Skip to main content

An Arneson Clapback, or The Distortions of Axe-Grinding Revisionism

David Wesely, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson (l-r)


I posted the below on Facebook recently, and it is a sentiment I'm compelled to express all too frequently in discussions about the creators of Dungeons & Dragons on Facebook's gaming discussion groups in response to the gratuitous Gary Gygax bashing I see these days.

"Dave Arneson gets way too much credit these days. David Wesely latched onto the role playing idea from germinal variations found in early kriegspiels, and Arneson repurposed Gary Gygax’s Chainmail rules to emulate Wesely’s idea in a different setting. Arneson was no game designer and could never hope to organize and codify a rule set for publication. You just have to look at what he produced in the field to see that (try reading and using that mess called First Fantasy Campaign). While Gygax was churning out huge hardcover tomes that became the foundational bedrock for the game, Arneson was so useless at producing anything around the TSR offices that he eventually was put in charge of the mail room in the hopes that he might be of help filling orders since he wasn’t actually concentrating on developing any gaming material when he managed to show up at HQ. Arneson, if anything, deserves less credit than the current fad tries to bestow on him, undoubtedly inspired by that amateurish Secrets of Blackmoor video. The case for lionizing Arneson is weak-sauce revisionism."

My above argument against Arneson is cast in pretty much the simplest terms--and is admittedly pretty harsh--though I don't think there is anything inaccurate there. Was he an important part of the equation? Absolutely. But I think, from what I have read and seen, that it is a huge distortion to give him out-sized credit for the development of the game beyond some loose ideas that emerged from Chainmail and the Wesely-inspired homebrew basement games. None of this happened in a vacuum for Wesely, Arneson, or Gygax...there was a rich gaming history that preceded and surrounded all of it (before even entering these debates, please at least read Jon Peterson's Playing at the World). This post is mostly a clapback against the recent push to disproportionately elevate Arneson and relegate Gygax to the role of merely being a "good businessmen" or, even less charitably, a thief of some sort (an idea the shoddy video Secrets of Blackmoor not so subtly tries to peddle). Frankly, the evidence for Gary Gygax as "good businessmen" is hard to find; he was, however, an obsessive gamer and game designer who was driven to try to make a living doing what he was passionate about. Gary has plenty of faults, and I'm certainly not trying to deify him, but as Wesely himself has said, if it wasn't for the multitude of skills and determination Gygax brought to the table, D&D would never have been anything more than a loose RPG-like game played by a group of guys in a couple of St. Paul basements.

I will also note that a friend made the worthwhile point to me that Arneson could have very easily struggled with some issues (ADHD, autism?) that may have made it hard for him to be more focused and productive (as a special ed teacher, this is my friend's area of expertise, not mine). This struck me as a very fair point, which also makes me a little uncomfortable that my framing of Arneson might sound mean spirited. I certainly don't mean to imply he was shiftless or lazy; game design, development, and codifying rules in a coherent way just may not have been in his personal make up, which certainly isn't a character flaw. And creative writing, which adventure design is at its heart, is another skill set that Arneson also didn't seem to have a knack for. But it does sound like he had an excitable imagination and could run a fun table in the right context.

Personally I'm looking forward to the seemingly far more fair-minded examinations promised in the upcoming documentaries, The Great Kingdom and Dreams in Gary's Basement. I'm hoping that those will serve as something of an antidote to the axe-grinding distortions found in Secrets of Blackmoor, especially for those who insist on expounding on the history of the hobby having only watched the latter without investing the time to actually read Peterson's book.

Anyway, I've got that off my chest. Happy to hear other's views...

Apologia: This post jumps right into the deep end of the current state of the debate over the history of the role-playing game hobby, so it might not be of interest to everyone. I didn't do a lot of context setting here; this is mostly for folks who know these personages and at least something about the events that led to the development of Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted a link that I could point to in these debates on Facebook rather than having to reformulate these ideas every time I feel compelled to weigh in.



Comments

  1. Replies
    1. This American does not hate you, Joe. He is a disabled veteran who served his nation proudly, but would understand if you were troubled the many divisions in our nation now and the immature way our citizens and media are handling our many problems. I would add others to that list, but I did mention that I'm a disabled vet, didn't I. I believe that the creation of Dungeons and Dragons was even more of a group effort than most people are willing to believe. Just where would we be without the original play testers and the feedback they provided to Mr. Gygax et al?

