Would a roleplaying game about drone operators who never actually step onto the battlefield be fun?

The game you are looking for is Duskers.
Would make a intresting horor scenario as the players dont know what is out there, just that something is out there.

Consider acquiring assistance if the incentive of cute girls is required for you to engage in activities.

Not even cute girls that you can see. Just the idea of girls that are cute.

...Fuckin' waifufags.

So basically a game of shadowrun with nothing but Riggers?

You know, this would work really well for a mecha game. This way, players can battle their opposite numbers again and again with all the drama of a Gundam series, but without the asspulls as to why someone didn't die in a massive explosion. (Because everyone's using drones, you can't kill the enemy pilot.)

There's so much potential in a game like this. I'll add that my penis would be erect constantly at the thought of just dropping into some horrible sand hovel and gunning down all the brown people there.

That sounds like great material for some kind of storygame, maybe PBtA. Focus on the fucked up dissonance between the everyday lives of people who are essentially desk jockeys, going to work every day in an airconditioned office where they sit in front of a computer drinking coffee and eating bagels, while on the other side of the world children get bombed.

That said, it's not exactly D&D and people who are looking for D&D aren't going to like it.

Sooo, a Build Fighters game?

I'm with you on this.

I'd take it one step further; bifurcate the game into two parts. In the first part, you'd play as a drone operator. The game's tension would be regarding advancing your career, inter-office politics, executing the drone strikes, juggling a demanding career with a satisfying home life, and IT struggles.

The second part of the game would play as one of the grunts whose grueling, door-to-door sweep you are supporting. Tension would be how often you're getting shot at (often), whether or not you get shot, how fatal being shot is, when you get to go home, and other dirt-and-blood concerns.

Really grind it in, y'know? Have the grunt-side stuff put in a Herculean level of work to get the intel necessary for the drone strike. The drone strike which is resolved in a roll or two in the first part.

youtube.com/watch?v=4XD6dN1ve2Y

Yes.
My nigga.

Depends on how fun the drones are.

Oh look someone finally found the resident excuse to post waifus. Wonder which will open the dump?

You just described my Shadowrun game user.

>3 drone riggers
>2 Deckers
>6 missions complete
>never been within 20 miles of the fighting

I'd cut the procedural middleman here and make half the players drone operators and half actual operators, though this might have the disadvantage of distracting from the themes. As an alternative to the "post drone operator gameplay", I suppose if you're going for that kind of story you might want to talk with the players about how their characters contend with life once they're done with the job. Do they get another one? Retire? How is it to "return to civilian life" after not having really left, in a sense? With the knowledge you've killed people in war, yet never left your home town? In the twilight between those two states, a killer yet not a hero? How will you interact with your marine friend who was there on the ground and lost an arm to an IED while you were eating donuts in your trailer in Texas? What will you tell your kids when they ask you how your participated in the fighting? Could you tell them daddy was a hero who fought the bad guys when he did it all from the comfort of his chair, with zero risk to himself?

I thought it was a Mirage 2000 from the thumbnail, I'm a bit disappointed.
Nice DEFA 791, tho.

That is a very interesting premise, and along with stuff other people mentioned like , , and it could easily be something I want to play. Though in relation to the last idea, I'd downplay the acquisition of information and probably do it as an off-screen event that the players can influence. Otherwise it can quickly become the main drive of the game with the drone gimmick that may or may not work well.

Personally, I'd do it so that the players are given an number of potential targets they can decide from, with limited information given. They can then, on the amount time available either run a reconnaissance mission one one target to obtain more information and then deciding whenever or not to run a mission there. Or they can run two missions on targets they only have limited information and may be a hospital and/or orphanage. The mission to obtain intelligence would similarly be simulated instead of role played to further emphasize the detachment felt from being a drone operator away from the battlefield.

Depending on the player's performance they might then either get a stern warning or be sent to a military court for war crimes (basically game over), or if they do well, have more advanced drones and hardware put at their disposal.

