So my gaming group’s last campaign wound down last week, and it’s now my turn to DM as we get ready to kick off a new game after spring break. This leaves me about two weeks to prepare, and when I asked if anyone had specific system or theme requests. they all agreed that a gritty WWI/WWII, “Band of Brothers”-style campaign would be really neat. I happily agreed, because that does sound pretty bitchin’, but now that I’m sitting here and planning I realized that I have no idea what system would work best. I know there are a lot of marvelously imaginative and very experienced tabletop gamers on the dope, and so I thought I’d post to ask if anyone had suggestions about either commercial or homebrew systems that would suit the campaign, or just about content/encounters/suggested dynamics for the game itself. Based on last week’s discussion, here’s the criteria I’ve worked out:
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Our games are typically more strategy and wargaming than roleplaying, so whatever I do needs lots of numbers, rolling dice, and a fair amount of think-y puzzles and asymmetric warfare/lopsided fights. If possible I’d like to give the group a chance to work out and perfect several basic small unit tactics over the campaign, but that’s optional.
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Given that, we don’t like grand strategy as much. At the most, we’ll be doing things on the Company level, but it’s much likelier that we’ll end up focusing on a single platoon (maybe) or squad (likelier). The group agreed that they would be equally happy to play hard-to-kill PCs intended to last through most of the campaign or Call of Cthulhu-style short-lived PCs with lots of other characters in reserve. What I’m thinking of doing is either making the PCs into the company NCOs and requiring them to each manage a few weaker NPCs, and then pull new PCs out of the NPC pool if an NCO gets ganked and our (NPC) captain needs to hand out field promotions.
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We like realism for its scenery potential, and to a certain extent one of the big attractions for this campaign is that it forces us to learn useful tactics with period weapons, but utter realism is not mandatory and if it’s sufficiently awesome, almost any anachronism can be excused.
And really, beyond that anything goes.
One question in particular I’d like to ask is if anybody has experience forcing players to carefully manage their resources and inventory, and if so what worked and what didn’t. Virtually every D&D 3.5 game I’ve ever played has assumed unlimited amounts of food and water and (within reason) unlimited candles, melting wax, twine, and other daily consumables, simply because keeping track of them is a giant pain in the rear that isn’t fun for anybody. On the other hand, I really like the idea of assigning each PC a full backpack with similar kit at the beginning of the campaign and require them to carefully manage essential supplies that quickly dwindle and are hard and dear to replenish.
Oh yes, and I’m going to let our players decide their own concepts (of course), but I wanted to come prepared with a list of 10-15 “pre-packaged” character concepts, so that if anyone gets swamped or doesn’t feel like juggling minutae, they can look at a list of suggested useful roles and equipment loadouts and quickly mix and match. Given that, I would love to hear any suggestions for historically appropriate or useful roles. Thus far, I have:
Medic (obviously)- depending on the system, I’m thinking of making him a guy with several extremely powerful healing techniques that require resources he simply won’t have for a lot of the game (morphine, antibiotics, disinfectant, sutures, sterile bandages) who also gets lots of skills which let him handle minor injuries and jury-rig long-term solutions for broken limbs sustained behind enemy lines and such.
Machine gun crew-one PC and one or two NPC assistants who are really good at assembling, dissembling, maintaining, and accurately firing a big, heavy crew-operated machine gun; probably the M1917 Browning or M1941 Johnson. They’re great at suppression, but move slowly and require time to assemble and disassemble the weapon.
Mortar crew- same concept as above, for indirect fire instead of supression
Scout/sniper team-Since my understanding is that the US did not have a specialized sniper role for a lot of WWII, I’m mainly picturing this as the party’s thief: one PC and an NPC spotter who are great at stealth, mapping out coastlines or other areas of interest, can call in coordinates for artillery fire, and generally fill a lot of planning and maneuvering utilities. Also, they have scoped M1 Garands and occasionally shoot people with them. 
And really that’s it- I was considering an anti-tank crew but I’m worried that a PC crew would either be bored if we don’t run into tanks enough or irritate everyone else by always being the hero if we run into them too much.
