What's Better than a Battle Braunstein?
A Player-driven, Always-on Campaign!
Braunstein play is the topic of conversation around the campfire lately, and player versus player/Faction play is a big part of the Leader of MenTM project so I'd like to discuss my point of view when it comes to writing this game supplement.
A short chat happened recently in a dungeon master group I'm part of. Campaign rules, mini games, and Braunstein came up in the discussion and I spent a few minutes clarifying my thoughts on the subject.
I thought it might be interesting if I were to copy these chat posts into a document and elaborate even further on the topic.
How It Started
One of the participants said, “As foretold in book one, proper development of the game will come through play, in the process inventing/discovering the campaign rules themselves.”
By this he means the Foreword and Scope sections of the original Dungeons and Dragons rule book. Here Gary writes, “While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules were designed.”
Also, on page 5, “Dungeons and Dragons will provide a basically complete, nearly endless campaign, of all levels of fantastic medieval wargame play.”
How many times do you suppose players have skipped over these sentences?
The short answer is, too many. The war game concept was lost, abandoned, or worse yet, purposefully ignored.
Even though, at the bottom of page 5, there is a bold section heading “Preparing for the Campaign.”
The chat continues to say, “The original Dungeons and Dragons dungeon seems almost like a mini game, to provide a source of risky wealth for characters and lips sees the PvP slash Braunstein aspects of the game take place outside of that, as armies are being formed castles built or claimed.”
An inspired extension of this was, “It is no mistake that when the game is played correctly, more and more subsystems are demanded of the game, requiring the mash up and experimentation.”
My Initial Thoughts
The preceding comments really got the wheels turning in the old noggin. I started with, “Brigadine and Belloc proved this point with their interpretation of the Sojenka campaign. My intention was to create a game where multiple parties would explore the concept of 1:1 pacing in extended mega-dungeon exploration. Instead, they went off in their own direction creating a massive army and taking the battle to the non-human Factions surrounding the civilized realm.
I had to come up with a whole bunch of more detailed recruiting rules, army organizational rules, and bolt on the economic system from ACKS.”
Brigadine replied: “Game was mostly totm, the only truly tactical battle we really had was the last one. We could have done more of it for sure but our biggest challenge was finding an opponent.”
REPLY When you say opponent do you mean someone to run the other force?
Brigadine: “Another force of any significance to challenge us. We bullied everything around us but didn’t quite have the strength to target the capital.”
(more) “That’s what we found. To be fair we didn’t test that side of things much. Our objective was to destroy a patron. We killed two in a single decisive battle and called that our win con. With the kriegspiel that we’ve run so far the most fun has been the double-blind tactical level ones. I’ve yet to have an opportunity to play at that scale during an actual campaign. My large-scale conflicts have been abstracted.”
Me: Part of the difficulty with "getting tactical" was the online nature of the game and the "zero prep" situation. Brig & Co really really leaned into the Fog of War concept, and in order to conceal their actions from patrons and other players, they also concealed a lot of their stuff from me.
The double-blind Kriegsspiel game or Chainmail game requires some advance prep & most importantly a visual representation of the battlefield.
The big climactic battle at the end of the season as it were, was more tactical in nature because I knew that it was coming.
The patrons were actually driving this one and coordinating their activities between each other and myself.
So I was able to put together the needed lists of troops etc.
BRIG: We were rabid about OPSEC lol
Me: I had expected, as did Brigadine, that the patrons would respond to the growing strength of [the Tuesday] gaming group more aggressively.
So, because I was letting the Patrons play, and letting the Factions develop organically, when they didn't step up (until it was too late) there weren't any phony/contrived Factions that I generated to create a "challenge" for the Tuesday group.
In my opinion, this kind of situation brings us right back around to the very beginning. You only get these sort of massive Factional conflicts ORGANICALLY when all of the participants are knowledgeable and literate in the map-based war game campaign phenomenon.
(NOTE: More on this topic, specifically, further down!)
The Battle Braunstein concept is interesting in that it can be a very effective tool for communicating the concepts of the map based campaign.
