Slush Pile: Hard-SF Space Combat via Children of a Dead Earth
Roll to Doubt wrote a cool post about straight-up using video games as ttrpg mechanics as a provocation to the 'I want D&D but with Dark Souls combat' crowd -- perhaps facetious on some level, but got my imagination cooking.
Hybridizing ttrpgs & video games is definitely already a thing -- As a teenager I did a play-by-post RPG where dozens of people RP'd as parliamentary deputies in an alt-history Austria-Hungary, using the game Victoria II to resolve the outcomes of our policy decisions. I've also run across Milsim players (Arma, DCS) who organize elaborate role-playing scenarios, sometimes across multiple games. Hell, I recently played a Pathfinder 2e one-shot in Foundry and so much was automated that it basically felt like a gm-directed video game.
If I were going to try this, I'd want the video game to have the following qualities:
- Quick, flexible scenario setup - like, if I'm using it for mass combat, I'd want to be able to specify both sides, the terrain, and the army composition. No having to sit through cutscenes or playing tutorial missions to get to the action.
- A format that allows consensus or input from multiple players - so it should allow players to pause and strategize or have multiple inputs, and shouldn't just require everyone to watch one person at the controls.
- It should allow situations to be resolved in the time window allotted for a typical RPG session.
While brainstorming what would work I kept coming back to this neat little game from 2015 called Children of a Dead Earth, which is basically Kerbal Space Program with hyper-realistic railguns & nuclear missiles.
COADE checks most of the boxes:
- You can set up pretty much any skirmish scenario. (AFAIK it's easy to mod in additional celestial bodies, but I'm not certain).
- It's pausable, and the tactical controls can be easily verbally articulated by a players (e.g. 'target their radiators' or 'fire missiles'). It also has strict time tracking, so you can know exactly how long your skirmish in Martian orbit took (but there's a fast forward button so the fights can play out in around ~20 minutes).
- You get tons of control over ship design, down to individual components (you can straight-up design your own nuclear reactors). Thus, there's good world-building potential. When I played it back in 2015-16, I made custom fleets for several invented factions, giving each a unique look & preferred armor & weapon materials.
The drawback is that it's extremely (realistically) lethal, and almost everything depends on ship quality. It wouldn't work for swashbuckling space opera -- no plucky heroes dodging through an asteroid field. But for hard sci-fi that's ok; it feels thematically appropriate to simulate a space battle with absolute physics-based rigor & to mediate the action through a computerized control panel. (COADE combat largely feels how it's depicted in The Expanse -- lots of tense waiting for point-defense to take out missile swarms). Planetside, players can get up to whatever hijinks they desire, but in the merciless void of outer space the implacable laws of physics decide your fate.
Were I to try this, I'd probably hack together a rules-light game similar to Monolith or 2400 for the human-scale gameplay. And I'd set up a rocketpunk point-crawl scenario along the lines of the Ring Raiders idea on Atomic Rockets. Say, humans used a wormhole to reach a red giant with two dense gas-giant systems full of habitable-ish moons (mapped on a hex map, perhaps?). A sclerotic, Earth-based corporation tries to maintain order but response times from HQ are slow and outside the range of 3-5 heavy cruisers anarchy prevails. (The corporation would get the high-tech minmax-y ships with nukes and lasers that can vaporize you from 1000 km away, whereas most pirates and raiders would have the equivalent of a vulcan-cannon awkwardly strapped to a cargo rocket, making combat more even and marginally less risky).
