At its core, DANGER CLOSE, my tactical military skirmish TTRPG, sets out to capture what is cool about firefights, military fiction, heroics and action scenes in approachable dice rolls and mechanics.
One of the core elements is the Contact Roll. This is the moment the Squad advances into a Sector (which can be a room, a street, a stretch of woods, or any other kind of somewhat-delineated battlefield environment) and encounters opposition.
DANGER CLOSE does not involve an initiative roll. Instead, the Squad determines their Posture: how they are approaching the situation, or how they have been moving so far. The Contact Roll determines the best-case scenario for the Squad based on their posture, and the Threat Roll determines whether this holds, or is degraded by the strength of enemy opposition.
You can read the actual rules for free in the SRD!
The outcome of this all determines whether the Squad is ambushed, spotted, has surprise, or perhaps even manages to instantly overwhelm the enemy or manages to bypass them all together. It determines the starting positions of each Trooper (both offensively and defensively), and the starting momentum of the fight.
If we were to put it on OSR terms:
The Posture of the Squad and the subsequent Contact Roll and Threat Roll is a bit like picking your own odds for the Surprise/Distance roll in more traditional RPGs.
In essence, the Squad has 3 postures to choose from: Bounding (inspired by bounding overwatch), Assault (try and overwhelm the enemy at the cost of ammo) and Stealth (high risk, high reward).
Bounding Posture
The fantasy here is “competent soldiers moving cautiously through dangerous ground”. Trooper A holds position, squats down and provides overwatch, while Trooper B rushes forward, after which Trooper B is the one that provides cover.
If you’ve ever carefully moved through a map in XCOM 2 with every other soldier Overwatching as to not alert a pod, you know exactly how this works.
No one is doing anything flashy, but no one is doing anything stupid, either.
In mechanics, this means the Contact Roll uses the following odds and outcomes:
| 1d6 | Outcome |
|---|---|
| 1 | AMBUSHED |
| 2-5 | SPOTTED |
| 6 | SURPRISE |
This is by all means a quite common distribution for surprise rolls in encounters.
- Ambushed means the fight starts with Momentum at LOSING GROUND, and each Trooper starts in a neutral Offensive Position (Engaged) and a degraded Defensive Position (Flanked). The Squad will have to fight harder from a worse position to win the Engagement.
- Spotted is the true neutral of our outcomes; start at CONTESTED, with neutral Offensive- and Defensive Position for each Trooper.
- Surprise starts the fight at GAINING GROUND, with each Trooper in an optimal Offensive Position (Flanking) and Defensive Position (Fortified). An important caveat though: the actual battlefield can still limit the total number of Flanking or Fortified Troopers. If you’re fighting in a tight corridor, the Sector has a hard limit on how many Troopers can be Flanking, for instance, and the Contact Roll does not alter that.
Baked into the predictability of the bounded approach is that each Trooper shares the same starting state. This means that you, as a squad, either all benefit from a good position or all start out from a bad position.
Offensive Position and Defensive Position are key variables that dynamically change for each trooper during a firefight. Troopers try to optimize both, while enemy tactics can alter them by force.
If we have to describe it in classic RPG terms, it is the trade-off between increasing your chance to hit while increasing your chance to get hit at the same time, or lowering both at the same time.
The interesting bit is that these variables are often moving in tandem, but not always. You can make active choices to improve one at the cost of the other.
Assault Posture
The assault posture takes the bounding overwatch approach but lets you burn resources to add a bit of punch to the final result.
This is the action-movie and tactical-shooter fantasy of a squad exploding out of cover, throwing grenades, firing continuously, and forcing defenders onto the back foot immediately.
In terms of mechanics, Assault costs Ammo (generally a finite resource carried by troopers) to activate, requiring 2 Ammo to use.
The result distribution of the Contact Roll is also more extreme:
| 1d6 | Outcome |
|---|---|
| 1-3 | AMBUSHED |
| 4 | SPOTTED |
| 5 | SURPRISE |
| 6 | OVERWHELM |
It greatly increases the odds of being ambushed, as being loud can draw way more enemy attention towards you.
It does however unlock the option of OVERWHELM: You hit the enemy hard enough to instantly break their morale, and are free to narrate how they flee or are eliminated to the last man. You essentially skip the entire Engagement.
Note, however, that after each Contact Roll (be it Bounding, Assault or Stealth), we also make a Threat Roll. “Threat” is abstracted from 1 to 4, and noted as Threat Level 2, or TL 2.
If the Threat Roll (1d6) shows the Threat Level or less, the enemy hinders the Squad: lower the Contact Roll result by the difference between the Threat Roll and the Threat Level, or by -1 if the Threat Roll and Threat Level are the same.
Practically, this can mean:
The Squad performs an Assault and burns 2 Ammo. Contact Roll (1d6): 5, Surprise. The opposition is TL 3. Threat Roll (1d6): 2.
The Threat Roll is lower than the Threat (2 v. TL 3), and the difference is 1; The Contact Roll outcome is lowered by 1, and thus becomes 4, Spotted.
