Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (19 page)

The
Players Handbook
focused heavily on character creation, offering lots of rich detail and opportunities for personalization. In addition to the ten core classes, players chose between seven playable “races”—dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, human, half-elf, and half-orc. They picked one of nine “alignments” (chaotic evil, chaotic good, chaotic neutral, lawful evil, lawful good, lawful neutral, neutral evil, neutral good, and true neutral) that provided a loose description of their character’s moral code.
¹⁰
They determined what languages the character could speak (from a pool including Lizardman, Hobgoblin, Kobold, and Orcish) and what equipment they carried; the handbook describes a monetary system (1,000 copper pieces = 100 silver pieces = 10 electrum pieces = 5 gold pieces = 1 platinum piece) and provides long lists of gear to make each hero unique (low, soft boots cost 8 silver pieces, and a ten-foot pole costs 3 coppers).

For all its detail, the
Players Handbook
doesn’t spend much time actually describing how the game is played; the book only covers what a player needs to know to get started, like how to move and fight. Gygax hid much of the game’s inner workings behind a curtain, promising those rules in the upcoming
Dungeon Masters Guide.
Until
that book was published, DMs would have to wing it based on what they could glean from the
Handbook
or default back to the original or Basic D&D set.

One thing was clear about the new rules: The Basic Set didn’t really feed into Advanced D&D. Rather, they were two different experiences, parallel universes; AD&D was its own game from level one upward. Before long, most experienced players would come to look down their noses at the Blue Box set: Basic was for kids, AD&D was for men.

AD&D was also Gary Gygax’s game, from start to finish. He’s listed as the sole author on the cover and on the title page; Dave Arneson only receives a thank-you in the preface, along with twenty other friends, family members, and TSR employees. Gygax even appears on the book itself. The wraparound cover illustration, by David Trampier, shows a group of adventurers looting a temple dominated by a huge statue of a horned devil: “
There is one dweeb-like chap on the back cover,” Gygax would later admit, “that has a certain resemblance to yours truly.”

The
Players Handbook
was another big hit—
TSR sold ten thousand copies in the first three months after publication. That kind of success began to attract attention from outside the game world. On November 29, 1978, the Canadian national newspaper
The Globe and Mail
published one of the first long features about D&D to appear in a major media outlet: “Dungeons and Dragons: An Underground Game Is Ready to Surface” features interviews with D&D players at a Toronto hobby shop called Mr. Gameway’s Ark and notes that the game “
inspires the sort of fanatic devotion usually associated with mind-bending religious cults.” Shelley Swallow, a Mr. Gameway’s buyer, is quoted describing the game’s growth rate as “astonishing” and saying the store sells twenty-five sets a week—twice as many as Scrabble.

Gygax, never shy when it came to publicity, was also interviewed for the article, which describes him as “
the J. R. R. Tolkien of the games world” and “the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.” Cocreator Dave Arneson only warrants a misspelled parenthetical: “(The magic ingredient, the labyrinth, was borrowed from another designer, Dave Arnuson.)”

At least he got a mention. Arneson’s name didn’t appear at all in the
Dungeon Masters Guide
when it finally arrived in the summer of 1979. In his preface to the book, Gygax offers “an alphabetical list of all those persons who in some way contributed to the formation of this work”; the twenty-nine names that follow include his players, his coworkers, and even the novelist Jack Vance, whose fantasy stories helped inspire AD&D’s spell-casting rules. Somehow, D&D’s cocreator didn’t make the cut.

Still, there’s no denying Gygax’s singular achievement. The
Dungeon Masters Guide
is a mammoth piece of work, written entirely by the man himself—240 pages of rules and tables advising the DM on nearly every matter imaginable. There’s a section discussing how to deal with character aging and death, instructions for when your players want to develop new magical spells, even a table specifying the amount of time it takes to mine tunnels through different types of rock. If your players might conceive of doing it, Gygax labors to provide rules for it. The
Dungeon Masters Guide
is comprehensive to a degree that no game before it approached and few that came after attempted.

