Dave Arneson

David Lance Arneson (October 1, 1947 – April 7, 2009) was an American game designer who, with Gary Gygax, co-created Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the first published tabletop role-playing game, released in 1974.¹³¹⁶ He is credited with pioneering many of the fundamental devices of the role-playing game, including the idea that each player controls a single hero who gains power through adventures, and that a character’s personality matters as much as combat prowess.¹⁰ Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game, described his pre-D&D campaign Blackmoor as the “first-ever role-playing campaign and the prototype for all [role-playing game] campaigns since”.¹⁰

Arneson was born on October 1, 1947, in Hennepin County, and grew up around St. Paul, Minnesota.¹³ His parents bought him the Avalon Hill board game Gettysburg in the early 1960s, and he became absorbed in historical wargames, teaching his friends to play and designing games of his own.¹³⁷ While at Highland Park Senior High School he joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA), a circle of high-school and college-age wargamers in the Twin Cities who gathered, often in the basement of Arneson’s parents’ house, to play historical military simulations.¹³¹² He pursued a history degree at the University of Minnesota?, favoring the Napoleonic era.¹³

From wargames to role-playing

The MMSA’s drift toward role-playing began when members, Arneson among them, started setting non-military objectives for individual players rather than maneuvering whole armies.¹³⁷ Arneson traced this back to a habit of giving generals personalities and having players negotiate, steal supplies, and run blockades — objectives beyond simply taking the town or the hill.⁷⁸ In his own account, he first encountered role-playing in college history classes, where he “perverted” a professor’s exercises on the Continental Congress and the French Revolution by introducing characters and random events of no historical interest.⁸ He was also a participant in David Wesely’s Braunstein games, which formalized this style of individual-character play.²⁰¹⁸

Arneson met Gygax at the Gen Con gaming convention? at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1969 — only the convention’s second annual meeting — where the two discovered a shared interest in game design and wargames.¹³¹⁴ Both belonged to the wargaming community organized around the International Federation of Wargamers and the Castle & Crusade Society.¹⁴¹¹ Their first collaboration was a Napoleonic naval combat set, Don’t Give Up the Ship, on which Arneson had worked with Mike Carr and which Gygax helped ready for publication through Guidon Games in 1971.¹⁴⁷

Blackmoor

In the early 1970s Arneson developed a fantasy game and introduced it to his MMSA group, which descended the basement staircase into “Blackmoor dungeon”.¹²¹³ The fantasy elements and magic drew heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings and Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, though Arneson himself named Conan as the inspiration, recalling that the dungeon idea came after “a monster marathon week of reading Conan novels”.¹³⁸²³ The campaign carried characters from session to session with experience points and advancing levels, and what a character did outside of combat mattered as much as fighting.¹⁴¹³

Arneson experimented with several combat systems before settling on the conventions that became standard.⁶ He briefly tried the fantasy supplement to Gygax and Jeff Perren’s Chainmail but found its mass-combat rules unsuited to individual role-playing, dropping it after about two games.⁶¹⁴ He instead adapted a combat system he had used for Civil War ironclads, which already had armor class and hit points, assigning values to a growing list of monsters.⁶¹⁴ He introduced 20-sided dice he had bought at a miniatures store in London in the mid-1960s, which had sat unused for years because his fellow wargamers preferred six-siders.⁶ GameSpy credited the Blackmoor campaign with first discarding the “either/or” combat matrix and adding hit points, experience points, advancing levels, and the first “dungeon crawls”.⁷

Arneson introduced the game, by then called Blackmoor, to Gygax and his Lake Geneva group, and the two collaborated by mail and phone — Gygax’s group running a parallel campaign, Greyhawk.¹³¹² Ironing out the rules was difficult because Arneson preferred improvised rulings to codified ones, finding fixed rules slowed the game.¹³ With financing from Don Kaye, Gygax formed Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in October 1973, and the original Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974.¹³ Brian Blume’s financing brought the game to print, and the hand-assembled first run of 1,000 copies sold out within a year.¹¹¹ Blackmoor became the second supplement to the original game in 1975, with a foreword by Gygax praising Arneson as “the innovator of the ‘dungeon adventure’ concept” and an “inscrutable dungeonmaster par excellence”.¹⁵¹²

OD&D Supplement II: Blackmoor by Dave ArnesonUnscripted & Unchained RPG Review

Dispute with TSR and later career

Arneson was not asked to join TSR as a partner, in part because Gygax regarded him as a designer rather than a businessman, and he received royalties only until 1977.¹³ He moved to Lake Geneva in 1976 to work briefly as a TSR creative director but was forced out that same year after refusing to lower his royalties.¹³ When TSR released Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1977–1978, treating it as a new game, the company declined to pay Arneson royalties on it.¹³¹⁵

Arneson sued TSR over credit and royalties, filing the first of a series of lawsuits in 1979; the matter was settled out of court on March 6, 1981, with the terms sealed.¹³¹⁴ It became public knowledge that he was paid royalties for AD&D and credited as a co-creator in all editions of D&D.¹³ The dispute, and TSR’s tendency to treat AD&D as the “real” game, contributed to Arneson’s name fading from the popular history of the hobby for years.¹⁵¹⁷

After leaving TSR, Arneson founded the game company Adventure Games, which produced the miniatures games Johnny Reb and Harpoon, and wrote the role-playing game Adventures in Fantasy with Richard L. Snider.¹⁴ He returned briefly to Blackmoor in the mid-1980s, writing the “DA” series of modules for TSR after Gygax became president, before a later president removed him.¹⁴ He was elected to the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1984.¹³ He founded the computer company 4D Interactive Systems and, in California in the late 1980s, used games to teach special-needs children.¹⁴¹³

In 2000 Arneson moved to Florida and taught game design at Full Sail University; in the D&D film released that year he made a cameo as one of several mages.¹³¹⁴ He also appeared briefly in the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie among the mages throwing fireballs at a dragon.¹⁴ He retired in 2008 and returned to Minnesota to be near his family and his old MMSA friends.¹³

Arneson died of cancer on April 7, 2009, at age 61, in a hospice in St. Paul, after a two-year battle with the disease.¹⁰¹³ He was survived by his daughter Malia and two grandchildren.¹⁰ In 2010 Full Sail University dedicated its student game development studio space as “Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor Studios” in his honor.²¹ The surviving members of his original Blackmoor group have continued to play the same characters for decades.¹³