Historical Bro-stein After Action Review
Improving Bro-stein play through critical analysis.
I have multiple years of experience as both participant and Referee of wargames and role playing games going back to 1981. I have authored two -steins (one in Midwest Fantasy Wargame: The Primeval RPG and another entitled Trouble Aboard Station Brown). I have participated in Trekstein, Hail Steinser, and Spacestein. As a player, I would rate myself as mid. As a Referee, I think I am a notch or two above average.
Last night we conducted a Bro-stein which had a historical theme. Afterwards we had a one-hour after-action review. These are the results of that discussion.
The overall consensus was that the game was a success. The things that worked well were:
Setup
The clock
Search mechanic
Anti-fragility
Replay-ability
Lethality
Session Length
There were also numerous things that can be improved for next time.
Setup
Pregame setup of the voice and text channels went smoothly. The permissions did not require any tinkering during the game. I must confess, I did not ask anyone to test things out prior to game night. Non-Bros may struggle a bit here, but on a Bro discord server, this was a non-issue.
The Clock
A solo wargame called The Fall of Berlin was used by the Referee. Every 30 minutes, a briefing about the evolving military situation was provided to some participants in the Bro-stein.
Because the wargame itself has a considerable amount of variability and replay-ability, there was no certainty about when Soviet forces would overwhelm German defenders. The Referee and the players were left at the mercy of dice rolls and card draws. This clock, external to the role play amongst participants, stimulated convergence. It encouraged participants to draw on resources to escape the situation.
Search Mechanic
The player-facing mechanics were kept light and based on CHAINMAIL (a medieval/fantasy wargame co-authored by Gary Gygax in early 1971), the original version of Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D) published in 1974, and Charles Totten's Strategos published in 1880. For those that aren't aware, David Wesley and Dave Arneson developed a sets of rules for wargaming in different eras based on Strategos. David Wesely went on to develop the -stein concept while David Arneson co-authored OD&D with Gary Gygax.
Searching
If you are searching for something in a room where such a thing is commonly found, it is there if you roll 1 on a d6. You must wait 10 real minutes to search again if you fail this roll. For example, rope might be found by searching the storeroom.
If you are searching for something unlikely to be in the bunker, you must roll a 1 on d12 to find it. Again, you must wait 10 real minutes to search for the same object again in the same room.
Players agreed that this gave them the ability to draw on resources. This is how, for example, one player was able to get his hands on a set of bolt-cutters and sabotage a generator. What could have been more clear, however, was that there really was a secret door that led to a laboratory. One player had no immediate feedback on whether he was searching in the right place and did not want to bother the Referee.
Anti-fragility
Every character had a valuable skill (such as piloting an aircraft) or "super power" (such as being able to call for outside updates about aircraft via the switchboard). A handful were armed with pistols that they could choose to keep on their hip or concealed. Many also had "dirt" on other players to give them leverage when role playing.
Overall, despite only having 7 players show up for the game (out of 14 front-line characters) there was still enough meat on the bones for the game to proceed. The combination of skills, powers, and hidden information, along with conflicting goals still created enough kindling to get the fire roaring.
One concern I had authoring the game was that the character that had a lot of decision-making power (player-A) could potentially decide to make a fast escape from the situation. Although there were several conflicting goals and "brakes" that were set up to restrict such a quick resolution (such as having the first military briefing 20 minutes into the game), player-A definitely made a conscious choice to stay in the game instead of trying to snatch an easy personal victory that would have derailed the entire scenario. I am not sure how to fix this, other than to make sure that the correct mix of characters are present at the start of the game.
I think that even if Player-A (and a handful of others) had managed to escape the situation, the remaining members still had enough resources to continue to play. But this was not put to the test. Likewise, an early arrive of Soviet forces could have precipitated a mass casualty event, allowing a shift into "Act 2", but again this part of the scenario needs to be tested.
Replayability
There are 14 "main" characters and 6 off-board/contingency characters. 17 of these were written in a single day. The remaining 3 contingency characters were added the day of the game. Anticipating a potential high death toll, I wanted to be sure we had enough of a stable to easily continue. Having this many characters makes it possible to reconfigure the game so that even if the same participants play again, the situation presented will have unique social challenges. Again, the use of a solo wargame also ensures that no two gaming sessions will ever be the same. We plan to reconvene in six months and run this game again in mid-January.
