Dave Arneson 1947-2009

Dave Arneson

Today is the 70th anniversary of Dave Arneson's birth. In the genesis of D&D and the RPG hobby and genre, Dave played Jack Kirby to Gary Gygax's Stan Lee. The analogy is not perfect but it's how I always think of them.  Dave Arneson invented what it means to be a RPG player, back in Dave Wesley's Braunstein games.  He invented what it means to be a Dungeon Master when he ran his First Fantasy Campaign in the Twin Cities. And he scribbled down the first jots and tittles of D&D, including the first dungeon, during that time too, in 1970 or '71.

Dave and Gary

When Gary in Lake Geneva heard about the games Dave was running, Gary urged Dave to publish his rules. (A lot of wargames were published in fanzines and shared on mailing lists of hundreds or even thousands of players in what was then a very narrow hobby.) Gary playtested and added his changes, expanding the rules into a more coherent whole.* Then he collected the notes that Dave wrote as he went along judging the FFC and wrote them all up into the three little brown booklets we know today as OD&D, the Original Game.

Dave's genius would have likely been a local phenomenon, enjoyed in Minneapolis but unknown elsewhere, if Gary hadn't made a big deal out of the rule set and published it. So it took the both of them to come upon and then popularize the first game in a lineage that spans everything from Toon to Dark Souls II on the latest generation of home game consoles.

If you have ever played the lineage of D&D sometimes called Basic - that is, the B/X, BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia tradition (the ones where Elf is a class and Clerics don't get a spell til level 2), then you have played the "Arneson" version. For legal reasons, D&D was split into "Basic" and "Advanced" - Dave's version became Basic and Gary's became Advanced. I think a lot of us have played it and liked it. I didn't know it when I started writing my version of D called Mythical Journeys, but it follows Dave's lineage more closely. I guess I owe him an even greater debt of gratitude.

I spent today at the Renaissance Fair, and I just know the angel over my shoulder shining bright all day was Dave.  Thank you Dave.  Thank you.

*OD&D needs two other games to make a whole game - it was a supplement to CHAINMAIL by Gygax and Jeff Perrin, and required the board to Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival.