While I remain focused on finishing the second edition of Thousand Suns – hence my continued absence from posting here regularly – I was nevertheless determined that I would not forget to commemorate the birthday of Dave Arneson this year, as I have too often in the past. Rather than rehearse why I keep erring in this particular fashion, I thought it might instead be more fruitful to look at just one of the many reasons that Arneson deserves to be remembered not only on this, the 79th anniversary of his birth.
Whereas Gary Gygax left behind an enormous body of writing through which we can directly encounter his ideas and contributions to the hobby, Arneson's legacy is more elusive. He wrote and published, of course, but I would argue that, rather than what he wrote, his greatest contributions to the history of the hobby happened before any rules had been written down. They happened at his table, refereeing Blackmoor and many other games with his friends in the Twin Cities. In fact, I'll go one step further and suggest that one of Arneson's greatest contributions to the hobby was his way of thinking about what a game could be.
When Arneson began the medieval fantasy campaign that became Blackmoor, there were obviously no roleplaying games as we know them today. There were wargames, some of which connected individual battles or engagements to a larger conflict. There were also David Wesely's remarkable Braunstein experiments in which players took on individual roles and pursued their own, sometimes conflicting, objectives under the supervision of a referee. There were also innumerable fantasy stories to draw upon, not to mention many other raw materials from which roleplaying games would eventually be fashioned. But there wasn't a rulebook explaining how to put all these things together – not that that stopped Arneson from doing it anyway.
Looking back more than half a century later, it's very easy to see the development of roleplaying games as a succession of innovations, like individual characters, experience points and levels, dungeons, and so on. A lot of work has been done by people more knowledgeable than I about who first introduced which element into the mix and when. I find such questions interesting, as anyone who's read this blog should know well. Even so, I sometimes wonder whether concentrating too heavily on them causes us to miss something more fundamental about Arneson's achievement, namely, that Blackmoor wasn't simply a collection of game mechanics. Rather, it was a place.
Week after week, players returned to "the weird enclave" in "a nice bog" between the Great Kingdom and the fearsome Egg of Coot. Their characters explored and fought in it, schemed within it, and, perhaps most significantly, changed it through their actions. Things happened when they ventured into the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor, but the dungeons weren't the whole game. Outside, there was a world filled with rulers, factions, and monsters. In Blackmoor, player action had long-term consequences and Arneson used those consequences as starting points for later sessions. In this way, Blackmoor, this imaginary place, accumulated a history that nobody, not even Arneson, could have known beforehand.
From the vantage point of the present, that sounds utterly ordinary, because it's fundamental to the way many of us understand roleplaying games today. Consequently, that makes it difficult for us to recognize how extraordinary it would have been at the time. Consider that a "traditional" game is entirely bounded by its rules. Even a complicated wargame attempts to specify beforehand what can happen and how it is to be resolved. Arneson's Blackmoor was founded on something rather different. This was a game whose boundaries could expand whenever the players attempted something nobody had yet anticipated.
The referee describes the world and portrays its inhabitants. He knows things the players don't. He also decides what happens when the rules provide no obvious answer. More importantly, though, he takes the unexpected things the players do and incorporates them into the evolving world they're creating together. Their successes, failures, schemes, mistakes, and ridiculous ideas all become facts with which everyone must subsequently contend. In this conception of play, the rules are indispensable, but they are not sovereign. Rather, they are tools used by the referee and players to interact with an imagined world that is always larger than the procedures used to describe it.
This is Dave Arneson's lasting legacy, a conception of the referee and the campaign that, while born out of miniatures wargaming, transcended them. I get the impression from accounts of the early Blackmoor campaign that Arneson was constantly tinkering. His conception of both the rules and the campaign itself was in a regular state of flux, which only makes sense. He was doing something new and thus could not possess a finished theory of roleplaying games. He had a campaign to run for his friends and, if one of them wanted to try something unexpected, he needed some way of determining what happened next.
The hobby now possesses more rules than Arneson could possibly have imagined in the early 1970s. There are systems covering nearly every genre and style of play, some of them refined over the course decades. There are also innumerable books explaining nearly every aspect about running RPG campaigns that you could possibly imagine (and some you probably couldn't). Yet, all that accumulated knowledge can sometimes obscure the beautifully simple insight at the heart of what Arneson and his players discovered: you don't need to know beforehand what the campaign will become.
What you do need is a place. You need some interesting things happening there and players willing to interact with them. And, yes, you do need rules to resolve the things you can anticipate, though you also need a referee willing to make judgments about the things you can't. After all, the characters will go somewhere you didn't expect. They will become interested in an NPC you invented five minutes earlier and ignore the one you thought would attract their attention. They will hatch plans for which there are no rules. When that happens, you roll some dice, think about the consequences, and then bring those consequences back to the table at the next session. Slowly, almost without anyone noticing it, you're bringing a world into being.
That's the part of Dave Arneson's legacy I find most worth remembering on his birthday. Blackmoor demonstrated that a game did not have to be entirely contained within its rules. There would always be something beyond the edge of the map, something the referee had not yet imagined, and that nevertheless would interest the players in a way no one had foreseen. This is the kind of game that can only grow through play. Dave Arneson's greatest contribution was discovering a new kind of game, one in which the referee creates a world, sets it in motion, and then relinquishes control over where that world will go. The players act and the referee responds; the world changes as a result. Everyone, including the referee, finds out what happens next.
