OD&Documentary Hypothesis, Part 1: Distinguishing G&A

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball”:

Not only was OD&D interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text.

Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on Dungeons & Dragons, and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on FMC, I was interested in the development of the OD&D text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ Hidden in Shadows blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on Beyond This Point Be Dragons:

1. In 1972, Arneson sends Gygax a manuscript 16–20 pages long.
2. In a few weeks, Gygax expands this manuscript to 50 pages (approximate to BTPBD).
3. By 1975, Gygax completes a final draft (mostly ignoring Arneson’s suggestions).

Boggs’ project was to identify at which points were different aspects of D&D codified into what would become the original print. Much of it centers on Beyond This Point Be Dragons, the so-called Dalluhn manuscript, which Boggs originally identified as an Arnesonian ‘fork’ of D&D before eventually discovering it was compiled by Mark Bufkin who used to play in Arneson’s group and copied his notes for his own games with some personal touches, like only using six-sided dice (August 2017, November 2017, March 2018). Although, he says, we can’t know exactly what was in the original 18-ish pages, we can compare the content of BTPBD, FFC, and OD&D for what seems to originate from Arneson based on whether material in either BTPBD and OD&D also appear in Arneson's independent First Fantasy Campaign (November 2014):

• Weapon and armor prices
• Construction and prices
• Personnel costs
• Wilderness encounter matrix
• Wilderness evasion
• Wilderness movement rates
• Magic items (basic weapons, potions, scrolls)
• Monster descriptions (mechanics, army composition, wilderness statistics)
• Treasure categories
• Sleeping and subduing dragons

There’s some additional things not mentioned in that blog because they were some of the few contributions Arneson made to the final draft, which were mostly otherwise ignored by Gygax (but we guess they were added later because they were in FFC but not BTPBD): the first is an expansion of rules for magic swords, now having special abilities as well as alignment, intelligence, and egoism (Boggs, October 2016); and the aerial combat rules or “Battle in the Skies”, which Gygax abridged by name in the final version to ~3 pages from Arneson’s original 18 pages (Collins, August 2020).

Other aspects of the game, although they may have been (or certainly were) informed by Arneson’s original draft or Gygax’s experience playing his campaign, were at least filtered through Gygax’s creative lens. Boggs in his post attributes the concepts of classes, levels, experience, and abilities to Arneson, but I think the form they take in BTPBD are non-Arnesonian if not Gygaxian: fighters and wizards abilities are split into experience levels, each requiring 1k experience points, but fighter levels represent a sort of meta-experience into the meta-levels of flunky, hero, superhero from Chainmail (Boggs, February 2012), whereas Gygax assigns each level a specific fighting capability; Arneson had a unified system of equivalence between hit points, point value (to stock dungeons with monsters), and experience points (August 2014), whereas Gygax seems to build his system based on his memory of what he played, possibly partly informed by David Megarry's Dungeon! rather than Blackmoor directly, especially w.r.t. difficulty-scaling in dungeons (August 2019); Gygax condenses Arneson’s list of bespoke personal characteristics into the six ‘standard’ abilities (December 2012); and whereas Arneson built his system on top of Chainmail, except giving figures multiple hit points, Gygax built or recreated from memory a D20 system and modeled figure statistics using hit dice as opposed to hit points (e.g., a hero is defined as 4 hit dice rather than as 14 hit points, also referencing them being equivalent to the hero figure of 4 virtual men in Chainmail, but also granularizing counts of virtual men at intermediate fighter levels). So, that’s what we know.

But that’s not what I said! Sure, Arneson co-authored and thus probably contributed to the composition of OD&D, and we can probably guess what those contributions were by comparing his self-published materials to the drafts and eventually published version of OD&D. That doesn’t mean that the two authors had different priorities in their play-campaigns, with those differences being manifest in their collaborative work (or, rather, that the two authors’ contributions, as described above, express different priorities); or that the work prefigures different interpretations of itself (partly) because of its internal contradictions. Each of those points is a separate thesis which one-by-one builds upon the initial thesis that the authors’ contributions can be distinguished at all. So, we have that foundation: but do the other points hold up? I don’t know. Really.

You thought that was gonna be one post, anyway?