimics will attempt to time their assault so that they can trap as many of their foes as possible.

BARGAIN: If things are going badly for the mimic, it will not hesitate to bargain – often doing so while it can still maintain the appearance of superiority. If the bargaining fails it will attempt to escape.

NEXT: vs. the Mimic

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 11A: Into the Caverns of the Ooze Lord

At the same moment, two of the greenish, ooze-like creatures dropped from the ceiling of the chamber and landed in front of the passage. They were not as large as the creature they had just defeated, but between the two of them the entire width and much of the height of the tunnel was filled.

In some design circles, there is a tremendous amount of focus and energy expended on making encounters mechanically interesting and/or mechanically novel. While I generally agree that a game (and thus encounters) should be both mechanically interesting and varied, I also think that there’s currently way too much emphasis being placed on this.

In my experience, you don’t need special snowflake mechanics in order to have memorable encounters. Of course, this doesn’t mean that mechanical interest isn’t important. Those who go to the other extreme and act as if mechanical design, mechanical effects, and mechanical interaction aren’t significant in the design and experience of combat encounters (and other gameplay elements) are blinding themselves and needlessly crippling their toolkit as a GM.

NOVELTY STAT BLOCKS

There are several ways to generate mechanical interest. For the moment, let’s limit our discussion to mechanical novelty in stat blocks – i.e., studding the stat blocks of your adversaries with unique abilities.

This is a particular area where it seems to have become fashionable to expend way too much effort on creating these unique, special snowflake stat blocks in the name of creating “memorable” encounters. There are 4^th Edition modules, for example, where seemingly every single encounter features an orc with a different suite of special abilities.

Not only do I think this is unnecessary, I think it can actually backfire: One of the things which creates mechanical interest is mastering a mechanical interface and then learning how to interact with it. Chess doesn’t become more interesting if you only play it once and then throw it away to play a different game; it becomes less interesting because you never learn its tactical and strategic depths. Similarly, when every single orc is a special snowflake with a package of 2-3 unique abilities that aren’t shared by any other orc, you never get the satisfaction of learning about what an orc can do and then applying that knowledge.

A constant, never-ending stream of novelty doesn’t make for a richer experience. It flattens the experience.

This is why video games generally feature a suite of adversaries who each possess a unique set of traits, and over the course of the game you learn how to defeat those adversaries and become better and better at doing so. That mastery is a source of interest and a source of pleasure.

(Of course, conversely, most video games will also feature bosses or other encounters that feature special mechanics or unique abilities. I’m not saying you should never have something a little special; I’m just saying that when everything is “special”, nothing is.)

My general approach to stat blocks is basically the exact opposite of this novelty-driven excess: Not only do I get a lot of mileage out of standard goblin stat blocks, I’ll also frequently grab a goblin stat block and use it to model stuff that isn’t even a goblin.

The other big benefit, of course, is that this is so much easier. So there’s also an aspect of smart prep here: Is all the effort you’re expending to make every single stat block unique really paying off commensurately in actual play? For a multitude of reasons, I don’t think so.

SYMBIOTIC TACTICS

The other two goblins passed into the slime creatures and… stopped there. Their swords lashed out from within the protective coating of the slime, further harrying Agnarr.

Perhaps the primary reason I don’t think so, is that there are so many ways of creating novelty (including mechanical novelty) in encounters without slaving over your stat blocks. One way of achieving this is through the use of symbiotic tactics.

Basically, symbiotic tactics are what happens when you build an encounter with two different creatures and, in their combination, get something unique that neither has in isolation. The current sessions includes an extreme example of that in the form of the ooze-possessed goblins who can fight from inside the green slimes (and are, thus, shielded from harm).

Symbiotic tactics, however, don’t need to always be so extreme in order to be effective in shaking things up. A particularly common form of symbiotic tactics, for example, are mounted opponents: Wolf-riding goblins are a distinctly different encounter than either goblins by themselves or wolves by themselves.

