RIP Dave Arneson, 1947-2009
Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died.
From Ed Grabianowski's post on Robot Viking:
It’s tempting to say that Arneson brought the “fluff” to D&D, while Gygax was the “crunch,” but that’s really too simplistic. It is safe to say that Arneson’s ideas on storytelling, experience levels and rules flexibility shaped virtually every aspect of the RPG as an industry and an art form. Yet he never achieved the widespread fame that Gygax did, perhaps because his personality wasn’t the kind that drew attention. By most accounts, he was easy-going, good-humored and never took himself too seriously. I’ve always thought of him as the George Harrison of D&D.
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Wow, first Gygax and now Arneson in such a short period of time. OOTS as usual has summarized things well:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0644.html
If you want a more informative, dare I say--accurate portrayal of Dave and his influence on the game head over to grognardia.blogspot.com.
If anything Gary added the 'fluff' with his wonderfully inimitable prose. But Dave was THE man who took old war games and made them player-focused. It was his ideas that led to the development of the dungeon crawl. Without Gygax, we may never heard of D&D, but with out Arneson, we might never have gotten to level 1 in the first place.
The first time I met Dave I thought he was gruff--almost to the point of being rude. In fact, he was joking around. His wit was so wry and sharp that it was disarming. He had a great many things to say about Gygax, who I think he saw as the 'successful older brother type' who needed to be taken down a notch.
But as candid as he was about Gygax and the early D&D days he was also generous and respectful. He will be missed.
He will indeed. I met him once many years ago, and I agree he was a nice guy.
Man.. that's a shame. I took his "Rules of the Game" class at Full Sail University. He was a good guy, and he definitely influenced my approach to all user interfaces and programming, not just gaming. I still have a 20-sided die he gave me.
Yet another "met him once; nice guy" comment. He and his wife visited a local game store (circa 1980?) to demonstrate his new game. At the time he was shut up and shut out by TSR. At the time Gygax was seen as a bit of a megalomaniac.
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The first edition of D&D -- the "white box" printing and the even earlier "brown box" and possibly a green box I've heard of but never seen -- had what amounted to two combat systems.
One was Gygax's, based on the Chainmail miniatures rules. Under this scheme, your character was essentially a slightly more complex miniatures game figure. Prowess of a monster or character was computed in the equivalent number of ordinary fighting men. So you'd run into odd wording like (paraphrasing) "Trolls fight as eight men."
Arneson's contribution was the ancestor of the d20 based combat system of modern D&D, with armor classes (the lower the better, ugh) versus character levels or "dice" for monsters. Later supplements elaborated this greatly; originally all weapons did a standard 1d6 of damage.
Wow, he wasn't even that old; only 62.
RIP and thanks for all the nights of unabashedly nerdy D&D fun.