The weakness of Battle Braunstein's contrived Factional conflict is, while it may work well as a one-off, periodic exercise, you have the "Valmar" problem where the regular participants may not be interested in maintaining this operational tempo on a regular basis.
I've said it before, several times, that the original groups that developed the game apparently consisted of nearly 100% participation by players who were absolutely wild about campaign play.
BRIG: Agreed. My RL table only wants to dungeon delve and quest and whatnot, aside from F. No interest in the campaign level.
Me: There are a couple issues of the old fanzine that have multiple iterations of Diplomacy variants set in all sorts of alternative environments, such as Lord of the Rings etc. Currently, it is my opinion that the Braunstein level of the game should strictly be part of the Downtime Player area of the game and run continuously in the background.
Maintaining the Fog of War between Downtime Players, and especially the session players, maintains that magical "Discovery" element
(NOTE:that the zero prep concept allegedly produces but fails miserably at, i.e. #desertswamp & "the mountains that weren't there yesterday").
Regulated by 1:1 pacing, the ongoing Braunstein interactions act as the engine that keeps all of the various parts of the campaign setting in motion.
This continuous background activity produces an incredible number of "adventure hooks". So many in fact, that the players can't pursue them all and the Downtime Players get disillusioned because the players aren't interacting with them.
Because the baseline standard of player versus player interaction (Diplomacy, map-based wargame campaigns) was abandoned for the more collaborative model. PVP is something that most [modern] players aren't comfortable with.
The weakness [of the Battle Braunstein] is making it a "Session", rather than [making] this Factional conflict the backbone of the campaign.
I am not saying that they are not a good and useful tool. In a campaign where all of the players are not rabidly interested in continuous ongoing downtime play, the Battle Braunstein will be extremely valuable in generating Factional content.
What Does This Mean?
It means two things, really.
First of all, it means that the Original Dungeons & Dragons was meant to be a model for a Wargame Campaign. Unfortunately the word "Braunstein" is tripping people up. I am not aware of an “official” definition of the term, but the generally accepted description is a multi-player, free-form roleplaying scenario, where individual players are assigned individual roles and unique, personal objectives. These objectives, or victory conditions, may be isolated, conflicting, or cooperative. Completing an objective may include scoring sufficient points for various actions or achieving a particular end-state.
The game session that happened in David Weseley’s city of Braunstein was billed as the opening session of a new wargame campaign, with its own special scoring system. Luckily for us, the players had so much fun, operating in a free-form environment, that they lost sight of the intended goals. They went so far off the track that Weseley thought the session was a failure. Additional sessions were held, and Dave Arneson took the lessons of individual roles, personal objectives, and free-form referee concepts back home and created Blackmoor.
Blackmoor was something new. It was more than a Braunstein. In fact, the first “Medieval Braunstein” session was designed to hand out pre-made characters for the Players to play, and create an inciting incident to drive the new campaign forward.
In the introduction to The First Fantasy Campaign, Dave Arneson writes:
Each area had to mesh with those areas that were around it, insofar as setting up the various monsters, etcetera, were concerned. It was also readily apparent, from previous experience running a “conventional” Napoleonic wargames campaign that some sort of overall background would have to be constructed to provide a framework within which the players could work.
Thus the overall concept of the Evil egg of Coot and the Great Kingdom was born. These two entities could prove to be the source of great events outside of the actual campaign, a source of new recruits and monsters, and give the stimulus, in the way of quests and adventures to give the players more of a motive than just looting the dungeon. Also with such powerful and potentially aggressive neighbors, the locals decided that at least some taxes should be collected to provide for the common defense.
Blackmoor was a map-based wargame campaign containing the environment for Domain, Faction, and Individual-level adventuring.
Dungeons and Dragons is a Wargame
The second thing the Braunstein discussion means is that we have been playing D&D inside-out for 40 years. The “Gygax 75” method of creating a new Campaign with one town and one dungeon in a single 25 mile hex is completely wrong. I invite you to consider the rest of this essay in the context of the following statements:
The gamers who invented D&D were members of Wargame Clubs.
These gamers were very experienced in re-creating macro-scale, historical military campaigns and existing macro-games such as Diplomacy.
They had already completed long-term campaign games in which the participants “role-played” as national leaders and army generals.
