Dave Arneson Day

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robertsconley said:
Except the invention of the wheel took more than just making a round disk and attaching it. It was about the invention of the axle as well and getting that you need the wheel to be loose enough to sprin but not too loose. Which is why for some parts of the world the wheel wasn't invented, or not invented until much later.

  • Roleplaying itself is very intuitive.
  • Identifiying as an individual character and playing the game as if you were the character also make sense although would be considered unusual.
  • Playing a sophisticated game that emulated a specific genre, or situation is also intuitive.
  • Introducing fog of war by using a referee who has a god's eye view of the game's situation also makes sense.
  • Extending this to multiple players with multiple sides with multiple goals took some work and initiation which David Wesely deserves credit for, along Bath's with his hyperborian campaign.

So the next step was to do the last thing as a campaign. Which Bath did but not Wesely. From all accounts, Dave Arneson was the first to do this in the US but it quickly caught on with others leading to a gladiator game and Jenkin's Wild West game among others.

But we are still not at the point where any of these would be considered a tabletop roleplaying campaign that we play today. Why? Because all of these campaigns were beholden to the established scenario behind the campaign.

Think of it like a mid 80s group playing Battletech and pretend that RPGs didn't exist. So the group gets the bright idea to appoint a referee and instead of playing a bunch of individual scenarios they play out an entire campaign in one of the succession wars. That they would use the rudimentary pilot rules to track their mech pilots as individual characters. The campaign is launched and while we see some roleplaying and some play outside of the battles themselves. It is still focused on figure when and where to fight various battletech battles. And if a players found themselves more interested in playing a character who was a thief going around and stealing tech to sell to the highest bidder it wouldn't be part of the game.

Unless you had somebody like Dave Arneson who was willing to say yes. More importantly not only say yes but willing to put to work in to make the adventure that thief character had as interesting as the battletech battles themselves.

While we are real close but we are still not quite there yet. The transition happens when we get yet another player, who wants to go and explore the Succession War setting and not even bother with worrying about being involved in the battletech battles which is the main focus. Our BT version of Dave Arneson says yes and just as importantly also puts the work in to make this as interesting as the battletech campaign. Now this campaign has all the elements of a tabletop roleplaying game. The referee of these campaigns now allows their players to do anything their character can logically do within the setting without having to pay attention to some overarcing scenario or idea. Instead of the focus being on achieving the goal of the scenario which is to win this succession war campaign. We have players pursuing their individual character goals as the focus.

And hey, I get that this sounds like that with tournament dungeons, using published adventure, or organized play that I am saying that they are not roleplaying games. That is not what I am saying. Prior to Dave Arneson, everything was focused on the scenario however broad it may be. But when Dave allowed his players to ignore the scenario and actively supported what they were doing as the referee. The resulting rules he used became more expansive. They became a roleplaying game. And Gygax picked up on that when he made Dungeons & Dragons and it is just as expansive.

This also means that D&D and all the RPGs that came after didn't lose the ability to handle a specific scenario. That for various reasons like a lack of time for Prep, group interest, handling a lot of participants, using a scenario with a RPG may be the best option despite the reduction in scope to pre-Arneson campaigns.

One last bit of supporting evidence. Korns has several sections in his World War II skirmish rules that read like something that would be found in modern RPGs like GURPS World War II. A lot of folks use this section as evidence that Arneson didn't really invent the RPG. But when you read the entire chapter it is clear that it is there for two reasons. One that is very much about making a skirmish level World War II more realistic, and Two specifically by introducing fog of war in a way that the players has to consider the situation from the viewpoint of a ww2 infantrymen. That with the chapter and the book as a whole there is zero expectation that a group will decide to use the rules for anything other than a world war 2 skirmish. For example, playing out something like Kelly's Hero a ww2 heist.

Hope this makes sense.
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You've been beating this drum for a few years now, but what your argument overlooks is that the overwhelming majority of rpgs (like, probably 99%+) ARE tied to specifically defined genres and assumed activities and if the players deviate too far from that the other players (including the GM) will veto them and nudge/push them back into line. The idea that "players can do absolutely anything they want no matter the scenario parameters and the GM will accommodate it" as the defining characteristic of what makes an rpg is pretty nonsensical because almost no rpg actually allows that. Sure, the spectrum of allowed/supported actions is a lot broader in most rpgs than in traditional games, but I'm not convinced either that if players in some of what you're categorizing as non-rag precursors went off-script that it wouldn't be allowed (we know, in fact, that Arneson himself did so as a player in one of Wesley's early Braunstein games and that Wesley allowed it) or that if someone had gone way off-script in one of Gary's Greyhawk games that he wouldn't have shot it down. Arneson may well have been willing to accommodate any and every one of his players' whims at the expense of his planned scenario in a way that nobody had done before, but since very close to nobody followed his lead in that it feels invalid to single it out as the ultimate distinguishing characteristic of what makes something an rpg.

Dave Arneson has a perfectly legitimate and defensible claim as the co-inventor of the tabletop roleplaying game based on having co-written the first such commercial ruleset. That's established fact. Gygax and TSR in later years tried to minimize his contributions but the historical record has pretty well been set straight there - Dave came up with the concepts and worked with Gary to codify them into a publishable set of rules, even if he wasn't totally satisfied with the result and wasn't willing to do much to support or spread it (the first couple chapters of Peterson's Game Wizards book are full of letters from Gary to Dave urging him to do more to support and publicize D&D - to write articles and letters about it, work on supplemental material for it, invest in TSR to help fund it, etc. - and Dave demurred on all of it and seemingly only became really interested in D&D after he parted from TSR, when he developed a grudge against it and wanted to "beat" it and prove that his ideas were better than what Gygax/TSR published).

