Last night, the occasional D&D game I’m in on Thursdays (we’re supposed to be weekly, but we have an average of four sessions every three months) finally became the longest campaign I’ve ever been a part of as a player. At twenty-one sessions I’ve participated in out of a twenty-three total for the campaign, I’ve finally broken the record of twenty sessions I’ve been sitting at since 2016. Now, I’ve run a handful of campaigns that have broken past this number. I’ve routinely broken past fifty and even hit the triple-digits once. Every single campaign I’ve participated in as a player, though has fallen apart fairly quickly. One campaign made it to twenty sessions and naturally concluded (it was a limited run that just happened to hit twenty sessions) and then every single other one of them fell apart in the single digits save two that just faded away in the early teens. Most of them never made it past five. Any other multi-sessions games that ended naturally were all one-shots that ran long. This has been going on since my very first days playing Dungeons and Dragons in 2010 when I went from my third session of Dungeons and Dragons to being the GM because the person running the group didn’t have the time anymore and that has been the story pretty much ever since then. Almost all of my tabletop groups prior to 2020 were groups I joined as a player and then became the GM for since the GM couldn’t keep running and I stepped in as a temporary stopgap so we could keep meeting until, eventually, my role as the group’s GM became permanent.
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The Return to Overwatch
I’ve been taking a break from Overwatch for a while. I got to a point where my favorite teammate, my roommate, wasn’t playing very much, so I was mostly playing solo or with other friends. Unfortunately, most of the time, I got placed with people below my skill level or who weren’t trying to play well, and so I got trounced repeatedly. I’d often wind up with the most kills, the most damage-dealt, the most time on the objectives, and the most kills around the objective, four out of five of the measures of individual player achievement in Overwatch, all despite playing a tank character who is supposed to focus on keeping people alive. One or two out of the possible four (the fifth is healing and all the tanks I’m best with don’t do healing) is not a problem, but consistently getting all four is frustrating, especially when we wind up losing because I’m the only person contesting the objectives or trying to coordinate the team.
I’m no savant. I’m not even an amazing player. I’ve got a good grasp of team strategy, character dynamics, and how to figure out people. I have a few skills I’ve polished very well and I’ve got an excellent sense of timing and battle flow. As a shot-caller, I’m pretty good at figuring out where my team needs to be and what we need to be doing. As a tank, I’m good at being where I need to be. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before but with a different take-away, Overwatch is a team game. I can’t win the match on my own. I can do everything right and still lose. I can call every shot with perfection and lead every charge perfectly, but my strategies are doomed to fail if all the people who were behind me when I started peeled away to do who knows what on their, leaving me to get shredded by an enemy team that stuck together.
It can be incredibly frustrating to lose because my teammates either aren’t trying to win (“it’s just Quickplay, quit trying so hard” is a common refrain when I try to communicate with my team) or everyone is trying to play Call of Duty. I don’t might losing if the other team is just better than we are. It can be incredibly frustrating, just like any loss, but at least I know I lost because they were just better or smarter or faster than my team. Losing because my team is a pile of idiots who pick the worst possible characters or refuse to play healers or tanks doesn’t feel good at all.
A common response to this sort of behavior in matches is to just stop caring. Most of my friends don’t really care or can just shut it off when they started to get bummed by dumb Overwatch matches. They’ll lean into whatever dumb thing the rest of the team is doing and laugh as it inevitably collapses. I can enjoy that. Some of the most fun matches I’ve played have been when we did something dumb that would up working in the silliest way possible, or failing in a huge but hilarious way. The thing is, those matches aren’t super fulfilling to me. The matches I enjoy the most, that I get the most from, are the ones where we execute brilliantly timed plays, where the entire team operates in sync, where we manage to just barely scrape a win because we were slightly better or managed to combine our abilities perfectly. Those feel amazing and they’re the reason I play Overwatch.
I want those games because I feel like I’m learning something new or improving myself. I like forward progress and that’s difficult (if not impossible) to get when you can’t actually play at your current skill level. I don’t like re-treading the same ground again and again because I’m being held back.