The original composition of the D&D LBB rules was that of a large-scale fantasy simulation, with the LBB as a small-scale campaign system, designed for individual characters who would then investigate & explore the details of the large-scale simulation.
Gary Gygax wrote at the beginning of OD&D book 1:
“While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules were designed.”
“Dungeons and Dragons will provide a basically complete, nearly endless campaign, of all levels of fantastic medieval wargame play.” (emphasis mine, PD)
It is with this mindset that one should approach the game of Dungeons & Dragons, and other games like it.
Why a Wargame Campaign?
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and their respective groups of wargamers in the Midwest were students of the early pioneers of wargaming, such as Tony Bath and Don Featherstone (among others). They were intimately familiar with the conventions and processes of war games and political games, like Diplomacy. They wrote articles and alternate rules for these games and shared them with others in fanzines.
In the fanzine Europa (issues 6-8) there are FOUR different Diplomacy variants, including one for Middle Earth.
For them, the concept of this kind of multi-player game only existed in the context of a full-scale Faction vs Faction Campaign.
As for why, I suppose Tony Bath himself provides the best answer:
What makes campaigning so rewarding? Why, if you have fairly limited time available for the hobby, should you use time that could be spent in fighting on the tabletop in pouring over maps and situation reports? The answer is that no real life general could limit himself to the purely tactical problems of the battlefield, and the campaign is the way in which the war gamer general widens his horizon.
The player who merely participates as a general or a ruler finds the opportunity to practice strategy as well as tactics. He may find himself having to solve problems of supply and finance, and, if the campaign is a complicated one, matters of diplomacy as well. He must learn one of the hardest lessons for a war gamer: when to cut his losses and abandon a losing battle, instead of fighting on to the bitter end.
The war gamer who either runs or helps to run a campaign gains even more, for he can give full reign to his creative genius, both as regards the rules he uses and the countries and characters he creates. A radio interviewer once asked me whether the desire to run a mythical continent of my own was a sign of power mania; I replied that this was possibly true to some extent, since most of us like the idea of playing God to some degree, but more important was the freedom it gave to a bent for organizing things.
~Tony Bath, Setting Up a Wargames Campaign
I highly recommend his book (Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming & Setting Up a Wargames Campaign) for anyone wishing to expand their D&D game into a higher-order experience.
Research done by BigCorp has shown the typical D&D “Campaign” lasts about 6 sessions.
(from a WotC survey, which was widely linked years ago, but has since been removed from the WotC website)
I suspect this is because that’s how long it takes for the DM to run out of energy for entertaining the players or creating a script for them to act out, or when the players get tired of acting out this particular (usually lackluster) story.
I would imagine it gets boring rather quickly, acting out someone else’s fantasy.
The wargame campaign described by Tony Bath and Gary Gygax, however, is your fantasy, right from the beginning. You as the player decide what is going to happen next, and the DM, in his role as Referee, assigns some probabilities according to the theme of the Campaign and describes how successful you are.
This is where the vaunted Player Agency resides, in a living Campaign, where player character choices determine their fate and the fates of those around them. It is one where player character choices can alter the game world (or the characters themselves!) in meaningful, persistent ways.
When you approach the game as a CAMPAIGN FIRST, a living setting in constant motion, populated by multiple, independent groups competing for resources (power, status, magic, or whatever) you get a very different kind of game than the one that “most people” have been playing for the past 40 years.
Playing D&D Inside-Out
In November 2023 Jeffro Johnson tweeted about wanting his campaign to be a “Map Wargame”. He said he “originally thought Patron Play would result in that kind of gameplay dynamic, but BrOSR campaigns have NOT developed those kinds of battles at all.”
I retweeted him, with :
Patron play isn't resulting in this kind of gameplay dynamic because people aren't recruiting WARGAMERS to be Patrons.
We are recruiting RPG-ers to be Patrons.
They just don't know how to play an #Imaginations campaign, which literally goes back to the '60s.
This is not a dig at Patron players, it’s a comment on the state of the RPG community, which is almost completely divorced from the Wargame community. I say “almost” because there are a lot of wargamers who also role-play, but they seem to compartmentalize their hobbies.
