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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.

Games don’t always work. A game might be too ambitious to really be feasible, or it might just be too much for the people involved. In the middle is the range of games that work, the successful game, the fun zone.

There are two ways you can widen the fun:

1) you can push the boundaries of gaming, going into dangerous territory and making new and exciting game techniques possible

2) you can lower the barrier to gaming, making it easier for people to play and have fun

These are really measures of what the players at the table at the time can handle (GM included). The successful gaming zone is different for every group, perhaps different for every single person at the table. If you invent a bold new roleplaying technique some people will find it fun and exciting, others will cringe in its cruel embrace. And if you lower barriers to make it easier to play, some people will leap for joy but others won’t even need that help (at least not most of the time — some days even the best gamers need a booster seat).

…

Despite the experimental stuff you may have read about in these very pages (dirty tricks like NormalVision or postcognition), I find a lot of my activity revolves around the second case, lowering the barriers. I write and publish adventures to (hopefully) make it as easy as humanly possible for a GM to mount the hot seat and run a game that lands squarely in the fun zone.

When I run games, I do all those clever things I talk about here to embrace players and draw out their best game. Of course I’m not made of pixie dust. There are days I’m a cranky, fed up, and ready to grind the players into chum if they won’t stop being so goddamned stupid. But that’s not what I’m shooting for. It’s not what I’ll call the _ideal_ case.

My ideal case is not to impress them with my GM craft, but to get them to play so well that afterwards they walk around thinking how awesome they were. That’s victory, me bucko.

…

This division is a pretty fundamental one, philosophically speaking. Forging ahead or lowering the bar, experimenting or inviting, etc. Whichever your inclination (if you have an inclination), recognize that both are good for gaming as a whole. Both.

The natural question is: are they mutually exclusive? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that yes, in a particular moment in time, something that promotes one is unlikely to simultaneously promote the other. Different facets of the game may do either, but a technique that does both, that pushes gaming into new territory _and_ makes it easier to play… well that’s the holy grail isn’t it?

For many, many years I ran games as a way of expressing the worlds I had built.

I ran different campaigns, with different groups of people, all in different places or different times, but the vast majority were all on the same world and in my mind all connected. Not connected in plot, just connected because they were part of the same setting.

Even if I wasn’t running games, the world existed in my mind. I was constantly refining and revising it, though it would be more accurate to say I was exploring it, because as any serious world-builder will tell you it often feels more like you are discovering rather than creating. Just a trick of the brain? Probably.

But now I’ve noticed that I do the opposite. Now I run games, and if I need worlds to provide a context for those games I whip them up.

Game => world, not world => game.

As an experienced world-builder I can build a setting that feels detailed and fleshed out in a very short time so to a certain degree I can make the difference invisible to the players, but the root motivation is still entirely different.

For extra credit extend the concept: it’s not just the GM making the world and running the game, it’s also players and their characters. Is your character a tool to play the game, or is the game your vehicle to play the character you envision?

Naturally you’re asking: which one is the right way? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: what drives each? They may look the same on the surface, so much so that some people in the same gaming group may be doing one and some the other and never realize it, but I think they are intrinsically different activities. Understanding that difference can tell us a lot about why we game.

Which one are you doing?

Player: “… and after enumerating the logistical problems, I finish up by explaining that if the King invades now, he’s just repeating the same mistakes that doomed Badon IV when he marched into these very lands two hundred years ago, a fatal error that brought his glorious reign to an ignominous end.”

Player: “… I roll a 3.”

You’ve seen it happen. A player says something really interesting, really moving in character when trying to use a social skill, but cannot back it up with dice to save their life.

The first urge as GM is just to say “well forget the numbers, that sounded good to me, it works.” Good call, but the downside is that then you are just ignoring character stats entirely, which penalizes players who maybe aren’t so eloquent or pithy but still built characters who are supposed to be charming masters of discourse.

A better solution would be to combine roleplaying and character stats, taking the best of both worlds. How would you do that? How about assigning a virtual roll based on how good the roleplaying was, then apply character abilities to that virtual roll just like normal? Let roleplaying replace the dice instead of having the dice replace roleplaying.

