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+---- Thread: [Gamespy] Dave Arneson (2004) 2nd Gamespy Interview (/showthread.php?tid=522)
[Gamespy] Dave Arneson (2004) 2nd Gamespy Interview - Havard - 11-08-2010
Reposting the Gamespy Interview. These things should never disappear from the net.
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/540/540395p6.html
Dave Arneson Interview
By Allen Rausch | Aug 19, 2004
GameSpy sits down with the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and talks with him about the game.
While not as famous as Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson is the person who is arguably the one most responsible for the nuts and bolts basics of Dungeons & Dragons. Arneson met Gygax at the 1970 Gen Con, where the two bonded over a shared love of wargames and the fact that both were members of the International Federation of Wargamers. The two first collaborated on a naval wargame called Don't Give up the Ship that was published by Gygax's Guidon Games in 1971. It wasn't until the 1971 Gen Con, however, that the collaboration between them began that would ultimately culminate in Dungeons & Dragons.
At that show, Arneson had created a miniature scenario using a variant of Gygax's Chainmail rules that involved a commando team of soldiers sneaking into a castle to open a drawbridge. The scenario proved so popular that Arneson' gaming group began creating more like it, eventually turning a generic castle map into "Blackmoor," one of D&D's original campaign settings. It would be Arneson's Blackmoor campaign that first tossed out the "either/or" combat matrix of the original game, adding in innovations such as "hit points" to determine how wounded a character was and the idea of advancing levels and experience points to indicate growing power. He also moved the game away from set-piece battles and castles into underground spaces filled with monsters and treasures -- the first "dungeon crawls."
***
Arneson ended up walking away from D&D and TSR when a dispute over creative credit for Dungeons & Dragons resulted in a falling out with Gygax and a nasty lawsuit that was amicably resolved in 1981. Since then, Arneson has led a varied career, stepping into and out of the gaming field, first with a revised series of Blackmoor modules he did for TSR in the mid-'80s, and lately with a new series of Blackmoor adventures he's publishing under the d20 Open Gaming System with his new company, Zeitgeist Games. Arneson is currently a full-time professor at Full Sail University in Florida teaching computer documentation.
GameSpy: How did you first get involved with wargaming?
Dave Arneson: My parents bought me a wargame by the Avalon Hill company called Gettysburg. I thought there were a lot of possibilities there and I liked it a lot. I even talked my friends into learning how to play it. There was only one game a year that came out from Avalon Hill, though, so we started to design our own games.
Around 1968 I got in touch with some gamers in the Twin Cities that were playing with military miniatures and thought that was interesting and exciting. I played games with them for a couple of years and we started to make our own battles. That ended up leading to something a little bit closer to true role-playing when we started to set objectives for different generals that weren't necessarily military in nature. At that point I guess we started role-playing.
GameSpy: Can you go into a little more detail about how "different objectives" became role-playing?
Arneson: We started setting different objectives for the players. It wasn't just about fighting; we started stealing things: bombs, guns, food supplies, that sort of thing. Players could negotiate with each other for who captured the goal, and then had to figure out how they were going to slip the products past a blockade and sell them on the black market. Things like that.
***
GameSpy: How did you first hook up with the International Federation of Wargamers?
Arneson: They had an ad in one of the few (wargaming) magazines around at the time. They were about the only organized group of gamers in the whole nation at that time. I enjoyed writing articles for them and chatting with the members, and they started to do gaming in Lake Geneva in the early '60s. It was only an eight hour drive to see them.
GameSpy: What was the first GenCon you went to?
Arneson: Number two.
GameSpy: That would have been in 1970?
Arneson: I believe that was the one, yes.
GameSpy: That was the convention where you met Gary Gygax. How did you begin working with Gygax and the guys over at Lake Geneva?
Arneson: Well, the first IFW convention was in Lake Geneva on his porch. The second one was in Lake Geneva at a place called the Horticulture Hall which was only two blocks from his house, and he was instrumental in organizing the convention and inviting people to come. Since we're only talking a couple hundred people at that point, we pretty much ran into each other all the time. That's where I got to know him. We were both interested in sailing ship games and I had some rules for doing sailing ship battles. We got in touch over that and collaborated on a set of rules called Don't Give Up The Ship!.
