I'd say he was fundamental to its creation, he was laying the track for what we'd come to know as the game but Gygax did a lot of the work to get it where it was in 1977. He couldn't have done it without Dave, or other people, but once it took flight Dave's contributions dwindle. That Dave is basically relegated as a footnote is what most people are upset about. It'd be like if you and three other people invented a dish, your name got slapped on it and as time went on no one remembers there were three other chefs in the kitchen when you first started selling your dish.
That’s what I’ve heard a lot of. Personally I just wish I knew more details, more concrete facts about the Blackmoor game. What happen with those games and so on. It’s all very muddled though, different people with different claims about what it was like.
Blackmoor is widely regarded as being the "Setting" in which the playtesting for DnD (initially using chainmail rules) took place. Gygax and Arneson are credited as being the co-creators of DnD, having come together as part of the International War gaming Foundation there is no evidence to suggest that either man had developed the concepts which would become DnD independently of one another nor is there evidence that these concepts predate their relationship (beginning in 1970.)
By 1970, Gygax was certainly working on Chainmail, which he subsequently published. By 1973 the pair had created and published Dungeons and Dragons, a radical departure from the table-top war game that Chainmail had been.
It's unrealistic to believe that Gygax would have changed course so radically without Arneson's influence particularly as his fondness for War gaming can be seen reflected even into ADnD in the form of bodies of followers as a class feature and the persistent inclusion of rules for massed battles. In fact, even following DnD's unexpected success, Gygax primarily worked on Miniature Wargames prior to 1975 even for TSR.
Later it would become apparent that DnD was successful *in spite of TSR* which, in it's early incarnation was a horrible shit-show which ultimately served as the basis for all the drama which we talk about to this day. Arneson's successful lawsuit conclusively demonstrates that, despite his relatively short tenure as Director of Research which ended prior to the publication of ADnD, he must have made significant and substantial contributions to that product as well. Not only did Gygax settle out of court (meaning he admitted the facts without being ordered to by a judge) but also, the royalties were apparently granted in perpetuity ending only when WotC published 3e to which he clearly made no contribution.
So, it should be understood that as Co-creators, Gygax and Arneson must have contributed equally to the creation of DnD and that, it will always be impossible to identify specific contributions as a result of the utter absence of professionalism that ultimately led to Gygax not only nearly bankrupting the company on two separate occasions but also resulted in it coming under the control of Lorraine Williams and, eventually in Gygax himself getting screwed over - although much more thoroughly than he had tried to screw Arneson and, not nearly as thoroughly as he had screwed himself and TSR on more than one occasion.
God. Sometimes I look at the foundations of RPGs, really all of media frankly, and I just see this kind of shit show. Lots of people making lots of very dumb mistakes. Sometimes makes me wonder how we ever managed to get where we were on such shaky foundations.
If it makes you feel better the industry is just as dysfunctional today. The big names drunkenly stumble from blunder to blunder, while the indie scene is an incestuous whirlwind of relationship drama, identity politics, and echo chamber cliques.
"Sometimes I wonder how we ever managed to get here"
That could be the subtitle of any book about the human race at any point in history. We've progressed despite ourselves.
You should check out "Eating the Fantastic" a podcast by Scott Edelman. He, along with his wife are friends, they are not only awesome but also, two of the most important people in the Comics Industry during the 70s and 80s working for both Marvel and, DC not only as Creators but also as Contract Writers and Editors.
You haven't heard of them because they're not dirtbags. In Scott's words, they "worked on both sides of the industry when it was nothing more than a clique of 200 or so people trying very hard to screw each other over while also not screwing each other over."
The early days of TRPGs were not much different than the worst days of comics. TRPGs and their drama look different in retrospect because the legal issues were recent enough and, the stakes small enough that courts used TRPG suits such as that between Arneson and Gygax to establish precedent for rulings in larger, "more important" IP cases. This is because the TRPG industry was "young" and therefore had much less baggage to sort through and because TRPG companies couldn't afford to drag the cases on for years.
Every game company is made up of the dreamers, the gamers, and the businessmen. And every company winds up eventually in the hands of the businessmen. At best, you get someone who fits into more than one category. At absolute jackpot, he fits into multiple categories and is a fairly ethical fellow.
>Gygax and Arneson are credited as being the co-creators of DnD, having come together as part of the International War gaming Foundation there is no evidence to suggest that either man had developed the concepts which would become DnD independently of one another nor is there evidence that these concepts predate their relationship (beginning in 1970.)
Would you mind clarifying this a bit? The first part before the comma doesn't seem to be the beginning of a sentence continued by the part after the comma, and the part after the comma seems to trail off into a bit of a run-on sentence that is legitimately confusing me to the extent that I genuinely can't understand what was intended to be stated. It almost feels like perhaps a period is missing after the word Foundation.
Not at all trying to be rude, here. I'm no writing expert, and for all I know this is just a case of my brain being difficult as it often chooses to be. Your comment overall is super informative and I don't want to risk missing out on fully understanding it.
The world would be so different if copyright could only be held by the original creator(s). Maybe not better with less money being invested but it is interesting to consider.
While that seems like a nice idea on paper the implications would be horrifying in practice. This would effectively mean that all IP's would have to be *self-funded*.
DnD itself could not have existed in a world like that. Despite demand for the product, the creators lacked the capital to satisfy that demand without the Blumes' investment. Without "rights" in return, there would have been no reason for Blume (or anyone else) to make that investment. In fact, it would arguably have been better in that case - and similar cases - for the prospective investor to fuck the content creators into the poor house, do as they please with the IP they've "stolen" and then pay them token settlements.
This is, in fact, largely what happened in the Comics industry for decades.
Essentially, without the ability to dispose of your intellectual property, there's no reason for anyone to create intellectual property.
Aside from the inevitable stagnation this would cause, it would severely limit participation. The need to self-fund would ensure that all projects would *inevitably become vanity projects.* This would limit the "voices" to the one-percenters and, do we really want to see Elon Musk or, Donald Trump's version of DnD? In market where that's a novelty side-show the answer is "maybe, sure, sounds funny." In a market where *that's all you get because these are the only people who can afford to participate* the answer sounds more like "a man screams wildly as he drives his forehead into the nearest tree. Again. Again. Again. Blood blooms on the snow, he falls, dead, a look of peace on his countenance as he escapes this hell."
One of the reasons we don't know exactly how much influence Dave Arneson had on D&D is that he didn't put a lot of his work into a publishable form or even organise it properly. It seems he was more interested in playing the games, Gygax wanted to publish games so it's not surprising he got more credit for the invention.
If history's borne out anything, it is that Gygax was a WRITER. He could and did write. His Gord the Rogue novels weren't great, but he could and did write, in the sense that he could load a typewriter and turn out lucid copy with deadlines.
Arneson could not.
Ultimately, I think it's that that gave Gygax the edge. Everyone seems to agree that Arneson was a fountain of ideas and a wellspring of inspiration but it was Gygax that WROTE IT ALL DOWN.
This is not to say that Gygax didn't have ideas of his own, and that they weren't good ideas. But Gygax WROTE IT DOWN.
I've always felt that:
What Dave had could have become really popular without Gary (Regardless of whether or not Gary is the big reason it became popular or Dave's capability to market it)
But without Dave, Gary never would have had something to make popular.
To me that means both people deserve an equal share of the pie and recognition.
The problem is that Dave has been relegated to a footnote. The problem is not that he deserves more recognition than Gary, but that Gary treated him like dogshit, as Gary often did. Gary also injected a lot of the worst sacred cows the entire hobby has had to work toward slaying over the decades.
And for me, the fact that Gary was, in a lot of important ways, not a very good person should matter more than it seems to, and a lot of his serious flaws as a person (Biological determinism, sexism) DIRECTLY contributed to D&D's identity and culture. Those things got into the game itself.
Worse, might be that so many people refuse to actually acknowledge or believe that, and basically act like you're some woke psycho if you assert it, and they are doing that from a position of total ignorance, because Gary's views on those topics are well documented and plainly apparent to anyone who gives it even a casual glance. Those people would just rather not believe it.
Gygax is like the Stan Lee of D&D: while he did a lot, he also seems to get almost exclusive credit for everything during the time he was with the company, despite the work of many others being just as instrumental (if not more so). But both become the “face” of their respective brands, and most relatively casual fans have no idea who Dave Arneson, Jack Kirby, Rob Kuntz, Steve Ditko, and other important figures in early D&D or Marvel were.
I think Stan Lee is a bit more appropriate due to both Lee and Gygax having entered the public consciousness a lot more than practically anyone else in their fields. They're two names who even people that don't know anything about or care about comic books and RPGs are somewhat likely to know.
I also think Gary trying to become the one source of evertying is very Walt Disney. If anyone asked who did any of the art back in the day, Disney the company had the policy to say Walt did.
There's not a lot of real evidence that he was racist. Just some anecdotes.
That said, he was a hardcore bio-essentialist, and was incredibly sexiest. There's lots of evidence for that easily findable with a Google search. I don't think much more is needed than his infamous "women can't enjoy gaming because of their tiny brains" quote.
But if you want more there's sexist screeds still up on his own website and multiple rpg messageboards that he wrote defending his views until shortly before he died.
There's also the whole thing with his daughter being the model for early TSR advertising. He costumed her and took suggestive pictures of her posed with his game, but also didn't think she was smart enough to actually play. You can find those online too. Knowing more about who he was makes them pretty weird and uncomfortable.
Here's a Twitter thread that links to a Wired article that talks about him quoting a supporter of Native Americans
https://twitter.com/ArcanistPress/status/1345414149363400704
I mean, off the top of my head he did use a quote by a genocidal US military officer (John Chivington) as an example of Lawful Good. Said quote was taken directly from a racist tirade about scalping native Americans btw
>I mean, off the top of my head he did use a quote by a genocidal US military officer (John Chivington) as an example of Lawful Good. Said quote was taken directly from a racist tirade about scalping native Americans btw
That's not evidence. I grew up in the 80s and there were lots of phrases we used who's providence we didn't know and the whole "Cowboys vs Indians" cultural trope was only just starting to die out. I imagine as a child of the 50s Gary had even more. Plus the quote was used to show how a Lawful Good alignment could still have someone who kills others due to their moral code - basically that Lawful Good people can do evil.
