Cedgewick's Reviews > Dave Arneson's True Genius

Warning: if you don’t like to think, don’t read this book. This book stimulates intense thought.

Rob Kuntz was ushered at an early age into Gary Gygax’s inner circle of friends because of his precocious intellect. That intellect is on full display in this book. More subtly on display, however, is Mr. Kuntz’s unarguable bravery in tackling the firmly-entrenched Gygaxian narrative of Dungeons & Dragon’s creation. In fact, to my knowledge this is the first time anyone in the 43 year history of the game has dared to challenge that narrative in a published work, despite the persistent whispers in various corners of the industry of its fallacy. But what better man to do it than Kuntz, who was at the table with Gary Gygax when Arneson first unveiled his revolutionary new game system?

The book is arranged in the form of three essays. Yes, they are difficult to parse—but those who stick it out will be richly rewarded with many nuggets of thinking that are refreshingly deeper than the superficial coverage the topic of game design typically receives. Not surprisingly, those readers (or reviewers) looking to skim quickly through this unassuming little book and make sense out of it are understandably left perplexed, with a natural inclination to lash out. But how can one expect to absorb the teachings of a master with four decades of design experience without the requisite input of time and effort?

The first essay deals with the unique system qualities of Arneson’s creation, Blackmoor, which Arneson conceived of and developed more than a year prior to revealing it to Gygax. Here Kuntz’s genuine excitement and respect for what Arneson achieved is readily apparent, as he reveals 26 distinct leaps in game design that he has identified from Arneson’s work. Most notably is Arneson’s genius in merging two seemingly disparate concepts: the open system of play as exemplified by children imagining together, and the closed system of play as exemplified by a typical board game. Kuntz then moves on to demonstrate, through analysis of Gygax’s own shifting statements as well as through recounting several key events, how TSR abandoned a basic tenet of Arneson’s philosophy: that of the gamemaster as the absolute creator of his own highly individualized game. In its place, Gygax instituted a new and far less creative role for the gamemaster as simply the administrator of standardized and structured rules (AD&D and the boxed sets of increasing complexity), premade game worlds (Greyhawk and Mystara) and even premade adventures (modules). Kuntz points out that Gygax instituted this shift at TSR to further monetize Arneson’s concept while privately adhering to Arneson’s original philosophy at his own gaming table.

The second essay is the most abstract, deep, and challenging of the three, delving into Arneson’s system of systems thought process. Arneson would iteratively intuit his way toward a goal, testing each iteration of the design to determine where it stood at present relative to the goal. Arneson imposed no constraints (such as deadlines) on his searches; his Blackmoor game was in a constant state of flux as he iterated it over the span of years. Kuntz points out that Arneson’s thinking was absolutely divorced from market concerns. By contrast, today’s game designers (perhaps due to deadlines, budgets, and directives handed down from on high) regularly duplicate the basic form and functions of an existing game to produce a new iteration that conceptually is not fundamentally new. In other words, they start from and work within the rigid confines of a template, whereas Arneson’s thought process was devoid of any such base structure. The unstructured, unconstrained nature of Arneson’s continual experimenting resulted in the dramatic design leaps he achieved (as enumerated in the previous essay) and culminated with the development of what Kuntz terms the concept of the RPG engine. Kuntz notes that the conceptual model Arneson developed is comprised of two interdependent components, the conceptual interface (a gamemaster determining the result of each action taken by the characters as directed by the players, but without constraining these actions in any way) and the mechanical apparatus (the game mechanics). Kuntz tells us that the game mechanics can only represent what the conceptual interface decides is in need of representing. Thus, the game mechanics must always be subservient to the conceptual interface if the system is to evolve in real time (allowing existing concepts to change, resulting in changes to the game mechanics, and new concepts to be added along with new game mechanics to represent them), a highly desirable trait of Arneson’s original system. This leads directly to the refutation of Gygax’s claim that Dungeons & Dragons was derived from his miniatures wargame Chainmail, which is a system consisting purely of game mechanics and which therefore critically lacks a conceptual interface to drive evolution of the game in real time.

The third and final essay further refutes Gygax’s claim that Dungeons & Dragons descended from Chainmail, or from David Wesely’s Braunstein game for that matter, by using comparative analysis. Such an approach is refreshingly scientific compared to other methods, relying solely on comparing the system qualities of the two games to determine if any fundamental traits observed in the child game are also exhibited in the supposed parent game. The approach is akin to DNA analysis, which revolutionized the field of forensics. Of particular note is the absolute lack of reliance of the method on anything external to the two games themselves (old documents, correspondence between the game designers, old memories, etc…) Kuntz first defines parentage as requiring that the supposed parent game have at least 50% of the fundamental traits (i.e., the DNA) of the child game. Kuntz then runs down the list of the 26 leaps in game design that Arneson achieved (as enumerated in the first essay), which he takes as the fundamental traits of both Blackmoor and D&D, and asks the question of each, “does Chainmail or Braunstein exhibit this?” Of the 26 traits, Kuntz finds that 19 are entirely absent from Chainmail, 5 are present in a limited sense, and only 2 are definitely present but still somewhat limited in scope compared to D&D. Similarly with regard to Braunstein, Kuntz finds that 17 are entirely absent, 7 are present in a limited sense, and only 2 are definitely present but again still somewhat limited compared to D&D. Since both games possess only approximately 8% of the 26 fundamental traits of D&D, a far cry from the 50% required for parentage, Kuntz asserts that D&D did not derive from either of them. Instead, they should be considered merely as influences on D&D, just as many other games of the time were.

If, by now, the reader of this review gets the sense that I have summarized all of the thoughts and topics contained in this 69 page book, I can assure you that I have not. But given the superficial nature of the other reviews that I’ve seen for this book, I thought it necessary to provide you a taste of the thought-provoking richness Kuntz offers should you dare to read his book—if you are brave enough to do so, good luck and enjoy the adventure!