Dice Goblin

I started with listing my inspirations – vibes I wanted to capture – and worked my way back from there. Let’s dive into my inspirational sources!

I started trying out Solo RPGs recently, and having a lot of fun with them. I’m usually always drifting between genres, and I found myself in the mood for sci-fi stuff; Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Helldivers 2 (a pretty constant inspiration for me the last few months; a lot of my FIST stuff takes inspiration from Helldivers 2).

Anyways, I was looking for something a bit larger-scale than just a solo RPG character against a few grunts, and didn’t want to do the bookkeeping for a whole party.

Five Parsecs from Home hits a lot of those notes, but it explicitly a solo skirmish wargame – positioning minis, and still quite a bit of crunch.

I thought about Only War – a game I appreciate from a distance. I love reading the rulebooks, but the idea of actually running a session… scares me. I looked up what it takes to calculate an attack yesterday:

Check rate of fire, Ballistic Test (modified by range, visibility, target size, movement, apply rate of fire bonus), calculate number of hits, based on degrees of success, roll damage for each hit, including possible penetration, resolve armor and toughness from each damage roll, track wounds, critical effects and possible shock.

Wowzers. That kinda brings me to a point, though: just as D&D has an unspoken promise around it (“Go be an adventurer in a fantasy world, and follow your imagination”!) that it doesn’t fulfill, I feel like the existing TTRPGs that exist in the “tacticool sci-fi military-esque” space (that I was able to find) also don’t really fulfill their potential.

When I’m feeling the 40k itch, I want to fight amazing battles against overwhelming foes in enormous landscapes. The RPGs don’t fulfill that promise (note: I haven’t played Wrath & Glory), focusing too much on bolter porn (which, hey, is also neat). Heck, the actual full wargame doesn’t even match that idea – a table can only get so big, and everyone can only afford so many miniatures.

On the topic of wargames: It was 40k that drew me into RPGs, in a way – the local Games Workshop being a gateway, providing a space to play with the miniatures I had just bought. I soon realized that I enjoyed the emergent stories far more than the actual wargame.

I’d lose the game, quite severely, but I’d still be thinking of how one group of snipers held out for so long.

I’d throw tactics to the wind to have my commander face off with that one Tyranid that would definitely wipe the floor with him.

I was thinking way more about ‘my guys’ and their adventures than the actual meta of the game – and having a lot of fun doing it.

It were those moments that made the idea of TTRPGs first *click* in my mind, even though I didn’t know it at the time. It was my exposure to cool people at game shops that led me to D&D in a practical sense – and from there, the usual ‘I love it’ to ‘Wait a second’ disillusionment that brought me to the OSR.

What I realised then, and what I realise now, is that what makes pew-pew shooty battles interesting, is the little stories happening during them. The choices made, the risks taken – not the individual narration of “The Captain shot a guy, then another, then another, then ducked and reloaded, only to shoot two more.”

So: that was one of my parameters: to try and make a system that incentivizes, nay, is directly primed to create moments of dramatic choice, high stakes, and narrative impact.

I’m a proud veteran of the recent battle for Super Earth, and at its best, it made me reminisce the feeling that games like Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach gave me.

A planet under siege, banding together with other soldiers/players – and puppy-eyed grunts cheering you on/helping you fight/getting blown up left and right. How keeping that one random private alive to the end of the mission becomes a whole thing, even though there’s no mechanical incentives.

Anyway, the feeling of being part of some bigger war, contextualizing your efforts, is also an appealing note to strive for in DANGER CLOSE.

Lastly, for now, because I keep rambling on: XCOM 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, for a variety of reasons: emergent storytelling, customizing ‘your guys’ as the game progresses, and its modability: I’ve used it when I craved to “play Star Wars”, or “play Halo”, or “play Imperial Guard”, in ways that none of those franchises actually allow. In that way, DANGER CLOSE also aims to be a setting-agnostic toy- and sandbox, allowing you to quickly jump into a pitched battle and seeing what kinds of stories emerge.

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That’s all for now!