Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games

Comment: I find it frustrating, but not altogether surprising, to see Braunstein claimed as the spiritual ancestor of "avant garde indie gaming". I mean, it's acknowledged in the ars ludi article that the original RPGers were already doing stuff that today's Young Turks have hypnotized themselves into thinking they invented. But what's not there is that the methods used back then demonstrated the natural aptitude that people involved had for roleplaying, once they were given a virtual world to play in. Which is the antithesis of much of the particular "avant-garde" referenced, where the trend has been to insist on the need for rules to guide roleplaying.

Sour grapes aside, it's good to see this stuff being recognized. Compare the sentiment (three years ago) regarding technical simulationist "agendas".

I also really like the sentiment expressed at the end.

Addendum: previous posts on Braunstein--

Braunstein, RPG roots, and the role of the GM
Update on Totten and "Dungeon Master Zero"

This is a followup on my earlier notes on Braunstein and the roots of RPGs.

I had some sour comments about Rob MacDougal's article over at theRPGsite.

One thing that Rob probably gets wrong, and certainly doesn't demonstrate adequately, is the "specialness" of Totten in the RPG lineage. I.e., there's nothing there which shows Totten was much different from any other teacher of Kriegsspiel concepts, either "free" or "rigid". He may have been the first American to bring them over from the Prussians, and he may have been the direct source for other American military wargame developers (such as Farrand Sayre), but Rob doesn't make the case. Instead he talks up Totten's eccentricities and connects them tenuously to modern geek personality traits. In the process, the nature of the "referee" in wargaming--in terms of responsibilities and prerogatives--is relegated to a side-note that obscures both the nature of the game and the radical changes (in responsibilities and prerogatives) that only occurred after D&D hit a mass audience.

So in regard to the role of Totten in Kriegsspiel development and transmission, it was interesting to find this article.

In the United States, Army Major William R. Livermore introduced his The American Kriegsspiel, A Game for Practicing the Art of War on a Topographical Map in 1882. The game was complex and similar to Reisswitz' system, but did attempt to cut down on the paperwork involved by the introduction of several training aid type devices. At the same time Lieutenant Charles A. L. Totten introduced a game entitled Strategos: A Series of American Games of War. Totten's game was as complex as Livermore's, but he appealed to the amateur through the inclusion of a simplified, basic set of rules.

Neither was wargaming neglected by the US Navy, thanks to the efforts of William McCarty Little. [Goes on to talk about the development of wargaming at the Naval War College up to the turn of the century.]

Regarding Livermore, you can find more on Google by searching on his last name along with "Kriegsspiel". Perhaps most interesting is an overview of the history of American wargaming which he delivered in his own words at M.I.T. circa 1889.

BTW, I don't know what source gave Rob a date of 1871 for Totten's original publication; everywhere I look, including both antiquarian booksellers and university libraries, I see a date of 1880.

The message here is that while Weseley happened to use Totten as his vector for transmission of Kriegsspiel methods into a hobby context, I do not see anything to particularly distinguish Totten from Reisswitz or Livermore in terms of the nature of the game he developed, and thus Totten's personal eccentricities have, in my opinion, little bearing on the intellectual lineage of the practices that eventually produced RPGs. What should be emphasized, instead, is the nature of the referee or "umpire" who ran both the military games and Weseley's. In Livermore's words:

When the position of the blocks indicate that the hostile troops are within sight and range of each other, they are supposed to open fire, if the players desire it, and in this case it becomes the umpire's duty to decide the result upon the basis of experience. The rules of the game explain to him how to estimate the loss from this fire [...] Since the time of Von Reisswitz the game has been much modified ; and the different forms which it has assumed may be classeed in three groups. [...]

The third form is employed when an officer of much experience can be found to take the position of umpire ; one who from long familiarity with the Minor Kriegsspiel [the second type, essentially, a detailed skirmish wargame with rigid rules], and from practice in leading troops in action, can form a correct judgment of the possibility or results of any movement, without the necessity of making any calculations or referring to any rules.

In other words, the role of the umpire was to act as an "expert simulation" by guesstimating results from the interaction of the players' initiatives. To a wargamer this is probably obvious, but in the RPG context it seems it must be emphasized: the innovation of the umpire or referee was not that he could tell a story, but that he could substitute for complex rules in representing an external reality against and through which the players would act.

Settembrini first pointed me to the fact that RPGs have as their earliest identifiable hobby roots, not Chainmail, but a multiplayer wargame designed/organized by David Wesely in the 1960's. Lately I've been referring people to THE PERFECT PLANET: Comics, Games and World-Building, by Dylan Horrocks, who summarizes some information from a print source, Heroic Worlds.

Even better is this recent thread from the Acaeum in which Wesely himself gives his account and answers a few questions. Some interesting tidbits:

• Wesely based his original Napoleonic miniatures games not on Prussian/German Kriegspiel but on an American equivalent (no doubt influenced by the Germans) found in a book entitled Strategos, The American Game of War.

• Wesely co-designed Source of the Nile, of which I own a copy. It's a board game of 19th-century exploration of Africa, in which the terrain is unknown (you generate it randomly as you go and draw it in with crayons) and the action is driven by random tables and paragraph lookups. (Similar games include Barbarian Prince and Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora.)

Weseley also says some interesting things about the role of the GM:

The idea of having an all-powerful Referee who would invent the scenario for the game (battle) of the evening, provide for hidden movement and deal with anything the players decided thatthey wanted to do was not taken from Kriegspeil but was mostly inspired by 'Strategos, The American Game of War', a training manual for US army wargames Lt. Charles Adiel Lewis Totten, USMA 1871, publshed by Doubleday in 1880.

Combined with what Dave Arneson had to say in an interview I linked some time ago, I think we can see that the initial role of the GM in the 60's and 70's was limited in terms of what might today be called "narrative prerogative"--that is, "telling a story" wasn't something the GM actively did in the course of a game, while players would interact with the games as a means of exploring the interaction of characters' motivation and information. Glenn Blacow's "Aspects of Adventure Gaming" is still the first written documentation--that I'm aware of--of a "storytelling style", circa 1980.