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Want to hear what Major Wesely has to say about Braunstein first hand? If you’re going to GenCon now’s your chance:

Play The Braunstein Game
Fri noon-4 pm (SEM00151), Embassy Suites - Ambassador II
Sat noon-4 pm (SEM00152), Embassy Suites - Ambassador II

Make sure to double-check at the con in case they move the room or anything sneaky like that. If you’re looking online be warned that Wesely is frequently misspelled Wesley or some other variation, so if you’re doing searches check both.

While we’re at it here’s where you can find Dave Arneson and Lou Zocchi.

I’ll be at the Friday session. Hope to see you there.

UPDATE: there was an error in the GenCon schedule which has now been fixed. Both sessions are noon-4 pm, not noon-2 pm

In 2005 I was standing near the registration booths at GenCon, flipping through the event catalog while the posse debated where to go first. I had already scoured the listings online, but as I glanced across the pages I spotted a word I had somehow missed before: Braunstein.

I knew what Braunstein was (sort of) so I dragged my whole crew to the far, far outer reaches of the con, to a seminar in a very quiet room with very few attendants. And we sat, and we listened.

What did I know that made me drag them all that way?

I knew that Braunstein was the world’s first roleplaying game. Ever.

Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you’ll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who’ve heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all.

“French Lancer Colonel. His unit is hiding off the board at (B). He has infiltrated the town in civilian clothes to check out its defenses, and been arrested during the student riot last night. Starts in jail.”
–Braunstein 1

Once upon a time, tabletop gaming meant wargaming. Roleplaying games did not exist yet. Wargamers met and played out famous battles, recreating the last moments of Acre or the charge at Crecy and seeing if maybe with skill and clever tactics they could alter the course of history.

Major David Wesely took his usual wargaming group and tried something a little different. Instead of having them command armies he set down the two opposing leaders in a Prussian town before the battle, their troops nearby but not on stage. To give the other players something to do he let them control other people around town: the Mayor, a school Chancellor, some revolutionary students, etc. The humble town was the eponymous Braunstein, “brown stone” in German.

With that one small shift, playing your guy instead of moving your guy’s armies, Major Wesely and his players took a step into roleplaying. No, Major Wesely wasn’t a Major back then. And no he wasn’t called a GM or a DM, because Game Masters or Dungeon Masters didn’t exist yet.

But a GM is exactly what he was — the very first GM.

If you jumped in a time machine and asked Major Wesely how the first Braunstein game went, he would tell you it was a failure. A total mess.

In what was to become a familiar pattern to all GMs that came after him, he had prepared a game that he expected to go a certain way but once the players got their hands on it all hell broke loose. People running all over the place having secret meetings in corners, planning things the referee knew nothing about — total chaos. A referee’s nightmare.

To his surprise the players demanded more. So be it, thought not-yet-Major Wesely, but this time there will be order! Again setting a precedent that GMs would follow for generations to come, he clamped down with an iron fist to prevent the unpredictable chaos that had (he thought) ruined his game. Careful monitoring of player interactions! Limited communications! Basically eliminating all the things the players liked.

The history books tell us the next two Braunstein games were met with weeping and gnashing of teeth. The players were not pleased. They missed the freedom of the first Braunstein game.

And so still-not-yet Major Wesely prepared Braunstein 4. He moved the venue to a tropical dictatorship, complete with secret police, student revolutionaries, corrupt treasury ministers, and the grand leader El Hefe himself — a full-blown banana republic.

On paper Braunstein 4 looked like a wargame or a boardgame. Most of the players controlled units (army, the inland navy or the secret police) and filled out order sheets to send them places each turn. Want to take over the radio station? Send some soldiers!

And it might have stayed that way, except for the nefarious wiles of one player: Dave Arneson.

“Peaceful revolutionary. Gets points for printing and delivering leaflets to each of his revolutionaries, and more for handing them out to other civilians (who may be agents or guerrillas of course…). Starts at home. (B-4)”
–Braunstein 4, Banana Republic

When you started gaming you read all these books, and they told you you could be a cleric or a thief or an elf (or a vampire or a Prince of Amber) and they told you you should probably pick a caller and set up a marching order and listen at doors and all that other stuff. You marched your character around and talked in funny voices. Sooner or later you may have realized that the rules didn’t drive the game, your imagination did.