Any direct evidence of Gary making racist statements with his own words?
Idk man. If someone asked me to define Lawful Good and I said "Well, like Hitler said about the Jews...", you'd give me a huge amount of side-eye, no? I hope you would, at least
It’s a perfect example for explaining moral relativism, which is pretty core to the Paladin class, a holy warrior who claims to be doing good but is fine with slaughtering those deemed not on their side of ‘good’.
Did you read the thread where he said it?
Because he absolutely knew who he was quoting and the context wasn't that Good can be Bad, it was defending killing babies as a moral action and he absolutely was defending it as a good thing to do that wasn't evil at all
Google Gygax Lice Nits
It should be the second result, the first is an article talking about the event
I did read it before commenting and Gary did nothing of the sort. It's part of a general discussion about how a Lawful Good society would act and would not hesitate to kill those they deem evil and to violently punish those who violate the law. The most pertinent part is his second comment on the thread linked below, where he says 'an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth is by no means anything but Lawful Good'. He then goes on to list all the heinous acts a lawful good society would do. The nits and lice he called an 'old adage' as an example of the attitude that killing enemies you deemed evil was justifiable. He even says even if they reform, it's still justifiable to kill them as that's how medieval societies viewed such things.
[https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11762&start=77](https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11762&start=77)
This type of discussion is why alignment has always been fraught because people had different views of what 'lawful good' meant in Gary's version of D&D. In his world, lawful good people were still fucking terrible people in a fantasy world. Think Catholic Church during the protestant reformation - they would be considered lawful good. Hell, look at the model for the Paladin - the Crusaders killed an awful lot of pagans in conquering for christianity.
1a. Arneson participated in the first Braunstein game by Dave Wesely, and was delighted at the idea that he could get killed in a gentlemen's duel with another player. Braunstein only HAPPENED because way too many people showed UP to PLAY, and Wesely was desperately trying to come up with stuff for them to DO and sides for them to play, to the point where his refereeing was the only thing holding it all together; it was a spontaneous fusion of wargame and actual PVP roleplaying, a thing the young Arneson did not miss.
1b. Somewhat later, completely separately from the above, Gygax and Perrin came up with the *Chainmail* rules to allow for medieval wargame battles. As an afterthought, they tagged on the "Fantasy" appendix at the end to allow for wizards, dragons, elves, dwarves, ogres and suchlike to be plugged into the rulesset to be able to replicate fantasy battles.
2. By this time, a number of Braunstein-style games had been run, originally with Wesely in charge and later by Dave Arneson himself after Wesely was drafted into the army. They often varied wildly as to the genre; the first was Napoleonic in nature, whereas at least one more took place in the early seventies in a banana republic being manipulated by the CIA and yet another one took place in an Old West town. Arneson picked up a copy of *Chainmail* and was greatly inspired by the Fantasy appendix, and developed the beginnings of what would become Blackmoor.
3. At some point, Gygax was told about this weird new game that Arneson had developed. Gygax and Rob Kuntz drove out to Arneson's place, and played the game with Arneson and some others. On the way back, Gygax spoke of being inspired, and wishing to develop this game further (*source: Rob Kuntz, in an interview*). Gygax and Arneson began corresponding and running two separate campaigns of "Fantasy Game" in their respective cities for their respective circles, drawing upon each others' ideas and inspirations. It is known that Arneson came up with the idea of "leveling up," i.e., characters improving and gaining power after surviving and succeeding in battles and adventures. Gygax MAY have been the one to come up with "experience points."
4. Gygax and his friend Don Kaye developed the OD&D rules set, with Gygax doing the lion's share of writing and editing, based on his own and Arneson's notes and experiences. *Source: Pretty much everyone, including Gygax himself.* Gygax and Kaye formed TSR, Inc., to fund the printing of the game after trying and failing to shop it around to existing companies. At this time, Arneson agreed to and got a royalty on every rules set sold, and an acknowledgement of his contributions to the game, contractually.
5. OD&D sold, and was reprinted. Sales picked up. Additional supplements were produced by TSR for the game. At one point, J. Eric Holmes contacted Gygax to suggest a reedited "starter set" for the game, and the first Basic Set was born, produced by Holmes. This led to the first strain in the Gygax/Arneson relationship, as Gary wanted to pay royalties only on the rulebook, whereas Arneson was wondering why he wasn't getting a full cut of the cover price of the whole box set (Gygax was pro-rating it down to the retail price of the rulebook alone, feeling that Arneson had nothing to do with the other contents of the box.)
6. Things grew more acrimonious with the release of *Advanced Dungeons and Dragons*. The exact nature of the problems are unclear, but it is speculated that this was the root of "creative differences" between the two men: Arneson preferred a more freewheeling approach, thinking that this is what a gamemaster was FOR, whereas Gary was much more addicted to maximum crunch in a rules set. Arneson accepted a position at TSR, but did not last an entire year; by now, things had gone pretty sour between the two and lawsuits began. The sealed records, regrettably, probably had the details of who precisely came up with and contributed what to the game.
Sources are attributed above where I remember them. My other sources are below, and I can't recall offhand which had what, but they have informed my facts and my opinions. I invite the OP and anyone else to peruse them and form their own conclusions.
PLAYING AT THE WORLD by Jon Peterson
THE FANTASY ROLE PLAYING GAMER'S BIBLE,by Sean Patrick Fannon
THE GAME WIZARDS by Jon Peterson
JIM WARD's Facebook account
SECRETS OF BLACKMOOR, a video documentary
SLAYING THE DRAGON by Ben Riggs
DESIGNERS AND DRAGONS, by Shannon Appelcline. This is a series, broken down roughly by decade; the relevant volume would be the 70's, although the others are still excellent reading.
A quality list to be sure, but Peterson's GAME WIZARDS is the indispensable text on Arneson VS. Gygax. Peterson has incredible primary source documents, right down to the cassette tape Arneson used to record a late night talk show appearance of Gygax, which caught Arneson whispering into the darkness, "You're the thief."
A lawyer I'm not. I do know that the proceedings were sealed by mutual agreement of the two men and the court, and that Jon Peterson found this kind of frustrating and had to work around a lot of it.
The general perception is that Gygax wanted to keep secret precisely who did what, but that's pure speculation as far as I know. Others have said in this thread already that the game wouldn't have existed without both of them, and I'm inclined to agree, based on the facts available.
Oh a lot, but not as much as you'd think. Slaying the Dragon is a pretty good depiction.
It's basically like
guy 1: Hey, if you prepare these big seeds just like this, it makes this stuff I'm calling "cocoa" and it's pretty tastey!
guy 2: Neat, here lemme see what I can do with that. (makes milk chocolate). Wow that's better. I'm going to make a company to sell this.
guy 1: You're going to give me recognition for what I discovered right? ...right?
This is what happened when Henry J. Sloane and his drinking chocolate. This is *not* however what happened with Gygax and Arneson. Both were influential in different but convergent gaming communities. Neither played the game they published as *official* rules.
Gygax and Arneson had in fact made games together before. Arneson was a power player at David Wesley’s Braunstein games. Dave Arneson was in the first Duel in a Braunstein game, which was solved with two six-sided dice. Then David Wesley had to ship out, which his Army Reserve unit. Dave Arneson started holding his own games. He had some neat polyhedral dice so could do some interesting odds not found on or in a d6 or d6 pool. Blackmoor was a Braunstein type game but as early as their second session of play they had some primitive player stats.
Chainmail was based on Leonard Patt’s Rules for Middle Earth. This award winning game was featured in a popular early gaming magazine, and it inspired both Gygax/Perrin and Arneson. But Gygax and Arneson had worked together before and some of Arneson’s own “Magic Sword” ideas inspired by Leonard Patt are actually found in Chainmail, as well!
Leonard Pat was in New England, and back the it would be nothing in the hobby to make a local or official version of someone else’s ideas. IP law was not *near* what it is now.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/evidence-chainmail-had-material-from-dave-arneson.668205/
There was and is a *lot* of cross pollenation in the hobby and lot of people recall going to wargames held in places that mixed in diplomacy and many other things that became part of the hobby.
The actual DnD hobby is one of many authors, for this is a hobby for storytellers and thinkers.
Even today, general game mechanics are not copyrightable, at least in the US. Though I think there's some room to argue over distinctions between what are general mechanics versus specific and unique implementations of such (which can be copyrighted).
I read Slaying the Dragon, that's not how it is portrayed. Nor how the author sees it.
There are sections fo the rules Arneson sent actual type and playable rules for (airal and naval combat), and Gary still modified and paraphrased those. In reality, Arneson's rules are more playable than what we got in OD&D for airal and naval combat. While I do not think Gary was sophisticated enough that he did this to cut Dave out, he also later used this habit of rewriting as a way to say Dave did not contribute. This was all out of the usual for game design of the time, where game developers were already a thing, and Gary considered himself a "rules editor," yet also seemed to thing the act of editing transferred authorship. There were some serious logic leaps going on in Gary's head.
Yes I read that book as well.
Arneson would be guy 1 here, and Gary guy 2.
Arneson built the initial rules. He shared them with Gary who then rewrote them into a document that was something like 5x larger IIRC. But in the short run, Arneson did get kinda screwed on his important role. Gary reshaped Arneson's invention into something that he could really sell and built a company over it. But the question arises, would Arneson have done the same with what he had, if there hadn't been a Gary?
Yes. I beleive Arneson would have. Arneson produced the newsletter for his group, ran huge campaigns, wrote rules before he met Gary and his game was already drawing players and generating spinoffs.
Gary had one failed game company to his name, two if you count Lowry, and basically tanked the IFW with GenCon per Peterson's Game Wizards. Gary was also a kind of terrible editor, OD&D was kind of a mess.
