Asking the players to create pieces of the world and expecting them to deliver implies I need better friends 😨

Excellent video. This Braunstein play is the real magic, not buying yet another module or supplement or setting, but turning the big pieces of your campaign over to the players and inviting them to impact the world.

Great video! I'm going to try this in my campaign. I have two groups playing in the same word using 1 to 1 time.

Sneaky Braunstein spiked the punch at the middle school dance!

Bro, the Campaign "Hyboria" this so nice. This like a Braunstein + Wargame, so crazy you need see this.

This is much easier to pull off with Wargamers then RPG players. Honestly, I'm ok with story based RPG's but I can't even think of playing a wargame anymore without adding this kind of stuff. Battletech for example is built for this kind of stuff. It gives you all the tools to build up your forces in an organic way and really encourages you to build a history and personality behind your units (the rules for creating your force at the advance level gives you rules for how many mechanisms you need, ow many bean counters and paper pushers and even throws in things like family members. Really adds a lot of nice roleplay elements). When you through in a referee things get really fun as he can set up scenarios. Players can choose to build a force of mercenaries, or play the military forces of one of the great house, part of one of the clans, some can be pirates, or even the militia of some backwater periphery state. And as you can see this right here leads naturally to a Brunstein style of play and the all the referee needs to do is throw some scraps of meat onto the campaign map and the players will naturally start typing to figure out how to uses/screw each other to get to it. The house military players want to fuck each other over and take their shit so will want to hire the mercenaries to do so or even the pirates or even some backwater militia for plausible deniability. The mercenaries just want money so they'll fight for anyone but also want to knee cap their competition and while they can't do it themselves without getting kicked out of the merc guild, they also can hire some unofficial third parry help. The pirates want to raid everyone for booty but also have to think about their targets so that they don't become big enough of a annoyance that people team up to go after them. Then the clans want to take over house territory but also want all the glory so they'll want to reduce the effectiveness of the other clan players by forcing them into trials of combat or trails of procession. And while lacking in honnor, some might even higher mercs or pirates to, once again, add some plausible deniability. So way ahead of you there for Battletech at lest. Then you can even through in the Battletech RPG rules if you want you dudes to go on a little adventure or even go to a bar where their happens to be the dudes from a rival merc company or house and a good ol bar brawl can start up. Good stuff.

Great content as always. I’m going to start one of these soon

Brilliant. Been wanting to include Braunstein sessions since I saw Secrets of Blackmoor. I'll try this. Need to grab that Blackmoore Foundations tome as well. I'm definitely gonna start a game like this. I've been prepping a game, but I was limiting to scope to make it manageable. This blows the whole thing open. I've already been running sandbox games 1:1 for awhile now so this should be a piece of cake. I'm thinking of having some dedicated players take over factions I've already loosely sketched out; let new ones spring up organically as the game progresses. These players won't be my regular group though, those guys are still gonna be playing "conventionally". If they start factions it'll be from the ground up. Or they join up with someone else. I'm thinking that once factions are established, any PC's you generate need to be allied with the faction you're running. I like to reduce friction between player knowledge and character knowledge as much as possible, want to keep perspectives limited. There might be players who just wanna dungeon crawl and they set up west marches style sorties into the wilderness... Lots rattling around in my head now. Thanks for another great video. Side note. That Frazetta hard cover with the 3LBBs and Chainmail in a single volume... is that available anywhere? It's beautiful.

A few years ago I had two weekly gaming groups: Tuesday and Thursday. I created and ran via Roll20 a Savage Worlds Western campaign for two months I called "The Duel Campaign". Each group was a criminal family in this sleepy Wild West town vying for control. Each session they would do missions to get more clout around town and recruit NPCs into their fold, and spend time between sessions to sabotage the other group. But the real kicker was my friend Andrew (who played in both groups), who was running the Tong and playing a set of twins in each group who were ALSO attempting to undermine everyone. Cut to the finale where there was a big wedding in town: the guns are out, horses charging through the streets, and the hidden explosives set by the Tong wipe almost everybody out. It was an awesome time and though it was about three years ago now they are still talking about it and I am waiting for the planets to align so that I can run something similar again!

A big issue with baunsteins is that if there's actors without players, in other words an NPC, players end up sticking with other players to the detriment of the game. I theorize to get a better effect I woulda either needed to get more players so there's no NPCs or obfuscate/intermediate comms so players don't know if the druid of the bogwood is a Andrew or just an NPC. Or simplify my scenario i guess.

The Powered by the Apocalypse engine games work similarly with creating a map like you did. I have to agree with you about allowing player input for world building. We did this once in a Dungeon World game, and it realty did add to the fun and player investment. We didn't even go PvP or faction play.

Great videoand great way of playing, will try with my next campaign. Atleast here in scandinavia alot of wellwritten larps are in this style. Works really well, especially settings like vampire the masquerade, almost works better larp then ttrpg, as there are plenty of minds coming up with strange stories, instead of a single dm having to do it.

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LOL that is not a Braunstein. You kind of get it, but it's very different from standard RPG play. The difference between an adventure game, or Blackmoor Style, and Braunstein a character driven game is huge. Big differences on every level. I've been working on the manuscript fo Braunstein and one chapter is all about methodology differences between the two styles. What you are proposing is more of the open format of Blackmoor. Arneson was a total kitchen sink gamer, just use anything which will work. This fits how he played more than Wesely. Wesely is very strict on his methods. I do like what you are doing though. It's good stuff.

Does anyone know where the recordings of Jeffro’s (sorry if I got the name wrong) sessions are? Someone mentioned the name of the KZfaq channel and for the life of me I can’t find it.

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