The problem is people want to go beyond that to elevate Dave into the true/sole inventor of the rpg game-form without sharing that credit with Gary (and usually going a step further to imply or state that Gary stole his share of that credit from Dave and is undeserving of it). But in order to do so they have to come up with other definitions of what "inventing rpgs" means beyond the obvious (i.e. writing the first commercially published set of rules). However, all of those attempted redefinitions ultimately fall short, either because it's demonstrable that other people were already doing those things prior to Blackmoor or because (as in this case) effectively nobody did them other than Dave. "Dave Arneson invented roleplaying games because he was the first person to say yes to everything his players suggested" is a nice-sounding story, but it's also meaningless because "the GM must always say yes to everything the players suggest" isn't a defining characteristic of role-playing games.
 
T. Foster said:
You've been beating this drum for a few years now, but what your argument overlooks is that the overwhelming majority of rpgs (like, probably 99%+) ARE tied to specifically defined genres and assumed activities and if the players deviate too far from that the other players (including the GM) will veto them and nudge/push them back into line. The idea that "players can do absolutely anything they want no matter the scenario parameters and the GM will accommodate it" as the defining characteristic of what makes an rpg is pretty nonsensical because almost no rpg actually allows that.
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It is remarkable when you hear about people's campaigns when they use systems like AD&D 1e. Just how diverse they are. Far more diverse than you hear what happens with wargaming rules even if they are used as a campaign. I don't see an RPG tied to a specific genre as particularly limited, especially in the case of AD&D which is a smorgasbord of fantasy tropes.

You are correct that a group, running a campaign in a setting, focused on doing specific things using a particular system will tend to nudge/push a player that gets off track. That is thing that happens over and over again for practical reasons. But what you are ignoring are the numerous times when the campaign has changed focus to doing something else because the players and referee mutually agree that the way to go forward. And AD&D manages to handle that shift without breaking or making a switch to a new system necessary.

AD&D 1e is not tied to a set of assumed activities. Dungeon crawls and wilderness exploration to get a lot of support, especially in the DM's Guide. But AD&D 1e is not just a game about dungeons and wilderness. If been following me "beating this drum" then you are also well aware of how I ran AD&D 1e 'as is' back in the day. And how I focused on letting players trash my setting and how to make that interesting.

So I submit that RPGs are that flexible. In fact, the game format is so flexible that an author to really work at making it so narrow that is only good for a specific situation. That is certainly not the case with AD&D 1e.

T. Foster said:
Sure, the spectrum of allowed/supported actions is a lot broader in most rpgs than in traditional games, but I'm not convinced either that if players in some of what you're categorizing as non-rag precursors went off-script that it wouldn't be allowed (we know, in fact, that Arneson himself did so as a player in one of Wesley's early Braunstein games and that Wesley allowed it) or that if someone had gone way off-script in one of Gary's Greyhawk games that he wouldn't have shot it down.
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I made clear in the past and present folks were running sophisticated and nuanced wargames that are far more free-form than sitting down to play AH's Gettysburg or SPI's First World War. But those incidents were the exception not the rule. There are also accounts of people getting annoyed at this because they wanted to focus on completing the scenario.

T. Foster said:
Arneson may well have been willing to accommodate any and every one of his players' whims at the expense of his planned scenario in a way that nobody had done before, but since very close to nobody followed his lead in that it feels invalid to single it out as the ultimate distinguishing characteristic of what makes something an rpg.
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My answer is to that is given the fact the usual mode of play is a small group meeting on a regular basis to play that the diversity isn't found within a group like it was in Dave's Blackmoor (or Gary's Greyhawk) campaign but rather in diversity of campaigns that are run using a given system. In short D&D and AD&D campaigns were all not about dungeon crawl and wilderness explorations. They were just the most common campaign types out of a bewildering kaleidoscope that existed then and now.

T. Foster said:
Dave Arneson has a perfectly legitimate and defensible claim as the co-inventor of the tabletop roleplaying game based on having co-written the first such commercial ruleset. That's established fact. Gygax and TSR in later years tried to minimize his contributions but the historical record has pretty well been set straight there - Dave came up with the concepts and worked with Gary to codify them into a publishable set of rules, even if he wasn't totally satisfied with the result and wasn't willing to do much to support or spread it (the first couple chapters of Peterson's Game Wizards book are full of letters from Gary to Dave urging him to do more to support and publicize D&D - to write articles and letters about it, work on supplemental material for it, invest in TSR to help fund it, etc. - and Dave demurred on all of it and seemingly only became really interested in D&D after he parted from TSR, when he developed a grudge against it and wanted to "beat" it and prove that his ideas were better than what Gygax/TSR published).