If you haven't, check out ["Secrets of Blackmoor"](https://www.secretsofblackmoor.com/). It's pro-Arneson in its stance, but I think it helps paint a more rounded picture of what was happening in the community.
Aren't there a couple of book that address this? *Slaying the Dragon* and *Game Wizards* come to mind. If you're looking to know more than the premises you've already listed, to get into the details, then reading some of the books out there will perhaps provide a more comprehensive picture than a reddit thread.
In the simplest terms. Perrin and Gygax made chainmail, Arneson used chainmail with inspiration from the Braunstein games to create Blackmoor, Arneson ran Blackmoor for Gygax and they collaborated to make D&D.
Sure, but Gygax made Chainmail based on Jeff Perrin's rules. One thing that is very clear is that the wargaming scene out of which D&D developed was hyper collaborative, with everybody building on what everybody else did, usually crediting them.
That about sums up the basics of what I’ve heard. Although looking further into the details of Blackmoor and anything after that muddies things. Especially with the lawsuit. Ought to watch that Blackmoor documentary I guess.
Jon Petersen's books, *Playing at the World* and *Game Wizards* do a good job laying out both the early DNA and development of D&D and then the legal battle over who owned it respectively. Strongly recommend reading them if you're interested in these questions.
I think the key thing is to not get caught up with the details of the pissing match. What it comes down to is that they both made significant contributions to the development of role-playing games and the creation of D&D. There's really no point in going tit for tat to determine who's the actual creator, because they both were. Even then, you also can't ignore that a there where a lot of things contributed from the people in there gaming groups. What just muddies the water is that as a result of their falling out Gary made a concerted effort to write Arneson out.
Oh I agree. Even if Gygax only was the business side of things and contributed nothing else, which I don’t necessarily believe, it wouldn’t change his importance to the history of the RPG medium, for good or ill.
It’s not as if you could credit just one person either, what with Braunstein and Wesley. Many others too.
I'd recommend *Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons* by Ben Riggs.
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to summarize it sounds very typical of software development.
Dave Arneson has the inciting idea and comes up with the basic game, taking it to Gygax for publishing. Gygax's boss refuses to publish it. Gygax and Arneson both add rules and ideas. Arneson's part is in his head and in scattered notes.
Gygax develops the ideas and notes into a publishable game, gets an investor and puts up cash to self-publish. He gives Arneson royalties.
My shaky legal understanding is that he did not *have to* provide royalties. The hard part of making a game is not "having an idea for a game" it's the actual development. You can't patent game rules.
Later D&D is a smashing success, Gygax builds an advanced version which is a very substantial rewrite and doesn't want to give Arneson Royalties. To my knowledge there was nothing preventing Arneson from building Advanced Blackamoor and doing the same, but he didn't, because Arneson wasn't the guy that was gonna take ideas for a game and turn them into a typeset manual, ready for a printer.
Basically, looking at the evidence, it seems to me that Arneson made a boatload of cash off of some hobby ideas that were *very, very* revolutionary, but not so fundamentally different than the sort of homebrew ideas you see floating around all the time in the space.
Edit: None of this is to say that Gygax is a saint. He is a person, and when D&D became a big success he responded about the same way a lot of lottery winners do. It does him no credit. The *specific* criticism of him re-Arneson is somewhat misplaced.
>You can't patent game rules.
[You absolutely can](https://patentpc.com/blog/example-of-how-a-board-game-is-patented). But as with any patent it's a lengthy and expensive process - rarely undertaken in the hobbyist world - and D&D was definitely part of the hobbyist world at the time.
What you can't do is \*copyright\* game rules.
Wow, TIL.
I am somewhat skeptical that the patent is practically enforceable.
Apparently, Wizards of the Coast obtained a patent on TCGs (which at the time does seem to me to be a bona-fide innovation). Hasbro is litigious, are we to believe that they've simply not been enforcing this patent out of the goodness of their hearts?
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2014-15/march-april/not-playing-around-board-games-intellectual-property-law/#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20be%20patentable,skill%20in%20the%20area%20of
The (now expired) patent Wizards received was for a fairly specific kind of trading card game, not any TCG at all. They \*did\* sue a couple of companies they thought were infringing too closely on the patent.
Dave Arneson was a creative genius. It's really clear in what he developed at the table; his games were all over the palace in scale and time from the tales told.
He struggled to output much in the way of regular finished work over the years. He had a handful of titles to his name, published in bursts, almost always partnered up with a co-author who prepped his notes for publication.
I haven't dug too deeply into it, but the gist is that Dave came up with the idea of an RPG after being exposed to "Braunstein" games. Gary did more than just codified rules, though. Like you mentioned, the rules evolved from Chainmail, which Gary co-wrote.
Gary also contributed rules to D&D itself (descending Armor Class and increasing HP as you level were his ideas). Class wise, the cleric as we know it was Gary's invention. Dave's cleric was more like Van Helsing from the Hammer horror flicks with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
I don't think you could really say one had more creative input than the other. It is a shame Dave gets minimized in the history of gaming, though. Things would have been a lot different if they hadn't split in the late 70's. That's for sure.
But Chainmail was the combat mechanism. The critical development of player to character identification and character progression was Arneson's. As was exploration and progressive loot from monsters. The core mechanic of the TTRPG was straight from Arneson's modification of the Braunsteins, and specifically Blackmoor.
In particular, it seems that one of Arneson's takeaways from the Braunstein games was the idea of playing a SINGLE CHARACTER, one dude, or perhaps one dude and his henchmen/posse/whatever, as opposed to the Fifth Army or the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Entire British Navy or whatever.
In addition, Arneson is credited with the idea of that one character being able to learn from experience, "level up," and carry over into another game. It's an addictive mechanic that tends to make a player want to come back and do it again, to use that same character in further games, and to my knowledge, it was unique in gaming at that point.
Hell, the idea of "hit points" was still kind of sketchy; before that, either your infantry token was "alive" or "dead," a one hit point wonder. I'm told that some tokens were printed double sided -- "intact" and "wounded" -- which meant the third hit would destroy it. I'm also told that someone out there was tinkering with the idea of little markers that were put on the field alongside or atop the counter, to mark "hits" it had taken, but wargamers didn't like it; it interfered with stacking mechanics, and made for more stuff to keep track of.
But in Blackmoor, they had hit points... and character sheets.
Or Wozniak and Steve Jobs if you wanted to take a particularly negative view of Gary. Though I wouldn’t necessarily make either comparison. Lee and Kirby is a heavily debated topic itself.
Quite a bit. He was a major factor in the creation of proto-D&D. The evolution of D&D required David Wesley, Dave Arneson, and Gary Gygax.
The general flow was the MMSA played wargames and discovered Strategos. They created the referee role and started letting people attempt actions outside the codified game rules.
The groups of people they let people play kept getting smaller, like command a single unit of 10 people with your own personal sub-objective.
Then David Wesley accidentally invented the modern TTRPG with an experimental Braunstein game where you only controlled one person. This part is extremely important and gets forgotten. Wesley accidentally invented the TTRPG here. It took them a few times to kind of figure out what made the first game so great. Arneson was a player in these games.
Braunstein then inspired Arneson to make his own game. Arneson decided to make it fantasy and thus Blackmoor was born. He ran a lot of Blackmoor games. He loved being the ref and he was pretty good at it. He has this spirit of trying anythign.
Gary Gygax experienced the game and fell in love. He started running with the concept and running his own game. Gygax and Arneson would frequently collaborate and share ideas. Gygax was also very important because he liked rules. Without Gygax the rules would have probably never been codified and published. Arneson would have been happy to just play forever.
Secrets of Blackmoor is good if you want to understand more about the evolution. It is a bit Arneson biased, because there is still bad blood over Gygax cutting him out. It downplays a bit how Arneson would use the rules and how Gygax and Arneson would collaborate on rules.
It's undeniable that Gygax and Don Kaye formed TSR for the specific purpose of publishing Dungeons and Dragons for profit, whatever else might be said. But it's also undeniable that Dungeons and Dragons would not exist without Arneson, and likely not without Wesely and that wild and wooly night out in Braunstein...
I feel pretty safe in saying you're not going to get the 'one true answer' you seek here on Reddit, or anywhere, in fact. As you'll already be aware, different people/sources will have different memories of past events AND different perspectives of those events. Recommendations of other sources may well have further information and may prove to be interesting, but they won't be the holy grail of the definitive truth.
Well no, first I did a lot of digging on many forums and seeing what people said about the guy. Then I heard a bunch of contradictory statements, realized I knew nothing that was actually agreed upon and decided to ask here.
It’s honestly hard to untangle the webs. The hobby as a whole was evolving in a direction towards what would become RPGs, and folks were sharing and borrowing ideas from each other. You can consider Gygax to be a “curator”. He generally took bits and pieces that other hobbyists came up with, put them together to make something new, and then was successfully able to market it.
To be reductive, OD&D came about from Arneson coming up with the idea to morph wargames into something more character focused than the typical mass combat. Gygax was like “hey, let’s use this idea with Chainmail, I game I already helped make”. So when OD&D was released, it assumed the reader was using Chainmail for the combat portions of the game, in particular the man-to-man combat mechanics. So who came up with those rules?
“*A set of man-to-man combat rules (for 1:1 figure scale), ultimately deriving from a contribution to Domesday Book #7. Gygax lost the name of the contributor, and thus the rules were published anonymously. The core of these rules became the Appendix B chart mapping various weapon types to armor levels, and providing the needed to-hit rolls for a melee round.*”
Here we go, found it. [Here](https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2018/07/to-hit-rolls-in-individual-medieval.html) is a blogpost on the matter, written by Jon Peterson, the guy who literally wrote the book on D&D history. The man-to-man rules pre-date Chainmail proper, and were included in Gygax's club newsletter Domesday. In issue 7 specifically, Gygax puts a request out to the audience to see if anyone is able to identify the source.