I’m sure I’ve screwed up matches for other people. I’m not some poor victim of the twists of randomly assigned teammates, I’m also one of the perpetrators. I can get a little tilted (playing aggressively and unwisely because I’m angry) when I get frustrated. I’m good at keeping my cool and playing consistently, but I occasionally mess up horribly because I’ve misread the situation or made a terrible guess at what the enemy team was going to do. I get that most people aren’t doing it maliciously and I’d probably benefit from trying to help other people play well than lamenting that they play terribly, but there was little incentive for people to actually care during most matches or to try to be a team player beyond winning or losing the match (which people don’t always care about).
That might be different now. Recently, Overwatch added an “endorsements” feature. You can endorse allies for sportsmanship, shot calling, or being a good teammate. You can endorse enemies for sportsmanship. If you get endorsed frequently, you get rewards and a little ranking thing next to your name. It also shows what you get endorsed for by coloring each endorsement differently and showing the percentage via color around the endorsement level in your name. Now, players are rewarded for actually working as a team beyond a win or loss. You can also spot when people just get endorsed because people see no drawback to endorsing as many people as possible after a match. If they are heavily endorsed for sportsmanship and very rarely endorsed for anything else, there’s a really good chance their opponents are just auto-endorsing them at the end of matches. If their teammates like them, there should be a higher percentage of “teammate” or “shot calling” endorsements.
I’m cautiously optimistic (like always), so I’m willing to get back into the game. I’ll give constructive leadership and shot calling a try again. I’ll do my best to make my teams the best we can be, try to reward good teamwork with endorsements, and hope positive reinforcement is going to be enough to change my experience with the game. If I can get back to a year ago, when I just loved playing the game whenever I had the time, I’ll be ecstatic. If I can stop feeling frustrated every time I play, I’ll count this as a rousing success. The internet is aglow with praise for the endorsements feature, so maybe it really will mean a shift in the game’s culture.
Communication and Teamwork in Overwatch
Watching the Overwatch League has made me want to play the game more than ever. Watching teams pull off these amazingly well-coordinated plays makes me want to assemble my own team. Not in order to compete at even the amateur level, but to play with that level of communication and trust. That being said, the league is still rife with examples of people doing their own thing, including both times that it pays off and times that it does not. Single DPS players have, with minimal support from their teammates, either crippled or halted an entire enemy advance. In juxtaposition, tanks have recklessly charged and players of all kinds have wasted ultimate abilities that would have been more useful if they’d saved them for a minute or less later. Often, the reckless tank and wasted support ultimate ability have led to the team collapsing. Interestingly, half of the team collapses I’ve seen have turned into times when a single DPS found the right moment and help the enemy team off.
The best teams, though, are the most coordinated ones. New York Excelsior, Seoul Dynasty, and London Spitfire are all the most coordinated on average and they’re all the best teams in the league in a general sense. Having actually tried to build a 6-player team in Overwatch, I can definitely say that team coordination matters. To be fair, you don’t need to have six people in order to see that, it just makes it easier to see. I love playing with one of my roommates the most because we’ve played together long enough that our play styles complement each other, we trust each other to know what we’re doing, and we can anticipate each other’s needs and movements in a way the really streamlines communication. He also plays DPS (damage per second) characters and I play tanks, supports, and filler characters (swapping around to meet the team’s current needs rather than sticking to one character in particular). Comparing our play to me playing with only one of most of my other friends highlights just how important that almost unspoken communication is to our success as a team.
I’m hopeful that, if the 6 of us play together often enough, we’ll eventually figure out the communication stuff. I have a hard time verbalizing my thoughts in generic specifics because I’m so focused on what is going on in front of me, so my ability to call shots and direct the team is at its best when I can either get the words out properly or when my teammates are aware enough of what is happening in the battle as a whole to interpret what I’m trying to say correctly. It can be annoying, to have a shot-caller who has trouble saying the right names for characters and coming up with the right word while it is still relevant, but I’ve got the best battlefield awareness of the group right now so working on communication is out top priority. For now, I am grateful that my roommate is one of the six people and that I can count on him to interpret and then translate what I’m trying to say.
