Thursday, December 29, 2022

The Business: Turning The Lessons Of The #BROSR Into All The Money

Time to think about how to start making use of what we've discussed in practical terms.

Remember this property? It was FASA's also-ran once BattleTech took off back in the day, before Shadowrun moved in and bumped it further down the ladder.

There's also Interceptor (dogfighting) and Prefect (macro-level), along with a few side-games.

I point this out not only because I think it's a property worth revisiting, but because this is a property that deals with scale.

Consider a tabletop wargame like where the individual player-character seamlessly slots into every other game that operates at bigger scales. We've seen this done with the various BattleTech RPGs over the years, R. Talsorian's Mekton Zeta does this emergently as a side-effect of its build system for widgets, and DP9's games do this natively. Others tried, to varying degrees of success, do go from Man-To-Man to Vehicle-On-Vehicle (Centurian/Interceptor).

What has not been done is to ensure that Your Guy slots into the bigger scales, represented here by Leviathan and Prefect. Macris's Adventurer, Conquerer, King goes for this and it is one of the few that even realize that this should be addressed at all.

While it is good that more gamers are folliwing the #BROSR lead and returning to the wargame roots of RPGs, going forward it is necessary for game designers to acknowledge this in their designs by--like DP9--making it a native quality for a player to slot Their Guy into the spot where a big-scale wargame would have their Shotcaller figure (General, Admiral, Sovereign) and to structure gameplay accordingly.

Yes, this means that your tabletop RPG design should possess native support for macro-level wargame play; again, I point to ACKS, and I dare you to do it better than Macris did. The failure to acknowledge the macro level at all is what sunk the World of Darkness, and the incompetent approach is one of the many reasons that Exalted only got worse with each edition, and that's just White Wolf.

Your Guy should seamlessly go from Me & The Boys through The Rat Patrol, past Top Gun, zoom by Master & Commander, and be present at the Fleet Command briefing before wrecking the enemy while outnumbered 2:1.

The first designer to do this competently will have an epoch-changing game on their hands. The first publisher to bring it to market will have a license to print money.

Speaking of licenses, there is one very good example to draw from to guide your actions:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Anonymous comments are banned. Pick a name, and "Unknown" (et. al.) doesn't count.