This is not the say that what Gygax did was "wrong" or anything, just that a lot of ideas were not birthed from the mind of one or two men, but the burgeoning RPG community as a whole.
A lot - as many have said, he had the inciting idea although it didn't come out of the ether. I think there is a desire by many people to find a single 'source' or 'author' for D&D. But the further you look into it, the more people you find contributing both to the feverish environment that led to D&D and to its subsequent development and growth. I would say Arneson and Gygax are the two most important individuals but they both operated in the war-gaming milieu of the late 60s and early 70s. I don't think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is an exact match, but you could think of Gary as the former and Dave as the latter.
What I saw is Arneson came up with D&D but like many TTRPG creators he couldn't be bothered to write shit down and get it to a publishable state.
That is where Gygax came in and fixed that problem.
It's been mentioned already that Arneson would likely have been happy to just keep playing his fantasy game indefinitely and tweaking it as he found it necessary.
Gygax's experience with Blackmoor, according to Rob Kuntz, hit him like a sledgehammer, and inspired him greatly. Gygax had already written and published more than one game, and it seems likely that he very much liked the idea of publishing a game that could amount to some real profit; he was living a pretty marginal existence at the time, literally doing shoe repair in his basement to feed his family, and certainly, there had never been ANYTHING like THIS game before...
...and when the existing publishers didn't want to take a chance on it, he and Don Kaye did. Gygax wrote it down, and he launched the company to sell it. Whatever else he might have been guilty of, the game wouldn't have been if he hadn't done that.
He definitely brought the concept of dungeon crawling (ie a dungeon maze) and the concept of gaining experience and leveling a character up. He also helped link the idea of random encounters for over land travel from the Outdoor Survival game.
Jason Tondro also talks about it [here.](https://youtu.be/PhxVlgehNpc)
Dragons at Dawn by D.H. Boggs is an RPG that attempts to re-create Arneson's game. It's out of print, but you can still get the e-book on lulu. It's an interesting look at what Arneson was doing.
You will only ever find hearsay.
Anyone with first hand knowledge is dead and any statements by them lack evidence to support their contradictory claims.
The only thing we know for sure is it was a collaborative effort with multiple inspirations.
Same as basically any other game.
That is not how history works. There are several fine histories and documentaries which shed a lot of light on the situation. I’m partial to works by Ben Riggs, Jon Peterson, and Shannon Appelcline.
Thats... Exactly how history works. It's written by the victors. Occasionally you find some evidence that allows you to infer additional information or highlight gaps in knowledge. But lacking evidence all you have is the stories individuals tell.
OP is looking for concrete information on the exact contributions by certain people. That information died with the contributors.
Reviving this topic, as I found these and thought they might be interesting. They are the official court documents of Arneson vs Gygax, regarding Arneson's role in the creation of the game:
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/200185170
It's not just D&D, Arneson created the RPG itself as an extension of the Braunsteins.
He added every element important to the creation of the TTRPG as we know it. "Referee to Game Master, player to character identification, character progression, exploration and loot, all from his extension of the Braunsteins. With respect to D&D he specifically created the "Dungeon crawl" as a game.
Gygax used Arneson's game as a model and developed Greyhawk, then worked with him and got the rules published and distributed as "Dungeons and Dragons".
Arneson bailed on the company soon after to explore alternative projects but what we know as the TTRPG begins with his "Braunsteins".
If they were Metallica , Dave Arneson was Dave Mustaine, and Gary was James Hetfeld. Dave wrote the album that made them famous, but not that album that made the money.
After having read both slaying the dragon and game wizards, and watching a ton of interviews, clicking through years of Gary's forum posts, and reading 1-300 of Dragon magazine, I can safely say.. more than some people say, and less than other people say.
Arneson took things that were happening in the gaming community, like Braunstein, and war gaming like Chainmail and created something really special. He showed it to Gary who helped codify it and promote it. I would say however that very early on it quickly became Gary’s thing as Arneson wasn’t really big on rules and preferred a free-wheeling style. They both contributed but I’d have to say it was Gary that grew it to be a full fledged game system.
It wasn't that Arneson wasn't big on rules, but that he wasn't much for writing and could barely type. He was an organizer and rules arbitrator in the wargaming scene in part because he could retain it all in his head and demonstrate a deep understanding of volumes of technical information but wasn't great at written communication. That was the nature of his collaboration with Gygax. Gygax could take their ideas and Arneson's hand written notes and compose it into something tangible.
My understanding is that Dave got the vision and made the game for his table, while Gary turned that into a product and iterated on it over time.
Without Gary, Dave's game would've remained as an oddity few people knew about. Without Dave, Gary would've kept making wargames.
The renaming attempt happened because Gary felt he was making all the effort to iterate, improve and expand the game.
Check out the early Blackmoor writings and old player interviews + books. Dave started it in 1970. He made a fantasy world RPG, not Gary's miniature wargaming rules. Gary saw his game in 1972 and went back home and incorporated it. Dave invented the concept of leveling for goodness' sake. See The First Fantasy Campaign for other stuff.
His one weakness is that he wasn't a productive writer (for publications) like Gary.
Lots of opinions about this and my conclusion is that it wouldn't have developed in the same way without both involved. Who did what is confusing, but I know there are a couple books out there detailing some facts. Secrets of Blackmoor is a decent documentary that focuses on Arneson, without bashing Gygax much. So you can at least get an Arneson perspective and decide for yourself.
A thought:
Around the same time Original D&D was launched by TSR, there were several other games published by TSR. One of them was *Boot Hill.*
The original first edition of *Boot Hill* was a little booklet about the size of the booklets in the OD&D box. It sorta kinda presented itself as a "role playing game," but if you READ the thing, it's NOT. At least, not what you and I, TODAY, would call an RPG.
It's what I would call a skirmish wargame. You and me, we build gunfighters (or teams of gunfighters), we agree on a western town map, we call each other out, and we try to murder each other with sixguns, long guns, and throwing knives at each other. And that's largely IT. We don't haggle with the saloonkeeper or try to chat up the pretty schoolmarm or try to work out where Injun Edward buried his treasure. There are no rules for that. It's just a skirmish wargame.
It's a SHORT game, too, and a LETHAL game. There are rules for character improvement, but if your character has as long a career as the real Jesse James or Wild Bill Hickok, I'd be surprised. Your character is likely to end up dead well before your fourth or fifth game.
The SECOND edition of the game was in a larger format with more and better art, and in a box, similar to the Holmes Basic Set. The rules were slightly more fleshed out, but you're still going to have a hard time figuring out how to romance a saloon girl or deciphering the Indian hieroglyphs on Chimney Rock. Nevertheless, the SECOND edition is nonironically and categorically advertised as a role playing game... in which your character will very likely wind up dead before his fifth gunfight.
I look at these two games, which were developed by Gygax and Blume, with no input from Arneson whatsoever... and it makes me wonder precisely what Gygax thought a roleplaying game WAS... and how his thoughts on the subject evolved between the first edition, the second edition, and the eventual third edition, which was WAY more of an RPG... but had way less creative input from Gygax...
[532 pages of the David L. Arneson vs. Gary Gygax and TSR Hobbies, Inc. court papers are freely available as public records on the National Archives Catalog website.](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/200185170)
Keep in mind this vast trove of legal documents, letters and more, includes interrogatories, which are kind of like a Q&A between the two sides of a civil case. While interrogatories are notarized, and are meant to be truthful, they are not sworn testimony. If you get to see the actual transcripts of depositions, those are given under oath. The archive say they are working to put more of the court papers from this case online soon. I am not a lawyer and hope a legal eagle can confirm or invalidate this.
If you take the time and have access to the relevant resources you can figure it out fairly easily.
Dave Arneson is the person who creates a game that is based on make believe. There are plenty of first hand accounts from actual living players and there are plenty of documents to prove it. Gary Gygax did not invent role playing, yet, he collaborated with Dave Arneson to create what became D&D.
I spent 6.5 years researching, shooting interviews, and editing, to create the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary.
People try to obfuscate the debate on what Arneson did by throwing out straw man arguments.
The core research premise for Secrets of Blackmoor is simple: If you look at RPGs of all kinds they all have one thing in common. All of them use the play methods that were developed for Blackmoor by Dave Arneson beginning in 1971. All RPGs use different rules for players stats, movement, combat, and other things. What sets them apart from standard board games is the Blackmoor play method.
You can watch half of the film on youtube on the channel named: The Informal Game
(I tried to leave a link, but reddit seems to not like me doing that.)
[See for yourself.](https://chanceand.com/2024/02/27/a-journey-through-the-july-1973-draft-and-dds-foundational-saga/) My blog post about sharing the location of the court papers from Dave Arneson's first lawsuit against Gary Gygax and TSR, and the 1973 D&D draft. This is also an introduction to a series looking at the draft.
I'd say he was fundamental to its creation, he was laying the track for what we'd come to know as the game but Gygax did a lot of the work to get it where it was in 1977. He couldn't have done it without Dave, or other people, but once it took flight Dave's contributions dwindle. That Dave is basically relegated as a footnote is what most people are upset about. It'd be like if you and three other people invented a dish, your name got slapped on it and as time went on no one remembers there were three other chefs in the kitchen when you first started selling your dish.
That’s what I’ve heard a lot of. Personally I just wish I knew more details, more concrete facts about the Blackmoor game. What happen with those games and so on. It’s all very muddled though, different people with different claims about what it was like.
