I'm not clear on what you mean. It was their wheelhouse -- Gary played Braunstein and other domain-centered play. That's what he expected people to do with their characters* once they hit high level. Once he realized that it wasn't wargamers, but instead mostly high school and college kids new to the scene who were picking up D&D, he could have made similar rules (or even bought/licensed Braunstein).
*if anything, I think this notion that you were supposed to play them as leaders and rulers gets overblown, and oftentimes that was just the explanation of what they did when you retired them.
A couple of points of historical clarification.
I don't know whether Gary ever played any of the Braunstein derivatives, but as far as I'm aware he's definitely not recorded as playing the original. That was Dave Arneson and a bunch of the Twin Cities gamers.
The original Braunstein wasn't a domain management game. It was a scenario set in a Napoleonic-era Prussian town (named Braunstein) where each of the players was given an individual person as a role- like the mayor, the head of the local cavalry unit, a student agitator, etc. Very similar to a modern Live Action Roleplaying Game of the sort the Society for Interactive Literature started running at sci-fi cons in 1983. Each character Dave Wesely assigned had goals to achieve. I believe he initially anticipated that the individual characters scenario would inform the setup of an army-scale wargame scenario to follow, based on what the players did, but in practice everyone enjoyed the individual character play so much they didn't even get to the wargame.
Subsequent "Braunsteins" followed, with different settings, the name being kind of generified. One of the most famous examples being the banana republic game set in a South or Central American country on the brink of revolution, where Dave Arneson (assigned a "peaceful revolutionary" role with a goal of distributing leaflets to other revolutionaries, and more for getting them to other civilians) famously tricked other players into thinking his character was a CIA agent, ended the game flying out of the country on a helicopter with most of the country's treasury, and, reminded that he got points for distributing the leaflets, said something like "Oh yeah, I dump those out the side door, so they rain over the town."
In 2005 I was standing near the registration booths at GenCon, flipping through the event catalog while the posse debated where to go first. I had already scoured the listings online, but as I glanced across the pages I spotted a word I had somehow missed before: Braunstein. I knew what Braunstei
arsludi.lamemage.com
To my recollection, Dave Arneson first described his idea for the game that became Blackmoor as "a medieval-style Braunstein game" in his Corner of the Tabletop newsletter, when advertising that he'd be running it and looking for players.
While OD&D is definitely written to support the idea of high-level Fighting Men claiming domains, building castles and clearing the area around them of monsters, and receiving tax income, I'm not sure how much of that Gary actually did that way. I do believe that such play was characteristic of Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor, where players often controlled factions and larger forces, and a certain amount of oppositional play was common, and probably was adjudicated using Chainmail or other wargame rules for the battles, though I don't have much documentation on that. I expect there's more detail on that in the doc film
Secrets of Blackmoor, but I still haven't watched it.
I agree with you, though, that it's a little strange that TSR didn't come up with and publish some more rules for running a domain some time after the 1974 set gave us (pretty bare bones) parameters, given that AD&D continued to imply that this would be common of high level play, and added in all those charts of what kind of followers would be attracted to PCs once they hit name level, and basic details in the PH about what kind of strongholds the different classes could build. The D&D Companion set more or less covered that base in 1984, but only for the subsidiary product line. I don't think there was ever anything similar for AD&D.
Right, but it is still one property. I mean, I don't want to dismiss the power of one IP (after all, 300 made hoplites and spear-soldiers cool again for TTRPGs almost solo), but in general it takes a lot more than that to make a fad or trend.
Manga and Anime are completely different things whose relevance to the discussion I don't understand. They happen to be Japanese initiated art forms/movements, but that's not the same thing as the (centered on the) 80s western martial artist/ninja fad. There are sometimes martial artists or ninjas in Manga and Anime, but not consistently or I'd say even most of the time.
I'm not clear on what you mean. It was their wheelhouse -- Gary played Braunstein and other domain-centered play. That's what he expected people to do with their characters* once they hit high level. Once he realized that it wasn't wargamers, but instead mostly high school and college kids new to the scene who were picking up D&D, he could have made similar rules (or even bought/licensed Braunstein).
*if anything, I think this notion that you were supposed to play them as leaders and rulers gets overblown, and oftentimes that was just the explanation of what they did when you retired them.
Exactly what the old school sensibilities 5e has are really up to interpretation. IMO, 5e could be hammered into place to do this, but to really make it the same beast as bitd Greyhawk era dungeon crawling, a lot would have to be modified. Stuff like eliminate light cantrips, make treasure obtained the XP metric, makes sessions end when you left the dungeon to rest, and so forth.
Exactly what the old school sensibilities 5e has are really up to interpretation. IMO, 5e could be hammered into place to do this, but to really make it the same beast as bitd Greyhawk era dungeon crawling, a lot would have to be modified. Stuff like eliminate light cantrips, make treasure obtained the XP metric, makes sessions end when you left the dungeon to rest, and so forth.
Right. I don't think we'd want WotC to try to make it "the same beast". But with a few tweaks (like maybe removing light cantrips, and definitely adding a dungeon exploring play procedure) we could fairly easily have a new version which pays homage to the old while leaving behind elements which players quickly abandoned as frustrating and tiresome (like the combination of player mapping based on DM description along with teleporters and similar shenanigans to frustrate mappers).
