12-08-2013, 10:47 AM
Digital Entertainment News Repost
Dave Arneson created Dungeons and Dragons with Gary Gygax.
Posted by Harold Foundary on Mar 15th, 2004
Dave Arneson is the father of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s existence is owed to his original designs, and nearly all major conventions in modern role playing games stems from some decisions he and his group of adventurers made in the early 70’s. From the use of 20-sided dice, to hit-points, to armor class, to experience points; the basic concepts of almost every RPG ever made were originally created on the campus of Kansas U. in the early 70’s by Dave Arneson and his band of geeks.
Today, Arneson lives in Florida and teaches game design courses at Full Sail University. We chatted with him about computer games, the birth of role playing, and the prevalence of the Orc in gaming. We found that he’s a curmudgeonly gamer and is none too pleased with the modern state of electronic gaming.
So, where did you get 20 sided dice from?
We were in the very beginning using the six siders, but when we started doing the fantasy games, I dug out some 20-sided dice I’d purchased in England in the mid 60’s. I went to a game store — well, a historical miniatures store — in London, right off of… I think it was at Picadilly, I’m not sure. And I went upstairs to their gaming area and they had these little boxes of 20-sided dice, and I thought “oh, how cool!” And so I picked up three pair, and I came back home with them and tried to introduce them into our military games, but the guys would have nothing to do with them. We had several mathematicians, and working out percentages for six-sided die were child’s play for them, but it gave me a headache. So really, the dice sat there for three or four years. Then we did fantasy, and I said “hey, let’s use this stuff for it.” So when we started on Blackmoor, we started using 20-sided dice at the same time. Go figure. They’re gamers, you know?
How did you decide on probabilities and percentage chances of the various things you could do? How did you translate real world probabilities into dice rolls?
Well, I could tell you I had it all planned out, but that wouldn’t be true. And I could tell you I faked it all, and that wouldn’t be true either. We adapted. We started out using the Chainmail combat system. They had a fantasy supplement for Chainmail. I think we used that for two games. We quickly discovered it didn’t work for what we were doing since they were mass-combat rules not individual rules. We were doing role playing and they weren’t role playing. We started off our monster list, and I think Chainmail had only seven or eight monsters. So we quickly came up with twenty or thirty. We tried setting them up in a matrix, but that didn’t work because it was quickly taking up an entire wall. So, I adopted a combat system I used for Civil War Ironclads because they had armor class, hit points, all that stuff. And we did that for the monsters, we assigned values to them: giants are big, orcs are little. We tried to make the creature’s power similar to what its size was. We tried to give each monster a special power that wasn’t overwhelming, which was harder than I thought. It’s easy to come up with incredibly powerful abilities, not so simple to make small ones.
What do you think of 3rd edition D&D and the open source design of the D20 system?
Well, since I’m about to publish the Blackmoor campaign in the D20 system, yeah, it’s working out quite nicely. I’ve wanted to do this for a while. I had to negotiate with Wizards of the Coast for a year. As soon as I started, they got sold to Hasbro, nobody knew who to talk to, nobody wanted to take responsibility. But now it’s done and I’m very pleased.
I didn’t expect them to do that (open source). You’re still encouraging people to buy your core rule books, and it allows just about anybody who wants to to publish modules, which, although it’s very profitable, it’s always very time consuming.
Are you primarily a fantasy gamer? Do you ever do sci-fi stuff?
I’m primarily a fantasy gamer and historical miniatures.
What sort of computer games do you teach about?
Our students are required to produce a beta version of a game in order to graduate. I’ve been, in some respect, involved in somewhere around 200 games over the last four and a half years. Games of all shapes and sizes. I prefer the real time strategy games. As I say when I talk about first person shooters: my twitcher doesn’t twitch quick enough to have me survive.
What RTS games do you enjoy?
Oh… Warcraft. Age of Empires. Those are the two main ones right now.
Of all the places that Orcs appear, do you have a favorite? Tolkein? Warcraft? D&D?
