Post by Crimhthan The Great on Jun 11, 2018 14:23:57 GMT -5
Quoted below is Wesely's own explanation of the origins of the game, excerpted from one of his posts on the Acaeum... He says he got his main inspirations from three books (he seems to get the second two authors' names messed up, but I think I got the right ones). So, you could "reconstruct" the game by following his steps and first read these books. The first two books are free and available online:
1. Strategos: A series of American games of war, based upon military principles, and designed for the assistance of both beginners and advanced students, in prosecuting the whole study of tactics, grand tactics, strategy, military history, and the various operations of war.
By Charles A. L. Totten, 1880, In two volumes:2. The Compleat Strategyst: Being a primer on the theory of games of strategy
By J. D. Williams, Copyright 1954, The RAND Corporation (which has it posted for free on their website!)
3. Conflict And Defense: A General Theory
By Kenneth Ewart Boulding, 1963 (Amazon link)
...and here is the quote used as the source for this reading list. He posted it on Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:05 pm. You can read it in full context here on the Wayback Machine:
1. Strategos: A series of American games of war, based upon military principles, and designed for the assistance of both beginners and advanced students, in prosecuting the whole study of tactics, grand tactics, strategy, military history, and the various operations of war.
By Charles A. L. Totten, 1880, In two volumes:2. The Compleat Strategyst: Being a primer on the theory of games of strategy
By J. D. Williams, Copyright 1954, The RAND Corporation (which has it posted for free on their website!)
3. Conflict And Defense: A General Theory
By Kenneth Ewart Boulding, 1963 (Amazon link)
...and here is the quote used as the source for this reading list. He posted it on Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:05 pm. You can read it in full context here on the Wayback Machine:
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. We had found a copy in the U of Minn library and I had tried to adapt it for Napoleonic Wargames ('Strategos-N') before Braunstein. I created all the non-military roles for the first Braunstein game, not because I had too many people for the game, but because I had become interested in the concepts of n-player strategy games (where N is > 2) discussed in Kenneth Swezy's book about the theory of games 'The Compleat Stategist' and of overlapping and conflicting, but not directly opposite, objectives laid out in 'Conflict and Defense' (sorry, I've forgotten the author of that one). The latter were the only books on "games" or "strategy" in our college library in 1963. As the article says, I thought of the "wacky" roles as a joke on my players, and did not expect we would be repeating my multi-objective game any time soon.
However, the players were of a different mind, and after two flops, when I realized that the key was letting the players try to do whatever they wanted, and not worrying about how to score the game, we started playing a lot of "Braunsteins" (no one ever called them MOGs again). The Latin Amerca "Braunstein" (I thought of it as Piedras Morenas, and the one set in 1919 Russia was going to be Kraschevuii Kamengorod - both meaning "brown rocks" - but no one liked those names either) was my first really well set-up Braunstein. I have presented it as a talk at GenCon 2005 (and could do it again, it I get a lot of fan mail urging me to do so).
By the way, I did not like the term "role-playing game" when it appeared, as "role playing games" that had nothing to do with what we were doing, already existed: The term was already being used for (1) a tool used to train actors for improvisation (an example being the Cheese Shop Game since imortalized by Monty Python) and (2) a tool used for group therapy and psychiatric analysis ("Pretend you are an animal. What kind of an animal do you want to be? How does your aniimal feel about Janet?") And using this already overloaded name did not help us look less nutty. I favored "Adventure Game" but that was siezed-upon at the time as a replacement for "Hobby Game" or "Adult Game", and now we are stuck with "RPG".
Even before I went off to the Army in 1970, Dave Arneson was re-running the Latin Amerca "Braunstein", which we had set up at his house, and he soon started inventing new scenarios. Eventually, he expanded them to include ideas from "the Lord of the Rings" and "Dark Shadows" which were the "in" book and TV show for us college students in 1968-1970. This led to Blackmoor and then D&D.
While I am beating my own drum, I would like to lay claim to having "invented" polyhedral dice. I was the first person to USE what were then being sold as "Models of the five regular polyhedra" (for mathematics teachers to show to their students), AS DICE. I have since seen a book that claims that the Japanese were already using three D-20s, numbered 0-9 twice, to generate 3-digit decimal random numbers at some time before 1976. So it may be that they also invented this use for polyhedra, but I was unaware of them so I am at least an independent re-inventor. And it was my introducing the D4, D8, D12 and D20 to our gaming group in 1965 that led to them being used in RPGs and D&D.
Now, having told you how I invented RPGs in the mid 1960's, I will point out that in 1968, Micheal J. Korns published "Modern War in Mimiature", a set of miniature rules with all of the features of an RPG, and he and I had never met. While Braunstein pre-dates Korns' rules, it is only fair to say that he also invented the RPG.
However, the players were of a different mind, and after two flops, when I realized that the key was letting the players try to do whatever they wanted, and not worrying about how to score the game, we started playing a lot of "Braunsteins" (no one ever called them MOGs again). The Latin Amerca "Braunstein" (I thought of it as Piedras Morenas, and the one set in 1919 Russia was going to be Kraschevuii Kamengorod - both meaning "brown rocks" - but no one liked those names either) was my first really well set-up Braunstein. I have presented it as a talk at GenCon 2005 (and could do it again, it I get a lot of fan mail urging me to do so).
By the way, I did not like the term "role-playing game" when it appeared, as "role playing games" that had nothing to do with what we were doing, already existed: The term was already being used for (1) a tool used to train actors for improvisation (an example being the Cheese Shop Game since imortalized by Monty Python) and (2) a tool used for group therapy and psychiatric analysis ("Pretend you are an animal. What kind of an animal do you want to be? How does your aniimal feel about Janet?") And using this already overloaded name did not help us look less nutty. I favored "Adventure Game" but that was siezed-upon at the time as a replacement for "Hobby Game" or "Adult Game", and now we are stuck with "RPG".
Even before I went off to the Army in 1970, Dave Arneson was re-running the Latin Amerca "Braunstein", which we had set up at his house, and he soon started inventing new scenarios. Eventually, he expanded them to include ideas from "the Lord of the Rings" and "Dark Shadows" which were the "in" book and TV show for us college students in 1968-1970. This led to Blackmoor and then D&D.
While I am beating my own drum, I would like to lay claim to having "invented" polyhedral dice. I was the first person to USE what were then being sold as "Models of the five regular polyhedra" (for mathematics teachers to show to their students), AS DICE. I have since seen a book that claims that the Japanese were already using three D-20s, numbered 0-9 twice, to generate 3-digit decimal random numbers at some time before 1976. So it may be that they also invented this use for polyhedra, but I was unaware of them so I am at least an independent re-inventor. And it was my introducing the D4, D8, D12 and D20 to our gaming group in 1965 that led to them being used in RPGs and D&D.
Now, having told you how I invented RPGs in the mid 1960's, I will point out that in 1968, Micheal J. Korns published "Modern War in Mimiature", a set of miniature rules with all of the features of an RPG, and he and I had never met. While Braunstein pre-dates Korns' rules, it is only fair to say that he also invented the RPG.
I have often had my players in crazy situations and for me that is one of the fun parts of being a referee. Those are definitely some crazy ideas