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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8993275" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, there was a whole kind of an evolution that happened. Roughly speaking, and I'm sure there are other 'threads' that existed, you had the original 'Kriegsspiel' which was simply TT miniatures wargaming in essence. That was proposed as a way of training officers in Prussia, but it proved to be too inflexible and evolved into 'Free' Kriegsspiel in which the referee went from simply adjudicating 'fog of war' to making judgments about outcomes and capabilities of the various forces. This allowed the players to 'try anything', and these games were elaborated to produce entire large scale general staff/officer corps operational training. This type of training and 'wargaming' of possible situations became standard fare, especially after 1872 when the Prussians demonstrated just how far ahead their officer corps was in its ability to execute war plans. Dave Wesely introduced Arneson to a generalized form of this, the so-called 'Braunstein' in the late '60s. Arneson then ran some of these scenarios, which were very similar to LARPing in a sense, as they were live action scenarios, though not necessarily acted out, but role played physically. Later one of the other people involved created a 'Braunstein' that was centered on playing Wild West scenarios, and Arneson basically took that and fused it with rules being used by the Castles & Crusades Society (Chainmail being part of that) to make Blackmoor. It was all a bunch of the same people, and undoubtedly the ideas were not all from one person. Dave apparently did develop the mechanics however, and things like leveling, and his game was the first that was distinctly table top and wargame-like. The earlier Braunsteins didn't use table tops, and didn't have recurring characters, which the Wild West 'Brownstone' had introduced. So, Dave's game is the first one with all the elements.As for his ability as a game designer, how many people have made a career of that? He did, at least to a degree. He did author a number of wargames prior to the development of D&D, and some of the elements of at least one of those (Hit Points and Armor Class) made it into D&D as well. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunstein_(game)" target="_blank">Braunstein (game) - Wikipedia</a> is a pretty good, if sparse, description of the overall history of that evolution.</blockquote>

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