The Culture: Things Bros Are Taking Off The Table (Part One: Adventure Length)

Things that the #BROSR is making obsolete: Stupid Questions About Adventure Length.

Conventional Play people have this long-running argument because of its premises, premises rooted in Narrative frameworks that do not apply to real gameplay.

Conventional Play presumes that the players are One True Party, the Get-Along Gang, going through a (more or less) predetermined set of encounters leading up to a final encounter with the adventure's antagonist.

This is a structure that videogames does better and has since the 1980s- the early 1980s.

What the Bros do is to consider all adventure opportunities in light of larger objectives (Pull) and constraints (Push). For AD&D1e, this means wanting to level up so they need money to fuel that progress so they want to hit opportunities most likely to provide a good return on the time and capital invested while working under constraints of limited time (IRL and in-game), limited material resources, and ongoing costs (those monthly bills don't pay themselves).

This reframes the matter. Narrative logic no longer applies.

How long does a specific delve go? Until the session reaches a point IRL where the party needs to turn back to reach safety. (This, by the way, is the most important reason for a dungeon expedition to have that safe location as close to the dungeon as possible.) Until they get enough loot to encumber their return trip. Until they're low on resources. Until they think that they're at the limit of their luck.

While that delve is going on, someone's just started an Undead Plague outbreak by messing up a vampire hunt and that's reshaping the campaign map. That someone is another player, who took over the vampire that murked his man and his man's Henchmen and Hirelings, and now they're running a faction of very angry vampires.

A Cleric gets divine warning of the problem and decides to settle old accounts by launching a Crusade aiming to put the vampires and everything else opposed down. That's run by yet another player.

And both of those players have characters in that dungeon delving crew, a crew now facing fangs and blood on one side and fantastical firebrands (literally) on the other with their safe camp between the two.

Then some cosmic event that happened at another table (same people, same campaign, different Referee) dumped a massive Fimbulwinter on the region upending the environment. Oops.

That's a series of events that, in Conventional Play, would be entirely determined by the Referee and not occur unless and until the players reached the specific encounter; Nothing Ever Happens otherwise because that sparks player revolts due to violation of (Narrative-framed) expectations.

Proper campaign play doesn't work that way. Events that your man had no knowledge of, let alone control over, can and do have events upon what your man deals with during play because the control is all in player hands.

"Adventures" as such, therefore, are a Category Error. There's just work to be done because that's what your man needs to do to get what he needs to achieve what's he's after- and it applies down at the level of individual mans doing their things as well as up at the high end where Factions make their moves.

Lots of you folks need to spend more time reading history instead of yet more Pink Slime fantasy because proper play is more like history, and that's how things actually work at the table.