# carry: a game about war tags: #game/rpg/carry ![[carry (cover).jpg|600]] **carry. a game about war.** — note the period — is Nathan D. Paoletta's short-form roleplaying game about American Marines in the Vietnam War, and one of the quiet landmarks of the indie side of the hobby. It is emphatically not a combat simulator and never claims to be. The war itself is backdrop, color, and pressure; what the game is actually about is what war does to the men carrying it. You play a **Grunt** drawn from a fixed cast of fifteen soldiers, each loaded down with a **Burden** the table builds together, and you carry that burden — and each other — all the way to the endgame. It is designed to be played to a finish in a single sitting, three to five hours, and to leave the table feeling the weight of having carried something. ## Setting The setting isn't a country so much as a memory. **carry** situates its story in the collective, slightly romanticized-but-not-trivialized view of Vietnam handed down by its iconic fictions — Tim O'Brien's *The Things They Carried*, Oliver Stone's *Platoon*, and Stanley Kubrick's *Full Metal Jacket* — which are the game's three stated inspirations. You need no military expertise to play; the game leans on what you've absorbed from culture, and says plainly that it prefers that to a tactical briefing. Play revolves around the tensions, conflicts, and psychological damage embedded in a squad of US Marines: the convictions, people, and values that let a man resist shock, fear, and madness. It's a human drama, not a war drama. The **Squad** is a preset cast of fifteen men — three fire teams of four, a Sergeant who leads them, a radioman carrying the field radio, and a Navy Corpsman medic. Players pick their Grunts from these fifteen; the Marines nobody chose are **Fodder**, played by the GM, and the Fodder are the ones who die. There are no win or lose conditions the mechanics enforce. You're meant to play with emotional honesty and see what arrives. ## Mechanics Character creation is collaborative and fast. Each Grunt player writes a personal issue on an index card — "girlfriend back home," "must prove himself to the squad," "loves to kill" — then everyone passes their cards around, each player adding a second line that's a cause, symptom, or further expression of the first, and then a third, until every **Burden** reads as three sentences gestalted into one loaded thing. The cards come back to their authors and get read aloud to the table, and only then do you pick the Grunt who'll carry it. ### Profiles and Approaches Each Grunt carries one of six **Profiles** — **Accuser, Brawler, Companion, Invincible, Soldier, Warrior** — which shift during play as the man is worn down or transformed. When a conflict breaks out in a **Squad scene**, you declare an **Approach — Peaceful, Subversive, Honorable, or Violent** — and your Profile and Approach together cap the size of the die you may commit from your dice pool, per an approach table. Everyone rolls the die they picked; whoever rolls highest gets their **Stakes**; everyone else faces their **Counterstakes**. Grunt-versus-Grunt ties break first by die size rolled, then by the largest remaining pool, and a tie between a Grunt and the GM always goes to the Grunt. Anyone losing may **Push** the conflict to keep going, committing dice and switching Approach to claw a way back in. ### The Dice Go Around The resolution has real fiscal gravity. Your dice pool is a persistent stock you spend through the night, and the dice you roll get passed to the other players, feeding their pools; the GM's rolled dice leave the game entirely. So as trust and grudges form, so does the table's dice economy, which is part of why the thing hums. ### Scenes and the Shape of Play Three scene types carry the arc. **Squad scenes** draw out the Grunts' Burdens and the conflict between men who have to trust each other under fire. **Action scenes** put the whole squad into a firefight, resolved with temporary action pools that generate **Fallout** — a pool the winner spends to injure and kill members of the squad. **Burden scenes** give a Grunt the chance to face the thing they carry head-on and try to change. As the Fodder fall and the squad whittles down to just Grunts, the pressure peaks into an **Endgame** where the Grunts themselves may finally die, before closing on **Epilogues** that fix each man's legacy. ### Safety The revised edition also folds in the tools the indie scene built after the original: up front, the table sets **lines and veils** over the heavy content the fiction genuinely explores — torture, cruelty, rape — and puts an **X-Card** (John Stavropoulos's safety tool, credited in the text) on the table, so anyone can stop a scene and wind it back without explanation. ## Editions - **First edition (2006)** — the original release of **carry. a game about war.**, by Nathan D. Paoletta / ndp design, written for the Iron Game Chef: Historical contest in 2005 and published standalone the next year. *(Not the edition in the library.)* - **Revised edition (2016)** — the 10th-anniversary edition, edited and re-organized by Adam Dray, with clarified and expanded rules, entirely rewritten examples, corrections to the squad's Marine Corps structure, and the addition of the content-safety tools. Print ISBN 978-0-9863762-3-8. *(In the library: the revised core rulebook and the official play aids.)* ## References - [carry. a game about war. — official site (ndp design)](https://ndpdesign.com/carry) - [carry. a game about war. revised edition — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194309/carry-a-game-about-war-revised-edition)