My Life As A Gamer: How Patron-Level Play Restores RPGs To Their Wargame Roots

Continuing this talk of Jeffro's rediscoveries, today I'll focus on Patron-level Play.

The game presumes that a character will become sufficiently influential so as to become a patron to others. Most people conflate this with Name Level and Domain Play, but this actually begins much earlier with characters taking on Henchmen, and it becomes obvious that this is intended to be available from the beginning as soon as timekeeping is properly executed.

A character cannot be everywhere at once. As noted yesterday, ensuring that time actually matters means that someone will want or need something done that they are either unable or unwilling to do themselves. That creates an opportunity for gameplay right there, depending on what the character in question wants or needs to delegate.

In terms more familiar to too many players, a character can both give and receive quests. Those delegating tasks to another is the Patron. Those agreeing to execute those quests on the Patron's behalf are the Clients, and they will want compensation for their time and effort. If you recognize this as the basis of mercenary or itinerant work, which is the backbone of mediocre Pink Slime fantasy, good for you.

There is more to this. As regular fantasy gamers will expect, there is an obvious place for Non-Player Characters to be patrons great and small. However, these are not mere bots that dispense makework and pay out like you're working a job. They are full-fledged actors in the campaign, with ambitions and objectives of their own, and therefore that NPC Ogre chieftain can be delegated by the Dungeon Master to a player to run.

Now we see another way that the wargame roots reveal themselves. Players playing at the Patron level do not need to be at the table. They can send direct messages to the DM, engaging in defacto Play-By-Mail double-blind wargame play, which allows for players that have to be absent to maintain participate in the campaign. It also allows for players to directly interact--at DM discretion--either to collaborate or to conflict. If you recognize this as Diplomacy, then you're on the right track.

The DM no longer needs to directly inject gameplay scenarios into the game once players, by one route or another, engage Patron-level play. All he needs to do is to work out the effects, the consequences, of an action and report those back. Players take the wheel and begin driving play, soon working both with and against one another, expanding the scope and scale of play as they go in manners that the DM alone would not or could not do.

Let's put this into a typical example:

• Mary recently had a baby. She cannot be at the table for a while. Mary's most successful character is a Magic-User. Her MU is 9th level, and she wants to start driving major expansion of the campaign by creating a teleportation network. This will require, first and foremost, a secure headquarters from which to run this operation. Mary takes the time while the baby's down for a nap to get on her phone, open up Discord, and drop a line to the DM about this course of action.
• The DM gets Mary's message. He reports to her the steps her MU will need to take to make this happen, starting with establishing that headquarters, which will require a tower and some land around it so her MU can conduct research and development without external intervention.
• After some back-and-forth, Mary delegates what she can to her Henchmen; this results in the revelation of an Ogre tribe contesting the area Mary's MU wants.
• The Ogre tribe is assigned to George, who's aboard an aircraft carrier out in the Pacific. George writes his moves to the DM, who adjudicates the two players' orders and reports results. Mary decides to put forth a bounty on the Ogres, while George decides the Ogres will call upon their god for aid.
• Dick hears from a campaign email about the bounty, but his Figher is laid up so he takes his Thief and calls up Larry and Dave. They drop the DM a line about pursuing this bounty, so they make a table appointment and the scenario is played out with their characters and the collected Henchmen and hirelings to tackle it. The DM reports the results to Mary and George, who then email the DM to request parley with the other party (i.e. directly intereact).
• Dick's Thief levels up from the bounty's proceeds, so he takes his remaining funds to commission some new gear while his Thief trains and his Fighter comes off the bench. In the meantime, Dick takes over running an Elf warband that appeared on the fringes recently, prompting Larry and Dave to get their Cleric and Druid duo together to go open relations.

You can see how things snowball quickly, once the players stop waiting for things to happen and start making things happen, and people that aren't even able to be at the table can get and stay involved in the campaign by resorting to Patron-level play. It requires that the DM remain available to contact, which is why I say that something like an email address or a Discord server should be made available, but once this wargaming style of play begins the DM ceases to need any external input for gameplay- no modules, no homebrews, nothing at all.

Let me say that again: There is no need to buy modules or anything else once this gets going. The players emergently generate gameplay scenarios without trying.

Is this not something complete different than what you are used to? This is proper RPG gameplay, and if you think this is confined to Dungeons & Dragons, then you are mistaken. You can readily apply this to Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, RIFTS, Champions, and a whole lot more. Tabletop RPGs are a wargame medium at its heart, and once you see this you won't unsee it.

And the more players you have in the campaign, the sooner this dynamic takes off and quickly reveals how fractal it is. The manuevers of high-level characters will open up opportunities for lower-level ones, and the opportunities exist for lower-level characters to aid or hinder higher-level ones depending on what tasks are delegated. (Cleric needs stone for a castle? Your evil Fighter, despite being 1st level, can mess that up by raiding the quarry.)

Each campaign quickly acquires its unique quality due to this dynamic playing out, and as such this is where the magic begins to happen. You can't replicate this with MMOs--not even EVE Online, though it gets close--and Pink Slime fantasy doesn't even try. This is unique to tabletop RPGs, but it is not commercially viable, which is why it is suppressed.