I'm sure this has been discussed in the OSR plenty already, but I'm actually not all that well versed on the subect of Gygax and Arenson's contribution distribution. It sounds to me like, more or less, it is like a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby situation fron Marvel's Comics silver age. Jack did a lot of hard work on characters that would become billion dollar icons, but Stan was the "Funky Flashman" charismatic face of the company. Face front, true believers!
In this Cracked.com article, the Gygax and Arneson history gets a small, but biting, entry in an article about getting too much credit for things.Cracked is awesome in general, but seeing D&D make a significant appearance on one of the sites articles really got me jacked. Here's the meat of it if you don't feel like looking at it (although with lines like "...Gary was more like the weird uncle who lived in the garage and clogged the toilet" you might want to check it out). If this is all true, the Dave created everything I love about the game except the part about using dice.
Who Actually Deserves the Credit:
During a nerd side quest, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax had an epic random encounter when they chanced to meet at Gen Con in 1969. Gygax was working on something called Chainmail, which was a war simulator only a bit more complicated than the average board game. With Arneson's influence, Chainmail was adapted to include:
- Exploring dungeons
- Using a neutral judge/dungeon master
- Conversations with imaginary characters (NPCs) to develop the storyline
- Hit points
- Experience points
- The concept of role-playing an individual character rather than just rolling dice
So, basically, he put the "R" in RPG.
Then again, much of Arneson's idea of role-playing grew out of Major David Wesley's Braunstein games.
ReplyDeleteI had never actually heard of that guy, and just looked him up. He for sure seems to invent role play in a game right there. That he didn't like it but his players did is a trip. I mean, even as kids long before we played D&D we liked to sort of add role playing elements (though we didn't call it that or know what it was) to our Monopoly games with ad hoc rules to accomodate out of game trading and threats and such.
ReplyDelete"...When two players challenged each other to a duel, Wesely found it necessary to improvise rules for the encounter on the spot. Though Wesely thought the results were chaotic and the experiment a failure,[5] the other players enjoyed the role playing aspect and asked him to run another game..."
Interesting article. Wesely introduced Roleplaying method into his wargame campaigns. What was new in Arneson's adaptation was that it was set in a Fantasy Environment and more importantly that you would play the same character over time and that he would develop. Arneson borrowed ideas from Gygax, Wesely and many others, but it was the combination that made it into a new thing. On the other hand, the Blackmoor game may easily have ended up being played by just a handful of people in Minnesota if it had not been for Gary Gygax.
ReplyDeleteThe Lee-Kirby comparison does seem apt.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Havard. There is a great chance that without Gygax promoting the game as he did 99 percent of us would have never played.
ReplyDeleteGygax also took Arneson's ideas and really ran with them. Arneson doesn't get enough credit, true. But that doesn't mean credit should be stripped from Gary. Perhaps more credit should be thrown out there as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI am a bit behind here, but I am about to start a game featuring one of the guys that was a part of Arneson's early campaigns. I'll see what insight I can get out of him.
ReplyDeleteRJ: That's pretty awesome. Are you going to be posting about that game?
ReplyDelete