      Delete
  2. I enjoyed Secrets of Blackmoor. I went into it knowing that it had a strong perspective, and that the makers of the project were going to try to convince me of something. That's fine. What I liked about it was the input from those who were around Dave (and to a lesser extent Gary) back when all of this was getting started. I thought segments on Braunstein hewed rather closely to the narrative that can be found in Peterson's book.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A big part of the push for revisionism with Gygax is a psychological sign of the times. It is not as if the rumblings of "yea but" hasn't been around for three decades with TSR and Gary. The seed finally gets some water, fertilizer and the soothing whines of the mediocre.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Late to this post, but had to say: thank you. Thank you for making feel like I wasn't alone in my distaste for the Arneson-deifying/Gygax-villifying trend I've been seeing. Nice to see there are still at least a few sane people in the world...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Well-thumbed posts

Scrum Con IV: In Your Face!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club rejoined the fray on April 8, organizing and hosting Scrum Con IV in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although we ran a surprisingly successful virtual convention in 2021 that took advantage of its online format to invite all sorts of participants we couldn't have otherwise (Dirk the Dice of Grognard Files  in the UK ran a game, and I interviewed wargame/RPG historian Jon Peterson via livestream ), Scrum Con IV marked our return to an in-person format. Because  Scrum Con 2020 ducked right under the pandemic lockdown on the last weekend of February that year, we were anxious to see if anybody would remember us. Turns out any fears were misplaced...because Scrum Con sold out again this year! In fact, every in-person convention we've organized has sold out, but this year's Scrum Con IV was almost 70% sold out of its 225 badges in the very first week, a pace that frankly caught us off-guard. About a week before the show, we had sold enough badges that

Take the High Road: Making Cheap and Easy Dirt Roads

I have wanted some good roads to add to my games for a while now. My first attempt was a couple of years ago when my standards were a bit lower and I wasn't sure how much I was interested in investing in this new hobby. I bought some PDFs of cobblestone roads that I sized, printed, and glued to felt. The result was okay, but the way my laser printer  produced the roads ended up being quite reflective to the point of almost being glossy looking. The combination of glue, paper, and felt also meant the roads had a wavy consistency and almost always curled at the edges. I used them once or twice but was never happy with them. My sub-par first attempt at making roads for my games using felt strips, glue, and printed designs. You can see how shiny and how wavy and curled at the edges they turned out. I never felt good about putting them on the table for our games and eventually stopped altogether. I've been meaning to take another crack at making some roads now that I have

Candid Photos From "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)

This post is barely gaming adjacent, but the Conan stories have informed much of my fantasy gaming since my first forays into the hobby. I've seen the John Milius adaptation more times than any other movie (probably over 50 times, though most of those viewings were on VHS or HBO as a teenager). The 1982 Conan  film was the first R rated movie I saw in a movie theater (age 12). The first convention game I ever played in was one in which I played the barbarian himself. The first convention game I ever ran as game master was an adaptation of Howard's "Beyond the Black River." For good or ill, I've spent a lot of time in that fantasy world. When I stumbled on an online trove of about 400 candid photos from various sets of Conan the Barbarian shot by somebody on the crew, it was oddly visceral for me. It generated a warm feeling getting to see these actors and sets from new angles, both in character and out, in situ and behind the scenes. Seeing Sandahl Bergman, Ge

Lost Art of D&D No. 2: Games Workshop's Holmes Basic (1977)

After Games Workshop attained the license to print a co-branded edition of TSR's 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic rules book, they set about putting their own stamp on it, designing a new cover and replacing a number of the illustrations they deemed too crudely drawn for their U.K. market.  The cover art was by John Blanche at the very start of his career as a fantasy illustrator. Blanche went on to be a mainstay at Games Workshop, producing countless illustrations for them. His fannish enthusiasm for the material--as an artist as well as a lifelong gamer--has deservedly made him a favorite over the decades. I first encountered Blanche's work in the David Day compendium, A Tolkien Bestiary (1978), to which he contributed five illustrations that sit comfortably alongside the book's chief illustrator, Ian Miller. I have a special fondness for this book, having coveted it as a child during my incipient Middle Earth fixation. My parent's procured an out-of-print copy of t

Playing with Yourself: 'Rangers of Shadow Deep' vs. 'Sellswords & Spellslingers'

As the year crawls to an end, I'm looking through this blog and noticing a couple of posts I started and never finished. This is one of them. Back in July 2019, I placed the photos on the page, jotted down a few bullet-point placeholder notes, and then never actually went back and wrote anything to post.   The post was meant to be my informal review of Rangers of Shadow Deep after my first game of it with Josh O'Conner, who set it up for us to try in his basement. I think I never finished this post because I was not very impressed with the game but I knew Josh was, and we hadn't been gaming together long enough for me to be sure my candor about the game wouldn't hurt his feelings and sour a budding gaming friendship. I consider Josh more than a gaming friend these days, and so I'll go ahead and post this with some very short notes fleshing out the bullet points I had left as a reminder for myself back in 2019 (at least the one's I can still decipher the

Chainmail: Battle of Emridy Meadows

In my imagination, Chainmail has always been that shadowy precursor to Dungeons & Dragons that I was both intrigued by yet leery of. I loved the idea of a game involving mass battles in a fantasy setting akin to those depicted in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , but I also had a sense that Chainmail , released in 1971 a mere year after I was born, was likely a clunky wargame that would be too frustrating to bother mastering. It also didn't help that my first inkling of its existence was around 1980 or so when I could never dream of amassing the miniature armies needed to play out these massive conflicts. No, back then I was pretty sure Chainmail was the province of grizzled old grognards who had started wargaming before I was even born. Even after my gaming rebirth decades later in 2016, I was fine with letting the dim past remain so, and was more than content during my first couple of years back in the hobby exploring rules of a more recent vintage and managea