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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertsconley" data-source="post: 9276188" data-attributes="member: 13383">Serious research into the development of D&D has been ongoing since the late 2000s thanks to folks like Jon Peterson who wrote Playing at the World and others like the Hawk & Moor series and the various forums that the original players hang out at.While there were several missing pieces folks understood how D&D was developed. What these files provide are confirmation and details of what is the earliest version of D&D we know exists along with details provided some of the correspondence between Gygax and Arneson.We also know that this whole thing got started with Dave getting tired of running a grand Napoleanic campaign.  He creates a fantasy Braunstein and crucially decides to run it as a campaign rather than as a one-shot as Wesely did. Dave wasn't the only one doing this. We know that Duane Jenkins was running a Wild West Braunstein campaign and that there was another based on Roman Gladiators. But Dave's Blackmoor proved to be one of the most popular, and he had a lot of players playing the good guys and bad guys.  In addition, every account by his players paints him as an awesome referee who was willing to go along with his player's crazy ideas (within reason) and willing to do the work to come up with rules to make it happen. They describe him as being exceptionally well at coming up with things on the fly.The final pieces of what turned Blackmoor into the first tabletop roleplaying campaign was the introduction of the Blackmoor Dungeon. Soon exploring the dungeons became more popular than playing out the ongoing conflict between Law and Chaos (Baddies). Prior to the dungeon the accounts were focused on military exploits and adventuring to gain allies, items, and advantage in the Law vs. Chaos conflict. And something that most don't get is that there were only a few what we called NPCs; the antagonists (chaos) and the protagonists (law) were both groups of players. All of this is documented by numerous accounts and in a half dozen books. Gygax and his group hear about this and invite Dave down to Lake Geneva. Dave takes the most portable aspect he has the Blackmoor Dungeons. He has everybody there make up characters and ran them through the Blackmoor Dungeons. Impressed Gary asks Dave for some notes, get them, types up what we know as the Fantasy Rules, runs his kids and later friends through a dungeon of his own Greyhawk. Then types up the draft we see in the court files, sends it to Dave, and the development of D&D begins with Dave editing, and commenting on the book that Gary is writing.We also know Dave rules were not the same as what Gary wrote up. Dave did contribute some elements like monsters, treasure tables. But Dave never wrote up the rules he used to run Blackmoor. Instead we know from accounts he had a binder filled with notes, charts, and tables he used for a reference. Occasionally, he would give a copy of some crucial charts to a friend like Greg Svenson to run their own campaign or dungeon.There are dozens of die hard Arneson fans who will kill to get their hands on that notebook but so far it hasn't surfaced. We do know bits and pieces, enough that the system used was Arneson's own. For example a character matrix that David Megarry kept obviously relied on a 2d6 skill system. From First Fantasy Campaign we know the magic system was not Vancian but relied on making spells from reagents. [ATTACH=full]348549[/ATTACH]And to make it more maddeningly, Dave was continually revising, deleting, and adding throughout the life of the Blackmoor Campaign, including switching to the published D&D rules.You don't have to take my word for it. Just go to the forums and the books and read up for yourself.The fact is that ever since serious research began there has been  a Dave Arneson camp and a Gary Gygax camp. With folks wanting to paint one or the other as the "villain" in the story. The truth as it often is in the middle. Dave Arneson figured out tabletop roleplaying. He started Blackmoor as a fantasy Braunstein campaign and bit by bit in the coming years he added this and that until it was a tabletop roleplaying campaign. Then he showed Gygax a part of what he did. Gygax was a go-getter who was disciplined and organized enough to write and publish wargames. Inspired by what Dave did, he asked Dave to teach how to run a tabletop roleplaying campaign, wrote up a set of formal rules, got Dave to help him edit them and comment on them. In addition he came up with some of his own ideas from the running the Greyhawk dungeon campaign.  Made a final version and published it as Dungeon & Dragons.There is no path to our present-day hobby that doesn't run through those two men. Gygax would not have written D&D without Dave Arneson, nor would any type of RPG rules would have been published without Gary Gygax.  While there were other campaigns being run at the time undoubtedly one of them may have led to a published set of rules. They would have led to a very different hobby in that alternative history.One thing people often miss that Dave and Gary didn't just co-authored a set of rules, they together refined the dungeon adventure. Out of all the different types of adventures one could run with tabletop role-playing, the dungeon is perhaps the easiest to describe to a novice. Take a sheet of graph paper, make a maze with rooms, and leave some empty, some with monsters, some with treasure, and a few with puzzles. Place the players as their characters at the top of the stairs leading down into the maze. If you want more adventure make additional levels and place them underneath or above the first level you created.The other proto-roleplaying campaigns didn't have anything like the dungeon thus would have led to a very different type of game and hobby.Finally, you have to understand that in the late 60s and early 70s there wasn't a lot of published material for miniature wargaming. Instead what you had is a bunch of collective "rules of thumb" people found useful when setting up a particular scenario or later campaign.  They also didn't just make up naughty word out of thin air, they started out with some sources from history or fiction and then came up with the rules to use for the scenario or campaign. They also didn't hesitate to borrow stuff from the few existing games they knew about like Diplomacy.The overall impact of this was the default was to think of something fun to play and then assemble the rules to play it. Greg Svenson's Tonisberg Dungeon were a good example. He played in Dave's campaign, knew the general gist of how to run a campaign and a dungeon, asked Dave for some help, who provided Greg with some charts and references, and then Greg came up with the rest.  Dave wasn't passing out rulebooks for other players to use. Only after the draft we see in the court files do we find people making a document we would recognize a RPG rulebook.As you can see from one example I posted, the Megarry sheet has a very different set of character attributes.</blockquote>

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