Okay, I want to talk about this.
For the last several years, I've become intensely interested in the history of D&D, and have made a dedicated effort to read up on it. I've acquired and read copies of the little brown books, supplements I-IV,
Swords & Spells,
Outdoor Survival,
First Fantasy Campaign, the collector's edition of Kuntz's own
El Raja Key Archive and, of course,
Chainmail. I've likewise read through
Playing at the World, all four volumes of
Designers & Dragons and its "Platinum Appendix,"
Empire of Imagination,
Heroic Worlds,
Of Dice and Men,
Art & Arcana, and Kuntz's book
Dave Arneson's True Genius. (I've also got a copy of C. A. L. Totten's
Strategos, but that's proving much harder to read, as are those first few dozen issues of
Alarums & Excursions I bought a while back.)
Call me a +2 bonus to your Strength score, in other words, because I'm a buff.
I have a lot of things I could say about Kotaku in general, and the writer of this piece in particular, but since the profanity filter isn't working I'll limit my focus to what's written here.
A new documentary out last week,
Secrets of Blackmoor, attempts to get to the bottom of who really incepted the world of fantasy role-playing.
I'm going to be extremely pedantic and note that, when it was posted, the makers of
Secrets of Blackmoor admitted that that was the
"find a flaw" version, asking the backers to let them know if they made any mistakes, errors, or omissions that they could then update for both the digital copy of the film and the physical copy being sent to backers. Since they said they'd have that done by the 22nd, what's at that link is presumably the final version.
If the ideas of “innovation” and “iteration” hadn’t been so co-opted by corporations today, Arneson’s little gaming group may have been more deeply inked into the history of Dungeons & Dragons.
Sentences like this are why I have such little regard for this outlet and this writer. The entire article goes into some detail about the falling out between Arneson and Gygax, making a decent (if, in my view, less than holistic) showing of how "'innovation' and 'iteration' being co-opted by corporations today" had nothing to do with it. It had to do with clashes of personality, issues of money, and other much more personal concerns, rather than the corporatization of hobby gaming.
Chainmail, or more specifically its fantasy supplement, is widely considered to be the prototype of D&D.
This, right here, goes to the heart of the current "Team Gygax or Team Arneson" nature of the disagreement among D&D historians. It's a debate that has been around for quite some time among those who look into the game's history: if you read Lawrence Schick's
Heroic Worlds, published in 1991, you'll find an essay from Gary Gygax himself talking about how
Chainmail was fundamental to the development of D&D, and another essay from Dave Arneson about how
Chainmail had very little influence on the development of D&D! In more recent characterizations, Shannon Appelcline, author of
Designers & Dragons agrees with Gygax that
Chainmail played a pivotal role in the creation of D&D (and calls those who disagree "Chainmail denialists"), whereas Paul Stormberg disagrees. This is
the dividing issue among D&D aficionados!
Despite all of this, Chainmail was decidedly not a role-playing game. It wasn’t structured around campaigns. There were no experience points.
Interestingly, Jon Peterson says in
Playing at the World that the use of the same individual character over multiple adventures and having them gain experience to become more power/competent as they do is one of the defining characteristics of what makes a role-playing game a role-playing game. Which always makes me wonder if the original edition of
Traveller was an RPG or not.
That said, we tend to think of "campaigns" today as involving a progressing
narrative, rather than just having the same characters take the field in subsequent adventures, and in that regard the early years of D&D were notable for being
far more picaresque than that.
With the release of Secrets of Blackmoor last week, documentarian Griffith Morgan is pushing back against the popular narrative that Gary Gygax was the primary figure behind the creation of what we know today as the tabletop role-playing game, “the mythology that Gary Gygax created everything,” as he told Kotaku.
As other people have noted, this is the point that's going to remain divisive, because while Gygax and Arneson both deserve credit - the game wouldn't exist without
both of them - the issue is largely one about who deserves the lion's share of the credit (though I'll admit that a lot of casual fans probably haven't heard of Arneson at all, which is certainly a shame and something that should be corrected).
To reiterate, while Arneson came up with the core concept of the table-top RPG as we now understand it, there's no indication that he had the inclination of aptitude to market what he'd made. Gygax was the one who cleaned it up for general publication and pushed to get it out onto the market. Personally, I think that makes his greater recognition, if not deserved then at least justifiable. Good ideas alone aren't enough; they require follow-through.
“People turn it into a thing,” Morgan said. “This guy Dave had a couple ideas, Gary saw what he was doing and was a genius, and figured out how to make it 20 times better. That’s the narrative. Actually, they were working on this role-playing thing for 10 years before Gary was even there. He came in late 1972. He still [didn’t] know how to do it until early 1973.”
