A Braunstein is Not a One-Shot

One-Shot Play is WILDLY Different from Campaign Play

There is a recent video, and a long tweet about what a Braunstein is, and what it is not. I had some thoughts, which I shared in a private chat, and I thought maybe they would be illuminating to y’all.

The video is linked at the end of the post.
The long tweet by the video creator (@cerulean_rex) is clipped and linked here:

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On the subject of what Major Wesely calls a Braunstein(which is German for brown stone of course), his Banania game which was set in the town of Piedras Morenas (again brown stones) and then finally Duane Jenkins Brown Stone )which I am sure you can guess the meaning of lol) I don’t even think we can say for sure that Blackmoor was called a Braunstein by the time Wesely returned home from his military service.

Dave Arneson and the Blackmoor bunch only described Blackmoor as a Medieval Braunstein for a Very short amount of time. I think they knew they had something different. And Major Wesely returned from military service overseas long after Blackmoor was started. I think that calling Blackmoor anything other than Blackmoor by that time seemed inappropriate. As for Braunstein being a methodology I won't commit to a term at this time. I don’t want to get boxed in during this discussion, which I think is something I should watch out for. I saw that go poorly a couple of weeks back.

Framing this as a choice between ‘Methodology’ vs “Single Setting Game’ requires me to buy into a dichotomy that I am not sure exists. I would also like the citation on that video where Major Wesely states ‘it is a methodology’ for contextual clarity. if you can find it of course. It begs the question, methodology for what exactly. I don’t have sufficient information to answer your question. Halls of Arden Vul was written for OSE and I was not familiar with it. I will state however, that it immediately violates one of my ‘what is Braunstein nots’ as soon as you say leaders and factions. This gives the leaders and factions the ability to reach out across a campaign world and do things. Braunstein and Banania are encapsulated. And with several very good reasons..

The fictional town of Braunstein is not a part of reality, but it is very much meant to seem like it could. I believe that Major Wesely was after something very important to him. He wanted to see someone using multiple single characters with multiple objectives interacting with each other. THAT was a major part of the experiment. It has been related to me second hand that he was looking at the emotional state of the town just before war it knows is coming. You need a worms eye view for that, not birds eye.

Single character. Small scale.

You can’t get what the game form is attempting on grand campaign sized scaling is my belief.

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It is as much psych experiment on the one to one scale as it is anything else.

High level national and factional political intrigue … that’s more like Diplomacy. Braunsteins are all about taking the local temperature in a pressure cooker. As for the capping of the game form, I think any number of people could have made more Baunsteins. I think Blackmoor took over everyone’s interest. “I am sure people have run with it at their own tables.” Running the Braunstein or Banania or even the Brown Stone scenarios? I am having trouble envisioning this, but again you are operating from a place where the scale doesn’t matter. I believe it does. If we can get context on the methodology quote you bring up, some other things might might pop up with that that describe said methodology. I would be very interested in seeing it for sure.

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My Thoughts on the Matter

The ideas and opinions I share below are based on the text of the tweet by Cerulean Rex and my own research & experiences with higher order play. At the time of these chat posts, I had not seen the video. my thoughts on the video are posted below the video.

If you have not yet seen this video, I recommend that you do, while keeping an eye on my own observations and criticisms, which are posted below the video embed, with approximate time stamps.

The Chat

The session Braunstein works perfectly well in the context of a larger campaign. It only looks like a "One shot, psychological analysis of a pressure cooker."

The caveat is that the campaign needs to be fully developed, with patrons making long-term plans, executing monthly turns, and players having multiple characters pursuing independent objectives, all held together in a network by 1:1 downtime pacing

It's a radically different type of game than conventional play represents

[Example] On September 1st the patrons submit their turns for the month. The referee sees that two of them are going to have a military conflict at some point. He informs the players that they need to structure their next two sessions such that the third week of the month is free for them to participate in a session Braunstein in the town stuck between the hammer and the anvil of the two patrons' armies.

This is not an easy situation to manage for an inexperienced dungeon master or referee, but with motivated players who are energized to participate between sessions, as well as patrons who will take the time to interact with the dungeon master and the session players between sessions, it's relatively simple to adjudicate.

Experience, elite-level players can manage Patron interactions on their own, especially if it's handled in Discord, where the referee can go back and review the conversations as an archive.