I’ll use d20 as a specific example, but the concept should work for any system that uses dice to resolve social interactions.

When a character roleplays a social action that would normally require a roll, instead of the player rolling a die the GM assigns the result of the die roll based on the roleplaying (”your speech was good enough that we’ll say you rolled a 15″). If you want some consensus democracy you can let the whole group decide what the virtual roll should be, or even just let the player assign their own score — it all depends on what kind of group you have (insert social contract here).

The default is a 10 (aka taking 10) even if you don’t roleplay at all or have nothing interesting to say. This is important because the goal is _not_ to penalize people who aren’t up for roleplaying. You should only assign a number below 10 when the player uses an argument that is particularly bad for some reason (like threatening the king, or unintentionally citing a bunch of mistakes he made recently and is still sore about).

Assign a number that seems right to you. A 15 is nicely done, and a 20 is reserved for really impressive roleplaying (naturally). You shouldn’t have a hard time coming up with the virtual roll, because you’re already used to thinking in terms of these scores — years of gaming have given you a keen sense of how good it would be to roll an 18, for example.

Now that you’ve determined the virtual roll, just proceed to add skill ranks, ability modifiers, etc to the roll and resolve the results as you normally would.

Let’s take a classic diplomatic example:

A PC knight tries to convince a weary king to join the war and save the besieged city. The character has a moderate Diplomacy score, but the player is making really good arguments, bringing in the King’s past, the plight of the people, rah rah rah.

After some consideration everyone agrees the knight did a very good job, and the group decides on a virtual roll of 16. He has a Diplomacy +6, so he gets a total of 22. Not bad.

To make things interesting let’s say another player is against the idea, and her character is trying to point out all the flaws in the plan, how it will mire the country in an unwinnable war, etc. Her priest has very sharp social skills, but the player is just saying “err, I tell him it’s a bad idea. It will go badly. Really badly.”

The priest doesn’t throw in any roleplaying, so she just takes 10, but her Diplomacy is +11 so she gets a 21. Or since she isn’t roleplaying, you could just have her roll as normal.

An interesting side effect is that you even though you aren’t penalizing people who don’t roleplay, you may encourage people who normally don’t roleplay much to do it a little bit more because of the small incentives. A player can say nothing and get a 10, but maybe if he says just a little bit, tries to get in character just a smidge, he could get an 11 or 12 pretty easily.

Is this enough to encourage some players to roleplay a bit more? Maybe, maybe not.

But wait, you ask, why not just give a bonus for good roleplaying? Isn’t assigning a 16 about the same as giving a +6 bonus? No! A bonus changes the possible range of success (i.e. in this case you can a get a maximum 26 instead of a maximum 20 before factoring in your stats), whereas assigning a roll doesn’t change the range at all since you still can’t “roll” higher than a 20. And let’s face it, no matter what kind of bonus you assign the dice are still pretty random.

But what if you like the random? Well in lots of cases there is still randomness on the NPC side of the roll. If the PC rogue is just trying to deceive the NPC king, you are still rolling for the king’s ability to sense deception. There are also whacky things you can by making part of the die random and part assigned (using a d10 instead of a d20 and calling the other half the assigned score part) but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student.

And then there’s the big question: why just social skills? What about applying a virtual roll to other things the players do? Sure, if the player works out a cunning plan to build his fortress where the marshes run up to the fork in the river to make it hard to storm, assign him a high virtual roll for his War Architect skill. Attentive readers may even now be considering how to use this idea to make decision-driven Spot checks without giving up on having some characters more perceptive than others.

How far can you take it? Try running a bar room brawl where you assign virtual attack rolls based on how interestingly players describe kicking a stool to trip someone up or swinging from a chandelier to tackle a ruffian. Or assign virtual saving throw rolls based on clever descriptions of exactly how the players avoid the fiery dragon breath, or magic rolls based on florid descriptions of mystical mumbo jumbo. You can even mix it up and let some people roll, some people roleplay, as you prefer.

Can you really transform D&D into a cinematic story game just by changing this one rule? Try it and see.