I prefer David Sutherland Pigfaced Orc myself. he’s the original orc with a very pig snout on him. Because I thought it was so ridiculous it was cute. When they’re used properly, I’d say the D&D Orc. When I say properly, that’s not when they make them big and powerful. All too often the referee simply decides that they don’t want to throw endless waves of Orcs so let’s just make them big and powerful. I think that’s a weakness on the part of the referee. I think they should be able to find a way to use them even if they’re relatively weak.
Aside from Blackmoor, what other fantasy settings do you run your campaigns in?
Tekumel. Was invented by Professor MAR Phil Barker in Minnesota. I met him, in fact, about the time D&D was published. He has a fantasy setting, he’s developed it over the last 35 years, even before D&D, as an intellectual exercise. and his group has met regularly every week for the last 30 years. One of the very first settings that TSR ever published was Empire of the Pettle Throne. It’s a very rich culture, has it’s own language. It’s a little too exotic for some people, so it never really caught on. But Barker has published many versions of his game since them and, I think six novels.
What other types of games do you play?
Uhm, the simple board games, like House Divided. The new version of Battle Cry, not the old version. The board game has to be short and fun. To be quite honest with, even though I’ve had some excellent people try to teach me Magic: the Gathering, including Richard Garfield and his father, I’m really not any good at that. Chess… I was on the chess team in high school and in college. It was too predictable and I had to think really really hard. Over the years I’ve found that if there’s something where I have to think really really hard it’s no fun. So I backed off on that. I was pretty good, but not on a championship level.
What do you think the most important aspect of game design is?
Game Mechanics. Making a balanced game. It doesn’t happen very often. Especially in computer games… The problem in computer games is they’ve got sequel-itis up the wazoo! Good grief. We did a survey in class and the kids, all thirty-aught of them had to admit that there’s very little under the sun out there. A lot of it’s the publishers. They want to play it safe. They don’t want to do anything experimental. Look at the problem Will Wright had selling Maxis on The Sims. I mean, if my best game designer came up to me with a really weird off-the-wall idea, I wouldn’t argue with him!
When I started gaming back in the 60’s, there’d be one new game a year from the Avalon Hill company. And it was a very good game, and again, good game mechanics is central. But you couldn’t pick and choose. But today, we figured out that, including shareware games, there’s about 10,000 games produced, of which maybe 200 actually get into a store someplace. And maybe about a half dozen are worth playing.
These guys are under a lot of pressure to get the games out, and often times what happens is they don’t really test them ahead of time. They have a lot of bugs and stuff. We get after our students about that. We know they’ve only got four guys and six months to get a game out. We’ve had some good ones, and we’ve had some that were so buggy they barely ran.
Have any of the games your student’s produced been published?
Well, we’ve had twenty or thirty of our students go on to design successful games for SSIE and Microsoft. I keep wanting to say Zeppy and Mr. Fez, but that’s not what it came out as. I’m not sure that that was one that got published as that was one I really liked.
Who would you say is getting it all right? What published, what developer makes near perfect games?
None. Again, I think they’re under a lot of preasure to get the game out and a lot of them cut corners. I think there are some good basic games out there, don’t get me wrong. I don’t play first person shooters because I’m not good at them. There are some good shooters out there, though. That’s just not my genre. What can I say? I won a prize one time for an Age of Empires tournament in Alabama.
What about older games? XCom?
Well, you have to consider what they had to work with. It’s easy to say those were crummy games, but they were fun in their time. I mean, I liked Seven Cities of Gold, yet that was, in many respects, dorky. I mean, you had to dance with the natives to get to the chief. It was silly. But it was fun! And you were always generating new worlds, and I thought that was cool. Some of the early Ultima games that I got into: they were a lot of fun. Did they do it perfectly? Well, they didn’t do it the way I would do it. So, obviously, they’re not perfect, but obviously, that’s just my taste.
I mean, you want to ask me about some of the new role playing games they’re coming out with, and some have been very good! Don’t get me wrong. But again, I wouldn’t have done it that way. I played Neverwinter Nights. I’ve got it installed on my machine. It’s still there. That puts it up with only three games that are still installed on my machine. Warcraft, Age of Empires, Neverwinter Nights.
