The Culture: Dunder And BDubs Talk UMBROS!

Last night, Dunder had on BDubs to talk UMBROS.

It's always good to see BDubs in action.

Welcome to the next False Idol of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play to get the hammer: PVP Is Fundamental To The Real Game.

The players must drive the bus to make the game work as intended, as promised. That means that players must engage in PVP, both in the small-scale man-to-man action that is one long Prisoner's Dilemma, and especially in the big-scale faction-focused action that shapes and reshapes the campaign map.

BDubs dropping the knowledge is huge.

The solutions to Conventional Play problems is reverting to Braunstein. Total Non-Stop Braunstein. Quoting UMBROS, pg. 63:

This style of Braunstein play is where you “attach the game calendar directly to the real world calendar, communicate with all players virtually through Discord chats, cell phone instant messages, and/or social media direct messages. Any action can be declared to the Referee at any time and for game purposes at the precise second that the referee receives a comprehensible and actionable order” (Johnson, BROZER, P. 11). This approach can obviously overwhelm Referees and Players. I won’t belabor why as it should be obvious that, with players able to demand the Referee oversee a Downtime Order for them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; it can be tiresome. There are more thoughts about the advantages and disadvantages to this approach in BROZER.

What is left unsaid is that additional Referees distribute the load, and that is a capacity that should grow out to include all players in the campaign; players need to be pushed to handle more of the work of running the game, such that when two players' mans come into conflict they sort it out on their own if they can and just report the results to the Referee.

TNB is easier to accomplish when players can be trusted to handle more of the game without the Referee having to look over their shoulder all the time. This is desirable, as it distributes cognitive load across a broader surface thus making more complex games practical to play and allowing the Referee to let the players drive the bus and enjoy what goes down- to enjoy being surprised alongside everyone else.

This is the Real Game.