Dave Arneson

To any old gamer, someone who still has the little white box that doesn't say "Original Collector's Edition" on it, Dave Arneson needs no introduction. For those somewhat newer to the hobby, I can introduce him best by quoting E. Gary Gygax from his introduction to Dave's Blackmoor supplement to D&D, published in 1975:

"Dave Arneson . . . is there really such a creature? Yes, Gentle Readers, there is, and shudder when the name is spoken. Although he is a man of many talents who has authored many historic rules sets and games ... Dave is also the innovator of the "dungeon adventure" concept, creator of ghastly monsters, and inscrutable dungeonmaster par excellence."

Yes, this is that Dave Arneson – the man who started it all. He's still around, still writing, and of course, still gaming. Pegasus talked to him just before he moved to Florida to take up a teaching position at Full Sail University. Pegasus #1, back in 1981, featured an interview with Dave Arneson. The introduction to that interview gave a good bit of background on Dave's own history, and that of the game industry, and is reprinted here:

The infamous Blackmoor campaign, Dungeons & Dragons, and fantasy roleplaying games, all began during the summer of 1970. At that time, Dve Arneson was active with the Midwest Military Simulations Association. The group was mostly interested in Napoleonic miniatures campaigns, and a segment of that group met every weekend in the basement of Dave Arneson's parents' house in St. Paul. One weekened, instead of hundreds of Napoleonic miniatures, the gamers discovered Blackmoor, the first fantasy roleplaying adventure campaign. After some initial groaning about trying something new, the players descended the now well-worn main staircase to Blackmoor dungeon. Once play began the players were hooked, and the Blackmoor adventures came to dominate the group's interest with only an occasional break for Napoleonics.

From that inauspicions, and sometimes rowdy, beginning grew the concepts that became Dungeons & Dragons. The "rules" developed from notes Dave kept on decisions he made. News of the game spread beyond the Twin Cities to Lake Geneva, Wisconson, and Gary Gygax. Both Gary and Dave had been active in the Castles and Crusades Society, a wargaming group devoted to play with miniatures in a medieval setting. They had also worked with Mike Carr on a set of Napoleonic naval combat rules entitled Dont' Give Up the Ship. So they frequently corresponded regarding gaming news and ideas, and Gary was quite interested in the Blackmoor campaign. Dave visited Gary in Lake Geneva during February, and led him down into the Blackmoor dungeon for his first adventure. Gary was fascinated with the game and immediately began a similar roleplaying campaign, Greyhawk, for his wargaming group in Lake Geneva.

Within a month after that visit, Gary and Dave decided to collaborate in writing a set of rules so that other groups around the country could play and enjoy this exciting new game of fantasy roleplaying. After extensive correspondence, and playtesting by both groupes, they managed to complete the original three booklets of Dungeons & Dragons by the end of that year. Tactical Studies Rules, predecessor of TSR, was formed to publish and market the game after several companies failed to show an interest in the game. From its first publication in February, 1974, Dungeons & Dragons took off. In 1975, the first supplements were published. In July of 1976, Judges Guild was founded.

Today, nearly eighteen years after those words were printed in Pegasus #1, TSR is no more, fads have come and gone, the game industry has changed almost beyond recognition, and Dave Arneson? Well, here's what Dave has to say about it all:.

Pegasus: Are you still involved in wargaming?

Dave: Oh, yeah. I just got back from a gaming convention on the west coast last weekend.

Pegasus: What sort of stuff are you playing now?

Dave: I do a little bit with Don't Give Up the Ship, the sailing ship rules, do some with Seven Years War, 20 millimeter, and I've been refereeing a local American Civil War campaign using heavily modified Fire and Fury rules. I think that'll all be wrapped up next Monday, I hope. A nice clean end to a campaign for a change – that'll be novel.

Pegasus: What a concept!

Dave: Somebody might actually win.

Pegasus: As opposed to just sort of fizzling out.

