It has the worst fans.
But first, I want to talk about Traveller.
1977 gave us Traveller, which did away with the GM role altogether and was entirely the better for it. It had an extremely focused genre and framework, absolutely. Everyone at the table played a criminal or other ne’er-do-well in the middle of a situation gone terribly wrong.
But 80% of that situation was randomly generated from some thematic tables, as were the characters. Railroading was impossible because there was no one holding the tiller on the train.
Now, let me show you what passes for BROSR criticism on social media.
This was an attempt to prove that the BROSR is late to the party because we implemented the 1977 Traveller concept of blurring that line between player and DM without properly attributing the concept to a game written 32 years later.
Which itself was a means of parroting the thoroughly discredited lie that the BROSR believes that AD&D is the only RPG worth playing. Guys both in and out of the BROSR group chats have used the principles and synthesis of 1960s wargaming campaign ideas in multiple editions of D&D from OD&D through 5e, to say nothing of using them to great effect in Boot Hill (more than once), Traveller, and others.
These ideas work with just about any ruleset. They might even work with Fiasco, but you won’t see me running that experiment because I can’t get over my distaste for the reprehensible author.
Point being, the secrets to Big Dang Campaigns are old, and due to the herd mentality of the OSR,they haven’t been fully explored. The OSR rewound the clock to 1984 and said, STOP! No further.
If you look back to the late 1960s, you will find all the same ideas written down by Featherstone, Bath, and Young Gygax that the big name innovators resold between 2000-2016. But the old ideas weren’t wedded to modern tech in a an innovative way until the BROSR came along.
And unlike our critical who grasp at any straw no matter how thin to deny us any credit for any Discovery or innovation, we have never stopped yelling at the wider gaming community to go back and read old books. Unlike the fart Huffer brigade, we also don’t repackage those ideas, dump them in a product, and claim ownership. Aside from a few at cost titles, we are happy to share our hard one discoveries and are enthusiasm for free.
And oh, one last thought while I’m ranting, the tricks and techniques that Bath used to manage 40+ players in a single campaign take a lot of time to implement. These ideas are so powerful that they generate self-sustaining ecosystems of play. These principles do not build six sessions and a cloud of dust now I have to move on to the next thing out of fomo. The campaigns that result from BROSR principles are robust and long-lasting. Players just don’t want them to end.
Which means that stress testing these principles against different rule sets and in different eras and with different genres takes a long time. You don’t get a masterpiece overnight. You don’t make discoveries without tearing down a few blind alleys.
What we do takes TIME.
So the haters are going to have to repeat the same falsehoods until we get around to experimenting with their favorite system, and discovering things about it that they never noticed. They are just going to have to wait for new reasons to hate us for being better at this hobby than they are. We will let them know when we have something for them to chirp about as ineffectively as they speculate about the games they never run.
In the meantime, we’ve got gaming to do and discoveries to make.