Slashdot Mirror
Dave Arneson Talks About Helping Create D&D
Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has an interview with Dave Arneson, the lesser known co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax. He is at Gen Con in Milwaukee. Also on hand to talk was Sandy Petersen, the creator of Call of Cthulhu. He is working at Ensemble Studios on Age of Mythology. Both interviews are very informative."
Is it the guy who made many of doom2's levels?
Though Gary Gygax did a lot of the setup for the D&D game, it was Dave Arneson that wrote many of the early adventure modules, particularly the B and X series.
From the interview "Dave Arneson is the father of role-playing, no really; it says so on his business card."
Now that is a true honor, imagine how this guy feels, I mean he literally spawned a whole class of games and set the standard by which all other rpg's are judged (or at least the standard by which they were judged for quite some time) I want one of those business cards, it'd go into my collection of useless-but-neat-none-the-less stuff.
For those of you who like CoC, don't forget to check out Delta Green. Good stuff.
Hi,
Back in the good 'ol days I used to play multi-user D&D day and night via a VAX-VMS machine using IRC. Anyone know if this piece of software is available somewhere, possibly ported to i386 platform?
ta,
loz
But they never explained that they were Avatars until the 2nd Ed of Greyhawk, and it never made it into the Dieties and Demigod's rulebook. I always loved the "I'm stronger than Loki!" comments that would be made by some of our dumber players.
Personally, I want the "Giants in the Earth" series to come back in Dragon. I loved getting ideas by looking at these cool mythic heros all done up nice and neat with the James Holloman or Roger Raupp art.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
google says here and here.
Yes I do feel bad about it now, and I'm determined not to give my son the excuse of being too poor to afford it, and show him that through work on his part he can earn what he wants. Would I go back and smack myself if I could? You bet. Can I fix what I did twenty some years ago? No. Can I make sure my son doesn't follow in my footsteps? Hell yeah.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
haha...I can only laugh.
I met him one year (the only) at CoastCon. One of our gaming/drinking buddy's friends had bought a ticket to play in a game DMed by the man like, lost, stamped it out on the ground, then someone withdrew and another number was called. It was his! So he went to play the Thief.
We were shocked beyond belief.
And he was the only member of the party to live! So he can say he was the only one to live out of an Arneson game...
He said the game was "okay"...
I dont know which books you are referring to, but as far as the artist goes, I just remembered Larry Elmore, the guy who did the covers for the D&D boxsets and lots of other TSR stuff. How about buying THE ORIGINAL cover painting for the forth boxset? Price: $2,500
A couple of years ago I bought four of his original drawings (for something like 50 bux a piece!) and gave two to my first rpg buddies. For me it was the ultimate gift to give.
-Kraft
Live and let live
Honestly, the way he presented it in that article seemed to be very close to what I've gathered to be PROBABLY true. He invented the concept of the dungeon-adventure, with medieval fighting man miniatures going into the dungeon.
Gygax made up the rules which said that you could have player class X, with Y hitpoints, etc. Arneson had the idea that the miniatures had hitpoints, etc. Gygax made the leap which said that the miniatures just represented the personalities. So, I would say Arneson is more correct to say he was the father of "adventure gaming" and not roleplaying.
Gygax and Arneson are both trumped for actual "father of roleplaying" however, by the inventor of the "Braunstein" adventures. (I think it was David Wesley.) These were wargames where players could assume the roles of "President of Local University" and "General of Allied Forces." You talked your way into and out of things. It was more of a "How to Host a Murder Mystery" style roleplaying game. Sort of a LARP with a wargame tossed in. That really smacks heavily of the "First roleplaying game."
Arneson is the first one to have a roleplaying campaign setting, but only the second or third to ever have a published campaign setting. (You get really fuzzy with what came first between "Greyhawk," "Blackmoor," and "Tekumel.") And when you come down to it, Tolkien's Middle Earth predated them all, was a richer background, and had all the information to set up a good RPG.
So, any amount of "me me me" is mostly unfounded. You can always trace back to someone who predated you. But, they're still forefathers. And if one of them wants to have enough of an ego to say, "I invented it all" then let them... As long as they said, "And all my buddies helped me a lot." Arneson usually credits Gygax pretty well. I've seen interviews where BOTH of them downplay each other's achievements, but they seem to be much more gracious nowadays.
I'm waiting to see a good interview by Steve Jackson about his involvement in the beginnings of RPGs. Steve Jackson sounds like a very interesting fellow. In fact, they all sound fascinating. But, SJ was the first of those old RPGers to realize what an impact that computers were going to have on RPGs. Some of the companies of today are just NOW realizing how important the computer is to the modern RPG. (Wizards can barely recognize it. For a company that big, their attention to their webpage is kind of a side gesture. If they put some serious moeny behind it, I would be very impressed by what those guys could do.)
If it does well maybe we'll see a DL computer game. Until then, you could look for the old goldbox and silverbox games from SSI.
-- Argel