The problem is people want to go beyond that to elevate Dave into the true/sole inventor of the rpg game-form without sharing that credit with Gary (and usually going a step further to imply or state that Gary stole his share of that credit from Dave and is undeserving of it). But in order to do so they have to come up with other definitions of what "inventing rpgs" means beyond the obvious (i.e. writing the first commercially published set of rules). However, all of those attempted redefinitions ultimately fall short, either because it's demonstrable that other people were already doing those things prior to Blackmoor or because (as in this case) effectively nobody did them other than Dave. "Dave Arneson invented roleplaying games because he was the first person to say yes to everything his players suggested" is a nice-sounding story, but it's also meaningless because "the GM must always say yes to everything the players suggest" isn't a defining characteristic of role-playing games.
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I stand by my assertion that Gary didn't invent tabletop roleplaying. He invented Dungeon & Dragons and Dave invented tabletop roleplaying. I am sorry that you feel that somehow dismissed Gary Gygax's contribution but it doesn't.

Dave didn't just come up with some concepts, he honed them through his refereeing his campaign into a workable system. Then Dave taught him what he knew after Gary asked and was interested.

But the thing is Dave didn't write a system. Sure he could show it, teach it, and had pages of notes to give. But all the accounts paint it a bunch of charts, aides, and mnemonics. Not anything we would recognize as a rulebook.

So on the basis of one or two sessions, a handful of notes were written by Dave for Dave to use, phone conversations, and letters. Gygax was able to figure out what Dave was doing, distill it into an initial playtest, then run a campaign that was legendary and popular in its own right. Then published it which ignited an entirely new gaming hobby and its core concepts are still being used in the latest editions.

While that is not the same kind of genius that Dave displayed in figuring out tabletop roleplaying in the first place. What Gary did with D&D is still a work of genius. And it was the right kind of genius that was needed to let the rest of in on what was happening. Finally, I think Gary was being very generous in giving Dave co-credit. I think if I was in that situation, I would say something like "Hey why I don't I write up what I am doing, you write up what you are doing and we will publish both."

So please don't put me in the group that worships at the altar of Dave Arneson. But on the other hand, I am not going unduly elevate Gygax role in all this. Gygax would have not written an RPG, D&D or otherwise unless Dave had done the work he did in inventing it in the first place.
 
The most amazing thing about all this, to me, is that no one, to this day, has figured out how to kick D&D's butt, despite nearly 50 years of trying. Virtually every TTRPG ever made is in some sense a reaction to or attempt to expand or improve on D&D, and most are explicitly trying to do just that. And they keep ending up at relatively niche parts of the market that can't quite figure out how to fill the central place D&D has always occupied. And it isn't just the momentum that comes with being first - people were taking shots at it very early and there have been many, many games that became quite visible, and times when D&D was briefly in eclipse. But there is something about its structure and approach and scope that no one seems to be able to crack.
 
T. Foster said:
"Dave Arneson invented roleplaying games because he was the first person to say yes to everything his players suggested" is a nice-sounding story, but it's also meaningless because "the GM must always say yes to everything the players suggest" isn't a defining characteristic of role-playing games.
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Which is rather unfortunate, as it's the one unique thing that RPGs have to offer over any other type of interactive media.

You are correct, that it never becamme a defining feature of the hobby, but it should be.
 
Rather than dwelling on negativity let's talk about something more fun: how good Arneson's Temple of the Frog adventure is.

Temple of the Frog was included in D&D Supplement II: Blackmoor, published in late 1975, making it the first published D&D scenario by TSR (and possibly by anyone?). It fills 21 pages of that A5-sized book, detailing a town, 3-story temple, and 2 levels of dungeons beneath.

Up until this point, everything TSR had published for D&D - the original set, Supplement I, and the random dungeon tables in issue #1 of The Strategic Review, had been squarely in the "funhouse" or "mythical underworld" zone. Dungeons were a maze of corridors and rooms filled with a mostly-random and completely unecologized menagerie of monsters, treasures, tricks, and traps, all based on an artificial mathematical formula that each deeper level contains tougher monsters, more dangerous tricks and traps, and richer treasures than the one above. Even when the contents aren't literally random the focus is solely on obstacles to challenge the players' wits and rewards for successfully overcoming them. Nothing makes even a pretense at being logical or making sense. The rules even recommend tricks like occasionally changing the orientation of the maps (flipping them 90 or 180 degrees) to prevent players from being able to rely on the maps they’ve previously drawn.

The wilderness was also a random and arbitrary collection of monster lairs and castles that could be generated completely procedurally (and GMs who didn't want to bother drawing a map were encouraged to just use the board from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival - an appropriately varied and generic set of wilderness terrain). And “town” was a quasi-abstract place players spent their time between adventures recovering, gathering info, and acquiring equipment and followers until such time as they've achieved sufficient level and wealth to build their own castles.

It was effectively a big Roguelike world, where most elements could be handled procedurally and the GM's only responsibility was to draw dungeon maps (though the random tables in SR#1 eliminated even that) and come up with clever tricks, traps, and puzzles to challenge the players in-between the procedurally-generated monsters. Even the Tomb of Horrors, which Gary Gygax wrote and TSR sponsored as the first official D&D tournament at Origins I in the summer of 1975 (it wasn't officially published until later, but enough people played in it there that word of it got out and it was discussed in fanzines), was effectively just a themed funhouse: it was finite in scope and had a theme and backstory about being an ancient wizard's tomb, but its contents were still just a gauntlet of the most extreme and punishing tricks and traps Gygax could come up with with no real internal logic or ecology beyond challenging the players’ problem-solving skills and punishing rash or careless behavior.

