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Dave Arneson

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David L. Arneson is an American game designer born in 1955. In the early 1970s he 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.

Contents

Biography

The Beginning

Dave Arneson is from Minnesota Originally, went to college at the University of Minnesota. He started the whole "RPG thing" at Coffman Union.

Role-Playing vs Wargaming

Role playing is the act of being in character of another person or role. This can take on many aspects of personality, thought processes, and motives. You have to understand the background, history, and what has changed the personality of the person your portraying. What moved them or changed their direction in life and where they are resentful or happy helps bring out the role.

Power and armies are not what RolePlaying is about. It is more of holding back on what YOU would do and do what THEY would do. Not everyone is into power or conquest, after all we don't all act logically and gravitate to grabbing power.

Wargaming added to What was RPG

Role-playing needed rules to keep things fair and end arguments. Anytime you work with points of view unlike your own or anothers, you need agreed upon guidlines.

Arneson's role-playing game design work grew more 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. He was real fond of naval war 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 the Midwest Military Simulation Association, 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 (still primarily a wargaming only convention). 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.

The Ideas of wargaming helped define the rules to apply to the acting gaming called Role-playing. Role playing is more one on one then Wargaming could allow. And it was what the group wanted.

Blackmoor

Originally Dave played his own mix of rules, starting on rock/paper/scissors, then taking a adaptation of naval combat rules. Thus why the AC Class was better the smaller it was. This was orignially done at Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota.

He later dabbled with the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren, and found them majorly lacking when he came across them. Arneson wrote his own rules in his own play, Applying his own to his Role-Playing game scenarios and brought in his own rules one most what he saw from the naval game and dropped all of Chainmail. But Chainmail was on a similar Track to what Dave had in mind, combining Fantasy Elements with real world rules.

But he thought Gygax would be interested in Role-Playing as he was already a game maker with similar interest and help start the game Blackmoor (orginal name). Gary was more into alternative Wargaming but saw this was a great idea. And for one full weekend after Dave had been doing it for years, he played.

They then worked together on the game. (By the way Gary never gave his copy of the rule Dave wrote back.) They were in the basement often attacking Dragons, thus Gary's wife is said to have come up with the Dungeon of course. 'Blackmoor' name was dropped for a more interesting and maybe more encompasing name.

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.

Arneson demonstrated Blackmoor to the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association where Gygax was inspired to rename the 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.

But it was resolved that they are 'co-creators'. More on the origins will come out with Dragons in the Basement movie. Royalties are to be paid and other agreements.

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.

DA2 - Temple of the Frog, the 2nd in the DA series of Blackmoor adventures
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DA2 - Temple of the Frog, the 2nd in the DA series of Blackmoor adventures

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.

In 1986, Arneson wrote a new D&D module set in Blackmoor called "The Garbage Pits of Despair", which was published in two parts in Different Worlds magazine issues #42 and #43.

Arneson stepped into the computer industry. He founded 4D Interactive Systems, Inc., a computer company in Minnesota that is still in business today. He also did some programming and worked on several games. He eventually found himself consulting with computer companies.

Living in California in the late 1980s, he had a chance to work with special education children. Upon returning to Minnesota, he pursued teaching and began speaking at schools about educational uses of role-playing. In the 1990s, he began working at Full Sail, a private university that teaches multimedia subjects, and continues there as a professor of computer game design.

During lectures at Full Sail, he considers himself an Avatar, as well as giving lengthy lectures. He also refused to believe that World of Warcraft has had more than a million subscribers. Overall, he is a good teacher.

Around 2000, Arneson was working with videographer John Kentner on Dragons in the Basement, a video documentary on the early history of role-playing games, but little is known what has become of that production. He also made a cameo appearance in the Dungeons & Dragons movie as one of many mages throwing fireballs at a dragon. Unfortunately the scene was deleted from the Movie.

Arneson suffered a stroke in early 2002. He has recovered and continues his work.

Present

Arneson and Dustin Clingman founded Zeitgeist Games to produce an updated, d20 System version of the Blackmoor setting. Goodman Games published and distributed this new Blackmoor in 2004.

Now in his 50s, Arneson continues to play games, including D&D, military miniatures, and an annual meeting to play the original Blackmoor in Minnesota. He has received numerous industry awards for his part in creating Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games. He also teaches at Full Sail lending his experience to the class "Rules of the Game", in which students learn how to accurately document and create balanced rules sets.

External links

Interviews

 

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