The dates in this article make me question the "10 years" thing, as it sounds like less time had passed since Arneson started drifting towards what we'd now think of as running a role-playing game. Even then, that wasn't "working on it" in the sense of developing it with the intent of releasing it to the public, the way Gygax was working on it after he'd gotten involved. Rather, it was a hobby pastime, which I don't think can be honestly compared to trying to make a business work.
“Arneson set up his 3-ring binder as a screen between us and him,” wrote Kuntz in an unpublished work called A Tale of Two Daves, Two Gygaxʼs and Two Kuntzʼs, which he shared with Kotaku.
Fellow D&D history buffs likely noted this with raised eyebrows, since Kuntz has been teasing the release of a new book for a little while now. I don't recall this particular item in the
El Raja Key Archive (though I could be wrong; it's a big archive), so I'm hoping we see this later.
Arneson, who referred to himself as a “hunt and peck typist,” wasn’t much for polished rulesets. “The game was in Dave’s mind, in practice with his home players. It didn’t exist as a full-blown set of rules,” said Stormberg. “It was a eureka moment for Gary.”
Gygax read through Arneson’s notes. “Halfway through the reading,” Kuntz said, “Gary… nonchalantly said, ‘This needs to be rewritten.’ Not one nice thing to say about Dave, the adventure the rules. This is when it all switches.”
“He was jealous. Just stone-cold jealous.”
The first paragraph there underlines, at least to me, how unfair that "jealous" characterization is. Now, I wasn't there, so maybe Kuntz's take on it is correct, but the fact is that all indications are that Arneson's notes really did need to be rewritten. Shannon Appelcline's history on
Supplement II: Blackmoor notes how Tim Kask could barely make heads or tails of what Arneson gave him back in 1975. While that might be an issue of the corporate culture at TSR, I'm disinclined to believe that there were any office politics going on with regards to how unusable Arneson's rules were for anyone who wasn't Arneson. The reason is because
First Fantasy Campaign, the collection of Arneson's notes on Blackmoor published in 1977 by Judges Guild, is such a cryptic document. I'm being somewhat hyperbolic; the first part that overviews Blackmoor and its major characters is straightforward enough, but the parts that cover the actual dungeon and notes on things such as magic swords are
very arcane in terms of trying to actually use them.
All of which is to say that the quote section above feels to me like it's minimizing what Gygax brought to the (proverbial, as well as game) table. He was the 99% perspiration to Arneson's 1% inspiration.
The spell system was inspired by Jack Vance’s book The Dying Earth. The trolls, from Poul Anderson’s book Three Hearts and Three Lions. The character alignment system, from the novels of Michael Moorcock.
Nitpick again, the alignment system (though it was just the Law and Chaos dichotomy, to be fair) came from Poul Anderson too, and Gygax's list of titles in Appendix N make it hard to imagine that he didn't know that.
Kuntz was co-dungeon master of the original Greyhawk game, which involved “constant expansion and reiteration and experimenting with Arneson’s architecture,” he said—“fast and furious, trying to let no stone go unturned.”
Another point of order: my understanding is that Kuntz did co-DM Greyhawk, but only after it had reached the point where Gygax couldn't run the thing on his own due to having too many players. Back then, Greyhawk was run as what we'd think of today as an "open" game table. People just showed up and did their thing, in different groups at different times, and all of it was consistent within the campaign world. Hence why Gary wrote his now semi-famous note in the AD&D 1E DMG about "YOU CANNOT RUN A CAMPAIGN WITHOUT ACCURATE TIME RECORDS" (paraphrasing from memory, there). Since he needed to remember how long characters were recuperating, if someone else had already been to a particular dungeon floor and how long ago, etc.
Kuntz, it should be noted,
also was running his own campaign setting, Kalibruhn, with its own major dungeon above which a castle rested: the aforementioned Castle El Raja Key. Notably, Gary was a player in that campaign, which is where Mordenkainen came from (fellow history buffs take note: Mordenkainen wasn't technically from Greyhawk first).
In 1973, Gygax and his Lake Geneva friend Don Kaye founded their own company Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, to publish Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax would become the editor and co-founder. Arneson was creative director.
[...]
Arneson would work at TSR for just 11 months. If he produced any manuscripts there, their existence, and the reasons they were not published, remains unknown, although in 1975, a 60-page Blackmoor supplement was produced for D&D.
Okay, this part needs some clarification, because it's not very clear. Everything I've seen says that when TSR was founded, Arneson didn't work there in any
formal capacity (though I can certainly see him as working there informally) until 1976, after
Supplement II: Blackmoor had been published. During that time, he didn't seem to produce anything for the company, and the article notes that most of what he did make during this time was for further hobbyist activity. I can't say if there were any office politics going on with that, but given how
Blackmoor apparently needed such heavy editing, I'm partial to thinking that Arneson simply wasn't very good at working in a corporate environment.