Temple of the Frog turns out to be nothing like any of that. It starts with a map of a town and a two page background describing the history of the temple and its place in the campaign - how it developed, what it inhabitants do and their relationships with other realms, and some implicit reasons why adventurers might want to go there. We then get another two pages about the boss who currently runs the place and his elaborate backstory - he's actually a visitor from another planet/dimension who was sent here as a scout and has gone rogue a la Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and is sending falsified reports back to his bosses lest they figure out what he's actually up to. He also has a cache of extremely powerful technological artifacts (a suit of power armor, a sword that shoots lightning bolts, an advanced medical pod, and more).

When we finally get to the key of locations, even they are not like what we'd seen before - they're not just a series of set-pieces combats and puzzles, they're all functional locations occupied by the inhabitants of the place in a way that fits together and makes logical sense. Furthermore, they're not really based around exploration, or at least not the kind of aimless "kick in the door" exploration that characterized earlier dungeons - many of the rooms are locked and unopenable without a set of techno-magical pass rings, and many of the rooms are barracks or breeding grounds with hundreds of inhabitants who would utterly overpower any team of 4-12 invading adventurers. There's nothing arbitrary or random here, it all fits together and feels like a plausible, logical environment. There's also no sense of graduated or balanced challenge - no indication of "appropriate levels" or particular sense that the challenges get more deadly the deeper you go - because that would be arbitrary and artificial and wouldn't fit with such a "living" environment.

And that's it. We get this very detailed location with a detailed set of inhabitants and detailed backstory and a sense of the inhabitants' motivations and goals, but no indication of what we're supposed to do with them (except a sense that if you just wander in and start killing and robbing it's going to end very badly). That can be confusing to novice GMs (even now, I can only imagine in 1975) but for a GM who gives it some thought and study it's actually brilliant because it's NOT just a canned situation to be played through once in one particular way and then set aside. Rather, this is someplace that is likely to become a long-term fixture in the campaign, that can be interacted with in any number of different ways by different parties at different levels at different times. Parties can try to trade with the place; they can scout and spy on it; they can try to ingratiate themselves with its inhabitants to gain their trust and learn their secrets; they can try to free prisoners or rob the place and make a getaway; they can descend on the place in force with an army behind them; etc. The way the adventure is written it supports any or all of these approaches, not just in the sense that the GM gets to choose how to frame it, but that it's allowed and expected that different players will try all of these things at different times. This isn't a quasi-boardgame challenge gauntlet, it's a fully fleshed out location that can/should become a major fixture and factor in a sophisticated ongoing campaign.

This would be high-level sophisticated stuff even if it were published today (honestly, it's deeper and more sophisticated in this way that just about anything else TSR published, its closet parallel being perhaps the Vault of the Drow), which makes it almost unbelievable that it was published in 1975 (and, from what I gather, was actually written and run by Arneson c. 1972, i.e. before he'd even introduced Gygax to the concept of what ultimately became D&D!). He was really operating at a whole different level that everyone else took about 5 more years to catch up to (see: Jaquays' Judges Guild stuff (Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia) and RuneQuest scenarios like Snakepipe Hollow) and many people never caught up (see: the way TSR modules devolved into linear railroads).

I wasn't playing D&D yet when this was released (I first saw it ~1987, and didn't really "get" it until a couple decades after that - when looking back I realized that much of what I love about those later Jaquays, RQ, etc. adventures was already present here) so I have no idea what people at the time thought or made of it - whether it confused or annoyed them, or if they understood and appreciated it and realized that there was more potential to this type of game than earlier products from TSR had hinted at. But even now, 47 years later, it feels revelatory in its sophistication and open-endedness, almost like a lost artifact from some alternate dimension (perhaps the one Stephen the Rock comes from...) where rpgs developed in a different direction and the focus was more on the world and campaign as a living, breathing environment and less on contrived challenge-gauntlets or linear stories. [Regarding which, it's a sad and ironic epilogue that in 1986 TSR released a revised version that was restructured by a co-author (David Ritchie) into something much more like "conventional" module format with a canned storyline that manages to obscure and undermine just about everything good and charming about the original, though admittedly it does have really great cover art.]
 
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In my neck of the woods in rural northwest PA, some (but not all) of the Judges Guilds stuff did a pretty good job supporting a more naturalistic approach to building adventure locales. Especially the City-State of the Invincible Overlord which could be run either as a funhouse or as a more straight forward fantasy. Looking back, I would say those of us who were more into wargames were more apt to run adventures where "things made sense". Because the late 70s was the time of the great wargaming boom as well and some of the games were very detailed. So their ethos bled over how some of us handled RPG campaigns.

However there were not that many of us doing things this way. Wargames were pricey and time-consuming compared to RPG. There was only a few good ones that an entire group could play together.

As for the Temple of the Frog, I didn't care much for its mix of sci-fi and fantasy. I was a bit of snob about it then and I still like my fantasy genre straight up. But after your review I will take another look at it.
 
Endless Flight said:
I’m of the opinion that tabletop roleplaying games would have been invented even if Dave and Gary didn’t exist. That they were the first to do it gives them the right to take that credit but that’s about as far as I’m willing to go in general. Now when you narrow it down to Dungeons & Dragons and it’s specific idiosyncrasies, I believe in even more credit. I believe somebody would have invented RPGs. There were already other people who had inspiration that was headed in that direction. In an overview, I look at something the wheel. Nobody knows who invented it; it’s more important that it exists. That’s the way I feel about most inventions including RPGs.
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The Old West Skirmish Wargames that Blackleaf mentions upthread is a rpg imo and it was published in 1970.

