My Life As A Gamer: There Are Many Braunsteins, They Have A Culture, And They Have A Plan

Macross and its sequels have gamers for fans. Battlestar Galactica has gamers for fans. (Yes, both versions.) Homeworld built a franchise around the same premise.

Most people don't think of Braunstein when they think of gaming these properties, but if you do so you are far more likely to replicate the source media than otherwise.

Let's break down this structure.

• Pursuer and Pursued: You have two players here, minimum. One's running from the other, so this is a Cat and Mouse game scenario and that requires that the Mouse have some measure to either escape and evade or stand and fight- and will inevitably build up both capacities over time. Direct contact between the two is what generates most playable scenarios. A minority will involve encounters with third parties discovered along the way.
• Diplomacy Depreciated: The two factions are unlikely to reach a resolution that is mutually acceptable, nevermind beneficial, for some reason or another without one side being dealt a decisive defeat first. (e.g. the Zentran fleet under Breedai turning against the rest to side with Earth after the Protoculture revelation inflicts catastrophic cultural damage)
• Internal Disunity: Both sides are going to have internal disputes over what to do and how to do it. These should be rival Patrons within a faction, and this is where you get a Nested Braunstein potential in an organic manner; the latter being when third parties appear. Handling this is part-and-parcel of this structure, and its absence is notable in itself (Homeworld, outside of the groundside RTS.)
• Asymetric Play: Both sides are not identical. Different win conditions, resources available, intelligence capabilities, etc. ensure that both sides play very differently out of necessity.

While you can do this as a videogame, it's very difficult to get the full effect; Homeworld did not even try, and it is still hailed as a fantastic work (and with worthy sequels).

The reason this works best as a Braunstein is because of the easy use of Double-Blind gameplay. Both factions are divorced from each other, and all that they know is what they can sense on their own; only the Game Master has the full and complete map with the true locations of all participants at any given time.

All orders go through the Game Master. All reports come from the Game Master. If one side either fails to do a thing, or is successfully deceived by another, they have to figure that out the hard way.

"That's never been done!"

My Brother In Christ, that's the original mode of play!

Wargaming as we know it, and therefore RPGs as we know it, are a direct descendent of Prussian Officer Training.

This is how things were done, especially when using recent events to train officers on how to command troops and handle battlefield events.

The Braunstein form is an iteration of Kriegspiel, and it is not hard at all to see true tabletop RPG campaign play in this.

This structure is hardly out of line; it is trivial to imagine entirely mundane Pursuer-Pursued scenarios like this- no magic, no widgets, no aliens, just everyday life for the time.

What folks get hung up on is the idea that both sides are player-controlled. Far from being a bad thing, the entertainment experiences that people want can't be had without letting players play both sides of the conflict. You avoid all possibility of favortism by doing so, and you allow the interactions of players to do the heavy lifting of creating the scenarios wherein player actions in the micro can directly impact player actions on the macro.

Combine this with 1:1 time, strict timekeeping, etc. and you have the makings of a tense but cathartic gameplay experience that gets you what you want when you say "I love (X). I want to play a game like (X)." when (X) fits into this structure.