GameSpy: When did you first come in contact with Chainmail and how did you start playing that?
Arneson: Well, it was offered by a small company at that point called Guidon Games (Gygax's company - ed.), and we were doing some medieval battles so we bought a copy and tried it out. We thought the fantasy part was interesting so we elaborated on that, expanded it, etcetera, etcetera, and eventually that grew into what became the first Blackmoor game which eventually grew into being the first Dungeons and Dragons game. That probably took three years to develop.
GameSpy: Explain to me a bit about the process. How did it suddenly start being more fun to play as an adventurer than to command these big armies?
Arneson: You got me. We just did it. We tried it out for a couple games and we thought it was a lot of fun; they all did … all the guys in my group. And certainly it was easier to battle with only 20 or 30 individual (miniatures) than it was to set up a tabletop with five thousand different lead figures on it.
GameSpy: So you could play faster?
Arneson: Oh yeah, lots faster. And we all had read a lot of science fiction and fantasy books, so to a certain extent we were all into it anyways. We thought we were crazy, but we had a great time.
GameSpy: How did you come up with the idea of getting off the surface and going through a dungeon crawl?
Arneson: Well, dungeon crawls were, I think, the easiest things to set up because all you had to do was draw a grid map and didn't have to worry about the great outdoors and setting up trees and stuff. People also couldn't go wandering off where you didn't have a map because it was solid rock.
***
GameSpy: Why fantasy, though? You had started out playing with real-world armies.
Arneson: Some other people in my group set up rules for modern games, or even back in the age of Napoleon. We would get in these arguments, though, about historical accuracy, the latest translation of the latest book, and what was "real." Going into a fantasy world was actually again kind of a copout from my point of view. I didn't want people always coming up with some new book saying we just had to use because it was right and the old one was wrong. This was a fantasy world, so who could come up with anything to prove that he was lying or that a monster wasn't accurately represented? [Laughs]. Now, of course, there's book on everything. It's trickier than it was in the beginning when there weren't as many (fantasy) books.
GameSpy: So basically at the time you could say, "Listen, white is whatever I say it is."
Arneson: Yeah. You know, nobody ever said, "Here's my translation of some such book," and said I was wrong. It was easier for me to referee.
GameSpy: So you started playing Chainmail using the fantasy rules. How did you have to change the rules around?
Arneson: We had to change it almost after the first weekend. Combat in Chainmail is simply rolling two six-sided dice, and you either defeated the monster and killed it … or it killed you. It didn't take too long for players to get attached to their characters, and they wanted something detailed which Chainmail didn't have. The initial Chainmail rules was a matrix. That was okay for a few different kinds of units, but by the second weekend we already had 20 or 30 different monsters, and the matrix was starting to fill up the loft.
I adopted the rules I'd done earlier for a Civil War game called Ironclads that had hit points and armor class. It meant that players had a chance to live longer and do more. They didn't care that they had hit points to keep track of because they were just keeping track of little detailed records for their character and not trying to do it for an entire army. They didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow.
GameSpy: How consistent was your fantasy world? Could you develop a whole history right at the beginning or did that come later?
Arneson: No, that came later. I needed the first couple games to work out the rules. I came up with the maps and the castle, and [then] I came up with the characters and monsters. I didn't worry about any kind of world. Frankly, I didn't think it was gonna add up to some sort of campaign that was gonna last 35 years.
I built it as I went along, and as the guys wanted to do more. That really was good because then I had to keep notes and organize them. I wanted to be consistent. I had learned that from role-playing the military games. You had to be consistent. So I started keeping notes in a little three-ring binder, and then there was a much bigger three-ring binder. [Laughs]
GameSpy: When you and Gary started working together to take all of the ideas you had come up with and put it into kind of a cohesive rules form, you certainly contributed the bulk of the nuts and bolts rules. How much of the contribution did you have to the fiction and the storyline, and some of the other areas that eventually became Dungeons and Dragons?