Robert Kuntz has written, but not yet published, a dense text called Dave Arneson’s True Genius.
This is simply wrong.
Dave Arneson's True Genius is a seventy-page book that you can
buy here. Now, it's certainly difficult to read;
Playing at the World is literally ten times the size of this, and nowhere near as tough to get through. That's largely because
Dave Arneson's True Genius reads like a thesis on system design...not
game system design, but system design in the abstract. It's extremely illuminating if you can grok what Kuntz is saying in it, and his point about how original D&D (or "Classic D&D," as he calls it, which is also what TSR called it when they sold the game after AD&D 1E came out) combined the elements of an open system and a closed system, whereas AD&D was entirely a closed system, offer some startling insights, but I suspect that most people won't get through the material (or will simply dismiss it as a grognard looking back through rose-tinted glasses) to reach that conclusion.
The only reason I can think of to say that the book hasn't been published yet is that, throughout the text, Kuntz alludes to a much larger book in the works. I have no idea if that will have the same title, though.
It was an early stockholder’s meeting. Dave Megarry said that, to the best of his memory, this meeting was where he and Arneson suggested moving TSR to Minnesota to capitalize on local talent. Gary was not on board. “Gary suggested that we poll the department heads present about whether there was misdirection with the company,” said Kuntz.
After the vote, toward the end of the meeting, Gygax “bolted from his seat,” said Kuntz, and “screamed at the top of his lungs in my face.” Hearing all the complaints and suggestions from various staffers, it seemed, had pushed him over the edge. Today, Kuntz thinks Gygax feared that Melvin Blume, the father of Gygax’s business partner Brian Blume, would be brought on and potentially overtake the company, while Megarry thinks that “Gary thought Arneson and I were trying to take over the company.”
Okay, this is one of the two (that I recall) anecdotes from
Dave Arneson's True Genius, and I'm of the opinion that there's important context that isn't being noted here. The exact date of this meeting isn't specified, but the reference to Melvin Blume being brought on gives us a clue.
TSR was originally formed as a partnership between Gygax and his childhood friend Don Kaye, as the article notes. What it doesn't say is that Brian Blume came in as a third partner two months later, with money he received from his father, to give the fledgling TSR the cash necessary to publish the first run of D&D. A short while later, in early 1975,
Don Kaye died of a heart attack, and his widow (who had been acting as TSR's accountant, as I understand it) knew exactly how much it would cost to buy Kaye's shares out, since D&D was booming by that time and neither she nor the remaining principles wanted her to stay on.
Gygax didn't have the money to do that, but Blume did (or rather, his father did), and that's what happened. It resulted in a shift in power that later saw Gygax "exiled" to California during the mid-80's while the Blumes ran the company into the ground. When Gary came back, and brought Lorraine Williams on board to try and regain control of the company, the Blumes cut a deal with her behind Gygax's back that eventually gave
her the controlling interest in the company, and a short while later she forced Gygax out.
All of which is to say that, at the time of the alleged screaming incident, Gygax might very well have known that a power struggle was underway. If the Blumes were already moving to take control of the company that they'd acquired a controlling interest in, it's more understandable that Gygax would be wary of any sort of attempt to try and push him out, rather than him sounding like a paranoid tyrant.
Megarry soon resigned. Kuntz wrote a memo to Gygax with his request to be moved to design. He said he got it back a day later with NO! written on it in red ink.
It's worth noting that Kuntz wanted to publish his Kalibruhn setting as
Supplement V for original D&D, and Gygax didn't let it happen.
To be sure, there would be no Dungeons & Dragons without Gary Gygax. Chainmail is a clear influence for D&D’s famous combat rules, and Gygax’s particular tastes in literature and voracious reading habit helped populate D&D’s world with monsters, gods, and legendary beasts. Gygax saw the potential in Blackmoor, or the aspects of Chainmail it happened to bring out, and moved quickly and purposefully enough to put the idea into a publishable format. But what gets lost is that neither would there be D&D without Dave Arneson. And indeed, the things that D&D fans love the most about the game—the things that distinguish “role-playing” from “fantasy wargaming”—were Arneson’s vision.
This is probably the single best summary of the article, and the entire controversy regarding Gygax and Arneson. As I said, I agree that Gygax has largely eclipsed Arneson in terms of fame, and that Arneson deserves more credit for what he did. But I worry how some attempts to do this seem to operate as though Gygax's contributions need to be minimized, and the man himself diminished (rather than humanized), in order for that to happen.
kotaku.com
