Helldivers 2 lead says the game's farcical comedy was inspired by tabletop games like D&D—and he's nowhere near the first dev to worship at the altar of pen and paper

I've written a touch about Helldivers 2's slapstick deaths, reinforced by rapid respawns and a low punishment for beefing it—its Magika-esque friendly fire systems also contributing to its 'Warhammer 40k Gone Wrong' vibes. It joins Lethal Company as a game where dying is just inherently funny, each panicked, scrambling doom its own punchline.

Arrowhead Games history of games centred around friendly fire fun is—according to the studio's CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt—directly inspired by the chaos of tabletop roleplaying (thanks, GamesRadar). 

"[Comedy] is absolutely what I'm going for when I design games. The concept originates from years of playing [pen and paper] RPGs, where the players manage to turn everything into a farce. No matter if it's Cthulhu or D&D, it always ends with us crying of laughter."

As someone with a vested interest in running tabletop myself, Pilestedt is bang on the money here. The improv nature of most TTRPG games always leads to a chaotic network of stacking consequences, which can easily result in four grown adults giggling like school children around a bunch of dice and pencils. 

That word choice—'farce'—describes it perfectly. A good old-fashioned farcical comedy is built on physical humour, absurd situations, and unlikely circumstances—all things the whims of the dice help to enable. In a bi-weekly Sunday game I play over discord, the ongoing debate over whether horses actually exist or not has grown into a running joke that raises my cleric's blood pressure while I remain in stitches.

Helldivers 2 doesn't have a single dice roll in it, but it does occupy the same space by virtue of every mission being a playground. Here's a video of one player having a grenade hucked back at them by a bug completely on accident, to which Pilestedt replies: «this is the reason why you always simulate everything even though it doesn't make sense at the time.» You can almost picture the DM saying: 'You rolled a natural one? Uh. The grenade