So yeah I think it was pretty clearly going to happen, hell it already HAD happened before D&D was a twinkle in anyone's eye.
 
I found evidence of Arneson being a 'say yes' type of referee. I picked up a digital copy of Arena of Thyatis. On page 4 is this advice for the DM:

"Why should you not simply force the players to do or not do certain things, for the sake of preserving the "plot"? Simply because it won't be as fun, and you're sure to lose their interest. A module is designed as much for reading as playing, but your players don't want simply for the adventure to be read to them. They gain pleasure from thinking and deciding on their own. Give them that freedom, even if it substantially changes the story that this module presents."
 
TristramEvans said:
Which is rather unfortunate, as it's the one unique thing that RPGs have to offer over any other type of interactive media.

You are correct, that it never becamme a defining feature of the hobby, but it should be.
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I feel we must make the distinction between saying "yes" to what the players say they want their characters want to do versus saying "yes" to what they players say their characters do, or what happens in the game world.
 
Voros said:
The Old West Skirmish Wargames that Blackleaf mentions upthread is a rpg imo and it was published in 1970.

So yeah I think it was pretty clearly going to happen, hell it already HAD happened before D&D was a twinkle in anyone's eye.
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Also worth noting that Gygax was aware of the game and was following their campaign with interest.

That said, I think the true genius of Arneson was pulling these influences together into a coherent form and the true genius of Gygax was working out a way you could develop this game into something playable without having a little Dave Arneson in every box to explain how to play.
 
arjunstc said:
I feel we must make the distinction between saying "yes" to what the players say they want their characters want to do versus saying "yes" to what they players say their characters do, or what happens in the game world.
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Yeah, I think that in this context "say yes" is pretty clearly "the PCs can attempt anything they want to" rather than "any halfbaked idea the players comes up with succeeds".

You can certainly try and knock down a tower with your head, it just won't work.
 
BTW, here's what Jon Peterson has to say about Western Gunfight:

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

Western Gunfight (1970): the First RPG?

In 1970, a group of UK gamers located in Bristol published the first edition of their Western Gunfight rules, which recorded systems they ...
playingattheworld.blogspot.com playingattheworld.blogspot.com

It does sound like it was being played as pretty much an RPG, and it sounds like it may have informed Gygax, but it doesn't sound like it directly informed Arneson.

These days, I think the dominance of D&D is sheet momentum, and even back in the mid 70s, I think it did have first mover advantage. But I think there are structures of the game that helped its dominance. One of those ultimately is the dungeon crawl. It's an easy scenario to set up, and can be run in a sandbox way without the GM committing to a wide open world. But the game also has enough support for wilderness and military adventures to provide a solid framework for those wanting to escape the dungeon.

Looking at the other early games from this list:

en.wikipedia.org

Timeline of tabletop role-playing games - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Boot Hill, while it had "rpg" rules, I wouldn't be surprised if Western Gunfight was actually better prepared to be a Wild West RPG. Certainly between reading Peterson's blog and the write-up at Amazon: Amazon product it sounds like there's more to work with.

EPT is D&D with some rule changes and an alien setting that was never going to have much uptake.

En Garde! is very limited in scope.

Tunnels & Trolls, at least in the early editions really seems to be aimed only at dungeon exploration. Also it's focus on solo play probably influenced people. And then there's the spell names. And a profession that D&D was too complex.

Bunnies & Burrows again is very limited in scope.

Metamorphosis Alpha the first SFRPG is aimed at exploring wilderness as dungeon. And as an SFRPG is limited in scope.

By 1977, we have the introduction of Basic D&D that probably sealed the deal.

So looking back, D&D has the widest scope. Fantasy really is a lot easier to work with than science fiction or historical.
 
Trent,

Like Rob, the science fiction aspects of Temple of the Frog didn't appeal to me, also the clear huge numbers didn't appeal to me. I absolutely see your point though and I should look at it closer.

Another early RPG module with some open ended aspects is Apple Lane and it clearly informs Snakepipe Hollow.
 
ffilz said:
Metamorphosis Alpha the first SFRPG is aimed at exploring wilderness as dungeon. And as an SFRPG is limited in scope.
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I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.

Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.

...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
 
The Blackmoor Campaign kicked off the RPG revolution that exploded in an exponential fashion for 10 years. What made it special can be inferred from the very different off-shoots which each took a part of what made it special: boardgames (Dungeon!, Sorceror's Cave), gamebooks (Warlock of Firetop Mountain), and computer games - both puzzle adventures (Colossal Cave) and fighting/exploration adventures (pedit5 & dnd). To me that indicates it wasn't one thing but the magic combination of dungeons + role playing + puzzles + fighting monsters.

Blackmoor was itself clearly not mechanically very much like D&D (as can be seen from the surviving documents), and almost immediately spawned three immitators - Dungeon! (it didn't just turn into a boardgame, it showed how you might codify the rules, and provided what a dungeon looked like - dungeons look like Dungeon! not Blackmoor), the Rules to the Game of Dungeon (see Jon Peterson's blog, it's a sort of cross between Dungeon! and Blackmoor from people who had seen both), and D&D (itself clearly a cross between Dungeon! and Blackmoor).

It is clear the seed that Blackmoor planted was potent and was going to spread exponentially across the world (slowly at first, by the nature of exponential growth, but surely and consistently) - this would have hapenned regardless of whether D&D had been invented. What D&D did was provide a very solid set of rules that were, in particular, clearly better than the other three alternatives. That is, it out-competed other strains.