But what if you never had any of those books? What if no one had ever explained to you what roleplaying was? Were you a good enough gamer to become a gamer without even knowing what a gamer was? Could you have just started being a gamer out of thin air, without anyone ever telling you how to do it?

Dave Arneson did.

He lied, swindled, improvised, and played his character to the hilt. He came to the game with fake CIA ID he’d mocked up, so when another player “captured” and searched him he could whip them out. Other players were still moving pieces around the board and issuing orders like a wargame while Dave Arneson was running circles around them and changing the whole scenario. He was winning the game entirely by roleplaying.

You may think of Dave Arneson as one of the godfathers of GMing, but even before that he was the godfather of players. He was, literally, the proto-player.

“You’re the student revolutionary leader,” Wesely says “You get victory points for distributing revolutionary leaflets. You’ve got a whole briefcase full of them.”

Much later, having convinced his fellow players that he is really, perhaps, an undercover CIA operative, and that the entire nation’s treasury is really much safer in his hands, Dave Arneson’s character is politely ushered aboard a helicopter to whisk him to safety.

Far below the streets are still churning with fighting, plastic soldiers colliding with innocent citizens and angry rioters. In his lap sits the forgotten briefcase of revolutionary leaflets. “I get points for distributing these right?” And with a sweep of his arm he adds insult to injury, hurling reams of pages into the downdraft of the helicopter where they scatter and float lazily down upon the entire town…

Final score: Dave Arneson, plus several thousand points

Big whoop, you say, this is all old timey stuff. We modern gamers are way beyond dungeon crawls and listening at doors and all that primitive stuff. We have indie games and story games and narrative control and yadda yadda yadda.

Yes indeed. But even skipping the “standing on the shoulders of giants” argument or the “know your roots” argument, look again at what happened in that game: Dave Arneson was winning entirely by roleplaying. He isn’t doing tactical combat or playing some dumb-ass linear quest, he is making his own rules and being, for lack of a better word, an excellent player by any modern definition. He is making the game.

Don’t think Dave Arneson would kick your ass in some Sorcerer or Dogs In The Vineyard? Then you haven’t been paying attention. He would, as the kids say, take you to the net.

Modern gamers are pushing into new territory, but they’re also reclaiming old territory whether they know it not — the lands of their ancestors. If you’re an indie gamer or an avant garde gaming revolutionary, old school titans like Dave Arneson and Major Wesely are your peeps. They were trying things that had never been done before in their day too. They are your guys.

What happened after Braunstein 4? Major Wesely went off to the army and Dave Arneson started running his own “Braunsteins” in a little patch of imaginary world called Blackmoor. He sent his players into dungeons. To resolve combats he used a miniatures rule system called Chainmail. The rest, as they say, is history. [save the usual "who invented D&D" debate for another time] I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that Braunstein set the color-noun trend in early D&D (brown-stone, black-moor, grey-hawk).

So why didn’t Major Wesely stay involved in RPGs as the hobby blossomed? Why don’t you know who he is?

When he came back from the army the “braunsteins” had moved from real world situations to fantasy battles against orcs and frost giants. He lost interest because while wargaming is an examination of history, fantasy looks a lot more meaningless. What can you learn about the real world playing a game with fire-breathing lizards?

Major Wesely, the first GM, may actually have been the first person to pan fantasy gaming as escapist nonsense. He was certainly not the last. In a way he was completely right, but what he may not have foreseen was that even the most blatantly escapist or mundanely tactical game can still be enlightening (not just entertaining) because we play it with other humans. The content of the game might not teach us anything about life, but the method, sitting around a table interacting with other people, does. Of course I can say that thanks to thirty years of gaming hindsight that he didn’t have, so big whoop for me.

Carry that forward and look at modern indie games, games that tackle ideas like slavery or destructive love or moral doubt. The question is the same as Major Wesely asked all the way back then: the desire to have real meaning or examine real issues in the content of the game.

