Biggus Geekus & Retarded Bros

I'm not sure whether I should be surprised that, after all this time, the Brody Bunch are still peddling their lies and/or misconceptions about arbitrary kinda sorta but not really 1:1 timekeeping. Biggus Geekus did a video partially about them this week, and I wish I could have been on stream to talk about it given my experience dealing with both brosr tourists and their simple-minded simps.

To reiterate: arbitrary kinda sorta but not really 1:1 timekeeping, aka "bro time" isn't merely stupid, it's bullshit. The rules don't even tell you to play that way, and if you happen to run multiple groups and if they happen to all play in the same setting, at the same in-game time, in the same region, players with an Intelligence of 3 and up will quickly realize some destriments that are obvious as they are absurd (and there come straight from the tourist's trap):

The first is that if you end session in a dungeon your character just up and dies, because for no particular reason when you stop playing time "in-game" not only continues ticking away, it ticks away in "real time". So for each day you aren't even playing, where no dice are roll and your character is given no direction at all, a day still passes in-game.

Your character, having just finished a combat encounter and picked the bodies clean of a suspicious amount of gold, gems, and likely even magic items, will now just stand there for days or even weeks. Normal players accustomed to playing normal games would think this strange, as no sane person would do that, but when you're playing with "bro time" not only will your character remain stationary for however long it takes for you to return to the table, he will also not bother to defend himself.

Level? Resources? Capabilities? None of that matters: when you're playing by made up nonsense bro rules, a level 10 fighter can get gnawed apart by rats.

This is of course contradicted by brosr tourists, because if you instead stop playing in town you are then permitted to tell your DM what your character is doing in the controlling player's absence. This can range from a variety of likely unnecessary activities, such as gathering information that you for some reason didn't bother doing before heading off to the dungeon, or forging a sword that you don't need because you can just buy one (assuming you made it back to town with your suspicious amount of treasure before "logging" away from the table).

But, according to them and their made up rules, you apparently can't tell the DM that your character is going to keep exploring the dungeon, killing monsters, looking for traps, solving puzzles, and finding loot. You know, the things your character would be doing and only stopped because out of character you the player know that if you dare leave that table his life is arbitrarily forfeit.

It gets worse if you just so happen to be part of one of these weird bro-games with multiple groups playing in a shared world, because despite what Gelatinous Retard says everyone doesn't have the same amount of time to invest in an elfgame. This means that if you can only play once every other week, the guys that can play every week will be able to crawl circles around your group, exploring, slaying, and looting more.

And part of the bro cult's dogma is competitive play. So imagine you find a dungeon, clear out a few rooms and have to stop, then you come back a few weeks later only to find that another group cleaned the entire thing out. Or worse: they could also leave traps and lure in monsters so you waste even more limited time and resources.

As I've said before there are no unique benefits to retard bro time. You can reap them all while playing the game normally, and as an added bonus you won't be mired in absurd bullshit.

As for the actual video:

Around 8 minutes in Joe says that "they" claim to play RAW (referring to brosr tourists). He follows this by saying you can't, and whether or not it's true the fact is they aren't. They read the rules, misinterpreted at the least this one, and due to inflated egos and narcissism keep trying to convince everyone that they are playing the game as Gygax intended...even though neither the rules nor Gary himself support their claims.

Around 13 minutes Randy talks about just letting things go. Yes, and part of this involves not supporting companies that hate you, even if they hate you "just a little bit", or you're just curious about some new product they're shoving out. I forget where I heard this quote before, but it's something like the opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy.

At 16 minutes Randy expresses his desire to boot the tourists out of the hobby. You can't, at least their section that's geared around suffering from the delusion that gaming is a lifestyle, and pissing away their miserable lives merely watching others pretend to play and thinking that they're part of some "community" that doesn't give two shits about them.

Your only recourse is to gatekeep. Create quality entertainment, and support quality entertainment, and never apologize or cave to their demands. That's how you can really sock it to the mentally ill narcissists: have fun and tell them to piss off.

