Settings That Are Meant To Be Played

The way out of the mess is to replace what “Official Setting” as a product is.

Without trying, the #BROSR showed the way by publishing Braunstein scenarios meant to launch long-term campaign play. First BROZER, then UMBROS, and more on the way- all exist to show prospective players what Braunstein is and how it works by handing them a ready-made scenario.

What do they have in common?

• Limited information: You have enough to play- no more or less.

• Agency Is Expected: Players are required to be the Men In Command, acting in pursuit of their Win Conditions, forcing conflict and creating/shaping context.

• No Further Releases: One And Done.

What this combination does is force players to create the context in the setting needed to continue play until someone hits their Win Condition or everyone loses, something that picks up momentum quickly once players grasp the concept- a thing that those not mired in the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play get faster than those who are.

Let’s go over each point.

Limited Information

This is not a Series Bible. A lot of information published in Official Settings far exceeds what players need at the table or in submitting Orders for downtime play. It is good that both BROZER and UMBROS resisted adding more novel information that changed the default procedure or results of play than is necessary to play the scenario.

You do not need a detailed accounting of a location’s terrain. You do not need to know a massive backstory, or to see that pressed forward in a continuing timeline either. All you need is exactly who is who, what everyone has to work with, what everyone wants, what everyone knows about everyone else, how to win for that actor, and what triggers the Everyone Loses condition (if applicable).

To that we see that what is necessary is the barest of maps, and often only the big map that shows where everything is relative to everything else. No need for detailed maps of Blandistan’s Presidential Palace, no need for deckplans for S.S. Boomstick, no reason to get into the weeds about how the handheld death rays (that happen to look like a Whitney Wolverine)1 work, or anything else surplus to requirements. Rather what we see is a ruthless focus on giving the user what he requires to actually play it.

It is in this focus on only supplying what a player needs to know that makes BROZER and UMBROS so easy to get from acquisition to implementation- and it is telling that the bulk of both publication’s page count is in teaching users how to implement it.

Agency Is Expected

In giving the player what he needs, he receives the remedial education on Braunstein that he should have gotten but did not heretofore. This puts the user’s mind away from being a reactive Andy waiting for Simon to tell him the magic phrase that gets him the Plot Coupon which allows him to say that Simon Says Go To The Next Act and into the mind of an active and ambitious actor with the agency to mold, shape, and create what he needs to get the job done- to meet his Win Condition and win the game.

This is a far bigger thing than it may seem, but (as noted above) it is not; we see the results when those able to approach the game as a game—not as Theater (or worse)—get a chance to show what that means in practice. Given what the commercial side of this hobby gets up to, that is something indeed.

Putting players into the position of being responsible for driving the game by forcing them to converge on things and contend over them makes many players start acting like they’re playing Settlers of Catan, and that is a fantastic change of mindset to see. It is one thing to go “Yeah, we fought the Evil Overlord.” It’s another to say “Jane ran the Evil Overlord and she wasn’t at all fair about that fight. She showed up, overran us with the undead forms of the villagers she slaughtered, then pinned us down with them while she dropped Meteor Swarms on us until we all died. After the fight, she showed us how she killed us, and that made it worse.”2

Now that we’ve got people playing them, we’re seeing this in action and it’s panning out as expected. More engagement, more interest, more fun- better than anything else.

No Further Releases

This is where every Official Setting goes off the rails.

Never advance the timeline. This is easy to do if you don’t publish any follow-ups, so don’t do that. One And Done means that you have something there for players to use, but you don’t invalidate their investment by adding on what doesn’t need adding via a follow-up release.3

Never publish supplementary material. There is no diminishing return to be had; all you do is take agency from players by replacing what they could (and should) do on their own using the rules of the game and instead handing them context they did not create to use in its place.

Publishers that fall prey to this trap get captured by buyers who read but don’t play, or by delusions of breaking out of Tabletop somehow and into wider entertainment media, so they turn the setting into a Series Bible for Brand development reasons.4 Even if they have any success—Wizards of the Coast, Dream Pod 9, etc.—it damages the settings and is nigh-impossible to fix thereafter. By making then free in PDF and at-cost in print, BROZER and UMBROS avoid all of this. Any other such publication is wise to follow that lead.

The Reason The Bros Got This Right

The point was to get people playing properly. These are primers. Primers need to be cheap or free, readily available to acquire, and easily implemented once a user reads the manual.

That focus on the purpose, on the mission, allowed a clarity of communication that has effects on the user beyond what mere words convey. Can it be done better? Sure, but that is best proven by doing it and not by running one’s mouth.5

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