If you could jump on a development team and direct a project, who would you join?
Oh, I’d probably like work with the Neverwinter Nights people at some point. They seem to have a good notion about what to do. I’m sure some of the things they don’t do are their decisions, machine decisions, etc. I’ve learned enough about computers and programming from this school to understand this better over the last four and a half years. It’s easy to say “Oh, they’re not doing it right.” But, could they do it any other way? Well, the answer is probably no, at this point. Also, you’ve got to get the game done in a couple of years.
You get these teams, they’ve been together for a while. Maybe they don’t have a lot of new ideas, but they know each other. But that’s the problem, you have a 30 to 40 percent turn-over rate on projects, It’s hard to keep an act together because you’re still talking about a couple dozen people. You know, we’ve got the old core team from 4D Interactive systems (a company Arneson founded in the early 80’s). That’s eight guys. They’ve been working together for 25 years. It’s kinda spooky to watch them. They don’t seem to talk to each other. I think it’s a telepathic link between them all. But that’s an old team. They know what to do, they know who’s doing what. They’re not afraid to ask each other questions. Get a new team, and somebody new on the team. Is he going to squeak and say something to someone who’s been doing it for five years? Probably not.
What do you think of the parallel between your creation of D&D through modification and redesigning of older game ideas and the modern day phenomenon of the game Mod?
Well, on the one hand, more power to them. But on the other, they better realize that changing a game is not the same as creating a game. It’s a lot harder to come up with the original idea than it is to modify something that’s already out there. That was one of the things that got me excited about Neverwinter Nights. People are much more excited about changing games than being just players.
What do you think of MMPOG’s?
Well, at one time my entire family; my son-in-law, daughter, we were all playing Everquest. So obviously we’ve tried it out. There were some limitations in Everquest when you were trying to cooperate as a group. Then we played Dark Age of Camelot, and that was better. It’s getting better. When people can actually interact with each other and can be identified as participants, not just as an anonymous guy with a credit card, it makes it fun.
*********************
Reposted by Havard
Dave Arneson created Dungeons and Dragons with Gary Gygax.
Posted by Harold Foundary on Mar 15th, 2004
Dave Arneson is the father of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s existence is owed to his original designs, and nearly all major conventions in modern role playing games stems from some decisions he and his group of adventurers made in the early 70’s. From the use of 20-sided dice, to hit-points, to armor class, to experience points; the basic concepts of almost every RPG ever made were originally created on the campus of Kansas U. in the early 70’s by Dave Arneson and his band of geeks.
Today, Arneson lives in Florida and teaches game design courses at Full Sail University. We chatted with him about computer games, the birth of role playing, and the prevalence of the Orc in gaming. We found that he’s a curmudgeonly gamer and is none too pleased with the modern state of electronic gaming.
So, where did you get 20 sided dice from?
We were in the very beginning using the six siders, but when we started doing the fantasy games, I dug out some 20-sided dice I’d purchased in England in the mid 60’s. I went to a game store — well, a historical miniatures store — in London, right off of… I think it was at Picadilly, I’m not sure. And I went upstairs to their gaming area and they had these little boxes of 20-sided dice, and I thought “oh, how cool!” And so I picked up three pair, and I came back home with them and tried to introduce them into our military games, but the guys would have nothing to do with them. We had several mathematicians, and working out percentages for six-sided die were child’s play for them, but it gave me a headache. So really, the dice sat there for three or four years. Then we did fantasy, and I said “hey, let’s use this stuff for it.” So when we started on Blackmoor, we started using 20-sided dice at the same time. Go figure. They’re gamers, you know?
How did you decide on probabilities and percentage chances of the various things you could do? How did you translate real world probabilities into dice rolls?
