Backstab/positional damage
Attacking an enemy from behind or a flank deals bonus damage or triggers a special move, rewarding positioning over raw stats. Backstabs make orientation matter: combat becomes a dance for angles, stealth flows into lethal openers, and flanking becomes a tactical goal rather than incidental. Designers use positional damage to reward map awareness and movement skill, to give stealth builds a burst payoff, and to make being surrounded genuinely dangerous (the same rule cuts both ways). Key decisions: the angle threshold that counts as 'behind', whether it is a flat multiplier or an animated execution, enemy awareness (can they turn to face you, negating it?), and multiplayer fairness where lag makes back-facing contentious. Pitfall: in melee, backstabs can degenerate into circle-strafing to stay behind a slow-turning enemy — turn-rate tuning and tracking attacks are the usual fix.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: action, stealth, rpg