Review: LIVE TO TELL THE TALE Provides Some Great Meta Guidelines for D&D Parties
Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Player Characters is a new book from Keith Ammann. It is aimed at Dungeons & Dragons players, but with some work, could be applied to other tabletop games. Simon & Schuster were kind enough to send me a copy of the book and I’m not sure how I feel. If you’re interested, you can purchase it from Amazon or pretty much any other book retailer.
Live to Tell the Tale is a follow-up book to The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. That book was for DMs to get a better handle on using their monsters. Live to Tell the Tale is designed to help player characters optimize their combat prowess. It’s designed to help players understand the optimal combat role that their character fills such as the damage taker (Front Line), the damage dealer (Shock Attacker, Skirmisher, Marksman), the Spellslinger, and the Support.
Many players will already be familiar with these roles and will more or less be able to figure out which role their character fills. Ammann uses Live to Tell the Tale to help players not simply know what their role is, but how to fulfill it. This includes suggestions on which Abilities to focus on, Feats to choose, and more. He even walks you through some scenarios to show you how the combat roles can be used to make even a deadly encounter seem easy. This is actually really cool and useful.
So, why am I torn about my feelings for Live to Tell the Tale? Well, this is very meta. It’s telling players how to play their characters. Of course, Ammann always goes back to saying, play your character what makes sense for the character and thus everything in here is written more of guidelines. Some players will love this and others won’t simply because of how meta this is. This is not a tool for everyone. The other catch is that in order to really utilize the information in Live to Tell the Tale, the entire party needs to read through it to understand each of their roles. If only one or two people read the book, there’s a lot of room for them to not be able to do anything they try doing because their teammates do something that doesn’t fit in their role.
Yes, this book is meta. Yes, there’s a lot of helpful information available in it and it’s good information and good ideas. The guidelines are great. However, this is not a book for every D&D group or D&D fan.