This doesn't take anything away from Gary Gygax, and although it's interesting to ponder if the Were Bear comes from Arneson or Gygax, people shouldn't get too emotionally invested in it. D&D is clearly the work of both - the person who isn't given enough credit is Dave Megarry.
 
AsenRG said:
I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.

Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.

...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
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While I always appreciate a nice rant, Metamorphosis Alpha really is limited in scope. It deals solely with a “lost” generation-ship where the human crew has devolved to barbarism and radiation has turned most of the plants & animals (& many of the humans) into mutant monsters. The PCs are barbarian humans or mutants who explore the decks of the ship fightning mutants (& rogue robots), gathering tech artifacts, & learning more about the ship. There’s no support in the rules for doing anything else. Even the simple alternative of the PCs starting not as primitive barbarians but as “unfrozen” crew members who know the situation from the start but have to work to fix it isn’t in the rules and was presented by a third-party author in a Dragon magazine article.
 
AsenRG said:
I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.

Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.

...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
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I agree with you that an open ended SFRPG may have a larger scope than fantasy (at least if the SFRPG has enough scope to allow for magic and dragons...). But Metamorphosis Alpha as an SFRPG is pretty limited in scope unless you invent rules. It has no rules for exploring worlds or traveling between them. It has no trade rules. Lots of missing bits.
 
JoeNuttall said:
The Blackmoor Campaign kicked off the RPG revolution that exploded in an exponential fashion for 10 years. What made it special can be inferred from the very different off-shoots which each took a part of what made it special: boardgames (Dungeon!, Sorceror's Cave), gamebooks (Warlock of Firetop Mountain), and computer games - both puzzle adventures (Colossal Cave) and fighting/exploration adventures (pedit5 & dnd). To me that indicates it wasn't one thing but the magic combination of dungeons + role playing + puzzles + fighting monsters.

Blackmoor was itself clearly not mechanically very much like D&D (as can be seen from the surviving documents), and almost immediately spawned three immitators - Dungeon! (it didn't just turn into a boardgame, it showed how you might codify the rules, and provided what a dungeon looked like - dungeons look like Dungeon! not Blackmoor), the Rules to the Game of Dungeon (see Jon Peterson's blog, it's a sort of cross between Dungeon! and Blackmoor from people who had seen both), and D&D (itself clearly a cross between Dungeon! and Blackmoor).

It is clear the seed that Blackmoor planted was potent and was going to spread exponentially across the world (slowly at first, by the nature of exponential growth, but surely and consistently) - this would have hapenned regardless of whether D&D had been invented. What D&D did was provide a very solid set of rules that were, in particular, clearly better than the other three alternatives. That is, it out-competed other strains.

This doesn't take anything away from Gary Gygax, and although it's interesting to ponder if the Were Bear comes from Arneson or Gygax, people shouldn't get too emotionally invested in it. D&D is clearly the work of both - the person who isn't given enough credit is Dave Megarry.
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Some interesting stuff on Megarry here.

To summarise, on the balance of evidence it looks like he may have invented the following.

The idea of descending dungeon levels becoming harder as you go down.

Secret doors.

Only getting spells back when you leave the dungeon.

The Medallion of ESP.

Wandering monsters.

Wererats.
 
Black Leaf said:
Some interesting stuff on Megarry here.

To summarise, on the balance of evidence it looks like he may have invented the following.

The idea of descending dungeon levels becoming harder as you go down.

Secret doors.

Only getting spells back when you leave the dungeon.

The Medallion of ESP.

Wandering monsters.

Wererats.
Click to expand...
Wererats come from The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber, published in 1968. The other stuff may have been Megarry's or he may have lifted it from Blackmoor (Megarry was one of the early players who explored the Blackmoor Castle dungeons, which is what inspired him to create the Dungeon! game). That said, "the idea of descending dungeon levels becoming harder as you go down" is (from what I understand) pretty indisputably his: Blackmoor Castle had multiple dungeon levels, but not AFAIK a particular notion that the lower levels were more dangerous or had richer treasure than the upper ones. The version of the Blackmoor Castle dungeons published in First Fantasy Campaign is set up that way, but it was revised post-publication of D&D (the book notes it was the version of the dungeons Arneson ran at conventions in the mid-70s) so we (or at least I, without accessed to unpublished manuscripts) can't say whether or not it was always that way. People generally do seem to give Megarry credit for that innovation, though.
 
AsenRG said:
I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.

Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.

...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
Click to expand...
I'm a big fan of SF these days, however fantasy has a range of different sub genres too (I'm sure you're aware of them, but are trying to make a specific point.) For those who don't know you, let me point out: Fantasy has Sword & Sorcery, and Urban fantasy, and Epic fantasy, and Trad Fantasy, Low Fantasy (which isn't always S&S) and High Fantasy. D&D used to be Trad, but is now High Fantasy.

However, it is also an old trope that fantasy worlds can and do spawn from sci fi elements. Witch World for example has a post-apocalypse Isekai vibe in the earliest book, but moves into more standard fare in some novels. A more recent (but not a lot) series is C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy which starts off with SF and then becomes fantasy. The overlap is as you suggest larger in SF to Fantasy than Fantasy to SF partly because people balk at Sci fi--in their fantasy but not when it is present the other way around (which is really strange at times. I admit, I almost didn't read the Coldfire trilogy because of it but I'm less picky these days.)
 
