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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 8699923" data-attributes="member: 7026594">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."[URL unfurl="true"]https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/104/braunstein-the-roots-of-roleplaying-games/[/URL]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.  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).</blockquote>

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