Research Findings, Part 2-Fantasy Wargames to D&D

I left off last in my research findings telling how the release of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy revolutionized the traditional, historical wargaming format and changed it into a fantasy genre. The next step in the evolution of fantasy war games into true role playing games is credited to two men: Ernest "Gary" Gygax and David Arneson. Referring back to Steve Darlington's article "RPG History Part One", Gary Gygax and some of his friends in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin had created a war game that "gave an accurate model of most aspects of medieval warfare". The game was called Chainmail, and was published by Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, which was Gygax's company, and later versions of Chainmail include rules about giants, trolls, dragons, and magic spells.

While Chainmail wasn't a role playing game at the time, big changes were on the way for Gygax. Gygax was a member of a local medieval warfare enthusiasts' group called The Castles and Crusades Society while he was writing the rules for Chainmail. David Arneson, another member of this group was experimenting with role palying concepts in 1968. Arneson assigned roles and responsibilities to the members of the warfare group while they acted out battles, and the players had to stay in their role of the king, or the knight. This idea interested Gygax and together he collaborated with Arneson in the early 1970s to modify the Chainmail game system into a true role playing game. Later versions of the modified Chainmail rules became the earliest versions of Dungeons and Dragons.

Unfortunately, all was not magical and perfect with Gygax and Arneson's business partnership. According to Darlington's article, Arneson left TSR less than a year after Dungeons and Dragons was realeased. TSR continued to prosper and publish the game, but did not pay Arneson the royalties he was legally entitled to. Gary Gygax is thought of as the sole founder of role playing games, but Arneson has been forgotten.

Dungeons and Dragons got off to a slow start. In "A History of Role-Playing Part II", Gygax is quoted as saying that the public's opinion of the game was "not a hot reception". It took over a year for the first thousand copies of the D&D system rules to sell out, however the second thousand copies sold out in under six months. By 1979, D&D was selling 7000 copies a month.

D&D received criticism for being too complicated or too simple. The game rules written for the players belonging to Gygax and Arneson's gaming circles, so the rules and styles were unfamiliar to beginner players. The rulebooks for early D&D rely on the players already having extensive knowledge of the Chainmail combat rules. Spells were vague and combat statistics tables were difficult to interpret. This forced players to create their own rules and work around the vague or complex parts of the game. It was the idea and potential of the game that kept people playing.