Blackmoor was probably science fantasy; we know it had time travel and sci fi in it. (And a tank).
 
I'll probably be recovering from the weekend Blackmoor Session with the house group.

The mythology that Arneson was not capable of producing was created by people who did not like him, which is most people at TSR who actually were not even there when Dave and Gary Wrote D&D together. . At the same time as D&D was released he also had a follow up game to Don't Give up The Ship which was never published by TSR, but does have a forward in it by Gygax.

Just got off the phone earlier with someone who has a collection of about 115 banker boxes full of mostly unseen Arneson stuff. He would disagree on Arneson not being a producer of game things.

I have also seen what is left in the hands of the Arneson estate and it was culled due to space and also severely culled after a flood, yet, it contains an entire gangster RPG by Arneson that was never published.

We could argue all of this round and round. Most who make claims of the sort have not seen the amount of work Arneson put into his game research and design.

Arneson was an inventor. Once he had created fantasy RPGs he moved on to other things. Above all he was a hard core war gamer and loved both civil war and napoleonic era war gaming. In fact he won war game tournaments at conventions.

Having actually seen massive archives of his work I am convinced he was a genius, that is what Robert Kuntz says about him and I agree with his perspective.

As to other people having created RPGs previously in history. I would agree we see glimmers, but nothing on the level of Wesely's creation. Perhaps most telling about Wesely's game is that it has no combat system in the first session he runs. Korns is an RPG war game for sure, but there is no built in mechanism for interaction aside from shooting at each other. It is often inferred that Korns is multi player, but the rules talk about a player A and a player B with a referee - think what you will of that.

I've seen other games which have war game RPG elements, but often they are so fixated on combat that turn lengths are in the 5 second range which is hardly enough time to carry on a conversation.

And of course there are earlier play acting games, but they aren't much more than that.

Who knows, maybe Monday I'll rewatch Secrets of Blackmoor.
 
Secrets of Blakcmoor said:
I'll probably be recovering from the weekend Blackmoor Session with the house group.

The mythology that Arneson was not capable of producing was created by people who did not like him, which is most people at TSR who actually were not even there when Dave and Gary Wrote D&D together. . At the same time as D&D was released he also had a follow up game to Don't Give up The Ship which was never published by TSR, but does have a forward in it by Gygax.

Just got off the phone earlier with someone who has a collection of about 115 banker boxes full of mostly unseen Arneson stuff. He would disagree on Arneson not being a producer of game things.

I have also seen what is left in the hands of the Arneson estate and it was culled due to space and also severely culled after a flood, yet, it contains an entire gangster RPG by Arneson that was never published.

We could argue all of this round and round. Most who make claims of the sort have not seen the amount of work Arneson put into his game research and design.

Arneson was an inventor. Once he had created fantasy RPGs he moved on to other things. Above all he was a hard core war gamer and loved both civil war and napoleonic era war gaming. In fact he won war game tournaments at conventions.

Having actually seen massive archives of his work I am convinced he was a genius, that is what Robert Kuntz says about him and I agree with his perspective.

As to other people having created RPGs previously in history. I would agree we see glimmers, but nothing on the level of Wesely's creation. Perhaps most telling about Wesely's game is that it has no combat system in the first session he runs. Korns is an RPG war game for sure, but there is no built in mechanism for interaction aside from shooting at each other. It is often inferred that Korns is multi player, but the rules talk about a player A and a player B with a referee - think what you will of that.

I've seen other games which have war game RPG elements, but often they are so fixated on combat that turn lengths are in the 5 second range which is hardly enough time to carry on a conversation.

And of course there are earlier play acting games, but they aren't much more than that.

Who knows, maybe Monday I'll rewatch Secrets of Blackmoor.
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Is that volume of writing publishable level writing? I've written way way more code in my life than I've written publishable code. Orders and orders of magnitude more. It works for me and gets the job done for me but if someone else has to figure it out what it's doing and why they need to do a lot more work. When I hear complaints about his writing it's always that it needs editing and polishing and that's where he fell short. That often list as a problem with him in comparison to Gygax who I think everyone agrees desperately needed an editor.
 
Secrets of Blakcmoor said:
The mythology that Arneson was not capable of producing was created by people who did not like him, which is most people at TSR who actually were not even there when Dave and Gary Wrote D&D together. . At the same time as D&D was released he also had a follow up game to Don't Give up The Ship which was never published by TSR, but does have a forward in it by Gygax.


Just got off the phone earlier with someone who has a collection of about 115 banker boxes full of mostly unseen Arneson stuff. He would disagree on Arneson not being a producer of game things.

I have also seen what is left in the hands of the Arneson estate and it was culled due to space and also severely culled after a flood, yet, it contains an entire gangster RPG by Arneson that was never published.

We could argue all of this round and round. Most who make claims of the sort have not seen the amount of work Arneson put into his game research and design.

Arneson was an inventor. Once he had created fantasy RPGs he moved on to other things. Above all he was a hard core war gamer and loved both civil war and napoleonic era war gaming. In fact he won war game tournaments at conventions.