Symbiotic tactics also often appear in other media. For example—

—the fastball special from X-Men comics.

Unfortunately, to truly enjoy symbiotic tactics it’s not enough to simply design an encounter with multiple creature types. If you design an encounter with ogres and dragons and then the ogres simply fight separately from each other, it’s not necessarily a bad encounter, but it’s not employing symbiotic tactics. In order to have symbiotic tactics the goblins have to walk into the slime creatures.

(So to speak.)

Like many GMing skills, this is something that you can practice. Grab your favorite bestiaries, flip them open to two random pages, and then think about how those two creatures could cooperate to do something neither could do on their own.

Some actual examples I just generated:

• Dyrads + Ogres. A dryad is typically limited by their tree dependency, but this dryad is worshipped by a cult of ogres who carry their tree in a holy receptacle. The dryad is thus more mobile than usual, and will entrap opponents on the edge of their at will entangle ability so that the ogres can stand safely 10 feet away and use their reach to pound on them.
• Ankheg + Homunculus. An ankheg’s homunculus will fly above the surface, acting as a spotter for ankheg’s moving undetectably below the surface of the earth. (Yes, this does beg the question of how an ankheg ends up with a homunculus. Probably an interesting story there.)
• Harpy + Bebilith. The harpy uses their captivating song to keep victims passive while the bebilith snares them in their web.

What you end up may or may not be an encounter which even makes any sense. The point here isn’t necessarily to generate usable ideas. You’re flexing a muscle, and developing your sense of how creatures with disparate abilities can work together in interesting and creative ways.

In the process, you may start finding familiar themes: For example, after the three above I generated a Red Slaad + Ettercap. That can be another “stun ‘em, then web ‘em” combination like the Harpy + Bebilith.

Those types of discoveries are useful because you’ll begin building up a toolkit of such common tactical combinations that you can improvise with during play. But for the purposes of the exercise, try to pushing past the repeats and finding something unique. For example, the ettercaps might use their webs to stick the red salads to the ceiling. When the PCs enter the cavern, the ettercaps slice their webs and the red salads drop down all around them in an unexpected ambush.

Similarly, remember that you’re not necessarily trying to get their mechanical abilities to interact with each other in a purely mechanical way. It’s OK if that gives you an interesting idea, but it’s also limiting. Think outside the mechanical box and look at how these creatures might actually interact with each other. If that takes you back towards the mechanics, great! If it doesn’t, also great!

The final note I’ll make here is that this is not something I typically spend a lot of time (or any time) prepping before play. When you’re first exploring symbiotic tactics, it may be something that you do want or need to include your prep notes. But as you gain experience (as you exercise the muscle), you’ll likely find that you can dynamically figure out how different creatures can interact with and mutually benefit each other on the battlefield during actual play. You’ll be able to just focus on designing general situations (“there are ooze-possessed goblins and slime creatures in this area”) and then discover the rest of it during play. (Which will also have the benefit of allowing your encounters to dynamically respond to the actions of your PCs without losing depth or interest.)

In New Angeles the players each take on the role of a hypercorp in a cyberpunk megalopolis that’s fraying at the edges due to the social and economic crises created by the introduction of android labor. You play cooperatively to face the emerging crises of the city, trying to prevent the city from descending into enough chaos that the federal government moves in and shuts down the party. On the other hand, each player also has a secret rival and you need to ruthlessly exploit the city in order to earn more capital than your corporate rival.

Hypothetically, this tension between collective good and personal need will create dynamic, high-stakes gameplay.

Spoilers: It doesn’t.

CHOICE vs. CALCULATION

New Angeles should be exactly the type of game I love. The basic dynamic (collectively dealing with crises while seeking personal advantage for the victory condition) is shared with Republic of Rome, for example, which is one of my personal favorites.

The fundamental problem which cripples the game is that the crises faced all boil down to simplistic calculations instead of meaningful choices. At any given time, there are two problems faced by the hypercorps:

• A demand which must be met by producing X amount of five different resources. If the demand isn’t met, threat is generated.
• An upcoming event which will generate threat unless a specific type of problem is dealt with (Orgcrime, Human First activists, outages, unrest, illness).

