The Control Game

There is a kind of player who never throws the killing blow and wins anyway.

Watch one work a dungeon room and it doesn’t look like a fight at all. A dragon turns, slowly, and breathes fire — not on the player, but on the drake standing next to it. A pack of lizardmen that should have swarmed a single adventurer is instead tearing itself apart in the middle of the floor. Off to the side, almost bored, stands a figure with a lute in one hand and a calm expression, occasionally plucking a string. By the time the dust settles there is one monster left alive, badly hurt, and it dies to a bored swing or a tamed beast, and the player walks in and loots six corpses they barely touched.

That is the control game. This essay is about the archetype that doesn’t win by out-damaging the room — it wins by out-controlling it.

It is written in the spirit of the old Stratics tamer and bard guides and the UO-forum build threads that taught a generation how to provoke a balron onto its friends. Follow the links into our bard and tamer profession pages, and the taming-and-pets and combat (advanced) guides, for the hard mechanics. What follows is the why.

A different bet

Every template in Ultima Online is a bet about how you want to solve problems.

The dexxer bets on out-lasting the problem — stand in front of it, swing, bandage, repeat, and win because your hit points and your damage outlast its hit points and its damage. It is a beautiful, honest bet, and most of the game is balanced around it. The dexxer’s question is “can I out-trade this?”

The control player makes a different bet entirely. They bet that the strongest force on the battlefield doesn’t have to be theirs. A tamer doesn’t out-damage a dragon — they own one. A provocation bard doesn’t out-damage a roomful of monsters — they make the monsters do the damage, to each other. A disco-tamer makes a dragon weaker and dumber, then lets a pet it could have killed kill it instead. The control player’s question isn’t “can I out-trade this?” It’s “who can I get to fight this for me?”

That single shift in the question changes everything about how the game feels.

The tamer: owning the problem

The purest version is the Animal Tamer. The fantasy is simple and ancient — you walk up to the most dangerous thing in the forest and, instead of killing it, you convince it to follow you home. Then it kills things for you.

The tamer’s early game is famously, infamously slow. You fail tames over and over by design; you ride a packhorse around the wilderness chasing the one bull that will gain you a tenth of a point. People quit tamers in the first week all the time. But the people who don’t quit are playing a different game by the end — a game where the question “is this fight too hard for me?” simply stops applying, because you aren’t in the fight. Your dragon is. You are a few tiles back, healing it, watching, deciding. The tamer’s skill ceiling isn’t reflexes; it’s judgment — knowing which pet to bring, when to pull it back, what’s worth taming next.

There is a specific, quiet joy in standing behind something enormous and loyal while it demolishes a thing that would have one-shot you. It never gets old.

The bard: turning the room against itself

The provocation bard is the control game at its most audacious, because the bard brings no army at all. The army is the enemy.

Provocation is one of the strangest, most delightful verbs in the game: you point at two monsters and they decide they hate each other more than they hate you. A dense dungeon room — the kind that would overwhelm a solo dexxer in seconds — becomes a civil war you started and can leave at any time. You stand at the edge of bard range (about eight tiles, a little more as your skill climbs) and conduct. Provoke A onto B. Discord the survivor so it loses the duel. Peace anything that remembers you exist. Loot what’s left.

It is the closest thing in UO to a magic trick, and like a magic trick it can go wrong: a failed provoke turns the monster on you, which is exactly the moment you learn to keep Peacemaking loaded as a panic button. That risk is the spice. When it works — when you set a whole room against itself and walk away clean — it doesn’t feel like winning a fight. It feels like having gotten away with something.

Musicianship is the unglamorous heart of all of it. Every song rolls against your Music first; a bard with weak Music is a conductor whose orchestra ignores half the cues. Bards who skimp on it never understand why the build feels unreliable. Bards who master it stop thinking about it at all, the way a good musician stops thinking about the instrument.

The disco-tamer: making a dragon kill its own kin

And then there is the build that fuses both philosophies, the Bard Tamer, and it is my favorite thing in the game.

Discordance is a debuff: play the right discordant notes at a monster and you strip away a chunk of its resistances and its skills — roughly a quarter of what makes it dangerous, at grandmaster. Now feed that broken, diminished dragon to your pet. The dragon that your pet could never have beaten at full strength loses to it now, because you reached in and turned its dials down before the fight started.

The disco-tamer doesn’t out-damage anything and doesn’t even rely on a single strong force. They rely on arithmetic: lower the enemy’s numbers, raise your pet’s effective numbers, and let math that was a loss become a win. There’s a version of this that’s pure theater — discord a dragon, then provoke it onto another dragon, and watch it kill its own kin while you do nothing but keep your pet healthy and occasionally re-apply the song as it wears off. You are, at that point, less a warrior than a saboteur and a conductor at the same time.

Why it feels so different from a dexxer

If you have only ever played something that swings a weapon, the control game can feel almost wrong at first, and it’s worth naming why.

A dexxer’s combat is a conversation in real time: react, react, react, heal, react. The loop is tight and physical and it lives in your fingers. The control player’s combat is slower and lives in your head. The decisive moves happen before the damage — the provoke, the discord, the peace, the choice of pet, the positioning at range. By the time blows are landing, the fight is usually already decided; you set the dominoes and now you watch them fall. The tempo is patient on purpose.

This is why control builds reward a completely different temperament. The dexxer rewards nerve — the willingness to stand in the fire and trade. The control player rewards patience and foresight — the willingness to spend the slow first weeks of a tamer, to grind Music until the songs land, to set up a fight three moves deep and trust the setup. If you are impatient, the control game will frustrate you. If the idea of winning a fight you never physically entered makes you grin, you have found your archetype.

It also reframes danger. To a dexxer, a roomful of monsters is a threat to survive. To a control player, a roomful of monsters is raw material — the more of them there are, the more of them can be turned against each other, the richer the trick. Crowd control loves a crowd. Debuff loves a tough single target. The things that make the game harder for everyone else are the things that make the control player stronger.

The patience, and the joy

I won’t pretend it’s all elegance. The control game asks for an enormous amount of patience up front. Taming fails and fails and fails. Music gains a tenth of a point at a time. You will spend hours doing un-heroic, fiddly things — chasing bulls, replaying a lute near a chicken, re-taming the same panther for the fifth time — long before you ever orchestrate anything impressive. The payoff is back-loaded, and a lot of people never reach it.

But here is what waits on the other side. There is a feeling, unique to these builds, of conducting a fight rather than surviving one. Of standing slightly apart from the chaos you created, perfectly calm, making small precise inputs that ripple out into a roomful of consequences. The dexxer feels powerful when they win the trade. The control player feels powerful when they realize there was never going to be a trade — that they’d already taken the enemy’s strength away, or pointed it at the wrong target, before the first blow landed.

The classic guides used to call this “playing the battlefield instead of the monster,” and that’s exactly right. You are not the strongest thing in the room. You’re the one who decides what the strongest thing in the room does.

That’s the control game. Once you’ve felt it, the honest in-and-out brawl of a dexxer never quite scratches the same itch again — because you’ve learned the oldest trick in Britannia: the best way to win a fight is to make someone else have it for you.

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Build pages for the archetypes above: the Bard Tamer, the PvP Tamer, the Provocation Bard, and the crafting mule that keeps the rest of them supplied. Mechanics live on the bard and tamer pages and in taming-and-pets and combat (advanced).