Thank You Dave And Gary

I consider myself lucky that I was able to go to Gencon the last year that both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson attended. I got to meet them both and shake their hands and thank them for creating the RPG genre. Without both of them, what would there be? Sure, RPG's might exist, but what would they look like?

Gary gets most of the credit, and that's not surprising. After all, he co-founded TSR, he became the voice of D&D and AD&D and through the years, he sort of marginalized Dave's contributions. I debate in my mind whether he created AD&D as an effort to flesh out the game that people were having a hard time understanding or to erase Dave from the record. Yes, the game was hard enough for some new players to understand that something needed to be done, but then Dave felt he needed to resolve matters in court on more than one occasion.

This raises some questions. Dave has always been quick to acknowledge that the roots of his Blackmoor campaign, the idea of role playing, came from a Braunstein campaign his friend Dave Wesley had created and refereed until he joined the military. Dave's group had played Gary's Chainmail game before this Blackmoor campaign abandoned most of those rules and started creating new rules for a player controlling one character and having some adventures in the dungeon under Castle Blackmoor.

So, players are role playing these characters, dungeon crawling, using an armor class system in combat and several other things that Dave created on the fly and scribbled into his notebook. This is where Dave gets the tag "father of role playing games." I think it's fair, but in comments on message boards and interviews, Gary marginalized that, saying role playing began when kids started playing let's pretend. Furthermore, Gary claimed in one posting that as a young boy he and his friends role played outside and kept track of things with index cards.

I won't even touch the second thing. I can't prove it one way or the other, though it seems unlikely to me that they kept track in that way. However, Dave never said he created "let's pretend", but really, how many people gathered around tables playing a game where they adventured into fantasy lands, went through dungeons and gained power and prestige with each adventure? Come on now, that stuff was unheard of in 1970. Fantasy miniatures? Sure. Fantasy role playing? Not so much. It's a fair title for Dave as far as I'm concerned, and I'm happy that Dave's later years saw him get the credit he deserved and that he shared that credit with those who deserved it as well.

This is not a knock against Gary, because D&D would never have existed without him. This man spent over a decade molding and shaping this game and this genre at TSR and he deserves the credit he gets. But, there was no fantasy role playing table top game before Dave and his group started their adventures in the land of Blackmoor. There would be no D&D without Dave either, regardless of how brief his time was in putting the game together.

I often wonder if Dave realized what he had in Blackmoor? Sure, the guys at the table told him he should get this thing published, but did he think it would really sell, even a little bit? Obviously he didn't think it would be that big, or he would have approached things differently. He could have taken this game some place else (unlikely) or he could have found a way to get the money together to invest in TSR as an equal partner. I know he didn't have a lot of money then, but if you believe in your creation, you find the money and you make sure to play a part in the game's evolution going forward.

I think he was just a guy having fun who didn't fully realize what he had there. How could he? Nothing like this had been created before. These guys where literally creating the genre. Can you imagine Dave as an equal partner? It's been said that despite his disagreements with Gary, he frequently voted his token shares of TSR with Gary. It makes you wonder what direction things may have gone in from there.

I may never have been a player as Basic D&D might never have happened or maybe not evolved into the full fledged game it became. Basic was pretty much labeled the Gygax/Arneson line and AD&D was Gary's line. People underestimate the ability the simplified game has to draw people in, and I do think that factored into Gary keeping Basic around. It sold millions and many people went to AD&D from there. Some of us didn't.

As often happens, the founders get tossed aside. Dave first, but then Gary. TSR ended up going to the person Gary brought in to help him gain full control. A lot has been said about this person, and I'll leave that for another day. I will say the fact that this person would pull the company out from under Gary is pretty messed up in my book. But they did keep it alive for a little over a decade before Wizards could buy it from them.

What I did like about Wizards taking over TSR and the D&D line was that they paid tribute to both Gary and Dave. Dave's name started appearing in rulebooks again, and he was allowed to create content for Blackmoor and have his vision of things presented to a new generation of gamers. I know that had to mean a lot to him that it came full circle and he got to see how many fans he had out there.

If it seems like I'm putting Gary down, I'm not. Gary's TSR made me a fan of Basic D&D. He brought in people like Frank Mentzer and Tom Moldvay, whose work I appreciated. He remained active creating content for the game and was active on at least two forums doing Q&A for his many fans, answering the same question sometimes way more than he probably wanted to, yet still doing so with class.

It's been a while since I've posted here, but I felt the first thing I should write was something about the two men who started it all. People love 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 and that's fine. Fans of those games make comments bashing Gary as if he's some kind of jerk and not a creator of what became the game they play now. Just remember you wouldn't be playing D&D at all if not for Gary and Dave trying to publish this crazy game almost 40 years ago. I bet they're now up there at their respective tables gaming and having a ball.