#braunstein

At the start of a game of Careers, players must secretly commit to earning an arbitrary combination of happiness points, fame points, and wealth points (with a sum of 60 in total). It's this idea – of players operating from secret agendas that are, potentially, totally unrelated to the goals of their opponents – that was bouncing around the mind of David Wesely as he was experimenting with Strategos' philosophy that, in a robust refereed simulation, "anything can be attempted".

In 1969, this admixture led to Wesely's magnum opus: Braunstein, the first formal game in human history that clearly qualifies as a Role-Playing Game in the modern sense. At first blush, Braunstein seemed a perfectly traditional kriegsspiel about a fictional Prussian city coming under French attack during the Napoleonic Wars. A "Prussian General" player would face off against a "French General" player, with Wesely acting as the vertrauter – just as I described it in Part 1.

But the twist, inspired by Careers, was this: several more players would participate in a range of non-military roles, like the town mayor and the chancellor of the local university. These players, too, would receive a secret briefing which would include secret victory conditions tailored to the nature of their role. Just like the generals, these players would privately inform Wesely of their intentions, and would thereafter receive private reports from him, briefing them on the evolving consequences of everyone's actions. It was an extremely novel, exciting concept that had Wesely's gaming circle chomping at the bit.

The result was a catastrophe.

So much buzz had built up around Wesely's Wild Ride that, on the night of the game, more than twice as many players showed up as the number of roles he had prepared, forcing him to improvise several new roles (and their victory conditions). After getting underway, the game almost immediately devolved into a quagmire of chaotic political maneuverings. Many of the orders he received from the players went completely outside the scope of what he had expected or prepared for. He frequently had no idea how the events that needed to unfold could possibly be simulated, and so he found himself inventing sloppy rulings on the spot. When Wesely was finally forced to call the game late that night, neither General had ever gotten around to issuing orders to their troops. None of it was what Wesely had wanted.

His players, by contrast, uniformly loved the experience.