Making Rangers

The idea for rangers started with a different game. It was a one shot based on The Sprawl, a cyber punk PBTA game, that I played at a local TTRPG meetup. My friend who was running it had made his own homebrew setting, taking the core story of the Sprawl and flavoring it to Southern GA, crafting his own lore based on a catastrophic virus destroying the Internet and replacing networked computing with offline super computers

One session, pursued by various corporate factions, we decide to hang out in an old state park. I managed to convince everyone that we should use an actual state park (Fort Mountain to be exact, even though it’s more North GA). As the game moved into combat, I pulled up the state park map on my phone and we used it to plot out the combat, fighting our way through corporate mercs to the only exit from the park.

I’ve always liked games that take place on real geography, and that one shot got me thinking, what if I made a game that revolved around the real geography of state parks.

For a while I noodled on the idea, not really putting much effort into it until Thanksgiving of last year when I decided to really start thinking more deeply about it. As an experiment I decided to try using claude.ai as a brainstorming partner, which was a great way to explore what I wanted the game to be like.

Because I wanted maps to be central to the game, I quickly realized I was looking at a tactical, defense based game. The rangers had to be defending the park, because otherwise how could they be constrained to the map? From there I started asking Claude to throw out different ideas for how i might design the victory and defeat mechanics. It suggested a whole slew of things, like countdowns, clocks, objectives, but what stood out to me was the idea of waves. That the game would be about waves of enemies that you had to prepare for and defeat.

When I started to explore what a wave would really look like I again asked Claude for a list of ideas specifically focusing on ideas that let waves be light abstractions without crunchy star blocks. The idea the drew me immediately was the idea of a threat pool, that players would attempt to drive down to zero to banish the wave. At this point I realized this was basically like a classic tower defense game. Waves of enemies, with time for prep in between them.

I noodled on the structure of waves and turns and other detail for a while, but the game still wasn’t quite coming together. One problem I was struggling with, and which Claude pointed out explicitly, was it was unclear how should the GM play. Should they be tactical and antagonistic, an opponent to the players trying to win? Should they follow predictable and mechanical rules? Roll lots of dice for randomness?

I didn’t like any of these answers. I’ve always been most motivated by narrative and story telling and was coming to realize that some of the more tactical aspects of this game might constrain GM and player storytelling freedom. I’d constructed an interesting mechanical system but where was the story telling some of the game?

I wrestled with this problem for a while before I realized the answer was in the comparison i had made earlier to tower defense games. After all what’s the way every classic tower defense game ends? The enemy waves grow and grow and grow until eventually you are overwhelmed. The game isn’t about winning. It’s about survival, and about the desperate struggle

I started to think of my game the same way. I started to think about movies like Rogue One, where the heroes don’t “win” but they heroically struggle against any overwhelming enemy and extract something of value even as they are defeated. From here the idea of a three act structure emerged. First players prepare and set the narrative stage. Then they engage in a careful, tactical fight with the stakes ramping up and their losses mounting. Then something breaks, the losses become to much and they’re forced into heroically reckless gambles that pay off in spite of the odds. To make this work, I looked to token based systems like I had seen modelled in a number of D20 seasons. During the first two phases players would gain tokens as a reward for interesting narrative choices, and then be encouraged to spend them liberally in the thread phase for big heroic moments. This was the core structure I was looking for.

After a few weeks refining the details, the rough idea of a game about state parks had coalesced into a clear vision. Now I just needed to get to work on the assets that would let me playtest things.