The Culture: BDubs Explains The Core Of The Real Hobby

BDubs had a fantastic post about ACKS and the Real Hobby yesterday. There's a key bit that needs to be put on posters and T-shirts and used as meme responses until the Cargo Cultists are forced to admit that the Bros are right:

Braunstein Play

Why are multiple partes so important to Real D&D (thus Braunstein) approach to D&D?

-Braunstein play requires Convergences. The BROSR defines this as when the players' actions come together for interesting scenarios that are worth playing. The more PCs a player has the more personality and worldbuilding elements he will bring to the table in REAL PLAY that might create convergences.

-Having multiple PCs teaches a Player to put his PC on the proper D&D hierarchy. Which is rules over campaign over party over PCs over story. Most Conventional D&D players put their PCs and sToRy over all! I shouldn't need to prove this to anyone who has read most online D&D discussion. When you put the Campaign as a whole over the story/PCs then it's easier to really dive into a Braunstein scenario. You're not as worried your PC will die because you know the Campaign will live on and the Scenario itself is the thing; your interaction with it. Conventional Players can never truly accept this.

Convergence and Diffusion

Convergence is what makes a campaign fun and real. If an army falls in the Borderlands but no players are around to see it, did it really happen? Perhaps. But no one cares. It's not really part of the Campaign. It's part of Diffusion. Diffusion is when Players, PCs, or Campaign elements are off on their own. Sometimes necessary, never as fun as Convergence.

Having multiple parties active in the campaign also allows for more than a handful of players to participate in the campaign. It is this dynamic of Convergence that permits the involvement of a dozen, even a score, of players at a time without overwhelming the Referee.

The trick? They are not all at the table at the same time.

Strict timekeeping forces characters to rotate on and off the bench, either because their session activities put them into Time Jail (i.e. their actions take up X amount of days, during which time they cannot be doing anything else; Time Jail exists to prevent paradoxes) their actions outside of session play do the same thing.

Do that with every active character in the campaign and the Referee will see when, and how, their actions come together on an item of iterest. This is Convergence.

The key element of Convergence is that multiple actors come upon the same place at the same time to contend for something that cannot be resolved in a Win-Win manner. This forces the resolution of conflict, and that resolution is what playing Braunstein sessions handles.

Diffusion (defined in BDubs' post) is permission only so long as it leads to, and builds towards, Convergence. The process of ossilating between Diffusion and Convergence, which is seperate from and parallels the ossilation between Faction and Adventurer tiers of play, is the Perpetual Play Procedure that powers campaign play across the board. Multiple parties running around doing their thing inevitably comes together into a big blowout.

Yes, this means that the core of the real hobby revolves around Player vs. Player conflict. That, on its own, is going to compel all these "LOL Houserule!" soyboys to instantly turn into the strictest Rules As Written zealots because it's not some punching bag loot pinata they're facing but another player-control actor and he's out for blood. You had better believe--because I have witnessed it first-hand from multiple perspectives--how much being by the book matters for successful play when it's not the Referee doing the ganking but that Bob guy who plays with the other party on Tuesdays.

You've got to be player-maxxing. You've got to have stables of characters on the map. You've got to have players not even in the same time zone controlling Factions. The real hobby is a serious wargame campaign with multiple parties acting independently under a Fog of War, all pursuing their objectives, colliding upon points of Convergence time and against until someone wins or everyone loses.

That is not Le Get Along Gang. That's a proper wargame, a fantastic wargame, one full of adventure. A Fantastic Adventure (War)Game. All leading to this conclusion:

The Bros solved all of the Conventional Play problems by unfucking their non-games back into functional products that work as intended. The Cargo Cult will come around, but not before they are forced to because the truth gets smeared in their face by the actions of The Only Company That Matters stabbing them all in the back.