Ideally there would be a meaningful choice between these two problems. This would create a space for legitimate negotiation (by arguing that Problem A is more important than Problem B, and therefore your action to deal with Problem A should be supported instead of the other guy’s proposal to deal with Problem B). Except this doesn’t happen, because the threat gained from failing to meet demand is virtually always higher than the potential threat gained from the upcoming event: Thus, rather than a choice, you have a calculation. If the group is forced to choose between meeting demand or dealing with the problem highlighted by the upcoming event, the calculation is always to meet demand.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if you still had legitimate choices to make in how you meet the demand. The combination of board state, the limited number of actions you can take, and the specific combination of resources you need to generate in order to meet the current demand means that nine times out of ten there is one clear path to meeting the demand.

What you’re left with is a game that basically plays itself: There is always a clear set of specific actions that need to be taken, with little or no spare room for doing anything other than those actions.

Although the game features a complex cluster of scoring mechanics, the fact that the game plays itself boils the result down to random number generators: You’re hoping that you randomly draw the scoring abilities that match the randomly generated demand and board state.

The game could be potentially bailed out here if you had the ability to meaningfully cut deals based on personal greed: “Screw the city, let’s get together and make some profit!” But two things conspire to limit this dynamic. First, in any given interaction the scoring is uni-dimensional; you generally aren’t presented with and can’t create situations where you’ve got a pool of points and can divvy them out. Second, the overwhelming randomness of the game prevents meaningful long-term deal-swapping. (You can’t say, “I do X now and then you do Y later.” because there’s generally no specific “later” that will reliably create a desirable outcome.)

The other thing that could potentially save the game would be some degree of uncertainty about what the city actually needs, allowing for legitimate arguments that X would be a better preparatory action than Y. But each time you resolve the current demand, all of your resources are reset to a clean slate before dealing with the next demand, so preparatory action is largely impossible.

RUNAWAY LEADER

The other thing which cripples New Angeles is the runaway leaders.

The designers clearly think they’ve eliminated the runaway leader problem because there can be no leader! Each individual player has a rival, and you only care what your specific rival’s score is!

… except they’ve deceived themselves. What often holds a runaway leader in check in games like this is that everyone gangs up on them and pulls them back to the pack. That doesn’t happen in New Angeles specifically because only one person cares about the runaway leader: If your rival pulls out a big lead on you, you’re basically screwed and nobody else cares.

A related problem revolves around the Deal. The Deal is the central gameplay mechanic of the game: The current player offers an action card and then, through a bidding process, one other player has the option of offering a different action card. The other players (those who aren’t offering one of the two action cards), then bid to determine which action card will be resolved (which will also give the winner a bonus in the form of an asset which offers some special ability).

On the surface, the Deal seems very clever and immersive, supposedly creating high-stakes negotiations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work. In addition to the fact that the game plays itself (largely defanging the Deal in 90% of the turns you’ll take), even when you do have a turn with a meaningful Deal you’re faced with a more fundamental problem: The entire action economy runs through the Deal. If you can’t take actions, you can’t gain tradable resources. If you can’t gain resources, you have nothing to trade to convince other people to let you take actions.

AND ALSO A KINGMAKER PROBLEM

Lots of games featuring a point track suffer from a kingmaker problem late in the game (where someone who knows they’re losing is confronted with choices which basically determine which of the other players will win the game). New Angeles raises this to a whole new level because players are allowed to directly trade their personal points to another player at any time.

At the end of this 3-5 hour long game, people will have generally scored somewhere between 30 and 50 points. The margins of victory, however, will usually be in the single digits.

If you play rationally, therefore, everything you’ve done up to this point is rendered almost entirely meaningless in a final furious round of horse-trading to determine the actual winners.