There is a certain level of metagaming involved, but that's what happens when you're running a full-scale war game campaign. Because you're playing two or three different games at the same time, at different scales,

In one-shot war games, such as weekly round robins at the local game store, you will often see the armies battle to the last man, in order to determine a "winner". In a campaign-type game you will never see a battle to the last man unless the situation is extremely desperate, because both players need those men for next week's game.

A properly run campaign relies on resource management at every scale, whether that resource is a torch, a week's worth of rations, or a company of soldiers.

…if you run a Warhammer tournament at a game store, where every game you get to use the same army over and over again against a different opponent, and simply log your victory points, you will get a very particular kind of gameplay. If you tell the participants at the beginning that they only get to use the leftover figures for the second game, and that casualties have to sit out, you will see a wildly different type of gameplay.

I believe this is what made the first Braunstein so compelling because the participants were told that the results of the so-called social session would have a direct impact on the starting conditions of the full-scale war game to be held next. I wonder how different Dungeons & Dragons might be if Wesley had actually run the Napoleonic game with miniatures on the table the next day, with the starting conditions and victory conditions based on the results of the previous day’s social encounters.

Replies:

A:

Why I was pointing out the importance of his comment about the town having importance over the characters.

B:

One of the debates on Patrons was whether they were earned or not; turns out, that part was completely irrelevant to the question of "what new game scenario does a Braunstein with doled out characters produce?"

Patrons were an answer to a question we hadn't found the correct framing for, I think.

In the end, the "You can't just give people patron characters to run!" = "You can't just run a Braunstein in your setting!"

Patron roles don't need to be "earned". Patron players are playing a different scale of game, which is why I call them Downtime Players. [many] … fail to grasp this distinction. They don't understand that downtime players are participating at a different pace, and a different scale, from session players. And they really don't understand that the ways in which downtime players and session players can interact, both between and during sessions, is where the energy comes from that drives the whole Campaign World forward.

Patron characters don't have to be high level, that's another common misconception among the naysayers and ankle biters. People hear the term Faction Leader and they automatically think name level, or high level, when a very powerful person in a city could very well be a zero level politician or wealthy Noble.

The DMG has specific rules for creating higher level characters to use as npcs, including what magic items they might have. Nowhere does it say that the dungeon master has to run all of these NPCs.

[Many] are fixated on the PC Party, as though the Party is the axle around which the campaign turns. Because their approach to the game is completely backwards.

Random encounters, and domain events, are the engine that turn the campaign wheel. It doesn't matter if there are any patrons, or session players, the campaign goes on regardless of their action or inaction.

The Video

Critique

First, thank you to CR for presenting these concepts in a cogent manner. I heard some fascinating things here. However, I disagree with your premise that the Braunstein is “self-contained” and not an important part of a wargame.

One could say that setting up your miniature figures on a table is “not wargaming”, but it is an essential part of actually playing a wargame.

14:15 “another aspect that is not Braunstein is a future…the action of the game does not determine anything, any future play…the action of a Braunstein is self-contained”

I fundamentally disagree. The invited participants were told that the resolution of this Braunstein game would affect the starting conditions of an actual wargame, to be played with miniatures on a table, in the future.

This is incredibly important! As I mentioned above, people play games differently when there are limited resources to be conserved for a future game:

Believing your actions of today will indeed affect future events ABSOLUTELY has a strong influence on how you play today, the decisions you make about aggression or compromise, and the level of damage to your resources you are willing to accept.

27:00

We don’t know what kind of effects the events of this game, in this town, at this time, would have been on the greater world, because Wesely didn’t actually play the miniatures wargame that was advertised.

28:30 On So-called “Mundane Objectives”

“getting three extra bags of wheat”

This part of the game is indeed zero-sum. If war is coming to your town, getting extra food supplies is ANYTHING but mundane. In fact, it is VERY IMPORTANT! Food is a limited resource, there is a finite amount of it. If I have more, it means you will have less. Which could be a vital part of the miniatures battle to be played on the morrow!

30:00

“Braunstein” focuses on Social. Well, this one did, except for the duel. Which Arneson was not expected to have, nor was he really supposed to do. But he did.

37:00 “Weseley pushed ‘pure roleplay’ to a high level with almost no wargaming”

I think you continue to neglect the initial premise of the Braunstein, which was to generate the starting conditions for an actual wargame to be played shortly after the Braunstein scenario.

Whether or not the game was actually played is irrelevant to the strategies and tactics of the Players, who believed there would be a miniatures game tomorrow.

Thanks for reading, please share with your friends on teh interwebs.