Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Rasputin" data-source="post: 7799808" data-attributes="member: 8410">Well … Arneson didn't just have ideas. He had a game, and he ran it for about two years before showing it to Gygax. That's not dabbling. Arneson absolutely did test his ideas on his own; what he showed to Gygax was the result of two years of testing. You do cite that guy. There would be hell to pay if you didn't.Furthermore, this is beyond a mere idea, but an idea that came from many years of play and theory behind it. Dave Wesley can and will (dig up the audio of his interview before Gen Con about 10 years ago; it goes above and beyond what Wesley said in the Arneson documentary and is absolutely fascinating) talk for hours about the origins of this idea, and what led him to the Braunstein game. As well as reading Totten, this was a group that played the ideas therein. Arneson applied both the theory and the lessons learned in play (for example, he didn't like rules lawyers complaining about realism, so he set it in a fantasy world), and his players were receptive since they also had the same experiences.Frankly, the idea that Gygax was that organized with the rules goes against my experience with the rules he penned. It is hard to use OD&D without any prior experience, and rules aren't coherent at all. AD&D is better, but even then, I still read the original Dungeon Masters Guide and still find something new with each reading. Call it a bad combination of bad organization and the purple prose that Gygax so loved.Finally, a court of law agreed that Arneson did write some of the rules. Some of the items, most notably the magic swords, did make it from Arneson's draft rules to Gygax's final product relatively unchanged, which led to the ruling. You can see further evidence of Arneson actually writing rules in ones that Gygax didn't explain well because he likely didn't use them much (turning undead) or even understand them (% in lair). That wouldn't happen had Arneson only given Gygax an idea, not rules.</blockquote>

Verification