In addition, it doesn’t seem that many wargamers are doing the “ImagiNations” style campaign, or the open-ended map-based-campaign style of game. (a few are, a bare handful are writing blogs or posting videos!)
Now, Jeffro’s thread goes on and on, and he proposes a different reason for why this dynamic did not develop.
He answers that “role players are fighting to alter the game away from the “Rules > Campaign > Players” order that Gygax envisioned.” Which is, IMO, right on the money. Jeffro even goes on to describe what the solution looks like, “We are going to make the Campaign primary again and then bully the players into doing the work for the ref.”
It is here that he stumbles, and falls back into the conventional play viewpoint, with “tiers of play” and the idea of contriving (or “orchestrating”) a scenario that is worth playing out by a selection of Factions.
He even recognizes Dave Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign booklet from Judges Guild, which is not a setting book in the conventional sense. It is a reference guide to an ImagiNations Campaign. As I wrote previously (Creating the Unicorn Play Experience)
On page four of the booklet, the very first page of the description of Blackmoor itself, Arneson writes:
Blackmoor grew from a single castle to include, first, several adjacent castles (with the forces of evil lying just off the edge of the world) to an entire northern province of the Castle and Crusade Society's Great Kingdom. As it expanded, each area (castles first and then provincial counties) was given a preset army. Later the players were to organize their own forces based on experience and goodies acquired en route to their Greatness.
Part A, Scenario 3 (the previous two having been lost...): the entire third year of the Blackmoor campaign was to be part of a Great War between the good guys and the bad guys. Each area had a certain budget available (the budget is given a little later on), as well as an Alignment rating for each of the four seasons of the coming year. The course of the conflict might change some of the Alignments but barring anything major, I laid them out for the entire year. Fractions are given when only a part joined the fray. At the bottom, the approximate values and summary give the details about the strategic development of the war.
Following this description is a list of the various Evil, Neutral and Good Factions/Domains participating in the Campaign, including their Army Points (in Chainmail notation), their posture for each season, Domain income, number of villages, and a list of special characters/units.
This is the foundation for a Map-Based Wargame Campaign.
I contend that for the past 40 years, the party-centric session playstyle has dominated, even into the last three years when the “Always-On” campaign playstyle has begun to flourish, because the techniques of 1:1 pacing and the play-by-post map campaign have been forgotten.
Play-by-Post Wargaming
I have participated in or refereed, four play-by-post wargame scenarios since November 2023, two Kriegsspiel games and two Chainmail games. Both involved 2-3 players on each side, with turn orders being due daily, for some games, or 2-3 times per week for others. All four games were refereed, all four games featured a fog of war component facilitated by double-blind movement and pre-written orders. All of them were fascinating, entertaining, and educational.
The only thing these scenarios lacked was being part of a larger, ongoing campaign. Of course, because these were highly experimental, the isolation is to be expected. But the lessons stand on their own, and can be applied to an existing campaign, immediately.
Play-by-post gaming uses the same tools as the Battle Braunstein, but the time scale and the scope of the conflict are different. In an ongoing campaign, it is the timescale/pacing, coupled with the fog of war, that makes Always-on Faction play superior to a session-based Battle Braunstein.
The Always On Campaign
The Always on campaign is described as a method of continuing the PC and NPC actions between game sessions. Using techniques developed for Play-by-Post games, updated for 21st century tech, Session Players and Downtime Players can interact with the world and each other when no session play is occurring. With 1:1 Pacing and a weekly turn schedule for the Downtime Players, characters may undertake activities such as research, training, visiting a temple, and more.
The greatest obstacles to implementing Always-on Faction play are twofold:
1. learning to use a manageable turn structure that provides agency and predictability for the Downtime Players/Patrons and,
2. does not overwhelm the DM.
Unrestricted access to the DM and uncontrolled requests for downtime adjudication is a recipe for DM overwhelm and burnout. The play-by-post turn structure creates a schedule that Session Players and Downtime Players can use for communication, and 1:1 pacing puts a limit on the amount of activity any player can undertake in a given time frame.
