airwalker said:
I am corrected then. Consider me chastised for my ignorance.
Greetings Airwalker,
I didn't mean to sound like a scold. Pardon me
There were indeed a lot of gamers giving me useful input in regards to my design, but I was the only one doing the work, deciding what was "right" and "wrong." For example, before the D&D game was published, in early 1973, I allowed any class of character to use a wand, but if they were not a mgic-user, they had to roll their Int or ledd on 3d6 to make it work. The players generally liked that, but I scrubbed the rule as it blurred class lines.
I simply did not wish to do others a disservice if they helped come up with the idea in question. This brings up an interesting question for me though, since I was born after D&D was invented. I know you are credited with "creating D&D" and I certainly don't question that. But just how much was 1st edition your sole work and how much of it was inspired or suggested by others? 90% or greater? I mean, although you might be deific compared to such mortals as I, you did have help obviously with such a monumental task of creating a brand new game and getting it marketable. It is my current understanding that you were the primary designer and Dave Arneson collaborated. Was Rob Kuntz's contribution early on limited to DMing? What kinds of things did Dave Arneson help with? Others?
Your concern regardng others is understood
I can not attribute percentages of actual creativity to the whole, but here is how the OD&D game came into being:
I wrote the
Chainmail Medieval Military iniatures Rules "Man-to-Man" and "Fantasy Supplement" c. 1970, and the booklet was published in 1971.
Dave Arneson and I met at a GenCon here in Lake Geneva around 1968, and with Mike Carr we authored the
Don't Give Up the Ship Naval Miniatures rules for the Great Age of Sail around 1971-2.
Dave was running a man-to-man (1 figure = one person)
Chainmail fantasy campaign around then, and he and Dave Megary came down from the Twin Cities to see us, the gaming group, in Lake Geneva in the late autumn of 1972. Arneson brought some of his campaign material with him and Megary brought his
Dungeon! boardgame for us to play. Megary said he had used the
Chainmail Fantasy Supplement (which is obvious from the game itself) and sme of Arneson's ideas to create his boardgame. Would I become his agent, for he could find no one to publish it. We all had a great time in Dave's campaign and playing Megary's boardgame. I was enthused, and said I was going to create a full-fledged set of fantasy game rules; and yes, I would approach both Guidon Games, for whom I was Chief Editor, and The Avalon Hill Company in regards to the
Dungeon! boardgame.
At the end of 1972 I had written a 50 p. ms. for the fantasy game. Arneson was to send me all the rules notes he used in his campaign, but nothing usable arrived, so I write the entire ms. off the top of my head. At the same time I did a minor board re-design for the I]Dungeon![/I] game )mainly on the 4th level adding the "Torture Chamber" to balance the two parts of it, revised the monster and treasure cards, and cleaned up the rules.
Of course during all this time we were playing both the RPG abd the boardgame regularly, about every day for several hours as it were. The initial plau-testers were my son Ernie and my daughter Elise, then ages 12 and 10 years respectively. They adventured on the first of what became 13 levels of "Castle Greyhawk" of the "Greyhawk Campaign" and loved it. I went to work immediately on a second level, even as Rob and Terry Kuntz and Don Kaye joined the play-test group. I sent out about 20 photocopies of the fantasy game rules ms. to various gamers I knew that belonged to the International Federation of Wargaming, the Castle & Crusade Society, and/or the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Assoiation. Most of the recipients were as enthused about the game as I was.
By the late spring of 1973 we had played 100 or more sessions of the fantasy game, dozens of I]Dungeon![/I] boardgame games, and with the GMing and playng experience I had by then (then young Rob Kuntz being my main GM when I played), some input from those that had received copies of the nitial ms., I revised and expanded the rules to 150. pages, sent copies to the original recipients and a dozen other persons, and began to seek a publisher.
Guidon Games was not doing well, and my good friend, Tom Shaw, V.P. heading up The Avalon Hill Company laughed when I offered him one or both of the games. I then determined to do my best to start my own publishing cmpany...a;though I had not a spare penny what with a wife and five kinder to support.
None of my family was interested in backing the project, but my old pal Don Kaye was. After seeing how large GenCon had become in 1973, the new wargame compant Game Designer's Workshop formed in June of that year exhibiting at the con, Don came over to my house afterwards and asked if I could really do it, put a publishing compant together. I said sure thing! So Don borrowed $1,000 against a life insurance policy, he and I became equal partners in Tactical Studies Rules. We published
Cavaliers & Roundheads Military Miniatures Rules for the English Civil War by Jeff Perren & Gary Gygax in October of 1973, hoping the sales of the booklet would generate sufficient income to afford to publish the D&D game soon thereafter, as we both knew it would be the horse to pull the company.
As an aside, I had named the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons in the summer of 1973 after compiling two lists of potential titles, with "Dungeons" on one and "Dragons" on the other. When my little daughter Cindy said, "Oh daddy, I like Dungeons & Dragons best!" I went with her. choice.
Brian Blume attended Gencon in 1973, asked to join the LGTSA, and he was accepted. When he played the D&D game at my house, Brian bcame as enthused as we were, and when TSR was formed he asked to join as a partner. As we had only around $700 from sales, wanted to get the D&D game out, we agreed he could be an equal partner for $2,000. He joined the company thus in December, and I took the D&D ms. to Graphic Printing, then here in LAke Geneva, early in January 1974, ordering labels to go with the wood-grained paper-wrapped boxes I had ordered just prior to having the three booklets and reference sheets go to the printer. The whole run of 1,000 booklets, reference sheets sets, box front and spine labels, and boxes came to around $2,300.
Our first sale was one mail-order shipped off at the end of January when the game was hot off the press.
The next additions to the game were in process soon thereafter, those being the material published asthe rules supplement booklet
Greyhawk in 1975, again all of which I wrote, but with a lot of creative input from Rob, so I included him as a co-author.
I began writing the material for the AD&D game in 1976, and I did all of it by myself as well, again with a good deal of useful input from the fellow gamers named in the work.
There you have it.
Oh obviously. I find AD&D an incredibly well-designed and well-thought out system. I am not trying to tell you that you could have done a better job or anything. I am just seeking to make some adjustments to coincide with my tastes and the tastes of my group and was trying to be circumspect about the consequences of "changing the rules."
I appreciate the lauds
Rest asured that I don't that the OAD&D rules are perfect, can't be improved upon by change, addition, or excision. As a matter of fact, I did that frequently as I DMed
That is what I figured the reason was. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. Thanks a lot!
Sure, and now you probably have more information than you wanted
Cheers,
Gary
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