Arneson: Well, the initial D&D world was really just Gary's campaign, my campaign, and maybe a couple campaigns from people that were players in our group. There wasn't really any cohesive historical background and fiction for either Blackmoor or Greyhawk. Those details came later on.
Probably the first fantasy campaign that had a lot of historical and cultural detail was done by Professor M.A.R. Barker with his world of T¿kumel. He even had languages and cultures for his game far beyond anything that I or Bob or any of the guys that were involved in Blackmoor. T¿kumel finally got into print after D&D was published.
***
GameSpy: So once you and Gary had put the rules together, how did you get pulled into the idea that maybe there was a business in this?
Arneson: We didn't think that there was a business there. It was really Gary's friend, Don Kaye, who came up with the money to do the first printing of Dungeons & Dragons. We couldn't find anybody that would give us money. At that time I was a security guard who couldn't afford shoes, so neither one of us was willing to cashier.
Don bankrolled it and we thought, "Hey this is cool, we can move five hundred copies." Then we sold the five hundred copies in just a few months, which was amazing at that period. Usually, you had a game that sold a thousand copies and was regarded as being successful, and we did five hundred in three months. We reprinted again, I think we did a thousand on the second run, and that sold out in a couple months. Then we did two thousand and that sold out in a couple months until it became a hit.
GameSpy: Eventually, the game starts to take off and starts to turn into a real business that's going to move out of Gary's basement. What happened to drive you from the company?
Arneson: I can't talk about that.
GameSpy: OK. After you left the company, did you do any work with them afterwards?
Arneson: I think the next time any work with TSR was 1985. That was after Gary was able to become president after some sort of stockholders battle which I don't have any details on. One of the first things he did was approach me about doing a series of modules based on Blackmoor, and that seemed really exciting. He was president, I think, for three months when new people came in, and they suddenly weren't interested in working with me for various reasons. Again, I can't go into it, but that was it.
GameSpy: After 1985, with your lawsuit behind you and Gary no longer part of TSR, were you able to patch up your differences?
Arneson: We talk to each other. We don't hate each other. You know, we wish each other well, and he sent me get-well cards when I had my stroke and I sent him a get-well card when he had his stroke. [Laughs] We don't hang out with each other that often, though. We just kept going our own two separate ways.
GameSpy: When I recently spoke with him, I think he seemed very philosophical about everything that happened.
Arneson: That happens with these near-death experiences. Nothing like having a real adventure! [Laughs]
GameSpy: So what were you doing post 1985? Where did you go?
Arneson: I went into computers. I helped found a computer company in Minnesota which is still in business today. Then I got into computer programming, which I hated, and programmed a couple games. I did consulting and advisory work with computer companies, showing them how much money they could save by doing modules.
I got into education in the late '80s when I lived out in California. I did some work for some special education kids, and when I got back to Minnesota I picked up on that and did it some more. I would go to schools and talk about using role-playing for educational purposes -- which were pretty much ignored by most of the people involved, but that's the way it goes. Finally, I landed this really great job down here in Florida about twelve years ago.
***
GameSpy: Looking back, are you occasionally amazed at something that you had such a big part in contributing to?
Arneson: I remember 30 years ago we were playing this game, which wasn't even called a role-playing game back then, and we thought we were crazy when we published it. We didn't advertise the first couple runs of D&D. We didn't have any money for it. It was all being sold word of mouth. It was pretty much all a hands-on experience for everybody, and we thought it was great at the time. If we'd told our friends, even our old military miniatures buddies, that it would be this big, they be like, "You're crazy!" But hey, it's still here. I think they (Wizards) sold a million copies (of D&D) last year. I mean, good grief, most game companies don't sell a million copies of anything in a year.
GameSpy: So, and please don't take this as being morbid, what would you want on your tombstone? How do you want the world to remember you?
Arneson: The world in general? That I was a good grandpa -- that's a good one … I don't know, "Father of role-playing games?" I got a sign that says that somewhere.
***
-Havard