Re: (TFT) Arneson created D&D, creating characters, dungeons, etc.

[Rick Smith <rsmith@lightspeed.ca>]

I had read an interview:

-- Arneson was running a military campaign where the
players had kingdoms and raised troops to fight each
other.  Each side improved their castles and defenses,
built roads, etc.

-- As a lark, to add variety, he had the players run
their chief generals as individual characters.  They
went down to fight monsters under Darkmoor castle to
help a friend.

-- Thus he created the standard tropes of D&D.  He
had people write up individual characters, created 
the first dungeon, created the idea of leveling up 
with experience points and character classes.

I followed his career closely after that.
-- TSR tried to avoid paying him his agreed royalties
for years and publicly slandered his contributions,
(tho rarely in print).  He had to fight several 
law suits with TSR to get his share of the royalties
for D&D which (in the first edition) he was listed as
a co-creator.  

-- When WotC took over the rights to D&D, they invited
him in and voluntarily paid him an undisclosed sum as 
they felt that he still had not properly received fair 
treatment. 

I consider Dave Arneson to be the creator of my hobby
and am sad I never got the chance to meet him.

Warm regards, Rick.


On Tue, 2011-22-03 at 04:08 -0400, Cris Fuhrman wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 16:55, <kruch7@cox.net> wrote:
> 
> > So what is the name of this system? that Dave designed other then
> > adventures in fantasy?
> 
> 
> There's a partial bibliography for Arneson on his wikipedia page:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Arneson#Partial_bibliography
> 
> It seems from the text on that page that Arneson brought primarily the
> elements of role playing to the D&D collaboration with Gygax, who had done
> mostly war gaming (e.g. Chainmail) prior.
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