It’s also equally likely that a runaway leader will have enough spare points to arbitrarily choose winners and losers. Or, conversely, a player who knows they can’t possibly win will have a pool of, say, 30 points that they can now arbitrarily dole out to all of the other players.

THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE HELPED

In order for meaningful choice to exist, you need to have two (or more) objectives that are put into conflict with each other.

New Angeles lacks that conflict. It therefore lacks true choices. And it therefore lacks the ability to negotiate and debate between those choices. Even if the mechanical structures it provides for competitive negotiation were flawless (and they aren’t), they would be rendered meaningless because, by and large, there’s nothing to negotiate.

It may be easiest to understand this by looking at some ways in which New Angeles could have avoided this problem.

Persistent/Escalating Demand. As described above, the fundamental component of gameplay is generating X resources to meet Y demand. You’ll do this three times over the course of the game, wiping out all of the resources you’ve generated each time.

If you didn’t wipe out all the resources you generated, however, you could meaningfully argue for long-term gains (“we can produce an excess now, so that we’ve got a more comfortable buffer for next time”) against solutions to your immediate problems. This would also inherently create an incomplete information problem (whereby calculations are turned into choices because you have to make the decision before having enough information to make a reliable calculation) because of the uncertainty surrounding future demand.

The game could have done this in two different ways: First, allowing you to keep your surplus after meeting demand. Second, using a set of escalating demand cards (so that you’d keep all your resources, but Stage II demand cards would demand even more production from you).

More Secondary Production. You generally generate resources by exploiting different districts of the city. Although some of these districts generate a primary and secondary resources, most only generate a single resource type. If there was more secondary production, there could be legitimate debate not about the primary production, but about which non-essential secondary production would be chosen.

This would work even better if you had secondary production that generated something other than resources.

Multiple Paths to Victory. Victory in New Angeles boils down to a single metric: Having more points. This makes it incredibly difficult for the game to escape the crippling flaw of boiling down to calculation instead of choice, because ultimately all actions are only meaningful insofar as they either directly or indirectly generate points.

By contrast, consider the aforementioned Republic of Rome (which features a very similar gameplay dynamic to New Angeles): In Republic of Rome you win by becoming Consul for Life. But you can do so through money, influence, military revolt, and/or manipulating other players’ vote totals using a variety of mechanics (including assassinations, concessions, and military assignments). Each of those is a different resource, which creates the incomparable comparisons that result in meaningful negotiation and deal-making.

Varied Costs for Actions. Most of the action cards in the game do X while having a cost Y. (You have to destroy a beneficial Prisec unit in order to remove two enemy units. Or you break up a strike, but at the cost of provoking Human First protests.) The game would benefit enormously from having the same outcome X available with a significant variety of costs, which would allow two players to offer the same necessary action while arguing for different costs. (“I think we should violently break up this strike at the cost of dealing with Human First protests tomorrow.” vs. “I think we should break up the strike by sacrificing a Prisec unit.” vs. “I think we should just move the strike to a different location.” vs. “I think we should use my Orgcrime contacts to roust the strikers.” vs. “I think we could patiently negotiate with the strikers and resolve their problems, at the cost of 2 production credits or a group sacrifice of 10 personal capital.” and so forth.) Unfortunately, the game generally doesn’t offer these options (more generally favoring a “this card lets you get rid of a little bit of problem X with a no/minimal cost and this other card lets you get rid of a lot of it at a higher cost”). If it did, you would again have the opportunity to debate legitimate incomparables: We all know that we need to get rid of the Strike token in this district, but what price are we willing to pay to do it?

CONCLUSION

Unfortunately, none of the things which would improve New Angeles are quick or easy fixes. It thus comes tantalizingly close to being a really compelling and interesting game, but is instead limited to mediocrity. A mediocrity which is compounded by its rather long playing time (3-5 hours in actual practice).

It probably plays better if your group is really bad at co-op games and incapable of performing the calculations. So it’s got that going for it, I guess.

But for me and mine, this game has been dumped onto eBay and won’t be returning to our table again.