I'm well aware that Dave Arneson's rules changed over time and that the best way to "play like Dave" is to emphasize fun, story, and improvisation over rigorous adherence to rules and mechanics. To Arneson: "Most of the rules are only between my ears and they're constantly changing."

But AiF does appear to be a snapshot of the rules as they were at one point in the late 1970s. Arneson himself About AiG: "D&D had not come out the way that I envisioned it. The only answer was to present my system under a different title."

So what do they say about how Arneson played?

I admit to having only ever skimmed AiF. My eyes glaze over a bit looking at all tables and formulas and stuff. It looks much crunchier than I would expect given Arneson's reputation for winging it and being more interested in story than rules. As DH Boggs over on odd74 years ago: "Arneson's philosophy was always rules be d**ned, its Role play not Roll Play, and yet he seemed to love to experiment with complexities like all the divide by formulas in AIF, the random disease charts in Supp II and Pegasus mag and the hit location charts."

That's led me to think one or more of the following much be true:

a) Arneson had a lot more rules in his head (and on his clipboard) than I had expected reading the stories about the Blackmore sessions and what he considered simple probably wouldn't meet my definition of simplicity in role playing (indeed, in an interview he that AiF is simpler than D&D, which I think demonstrates that he probably had a different perception of how complicated AiF was than I do).

b) AiF was an attempt to codify some of the heuristics that Arneson used to make rulings, even though he didn't necessarily hold all the specific numbers in mind all the time. In other words, he might have taken social standing and reputation into account when adjudicating charisma related issues, but he didn't necessarily always apply the formula for modifying the rolls.

c) Arneson felt the market demanded detailed rules and wrote a manual that was perhaps heavier than he really wanted. In other words, AiF is still a compromised vision. (But Mike Mornard "AIF is pretty much what Dave thought D&D should have been (and pretty much WAS the way he ran it.")

My hunch is that it's probably some combination of all three: that Arneson had more rules than I'd anticipated, but that a lot of those rules were more like gut checks than hard and fast rules, and that he felt like he needed to codify those gut decisions based on the criteria that he applied on the fly.

Anyone have any insight on this?

As far as I am concerned, you have correctly surmised what David did. Many people complained about the fact that the rules in the original D&D were rather vague, but the important thing was not the rules, it was how the game was run. David did indeed have many rules, he just did not burden the players with the rules, so that they could concentrate on being characters in another world. The Blackmoor games I run now do not use the same rules that David used; I do that deliberately to get around players knowing all of those rules already. I do not let the players know my rules, so that they will concentrate on being their characters. I think I have been successful in recreating what it was like in the beginning, because the other players that were there in the beginning have told me that it is just like the way it was in the beginning.

I read somewhere (I can't find the source, sadly :( ) that AiF was a lot more Richard Snyder than it was Dave Arneson. Can anyone from the original era group comment on this?

Answering your question could really take pages, but I'll at least start with some observations.

So Arneson wrote a number of games over his career. The first published by an independent publisher was Don't Give up the Ship (a mostly the same version of which existed without the bits contributed by Gygax). He wrote a couple RPGs in the 80's (unpublished) and in the 90's IIRC he wrote Trapmann.

The Trapmann game may be the most "Arsonian" in spirit, or at least feels closest to what one would expect from a "rules light" perspective.

Regarding AiF, despite what Arneson said in the Pegausus interview, the order of the names on the booklets really does tell you who wrote most of it. While it was very definitely a joint project between Snider and Arneson, I'm quite convinced Dave was the primary author only on the first book and the dragons section of the monster book.

AiF really isn't that complicated in most aspects. Sure you have to calculate some stuff at character creation, but most things are adjudicated through a percentile roll against a stat.

However, combat can be fairly complex - especially if you add in a lot of optional factors, Combat was Arneson's attempt to make it more realistic than D&D and scale by level, I suppose. Notice that all those factors are on the GM and Arneson, being good at quick thinking and well accustomed to crunching numbers in combat (hello Strategos N) probably didn't think of that as complicated.

However, I do have to say that Arneson did originally envision a simpler and more elegant combat proceedure - details of which I will put on my blog at some point not too distant (as time permits)

The thing to remember is that his partner on this effort, Richard Snider, went on to craft a similar but much more complicated system Powers and Perils. I'm in the unique position of being able to clearly see the thread of RS influence from his pre-D&D "RSV" rules through AiF and into P&P. It is pretty plain to see that Snider influenced Arneson to create the more complex system in AiF than he originally envisioned. I think, if you look at how wizard combat works, you will be looking at a system mostly written by Richard, and it is one of the more arcane bits of AiF (pardon the pun).

So what am I saying? AiF has the elements Arneson wanted, not always well described, ("Reputation" for example only begins to make sense if you look at Aif material outside the rulebooks.) The education system is really just an expansion of his pre D&D character sheets. So there's a lot there that all about Arneson's style, but the complexity of some of the rules had a lot to do with the influence of his partner, and no doubt, of the perception that gamers wanted games that were more robust than D&D.