The game can be played "straight" as an alternate history pressure cooker. But it can also be played gonzo style. Either way, it is re-playable at least once.
Lethality
Combat was sufficiently deadly to discourage the immediate use of weapons. As there was no guarantee who was actually armed, players avoided one-on-one combat. When guns were drawn, it was usually a two on one situation. The rules for a revolver were different from an automatic pistol which ensured that the weapons had pros and cons that had tactical significance.
The map design itself helped to prevent the emergence of a "murder mystery" scenario where players could easily get picked off one by one.
Session Length
The planned gaming session was three hours long with a 15 minute post-game discussion. Events drove convergence between 2:40 - 2:50 into the scenario with some final pursuit and evasion rolls in the final minutes. Thus the game met its design goal. Because many people were able to stay in the post-game discussion longer, we let that run for 1 hour. We kept the post-game discussion tight. Due to the politically sensitive nature of the scenario, we had no plans to publish a "live" AAR on YouTube.
ROUGH PATCHES
There were several things that could have been better.
Insufficient Orientation
Players received an 8 minute briefing prior to play (unlike Dave Wesely who apparently gives a length historical overview). Each character background that I sent out only had, at best, a sentence or two about who the character was as a person. This was insufficient. My own background (Gen-X and military history major) is to blame. I assumed a great deal of familiarity with the historical figures and situation. I did try, pre-game, to post YouTube videos to one discord channel, but this was also not sufficient.
In the future, a paragraph on the historical situation along with 3 or 4 sentences about the main characters and their relationship to each other will be provided. To avoid overwork, this will be a single page handout that is common to all participants.
Critical Roles Unfilled
As soon as someone expressed interest in playing, I forced the character selection (or left it to chance). This resulted in one character (codename-EB) from having a player. Another person, who was going to play Doctor-M, was not able to play.
My thinking, based on seeing Spacestein kick off hours before the actual game, was that having some pre-game play was a good thing to have and therefore I ought to immediately assign a role to each potential participant. I did get some enjoyment (and ideas) from players pre-game, but this was offset by having to deal with no-shows.
I now think the 7 most critical roles should be assigned the day of the game to people who are almost guaranteed to show up. The rest of the roles can be picked (or diced for) and handed out during the player briefing. This additional admin activity should take no more than 10 minutes.
Superpower Underutilized
One player had the ability to tap into the switchboard and receive all message traffic. He had also worked with me pre-game to have the ability to tinker with these messages. In actuality, even if that player had been more aggressive about using the superpower, I don't know that I would have had the cycles as a Referee to handle the additional workload, especially if all 14 roles are filled. I need to give this one some thought and restructure how it works.
Die Plane, Die Plane!
I was surprised at the number of planes that did not manage to land due to interception, anti-aircraft fire, or Russian ground forces. The players made calls for aircraft (of various types) at 1:02, 1:15, and 1:25 into the scenario. I think the lethality and arrival times need tuning here. This was a probability/design issue, not an issue with players waiting too long to exercise their autonomy.
Confirmation
This Bro-stein confirmed my own gut feeling that the critical mass for a -stein is 7 participants. If we had any more people fall out, it would not have worked.
To quote Jeffro Johnson's definition in Brozer, a -stein consists of "multiple independent players operating in conflict under a fog of war." Dave Wesely, in one interview, described his Braunstein as a "multiplayer multiple objective game" (MMOG) as opposed to a role playing game (RPG). We checked the boxes on all of these things.
[x] Multiple independent players (no pre-arranged factions)
[x] Conflict
[x] Fog of war
[x] Multiple objectives
These are sound design principles for any -stein.
Even though the players were not privy to all of the mechanics used by the Referee, the principle of keeping things lightweight is critical to avoid Referee overload. For this -stein, most every roll I made was done using a real six-sided die.
Time Investment
I authored this stand-alone, historical Bro-stein mostly in one day. It probably had about 10 hours of design time, 4 hours of recruiting/hyping the -stein, 3 hours of game play, and a 1 hour AAR. Replay-ability is important to ensure I have enough fun running the game to recoup my effort in writing, hyping, and running it.