Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Can we date any of them from prior to Feb 1973?
D&D General Evidence from the Arneson vs Gygax court case, including early draft of D&D with notes
Yaarel
He Mage
I consider both Arneson and Gygax to be equally responsible for the publication of the game, Dungeons & Dragons, in 1974.
The formative proto-D&D that eventuates in this publication is interesting.
Arneson is the responsible for the revolutionary paradigm shift to the concept of a roleplaying game. Moreover, Arneson develops the game engine for it. Yet most of this is an oral tradition, except for incidental stray notes during game play.
The prolific writing by Gygax and his business ambition, helps crystallize what Arneson is doing into readable and publishable game rules.
In history, it is often the case that the students of a revolutionary, or in this case the players of the first DM, are the ones who write down the ideas of the revolutionary. It is important to credit both the revolutionary as well as the ones who are part of the authorship of the revolution.
The formative proto-D&D that eventuates in this publication is interesting.
Arneson is the responsible for the revolutionary paradigm shift to the concept of a roleplaying game. Moreover, Arneson develops the game engine for it. Yet most of this is an oral tradition, except for incidental stray notes during game play.
The prolific writing by Gygax and his business ambition, helps crystallize what Arneson is doing into readable and publishable game rules.
In history, it is often the case that the students of a revolutionary, or in this case the players of the first DM, are the ones who write down the ideas of the revolutionary. It is important to credit both the revolutionary as well as the ones who are part of the authorship of the revolution.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Again, the historical record (and these documents) have already been gone over by actual historians.
It's almost like ... there are histories, and books, about these things.
In terms of trying to say one person, or another person, is solely responsible for D&D, I think it is a fool's errand, and I will borrow the phrasing of someone more knowledgeable and leave it at this-
"...Gygax and Arneson were co-creators of D&D, in at least the crucial sense that Gygax would never have worked toward such a game without incorporation of Arneson's vision, and Arneson would never have realized the publication of such a game without the structure that Gygax provided it."
Yaarel
He Mage
Literary critique can show that the outline dictation by Arneson preexists the draft of D&D for the publication, which is dependent on Arneson.
Yaarel
He Mage
The sarcasm is unhelpful here.
I already said, more than one person is responsible for D&D.
Arneson invented the concept of D&D and its game engine.
Gygax created a setting for this game engine.
What makes Gygax vital is, he wrote down the rules for this game engine in a publishable format, where Arneson mostly didnt.
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overgeeked
B/X Known World
There are interviews in various places. The last OG player turned referee stopped running the thing a few years back. I’ll dig up the interview, but they were playing a 2d6 FKR game.
If people want to argue about FKR, kindly take it elsewhere.
zenopus
Doomed Wizard
I'm not convinced that the list (pages 13-14 of court case documents) actually predates the 1973 draft. It reads like an index that someone prepared from the draft up to about page 32 (42 of the court docs). It almost exactly includes all of the underlined headers, even to the point of including a "Fighting" by itself from page 26 where the "Men" of "Fighting Men" is dropped down a line by the typist, and "Adventure" by itself from page 27 where the full title is actually "Die for Type of Adventure", but "Die for Type of" was presumably missed by the indexer because it is on the line above and is not underlined.
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Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Given that we just had a book that extensively discussed this history, and that is repeatedly mentioned (and was just mentioned again), I am not sure how else to keep saying the same thing.
How is this- There is a book that extensively documents this history. Go read it. Or at least start with the many threads where we discussed it. But the book is really readable.
I don't think it's accurate to say that Arneson invented the D&D game engine (as in, the game engine that was OD&D); the evidence, instead, shows the following two things-
1. Arneson's strength, and weakness, was his improvisational abilities. He had very little fixed in terms of producible notes which is what led to the clashes during development. The concept, yes. The game engine? Not so much.
2. Many of the ideas that Arneson was using for were discarded or modified by Gygax to produce OD&D. That doesn't mean that there weren't conceptual ideas that made it into the published version, but saying that the game engine was the same as what was being used by Arneson isn't correct.
As already recounted, Arneson was excellent as a GM ... truly great ... but his repeated issues weren't just with Gygax and D&D- he was singularly incapable of creating stable rulesets for RPGs.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
I can't agree based on what I've read and seen in the documentation so far. It appears to me more like Gygax coalesced, added to, and edited down an amorphous and variable set of procedures which Dave never firmly cemented, and which he initially drew on rules and ideas from Dave Wesely (Braunstein) and Gary Gygax (Chainmail and Thongorodrim) to create.
Dave had a bunch of rules and ideas, among which he continually shifted and switched but he was never able to turn into a set of game rules. He was able to teach a couple of other referees (like Greg Svenson) a few core elements but a lot of it was more like Free Kriegspiel. Gary took some of Dave's ideas, discarded others, and added some of his own in forming the actual publishable game some of us still play today.
It is telling, to me, that Supplement I: Greyhawk (by Gygax and Kuntz) contains a bunch of rules we're basically still using today in updated form, and Supplement II: Blackmoor (composed by Tim Kask from Dave Arneson's notes) much less so.
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