“
Only the most severe critic could point at a minor omission, let alone a serious one,” game journalist Don Turnbull wrote in a review of the
Guide
published in the UK magazine
White Dwarf
. “In the end, set to the task of reviewing something to which I know I cannot do justice, all I can say is—can you afford to be without it?”

The initial publication of the
Dungeon Masters Guide
was plagued
with technical problems: All forty thousand books in the first printing had to be recalled because they had sixteen pages from the
Monster Manual
mistakenly bound into them; twenty thousand books in the second print run were gouged by a loose wire on a boxing machine, and their covers had to be replaced. But the book was still a critical and commercial success. “
Our once lonely pastime has arrived with a vengeance,” Tim Kask crowed in the March 1980 issue of
The Dragon
. “Sales of Advanced D&D
DMG
bear this out; it is the best-selling game/gamebook of all time.”

Elsewhere in the magazine, Gygax shared in the celebration: “
The course of TSR Hobbies’ development has been rather like a D&D campaign. When we finished our first fiscal year back in 1975, we were pretty much a low-level-character sort of company, with gross sales of only about $50,000. We had [an] excellent experience the next year, with a $300,000 figure, and in 1977 we doubled that to $600,000. TSR didn’t quite double again in fiscal 1978, ending the year at a gross of near $1,000,000, but in ’79 we did a bit better, finishing at a gross of well over $2,000,000. From the way 1980 is shaping up, there is no reason to doubt that we’ll at least double in size once again. It is possible that we’ll be the largest hobby game company—and ready to start toward the really high-level game producers such as Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers—by 1982.”

In the four years after Tactical Studies Rules reformed into TSR Hobbies, the company’s revenues surged 4,000 percent. By Gygax’s reckoning, half a million people around the world were playing D&D, and bringing more of their friends and family into the hobby each day. D&D was competing with Monopoly and Scrabble, not Bunnies & Burrows. The game was practically a license to print money.

None of this had slipped the attention of Dave Arneson.

In April 1975, when Tactical Studies Rules had sales of just $2,000 a month, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax signed a contract giving the company the rights to Dungeons & Dragons. In return, TSR agreed to pay royalties for each and every copy sold—a total of 10 percent of the cover price, split equally between the two men.

When you’re only selling two hundred copies each month, 5 percent of a ten-dollar game doesn’t add up to much money.
¹¹
But D&D grew so quickly that when Dave Arneson left TSR a year and a half later, his royalties were probably around a thousand dollars a month.

Arneson kept collecting his 5 percent after he departed the company, and for years, the checks kept growing. But in the fall of 1977, he noticed his payment was smaller than expected. TSR had started selling the Basic Set, and it was a big hit, but the company wasn’t paying royalties on those sales. He protested, but the complaints went nowhere. Then TSR published the
Monster Manual,
and then the
Players Handbook,
and denied payment for those books too. Basic and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the company said, were new games and weren’t covered under the 1975 agreement, so TSR didn’t owe him more royalties.

On February 22, 1979, Arneson filed a lawsuit against Gygax and TSR in Minneapolis’s U.S. district court, accusing them of violating his royalty agreement. TSR, it alleged, had published games that were copied and derived from D&D, so Arneson deserved to be credited and paid as their author. The suit also claimed that TSR falsely represented the
Monster Manual
and
Players Handbook
as the sole work of
Gygax because it wanted to stop paying Arneson royalties—and that because he had been denied the “
commercially and artistically valuable right” to be identified as the author of Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson’s reputation had been irrevocably damaged. He requested $100,000 in damages and asked the court to order TSR not to publish any D&D rule books unless they listed him as coauthor.

In mounting their defense, Gygax and TSR claimed the books had nothing to do with Dave Arneson. “
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a different game,” Gygax wrote in his column in the June 1979 issue of
The Dragon
. “It is neither an expansion nor a revision of the old game, it is a new game . . . it is necessary that all adventure gaming fans be absolutely aware that there is no similarity (perhaps even less) between D&D and AD&D than there is between D&D and its various imitators produced by competing publishers.”

