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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Rasputin" data-source="post: 7800167" data-attributes="member: 8410">1) If you published a paper and didn’t give at least a byline to someone who created, developed, tested, and sent you draft notes, you’d face an inquiry. In short, Arneson was a factor in publication, and he reviewed drafts from Gygax with publication as the clear goal. In 1973, Gygax clearly treated Arneson as a coauthor, because he was. That Gygax was the corresponding author, to use the academic term, doesn’t make Arneson any less an author.2) “The talent”? Where? I’m serious here. Gygax was a terrible writer and woefully disorganized. (He does appear to have been more organized than Arneson. That’s not praise.) He wrote an ungodly number of unclear rules in AD&D (weapon length and speed factor, anyone?). What Gygax had was drive and ambition. Those things don’t always get enough credit, but had Arneson and friends not come up with the original idea in the first place, Gygax would have kept writing Civil War minis rules.3) The Braunstein originator is David Wesley, and I agree, he doesn’t get enough credit. The whole gathering of players in Saint Paul and trying to push the boundaries of wargames is the theoretical basis that this group had leading up to the ideas of role playing games: playing a single person rather than a whole army, and the open-ended goal of the game beyond winning a single battle.4) According to Kuntz, there was some attempt to keep Arneson from making contributions while at TSR. I hadn’t heard the whole bit about trying to move the company before so I don’t know how true it is (though Arneson was right—there was more available talent in Minneapolis; Milwaukee or especially Chicago, too, for that matter), but his tenure at TSR was short, and unusually unfruitful given that he had co-written D&D and written the Blackmoor supplement before moving. Adventures in Fantasy came afterwards, suggesting that Arneson had some writing in him at the time.</blockquote>

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