Roll d6
1-3: Target destroyed, receive medal
4-6: Oops, you bombed a refugee camp and some barefoot eight year old brown kid with an iphone uploaded the video to youtube, now it's all over CNN. gg, court martial

Is this the Israeli anons getting all over the board again?

idk, I read some stuff a year or so back about psychological effects of drone warfare, shit's not okay and it'd be interesting to factor it into the game

Drone Cucks - Teh Animu

How's anime related?

Girls and Panzer - so Drones and guys

That kinda sounds like a stretch, I have to say. The animu boogyeman isn't so omnipresent that every instance of humans interacting with technology references it...

Because even though they're not their, the stakes are real. Don't do drone wars against poor Afghani's just trying to grow some hash to feed their families, have drone wars against Chinese ultranationalists who are going to nuke new york in 2 hours if you don't take out their base.

Problem is that thus far I don't think there's much historical precedence for serious, offensive use of drones against a modern military with capabilities like air control and defense. I don't think modern drones are built to handle these kinds of missions - that's part of why militaries still keep whole squadrons manned jet fighters and the pilots to fly them. Drones are excellent against barefoot guerillas with kalashnikovs because their RELATIVE cheapness (true, they're not cheap, but they're WAAAAY cheaper than fighters, and training a fighter pilot is a massive investment AND a massive accompanying risk of losing them) serves to kinda even out one of the biggest advantage with the strategy (i.e. the enemy will run out of jets long before you run out of farmers with kalashnikovs) while at the same time not sacrificing much in the way of effectiveness since those kinds of forces rarely have any counter for them.

Against China, or any other country with a modern military, with RADAR, and its own fighter squadrons, and anti-air batteries, and electronic warfare umbrellas, a drone's not going to get anywhere near the target.

So, Shadowrun with a party of riggers, mages, and deckers?

> Meet with the Johnson
> Two drones with smiley faces painted on under the cameras
> Hacker watches on security camera
> Rime of frost around the table due to the mage

> Try to get intel from local gangs
> They just try and steal the drones
> Get intel as the drones escape

> Get captured by corpsec
> Self-destruct the drones
> Buy new ones
> Try again tomorrow

> GM gets fed up, demands the PCs show up IN PERSON
> Bunch of overweight weak-chinned neckbeards with no social graces seated around a table
> One refuses to leave his PMV, has to have drinks poured into the intake
> One turns up late, had been telecommuting from Japan the whole time
> Another turns out to just be a matrix ghost, and attending via drone is the best they can do

You sound like a liberal cuckold that doesn't know many drone operators.

Make a rule where if you lose your drone doing some dumb bullshit you have to pay for it yourself.

What sorts of personal combat can a drone operator engage in? Be mugged on the way back home from the office and draw a pistol?

The waybill see this working would be to have your PC's work for a mercenary group and have to self finance their drones. Have an upgrade tree for their drones, make them fork out cash for new parts and repairs and pay them for doing missions well. If you make the setting somewhat futuristic you could have a lot of variety, including land based drones and other bits and bobs. Could be fun.

This is pretty much what the game would boil down to. Whether a drone operator succeeds or fails has less to do with his own performance and more to do with the performance of the guys giving him his intel.

I cannot imagine any way to make it fun or to incorporate roleplaying elements in a way that wouldn't be incredibly hamfisted.

Drone operators are not invulnerable.

A lot of the fighting could be based around trying to outmaneuver the enemy so they can strike command centers while preventing the enemy from getting a shot at them.

ECM-heavy environments could necessitate moving the operators closer to the front lines, putting them at greater risk.

And even though their bodies aren't always in danger, their minds are. PTSD is more likely to develop in second-line troops, which the operators would be.

Also, there is evidence showing that because drone operators are better able to see the people they kill (IR cameras are a hell of a drug) compared to the average rifleman (who usually only knows the general direction the enemy is in and oftentimes never sees the actual people shooting at him), they face a greater emotional/psychological toll. They face a situation similar to some snipers/marksmen who are able to watch the bodies of the people they shoot lose their heat signatures - literally watching what death does to the workings of the body in real time.

A drone operator campaign could have a greater opportunity for existential crisis and war crime plots.

