Dave Arneson...has Run Out of Hitpoints

[Bloodyredbaron]

http://us.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/04/10/ob ... index.html

http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/out ... neson-rip/

Dave Arneson, RIP
Dave Arneson invented this column.

Dave Arneson invented the reason you read this column.

Dave Arneson invented the reason the website that hosts this column exists.

Dave Arneson invented “armor class.” He invented “hit points.” He invented the “cleric.” He invented the “dungeon.” He invented “so, last week you cleaned out the dungeon, and now you’ve heard about another, even scarier dungeon, over the ridge there.” He invented “everyone plays one guy, and I play all the monsters.”

Dave Arneson co-invented Dungeons & Dragons.

Dave Arneson invented role-playing games.

On a personal note, he was a friendly, generous person who genuinely liked games and gamers; seeing him at a convention, or a store appearance, was always a delight — for me, for the fans, and (as far as I could tell) for him. I had the good fortune to talk to him a lot at various shows; he was a demigod adept at playing a mere tenth-level game designer, or first-level fan, but he also liked hanging out and talking about the Civil War, or his students, or what was going on in my life.

I first met him at GenCon 1997, right after Wizards took over TSR. He was sitting alone, near the Wizards booth, wearing a badge but otherwise inconspicuous. Certainly, there should have been throngs of worshipers bestrewing his lap with rose petals, or a shaft of light from the Fifth Heaven, or an honor guard of bugbears, or something. But I got to shake his hand and thank him for inventing my spare time, and my career.

And now he has leveled up.

No words can describe how I feel right now.

[Shadow Wulf]

May he rest in peace. Im not a Dungeons and Dragon fan but I know how it feels when someone you admire dies. For me it was Stan Winston, he is in a better place now.

[Wingman]

Cursed 4th Edition and making people no longer mortal after they reach a certain level.
Cya dude.

[Aki]

Ouch, that's sad. RIP.

[Grayheart]

And another great personality of roleplaying is gone. May he rest in peace and have some great campaigns with Gary Gygax!

[Scott Gardener]

I was just about to say that we lost Gygax last year. It seems that we're losing D&D's Founding Fathers right and left.

I've looked at D&D Fourth Edition on the shelf, and I'm really feeling left behind. It's changed so much that it doesn't look or feel like the same game any more. That the writers of the original are now dying only adds to that sense of alienation.

D&D started role-playing gaming as a genre and made possible Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse in the nineties. It also set the stage for trading card games like Magic: the Gathering to come about, kindling the fires of its own phoenix-like resurrection at the hands of Wizards of the Coast almost a decade ago. The game has been personally influential in a substantial portion of my imagined works. I sometimes refer a period from 1991 to 1993 in my life as my "Ravenloft era," because so much of the transitions in my life were parallel to those of a character I played in a short-lived but highly memorable gaming campaign set in the Ravenloft campaign setting. I first met at least one of my long-time friends by talking with him about D&D; he now makes his living working for Steve Jackson Games, who publishes role-playing games.

[Berserker]

It's changed so much that it doesn't look or feel like the same game any more.

This. Blame the World of Warcraft generation.

But all is not lost. There has been a resurgence of interest in the classic Dungeons & Dragons feel in fantasy games like Dragonwarrior, Castles & Crusades, and Barbarians of Lemuria.

[Terastas]

I'd say about 5% of my inspiration I owe to Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), and the rest of it I owe (directly or indirectly) to Gygax and Arneson.

Peace be with them both.

[Scott Gardener]

I don't really need to go back to dungeon crawls and plot-less treasure quests. I just miss D&D resembling D&D. A lot of the changes they made belong in a campaign setting, not the core rulebooks. They changed things that were working fine, like the main character races and classes. The alternate races such as the dragon-kin and the guys with antlers are cool, but put them in a supplement or something. But, I'm more bothered by the axing of the most fundamental of character building concepts, such as fighters/warriors, wizards/magic users, priests/clerics, and thieves as basic character classes. Second edition did pretty well tidying things up after Unearthed Arcana threw in some wrenches, like "Comeliness" on top of "Charisma." Third edition was a dramatic improvement that streamlined and polished a lot, solving a lot of flexibility problems and refining the system quite well. The d20 open gaming standard was also a welcome evolutionary point. It just feels like Fourth Edition took a sudden turn away from natural evolutionary development, into "let's fiddle with it just for the sake of fiddling." I'm all for being experimental, but not with the main system itself! That's like solving our current economic crisis by having all our governments replace money with dinnerware--restaurants become banks, and sporks become a commodity tracked on the New York Stock Exchange.