This was a very difficult post to get on paper, because no matter how hard I try, this is still a fictional account. These are my memories of stories I was told about a game someone else played 40 years ago. It’s probably nowhere close to the literal truth, but hopefully it’s very close to the spirit of the truth. All errors or misrepresentations are solely mine, not the fault of Major Wesely, who is clear, informative and a hell of a fun guy to talk to. I also make it sound like Dave Arneson was the only player in the game, or the only good player, but of course that’s nonsense. Like any game there’s more sides to it than you can easily sum up.

So now you’re asking, what do I do with this slice of history?

Gary Gygax is no longer with us. Don’t you wish you’d talked to him? Don’t you wish you asked him questions?

So here’s what you do. Find the guys who are still here and talk to them. When you’re at GenCon this year, hunt down Major Wesely or Dave Arneson and pigeon-hole them and make them tell you these stories. Do what we did and corner Major Wesely in the lobby and don’t give him food or water until he spills all the beans about TSR’s dark past. Drop by Lou Zocchi’s booth and make him tell you about the limits of platonic solids. Put on your historian hat, not to venerate the past but to learn from it.

They are gamers just like you. Buy them a beer, take them out to dinner or just corner them in the hallway — do not let them escape! It will be an experience you will never forget.

Update: going to GenCon? Check out the schedule of Braunstein at GenCon.

I admit it: when I’m running Agon I’m a stickler for Classical Greek style. I don’t just want D&D with spears or a fuzzy Xena-barbarian analog, I want it to feel like mythic Greece. Hubris, arrogance, tragedy — the works. That’s a great thing about Agon: the built-in mechanics pack a lot of Greek punch.

But not all Classical texts are the same. There’s one thing that varies a lot, and that’s the overt presence of the gods and (for lack of a better term) the prominence of the supernatural.

So if you are going do mythic Greece, which mythic Greece is it? The one where gods frolic with maidens and hapless lovers are turned into flowers every three minutes? Or where bold heroes fight with javelins or sulk in their tents, watched by the curious yet distant gods?

We can break it down into three major styles, which I’ve named after the Classical authors who exemplify them. These are basically the three flavors of Agon you can run if you want to go solid Greek:

Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War) — Straight real world action: arms and the man, wars and demagoguery, kings and nations. People may talk about the gods — because they believe in the gods — but from an objective point of view the gods are never seen or directly felt. Nothing magical ever happens, and even if there are monsters in legend they never make an appearance. The story is squarely centered on mortal conflicts. Sack of Lemotea (not yet released) fits this style.

Ovid (Metamorphosis) — Yeah, it’s true, Ovid was Roman not Greek, which is probably why this style seems a lot different from many Greek texts. There’s a lot more divine intervention, a lot more maidens being turned into trees (or flowers, or streams). The gods are active, present, and magical things happen all the time. Temple of Hera falls in this category, particularly if Menae starts lashing the heroes with sorcerous fury.

Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey, duh) — Pretty much the definitive Greek experience. If Ovid sits on the magical end and Thucydides on the realistic end, Homer sits square in the middle, permitting myth but never letting it overwhelm the mortal action. There are gods, and the gods manipulate the affairs of men, and though the reader sees them the mortals rarely do. Sometimes a god will speak directly to an important hero, but often a god takes on the form of a trusted confident and offers advice posing as them (the “divine doppelganger” approach). Later people may wonder if that really was the old mentor or Hermes in disguise, but they never really know. There are monsters like the cyclops but they are rare and important, never commonplace (one could even say mythical). Even when there are supernatural elements like the sirens or the sorceress Circe, it is ordinary mortal deeds that drive the action, not magical solutions. Beast of Kolkoris falls in this category.

It shouldn’t be any wonder that Homer falls in the sweet spot, the middle ground where there are supernatural elements but they don’t overwhelm the core of the story, the deeds of the mortal heroes. As I said, Homer pretty much defines Greek literature.