>Ctrl+F Transhuman Space
>No results
Come on guys get those Cybershells

Ender's Game?

This is a terrible, terrible idea.

>Legal
Meh, my superiors are probably responsible for that.
>Moral
Eh. Everybody dies eventually.

Sort of a related question, but:

How come people say drone operators are more susceptible to PTSD than frontline troopers? Shouldn't it be the other way around, given that they, you know, don't actually face any hardship and are sitting the whole time in front of their computers basically playing video games?

I don't know if PTSD is an accurate description of what these people end up experiencing, but they aren't playing games. When they push a button someone dies for real, it just happens to be as easy as a game would have been. Being able to kill people from relative safety like that has to feel pretty bad, it's just a different kind of bad to pulling a trigger.

See:

>Also, there is evidence showing that because drone operators are better able to see the people they kill (IR cameras are a hell of a drug) compared to the average rifleman (who usually only knows the general direction the enemy is in and oftentimes never sees the actual people shooting at him), they face a greater emotional/psychological toll. They face a situation similar to some snipers/marksmen who are able to watch the bodies of the people they shoot lose their heat signatures - literally watching what death does to the workings of the body in real time.

PTSD is also more likely to develop in second-line troops in general. There are a lot of factors, but most of it boils down to support. The disorder is a reaction (or overreaction) to being put in danger, and it's best combated by an environment that lets the brain know that the danger has passed. Troops in combat have each other to rely on, and PTSD most often forms in people who don't have any kind of supportive community.

But second line troops are often close enough to the fighting to know that mortal danger is right around the corner (what constitutes the "front line" is always in motion), but they never know when they'll turn that corner, or when they'll back away from it. They live in a mortal limbo, and the that perpetual uncertainty is damaging.

What causes their PTSD to form is that people don't recognize what they do as being in "real danger," so rather then being told that the danger has passed, they're told that the danger was never there in the first place, and they're not giving the chance to work through the emotional toll - they're told they're weak, cowardly, and somehow not a "real" soldier, and that's what causes the disorder to take root.

Add to that what was said above - drone operators face the lethal consequences of their actions in a way that even the average rifleman doesn't - and you have a recipe for psychological disaster.

Also, you might be interested in this:

vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger

Question is, why do we care if a bunch of killers feel like shit for doing it? That's good. That's normal. If they feel like shit to way past breaking point, even better, maybe they'll choose a better career path next time.

I really don't understand why people have sympathy for these folks - they know they signed up to be murderers-for-hire. That's all a military is when you get past the false air of nobility and 'protecting our families' nonsense. It's like, "You live in Arkansas dude, ain't nobody bombing your ass."

They have lives to go back to at the end of the work day and your disapproval has no bearing on this.

So did the guys on the other side, except they got shot instead and no longer exist.

Yeah, no, still not feeling sorry for the 'winners'. It's good that treatment exists, don't get me wrong, but it shouldn't be wasted on people who did ask for this.

What about people who live in countries where the military isn't a career choice for people without college degrees? What about people who need to fight because their families are in danger?

Does it hurt to be this retarded? I mean, really, why take care of soldiers, right? It's not life they have a Shit job that they took because, for a good portion, it leads directly into education and better jobs. Fuck, why do we need rational, stable people who are trained to kill?

Go back to tumblr, libfag.

No, Israelfag, your family is not actually being threatened by Palestinian girls playing skip rope in the street. You just call it that because it makes your bombing them with missiles sound better than "ethnic cleansing", because that's something that only ever happens to poor innocent Jews :^(

>but it shouldn't be wasted on people who did ask for this
It's a risk of the job that they knowingly chose, are you saying that you shouldn't get treatment for something you know is a hazard of your work?

>Sorry buddy, you signed up to be a lumberjack, you knew you'd be working with chainsaws and that you were at risk of chopping something off. Yeah, I bet you didn't think it'd happen to you, but you knew it happened, so you don't deserve treatment.

That picture of a fish looking at a hook, with a thought bubble "there isn't even any bait on this hook".

...says every edgelord, until he actually kills people.

Not an argument.

How about a game about military secretaries who make the officers coffee?