Dave: Yeah, usually they fizzle. I'd say, nine times out of ten, campaigns, whether they're a fantasy campaign or a wargame campaign, fizzle out.

Pegasus: Someone can't make it for a couple weeks, someone moves away....

Dave: And since I'm the referee and I'm moving away, that's a worse than usual problem.

Pegasus: Where will you be teaching?

Dave: It's called Full Sail University. It's associated with the University of Central Florida, it's what's called a satellite or associated school.

Pegasus: Is any part of Blackmoor still running?

Dave: Well, we try to get together at least once a year, some times three or four times a year, with the original group. Even when I lived in California, whenever I'd come home on vacation we'd try to get together, even if it was just a few of us, so that we could keep the campaign running. Since I've been living back here I've been able to do a little bit more of that. I've got the old hands that are in one group, and I've got some younger folks that are in what I call the new group, although it's all the same campaign. I try to mesh them both together, pretty much. So it's been going now since, oh, '71, '72, which was when we started roleplaying, which was long before there was a D&D. If the Guinness Book of World Records ever asks me, I've got the longest-running fantasy roleplaying campaign in the world.

Pegasus: Going on to changes in the industry ... back when we started, going on 25 years ago, everyone was pretty much discovering roleplaying for the first time. There was all the excitement and so on. Today it's almost totally commercial, as close to mainstream is it's ever going to get. What changes do you think that's made in the hobby, in the people who are playing?

Dave: Well, you know, it was a lot more fun when we started out. Some of the changes were good, because, well, first edition Dungeons & Dragons didn't even tell you how many dice you were supposed to roll to generate your stats. You could tell from the numbers, but it never did say you were using three six-siders. There was a lot of cleaning up there needed to be, tightening up, but I think what happened, oh, ten, fifteen years ago, things got so commercial, TSR was making studies about what grade level they should be writing their rulebooks for, they would include boxed dialog for everything, and that caught on with the other outfits. Sitting down and reading boxed dialog, going through seven or eight volumes of rules, is a long way from the scribbled notes I started off with, even the first three-volume set of Dungeons & Dragons. It just got very, very complicated and, in the efforts to simplify things, they just lost whatever creativity was left. We talked about Judges Guild, they're really the ones that started doing modules in a wide variety of areas. I'd done a couple for TSR. They didn't call them "modules" back then of course. They didn't have boxed dialog in there, and it was up to the referee to pass that information on to the players as they played. That was probably a little bit too little information, could have used a little more help in that regard, but then it's like suddenly they went to the opposite extreme, trying to provide them with everything. I think what you lost there was the spontaneity of the whole operation. I would have rather seen efforts expended improving the quality of referees, whether it was a referee class, or college, or more seminars than the couple you get at a gaming convention once in a while. A lot of people want to be referees, but that doesn't make them good referees, because a good referee has got to be a good storyteller, keep things moving along. You can have a crummy set of rules, and if you've got a good storyteller, you can still make it work. Or you can have a great set of rules, and a lousy storyteller for a referee, and it doesn't matter.

Pegasus: So you think that there's been too much dependence on trying to do everything in the rules, and getting away from the Judge's own creativity?

Dave: Oh, yeah. Too many of them try to do everything, or they follow the official line of "You can't change anything or you'll destroy the rules." Aw, forget it. That's not the way things started, that's not the way things should be. If something doesn't work, get rid of it. If something works in another set of rules and you want to put it in your game, go for it. The [rules'] job is to make the referee's life easier, so he can referee, not harder.

Pegasus: Do you think that some of this – stifling creativity, basically turning the referee into just a speech synthesizer for the designer, is one of the things that has contributed to the decline in roleplaying?

