Take a quick look at your average World War II-themed game and you’re likely to find a heavy emphasis on weapons. Whether it’s loot crates full of skins for BARs and M1 Garands raining down on the beaches of Normandy in Call of Duty: WW2 or the Panzer variants featured in Company of Heroes, games about war are often games about firearms and tanks, and much less about the people who fought in the hedgerows and trenches. A developer named Luke Hughes aims to change that with the forthcoming Burden of Command .

While it’s set in World War II and involves a healthy dose of battlefield tactics, Hughes is emphatic that Burden of Command is not a wargame, at least not in the traditional sense. The keyword for Green Tree Games, where he’s the project lead for Burden of Command, is leadership. As he describes it, Burden of Command is a “leadership role-playing game.”

“How do people react to these severe things, like fighting in the trenches of World War 1? I’m extremely interested in how people respond [to these situations] morally, spiritually, and emotionally,” Hughes said. He’s particularly fascinated with how these experiences forge leaders, and the goal of Burden of Command is to teach players something about leadership.

“Eisenhower said, strikingly, that one of the few things that can be learned is leadership,” said Hughes, whose own academic background includes a PhD in AI from Yale and a master’s degree in neurophysiology and psychology from Oxford.

There’s a weird paucity of titles that actually dig into the idea of what it means to be a leader. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard is a kind of leader by dint of the series’ story, but the decisions you make as Shepard tend to be personal, and the outcomes of those choices only color the path you take through the predetermined narrative. Wargames try to recreate the complexity and scale of battle, but in the process individual soldiers disappear into abstract unit counters. For all the games we have about commanders and tactics, few of them ever try to say anything about leadership. Because it turns out that leadership is difficult to simulate.

Hughes said they’re taking inspiration from what he calls “psychological games,” titles like This War of Mine, Crusader Kings II, and Darkest Dungeon—_games that all prominently feature permadeath of characters. _Burden of Command is using that mechanic to underscore the fact that leaders bear the responsibility for the lives of the soldiers they command.

Modern militaries tend to agree with him: The U.S. Army’s set of core values is summed up with the mnemonic LDRSHIP (for loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage). Junior officers and cadets go through training that routinely assigns them more to do than they can feasibly accomplish with available time and resources, forcing them to learn how to make tough choices and triage priorities. Sergeants take lengthy leadership courses at every stage of promotion.

Burden of Command follows a historical company of U.S. soldiers, part of the Army’s 7th Infantry Regiment “ Cottonbalers ,” through some of the now-familiar beats of World War II. And even though if you squint a bit the game might look like a familiar wargame complete with hexes and unit counters, its focus is on relationships rather than rounds of ammunition and armor levels.

“Look, there’s been enough games that have gone, ‘It’s tough to go to war,’ and This War of Mine does a lovely job of the emotional and psychological experience of being in a conflict zone,” he said. “But very few games have covered what it’s like to be responsible for people’s lives in that situation, which is an extra and unusual burden.”

For Hughes, empathy and what he calls “emotional authenticity” are the focal points for the design of Burden of Command. The studio has set out a rather prickly design problem: synthesizing battlefield tactics and doctrine with moral decisions about how to respond to the needs of your men in a way that’s both historically accurate and engaging on a deep level. And to do this, they’ve shifted their focus away from rounds per minute statistics and onto the psychological concept of suppression—which is, essentially, the tactical application of fear.

“Most games treat firepower as the essence—I mean, pick a shooter. It’s all about landing those bullets, that’s how you win. Wargames too, for that matter, focus on firepower,” Hughes explained. “In our game, it’s all about fear of death. So when you fire at the enemy, you probably don’t kill them. If they’re not fools and running around in the open, they’re probably down on the ground, behind some cover, and you’re not going to hit them.”

Estimates vary, but during World War II it took something on the order of 8,000 rounds of ammunition to inflict a single enemy casualty. Keeping enemy soldiers pinned down with rifle and machine gun fire was often much more important than actually scoring hits for most infantry operations, and as Hughes explains, making that final push toward the enemy required not only courage but also an incredible amount of trust in leadership. It came down to a leader’s ability to inspire his troops for them to make that charge over the berm and—hopefully—secure a surrender or retreat from the suppressed enemy troops on the opposite side of the line.