Naturally, I end up in conflict with many other players about what is considered good encounter design and enemy usage, especially when it comes to players using classes that innately lack versatility in dealing with situations. The most notable of these is the Fighter.
The premise of the fighter class is simple: you are a character who excels at physical combat in some manner and who can theoretically reach a level of combat effectiveness that rivals or exceeds that of magic-users simply by having plenty of resources to dedicate to martial arts. I've seen many people decide to play a fighter because they want to prove that magic isn't the end-all be-all for combat utility, or simply because they want to emulate heroes like Conan or Theseus who take on crazy monsters with nothing but a sword and sheer guts. However, the harsh reality of the complex and rapidly evolving combat of Pathfinder means that Fighters aren't often capable of living up to their expectations.
Most recently, I was playing a dungeon crawl with a large party, one of who was a foul-mouthed falchion-packing 12th-level Orc Fighter named Krangoth. Krangoth wasn't the smartest character or even the most sensible; his specialty was dealing obscene damage using a combination of power attack and a 15-20 crit range on his blade. Thanks to his high base attack bonus and immense strength score, Krangoth could very easily hit any monster that he got close to, and was doing a respectable average of 48 or so damage per attack. On paper, it seemed like a character that could feasibly make their way through an appropriately tough dungeon. However, I very quickly learned how fragile this seemingly burly Krangoth was.
All that the monsters need to do to render Krangoth helpless was stay outside of his range, utilizing flight or climbing or even something as simple as a mud puddle or Obscuring Mist to stop him from effectively getting near them. Even when he could utilize his melee prowess, maneuvers like tripping, grappling, or bull rushing could quickly drop his damage numbers by means of negating his ability to full attack (or in the case of grappling, attack at all) with that immensely destructive sword of his. His HP was through the roof, but he was always a single bad roll away from being completely crippled by a spell or trap. What was designed to be an unbreakable juggernaut who destroys everything in his way ended up being a glass cannon who could be rendered helpless by any monster who used common-sense tactics.
While the fighter's copious number of bonus feats indicates that it should be capable of utilizing a vast arsenal of weapons and hence adapting to any situation, the design philosophy for many combat feats prevents such a build from being feasible. Being even passable at using a bow, a shield, or a second weapon requires at least two or three feats per selection, and being useful with a fighting technique requires even more investment in that style. Any Pathfinder Society players who have picked up the Valeros pregen may have noticed how haphazardly his feats are allocated, preventing him from making a sizable contribution to any sort of encounter. Fighters are forced to specialize in order to keep up with the creatures they are going up against, and these creatures often have quite a bit of leeway to negate whatever the Fighter is trying to do. Just looking at the statblock for a succubus or dragon displays just how many ways the average monster can do this.
And if a bad guy has the capacity to render a hero irrelevant, there is no logical reason as to why he shouldn't do just that. Something that many GMs end up forgetting is that monsters can be just as clever as the heroes, and that sort of cleverness can really help to engage players in a campaign. When spears were the paragons of warfare, the Macedonians won by utilizing bigger ones. When Britain couldn't overpower the Spanish Armada, the won by sabotaging it. When the mustard gas came into the trenches, you can be that gas masks emerged soon after. Likewise, the evil overlord should quickly recognize that throwing wave after wave of minions at the heroes is doing jack squat to stop them, and so turn to different tactics.
The benefits of strategic enemies in a setting are monumental. It gives players a sense of danger, because enemies are smart enough to cover their bases and exploit gaps in the heroes' plans. It gives players a sense of importance because now the tactics they are using have consequences, and the rest of the villains are shaping their agendas to guard against what took down their buddy. Finally, tactical bad guys give the player a sense of intrigue, because intelligent opposition forces the players to respect the NPCs as thinking, functioning entities whose capacity for ingenuity rivals their own. Overall, battle strategy turns a ho-hum encounter with ravenous Gnolls into a tense engagement that forces players to stay on their feet. If the baddies change up tactics, exploit the weaknesses of the players, and coordinate their engagements so as to maximize their chance of victory, the PCs will be forced to do the same, in the process delving into a dimension of gameplay they may not even have considered.
An example comes from my most recent session, in which the players were able to beat a rapacious barbarian horde by taking cover behind fortifications and employing elemental attacks that could get around the barbarians' damage reduction. Rather than having the clan leader send another horde to the same fate, I decided that the shaman commander would instead trap the heroes inside the fortress by laying siege to it, thus forcing them to engage her in the open before she called in more troops. On top of this, she gave potions of Resist Energy to her lieutenants, preventing the PCs from fire-balling or acid-globing their way out. This is the kind of thinking that a military commander does in real life, and it should be the sort of tactical aptitude that your villains display in-game.
The issue with classes like Fighters is that they are counter-intuitive to this sort of intelligence and adaptability, pigeonholing the character into one specific fighting style that is very difficult to change and which defines their entire character. This, in turn, makes things unpleasant for a Fighter who finds himself up against bad guys who quickly pick up on the fact that he's only truly dangerous in melee, and so switch to sniping tactics to take him down while minimizing casualties. A cleric or wizard can simply change their spells prepared, while a sorcerer or bard comes with enough spells and abilities that they have at least one trick up their sleeve in case things go south. A Fighter, meanwhile, is stuck, forced to use a fighting style that has become decreasingly useful as the game moves along. As a result, GMs are forced to design encounters that accommodate the Fighter's lack of tenacity (which results in a lot of samey-feeling games) or throw the character up against opponents that completely outplay them.
So, how does one reconcile this problem of unreliability while still keeping players alert with complex encounters? The answer lies in rethinking what a class should be capable of doing. When somebody builds a specialist, they should not be prevented from engaging in any other scenario. Instead, they should be able to participate to an adequate degree in any situation, truly excelling in a few specific ones that they optimized for. Classes like the alchemist and the inquisitor do a fantastic job of this, utilizing a large pool of resources that are universally handy but still offering options that enable them to be awesome in specific departments. The martial classes presented in Dreamscarred Press' Path of War books alleviate many of the troubles of playing a martial character, giving them a fair amount of power while also offering abilities that are useful not only in combat, but in exploration, stealth, and diplomacy as well. Some of the additional rulebooks put out by Paizo are helping to mitigate this issue, with archetypes like the Mutagen Warrior giving the maligned class some new options that enable it to work even against smart or non-combative foes. Heck, giving your Fighter some more skills or some feat-shifting mechanics might even be enough to bring him up to snuff.
Overall, I encourage GMs to get more dangerously inventive with their villains, and to perhaps encourage players to take more versatile classes than the Fighter for the sake of making the game interesting for everyone. The improvements that party balancing as well as enemy strategy can bring to a game are well worth the consideration involved.
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