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The Dueling Essays of Arneson & Gygax
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<blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 7805671" data-attributes="member: 16726"><p>Everyone agrees that they were both on the team, but there is strong disagreement over whether Arneson played a key role or was merely a bit player. In Gygax's telling, he developed D&D from Chainmail after participating in a Chainmail session called "Blackmoor" and realizing how Chainmail could be expanded into what we now know as D&D. Arneson replied that while Gygax had indisputably come up with a way to systematize and mass-market the largely improvised RPG elements Arneson had created in Blackmoor, Blackmoor itself hadn't originated in Chainmail and the two games actually had little in common except for the shared coincidence of both having fantasy elements to them. </p><p></p><p>This dispute matters because the Blackmoor campaign was the first time fantasy players sat around a gaming table and free-formed actions that were adjudicated by a DM, which Gygax and Arneson both say marked the intellectual genesis of D&D. The question is whether Arneson was simply DMing a slightly houseruled version of Gygax's Chainmail ruleset, in which case Gygax would deserve nearly all the credit for D&D, or whether Arneson was DMing his own creation which was then converted into a mass-market game by Gygax, which would say each person played a different but essential role in getting D&D into our hands today.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="jsaving, post: 7805671, member: 16726"] Everyone agrees that they were both on the team, but there is strong disagreement over whether Arneson played a key role or was merely a bit player. In Gygax's telling, he developed D&D from Chainmail after participating in a Chainmail session called "Blackmoor" and realizing how Chainmail could be expanded into what we now know as D&D. Arneson replied that while Gygax had indisputably come up with a way to systematize and mass-market the largely improvised RPG elements Arneson had created in Blackmoor, Blackmoor itself hadn't originated in Chainmail and the two games actually had little in common except for the shared coincidence of both having fantasy elements to them. This dispute matters because the Blackmoor campaign was the first time fantasy players sat around a gaming table and free-formed actions that were adjudicated by a DM, which Gygax and Arneson both say marked the intellectual genesis of D&D. The question is whether Arneson was simply DMing a slightly houseruled version of Gygax's Chainmail ruleset, in which case Gygax would deserve nearly all the credit for D&D, or whether Arneson was DMing his own creation which was then converted into a mass-market game by Gygax, which would say each person played a different but essential role in getting D&D into our hands today. [/QUOTE]
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