As much as I try to relax and have a good time when I’m with a large group that isn’t communicating, it is incredibly frustrating. As a tank, a lot of my ability to do anything effectively, aside from soaking up bullets, is contingent on having the rest of my team performing their duties and following the called shots. The other day, I kept telling everyone to group up with me since I was using the other team’s expectations against them, by setting up patterns that I’d subsequently break. It was working great except that most of my team wasn’t following me. I’d call them over to me, see them around me, start moving into position, and then they’d all be gone, getting cut down somewhere else because their tank is off trying to set up a flanking team-fight that would pick off the enemy sniper and supports before the enemy DPS could be brought to bear against us. We were so close to winning so many times that match and we had no good reason for losing, only that we were never all together and focused on figuring out how to circumvent the enemy traps and defenses. That was kind of the theme of the night, really. Knowing we should have won and being unable to say that we just got outplayed is frustrating to me because I’m trying to become a better player than I currently am and those kind of losses don’t do anyone any good.
It isn’t all of my teammate’s faults either. If I’d followed them in and stuck with the grind-y team-fights they kept running into, we might have won. We might have come out on top with enough ultimate abilities left to hold off the inevitable second wave when they re-spawned and pushed to retake the final point they were defending. I played a little more aggressively than I strictly needed to, winding up with all of the gold medals for enemy kills, enemy kills around the objective, enemy damage, and time spent on the objective(s). No tank should ever have all of those. A good tank can often wind up with gold medals in objective time and objective kills, but the DPS should always have the other two.
I’m going to focus on trying to be a better communicator when I’m playing with less experienced players and people who don’t know how to interpret my non-specific exclamations. That is something I can work to improve in every match, regardless of whether or not I’ve got a team skilled enough to help me improve as a tank. As long as I’m improving, I think I’ll be able to accept and number of wins or losses.
“Ich Bin Euer Schild:” How to Reinhardt in Overwatch
One of my favorite games to play these days is Overwatch. I don’t normally go for player-versus-player games since I dislike that toxicity that PVP environments usually generate, but Overwatch is just so much fun that I’m willing to deal with the toxicity when it comes up. I love those moments when a team comes together, communicates, and winds up kicking some serious ass because everyone is exactly where they need to be.
Unlike a lot of other online PVP games, Overwatch lets you change your character as often as you like, provided you return to your base to do so. That means that a good team can play fluidly, adapting to the changing demands of the match and picking characters to suit. In most games, this does not happen for one of two reasons. The most common reason is that people aren’t very interested in playing strategically and are either messing around, learning a new character, or unwilling to accept the fact that they are the one who needs to change (most commonly seen in players who are either snipers or regular DPS). The other reason, much less common, is that you’ve got a strategy that works and the other team isn’t adapting to it.
I had an amazing match that fell into the second category the other day. I, as I often do, played a Tank. Reinhardt, specifically. For those who do not know, Reinhardt wields a giant hammer, has a massive shield that his allies can fire through, and has an AoE stun as his ultimate ability. The main problem I usually run into when I play him is that I rarely have the support and DPS I need to make him a viable attack tank. The other problem is that I need my teammates to know what I’m going to do and to commit to doing it with me. People rarely use voice chat outside of ranked games unless you’re a part of a group and a lot of players will either ignore or make fun of people using the text chat to communicate. Not because its archaic or slow, but because trying to make plans shows you actually care about winning and the only people who care are the loners who try to carry the whole team by myself.
I still like to try, though. It is easy to ignore the typed replies, report the people who get abusive, and always worth it the time it works out. Like this time. I told everyone that I planned to march right through the first choke point, take out as many of the enemy tanks as I could, and then soften up the enemy DPS before I died so they could sweep in behind and clean up. After I got a DPS and a healer to back me up, I marched out the door and did exactly what I said. I was the only person to die on that push and we swept the enemy team right past the first capture point. It was everything I ever wanted as a tank.
Further on, as we escorted the payload through the map, I managed to stay in front of all of the enemy damage and one of the DPS characters on my team just danced through enemy lines as a high-mobility character, Genji, killing them as the rest of the team pressured them to stay facing us. Just when it looked like they were going to stall us, I managed to use my ultimate ability to stun four of them, three of which were killed by the Genji. Between my tanking on the payload, the Genji’s constant damage behind enemy lines, and the unwavering support and additional damage of the rest of the team behind my shield, we managed to push all the way to the end of the route in what was the fasted Overwatch match I’d ever played. I wish I’d recorded the whole thing so I could post it and show you all exactly what it was like.
