Tips on Setting Up a Session Braunstein Within a Continuing Campaign

The results are in. Session Braunsteins not only cause a great deal of excitement, but they also solve problems that have plagued longrunning rpg campaigns for decades. If there are things you always thought should be happening in your campaign, but which somehow never seemed to spontaneously materialize over the years, then the technique of setting up a Session Braunstein is more than likely the thing that you didn’t know that you didn’t know which you really really really needed to know.

Everybody’s doing one. You should, too! ANYBODY CAN DO THIS. Players LOVE playing out the higher echelons of conflict. The wild surprises generated by multiple people operating against each other’s interests under a fog of war never fail to entertain!

Given that you have never done this, here are some tips on how to go about it. (If I missed anything, please drop a comment!)

• Use an ORIGINAL Setting that incorporates elements stolen from multiple contradictory sources. You are departing from the assumptions of conventional rpg and it is best that you not be encumbered by “official” game settings.
• Be willing to delegate setting creation and major NPC’s to players. (A campaign that is a reflection of your best players’ personalities is the most likely to result in a long-running campaign that produces a great deal of excitement and engagement.)
• Create the Braunstein session out of things the players are ALREADY excited about. If you have been engaging in typical session type play where the players have total freedom to do as they please, then you should have a good idea of what fascinates them the most.
• Rig things to be resolved in six to (at most) twelve hours.
• Do things as a large group instead of spreading the play over months of “play by email” type exchanges.
• Rig things to punish turtling and encourage interactions.
• Create a loose Diplomacy-style gameplay loop that runs for 5-7 rounds/turns
• Use SIMPLE conflict resolution systems. The AD&D Assassination table is a model of how to do it. Nothing more complicated than High Guard is needed.
• If your Session Braunstein is set up to generate miniatures battles, you may want to have a separate “battle referee” that can adjudicate the fight while the “Braunstein referee” attends to interactions that are developing elsewhere on the map at more or less the same time.
• Whatever systems you do use, be sure the players have SOME level of system mastery before you begin. Running other sessions as canon to the campaign over time and putting each rule subsystem through its paces is the best way. Players can more easily make the shift to pvp Braunstein play then and make informed decisions. (Psychologists call this “affordance”.)
• As referee it is incumbent upon you to ensure that the resulting scenario is WORTH PLAYING OUT. If some player is liable to, say, roll back 8 hours of gameplay with a wish spell right at the climax, then you might consider nipping that in the bud before your players stay up until sunrise thinking that they are actually playing a game.
• It is essential that there be some means of arbitrarily allowing faction leaders to meet at will and in person in order to negotiate, cut deals, form alliances, and plot schemes. This is going to contradict some setting backgrounds (i.e., Traveller) and require a looser interpretation of timing and what a “turn” even means in some cases.
• You can very easily plan a Braunstein that is so elaborate that nobody can actually play it. Be judicious about what you elect to focus on and/or model within your scenario. It is okay to leave whole swaths of things from your campaign out of the endeavor for the sake of having a successful and playable session.
• Players that roleplay as faction leaders are liable to engage in a great deal of smack talk if they are on social media together. This is just one way that the game can begin before it’s even started. Other tables can also run table adventures in the setting environment even while it is still under development. If people are excited… just go with it!
• In D&D type systems, you may elect to focus on a particular tier of play rather than make a Braunstein about EVERYTHING that exists in the ENTIRE campaign that has players attached to it. Add however many new NPC’s you need to make the scenario worth playing. Try focusing on tiers of play that conventional methods struggle to do justice to– i.e. Companion, Master, or Immortal tiers for instance. If you give out objectives to each faction leader, you can allow a certain number of experience points to be awarded based on the final scores.
• Your session Braunstein may produce a titanic battle, but it may also produce some unresolved engagements. The flow of 1:1 time in the wake of the session Braunstein may produce aftershock scenarios. Be prepared to dedicate follow-up sessions to dealing with these situations.
• Try something that nobody else has thought of. All kinds of dumb game mechanics can be stolen or repurposed to enhance something that will be completely unique to your campaign.
• Don’t overthink this. Session Braunsteins are still fun even when they’re broken. They are probably even more fun when the game design is actually terrible. The most important thing to do is to simply DO IT.

Now, I do have one more tip on all this and that is… understand why nobody was able to explain how to do this stuff until campaigns like Dubzaron and Trollopulous were able to point the way. The reason for that is… all of the stories that people tell each other about the origin and evolution of rpgs are WRONG. Consider these posts and contemplate them in earnest:

• Braunstein Play is Fundamental to D&D
• Braunstein Was the First Braunstein
• Tunnels & Trolls is the First Rpg
• Braunstein is the Least Interesting Thing About Braunstein

That’s right. Basically, everyone outside of the reach of my influence not only has their head full of “Just So” stories that just ain’t so, but they also have a completely bogus nomenclature when it comes to talking about anything related to rpg history. THIS CAUSES BRAIN DAMAGE. And it is by design. If people knew how to do what I am telling you to do right now, they wouldn’t need any of those lame rpg products that COMPLETELY FAIL TO DELIVER THE GOODS and which have wasted so much of your time over the years.

So, run a Session Braunstein of your own. And get the word out about this OBJECTIVELY CORRECT way to think about rpg history.

This is a big deal!