Well, I could tell you I had it all planned out, but that wouldn’t be true. And I could tell you I faked it all, and that wouldn’t be true either. We adapted. We started out using the Chainmail combat system. They had a fantasy supplement for Chainmail. I think we used that for two games. We quickly discovered it didn’t work for what we were doing since they were mass-combat rules not individual rules. We were doing role playing and they weren’t role playing. We started off our monster list, and I think Chainmail had only seven or eight monsters. So we quickly came up with twenty or thirty. We tried setting them up in a matrix, but that didn’t work because it was quickly taking up an entire wall. So, I adopted a combat system I used for Civil War Ironclads because they had armor class, hit points, all that stuff. And we did that for the monsters, we assigned values to them: giants are big, orcs are little. We tried to make the creature’s power similar to what its size was. We tried to give each monster a special power that wasn’t overwhelming, which was harder than I thought. It’s easy to come up with incredibly powerful abilities, not so simple to make small ones.
What do you think of 3rd edition D&D and the open source design of the D20 system?
Well, since I’m about to publish the Blackmoor campaign in the D20 system, yeah, it’s working out quite nicely. I’ve wanted to do this for a while. I had to negotiate with Wizards of the Coast for a year. As soon as I started, they got sold to Hasbro, nobody knew who to talk to, nobody wanted to take responsibility. But now it’s done and I’m very pleased.
I didn’t expect them to do that (open source). You’re still encouraging people to buy your core rule books, and it allows just about anybody who wants to to publish modules, which, although it’s very profitable, it’s always very time consuming.
Are you primarily a fantasy gamer? Do you ever do sci-fi stuff?
I’m primarily a fantasy gamer and historical miniatures.
What sort of computer games do you teach about?
Our students are required to produce a beta version of a game in order to graduate. I’ve been, in some respect, involved in somewhere around 200 games over the last four and a half years. Games of all shapes and sizes. I prefer the real time strategy games. As I say when I talk about first person shooters: my twitcher doesn’t twitch quick enough to have me survive.
What RTS games do you enjoy?
Oh… Warcraft. Age of Empires. Those are the two main ones right now.
Of all the places that Orcs appear, do you have a favorite? Tolkein? Warcraft? D&D?
I prefer David Sutherland Pigfaced Orc myself. he’s the original orc with a very pig snout on him. Because I thought it was so ridiculous it was cute. When they’re used properly, I’d say the D&D Orc. When I say properly, that’s not when they make them big and powerful. All too often the referee simply decides that they don’t want to throw endless waves of Orcs so let’s just make them big and powerful. I think that’s a weakness on the part of the referee. I think they should be able to find a way to use them even if they’re relatively weak.
Aside from Blackmoor, what other fantasy settings do you run your campaigns in?
Tekumel. Was invented by Professor MAR Phil Barker in Minnesota. I met him, in fact, about the time D&D was published. He has a fantasy setting, he’s developed it over the last 35 years, even before D&D, as an intellectual exercise. and his group has met regularly every week for the last 30 years. One of the very first settings that TSR ever published was Empire of the Pettle Throne. It’s a very rich culture, has it’s own language. It’s a little too exotic for some people, so it never really caught on. But Barker has published many versions of his game since them and, I think six novels.
What other types of games do you play?
Uhm, the simple board games, like House Divided. The new version of Battle Cry, not the old version. The board game has to be short and fun. To be quite honest with, even though I’ve had some excellent people try to teach me Magic: the Gathering, including Richard Garfield and his father, I’m really not any good at that. Chess… I was on the chess team in high school and in college. It was too predictable and I had to think really really hard. Over the years I’ve found that if there’s something where I have to think really really hard it’s no fun. So I backed off on that. I was pretty good, but not on a championship level.
What do you think the most important aspect of game design is?
Game Mechanics. Making a balanced game. It doesn’t happen very often. Especially in computer games… The problem in computer games is they’ve got sequel-itis up the wazoo! Good grief. We did a survey in class and the kids, all thirty-aught of them had to admit that there’s very little under the sun out there. A lot of it’s the publishers. They want to play it safe. They don’t want to do anything experimental. Look at the problem Will Wright had selling Maxis on The Sims. I mean, if my best game designer came up to me with a really weird off-the-wall idea, I wouldn’t argue with him!
When I started gaming back in the 60’s, there’d be one new game a year from the Avalon Hill company. And it was a very good game, and again, good game mechanics is central. But you couldn’t pick and choose. But today, we figured out that, including shareware games, there’s about 10,000 games produced, of which maybe 200 actually get into a store someplace. And maybe about a half dozen are worth playing.