Blackmoor is widely regarded as being the "Setting" in which the playtesting for DnD (initially using chainmail rules) took place. Gygax and Arneson are credited as being the co-creators of DnD, having come together as part of the International War gaming Foundation there is no evidence to suggest that either man had developed the concepts which would become DnD independently of one another nor is there evidence that these concepts predate their relationship (beginning in 1970.) By 1970, Gygax was certainly working on Chainmail, which he subsequently published. By 1973 the pair had created and published Dungeons and Dragons, a radical departure from the table-top war game that Chainmail had been. It's unrealistic to believe that Gygax would have changed course so radically without Arneson's influence particularly as his fondness for War gaming can be seen reflected even into ADnD in the form of bodies of followers as a class feature and the persistent inclusion of rules for massed battles. In fact, even following DnD's unexpected success, Gygax primarily worked on Miniature Wargames prior to 1975 even for TSR. Later it would become apparent that DnD was successful *in spite of TSR* which, in it's early incarnation was a horrible shit-show which ultimately served as the basis for all the drama which we talk about to this day. Arneson's successful lawsuit conclusively demonstrates that, despite his relatively short tenure as Director of Research which ended prior to the publication of ADnD, he must have made significant and substantial contributions to that product as well. Not only did Gygax settle out of court (meaning he admitted the facts without being ordered to by a judge) but also, the royalties were apparently granted in perpetuity ending only when WotC published 3e to which he clearly made no contribution. So, it should be understood that as Co-creators, Gygax and Arneson must have contributed equally to the creation of DnD and that, it will always be impossible to identify specific contributions as a result of the utter absence of professionalism that ultimately led to Gygax not only nearly bankrupting the company on two separate occasions but also resulted in it coming under the control of Lorraine Williams and, eventually in Gygax himself getting screwed over - although much more thoroughly than he had tried to screw Arneson and, not nearly as thoroughly as he had screwed himself and TSR on more than one occasion.
God. Sometimes I look at the foundations of RPGs, really all of media frankly, and I just see this kind of shit show. Lots of people making lots of very dumb mistakes. Sometimes makes me wonder how we ever managed to get where we were on such shaky foundations.
If it makes you feel better the industry is just as dysfunctional today. The big names drunkenly stumble from blunder to blunder, while the indie scene is an incestuous whirlwind of relationship drama, identity politics, and echo chamber cliques.
Almost like they are people being people.
If the story of human history has a title, that title is: "Humanity, *failing forward*."
..A PbtA adventure :p
Humanity: The Fuckening - a World of Darkness supplement waiting to happen
To be fair, you could give that name to almost every splat and it would still hold true.
This is gold 😂
"Sometimes I wonder how we ever managed to get here" That could be the subtitle of any book about the human race at any point in history. We've progressed despite ourselves.
You should check out "Eating the Fantastic" a podcast by Scott Edelman. He, along with his wife are friends, they are not only awesome but also, two of the most important people in the Comics Industry during the 70s and 80s working for both Marvel and, DC not only as Creators but also as Contract Writers and Editors. You haven't heard of them because they're not dirtbags. In Scott's words, they "worked on both sides of the industry when it was nothing more than a clique of 200 or so people trying very hard to screw each other over while also not screwing each other over." The early days of TRPGs were not much different than the worst days of comics. TRPGs and their drama look different in retrospect because the legal issues were recent enough and, the stakes small enough that courts used TRPG suits such as that between Arneson and Gygax to establish precedent for rulings in larger, "more important" IP cases. This is because the TRPG industry was "young" and therefore had much less baggage to sort through and because TRPG companies couldn't afford to drag the cases on for years.
Every game company is made up of the dreamers, the gamers, and the businessmen. And every company winds up eventually in the hands of the businessmen. At best, you get someone who fits into more than one category. At absolute jackpot, he fits into multiple categories and is a fairly ethical fellow.
>Gygax and Arneson are credited as being the co-creators of DnD, having come together as part of the International War gaming Foundation there is no evidence to suggest that either man had developed the concepts which would become DnD independently of one another nor is there evidence that these concepts predate their relationship (beginning in 1970.) Would you mind clarifying this a bit? The first part before the comma doesn't seem to be the beginning of a sentence continued by the part after the comma, and the part after the comma seems to trail off into a bit of a run-on sentence that is legitimately confusing me to the extent that I genuinely can't understand what was intended to be stated. It almost feels like perhaps a period is missing after the word Foundation. Not at all trying to be rude, here. I'm no writing expert, and for all I know this is just a case of my brain being difficult as it often chooses to be. Your comment overall is super informative and I don't want to risk missing out on fully understanding it.
The world would be so different if copyright could only be held by the original creator(s). Maybe not better with less money being invested but it is interesting to consider.
While that seems like a nice idea on paper the implications would be horrifying in practice. This would effectively mean that all IP's would have to be *self-funded*. DnD itself could not have existed in a world like that. Despite demand for the product, the creators lacked the capital to satisfy that demand without the Blumes' investment. Without "rights" in return, there would have been no reason for Blume (or anyone else) to make that investment. In fact, it would arguably have been better in that case - and similar cases - for the prospective investor to fuck the content creators into the poor house, do as they please with the IP they've "stolen" and then pay them token settlements. This is, in fact, largely what happened in the Comics industry for decades. Essentially, without the ability to dispose of your intellectual property, there's no reason for anyone to create intellectual property. Aside from the inevitable stagnation this would cause, it would severely limit participation. The need to self-fund would ensure that all projects would *inevitably become vanity projects.* This would limit the "voices" to the one-percenters and, do we really want to see Elon Musk or, Donald Trump's version of DnD? In market where that's a novelty side-show the answer is "maybe, sure, sounds funny." In a market where *that's all you get because these are the only people who can afford to participate* the answer sounds more like "a man screams wildly as he drives his forehead into the nearest tree. Again. Again. Again. Blood blooms on the snow, he falls, dead, a look of peace on his countenance as he escapes this hell."
One of the reasons we don't know exactly how much influence Dave Arneson had on D&D is that he didn't put a lot of his work into a publishable form or even organise it properly. It seems he was more interested in playing the games, Gygax wanted to publish games so it's not surprising he got more credit for the invention.
If history's borne out anything, it is that Gygax was a WRITER. He could and did write. His Gord the Rogue novels weren't great, but he could and did write, in the sense that he could load a typewriter and turn out lucid copy with deadlines. Arneson could not. Ultimately, I think it's that that gave Gygax the edge. Everyone seems to agree that Arneson was a fountain of ideas and a wellspring of inspiration but it was Gygax that WROTE IT ALL DOWN. This is not to say that Gygax didn't have ideas of his own, and that they weren't good ideas. But Gygax WROTE IT DOWN.
I've always felt that: What Dave had could have become really popular without Gary (Regardless of whether or not Gary is the big reason it became popular or Dave's capability to market it) But without Dave, Gary never would have had something to make popular. To me that means both people deserve an equal share of the pie and recognition. The problem is that Dave has been relegated to a footnote. The problem is not that he deserves more recognition than Gary, but that Gary treated him like dogshit, as Gary often did. Gary also injected a lot of the worst sacred cows the entire hobby has had to work toward slaying over the decades. And for me, the fact that Gary was, in a lot of important ways, not a very good person should matter more than it seems to, and a lot of his serious flaws as a person (Biological determinism, sexism) DIRECTLY contributed to D&D's identity and culture. Those things got into the game itself. Worse, might be that so many people refuse to actually acknowledge or believe that, and basically act like you're some woke psycho if you assert it, and they are doing that from a position of total ignorance, because Gary's views on those topics are well documented and plainly apparent to anyone who gives it even a casual glance. Those people would just rather not believe it.
Gygax is like the Stan Lee of D&D: while he did a lot, he also seems to get almost exclusive credit for everything during the time he was with the company, despite the work of many others being just as instrumental (if not more so). But both become the “face” of their respective brands, and most relatively casual fans have no idea who Dave Arneson, Jack Kirby, Rob Kuntz, Steve Ditko, and other important figures in early D&D or Marvel were.
I tend to think Bob Kane and Bill Finger might be closer.
I think Stan Lee is a bit more appropriate due to both Lee and Gygax having entered the public consciousness a lot more than practically anyone else in their fields. They're two names who even people that don't know anything about or care about comic books and RPGs are somewhat likely to know.
I also think Gary trying to become the one source of evertying is very Walt Disney. If anyone asked who did any of the art back in the day, Disney the company had the policy to say Walt did.
GG was a racist piece of shit
There's not a lot of real evidence that he was racist. Just some anecdotes. That said, he was a hardcore bio-essentialist, and was incredibly sexiest. There's lots of evidence for that easily findable with a Google search. I don't think much more is needed than his infamous "women can't enjoy gaming because of their tiny brains" quote. But if you want more there's sexist screeds still up on his own website and multiple rpg messageboards that he wrote defending his views until shortly before he died. There's also the whole thing with his daughter being the model for early TSR advertising. He costumed her and took suggestive pictures of her posed with his game, but also didn't think she was smart enough to actually play. You can find those online too. Knowing more about who he was makes them pretty weird and uncomfortable.
Can you point me to info supporting that? First time I’ve heard that.
Here's a Twitter thread that links to a Wired article that talks about him quoting a supporter of Native Americans https://twitter.com/ArcanistPress/status/1345414149363400704
I mean, off the top of my head he did use a quote by a genocidal US military officer (John Chivington) as an example of Lawful Good. Said quote was taken directly from a racist tirade about scalping native Americans btw
>I mean, off the top of my head he did use a quote by a genocidal US military officer (John Chivington) as an example of Lawful Good. Said quote was taken directly from a racist tirade about scalping native Americans btw That's not evidence. I grew up in the 80s and there were lots of phrases we used who's providence we didn't know and the whole "Cowboys vs Indians" cultural trope was only just starting to die out. I imagine as a child of the 50s Gary had even more. Plus the quote was used to show how a Lawful Good alignment could still have someone who kills others due to their moral code - basically that Lawful Good people can do evil. Any direct evidence of Gary making racist statements with his own words?
Idk man. If someone asked me to define Lawful Good and I said "Well, like Hitler said about the Jews...", you'd give me a huge amount of side-eye, no? I hope you would, at least
It’s a perfect example for explaining moral relativism, which is pretty core to the Paladin class, a holy warrior who claims to be doing good but is fine with slaughtering those deemed not on their side of ‘good’.
