Dave Arneson and D&D

I'm curious about Dave Arneson. Gary Gygax is an icon, and rightly so, but we hear much less about Dave Arneson. I don't know the history around this and was wondering if someone could fill me in. Why is Gary Gygax so much more often given credit for the game than Dave Arneson is? It seems like Gary Gygax is often given sole credit for D&D. What role did each of them (and perhaps others for that matter) have in the creation of the game? Is there an incongruence between perception and history?

I hope I'm not offending anyone or bringing up any touchy issues here. It's certainly not my intent - I'm just curious and hoping that someone could clue me in.

Whe is the link to his site, CastleBlackmoor to help put some things into perspective. I will leave it at that...

Check out the following link which is full of useful information about the bckground of D&D and its creators:

http://www.gamers.com/s/feature/000927-dnd3/index

Well, part of it was that Gygax and Arneson had a falling out (if they ever were friendly) in the very very early days.

So, unless you played D&D since the begining (in the little tiny books), you haven't seen Areneson's stuff.

But most people have seen Gygax's stuff (since he wrote the first 3 AD&D core books)...


Anyway, I believe that Arneson mostly came up with the concept, playing D&D with Gygax's Chainmail rules. Which then got altered (quite a bit) to become D&D, and then a whole bunch of people added more and more rules to it, at which point Gygax collected all of them, and rewrote them as AD&D.

From reading between the lines on the early days, my take on the matter is Arneson was the first person to play "D&D as we know it". (Actually it was a heavily customized version of Chainmail but that is a minor detail.)

Gygax was still playing a wargame that much more closely resembled a multiplayer mass combat WH40K than a RPG.

Gygax got wind of Arneson's ideas and tried them out. But the important detail was Gygax eventually put the ideas into a publishable form.

Did Gygax steal Arneson's ideas? I suppose, but he stole them fair and square.

You could say the same thing about Edison and the light bulb. He was not the first or the second or the third guy to think up the idea of a light bulb. But he was the one who made it a practical consumer item for which he deservedly earns praise.

Neither Gygax nor Arneson were the first or hundredth person to come up with some kind of group storytelling activity. Or even such a thing with combat. For example, there already existed double-blind strategic & tactical third person adjudicated combat games as an esoteric tiny niche in the wargame world.

Gygax was the first person to put these ideas into a practical, attractive, and saleable form.

You want to know who Dave Arneson is? Read the backstory for Wierd Pete in the KoDT comics. Sure it's a spoof but it's basically what happened to him.

I believe that Dave's main claim to fame is that he basically originated the idea of the "dungeon adventure" (check out Gygax's introduction to Blackmoor for verification of this). He also came up with lots of other ideas that became incorporated into the game.

Gygax took Dave's ideas, as well as some from other sources (including his own) and codified those into an understandable and reasonable (of course I know this is debatable) set of rules. These rules formed the basis for AD&D.

Arneson at convention

For those who are interested, Dave Arneson will be the gaming guest of honor at the Trinoc-con sci-fi convention this year (Oct 4-6 in Durham, NC). Check out http://www.trinoc-con.org/

I believe that Dave's main claim to fame is that he basically originated the idea of the "dungeon adventure" (check out Gygax's introduction to Blackmoor for verification of this). He also came up with lots of other ideas that became incorporated into the game.

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Such as each player playing a single Chainmail hero instead of an army - I recall reading that this first happened in Arneson's game. He invented the concept of roleplaying gaming by doing this, making him effectively the inventor of the concepts behind modern RPGs.

Gygax took Dave's ideas, as well as some from other sources (including his own) and codified those into an understandable and reasonable (of course I know this is debatable) set of rules. These rules formed the basis for AD&D.

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As I understand it, D&D came before AD&D, written by Gygax from Arneson's Blackmoor campaign notes, but the result looked very little like Arneson's home rules.

I recall reading somewhere on the net that AD&D was invented after the falling out between Gygax and Arneson so that TSR could legally wash their hands of Arneson's rights to the game. With D&D still in print, AD&D was a "new game" in which Arneson was uninvolved in the development, and had no rights to. I don't know the truth of this rumour, but it sounds plausible.

So, if you like, Arneson is the inventor of the primary concepts behind D&D, and he is the original and definitive Dungeon Master. His idea formed the basis of the entire RPG industry, and the CRPG and MMPORPG industries too. Arneson also indirectly spurred the creation of AD&D. He and Gygax have certainly changed the world.

I pulled this off a the RPGnet forum about this same question.

<SNIP>
Arneson v. Gygax
Author: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Date: 12-11-2001 09:52

There has been a lot of controversy over time as to who was the true "creative genius" behind D&D (original model, pre-AD&D).

As far as I understand Our Collective History, it goes like this.

Back in the days before D&D there was a little gaming group that creating a game called Chainmail. Compared to other more popular minatures wargaming rules, Chainmail was pretty lightweight. There was a lot of mixing of historical eras, a lot of assumptions about abilities of troops that just were not accurate, and some rather oddly complicated rules that would show up in strange junctures. I should know -- I used to play

Anyway, this group decided it might be fun to make man-on-man rules for Chainmail. They had already devised jousting rules that were simple, fun, and allowed for a bit of characterization. So the man-on-man battle rules came into being in the back of the book. Then the bright idea was hit on -- let's add critters from Tolkein! Yes, we can refight the Lord of the Rings!

It was cool Accurate? No. But it was WAY cool.

Arneson & Gygax were both taken with their company's game. But Dave wanted something MORE. So he started creating a riff off the man-to-man rules where you could start with "just a guy" and make him into a hero. With a lot of work this evolved into the earliest forms of D&D.

The problem was that Dave came up with some great ideas, but it was just a heap of scattered notes. Gary got involved -- he helped organize the rules into something more coherent. (For any of you who have read those first three books, just cast your mind back to what the pre-D&D must have looked like if this was the edit job...).

In other words, both guys worked on the idea, but in very different ways. The problems cropped up later because Gary was more outgoing and opinionated -- he tended to dominate the early talk about the game, so with time people came to look upon it as "Gary's game". Equally, he was great at setting up the early scenarios based on Dave's ideas. Conversely, Dave was considered the better DM, but outside of his games he tended to be more withdrawn and made less of a splash at the early gatherings.

Gary was glad to take more and more of the credit, especially one "The Dragon" took off. Dave grew resentful and hurt; he felt like he was being edged out of what was essentially "his" game.

So, two different minds, two different approaches, two different egos of radically divergent natures. After the initial push, Dave Arneson tried to come up with new systems (I had a chance to look at a prototype of a game he was working on back in 1979 that involved using skills, including many NON-combat (!) skills and minimalizing the use of levels, but it was about then that RuneQuest started moving and so he never finished the product), but none of them ever flew. Gary Gygax became Head Honcho of TSR until he was unceremoniously dumped several years later. Now we have his resurrection.

Film at 11?

RE: Arneson v. Gygax --WOW
Author: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Date: 12-11-2001 13:58

Geez, XXXXXXXXXXXX, who art thou? You've got that story amazingly accurate, and 'I wuz there'.

RE: Arneson v. Gygax --WOW
Author: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Date: 12-11-2001 17:07

Well, XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, would you believe I had an accidental interview with Arneson at a game convention back in about '79 or '80?

e-mail me & I'll give you particulars of my life

(XXXXXXXXXXX -- gleefully celebrating his Silver Anniversary as a gamer in 2001)