Games - Dave Arneson

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	Games - Dave Arneson

David L. Arneson is an American game designer who co-created the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game with Gary Gygax. He has kept a relatively low profile and has been called an "unsung legend" in the early development of role-playing games.

Biography

Wargaming roots

Arneson's role-playing game design work evolved from his interest in wargames. His parents bought him the Gettysburg game by Avalon Hill in the early 1960s and he soon taught his friends how to play. He and his gaming group began to design their own games. Exposure to role-playing as a tool also influenced his later designs. In college history classes, he role-played historical events and preferred deviating from the recorded history in a manner similar to "what if" scenarios recreated in wargames.

In the late 1960s, Arneson began playing with military miniatures with a gamer group in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. It was with these players that he first developed the inklings of modern role-playing games. When they played they would set non-combat objectives for each player, a step away from wargaming towards the more individual play and varied challenges of later RPGs.

Arneson attended the Gen Con gaming convention for the first time in 1970, which was only its second annual meeting. It was at this Gen Con that he met Gary Gygax who had founded the Castle & Crusade Society in the International Federation of Wargamers in 1960s at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, not far from Arneson's home in Minnesota. They also shared an interest in sailing ship games that would bear fruit when they collaborated on the book Don't Give Up The Ship!, published in 1971 by Guidon Games.

Blackmoor

Arneson's gaming group began playing medieval battles and tried Chainmail
, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren. Arneson changed the rules in his own play, focusing on small-scale scenarios and the fantasy aspects. These changes reduced the number of creatures in battles from thousands to just 20 or 30, while the fantastical setting enabled them to create any story, rather than be leashed to historical accuracy.

The game that evolved was Blackmoor. Arneson tracked the myriad of rules notes in binders to maintain consistency. The gameplay would now be recognizable to players of Dungeons & Dragons, featuring the use of hit points and armor class, character development (levels and experience points), and dungeon crawls. The setting was also fleshed out over time. In the early 1970s, Arneson's gaming group in Minnesota began the Blackmoor campaign and has continued to play to the present, making it the longest continuously played RPG campaign.

The rules compiled by Arneson that worked off Chainmail provided the essential mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons. Arneson demonstrated Blackmoor to the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association where Gygax was inspired to create a brand new game — Dungeons & Dragons. After phone and mail design collaboration, Gygax and Arneson wanted to publish the game, but Arneson could not afford to invest in the venture. Don Kaye provided funding to publish D&D in 1974, which became a sold out success. Blackmoor became one of the two major settings for the game.

In 1979, Arneson filed the first lawsuit (of five) against Gygax and TSR Hobbies (D&D's publisher) over crediting and royalties on later adapted versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Arneson left D&D/TSR and they resolved the suits out of court in 1981, but this did not end the lingering tensions between them. The court documents are confidential and he cannot talk about the issues involved.

After TSR

In the early 1980s Arneson established his own game company, Adventure Games, which produced the miniature games Johnny Reb and Harpoon. He wrote the Adventures in Fantasy RPG(with co-author Richard L. Snider), which can be seen as D&D as he envisioned it. Adventure Games published several games and made money, but Arneson handed it over to Flying Buffalo as the workload became unbearable.

Arneson briefly returned to Blackmoor and D&D in the mid 1980s when Gygax became president of TSR. This production yielded the "DA" (Dave Arneson) series of Blackmoor modules. When a new president took control of TSR, Arneson was removed from the company before the fifth module was published. Gygax and Arneson went their separate ways.

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