The Business: Making Braunstein Part Of The Business Model Of Your Product

I'm watching all of the #BROSR campaigns out there. I am taking notes, as are others, and by sharing what we observe we're quickly improving the quality of the gameplay experience for all participants. That, in turn, makes the Braunstein-focused campaign play more attractive to the curious as certain difficulties are resolved by recovering the solutions to the problems encountered.

One that's come up is this: a clear and definitive Win Condition.

Not that every player has the same Win Condition, but that it exists at all. As soon as one player hits their Win Condition, that scenario is over- done, DEAD.

But just that scenario.

What happens next is this: the consequences of that Win Conditions are accounted for and applied to the campaign in the next Situation Report for the players.

Take what went down in the wake of "The Fate of Stormbringer" as an example; an evil sea goddess, having seized that sword for herself, has tried to expand her power across multiple worlds. This created a new playable scenario. Players responded by taking the opportunity to deal with this change in the situation to their advantage, and some have already done so.

This means that we now have a higher-level Stable Gameplay Loop to compliment the Core Gameplay Loop.

• Playable Scenario begins, with all participants having a Win Condition.
• Play goes on until a player hits their Win Condition OR a Loss Condition is met. (The latter may not be present, but usually is.)
• The consequences are sorted out, campaign is updated and players briefed.
• New situation means new plans are made and a new scenario begins.

Now we have a concise statement for how Braunstein-style play creates a Perpetual Play Environment that MMORPGs cannot match and never will.

We can also use this to express this in the fractal-like Nested Braunstein situation that organically arises over time, where characters emerge as Patrons within established Domains and create sub-Braunstein situations within them out of necessity that interact with the top-level Braunstein situation in the same manner that Great Power politics gets involved in the internal affairs of targetted regions or states.

Now, for you folks who design and publish RPGs: exploit this explicitly and deliberately.

Many of you already have games that work best this way, so all that you need to do is formalize it. You can fuck this up, so don't go off half-cocked. Take the time to engage with the #BROSR. Ask--in good faith--what is being done and how they are doing it. Contribute if you can; you'll benefit from doing so.

I'll get into this more tomorrow.