Some situations work in all three styles, only the emphasis is different. In a Homeric game the gods might proclaim to the heroes that a king be destroyed. The gods are the motivator, the watchers on high, but mostly they stay out of the way as the heroes fight and struggle. If it was a Thucydides-style game, there might be a background oracle that the gods have doomed the king, but the heroes would be doing it for mortal reasons — politics, war or vengeance — less for the gods. In an Ovid-style game the king might have offended a god who physically visited his court, and the heroes might need to accomplish a more magical goal to ensure his doom (like cutting down the tree his father planted that represents the vitality of his bloodline).

…

Do you have to pick one and run all your Agon games that way? Nope. Mix it up if you want and do different quests in different styles.

Knowing which style you’re shooting for helps you keep a clear mental picture of the tone you want. You don’t have to break out these categories for the players, but you can if you want to make sure everyone is on the same page. If some of your players are expecting Xena or Kratos, and you’re shooting for Achilles or Alcibiades, it might save you a lot of grief to tell them what you have in mind. “Heroic Greece” doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.

“Is it pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it’s pious?”
– Plato

I was having brunch with Ping and John Harper, so naturally talk turned to the complicated relationships between heroes and gods.

John was saying he wanted Agon to be a game where in the long run the heroes wound up with complex, even adversarial, relationships with their gods instead of just being dependent on them. After all when you’ve got a d12 Name die, is a d12 god oath really that big a deal anymore?

Very cool stuff, but as written the Agon rules don’t do enough to support really juicy god-hero relationships. First there’s a pitfall where a hero has a particular patron god but the Antagonist has set up a quest that will clearly offend that god. What’s a young hero to do, take the quest or be faithful to their god? It’s potentially a cool point of friction, but it only works if it presents the player with interesting choices. Right now it’s either do the quest or reject it and blow a Fate — no fun.

A second problem is that a hero’s relationship with the gods doesn’t change. If you do take a quest that offends your patron nothing happens. You can hand wave the god rejecting you, but it’s all arbitrary. Angering gods is also a big part of the genre, but you have no method of tracking all the gods you cheese off along the way.

Here’s an add-on that tracks your ongoing relationship with the gods. Tick off your patron god too much and maybe you better start making sacrifices to someone else next interlude…

Optional Rule: Wrath of the Gods

A hero has a separate relationship with each god. Heroic deeds and bold words can change these relationships, provoking the anger or affection of each god.

Write down god relationships at the bottom of the Oaths section of your character sheet. Use the box to track any god oaths you have as normal, but after the god’s name write your relationship score. A positive relationship means the god likes you, a negative score means you’ve angered the god.

Pick a patron god at character creation as usual — you start with a +2 relationship with that god. You begin with a 0 relationship with the other gods, but don’t bother to write them all down until you interact with them and your relationship changes.

Serving the Gods — Whenever you complete a quest for a god improve your relationship with that god by 1.

Angering the Gods — If you do something that offends a god, like slaying their favored hero or pet monster, reduce your relationship with that god by 1. Deeds that directly attack a god or its name, like sacking a temple or impugning the love goddess’s beauty, reduce the relationship by 2. Refusing a god’s quest reduces your relationship by 1.

Changing Patrons — You can choose a different god as your patron whenever you want, so long as you make a bold pronouncement about it. Take a -1 to your relationship with your old patron. During Interludes you can only sacrifice to your (current) patron god.

Sacrifice — The only mechanical effect of your relationship is sacrifice. When you sacrifice during an Interlude, take your (relationship - 2) as a modifier to your die roll. You’ll always get your divine favor back, but you are less likely to get a god oath and escape impairment if your patron is mad at you, and more likely if your god is pleased.

Let’s say I start with Zeus as my patron god. After a few quests, the bottom of my Oaths section looks like this:

Zeus +1
Ares +2
Hera -1

Now I’m at a -1 when I sacrifice to Zeus. Hmm, I might have to start thinking of switching to Ares as my patron god.

A bad relationship won’t prevent a god from giving you a quest, but it can and should color things. When an angry god issues the quest it might be more of a threat than a challenge — Hera descends in a thundering cloud and demands the heroes do her bidding or risk her wrath. On the other hand a good relationship means the hero is loved by the god and will be showered with affection and pride.