Discord is probably the best tool for processing these turn activities, as it creates a timeline of orders and responses, is searchable, and generates a network of interlinked communications/posts. The privacy feature allows for the fog of war by restricting access to any given channel to those parties appropriate to the conversation.
The limits imposed by 1:1 pacing keep the number of orders and communications manageable. At the same time, the steady, predictable rate of the passage of time allows for complex, long-term plans and movements.
The DM/Referee can control the inbound flow of inputs (requests for adjudication) in two ways:
· One downtime request or action at a time, and no additional follow-on requests until the first one has been resolved and the IRL calendar is once more synched with the Game calendar.
· Session Players and Downtime Players should be empowered to manage or adjudicate some of their own downtime activities. When the rules are clear & well-known to all, the Players have mutual trust in the DM/Referee and each other, and everyone respects the overall order (“Rules > Campaign > Players”, remember?), elite-level play can take place.
The Fatal Weaknesses of the Battle Braunstein
A Battle Braunstein is designed to take place in one session and usually involves the Session Players taking on the roles of various antagonistic Factions. This causes two serious issues which the Always-On approach alleviates.
First, because of the in-game time needed for the movement of troops, fighting of battles, and sending commands/communications, it could theoretically run farther into the future than one might expect. (or want!) This could lead to “freezing out” one or more Battle Braunstein participants who have moved too far into the future. This could also lead to paradoxes or create zones that must be “out of bounds” for Session Players or Downtime Players, due to the “prior” activities of the Battle Braunstein participants.
Jamming all of this activity into a single session exacerbates the DM overload problem, where one or more players can be left out of the action due to the volume of activity. This also wreaks havoc with the pacing of timekeeping.
It is said the point of the Battle Braunstein is to create conflict, that is, Faction vs Faction activity & content. It is designed to create large-scale battles between political rivals that can impact the entire Campaign. This contrivance makes the Session Braunstein a poor substitute for any organic conflict arising from Player vs Player or randomly generated events adjudicated within the bounds of the 1:1 Pacing of downtime and session time.
I believe the proper usage of the “Battle Braunstein” format is limited to that of a teaching tool for informing Players how to play a Wargame.
Second, putting Session Players in the position of running antagonist Factions removes the Fog of War aspect of Patron play. While it is possible for a Session Player to take the role of the Goblin King, for example, putting the Goblin King’s plans for an objective into motion, this ultimately removes Player agency and diminishes the Player experience.
The Fog of War enhances Player experience, by causing confusion and speculation about the Goblin King’s goals and motives. If one or more of the Session Players has first-hand knowledge of these goals/motivations, they become caught in a trap of being unable to fully engage with this Faction, due to this prior knowledge. They have been robbed of any sense of discovery, or solving the puzzle of the Factional activities.
I would submit this is objectively less fun for the Session Players, all around.
Solutions
A summary of the weaknesses:
There is a failure to understand the Braunstein. The participating characters (both Session Players and Downtime Players) are not "plucked from the simulation". It is part and parcel of the simulation. To make it work effectively:
Characters need to be able to effect change in the simulation
Player - Character Continuity: the same person plays each PC/NPC throughout, maintaining the role and fog of war
Session Players can take the part of NPCs, but only those likely to be allied with the Session Players’ Characters. Meta-gaming is regulated with Player session grading.
Downtime Players take the part of Antagonistic NPCs, those likely to be plotting against the Session Players’ Characters, whether through politics or violence:
Recruit a Downtime Player to take on the role of the Goblin King (Antagonist), who will keep the Faction activities secret from the Session Players (and Session activities secret from the Downtime Player!) and both types of Player will have the opportunity to struggle against the Fog of War, and attempt to discern the goals and motivations of their opponents through play.
Victory and defeat are both more satisfactory when achieved through your own efforts rather than due to having knowledge your PC wouldn’t have access to.
For more info on how Faction Play can work in your campaign, check out the Shadow Over Sojenka blog, this post in particular:
How to Play Factions
https://shadowoversojenka.blogspot.com/p/how-to-play-factions.html
If you are interested in joining the Campaign, as a Session Player or Downtime Player, drop me a line at worldofweirth at gmail.
Thanks for reading, I look forward to your Comments!