There are a few more modifiers that can tie into both Contact Roll and Threat Roll, but we’ll keep it simple for now.
A Squad picking Assault has one final trick, however:
Pour It On. After the Contact Roll and Threat Roll are resolved, a Squad performing an Assault may spend additional Ammo to raise the final result of the Contact Roll: 2 Ammo per +1. The roof here is 5 – SURPRISE. OVERWHELM cannot be reached this way.
So, if we look at the example above, the Squad can burn another 2 Ammo to reach 5 – Surprised again.
Normally, each Trooper can carry 3 Ammo, so that’s 15 Ammo in a full Squad. However, Ammo is also used during fights to use special equipment or enhance rolls, so it is a valuable commodity.
Stealth Posture
Stealth covers the fantasy of ambushes, synchronized shots and methodically taking down the enemy.
It has the highest cost of entry: Stealth can only be used if stealth has been maintained so far. It’s off the table the moment the Squad uses any other Posture once, messes up their stealth approach, or if the fiction of the mission simply does not allow for it (such as in frontline combat).
A good stealth posture approach can mean a severely disadvantaged enemy, all troopers in excellent positions, or sneaking your way past an encounter entirely.
The stealth posture is also the only approach that accounts for the loadout of individual troopers, meaning that if your squad is not equipped for stealth, it will be much harder to pull off. Furthermore, being stealthy requires you to pack lightly, which probably also means you’re going to bring less armor and guns to any firefight that might break out.
The Contact Roll distribution is as follows:
| 1d6 | Outcome |
|---|---|
| 1 | AMBUSHED |
| 2-4 | SPOTTED |
| 5-6 | SURPRISE |
Because the squad is moving quietly and carefully, the risk of being ambushed is low, and the odds of catching the enemy by surprise are raised.
However, after the Threat Roll is resolved, each trooper makes an individual Mobility Check. A trooper’s base Mobility starts at 4 and is increased or lowered depending on how much and what type of gear they carry. A Mobility Check is successful if the trooper rolls equal to or under their Mobility.
For the individual Trooper, this outcome is used as follows:
- Passed: the Trooper’s Offensive Position & Defensive Position are equal to the outcome of the Contact Roll (remaining unchanged).
- Failed: the Trooper’s Offensive Position (Limited < Engaged < Flanking) and Defensive Position (Flanked < In Cover < Fortified) are both one step worse than the one dictated by the squad’s outcome of the contact roll.
And for the whole Squad, we count the number of successful Mobility Checks:
If the result is SURPRISE and every Trooper passed their Mobility Check, the Squad bypasses the Sector entirely. No Engagement, and Stealth holds. Narrate how you pass like ghosts.
Beyond that, for each 2 successful Mobility Checks, one result can be picked from the list below:
- Cut Comms. Stealth survives this Engagement.
- Target Commanders. No Enemy Tactics this Engagement.
- Trap. The first Hard Target this Engagement takes 2 Hits on arrival.
- Exit Route. Disengage is automatic, no Injuries.
The contrast with Assault is clear. Assault can bypass Engagements by burning a lot of ammo, and if you can consistently pass Mobility Checks with stealth, you can bypass engagements for free.
If you don’t manage to succeed with every trooper, you can still “buy” the Cut Comms option, which maintains Stealth for the next Engagement.
The design philosophy here is that you either pay to keep stealth active or you cash out and leverage the position you have to inflict a lot of damage or get other benefits for the upcoming fight.
Special Situations: Ambushes and Breaching & Clearing
Setting up an ambush on a military convoy can be covered by simply applying the Stealth Posture, except that here, it covers a longer stretch of time, and the Mobility Checks narrate whether each Trooper can get in a good position before the enemy arrives. The Trap option now covers, say, laying down C4 on a road and blowing up the front vehicle.
Breaching and clearing a room uses the same basic logic, but adds one important factor: the Squad cannot all enter through a doorway at once.
Instead of a normal Contact Roll, the Squad first declares its stack order.
Starting with the first Trooper, each makes a Mobility Check:
- A success means they get IN, and the next Trooper rolls.
- A minor failure (Mobility +1) means they get IN, but the next Trooper is OUT and the stack stops.
- A larger failure means they stay OUT, and everyone behind them does as well.
Once the stack stops, compare the number of Troopers IN to the room’s Threat Level:
| Result | Outcome |
|---|---|
| IN > TL | OVERWHELM |
| IN = TL | CONTESTED |
| IN < TL | LOSING GROUND |
| IN = 0 | DENIED |
DENIED, in this case, means that the Squad did not manage to enter the room, and the door opening is now a kill zone.
In summary, the Contact Roll is essentially a microcosm of what DANGER CLOSE tries to do: take cool set pieces, moments, and bits of power fantasy from firefights, military fiction, and action scenes, and try to emulate that with tabletop RPG mechanics.
You can read the basic rules for free in the online SRD, and the full rules are available on Itch.io!
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