The Antagonist can (and should) use the evolving relationships between the heroes and the gods to guide future quests. Man those heroes have annoyed Hera again and again. Time for her to get some revenge!

For extra fun instead of just showing the total, put the total positive and negative points you’ve accumulated for the god in parenthesis. Apollo +1 tells you how the god feels towards you right now, but Apollo +1 (+7/-6) shows that your relationship with the god has been a divine roller coaster ride.

Because heroes can wind up with a net bonus for sacrifices if they please their patron they’re more likely to get god oaths. Of course the Antagonists can always throw in some quests against the wishes of their patron god to slow that down…

Heroes are free to switch patrons to take advantage of good relationships that develop but there’s a hidden cost: during character creation a player generally picks a patron god with sacrifice abilities that match their hero’s strengths, but the new god might not match up so well. What’s better, keep the god with the preferred abilities or get the bonus for the good relationship? It’s up to you.

For added zing you could also let heroes pick a second god during character creation that is hostile to them and take a -2 relationship with that god. Your father offended Artemis and you may wind up paying the price. You could also let half-divine characters start with a +4 with their patron but a mandatory -4 with an enemy god.

And yeah, it could use a better name. I would have called it “divine favor” but that was already taken…

For extra credit, take 3 minutes and think how you could use this whole thing as a plugin for any game with lots of relationships with the gods (hint: all you have to do is remove the one line about the sacrifice rules). I knew violating that shrine of Bahamut would come back to haunt me…

Agon includes a quick and painless way to get a quest started: a god descends from Olympus and says “hey, you, go do this thing!” (well, technically three things and you pick which one to do first) That’s excellent if you are doing a pick-up game and want to get straight to the action. But for a long-term game — the Agon campaign — it’s sheer buzz-death. A total passion killer.

Here are some other ways to do quests without killing the love.

The game starts off with normal human action: the heroes are in the court of a king, or attending the great games, fighting a war, ship-wrecked on a lonely isle, etc. Events unfold, people do stuff and the heroes just go about their business as they please, being brave and seeking glory.

Somewhere along the way the quest is revealed, emerging from the events in the game or the things the heroes do. The heroes trespass in a crumbling ruin and anger the goddess of the dawn, who won’t be appeased until her idol is returned to its rightful place. A long night of drinking in the king’s hall leads to bold words and brash oaths to slay the monstrous bull that ravages the fields.

Once the quest has been revealed, a god may or may not appear to cement the deal (see the Silent Gods below). As the heroes sleep off their hang-overs a glowing apparition of Athena rouses them from their sleep to declare that Zeus wills them to complete this task and slay the bull — or is it just a dream?

Spend strife as normal before the quest is revealed, but take it out of the budget for the actual quest. An alternative is to add a “discover the quest” objective and give yourself more strife accordingly.

Instead of an episodic game where each quest is independent, string a bunch of quests together under one overarching mega-quest spread out across multiple games. Bring back the three pieces of the panoply of Apollo spread far across the earth, slay the five heroes who sacked Thebes, etc.

Usually one agency (god or mortal) sends the heroes on all the sub-quests. They might be thematically related (like the examples above) or they might be very different tasks, only related because the same person is sending the heroes to do them (like the labors of Hercules). Depending on the premise failing one quest might end the whole quest chain.

The heroes should know they are doing a quest chain, but they might not know what all the tasks are when they start — they might just learn each new task when they finish the last one. It is probably wise to let the heroes know how many tasks they need to complete from the start. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get a sense of the scope and every quest is a “jeez, how many more are there!” game.

Create and spend strife just like normal for each individual quest. Alternately you could save strife you didn’t spend in each quest and carry it forward to the next quest in the chain — be careful or else you’ll wind up with astronomical strife for the last quest.

Somewhere up there in the clouds of Mount Olympus, the gods want the heroes to complete the quest. They want to see the monster slain or the rash king laid low for his hasty words. And they want to see the heroes do it. But that doesn’t mean they are going to show themselves. They are going to sit up in the heavens and watch, empowering the heroes when they spend their Divine Favor but otherwise just kicking back and watching. What’s the point of being a god and having heroes if you have to do everything yourself?

