My Life As A Gamer: The Keys To Making A Campaign Real

Over the weekend, this exchange went down.

I'm glad you asked, this is one way;https://t.co/8S0oEcrto7

— Macho Mandalf the White (@LL_929) August 14, 2022

His blog post is here, and if you haven't read Mandalf's campaign blog in its entirety then you should. It's as good as Jeffro's campaign reports for showing how the #BROSR has recovered true campaign play by providing concrete examples. Mandalf's creation of Puglins has been a watershed event in the campaign to date.

In the course of that Twitter thread, it comes out that Trollopoulous in general delegates Domain-level and Patron-level affairs to those players concerned, calling upon the Dungeon Master only as required.

People who are not used to this level of agency will be confounded by it. They are long accustomed to being little more than token-pushers obediently being lead by the nose, so it is no surprise that their reactions how things are meant to be done astonishes and confounds them.

This is why we emphasize the wargaming roots of RPGs. If you never played Diplomacy, then Domain and Patron play will be alien to you. If you never so much as watched a video on how real wargaming shaped real-world events, then you cannot comprehend what is possible outside of scouring dungeons and killing monsters as if this were a really shitty proto-Diablo.

There is something else to consider here: not all Domain/Patron level stuff concerns itself with commanding territory. Consider, for example, the possibility of a character who's ambition is not to rule a Domain, but rather to establish an influential institution; this is the sort of thing you may see more often with Magic-Users and Illusionists over others, in the form of a Mage Guild, but how about a Thief who uses his Thief Guild not as a criminal gang but rather as an intelligence network with the front organization being something like a Cartographer's Guild or Exploration Society.

Now we can consider the possibility of multiple Patrons engaging in Domain-level affairs within the same space as their affairs are, at the least, not conflicting. Paladin Lord Robert The Pure may pursue his ambition of establishing a Christian kingdom while his associate Shad The Chad establishes his Surveyor's Society as a front for his spy netwok; Shad's totally-legitimate-my-lord mapping surveys just happen to coincide with discovering the locations of notorious monsters, evil intruders, and other things that might pique Robert's interest. Both could be run by different players, but nonetheless operating in the same space.

Folks really aren't seeing the potential in Domain and Patron play here. Those classic campaigns last as they do in part due to players taking the initiative to handle subsets of campaign affairs on their own, including running play sessions.

Why would anyone want to play otherwise? Do it this way, or the lame standard way which amounts to "I wanna play a console RPG, but lamer and slower with shittier controls." (Hint: This is why most people bounce off tabletop RPGs; there is nothing to them that consoles and PC games don't do better.)