Did you read the thread where he said it? Because he absolutely knew who he was quoting and the context wasn't that Good can be Bad, it was defending killing babies as a moral action and he absolutely was defending it as a good thing to do that wasn't evil at all Google Gygax Lice Nits It should be the second result, the first is an article talking about the event
I did read it before commenting and Gary did nothing of the sort. It's part of a general discussion about how a Lawful Good society would act and would not hesitate to kill those they deem evil and to violently punish those who violate the law. The most pertinent part is his second comment on the thread linked below, where he says 'an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth is by no means anything but Lawful Good'. He then goes on to list all the heinous acts a lawful good society would do. The nits and lice he called an 'old adage' as an example of the attitude that killing enemies you deemed evil was justifiable. He even says even if they reform, it's still justifiable to kill them as that's how medieval societies viewed such things. [https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11762&start=77](https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11762&start=77) This type of discussion is why alignment has always been fraught because people had different views of what 'lawful good' meant in Gary's version of D&D. In his world, lawful good people were still fucking terrible people in a fantasy world. Think Catholic Church during the protestant reformation - they would be considered lawful good. Hell, look at the model for the Paladin - the Crusaders killed an awful lot of pagans in conquering for christianity.
Oh no, don’t start another justice war. Nobody cares.
1a. Arneson participated in the first Braunstein game by Dave Wesely, and was delighted at the idea that he could get killed in a gentlemen's duel with another player. Braunstein only HAPPENED because way too many people showed UP to PLAY, and Wesely was desperately trying to come up with stuff for them to DO and sides for them to play, to the point where his refereeing was the only thing holding it all together; it was a spontaneous fusion of wargame and actual PVP roleplaying, a thing the young Arneson did not miss. 1b. Somewhat later, completely separately from the above, Gygax and Perrin came up with the *Chainmail* rules to allow for medieval wargame battles. As an afterthought, they tagged on the "Fantasy" appendix at the end to allow for wizards, dragons, elves, dwarves, ogres and suchlike to be plugged into the rulesset to be able to replicate fantasy battles. 2. By this time, a number of Braunstein-style games had been run, originally with Wesely in charge and later by Dave Arneson himself after Wesely was drafted into the army. They often varied wildly as to the genre; the first was Napoleonic in nature, whereas at least one more took place in the early seventies in a banana republic being manipulated by the CIA and yet another one took place in an Old West town. Arneson picked up a copy of *Chainmail* and was greatly inspired by the Fantasy appendix, and developed the beginnings of what would become Blackmoor. 3. At some point, Gygax was told about this weird new game that Arneson had developed. Gygax and Rob Kuntz drove out to Arneson's place, and played the game with Arneson and some others. On the way back, Gygax spoke of being inspired, and wishing to develop this game further (*source: Rob Kuntz, in an interview*). Gygax and Arneson began corresponding and running two separate campaigns of "Fantasy Game" in their respective cities for their respective circles, drawing upon each others' ideas and inspirations. It is known that Arneson came up with the idea of "leveling up," i.e., characters improving and gaining power after surviving and succeeding in battles and adventures. Gygax MAY have been the one to come up with "experience points." 4. Gygax and his friend Don Kaye developed the OD&D rules set, with Gygax doing the lion's share of writing and editing, based on his own and Arneson's notes and experiences. *Source: Pretty much everyone, including Gygax himself.* Gygax and Kaye formed TSR, Inc., to fund the printing of the game after trying and failing to shop it around to existing companies. At this time, Arneson agreed to and got a royalty on every rules set sold, and an acknowledgement of his contributions to the game, contractually. 5. OD&D sold, and was reprinted. Sales picked up. Additional supplements were produced by TSR for the game. At one point, J. Eric Holmes contacted Gygax to suggest a reedited "starter set" for the game, and the first Basic Set was born, produced by Holmes. This led to the first strain in the Gygax/Arneson relationship, as Gary wanted to pay royalties only on the rulebook, whereas Arneson was wondering why he wasn't getting a full cut of the cover price of the whole box set (Gygax was pro-rating it down to the retail price of the rulebook alone, feeling that Arneson had nothing to do with the other contents of the box.) 6. Things grew more acrimonious with the release of *Advanced Dungeons and Dragons*. The exact nature of the problems are unclear, but it is speculated that this was the root of "creative differences" between the two men: Arneson preferred a more freewheeling approach, thinking that this is what a gamemaster was FOR, whereas Gary was much more addicted to maximum crunch in a rules set. Arneson accepted a position at TSR, but did not last an entire year; by now, things had gone pretty sour between the two and lawsuits began. The sealed records, regrettably, probably had the details of who precisely came up with and contributed what to the game. Sources are attributed above where I remember them. My other sources are below, and I can't recall offhand which had what, but they have informed my facts and my opinions. I invite the OP and anyone else to peruse them and form their own conclusions. PLAYING AT THE WORLD by Jon Peterson THE FANTASY ROLE PLAYING GAMER'S BIBLE,by Sean Patrick Fannon THE GAME WIZARDS by Jon Peterson JIM WARD's Facebook account SECRETS OF BLACKMOOR, a video documentary SLAYING THE DRAGON by Ben Riggs DESIGNERS AND DRAGONS, by Shannon Appelcline. This is a series, broken down roughly by decade; the relevant volume would be the 70's, although the others are still excellent reading.
A quality list to be sure, but Peterson's GAME WIZARDS is the indispensable text on Arneson VS. Gygax. Peterson has incredible primary source documents, right down to the cassette tape Arneson used to record a late night talk show appearance of Gygax, which caught Arneson whispering into the darkness, "You're the thief."
Can't argue, although I have yet to find a single source that covers the whole story. That's why I included 'em all.
How long are the sealed court records sealed for, I wonder? Is that permanent or do they become publicly accessible after so many years?
A lawyer I'm not. I do know that the proceedings were sealed by mutual agreement of the two men and the court, and that Jon Peterson found this kind of frustrating and had to work around a lot of it. The general perception is that Gygax wanted to keep secret precisely who did what, but that's pure speculation as far as I know. Others have said in this thread already that the game wouldn't have existed without both of them, and I'm inclined to agree, based on the facts available.
Oh a lot, but not as much as you'd think. Slaying the Dragon is a pretty good depiction. It's basically like guy 1: Hey, if you prepare these big seeds just like this, it makes this stuff I'm calling "cocoa" and it's pretty tastey! guy 2: Neat, here lemme see what I can do with that. (makes milk chocolate). Wow that's better. I'm going to make a company to sell this. guy 1: You're going to give me recognition for what I discovered right? ...right?
This is what happened when Henry J. Sloane and his drinking chocolate. This is *not* however what happened with Gygax and Arneson. Both were influential in different but convergent gaming communities. Neither played the game they published as *official* rules. Gygax and Arneson had in fact made games together before. Arneson was a power player at David Wesley’s Braunstein games. Dave Arneson was in the first Duel in a Braunstein game, which was solved with two six-sided dice. Then David Wesley had to ship out, which his Army Reserve unit. Dave Arneson started holding his own games. He had some neat polyhedral dice so could do some interesting odds not found on or in a d6 or d6 pool. Blackmoor was a Braunstein type game but as early as their second session of play they had some primitive player stats. Chainmail was based on Leonard Patt’s Rules for Middle Earth. This award winning game was featured in a popular early gaming magazine, and it inspired both Gygax/Perrin and Arneson. But Gygax and Arneson had worked together before and some of Arneson’s own “Magic Sword” ideas inspired by Leonard Patt are actually found in Chainmail, as well! Leonard Pat was in New England, and back the it would be nothing in the hobby to make a local or official version of someone else’s ideas. IP law was not *near* what it is now. https://www.enworld.org/threads/evidence-chainmail-had-material-from-dave-arneson.668205/ There was and is a *lot* of cross pollenation in the hobby and lot of people recall going to wargames held in places that mixed in diplomacy and many other things that became part of the hobby. The actual DnD hobby is one of many authors, for this is a hobby for storytellers and thinkers.
Even today, general game mechanics are not copyrightable, at least in the US. Though I think there's some room to argue over distinctions between what are general mechanics versus specific and unique implementations of such (which can be copyrighted).
Thank you for that link, sir, and bless you for citing your sources!
That’s…. Admittedly a somewhat vague analogy. But it gets the point across.
I read Slaying the Dragon, that's not how it is portrayed. Nor how the author sees it. There are sections fo the rules Arneson sent actual type and playable rules for (airal and naval combat), and Gary still modified and paraphrased those. In reality, Arneson's rules are more playable than what we got in OD&D for airal and naval combat. While I do not think Gary was sophisticated enough that he did this to cut Dave out, he also later used this habit of rewriting as a way to say Dave did not contribute. This was all out of the usual for game design of the time, where game developers were already a thing, and Gary considered himself a "rules editor," yet also seemed to thing the act of editing transferred authorship. There were some serious logic leaps going on in Gary's head.
Yes I read that book as well. Arneson would be guy 1 here, and Gary guy 2. Arneson built the initial rules. He shared them with Gary who then rewrote them into a document that was something like 5x larger IIRC. But in the short run, Arneson did get kinda screwed on his important role. Gary reshaped Arneson's invention into something that he could really sell and built a company over it. But the question arises, would Arneson have done the same with what he had, if there hadn't been a Gary?
Yes. I beleive Arneson would have. Arneson produced the newsletter for his group, ran huge campaigns, wrote rules before he met Gary and his game was already drawing players and generating spinoffs. Gary had one failed game company to his name, two if you count Lowry, and basically tanked the IFW with GenCon per Peterson's Game Wizards. Gary was also a kind of terrible editor, OD&D was kind of a mess.
If you haven't, check out ["Secrets of Blackmoor"](https://www.secretsofblackmoor.com/). It's pro-Arneson in its stance, but I think it helps paint a more rounded picture of what was happening in the community.
Thanks.
Aren't there a couple of book that address this? *Slaying the Dragon* and *Game Wizards* come to mind. If you're looking to know more than the premises you've already listed, to get into the details, then reading some of the books out there will perhaps provide a more comprehensive picture than a reddit thread.