These guys are under a lot of pressure to get the games out, and often times what happens is they don’t really test them ahead of time. They have a lot of bugs and stuff. We get after our students about that. We know they’ve only got four guys and six months to get a game out. We’ve had some good ones, and we’ve had some that were so buggy they barely ran.
Have any of the games your student’s produced been published?
Well, we’ve had twenty or thirty of our students go on to design successful games for SSIE and Microsoft. I keep wanting to say Zeppy and Mr. Fez, but that’s not what it came out as. I’m not sure that that was one that got published as that was one I really liked.
Who would you say is getting it all right? What published, what developer makes near perfect games?
None. Again, I think they’re under a lot of preasure to get the game out and a lot of them cut corners. I think there are some good basic games out there, don’t get me wrong. I don’t play first person shooters because I’m not good at them. There are some good shooters out there, though. That’s just not my genre. What can I say? I won a prize one time for an Age of Empires tournament in Alabama.
What about older games? XCom?
Well, you have to consider what they had to work with. It’s easy to say those were crummy games, but they were fun in their time. I mean, I liked Seven Cities of Gold, yet that was, in many respects, dorky. I mean, you had to dance with the natives to get to the chief. It was silly. But it was fun! And you were always generating new worlds, and I thought that was cool. Some of the early Ultima games that I got into: they were a lot of fun. Did they do it perfectly? Well, they didn’t do it the way I would do it. So, obviously, they’re not perfect, but obviously, that’s just my taste.
I mean, you want to ask me about some of the new role playing games they’re coming out with, and some have been very good! Don’t get me wrong. But again, I wouldn’t have done it that way. I played Neverwinter Nights. I’ve got it installed on my machine. It’s still there. That puts it up with only three games that are still installed on my machine. Warcraft, Age of Empires, Neverwinter Nights.
If you could jump on a development team and direct a project, who would you join?
Oh, I’d probably like work with the Neverwinter Nights people at some point. They seem to have a good notion about what to do. I’m sure some of the things they don’t do are their decisions, machine decisions, etc. I’ve learned enough about computers and programming from this school to understand this better over the last four and a half years. It’s easy to say “Oh, they’re not doing it right.” But, could they do it any other way? Well, the answer is probably no, at this point. Also, you’ve got to get the game done in a couple of years.
You get these teams, they’ve been together for a while. Maybe they don’t have a lot of new ideas, but they know each other. But that’s the problem, you have a 30 to 40 percent turn-over rate on projects, It’s hard to keep an act together because you’re still talking about a couple dozen people. You know, we’ve got the old core team from 4D Interactive systems (a company Arneson founded in the early 80’s). That’s eight guys. They’ve been working together for 25 years. It’s kinda spooky to watch them. They don’t seem to talk to each other. I think it’s a telepathic link between them all. But that’s an old team. They know what to do, they know who’s doing what. They’re not afraid to ask each other questions. Get a new team, and somebody new on the team. Is he going to squeak and say something to someone who’s been doing it for five years? Probably not.
What do you think of the parallel between your creation of D&D through modification and redesigning of older game ideas and the modern day phenomenon of the game Mod?
Well, on the one hand, more power to them. But on the other, they better realize that changing a game is not the same as creating a game. It’s a lot harder to come up with the original idea than it is to modify something that’s already out there. That was one of the things that got me excited about Neverwinter Nights. People are much more excited about changing games than being just players.
What do you think of MMPOG’s?
Well, at one time my entire family; my son-in-law, daughter, we were all playing Everquest. So obviously we’ve tried it out. There were some limitations in Everquest when you were trying to cooperate as a group. Then we played Dark Age of Camelot, and that was better. It’s getting better. When people can actually interact with each other and can be identified as participants, not just as an anonymous guy with a credit card, it makes it fun.
*********************
Reposted by Havard
Currently Running: The Blackmoor Vales Saga
Currently Playing: Daniel S. Debelfry in the Throne of Star's Campaign
Currently Playing: Daniel S. Debelfry in the Throne of Star's Campaign