How I learned to relinquish control and embrace the BrOSR 1- Where I explain the problems
I’ve fallen in with a bad crowd, as my parents would say (and have said many times), and I want to talk about the good things that came from this. To do so however, we need to talk about where I start out from.
Stay a while and listen…
I started playing around the time 4e came out. I’d been sort of aware of the existence of something called ‘Dee and Dee’, but no one I knew played it. However, around the time of the 4e release, Penny Arcade and PvP did a series of podcasts where they played the game, and it struck a chord with me. I’ve been hooked ever since, but it’s not been an easy journey.
I'm writing all of this out just as much as a form of therapy as it is about showing this way of playing to you guys. Furthermore, by doing so I hope further sharpen my thoughts on it. I have this jumble of thoughts in my head, and by writing them out I hope to untangle them and make sense of them.
The Cycle of Pain
Stop me if this sounds familiar to you. You plan to start a campaign. You have an idea for a story, and you write an elevator pitch. You hand the pitch to friends, you wait a few weeks, ask again, and four people reply they’d be interested in joining. They make characters, write 2 page backstories and you agonise a few weeks over how to incorporate those into the grand narrative, or if you can’t: write separate arcs for each of them. You start out excited, and the first few sessions go well. You spend hours doing prep, creating encounters and situations for your players to interact with. You have to be real careful, because you almost killed one of the players with an encounter earlier, and probably would’ve if you hadn’t fudged the numbers.
But soon the rot starts setting in.
You realise that players forget your NPCs, forget what happened 4 sessions ago. You start, as the kids say, to burn out on the heavy prep you need to do before each session, which could probably run from anywhere from 1:2 prep:play time up to 3:1, depending. You have a conversation, and you go from weekly sessions to twice per month.
More problems arise. A player goes through a major life event, and scheduling becomes a pain. On average you’re now doing one session per month. You have a conversation, and you come to the conclusion this isn’t going to work out. He drops from the game. You find a replacement, but you were in the middle of that character’s personal arc, so sessions are uncomfortable for a while, and the new player isn’t well versed in what happens before and he stays the odd one out.
You also start noticing that much of your prep goes unused because the players decide to go off the story arcs you lay out for them. You fret over whether this is due to them not being interested, or because it just wasn’t clear to them which way they were ‘supposed’ to go. To soothe your own ego you buy into the meme that your players lose 50 IQ points when they sit down at your table. Otherwise you'd have to admit it might be you either making things unclear, or even worse: telling a story and having them not be interested.
Because of this you stop prepping and just make stuff up as you go along. At first this feels like a breath of fresh air. The pain of players ignoring your cues and story threads are gone, because you’re making everything up on the fly. You have some issues with combat at first, until you find out that numbers can be made up as you go along, and have monsters die when it’s narratively convenient.
But somehow the magic is gone, and you realise that ever since the sixth session your interest in the campaign has been declining at a slow but steady pace. Like the frog in the pot, you only notice now. You have two choices ahead of you. Either you let the campaign die, or you push through. The latter is hard. Your last few months of meandering and making stuff up on the spot have left things narratively in shambles, and you spend hours figuring out a path back to your original storyline. You may manage, and when you do and bring it to a close your players will congratulate you and themselves on bringing the campaign to a successful closure.
Meanwhile you’re dying inside, thinking to yourself “there must be a better way”. You dread starting a new campaign and going through this whole charade again, but knowing deep down you will. You might try other systems, other genres, or short episodic campaigns, hoping that might fix these issues. These 'fixes'might patch over them for a while, with the novelty being enough to keep things interesting. However, the shine of that will fade with time, and the same cracks in the firmaments will become visible again and again.
A path less travelled
Now, no one is going to be jumping up and down going “oh god yes, that’s me down to a tee. Show me the light, Bosman! Lead me to the promised land With One Simple Trick”. These are experiences from over roughly 15 years of gaming all crammed together in a single package to show what my issues have been running games in what we'd now call the 'traditional' way. It’s not going to be universal, and what might bother some people might work for others, but for those who do struggle in the same ways, maybe I can show you what I’ve been doing and how it impacted my campaign.
This is not a simple solution though, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. There isn’t some trick you can do to patch onto your campaign and magically solve all your problems. This approach is a framework. If the firmaments are unstable no amount of scaffolding will be a long-term solution.
But what is this ‘BrOSR’ thing?
The BrOSR is a group of people (Jeffro, Bdubz or the many others) with a very peculiar idea: “what if we played ADnD as written, with all of the rules”. Those of you with little knowledge of ADnD may think “oh, that’s… a thing?”, while people who have read those books might be calling a helpline to get these guys the psychological attention they so obviously need. ADnD is complex. Some would argue needlessly so. However, they argued ‘Gygax placed these rules here for a reason, and unless you play with them it might not be obvious why’. They may not be the first to do things this way, and I'll talk about some other places where I've seen the same or similar ideas. However they're the primary ones where I first saw them all put together.
Because there's an additional thing they do: they show their work. They aren’t a bunch of armchair theorists saying “oh yeah, I thought about this hard and thought through all possible consequences”'. They tried these things in their game, and either blogposted about this or live tweeted their results, whether they were positive or negative. You can read through several entire campaign posts on blogs, or trawl through old twitter posts and see what they did. It can be rather interesting to see their evolution and what worked for them and what not.
All of this being said: there are plenty of people who take issue with the BrOSR, either because of what they’re saying or how they’re saying it. The second I’ll address simply by this: don’t throw out the baby in the bathwater. Behind the facade of their kayfabe on twitter and other public platforms there's a lot of highly intelligent people doing really interesting things.
The first I'll try to address over the course of the next few thousand words, as I try to explain firstly two separate posts the two major principles the BrOSR see as the foundations of how they play differs from the norm. After that there'll be one or more posts to conclude, talk about some additional principles that either flow from the main two, or ar implicitly assumed beforehand, as well as to answer any questions I’ve gotten about this.
Until then, count your torches and keep mapping.