RPG Atmospheres: War

To commemorate Remembrance Day, I want to talk about military RPGs, specifically those that take place in historical settings, though the conversation may be useful to running the War of the Ring or the Dominion War. Along with horror, role-playing a proper war narrative can be difficult to do "correctly", which is to say, with the right atmosphere, probably because they have a lot in common. You can play them as murder hobos, sure, killing monsters/Nazis like you're in an action movie, and never suffer any pangs of remorse, or you can tap into the idea of normal people facing unimaginable horror that breaks them down. Gamer shenanigans are fine in the former, but unwelcome in the latter.

So how do we approach a war game in a way that respects the veterans and victims who actually went through it? I think one of the lessons we can learn from war films on this subject is that every war film worth its salt is an anti-war film. If we experience the life of a soldier, even through the proxy of a character sheet, we should want the game (or at least the mission) to end as soon as possible, but at the same time, NOT want it to end because what awaits us back home may not be rosy (especially since players will have more hindsight about the historical treatment of veterans). Players should thus be encouraged to create backstories that play with this duality. What do they hope to go home to, and what happens when they get a letter from their sweetheart saying she's met someone else? Did they join up, or were they drafted? In the first case, will they be disillusioned, or did they perhaps have no other choice? In the second, what were they ripped away from? And what is the moral line they won't cross? What happens when the mission forces them to? The GM should mine those backstories to create the toughest possible choices (or non-choices, as the case may be).

The GM's biggest job will be to create a cast of supporting characters that are meant to be, narratively speaking, cannon fodder, but make them so central to the role-playing experience that it hurts when they die. This is where the GM is asked to kill his darlings - the more interesting, fun and important an NPC is, the more likely they are to die. Though I haven't played any war RPGs that use such a mechanic (look to Ross Rifles - powered by The Apocalypse - and the GM-less Carry), it should be simple to add psychological damage to your game. Imagine "hit points" based on a Resilience stat, dropping like Call of Cthulhu's Sanity, or Vampire the Masquerade's Humanity. Gives the character penalties until it reaches zero, and becomes Section 8. Shell Shock, Battle Fatigue, PTSD... name it according to the conflict you're fighting. The point is, even if the players are in it for the action, it shouldn't feel good. Exhilaration, but a lot of grief, too, and treading on morally gray territory.

Speaking of which, here's a trick I would use at the point where the players start acting as murder hobos. When they've dehumanized the enemy - whether Germans, Viet Cong, Celts, Orcs, Imperial Stormtroopers - run a special session where you hand them a character sheet for one of those enemies. Give them a unit, camaraderie, strong NPCs, and make them live through the opposite side of a mission. It could even be the mission they just completed, giving these "enemy PCs" a sense of doom. For the maverick gaming group, run both simultaneously, switching between one side and the other. It's easy to make villains of the leaders and officers, but the simple soldiers are in a situation similar to the "Allied" PCs, and the players should be hit with that from time to time.

I know most players hate homework, but a final atmospheric trick from me would be the soldier's letter home. This is one of the most compelling things to come out of more recent historical research. Historians have been researching correspondence to get to the nitty-gritty of these wars and how they were experienced on the ground (or sea, or air). Asking players to write home in between missions (perhaps for some reward, like healing a point of mental health, for example) not only taps into the "genre", but it also helps cement their connection to that home and the never-seen people they left behind.

Have you tried some of these? Do you have your own tips to offer? Or great stories of players properly adding to the mood of your military game? Let us know!