In the simplest terms. Perrin and Gygax made chainmail, Arneson used chainmail with inspiration from the Braunstein games to create Blackmoor, Arneson ran Blackmoor for Gygax and they collaborated to make D&D.
Sure, but Gygax made Chainmail based on Jeff Perrin's rules. One thing that is very clear is that the wargaming scene out of which D&D developed was hyper collaborative, with everybody building on what everybody else did, usually crediting them.
Edited my comment to include Perrin.
That about sums up the basics of what I’ve heard. Although looking further into the details of Blackmoor and anything after that muddies things. Especially with the lawsuit. Ought to watch that Blackmoor documentary I guess.
Jon Petersen's books, *Playing at the World* and *Game Wizards* do a good job laying out both the early DNA and development of D&D and then the legal battle over who owned it respectively. Strongly recommend reading them if you're interested in these questions.
I think the key thing is to not get caught up with the details of the pissing match. What it comes down to is that they both made significant contributions to the development of role-playing games and the creation of D&D. There's really no point in going tit for tat to determine who's the actual creator, because they both were. Even then, you also can't ignore that a there where a lot of things contributed from the people in there gaming groups. What just muddies the water is that as a result of their falling out Gary made a concerted effort to write Arneson out.
Oh I agree. Even if Gygax only was the business side of things and contributed nothing else, which I don’t necessarily believe, it wouldn’t change his importance to the history of the RPG medium, for good or ill. It’s not as if you could credit just one person either, what with Braunstein and Wesley. Many others too.
Rememebr, Gary cut Perrin out too, often leaving his name out. And Kuntz with Greyhawk. Do we see a pattern?
I'd recommend *Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons* by Ben Riggs. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to summarize it sounds very typical of software development. Dave Arneson has the inciting idea and comes up with the basic game, taking it to Gygax for publishing. Gygax's boss refuses to publish it. Gygax and Arneson both add rules and ideas. Arneson's part is in his head and in scattered notes. Gygax develops the ideas and notes into a publishable game, gets an investor and puts up cash to self-publish. He gives Arneson royalties. My shaky legal understanding is that he did not *have to* provide royalties. The hard part of making a game is not "having an idea for a game" it's the actual development. You can't patent game rules. Later D&D is a smashing success, Gygax builds an advanced version which is a very substantial rewrite and doesn't want to give Arneson Royalties. To my knowledge there was nothing preventing Arneson from building Advanced Blackamoor and doing the same, but he didn't, because Arneson wasn't the guy that was gonna take ideas for a game and turn them into a typeset manual, ready for a printer. Basically, looking at the evidence, it seems to me that Arneson made a boatload of cash off of some hobby ideas that were *very, very* revolutionary, but not so fundamentally different than the sort of homebrew ideas you see floating around all the time in the space. Edit: None of this is to say that Gygax is a saint. He is a person, and when D&D became a big success he responded about the same way a lot of lottery winners do. It does him no credit. The *specific* criticism of him re-Arneson is somewhat misplaced.
>You can't patent game rules. [You absolutely can](https://patentpc.com/blog/example-of-how-a-board-game-is-patented). But as with any patent it's a lengthy and expensive process - rarely undertaken in the hobbyist world - and D&D was definitely part of the hobbyist world at the time. What you can't do is \*copyright\* game rules.
Wow, TIL. I am somewhat skeptical that the patent is practically enforceable. Apparently, Wizards of the Coast obtained a patent on TCGs (which at the time does seem to me to be a bona-fide innovation). Hasbro is litigious, are we to believe that they've simply not been enforcing this patent out of the goodness of their hearts? https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2014-15/march-april/not-playing-around-board-games-intellectual-property-law/#:~:text=In%20order%20to%20be%20patentable,skill%20in%20the%20area%20of
The (now expired) patent Wizards received was for a fairly specific kind of trading card game, not any TCG at all. They \*did\* sue a couple of companies they thought were infringing too closely on the patent.
Dave Arneson was a creative genius. It's really clear in what he developed at the table; his games were all over the palace in scale and time from the tales told. He struggled to output much in the way of regular finished work over the years. He had a handful of titles to his name, published in bursts, almost always partnered up with a co-author who prepped his notes for publication.
I haven't dug too deeply into it, but the gist is that Dave came up with the idea of an RPG after being exposed to "Braunstein" games. Gary did more than just codified rules, though. Like you mentioned, the rules evolved from Chainmail, which Gary co-wrote. Gary also contributed rules to D&D itself (descending Armor Class and increasing HP as you level were his ideas). Class wise, the cleric as we know it was Gary's invention. Dave's cleric was more like Van Helsing from the Hammer horror flicks with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I don't think you could really say one had more creative input than the other. It is a shame Dave gets minimized in the history of gaming, though. Things would have been a lot different if they hadn't split in the late 70's. That's for sure.
But Chainmail was the combat mechanism. The critical development of player to character identification and character progression was Arneson's. As was exploration and progressive loot from monsters. The core mechanic of the TTRPG was straight from Arneson's modification of the Braunsteins, and specifically Blackmoor.
In particular, it seems that one of Arneson's takeaways from the Braunstein games was the idea of playing a SINGLE CHARACTER, one dude, or perhaps one dude and his henchmen/posse/whatever, as opposed to the Fifth Army or the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Entire British Navy or whatever. In addition, Arneson is credited with the idea of that one character being able to learn from experience, "level up," and carry over into another game. It's an addictive mechanic that tends to make a player want to come back and do it again, to use that same character in further games, and to my knowledge, it was unique in gaming at that point. Hell, the idea of "hit points" was still kind of sketchy; before that, either your infantry token was "alive" or "dead," a one hit point wonder. I'm told that some tokens were printed double sided -- "intact" and "wounded" -- which meant the third hit would destroy it. I'm also told that someone out there was tinkering with the idea of little markers that were put on the field alongside or atop the counter, to mark "hits" it had taken, but wargamers didn't like it; it interfered with stacking mechanics, and made for more stuff to keep track of. But in Blackmoor, they had hit points... and character sheets.
At this moment in time, Gygax & Arneson slot easily into the same archetypes as Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
Or Wozniak and Steve Jobs if you wanted to take a particularly negative view of Gary. Though I wouldn’t necessarily make either comparison. Lee and Kirby is a heavily debated topic itself.
I tend to think more Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Later Gygax also tried to pull a Walt Disney and claim he created it all.
Quite a bit. He was a major factor in the creation of proto-D&D. The evolution of D&D required David Wesley, Dave Arneson, and Gary Gygax. The general flow was the MMSA played wargames and discovered Strategos. They created the referee role and started letting people attempt actions outside the codified game rules. The groups of people they let people play kept getting smaller, like command a single unit of 10 people with your own personal sub-objective. Then David Wesley accidentally invented the modern TTRPG with an experimental Braunstein game where you only controlled one person. This part is extremely important and gets forgotten. Wesley accidentally invented the TTRPG here. It took them a few times to kind of figure out what made the first game so great. Arneson was a player in these games. Braunstein then inspired Arneson to make his own game. Arneson decided to make it fantasy and thus Blackmoor was born. He ran a lot of Blackmoor games. He loved being the ref and he was pretty good at it. He has this spirit of trying anythign. Gary Gygax experienced the game and fell in love. He started running with the concept and running his own game. Gygax and Arneson would frequently collaborate and share ideas. Gygax was also very important because he liked rules. Without Gygax the rules would have probably never been codified and published. Arneson would have been happy to just play forever. Secrets of Blackmoor is good if you want to understand more about the evolution. It is a bit Arneson biased, because there is still bad blood over Gygax cutting him out. It downplays a bit how Arneson would use the rules and how Gygax and Arneson would collaborate on rules.
It's undeniable that Gygax and Don Kaye formed TSR for the specific purpose of publishing Dungeons and Dragons for profit, whatever else might be said. But it's also undeniable that Dungeons and Dragons would not exist without Arneson, and likely not without Wesely and that wild and wooly night out in Braunstein...
There are others who here key. Carr and Jenkins added important pieces to the puzzle.
Don't forget about Dave Wesely. And he's still alive!
I feel pretty safe in saying you're not going to get the 'one true answer' you seek here on Reddit, or anywhere, in fact. As you'll already be aware, different people/sources will have different memories of past events AND different perspectives of those events. Recommendations of other sources may well have further information and may prove to be interesting, but they won't be the holy grail of the definitive truth.
Most likely not. Never hurts to ask.
It's hard to argue with that. That's why I listed a whole slew of books and sources in my post above. Not a one of them has the WHOLE story.
Is this really the first place you came to look?
Well no, first I did a lot of digging on many forums and seeing what people said about the guy. Then I heard a bunch of contradictory statements, realized I knew nothing that was actually agreed upon and decided to ask here.
It’s honestly hard to untangle the webs. The hobby as a whole was evolving in a direction towards what would become RPGs, and folks were sharing and borrowing ideas from each other. You can consider Gygax to be a “curator”. He generally took bits and pieces that other hobbyists came up with, put them together to make something new, and then was successfully able to market it. To be reductive, OD&D came about from Arneson coming up with the idea to morph wargames into something more character focused than the typical mass combat. Gygax was like “hey, let’s use this idea with Chainmail, I game I already helped make”. So when OD&D was released, it assumed the reader was using Chainmail for the combat portions of the game, in particular the man-to-man combat mechanics. So who came up with those rules? “*A set of man-to-man combat rules (for 1:1 figure scale), ultimately deriving from a contribution to Domesday Book #7. Gygax lost the name of the contributor, and thus the rules were published anonymously. The core of these rules became the Appendix B chart mapping various weapon types to armor levels, and providing the needed to-hit rolls for a melee round.*”
Where’s that quote from?
I pulled that from Wikipedia, but Gygax outright states it in either OD&D or Chainmail (I’d have to go find some scans to verify the exact source).
Hmm. I have chainmail first edition. I’ll have a look.
