The Business: The Way of the #BROSR Is How To Save MMOs

Following on from yesterday's post, I make this claim: The #BROSR shows the way out.

Curious? Good.

The success of the True RPG Campaign Paradigm rests on the following in addition to Rules As Written (from here):

• 1:1 time aka Jeffrogaxian timekeeping — The game world is tied to the real-world calendar. For each day that passes in the real world, a day passes in the game world. This may sound strange, but it turns out to be foundational to everything that the #BrOSR does. If you ever thought it was dumb that adventurers go from battling rats in sewers to assassinating demigods in a span of a couple weeks in contemporary games, rest easy. Gygax never intended the game to work that way!
• Faction play aka Chantsonian patrons — You may have noticed that high-level characters don’t really do much except give out quests and missions to the player characters in conventional games. The #BrOSR hands these roles over to players that don’t necessarily even show up to game sessions. What is mere scenery in most other games turns into a constantly developing backdrop that influences player character activities in countless ways.
• 1:10 scaling aka Chainmail scale battles — #BrOSR campaigns spontaneously generate exciting battles that integrate individual player characters and large army factions. Because D&D rules derive from a medieval miniatures game, it is trivial to resolve them without coming up with variant systems. It has never been easier to find, develop, and keep wargame opponents than with this approach to campaigning.
• An “always on” campaign made up of multiple interacting Braunsteins — #BrOSR campaigns create a framework that allows many different environments and situations to develop independently while all influence each other in surprising ways. Multiple Dungeon Masters find it trivial to coordinate their efforts and elite level patron players exercise many powers that are normally restricted to the DM.

Let's move this across media lines.

• 1:1 Time and Always On already exists. Time while online and logged in is already 1:1 because it cannot be otherwise. Most player-driven economies are likewise 1:1. The lacking element, with few exceptions (e.g. EVE Online), comes from character improvement; the norm is the ubiquitous "DING!" of instant Numbahs Go UP!
  
  
  
  
• This increase of friction should be widened in scope to eliminate default Fast Travel of all sorts; if players want it, they have to provide it themselves and maintain that service by their own efforts. Deliberate disabuse of default Muh Convenience is necessary and proper. This could be, and should be, widened to all forms of transactional activity.
• Patron-level play is the real endgame, and it needs to be in from the start. Again, we have this in a working form in EVE so it is possible, but that is not the only way to do it. For example, a player could pay a far higher subscription fee (say 100x) to play the Patron level of the game and thereby take control of a faction in the setting; this player can then engage in operations that generate content for other players to execute (for or against). This instantly solves the content problem by letting player pay for the privledge of doing so, leaving the implementation to the dev team.
• Wargame scaling isn't an issue; processing power is, which limits the scale to what the engine and the enduser's PC or console can handle. But otherwise this is a trivial matter to handle, as the details are what will trip this up (or not). Just look at EVE, Lineage 2, Guild Wars 2 and more.
  
  Therefore the solution is to remove default convenience and force players to make and maintain those things themselves, including having players become faction leaders or similar agents (Patrons) and make their operations the content generation machine of the game. No more need to have narrative wankers on your payroll. No more need to tell a story at all. You need solid mechanical engineers, coders, and QA teams to make sure that the rules and mechanics work as design and work as intended- then let the player tread roughshod over the setting with their sandaled feet.

Be a better wargame, and surrender narrative entirely. If it works at the core of the RPG, it works at every medium of RPGs. So do it. You will have an actual world again, that is massive and multiplayer by design from the get-go and it is worth it to retrofit existing MMOs to conform.