In addition to arguing independent creation, the defendants also tried to get the case dismissed on a technicality: Arneson had filed the suit in Minnesota, so Wisconsin-based TSR said the court didn’t have jurisdiction. But a judge denied the motion, pointing out that TSR had sold almost $12,000 worth of product to Minnesota customers. The case was set to go to trial.

But before that could happen, Arneson, Gygax, and TSR reached a settlement. On March 6, 1981, they agreed that Arneson would receive a 2.5 percent royalty on sales of all three AD&D rule books, up to a maximum payment of $1.2 million, and on “
any revised edition or foreign language translation thereof.” Arneson wouldn’t get an authorship credit in any of the rule books, but it was still a pretty good deal: In the third quarter of 1982, he received $60,236.68 in royalties.

The detente didn’t last long. In 1983, TSR published
Monster Manual II,
a follow-up to the contested bestiary. In apparent deference to the “any revised edition” language in the settlement, the company
granted Arneson a 2.5 percent cut of all sales—and paid out royalties totaling $108,703.50 in the first year of its publication.

Then the checks stopped. On November 2, 1984, TSR sent a letter to Arneson saying that the payments had been a mistake because the
Monster Manual II
was not a “revised edition,” and that since he’d been overpaid, the company would take the difference out of his future royalties for the other books.

Arneson sued again, alleging breach of both the settlement and his royalty agreement. The new lawsuit argued that
Monster Manual II
was substantially the same as its predecessor, so it was covered by the agreement—and that even if it wasn’t, and TSR paid him the royalties by mistake, they didn’t have the legal right to withhold his future earnings and had to eat the mistake. In 1985, the court ruled in his favor, and Arneson got to keep the cash.

Arneson filed five different lawsuits against TSR in the three decades after his departure, and while most of the details and settlements were kept confidential, it’s clear he made a lot of money from Dungeons & Dragons. He funded his own game-publishing company, Adventure Games, and a computer-game company, 4D Interactive Systems; he also invested a lot of money in other people’s game companies, never getting much in return except for the satisfaction of making good games.

Still, the relationship between Gygax & Arneson would never be repaired. “
We don’t hate each other,” Arneson said in 2004. “We don’t hang out with each other that often, though. We just kept going our own two separate ways.”

1
. TSR quickly overwhelmed its supplier of the cheap polyhedral dice included in each box and had to procure more directly from the Chinese manufacturer. As a result, the fifth and sixth editions of the Basic Set, both printed in 1979, came with two sheets of numbered chits printed on perforated card stock instead of dice.

2
. Gygax’s argument that the Blue Box might lead new players into Original D&D made about as much sense as Microsoft saying that fans of the 2012 video game Halo 4 should buy Pong while they wait for the next installment. While TSR did keep selling the original set—in a white box marked “Original Collector’s Edition”—through the end of the decade, it’s likely that few players moved from Blue Box to White.

3
. “The various eyes of a beholder each have a different function . . . 1 Charm person spell, 2 Charm monster spell, 3 Sleep spell, 4 Telekinese [
sic
], 5 Flesh-stone ray, 6 Disintegrate ray, 7 Fear, 8 Slow spell, 9 Cause serious wound, 10 Death ray, 11 Anti-magic ray.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual,
page 10.

4
. Gygax admitted that he “thoroughly enjoyed”
The Hobbit
but maintained that he disliked the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy: “
Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low powered . . . [Tolkien] drops Tom Bombadil, my personal favorite, like the proverbial hot potato . . . The wicked Sauron is poorly developed, virtually depersonalized, and at the end blows away in a cloud of evil smoke . . . poof!”

5
. Saul Zaentz owns the rights to a lot of creative works he didn’t create, and frequently litigates to protect them: In 2011, his company sued a small pub in Southampton, England, that had operated for more than two decades as the Hobbit. Creedence Clearwater Revival front man John Fogerty wrote the song “Zanz Kant Danz” allegedly about Zaentz after they battled over the rights to CCR’s music; the chorus of the song is “Zanz can’t dance but he’ll steal your money / Watch him or he’ll rob you blind.” After Zaentz sued, Fogarty changed the name of the character in the lyrics and the title to “Vanz.”