Braunstein supplied two ideas that define roleplaying: one player, one character, and open-ended rules under which a referee decides the outcome of anything a player tries. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor grew directly out of it.
Overview
Braunstein was not a product. It was never boxed, never sold and never had a finished rulebook. It was a series of refereed games run by David Wesely and his friends in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul wargaming scene at the end of the 1960s — and it is where a group of miniatures players first stumbled into what would soon be called roleplaying.
The name comes from the fictional town in which the first game was set, and "a Braunstein" became the Twin Cities gamers' shorthand for a whole style of play: a scenario in which each participant controls one individual with personal goals, and a referee adjudicates whatever they decide to do.
Origins
Wesely, a physics student at Hamline University, belonged to the Midwest Military Simulation Association. In 1967 he rediscovered, in the University of Minnesota library, Charles Totten's Strategos: The American Game of War (1880), a descendant of the Prussian Kriegsspiel. Totten gave him the model of a referee with broad powers: a game master who designs the scenario and who can rule on any action, not merely those covered by written rules. Wesely also took the idea of negotiation between turns from the board game Diplomacy, and the idea of many-player games from J. D. Williams's The Compleat Strategist (1954).
The first Braunstein, usually dated to 1969, was meant as a Napoleonic engagement around a small German town. Wesely wanted a game with more players and more objectives than a standard two-sided battle, so he handed out civilian roles as well as military ones — the mayor, a banker, the chancellor of the local university. Nearly twenty people came, more than he had planned for.
How it plays
Instead of commanding an army, each player is somebody: a single person in the town with a situation and a private agenda. Players were originally supposed to submit their actions to the referee, but they quickly began speaking to one another in character — bargaining, conspiring and wandering the town. When two of them challenged each other to a duel, Wesely had no rule for it and had to invent one on the spot. The referee, not a rulebook, determined what happened.
That is the crucial shift from a Miniatures & Board Wargames to a Tabletop Roleplaying Games. In a wargame each player controls a side and the goal is to beat the other side under fixed rules. In Braunstein each player controlled one character, the goals were open, and the rules were whatever the referee judged plausible. There was no board to finish crossing and no final score — only the question of what each character would try next.
Wesely considered the result chaotic and the experiment a failure. His players disagreed and asked for more.
Reception & impact
Later Braunsteins moved to a new setting: the unstable Latin American republic of Banania, where players plotted or tried to prevent a coup. Dave Arneson, a University of Minnesota history student and MMSA regular, took turns refereeing these, and when Wesely was commissioned and ordered to Army duty in October 1970, Arneson carried on. Another member, Duane Jenkins, ran Old West variants set in "Brownstone," Texas, in which players kept the same characters from session to session — an early glimpse of the ongoing campaign.
In spring 1971 Arneson's fanzine announced "a medieval 'Braunstein'" at his home, promising mythical creatures and a poker game under a troll's bridge. That session began Blackmoor, and Blackmoor, demonstrated to Gary Gygax, became the seed of Dungeons & Dragons. Arneson himself described Blackmoor as a variation on Wesely's game.
Legacy
For decades the published origin story of roleplaying began with Gygax and Chainmail, and Braunstein was a footnote known mostly to Twin Cities veterans. Historical work — above all Jon Peterson's research, including his 2012 Playing at the World — restored it to the center of the story, as the place where one-to-one identification between player and character and the referee's open-ended adjudication first came together.
Wesely went on to design wargames, including Valley Forge (TSR, 1976), and computer games. The Braunstein format — a crowd of players each with a personal agenda inside one refereed scenario — lives on in convention "megagames" and in the political intrigue of Live-Action Roleplay (LARP). Every time a Game Master responds to "I want to try something the rules don't cover," Braunstein is being replayed.
Marginalia
- Its referee, David Wesely, took his all-powerful umpire from Charles Totten's 1880 wargame Strategos, which he had found in a University of Minnesota library in 1967.
- Players were cast as the town's mayor, banker and university chancellor, among others — roles with goals that had nothing to do with winning a battle.
- When two players unexpectedly challenged each other to a duel, Wesely had to improvise rules on the spot.
- Wesely thought the first game a chaotic failure; his players asked him to run another.
- After Wesely was called to Army duty in October 1970, Dave Arneson took over as referee — and in April 1971 announced a "medieval Braunstein" that became Blackmoor.
- In a 1981 interview Arneson described Blackmoor as a variation on Wesely's Braunstein, set in a fantasy world.
Quick answers
- When was Braunstein first released?
- Braunstein was first released in c. 1969 (first game); later Braunsteins 1969–71.
- Who created Braunstein?
- Braunstein was made by David Wesely (creator and referee) and Dave Arneson (player; later referee of Braunstein scenarios).
- What kind of work is Braunstein?
- Braunstein is a wargame in the Miniatures & Board Wargames and Tabletop Roleplaying Games tradition, released for Refereed multiplayer game and Miniatures and maps.
- Why is Braunstein important?
- Braunstein supplied two ideas that define roleplaying: one player, one character, and open-ended rules under which a referee decides the outcome of anything a player tries. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor grew directly out of it.
