Braunstein

Braunstein is a tabletop game devised and refereed by David Wesely, widely cited as a foundational precursor to the modern role-playing game and to Dungeons & Dragons in particular.¹¹⁰ Its name is German for “brown stone,” after the fictional Prussian town in which the first session was set.¹ The game marked a shift in hobby gaming from commanding armies of units to controlling individual personalities.¹ The surname Braunstein is itself an Ashkenazic Jewish artificial name and a German habitational name drawn from several places in western Germany called Braunstein, “brown stone”.⁹

According to the account drawn from Ben Robbins, Major David Wesely ran the first Braunstein in 1967, taking his usual wargaming group and setting the two opposing leaders down in a Prussian town before a battle, with their troops nearby but not yet on the field.¹ To give the remaining players something to do, Wesely let them control other townspeople — the Mayor, a school Chancellor, and some revolutionary students.¹ The humble town that gave the game its name was Braunstein.¹

Wesely has been described as “the very first GM,” and his innovation lay in having an all-powerful referee invent the evening’s scenario, provide for hidden movement, and respond to anything the players decided to attempt.¹ By his own account this idea was not taken from Kriegsspiel but was mostly inspired by Strategos: The American Game of War, an 1880 training manual for U.S. Army wargames that featured a referee and allowed a game in which anything could be attempted.¹ Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World treats Wesely’s reintroduction of the referee — a role that had largely disappeared from contemporary games such as Diplomacy and Tactics — as his key contribution, noting that Bath’s two articles of 1956 had abandoned simultaneous movement in favor of players supervising opponents for rule violations, further obviating the referee before Wesely revived the role.¹

One characterization defines a Braunstein as a Diplomacy-like game in which players take on individual roles, cooperating or working against one another’s interests under a fog of war, while the referee meets with them in succession to adjudicate interactions as they arise and the other players negotiate in the next room.² The format combined one player to one character with referee-adjudicated open action choice, and it functioned as a sandbox game presenting an initial situation and asking each player what their character would do, including player-versus-player conflict.¹ Participants have likened the experience to a group live-action role-playing event, since much of the action is generated by players interacting with each other.¹⁴

A modern account of playing in one of Wesely’s own Braunstein games conveys the texture of the format: a player took the role of Gretchen, an uneducated woman who had escaped indentured servitude and joined a student group, arriving in the game already arrested for rioting in a tavern and saddled with goals such as escaping jail, getting an injured comrade to a doctor, and impressing a prominent student.⁴ Other participants bore titles rather than names — the Baron, the Banker, the Banker’s Daughter, the Tavern Keeper, a Chancellor, a Doctor, and an Engineer’s Assistant peddling the city’s wall plans to the French — and the action unfolded through bribery, negotiation, smallpox immunity, and dance-card confusion among independent actors pursuing crossed purposes.⁴ Wesely prefaces such games with a lengthy talk on the political situation and closes them with an After Action Report explaining what each role was trying to achieve.⁴

Among the players of that first game was Dave Arneson.¹ When Wesely joined the Army Reserves, Arneson began running his own games, transposing the format from Prussia to a fantasy world and using the Chainmail rules to handle combat; he called his world Blackmoor.¹ Arneson’s use of imagination to devise novel solutions to tactical problems, his thinking in character, and his getting the referee to respond in kind have been described as the move toward true role-playing games.¹ Arneson’s expansions to the Chainmail miniatures game — experience rules, fortification rules, and similar additions developed with E. Gary Gygax — became the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons.¹

Commentators credit Braunstein with several lasting innovations: it popularized the idea of one player equaling one character, it freed players from the actions enumerated in a rulebook by letting a game master interpret their creative choices, and through Arneson it influenced Gygax and the writing of the first D&D rules.¹ It has also been suggested that the “brown stone” name established a naming convention echoed in Arneson’s Blackmoor and Gygax’s Greyhawk.¹

Wesely himself disliked the term “role-playing game,” preferring “adventure game”.¹ The originality of Braunstein has been debated: contemporaries note that referee-adjudicated open play and character-scale wargaming each existed separately before 1967 — Kriegsspiel ran in an open mode around 1890, and naval wargames using rules such as Fred T. Jane’s Fighting Ships placed each player in command of a single ship under a referee and a fog of war — so that Braunstein’s distinction lay in combining one-player-one-character play with open, refereed action.¹² Wesely has further pointed to Michael J. Korns, who published Modern War in Miniature in 1968 with many features of an RPG, as a simultaneous and independent inventor.¹ Some commentators date the first Braunstein to 1968 and credit Ken St. Andre, rather than Wesely, with inventing the first true RPG, while others argue that conventional role-playing descended not directly from Braunstein but from a separate, improvised folk tradition of play.²

The term “Braunstein” has since come to denote a whole class of variants rather than a single fixed game, much as variants of Diplomacy proliferated, and to “run a Braunstein” is understood among hobbyists as devising and adjudicating such a scenario.² The format has continued to be played and revived; Wesely has staged convention games in which players receive individual character packets with goals and secret backgrounds, navigating a politically charged town under fog of war.⁴ Some modern practitioners integrate Braunstein-style single-session events into ongoing tabletop campaigns.² There is also a question among enthusiasts as to why Arneson billed his Blackmoor game as a “Braunstein” when it was first announced, and whether it was first intended as a single-session event before growing into a continuing campaign.²