My Life As A Gamer: The Almost Forgotten History of RPGs Is Braunstein

Jon Mollison has a video about Braunstein.

Good God, Jon really did nail why the #BROSR broke through as it did. Using social media not just to talk about gaming, but to do the gaming itself, has been a huge boon and so has using things like Discord to do play sessions or centralize play information and all sorts of private comms--text, email, DMs, etc.--to fill in gaps.

The Braunstein method solves one big problem with tabletop RPGs: CONFLICT.

You need active parties seeking specific objectives over which they are inevitably going to come into conflict over. This is why wargaming is baked into the medium and can't be escape- you need this for it to function at all. When players are allowed to take up those roles and be as aggressive as those personae and their resources allow suddenly the load on the Game Master falls away and he can focus him energy on being the strictly netural arbiter that he was always meant to be.

But, as some of the Commentors on the video page note, this requires being a good sport and seeing the game as sport. Both of these are known to be lacking in typical RPG circles, especially in the Storygamer crowd (and far more so among the Cultists that push it).

I look forward to seeing what Jon posts as a follow-up to this video.