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.
