What is a Braunstein?

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   A Braunstein is a free-form wargame/role-playing precursor invented by David Wesely in 1967, in which a referee places players in a shared setting (the original was the Napoleonic-era town of Braunstein) and assigns each one an individual character with private goals — a banker, a student radical, a visiting officer — rather than command of an army. There is no unified objective, no formal rules system beyond the referee's adjudication, and no requirement that players cooperate or even share information; the game emerges from players pursuing their conflicting agendas through negotiation, intrigue, and occasional violence, with the referee resolving outcomes on the fly. Braunstein is broadly credited as the conceptual bridge between Kriegsspiel-style military simulation and the character-centric roleplaying that became Dungeons & Dragons, since Dave Arneson — a Wesely player — carried the format forward into Blackmoor.

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