“Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons”, by Jon Peterson

 

The MIT Press, 400 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0262542951

I can’t remember a time when Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t a part of my life. Way back when I was a wee nipper, my oldest brother Rob bought my next-oldest brother Tom the original Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set sometime in the late 70s. That is, this thing right here:

 

And Tom was hooked from the get-go. It wasn’t until many years later that I started to tag along with him to gaming sessions with his regular crew, but I was still hooked on the whole Fantasy Dragons Swashbuckling Sorcery Blood Gore and Stuff thing, too (especially after watching the Rankin/Bass take on “The Hobbit”). So when I was in 2^nd & Charles and saw this, Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson, a behind-the-scenes history of E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.) and All That, I thought “What the Hell; gotta spend my credit somehow”.

Be advised: this is NOT a history of D&D’s development as a gaming system, but of how the game and company behind it came into being and how it was all fought over virtually from Day One. Oh, that stuff is covered somewhat throughout the book as needed, but the focus is really on the feud between, especially, Gygax and Arneson and, later, Gygax and…everyone else.

What Jon Peterson has provided is an inside history of TSR, starting when it began life as Tactical Studies Rules, the sort-of-club that players formed to publish a set of cribbed-together rules for table-top wargames and the like. It all started in the early 1970s, with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson collaborating with other friends; they had a bit of success here and there and so decided to form a company to distribute the rules they made up on the fly, as it were, which would eventually become Dungeons & Dragons and other games.

But bad blood, bad dealings and questions of ownership and authorship soured the deal early on, with the fallout especially from early authorship issues haunting TSR for a long time, especially when TSR seemed to be raking in the money. But inventors seldom make good businessmen, and Gygax, Arneson and the Blumes (that would be Brian and Kevin) definitely were not. So on October 22^nd, 1986, Gary Gygax was maneuvered out of his own company in order to save TSR. Under new management, TSR lasted another 10 years until another crisis ended with a sale to Wizards of the Coast, who own it still.

What to make of all this? Whose side should one be on? That can be a difficult question to answer, but after closing the covers for the last time I determined that, while Gygax could be insufferable, overbearing and unwilling to share glory, at least he put the work in to make TSR in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular a success. Arneson just comes off like a petulant, flaky loser who was lucky to have parlayed his incoherent idiocy into years of royalty checks and who was perpetually developing games that never seemed to be completed (the fact that he had no ability to either write or design makes this a fairly one-sided battle).

Many of his ideas made it into D&D – such as the experience points thing – but so much of what he wanted to do remained undone, due to his inability to buckle down and just do it, already. No doubt Arneson’s partisans have their own gloss on the Battle of TSR, but in Peterson’s telling, at least, their boy does not come off well at all. What I was left with at the end was a sense of gratitude to TSR – whoever created it – for making this game and others that gave me such joy and adventure at times when I especially needed it, and sadness for Gygax, jerk that he may very well have been, for his untimely professional and personal ends.