Gaming is about overcoming challenges. It’s about conflict, and there is no purer expression of conflict than war. War has been a central aspect of tabletop gaming throughout its entire history. Chess, the most popular board game in history, is a war simulation. Dungeons and Dragons was originally adapted from Gary Gygax’s tabletopwargame, and, to this day, the precise boundaries between tabletop wargaming and tabletop roleplaying are blurry. Many of the routine acts of dungeon invasion and slaughter that our fantasy adventurers engage in technically constitute warfare.
It’s unsurprising, then, that there should be many TTRPG systems designed specifically to simulate warfare. Here, we’ll be looking at a number of TTRPGs centered around war, soldiers, and the military.
Renegade Game Studios G.I. Joe Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
Straight from a childhood classic
Based on a highly recognizable line of toys, comics, and Saturday morning cartoons, G.I. Joe is a kid-friendly game that casts its players in the role of soldiers working to fight the evil terrorist organization known as Cobra, that wants to take over the world!
Most of the games on this list operate on a relatively dark and grounded notion of war and what it entails. Even where they incorporate sci-fi and fantasy elements, they still represent the horrific nature warfare. Not here. If you’re looking to be a romanticized international hero, right out of a children’s cartoon, this is the game for you. This game allows you to make your very ownG.I. Joes, and places you on the front lines of the battle against the Cobra, the terrorist organization that lusts for world domination. It’s the most dangerous threat in the world, and you’re just the squad to fight it, so what are you waiting for? Get out there and be a real international hero!
Delta Green: Agent’s Handbook
It’ll take humanity’s best to defend against these terrors
Delta Green is a classic, military take on the Cthulhu Mythos, a world of cosmic and supernatural horror invented by H. P. Lovecraft. It casts players as federal agents and soldiers working to protect the public from Mythos threats.
This list is about games where you play soldiers, which doesn’t always mean you’re fighting soldiers. In this game, you’re up against the many iconic monsters in H. P. Lovecraft’sCthulhu Mythos. In this world, Delta Green is a paramilitary group of government agents whose job is to fight the horrors that haunt the Mythos. These horrors are formidable, and Cthulhu games usually revel in the PC’s helplessness in the face of those threats.
This game does that to some extent, but the military hardware and skill of Delta Green agents gives them more of a fighting chance against these monstrosities than they’d have in a game like Call of Cthulhu, but the task of overcoming these horrors is still going to demand everything they have.
SCP: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game
An icon of internet culture
Similar to Delta Green, the SCP Tabletop RPG casts players as members of a paramilitary organization dedicated to protecting the general public from supernatural threats. As Foundation Agents, players will be using military hardware and skills to face down an enormous variety of “anomalies,” including monsters, artifacts, and strange locations.
The SCP Wiki is a collaborative fiction website with thousands of articles cataloging the thousands of “anomalies” contained by the SCP Foundation, an international paramilitary organization dedicated to tracking down and locking away supernatural threats.
This game casts its players as heavily armed and highly trained SCP Agents, and they’ll need their advanced training and military hardware if they’re going to have a chance against the enormous variety of anomalous items and situations this job will put them up against. Not everything in the SCP Universe is as formidable as a Shoggoth, but that’s more than made up for by the sheer unpredictability of it all. There are no limits to what a Foundation agent might find themselves up against.
Twilight: 2000
Even after the end, war never changes
This post-apocalyptic RPG casts the players as survivors in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war. Though the war that ended the world is over, warfare is at the center of this game, which contains extensive rules fleshing out combat and the weapons and other hardware with which battles are waged.
Twilight: 2000 is a post-apocalyptic RPG that casts players as veterans leading and protecting a group of survivors in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic war. The PC’s history of military service, including their nationality and the branch they served in, are core elements of their character.
The game has elaborate rules aimed at simulating conventional warfare in its post-apocalyptic environment, including rules for modern-day weapons, vehicles, unit morale, and other elements of war.
Carbon Grey: The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook
A gritty and raw depiction of war, despite its fantastic elements
Set in a very strange dieselpunk variant of World War I, Carbon Grey is a military RPG in a grim, war-torn dystopian setting that places its characters at the front lines of a Great War.
In an alternate version of our world, a war rages between European powers, defined by their relationship with the expansionist Mitteleurpoean Empire, whose authoritarian state and world-conquering ambitions have forced the western nations to join forces in opposition to it. Thus are the dividing lines of the Great War drawn, whose miserable trenches and dieselpunk weaponry evoke the war that once went by that name in our world.
This setting is further complicated by the machinations of noble houses and their minions. This world never progressed as ours did, and democracy is a rare thing on both sides. As you can see, this game has a rich setting, and is a fabulous place to run dark wartime adventures in a dystopian world.
BattleTech: A Time of War Role Playing Game
Warfare among the stars
Set in a space-faring Sci-fi future, this dark war game casts the players as sci-fi soldiers in a war-torn galaxy where feuding empires control hundreds of planets and endlessly battle for dominance.
Set in the 31st century, this military sci-fi tabletop RPG depicts a human race that has expanded into the stars. However, even after humanity has spread itself across hundreds of planets, war never changes. The feudal houses of this sci-fi setting forever war with one another. The PCs will throw their lot in with one of these noble houses, fighting to expand their power and enrich their coffers. Alas, glory is the only thing they stand to win for themselves, but if that were a deal-breaker, they wouldn’t be here.
This edition has multiple methods of character creation available. There’s point-buy for tables who want a simpler experience, but those who want to delve more deeply into their character’s background will enjoy its life-path method of character creation, which generates a character’s statistics by telling the story of their life prior to the events of the campaign.
FAQ
Wait, I thought an RPG was a type of Rocket Launcher?
Oh dear, you seem to have been searching for information about Rocket-Propelled Grenades, which are heavy weapons that use rockets to launch explosive warheads at enemy targets, most often vehicles such as tanks. They are a fixture of modern warfare and can often be found in the hands of real-life combatants.
Why do none of these games depict realistic modern warfare?
There aren’t a lot of TTRPGs that do. In real life, war isn’t fun or beautiful or glorious. In order to make it into a form of entertainment, game developers usually either use a fantastical setting to distance the game and its events from the real world and real or sanitize their depiction of warfare to the point where it’s just as alien to an actual battlefield as if it were set in another world altogether.
