David Lance Arneson was a game designer from St. Paul who collaborated with Ernest Gary Gygax to publish the famous tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1974. Although the D&D property changed hands in 1997, and the game’s mechanics have evolved, its core wouldn’t be what it is today without Dave Arneson.
Arneson was born on October 1, 1947, in Hennepin County. His parents bought him the Gettysburg board game in the early 1960s, and he became entranced with historical wargames.
While attending Highland Park Senior High School in St. Paul, Arneson joined the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA). The MMSA’s members were high school and college-age wargame fans in the Twin Cities who gathered to play historical military simulation games. Some of them, including Arneson, were more interested in the game itself than in historical accuracy. This group, in Arneson’s parents’ basement, began playing individual character roles instead of controlling large armies.
Due to his interest in historical wargames, Arneson pursued a history degree at the University of Minnesota. He particularly liked the Napoleonic era. The organizer of the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention, Ernest Gary Gygax, also loved Napoleonic-era naval battles. When Arneson met Gygax at Gen Con (a tabletop games convention) in August 1969, the two men discovered a shared interest in game design.
In the years after Gen Con, Arneson developed a fantasy role-playing game and introduced it to his MMSA group. He eventually modified the rules to allow players to act as individual characters rather than large armies. These characters had backstories and motivations which the players could roleplay. To Arneson, what the characters did outside of combat was just as important as the combat itself. He also introduced fantasy creatures and magic, largely inspired by J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian series.
In 1973, after two years of playtesting (testing for design flaws) with his Twin Cities cohort, Arneson introduced the game he now called Blackmoor to Gygax and his group of gamers. They loved the roleplaying elements Arneson had mixed with fantasy combat. Gygax had published a medieval-miniatures wargame of his own, called Chainmail, in 1971.
After the meeting, Arneson and Gygax mailed their playtesting notes back and forth. It was difficult to iron out the Twin Cities group’s notes, since Arneson preferred improvisational rulings over codified rules. He found that these slowed down the game and the fun.
With financial help from his friend Don Kaye, Gygax formed the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in October 1973 before publishing the original version of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. Dave Arneson was not asked to join the company, in part because Gygax saw Arneson as a designer, not a businessman. Arneson received royalties from TSR until 1977.
In 1976, Arneson moved to Lake Geneva and briefly worked at TSR as a creative director. He was forced out of the company that same year, after he refused to lower his royalties. In 1977, TSR released a new version of D&D called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). Thematically it was the same game, but rules were now more codified and less freeform, as Gygax preferred. TSR refused to pay Arneson royalties for AD&D, citing significant differences from the original version.
Arneson didn’t pursue legal action until 1979. After helping found two companies, 4D Interactive Studios and Adventure Games, and publishing Adventures in Fantasy, Arneson sued TSR for royalties. The lawsuit was settled out of court on March 6, 1981. Neither party was allowed to discuss legally the terms of the settlement. It is public knowledge that Arneson was paid his royalties for AD&D and is credited in all editions of D&D as a co-creator.
In 1984, Arneson was elected into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame. Gygax contracted him to write adventures for TSR based on his original Blackmoor setting in 1986. During the 1990s, Arneson worked in California, using games to teach special-needs kids. In 2000, he moved to Florida and taught game design at Full Sail University. He later suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with cancer. He retired in 2008 and moved back to Minnesota to be with his family and old MMSA friends.
Arneson died on April 7, 2009, in St. Paul. The surviving members of his original Blackmoor playtesting group still get together every year to play the same characters they’ve portrayed for almost fifty years.