Dave: Yeah... Well, for one thing, frankly, I think it's helped enough poor referees become adequate referees when they're not really good enough. The other thing is that it's all regurgitated so much, time after time, there doesn't seem to be much new coming out, either as far as roleplaying genres or concepts, or just the way to do things. That may not necessarily be bad, but if you keep going over the same ground time after time you're going to lose a lot in the freshness of things. Card games came along and that put a big dent in things but now the cards are starting to go back down to a reasonable level, people are more interested in fantasy games again. One of the talks at the game manufacturers' show a few weeks back in Las Vegas is how roleplaying is coming back. Like, I'm surprised, right.

Pegasus: It took a couple years longer than we expected.

Dave: Card games are fine, but you know, that's not fantasy roleplaying, that's card games. Again, nothing against card games, but you don't have the possibilities for different types of play or different adventures that you've got in a roleplaying game, whether it's fantasy or something else.

Pegasus: What other changes have you seen in gamers, rather than in gaming itself? How are we different?

Dave: Well, it seems like they're a lot older. Used to all be young – high school kids, college kids – you don't see that too much any more. I don't know if that's because they're off playing video games or card games, or they're just not interested. I think some of it's the video games because you get much more of an instant feedback response from a video game than you do from a roleplaying game. Again, is that good or bad? I think that's bad, because I think they ultimately have a lot more fun playing roleplaying games than shooting up spaceships and aliens. I'm going to be going down to Florida and teaching computer game design. Last year there were like 2,000 computer games released, most of which I bet you haven't seen.

Pegasus: Yeah, and out of those 2,000, I'd be willing to bet that over 1,900 (at least) of them stank.

Dave: Probably, because if you eliminate the games where they have all the graphic violence the law will allow, the prettiest explosions, the most gravitationally challenged female characters, oh, not many left!

Pegasus: The thing that bugs me about so many games – and I'm a computer game player myself – the thing that bugs me is they've left out one minor detail: They forgot to put in the fun!

Dave: Yup. A lot of these computer games, what determines whether they get funded, whether they get backed, it depends on the marketing departments at these big companies. The marketing departments like to do things that have been successful in the past, either for them or for somebody else, and they get into ruts really, really quick.

Pegasus: I was in the beta test group for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri – have you played that, by the way?

Dave: No.

Pegasus: Excellent game, if you're into Civilization-type games. Of course, I'm a little biased, my name's in the back of the book. But if that hadn't had Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds behind it, it never would have had a chance to get out the door.

Dave: Oh, no, Marketing would have shot it down.

Pegasus: On the other hand, if J. Fred Programmer came up with the concept, nobody would have touched it.

Dave: Nah.

Pegasus: Which is why we have nine million clones of Doom out there.

Dave: Probably more than that.

Pegasus: Back to my whole collection of questions here ... speaking of computer games, we used to think they were the wave of the future. Is that future any closer than it was?

Dave: Oh, the future's here. It turned out to be a lot dumber than I thought it was going to be. Now they're saying that games on the Internet are going to be there. Yeah, at least you get some group dynamics going, but you never really know what the guy on the other side of the line is really like. And that's not going to change when they have live video or anything. Whatever you can do online, you can fake. At least with a face to face group, if a guy's a turkey you can kind of edge him out of the bunch after a while. And the group dynamics is what I felt really made fantasy roleplaying the fun that it was. Sure, a lot of groups don't get along after a while. I can't say that my old D&D group all loved each other. They don't. But we get together and play. We did that two weeks ago. But it was funny, they formed up on either side of the table in the same grouping they always did.

As far as the future goes, oh, there'll be more bells and whistles, live, interactive, three-dimensional, etcetera, etcetera. Maybe if they can come up with some kind of portable environment projectors, you'll get people actually being able to go out as a group, physically, to have an adventure, even if they're all sitting in the same room. That'll be a little bit better. I certainly would find it to be fun. But I think the promise of computer games fell unfulfilled. We obviously don't have a holodeck yet.

Pegasus: Of course, given the amount of trouble the holodeck caused in Star Trek: the Next Generation....

Dave: That's true. I'd worry about it taking over the planet when I wasn't looking.