At 17 minutes Joe admits that the video title is a little "click-baity", but it's also what he thinks. I'm of the same opinion: every brosr tourist I've interacted with can't explain any sort of benefit to arbitrary kinda sorta but not really 1:1 timekeeping, nor can they reconcile the issues of characters just standing around doing nothing, while other players with more free time run around advancing events.

A couple minutes later they talk briefly about the OSR. My admittedly limited experience with the OSR is that it's largely lazy hacks slapping the label on their vapidware trash, as well as people like brosr tourists pretending that they're playing the game correctly. Like racism, sexism, nazi, etc, it's been watered down to the point where I don't think it really means anything besides maybe "this game uses a d20".

Right after that they start talking about tracking time and precision. You don't really need to track combat rounds beyond the context of the fight. Most fights might last ten rounds, or a minute, which in the bigger picture is barely anything. In the fight it only really matters for the purposes of effect duration, but if the duration is a minute or more than you can expect it to last the entire fight, anyway.

(This is somewhat how we determine item and spell effects in Delvers, assigning a duration based on whether we want it to last a little bit or an entire fight. Since you probably won't go from one fight to the next within 10 minutes, it's not really worthwhile to have an offensive/defensive/utilitarian buff last more than a minute but less than an hour.)

For exploration, you also don't need to be really precise. The players wander around, checking for traps, and you just kind of estimate the passage of time to determine how long light sources will last, when they need to stop and rest for a bit, random encounters, etc. You can't do this in "real time" (despite what some vapidware trash games might pretend), as it's possible for players to say "we leave the dungeon" and then unless something happens they're just outside.

It's also possible for them to say, "we go back to town", and they're either there or you roll random encounters based on the number of days.

For our games we track 10 minute units, as torches last 30 minutes, lanterns an hour per oil flask, many spell and item effects end within 10 minutes, gotta check for fatigue every hour (or 10 minutes for really strenuous activities), thorough searching of an area can take 10 minutes, etc. But these aren't super precise. There's a lot of estimation.

Days are also important: the characters hunker down for the night, day is over, eat food, drink water, check for diseases, disease and venom duration (because in Delvers both have lingering effects that can persist for days), wound recovery I(it's randomized now), etc (unless you're playing a casual game that uses item slots and/or usage dice). Also our campaigns actually feature holidays and such.

In the live chat, at 25 minutes Paddy's Parlor says the following:

"​I think a lot of people don’t like 1:1 on their character’s downtime because they want their character to be the hero rather than the setting being more important."

What does wanting to be in control of your character when he is awake and capable of doing things have to do with setting importance? How would that even detract from the setting? Time still advances. Events can still happen. A player wanting to have reasonable control over his own character's behavior doesn't and cannot detract from the setting.

I responded to him with this:

"@Paddy’s Parlor I don't like kinda sorta 1:1 time because I don't want my character doing nothing for an entire week when he WOULD be doing something."

He replied with:

"That’s how it works though David, when you’re not “playing” you send a text to your dm saying, yeah my character is crafting a sword or researching a spell."

Also:

"Perhaps he’s spending the week collecting evidence or shopping. Stuff that can be done when you’re not at the table rather than taking time when you could be delving"

The flaw in this reasoning is that my character probably won't have any downtime activities to engage in. How many characters bother crafting swords? In Delvers there's a function to it because you can craft masterwork weapons that are not immediately eclipsed by magical ones, as well as craft them out of unusual materials (and in 2nd Edition you can do even more than this).

But in older editions this wasn't the case, so why bother? Researching a spell has some merit, but that can be easily done at the table by telling the DM what you want to do, he fast forwards time and makes a check or whatever you had to do in editions past. Same goes for gathering information: make a check and move on. Going shopping? This should take a few minutes at most.

But then the players stating that they want to return to town and engage in these activities makes sense. They aren't doing it because, whelp, we have to pack it in for a week otherwise our characters will auto-die, so guess we'd better find something to do so our characters won't be standing around for a week for no reason.

