Recently I have started participating in one of the ongoing large scale BROSR Braunsteins, specifically Drakonheim, on recommendation. There is a lot to take in and I am still getting up to speed with what participating actually looks like. However, a few of their rules and practices have already fascinated me and I want to write a little about what I’ve discovered on the inside.
I will probably make another post at some point detailing what a Braunstein actually is, what differentiates these big open table, 1:1 time games from the sort of campaigns we have been running to provide context to the unaware. Put simply they are campaigns which generate convergence and interaction around resources and shared objectives by placing players in control of factions or individual actors with similar agency. I think. I am not an expert admittedly.
There are two anecdotes I have pulled from the campaign’s FAQ that are of great interest to me.
Q : I want to amass resources until I am invincible. A : Think about how to include other players instead. Some resource gathering is required to enact plans, but this is a game that we all want to enjoy. Be creative, sneaky, and devious, but play with the good of the game in mind.
Q : I want my character to do everything in secret. I’ll go to great lengths to describe how this is possible. Will that make it so there won’t be any public posts about what I’m doing? A : No. Player interaction is the key to the game. The fog of war can’t be too thick or the game will die. Whatever actions are taken, there will almost certainly be gossip.
What intrigues me about these rules is that they are completely non-diegetic, and are concessions made to promote pro-social behavior that enables the game to actually take place. As far as I understand these anecdotes represent hard won wisdom about how these behaviors (turtling, secrecy-maxxing) may represent earnest attempts to “win” in the game space but result in a game that is not actually interesting to play. There is a quantum observer effect at play wherein the game must be acknowledged as such. Agency cannot be construed to necessarily mean you can, or perhaps should, do whatever you want in-game in a literal sense.
This raises interesting questions about the nature of roleplaying games on a fairly fundamental level. What is the expressed purpose of the exercise of the the game? Turns out, it is the DMs job to make sure the game is fun…
That of course, is still hogwash. The DMs job, as Macris puts it in Arbiter of Worlds is to create an environment where players could have fun. Which is precisely what these rules do. They promote convergence. It is imperative players understand that it is in fact more fun when their plans go awry or something falls apart. “Losing is fun” - an ancient dwarf fortress adage. I think the DF grognards were closing in on a similar concept, convergence is fun and interesting and divergence is not. It’s not accurate to say that losing is fun, it’s more so that the game world is finite in so far as it can only exist on the endless imaginative and bookkeeping labor of its creators. If you wish for something interesting to occur the threads of the game must be doubling back upon each other.
In some multiplayer video games, there is a technical problem where the further players travel from the host the laggier the game gets as it struggles to keep track what’s around each wayward player. I’m describing the TTRPG equivalent of that problem. One of the consequences of this, however, is players must give up conflict-averting measures which implicitly cause divergence. This does on some level represent a loss of agency. This may cause you to lose. When two factions come up against the same objective, there will be a winner and a loser. I am a believer though that these interactions occurring at all is the implicit goal of a roleplaying game. Whether they are occurring between the DMs NPCs and his players or disparate groups of players working with and against one another.