My Life As A Gamer: All Your Braunsteins Are Belong To Us

West End Games' TORG: Role-Playing The Possibility Wars proves that all real RPGs are wargame derivatives, and therefore are Braunsteins.

Here, in this one game, meant to showcase the clash of different adventure fiction genres, did West End inadvertantly let the mask slip back in 1990.

You have Generic Fantasy, the coolest Cyberpunk setting ever, corporate-focused thrillers, a good shot at proper Horror, the blend of Terminator and Hellrazer, Lost World (two takes, in time), and classic Hero Pulp (including early Supers) all built on a foundation that is Classic American Action Cinema that Cannon Films would approve of.

"But-"

Shut up, Anon.

Even though each genre's dominant tropes are represented as explicit rules mechanics, this is still a wargame, and West End explicitly structured their Organized Play as if they wanted a proper Braunstein but had no language for that and therefore struggled to think through how to do it (which is why their Organized Play campaign was as scuffed as it was, leading to the game's demise).

Your characters can go from genre to genre--sometimes in the same session of play--and across the board you're pursuing objectives, managing resources, dealing with Fog Of War, and the only Narrative logic is that which is hard-coded into the rules (and yes, those can be wielded by players as weapons).

Read the immediate backstory leading up the invasion and you see Patrons doing pre-launch manuevering and dealing just like what is going on right now on Twitter with #BROverloft, the #BROSR's Braunstein-style Patron/Domain play pre-game of an October event. You could even see the various High Lords (and Darkness Devices) shitposting at each other had social media existed in 1990.

(Hey, that's your cue guys.)

Imagine that TORG began as a bunch of guys playing the High Lords and doing Domain plays and starting their invasions. As the backstory shows, this inherently creates playable scenarios; it's just sad that West End decided to shunt all of that into a series of novels no one read rather than start the game right there (but that interferes with the Organized Play stuff).

The High Lords, and Core Earth's key power-players, are all engaged in a war for control of Core Earth's possibility energy. Storm Knights are the tactical-level operatives able to cross the boundaries between the realms without (much) risk to take the fight to the invaders. That's a wargame. It's played on the strategic and tactical scale. The Patrons and the agents can and do work at cross-purposes, don't work as a unit, don't do everything together, etc. That's a Braunstein.

Everything I wrote about previous about Braunsteins applies here; all you need to do is hand control of the High Lords and other key NPCs to players to run as Patrons because the game already assumes every last little thing that makes a game a Braunstein. It just does them incorrectly by keeping that all in the publisher's hands and leaving players with the specific tactical wargame scenarios we think of as "role-playing".

"But-"

Shut up, Anon. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that this can't apply to other similar games, aren't you?

from Arnold Schwarzenegger GIFs via Gfycat

What TORG makes explicit is done implicitly with RIFTS (and, by extension, Palladium's entire catalog), HERO (the HERO Universe, complete with time travel, which really makes things complicated), Shadowfist/Feng Shui (which is just as much a perfect Braunstein setup), the entire World Of Darkness, and Exalted (for a more narrow range of "multi-genre").

They are all wargames at their root, and those roots are wrapped around the cornerstone of Braunstein. Stop fighting it, Anon. Embrace those roots, accept what that requires of you, and know that what you gain thereafter is yours and not a pity prize--not crumbs from the master's table--tossed at you with all the ceremony of dumping a corpse into a ditch just because you filled a seat and didn't complain about the railroad ride.

Scratch a tabletop RPG and you'll find a wargame, and that being Braunstein. That's why this is a big revelation because it completely changes how a campaign should be run, solves the "I have no time" and "Not in the same area" problems (play a Patron; use online channels to communicate), and takes the weight of administration off the shoulders of the Game Master- he can, finally, just be the Referee he should have been all along.

Couple that with other media doing "standard RPGs" better, and you have the conditions for a wholesale paradigm shift- a shift that Regresses Harder back to what once was because that's the only viable hobby and business niche left.

The #BROSR has seats at the table waiting for you, but only if you're willing to #winatRPGs and become #EliteLevel. Now do excuse me, for I have orders to adjudicate.

(PS: Birthday is in one month.)