Pegasus: It was the most dangerous place on the ship.

Dave: Yeah, it can't have been any better than the beta model!

Pegasus: You've pretty much approached my next question, which was going to be whether computer roleplaying games will ever be real RPGs, will replace getting together with some friends and a lot of pizza.

Dave: My gut reaction is no, but that's not to say it's not going to happen, not to say that it's not better than what exists today, because it will be better, and it will happen. If they find a way to generate the same group dynamics you get sitting together in the same room, more power to it.

Pegasus: So you think that's going to have to wait for the holodeck?

Dave: Yeah, it might not be as fancy as the one on the Enterprise, but you don't have to worry about it taking over the world, either. I know there's more than one group out there working on the concept.

Pegasus: Are computer game companies going about things the right way, emphasizing graphics and special effects?

Dave: Ah, they're taking the easy road out. It's easy to hire people to do graphics and animation. They always leave game design, it's either really, really early in the process when they do the game design, or it's really late in the process, when they can't change anything. Graphics are easy to do, you can compartmentalize it, you can assign it to teams, it's all very wonderful for the bean-counters up in Accounting. It's pretty obvious that if you've got something flashy and gory, it's going to sell to a lot of people, and the bigger companies, as I mentioned earlier, their marketing is pretty narrow, really. They're not out there looking for something new and exciting.

Pegasus: Games Workshop has built an empire on the collectible miniatures game. Not that I should comment, I'm putting together a Chaos Beastman army at the moment. Where I am, if I'm going to get any wargaming done at all where I am, it's going to be pushing little Beastmen around the table against players young enough to be my kids.

Dave: The historical gamers, for years, were pooh-poohing all this roleplaying, because it wasn't real wargaming with lead. Well, a lot of the lead is plastic now, and frankly, if I can get people pushing little Beastmen around, then I can switch them over to Civil War soldiers pretty quick.

Pegasus: How would you address the contention that some game systems, the AD&D rules in particular, promte roll-playing over role-playing?

Dave: Most are roll-playing. I always stress the role-playing part when I do my games. All too many of the computer games that claim they're roleplaying games aren't, just a little bit different stats for a little bit different robots running around. And most of the pseudo-roleplaying games that have come out, in boxed sets and whatever, aren't a lot better. They all pay lip-service to the roleplaying part, but they all end just having you roll different dice for different situations. There again, that has taken away from a lot of the spontaneity of actually roleplaying. When I do my games, I give roleplaying points for people staying within their character. If they want to go out and kill things, that's easy to do, and a lot of referees that's all they do, but there's more to it. The richness is not in just rolling dice, the richness is in the characters and becoming part of this fantasy world.

Pegasus: Going back to Blackmoor, what was or is the best thing about it as games go?

Dave: When something like that is unique, and it was first, it's hard to point at it. There are certainly worlds out there with far more depth and creativity in them than Blackmoor had or has. It was just my little fantasy campaign, in an area not much bigger than a couple of large states put together, maybe Montana. I always found plenty for them to do, they didn't have to go out and conquer new planets every weekend or something like that. We'd go through time warps occasionally, just to keep them on their toes. To me, what made it unique and different was that a lot of what made up Blackmoor was input from the players and the way they were seeing the world, and what they were doing in it. I just kept notes. I built the framework, and would occasionally throw in a few storylines, but it was the players get involved in filling in a lot of the gaps that made a difference. I haven't been involved in a lot of other fantasy campaigns, so I can't say that this is unique to Blackmoor, but it sure seems that way.

Pegasus: So what are you planning on doing next, gaming-wise, development-wise?

Dave: Well, I'm going to Florida to teach computer game design and game interface design. I think that's my next project, probably will be until I get settled in. I've been approached by some companies to do another roleplaying game. My stipulation was, it sounded fantastic, it sounded interesting, but if you want it any time in the next two years, that's probably not going to happen.