My Life As A Gamer: The Rat King Talks #BROvenloft & How To Braunstein

The other day Jon Mollison cut another Braunstein video, this time one of the post-mortems about #BROvenloft.

If there is any flaw to be had here, it is that most of the Patrons were very high-level NPCs; Jon's Rat King was atypical in its weakness.

The result is that most of the action was done by the Patrons. While ordinary PC play happened, along with a fantastic 0-level event that took out the Count and another adventure that saw the Cursed Gnome King taken out, most of the action wasn't just driven by the Patrons but done by them.

As a wargame, that's fine. What the #BROSR has been doing in practice hasn't had enough people participating so far for this to be more than a noteworthy defect.

If you want roon for people who don't want to play Patrons to get involved, ensuring that there's plenty of room for them to run around is paramount. So is clearly advertising to prospective players that this is an option, something that's been lacking and going forward needs to be emphasized.

This needs to be done because, for most players, this is a new thing and they need that assurance. You can't push people too far from the familiar, and Braunstein looks too unfamiliar to most players.

Making the effort to (a) show that non-Patron players have a place in Braunstein campaigns and (b) showing how the actions of one layer of play interact with and influence the other--and that it goes both ways--is a necessary thing to do to get more people on board with this mode of play and away from what they know.

Then you can show those players, after the fact, how their simple session or two taking out this monster or rescueing that maiden or beating so-and-so to a major item forced one or more Patrons to drastically alter their plans or even lead to their success or failure.

By "show", that means visible on social media, which is where one of the best strengths of #BROvenloft is apparent: the in-character shitposting on Twitter, coupled with out-of-character commentary and referrals to blog posts for long-form commentary.

This is the way.

Now to show how this can work for the benefit of players that want to show up, go adventuring, and have a good time without being involved in fantasy power politics.