The heroes start off with a mission, but it comes from a mortal agency, not a god. It could be a task put before them by a king, or an oracle they’ve sworn to fulfill to save their city-state, whatever. Getting the mission might be in the past, something read out as part of the introduction, or it can be something that happens early in the game (like the Emerging Quest described above).

Mechanically it’s not really different from the method in the book (you still get an oath from the god that favors the quest), but it’s a big difference in roleplaying: Athena isn’t in your face telling you what to do, you aren’t “on a mission from god.”

A mortal quest also opens up the door for a lot more player free will — defying the gods is a big step, but defying mortals is fair game. What if you hate the king you’re on the quest for? Maybe you’ll complete the quest as sworn but find a way to twist the intent to screw him over. The king demanded you bring the head of the medusa to him, but he didn’t say anything about not waving it in his face, turning him into stone, and slaughtering his city.

A quest is what one god wants to happen. But what if another god wants something else to happen and the heroes are forced to choose which god they obey? Hera wants the boy slain, but Zeus wants him taken safely to the queen of the Amazons.

Each god’s desires are usually in direct opposition, making it impossible to satisfy both and forcing heroes to choose sides and suffer the consequences. No matter how incompatible you think the goals are, clever players might find ways to surprise you and wriggle through some loophole, fulfilling both quests. To which I say, huzzah! That’s good gaming. Odysseus would be proud.

A really good conflicted quest would be crafted so that the heroes’ choice isn’t set in stone until the bitter end — they should be able to complete several objectives without having to pick sides. Once they take steps that absolutely support one goal and defy the other it’s pretty much a straight quest. Cruel Antagonists will also look for ways to make both goals appealing or unappealing at different stages of the quest. Sure slaying the monster sounded like the better choice, but then like the Beast of Kolkoris you meet him and find out he’s a guilt-ridden philosopher king with a crying wife clinging to his knees.

A combination of a few things above. You have been given a mortal quest that you appear to be fulfilling, but secretly the gods have appeared and given you conflicting goals. The king wants you to bring back the sacred apples, but the gods have told you to first pierce them with the fangs of the hydra, so the king will be killed when he eats them.

It’s different from the Conflicted Quest in that the decision is pretty much assumed: unless you reject the quest you’re going to be following the god’s objectives, not the mortal’s. Mechanically if you did fulfill the mortal quest and defy the gods it counts as both a quest win (take normal rewards, earn a Fate) and a quest reject (earn another Fate).

There’s lots of room for high drama, particularly if the mortal the heroes are betraying is likable or a sworn ally, not an enemy or some random jerk.

There’s a prophecy and the heroes are trying to fulfill it. Unfortunately like most good oracles the literal meaning can interpreted a few different ways. Which interpretation is the right one? What is the real goal of the quest?

Part of the heroes’ quest is to feel their way along and figure out the real meaning of the prophecy. It could be a real heartbreaker where the heroes think for most of the quest that they are intended to save a city, only to figure out at the last moment that the vague “it’s people safe behind wooden walls” didn’t mean the city walls would stand, it meant they were going to flee with the few remaining survivors by ship (the prophesied wooden walls).

A good prophecy quest should include lots of people along the way throwing out their own interpretations of the prophecy, just to stir things up and make the heroes look at the words in different ways. Kings and other heroes might take rash actions based on their own optimistic reading of the oracle, sweeping the heroes up in tragic events.

…

Mixing it up like this means that not only do the heroes think about what they’re doing inside the quest, they think about the meaning of the quest as a whole and their place in the world. They’re participants in an unfolding story instead of just following some god’s irresistible orders.

I present each of these types separately, but really you can blend them together in different degrees to create new and strange things. A king sends the heroes to bring back all the pieces of the panoply of Apollo (seven labors quest) thinking he will have impregnable armor, but Athena has told the heroes to give the final assembled armor to the king’s usurper son instead (ulterior motive quest), while Apollo demands his armor be destroyed in the mountain of fire since the hero he once gave it to is dead and no other mortal deserves it (conflicted quest).