Having actually seen massive archives of his work I am convinced he was a genius, that is what Robert Kuntz says about him and I agree with his perspective.
Click to expand...
I don't think anybody is saying Arneson wasn't extremely creative or that didn't put in the work. Quite the opposite. People are saying he was very much an ideas man (or an "inventor" in your terminology) who needed other people to edit and market to get that into a publishable form. That's not an insult and doesn't preclude him being a genius. I suspect the same has been true of a lot of creatives in history.
Secrets of Blakcmoor said:
As to other people having created RPGs previously in history. I would agree we see glimmers, but nothing on the level of Wesely's creation. Perhaps most telling about Wesely's game is that it has no combat system in the first session he runs. Korns is an RPG war game for sure, but there is no built in mechanism for interaction aside from shooting at each other. It is often inferred that Korns is multi player, but the rules talk about a player A and a player B with a referee - think what you will of that.

I've seen other games which have war game RPG elements, but often they are so fixated on combat that turn lengths are in the 5 second range which is hardly enough time to carry on a conversation.

And of course there are earlier play acting games, but they aren't much more than that.

Who knows, maybe Monday I'll rewatch Secrets of Blackmoor.
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I think more people on here are Bath partisans rather than Korns.

But that aside, I generally agree with your thesis here.

If we consider Braunstein the first RPG (and there's a good case for doing so) then Wesely was definitely first. The other candidates (mainly Western Gunfight) that we've been talking about predate D&D and even Blackmoor. But Braunstein was earlier still. And as T Foster has pointed out, while we know that Gygax was aware of the Bristol Skirmish Wargames Group there's no evidence that Arneson was. There the most likely explanation seems the correct one'; Blackmoor was influenced by and directly sprang out of Braunstein.
 
From my perspective, this is a fascinating thread. These sorts of discussions always astonish me, as they tend to be unaware of the middle 1970s context that led to RPGs in general and D&D in particular. (Free Kriegspiel, anyone?)
 
Black Leaf said:
I don't think anybody is saying Arneson wasn't extremely creative or that didn't put in the work. Quite the opposite. People are saying he was very much an ideas man (or an "inventor" in your terminology) who needed other people to edit and market to get that into a publishable form. That's not an insult and doesn't preclude him being a genius. I suspect the same has been true of a lot of creatives in history.
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Yeah, as someone kneckdeep in unfinished projects, I am woefully aware of the huge divide between "capable of producing" and "actually published".

I am a "fan" of Arneson, mainly as his style and approach to gaming is closer to my own than Gygax's. I'm always interested in hearing/reading more about him, whereas Gygax kinda bores me. But it's Arneson's playstyle that interests me, not the actual rules he wrote or used (which, as I'm sure he'd more than anyone would have been the first to admit, are completely inconsequential to his playstyle).

As far as "credit" goes, the only thing I am glad of is that Arneson is finally now starting to get the recognition he was denied earlier on. For the first 15 years of my experience in the hobby, I'd never even heard the name David Arneson, while Gygax was venerated and kown far and wide as the "inventor of D&D". This is where I think the Bill Finger analogy is slightly more accurate than the Stan Lee one, as Stan at least was always more than willing to share credit. In fact, one of Stan's least talked about but greatest IMO innovations in comics was the introduction of credits in the books which actually named the pencillers and inkers, something pretty much nonexistent in superhero comics before that point that he turned into standard practice. But I digress.

But where the Stan Lee vs Kirby analogy is more apt in that there are people who "take sides", wanting to give all the credit to Kirby/Arneson and dismiss the contributions of Lee/Gygax, and I'm not strongly partisan in that regard. I'm fine with both recieving credit. I also don't personally think that it lessens or undermines Arneson's innovations to acknowledge the path of folks that came before him. I'm not motivated by partitioning credit, simply by my own curiosity. I find reading about Arneson and Bath and the Bristol Western Gunfighters equally interesting. It's all just pieces of history to me.
 
chirine ba kal said:
From my perspective, this is a fascinating thread. These sorts of discussions always astonish me, as they tend to be unaware of the middle 1970s context that led to RPGs in general and D&D in particular. (Free Kriegspiel, anyone?)
Click to expand...

I mentioned Free Kriegspiel earlier, but I think there are a lot of people in the RPG hobby these days that aren't as activelly involved in the wargamming hobby ( Warhammer doesn't count) so don't understand how closely inter-related the two actually are, to the point where there may not even be a clear dividing line between playing a wargame or an RPG besides what one chooses to focus on at a particular moment in time.
 
chirine ba kal said:
From my perspective, this is a fascinating thread. These sorts of discussions always astonish me, as they tend to be unaware of the middle 1970s context that led to RPGs in general and D&D in particular. (Free Kriegspiel, anyone?)
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General Julius von Verdy du Vernois invented rpgs in 1876.
 
He did indeed, dropping a stone into the pond that caused ripples like Braunstein and Hyborea. Those ripples were in the pond that was full of serials, novels, movies, and short stories that made up the bubbling stew of creativity that the Daves reached into and that Gary developed. They all had a huge part, from what I saw when I met them, and there's plenty of credit to go around. (See also 'Appendix N', for that matter.) Context matters, in my opinion.

My take is that 'regular' Kriegspiel is very 'gamist', and devoted to a lot of number-crunching and rules-lawyering. The Prussian General Staff, on the other hand, wanted their officers to act like officers - in effect, getting them to 'role-play' themselves in order to learn how to run their units. "Death Amongst The Rutabagas", the teaching game I'm setting up for a local game group, runs the same way and in the same style as Dave played. It works, and people seem to have fun with that approach to game play.
 
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