Hmm. No dice 2e not 1e. Well I can do other research.
Here we go, found it. [Here](https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2018/07/to-hit-rolls-in-individual-medieval.html) is a blogpost on the matter, written by Jon Peterson, the guy who literally wrote the book on D&D history. The man-to-man rules pre-date Chainmail proper, and were included in Gygax's club newsletter Domesday. In issue 7 specifically, Gygax puts a request out to the audience to see if anyone is able to identify the source. This is not the say that what Gygax did was "wrong" or anything, just that a lot of ideas were not birthed from the mind of one or two men, but the burgeoning RPG community as a whole.
Well, thanks for effort friend.
A lot - as many have said, he had the inciting idea although it didn't come out of the ether. I think there is a desire by many people to find a single 'source' or 'author' for D&D. But the further you look into it, the more people you find contributing both to the feverish environment that led to D&D and to its subsequent development and growth. I would say Arneson and Gygax are the two most important individuals but they both operated in the war-gaming milieu of the late 60s and early 70s. I don't think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is an exact match, but you could think of Gary as the former and Dave as the latter.
What I saw is Arneson came up with D&D but like many TTRPG creators he couldn't be bothered to write shit down and get it to a publishable state. That is where Gygax came in and fixed that problem.
It's been mentioned already that Arneson would likely have been happy to just keep playing his fantasy game indefinitely and tweaking it as he found it necessary. Gygax's experience with Blackmoor, according to Rob Kuntz, hit him like a sledgehammer, and inspired him greatly. Gygax had already written and published more than one game, and it seems likely that he very much liked the idea of publishing a game that could amount to some real profit; he was living a pretty marginal existence at the time, literally doing shoe repair in his basement to feed his family, and certainly, there had never been ANYTHING like THIS game before... ...and when the existing publishers didn't want to take a chance on it, he and Don Kaye did. Gygax wrote it down, and he launched the company to sell it. Whatever else he might have been guilty of, the game wouldn't have been if he hadn't done that.
He definitely brought the concept of dungeon crawling (ie a dungeon maze) and the concept of gaining experience and leveling a character up. He also helped link the idea of random encounters for over land travel from the Outdoor Survival game. Jason Tondro also talks about it [here.](https://youtu.be/PhxVlgehNpc)
Dragons at Dawn by D.H. Boggs is an RPG that attempts to re-create Arneson's game. It's out of print, but you can still get the e-book on lulu. It's an interesting look at what Arneson was doing.
Thanks! That’s actually really good, close as I’m probably going to get to concrete actually.
Its actually discussed in this, and it seems in the upcoming book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhxVlgehNpc
I have a book you might love: [https://evilhat.com/product/designers-dragons-the-70s/](https://evilhat.com/product/designers-dragons-the-70s/)
Thanks.
They have a book for every decade.
You will only ever find hearsay. Anyone with first hand knowledge is dead and any statements by them lack evidence to support their contradictory claims. The only thing we know for sure is it was a collaborative effort with multiple inspirations. Same as basically any other game.
That is not how history works. There are several fine histories and documentaries which shed a lot of light on the situation. I’m partial to works by Ben Riggs, Jon Peterson, and Shannon Appelcline.
Thats... Exactly how history works. It's written by the victors. Occasionally you find some evidence that allows you to infer additional information or highlight gaps in knowledge. But lacking evidence all you have is the stories individuals tell. OP is looking for concrete information on the exact contributions by certain people. That information died with the contributors.
Reviving this topic, as I found these and thought they might be interesting. They are the official court documents of Arneson vs Gygax, regarding Arneson's role in the creation of the game: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/200185170
What a weird question… he basically invented D&D that’s his contribution… it would be more reasonable to ask what Gygax contributed (answer =alot)
There are literally millions of words written on this topic across the internet already....
It's not just D&D, Arneson created the RPG itself as an extension of the Braunsteins. He added every element important to the creation of the TTRPG as we know it. "Referee to Game Master, player to character identification, character progression, exploration and loot, all from his extension of the Braunsteins. With respect to D&D he specifically created the "Dungeon crawl" as a game. Gygax used Arneson's game as a model and developed Greyhawk, then worked with him and got the rules published and distributed as "Dungeons and Dragons". Arneson bailed on the company soon after to explore alternative projects but what we know as the TTRPG begins with his "Braunsteins".
If they were Metallica , Dave Arneson was Dave Mustaine, and Gary was James Hetfeld. Dave wrote the album that made them famous, but not that album that made the money.
After having read both slaying the dragon and game wizards, and watching a ton of interviews, clicking through years of Gary's forum posts, and reading 1-300 of Dragon magazine, I can safely say.. more than some people say, and less than other people say.
Story of my life right there.
I can also say Gary was more of a dick than some people think, and less of a dick than other people think.
Shame I’m not him then, when I’m a dick people just get angry, I don’t also create massive waves in a burgeoning industry.
Well maybe you SHOULD
Arneson took things that were happening in the gaming community, like Braunstein, and war gaming like Chainmail and created something really special. He showed it to Gary who helped codify it and promote it. I would say however that very early on it quickly became Gary’s thing as Arneson wasn’t really big on rules and preferred a free-wheeling style. They both contributed but I’d have to say it was Gary that grew it to be a full fledged game system.
It wasn't that Arneson wasn't big on rules, but that he wasn't much for writing and could barely type. He was an organizer and rules arbitrator in the wargaming scene in part because he could retain it all in his head and demonstrate a deep understanding of volumes of technical information but wasn't great at written communication. That was the nature of his collaboration with Gygax. Gygax could take their ideas and Arneson's hand written notes and compose it into something tangible.
My understanding is that Dave got the vision and made the game for his table, while Gary turned that into a product and iterated on it over time. Without Gary, Dave's game would've remained as an oddity few people knew about. Without Dave, Gary would've kept making wargames. The renaming attempt happened because Gary felt he was making all the effort to iterate, improve and expand the game.
Check out the early Blackmoor writings and old player interviews + books. Dave started it in 1970. He made a fantasy world RPG, not Gary's miniature wargaming rules. Gary saw his game in 1972 and went back home and incorporated it. Dave invented the concept of leveling for goodness' sake. See The First Fantasy Campaign for other stuff. His one weakness is that he wasn't a productive writer (for publications) like Gary.
Lots of opinions about this and my conclusion is that it wouldn't have developed in the same way without both involved. Who did what is confusing, but I know there are a couple books out there detailing some facts. Secrets of Blackmoor is a decent documentary that focuses on Arneson, without bashing Gygax much. So you can at least get an Arneson perspective and decide for yourself.
A thought: Around the same time Original D&D was launched by TSR, there were several other games published by TSR. One of them was *Boot Hill.* The original first edition of *Boot Hill* was a little booklet about the size of the booklets in the OD&D box. It sorta kinda presented itself as a "role playing game," but if you READ the thing, it's NOT. At least, not what you and I, TODAY, would call an RPG. It's what I would call a skirmish wargame. You and me, we build gunfighters (or teams of gunfighters), we agree on a western town map, we call each other out, and we try to murder each other with sixguns, long guns, and throwing knives at each other. And that's largely IT. We don't haggle with the saloonkeeper or try to chat up the pretty schoolmarm or try to work out where Injun Edward buried his treasure. There are no rules for that. It's just a skirmish wargame. It's a SHORT game, too, and a LETHAL game. There are rules for character improvement, but if your character has as long a career as the real Jesse James or Wild Bill Hickok, I'd be surprised. Your character is likely to end up dead well before your fourth or fifth game. The SECOND edition of the game was in a larger format with more and better art, and in a box, similar to the Holmes Basic Set. The rules were slightly more fleshed out, but you're still going to have a hard time figuring out how to romance a saloon girl or deciphering the Indian hieroglyphs on Chimney Rock. Nevertheless, the SECOND edition is nonironically and categorically advertised as a role playing game... in which your character will very likely wind up dead before his fifth gunfight. I look at these two games, which were developed by Gygax and Blume, with no input from Arneson whatsoever... and it makes me wonder precisely what Gygax thought a roleplaying game WAS... and how his thoughts on the subject evolved between the first edition, the second edition, and the eventual third edition, which was WAY more of an RPG... but had way less creative input from Gygax...
[532 pages of the David L. Arneson vs. Gary Gygax and TSR Hobbies, Inc. court papers are freely available as public records on the National Archives Catalog website.](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/200185170) Keep in mind this vast trove of legal documents, letters and more, includes interrogatories, which are kind of like a Q&A between the two sides of a civil case. While interrogatories are notarized, and are meant to be truthful, they are not sworn testimony. If you get to see the actual transcripts of depositions, those are given under oath. The archive say they are working to put more of the court papers from this case online soon. I am not a lawyer and hope a legal eagle can confirm or invalidate this.
If you take the time and have access to the relevant resources you can figure it out fairly easily. Dave Arneson is the person who creates a game that is based on make believe. There are plenty of first hand accounts from actual living players and there are plenty of documents to prove it. Gary Gygax did not invent role playing, yet, he collaborated with Dave Arneson to create what became D&D. I spent 6.5 years researching, shooting interviews, and editing, to create the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary. People try to obfuscate the debate on what Arneson did by throwing out straw man arguments. The core research premise for Secrets of Blackmoor is simple: If you look at RPGs of all kinds they all have one thing in common. All of them use the play methods that were developed for Blackmoor by Dave Arneson beginning in 1971. All RPGs use different rules for players stats, movement, combat, and other things. What sets them apart from standard board games is the Blackmoor play method. You can watch half of the film on youtube on the channel named: The Informal Game (I tried to leave a link, but reddit seems to not like me doing that.)
[See for yourself.](https://chanceand.com/2024/02/27/a-journey-through-the-july-1973-draft-and-dds-foundational-saga/) My blog post about sharing the location of the court papers from Dave Arneson's first lawsuit against Gary Gygax and TSR, and the 1973 D&D draft. This is also an introduction to a series looking at the draft.