My Life As A Gamer: Exalted As A Braunstein

Just after Cultural Ground Zero, White Wolf published their last great game: Exalted. I did a post about this back in March.

The game by its own description is tailor-made to be played as a Braunstein. The Exalted are obvious Patron-level characters, as are many of the gods and monsters that are on par with them.

War between domains dominated by them is commonplace. Entire economies are erected, perfected, maintained, and weaponized by them to be wielded in their contests for power.

Interaction between Macro and Micro is baked into the setting, and increasingly into the rules themselves, and it would come by late in its First (and best) edition to include mass combat rules of any sort.

That said, my God are the rules themselves the typical White Wolf mush of bad statistics and worse probability matrices- and that's before players got to work breaking the game and thereby cataloguing everything about it. (Want a summary? TV Tropes has you covered.)

Consider playing Exalted as a Braunstein scenario, specifically as a Nested Braunstein.

Don't shy away from starting on the Big Stage, playing a pre-game of Diplomacy like what went on in #BROvenloft, before opening things up for smaller-scale action and actors (many of which may also be playing the Patrons on the Big Stage).

Imagine how much fun it would be to the leader of one of the Houses of the Scarlet Dynasty having to deal with your own totally-not-Rome-and-China-blended-together manuevering while dealing with external threats to your House, to the Realm, and to all of Creation.

Imagine how much fun it would be to be one of the Deathlords, or one of the Demonlords, or the leaders of an Authchtonian state, or so on and having to deal with all that stuff.

You don't need to wait for the Game Master to make things happen. You're already somebody that matters, so you are the one that makes things happen. You're the general, the sovereign, the high priest, the merchant lord, the Perfect Immaculate One, or whatever; you give the command and say "Make it so".

If you succeed? That change is permanent, and even if someone else finds a way to undo it they steal had to put in serious work to pull that off- work that could not go into something else.

Don't want to be a Big Player? Wait until the campaign opens up, then make a character and do your thing.

The campaign, from the beginning, is driven by players and their interactions. What the players create and define will become the locations of playable scenarios, and their conflicts will drive all sorts of possible gameplay scenarios. All of this is emergent, all of this is unplanned, and all of this will produce ludological results that no one can anticipate.

Set it up properly and you could have scores of players in a single campaign all interacting at different scopes and scales and thereby achieve the promise of the game that the original team--and all successors to date--have failed to realize.

There's the matter of a ruleset that makes The World of Synnibarr look like a masterpiece of RPG design, but that's for another post.