“We are in a mass delusion that it’s all Gary, that he’s the father of role-playing games,” he said. “Humans do not like to admit they’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled.”
Kuntz’s thesis is that Dave Arneson was deprived of his share of the credit—deliberately and falsely.
Who are these people who’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled? Not anyone interested in the origins of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m not especially interested in this topic, but both Gygax and Arneson are credited as authors of the original edition. Isn’t that a clear enough sign that Gygax was not solely responsible?
I’m not committed to a particular view of the origins of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m sure there’s plenty of credit to go around. But a careful reader will note how D’Anastasio’s article repeatedly undermines its thesis. It acknowledges that:
- Arneson himself characterized his Blackmoor game as a Chainmail variant;
- “Arneson didn’t have a concrete ruleset; he was making things up as he went along”;
- Arneson gave Gygax “18 pages of handwritten notes, a lot of which were simply stats for Chainmail monsters”;
- Arneson “wasn’t much for polished rulesets” and his Blackmoor game “didn’t exist as a full-blown set of rules”;
- Gygax subsequently generated a 50-page manuscript of rules, “later accepting and integrating some notes from Arneson”;
- the ecosystem and mythology of D&D reflect Gygax’s fantasy preferences; and
- Gygax’s and Arneson’s home games differed from one another and from the published rules.
Boiled down to its essence, D’Anastasio’s claim—presented through the words of others, often Kuntz—is that Gary was merely responsible for the mechanics of the game, and that Arneson authored the all-important core of the game: “the things that D&D fans love the most about the game—the things that distinguish ‘role-playing’ from ‘fantasy wargaming.’”
Assuming that role-playing is the true core of the game, however, it is not intellectual property in any meaningful sense. It may have been an imaginative breakthrough in gaming—serially playing a single character in a fantasy setting—but it’s a very general idea. Arneson might be the father of D&D but no more than he is the father of all role-playing games. It doesn’t mean that Arneson’s role in the creation of the specific game of Dungeons & Dragons as it developed was especially meaningful.
And on its face, the claim that game mechanics are secondary is quite dubious. The early editions of the game are markedly different from later editions of the game, and they have different fanbases largely because of their different mechanics.
So when Kuntz says that Arneson’s Blackmoor “wasn’t a prototype” and that Gygax stole a "fully functioning game" from Arneson, he’s making an insupportable claim. Notably, he chose to make this claim only after Gygax’s death.
There’s no grand conspiracy to deprive Arneson of his rightful share of the credit. Setting aside the fact that most gamers don’t really care about the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson has a lesser reputation than Gygax for the same basic reason that we know less about civilizations that didn't leave behind written records. Gygax was far more productive in this respect. We can still reference, adopt, and modify the mechanics he set down in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks and they have informed the content of subsequent editions. Arneson did not leave such a legacy.