His response is:

"I don’t know David, if you’re not at the table, does it matter?"

I could be just as dismissive and say that, if it doesn't matter, then why bother with arbitrary kinda sorta but not really 1:1 timekeeping? Why kill off characters just because they're in a dungeon and for no reason will stand there and do nothing?

But the obvious answer is because it makes no fucking sense. There's no logic behind it. No in-game consistency. Additionally, some adventures and campaigns have time limitations. Some people like to run adventures and campaigns where events happen beyond the bubble of the party, such as wars breaking out, bad guys advancing plans, monsters showing up in a dungeon, existing monsters bolstering defenses, etc.

If I played in a game where we found a ruin filled with, say, orcs. We go in, slaughter a bunch, but end up retreating. Our characters rest up a bit, down some mending potions, and prepare to head back in. But, oh no! End of session! If we go in we'll be automatically slain, so we're stuck outside, giving the orcs a week to act, even though our characters would be able to try and observe their behavior, see what's going on, and even act in response.

But, nope, we're on bro-time, so they get an entire week, or more if we have to cancel the session.

Even sillier, if you're doing the multiparty thing, another group could show up, murder your characters because they magically can't defend themselves, and then clear out the dungeon. All because you had actual responsibilities, or were maybe exhausted playing so much.

KraftyMatt chimed in:

"If in the session, you travelled for 2 days, adventured 3 days, and travelled back 2 days, then your PC would be adventuring for that week."

I like how he just invents travel times that perfectly sync up with the schedulek. I guess in his games all the dungeons are at a convenient distance. Not in my game, though we play it normally so when you need to travel for a few weeks we just skip forward, and when we have to stop playing we just pause it wherever. This isn't the only time he tries to justify it, however:

"​Going back to the 3 week sailing between ports. If the group meets once a month, and the adventure takes 1 week + 3 weeks sailing time, then the calendar would catch up to the game by next session."

And what if the group meets once a week? Every other week? What if the trip doesn't take precisely four weeks? What if it takes 13 or 17 or 22 days? So the group shows up in port and dicks around for another few weeks because you for no reason have to wait for the calendar to "catch up".

Or you just play the game normally, fast forward past the week (or to a nautical encounter if you have one planned or one is randomly generated), and then the game keeps going. No one has to worry that they won't be able to play for who knows how long. Or that they'll have to play other characters who will be stuck in limbo for who knows how long while you play the main party.

Something I will give Krafty credit for is at the least stating that it's only something you should bother with if the table agrees to it. Not that anyone needed his permission, but it's nice to see someone that for some reason actually advocates for this nonsense but isn't trying to convince anyone that it is the correct way to play.

Joe mentions something about patron play around 43 minutes in. I've heard of this before, and someone on Twitter brought it up, so I'll be looking into that and probably writing an article about it.

Randy proposes a time-sensitive scenario, where if something isn't resolved within x days that a dungeon explodes and destroys a town. His suggestion is that this would be useful for that, but it's those sorts of adventures where it would be worse because, and I mention this in chat, the dungeon only explodes because the party does nothing, even though they would.

At 48 minutes Joe mentions his experience dealing with one of the "bros". He states that it was mostly pleasant at first, but once Joe disagreed with something apparently Jeffro went off about Gary and TSR, apparently unfamiliar with the appeal to authority fallacy.

This is similar to my xperience as well, though they aren't very polite. A brosr tourist tries to convince you that it's the one true way to play (despite not being a rule), that it provides benefits that they are unable to describe or are not unique to that style of play. You point out how retarded they sound, or that they're wrong, and they flip their shit. It's what happened thus far with Leaky Brain, The Basic Expert, and Gelatinous Rube.

And Joe is correct: trolling or not, they aren't helping their case. Not that I think it matters much: the whole arbitrary kinda sorta but not really 1:1 timekeeping thing isn't official and doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it.