I like this match, and the video I shared, because it highlights the power of a good team playing alongside a decently skilled Reinhardt. There are a lot of applications of Reinhardt’s ultimate, all of which look the same in initial execution, but all of which have different goals. There is the denial ultimate, which is supposed to either negate someone else’s ultimate or prevent the enemy team from killing allies. There is the straight attack ultimate, meant just to stun and hold a bunch of easily killed DPS characters while I kill them. There is the hold-the-point/payload ultimate that is supposed to chase enemies away from the point or punish them for sticking to it when they should have left.
Generally speaking, Reinhardt is one of the better team-player tanks, since his shield and high HP pool allow him to act as an excellent defender to any DPS or support characters that follow him into the fray. Alternatively, once the largest group of the enemy team is occupied, his massive hammer swings can steadily damage everyone in front of him rather than just one person. Flipping between shielding your allies and hammer swings is integral to any kind of group fight and there are no tanks do it better without using their ultimate abilities. There is an artistry, almost, to knowing when to change between defense and attack. I like to describe them as tipping points. A good Reinhardt can charge into a battle and, at the right moment, change a grinding fight into a route. A good Reinhardt can also turn what is starting to be a route into a grinding fight or a slow retreat.
One of the reasons Reinhardt gets a bad reputation and why DPS and support players don’t like to stick with a Reinhardt is that most Reinhardt players couldn’t see a tipping point if it hit them in the head with an over-sized rocket-powered hammer. They charge in or focus on attacking. Others just walk around with their shield up all the time and immediately hide as soon as it is gone or they stick to one spot like moving away is going to get them immediately killed. Neither one of these styles plays to Reinhardt’s strengths and both usually wind up getting the Reinhardt’s team killed. Reinhardt is never defensive or offensive, he is always both. He has an ability that shoots a slow projectile through everything, barriers and players both. This is his only ranged ability and most Reinhardt players couldn’t hit anyone with it to save their life.
A good Reinhardt can nail a fleeing foe with a Flamestrike. They can use a charge not just to pick off the most troublesome enemy, but also to scatter a group that’s threatening to overwhelm their team. They know when to keep the shield up or jump in front of the bullets and when to just wade into the fray, hammer swinging. They know when to use their ultimate for greatest effect, even if it doesn’t get any kills. They’re the team babysitter, protector, and the last line of defense in a route. They also know when to throw convention to the wind, swing around the back, and come charging in so they can take down the whole back line as the tanks turn and get shredded by the rest of their team. A good Reinhardt knows what the team needs from their primary tank and can deliver it with an extra side of pain for the enemy team.
There are any number of things I could say to help people learn how to play Reinhardt, but most of these things are best learned for yourself, by playing him. Trying him out as your next tank and keep in mind the dual nature of a good Reinhardt. Attacking and defending, each in their own time. Keep trying long enough and you’ll start to see exactly what those times are. Once you can see that, you’re 80% of the way there.
Tabletop Highlight: D&D 3.5 and Knights
One of my favorite classes to play in Dungeons and Dragons is the 3.5 edition’s Knight. This class is listed in the Player’s Handbook II and is probably the best class to use for the “Tank” role based on class abilities alone. Almost all of their abilities are geared toward grabbing enemy focus, surviving, or protecting their comrades. All of this comes at the cost of a lot of more the damage-oriented abilities or skills you might associate with fighter or barbarian tank builds. So often, a front-line tank fighter or barbarian’s skill set is focused around the idea of “if it is dead, it can’t hurt me or anyone else.” Yes, you can build a fighter’s AC (Armor Class: it determines how difficult it is to hurt you character with an attack) super high while still focusing on damage and you can get a Barbarian enough HP to tank a few disintegrate spells (which are as dangerous as the name implies) without healing, but Knights are focused on both of those things.
As one of the few classes with a d12 hit die (the die used to determine how many hit points the character gains each level), they can have almost as much HP as a barbarian before they start raging. Since their primary focus is staying alive and taking damage so other characters do not, putting the highest attribute score in Constitution is almost a requirement. The second-highest attribute score can work as well, but raising it with magic items as soon as possible is a must because a Knight can never have too many hit points. The alternative attribute for the highest attribute score is actually charisma. A lot of a Knight’s abilities are based on Charisma. Charisma can help a Knight challenge the boss to fight them and only them, grant them and their allies bonuses based on the Knight’s inspirational battle cries, and can help Knights come up with clever challenges to cause all enemies to charge them. Outside of battle, a Knight’s charisma can help them move through the social circles graced by royalty and nobility as they further their knightly cause.
As they progress through their levels, Knights enjoy a full Base Attack Bonus progression (one point per level) but, oddly, have only Will as a primary save. If you look through their abilities, you will find that Knights have abilities that can help them save allies who are being mind-controlled or mind-affected (made afraid, under the power of suggestion, etc), so having a high Will save means they are more likely to remain free long enough to save their companions. Other interesting abilities include being able to prevent enemies from easily moving past you (or using the common rogue trick of tumbling past the tank in order to attack the squishier characters behind them) by causing the space around them to be treated as rough terrain. This means that people cannot simply run past them or tumble past them thanks to the knight’s defensive capabilities. Other abilities include a boost to their AC as a result of using a shield and the ability to take part (and eventually all) of the damage dealt to an adjacent ally. If you’re protecting a spellcaster who gets shot by an arrow or stabbed by a rogue, you can opt to take some of that damage in order to mitigate what might have otherwise been a killing blow.
As far as combat goes, Knights get access to mounted combat feats, along with a lot of technical combat feats through a “bonus” feat system ever few levels. While a Knight may never do a lot of damage, compared to other martial classes, they can still dominate a battlefield riding about on a well-trained mount using a Lance in order to maximize their damage. They also have an ability called “Fighting Challenge” that gives them bonuses against a specific target they’ve challenged to a fight. The Fighting Challenge is a type of “Knight’s Challenge” which also includes things like the “Test of Mettle” which causes all enemies in earshot to focus on attacking you, the “Daunting Challenge” which causes weak enemies to flee in terror, and the “Bond of Loyalty” which allows a Knight to continue making will saves against mind-affecting spells or abilities until the Knight is free or out of Knight’s Challenges.
The most interesting use of the Knight’s Challenge, and what makes them the ultimate tank, is what they earn at 20th level: “Loyalty Beyond Death.” This allows a Knight to spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to literally continue moving after they’ve functionally died. At 20th level, a Knight will have over 200 hit points. A character typically dies once they pass -10 hit points. A 20th level Knight can spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to continue moving and acting once their hit points pass below 0 until their body is completely destroyed or they run out of Knight’s Challenges to use. This means they can still be healed back to the point of being alive or just sacrifice their live in one last glorious charge as they face down an ancient, all-powerful dragon or lich in order to buy a village or their allies time to flee.
There any number of other feats that can greatly benefit a Knight as well. Shieldmate lets you provide adjacent allies with an AC bonus based on the shield you use. Heavy Armor Specialization, a feat with dovetails in with a Knight’s ability to ignore movement penalties resulting from wearing Heavy armor, provides you with a permanent reduction to the damage you take as a result of wearing Heavy armor. The proficiency feat for Tower Shields also benefits a Knight because it increases the bonus provided by Shieldmate, increases your AC even more, and lets a Knight use their shield as protection from arrows or AoE (Area of Effect) attacks for anyone who isn’t tough enough to survive them. There is even a feat or a type of enhancement magic for armor and shields that lets your AC bonus from your armor and shield apply against certain magical attacks that normally just need to make contact with a character, rather than break through their armor. With the right builds, a Knight can because an almost unstoppable tanking machine.
I wouldn’t recommend using a Knight as the primary front-line combatant because their damage output is lower than most other martial characters, so they’re not always great picks for 4-person groups, but they work amazingly in larger groups, even if there are no other front-line martial characters. Especially if there are no other front-line martial characters. Next time you need a tank and don’t want to play the lawful good paladin, play a night! They can be lawful anything and their emphasis is more on their knightly oaths than obeying the rules of the land.