of Dungeons and Dragons and Doom

or, best friends means you get what you deserved

I read a handful of books about the history of Dungeons & Dragons for no good reason, especially since I only meant to read one¹ but I enjoyed that one enough that I picked up a few more² and now feel compelled to just sort of talk a bit about what I gleaned from this strange history of what has become one of the biggest and most important games in gaming history.

Before we get into it, I should probably say that I’m not much of an RPG gamer. I have played a few times and I’ve found it fun almost every single time, but I’m not someone who spent their childhood playing D&D or anything like that. But my interest in these games as a concept has grown and continued to balloon over the last decade so the point that I sure would be interested in trying out an actual campaign or whatever.

Which is a long way of saying that I’m an outsider to this hobby but one interested in it for varying reasons.

Dungeons & Dragons was started through the collaboration of a few people and it could not exist without the foundation of the wargaming community of Minnesota and Wisconsin. But most people attribute the game to Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax.

Dave Arneson, by all accounts, was a great idea person and an excellent Dungeon Master but terrible at actually producing something that could be usable for someone else. Defining and clarifying and laying out the rules - that was not Arneson’s skillset. It seems to be the aspect of creation he struggled with most.

Gygax, on the other hand, was an obsessive for the mechanics and rules. He understood that a game needs rules and boundaries for it to be repeatable.

It’s the difference between basketball and ten guys standing around a hoop and tossing a ball around.

There’s more freedom without all the rules and litigation, but all that freedom also has many obvious drawbacks, especially if you’re asking other people to come and play with you.

Famously, this partnership and friendship dissolved with Arneson leaving the company, Gygax trying to remove him from the game’s history, and Arneson suing Gygax to retain royalties on all future D&D games.

Contemporary accounts seem to blame Gygax but Gygax and Lorraine Williams, who took control of TSR (the company Gygax founded to publish D&D) and ousted Gygax, mostly erased Arneson from the history of the game he helped create. Eventually, Arneson was returned to his position in the cultural understanding as a founder of the Roleplaying Game through Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World in 2012.

Many people fixate on Gygax and Arneson’s relationship and collaboration, as if there’s really a way to give a single person, or even two people, the credit for something like Roleplaying Games.

They were important, of course, but trying to determine who was more important, who was the real founder, the real genius, seems very strange to me and actually gets in the way of our ability to understand where culture comes from.

The simple truth is that you needed both men but you also needed the long history of wargaming and hundreds of other components of culture and timing to make D&D make its way out of an impoverished near unemployed weirdo’s basement.

What I found more interesting about the history of D&D and TSR is how disastrously the company was run.

They developed a game that became a money printing engine with near limitless capacity for growth and they mishandled it so severely that it may have died decades ago, and the Roleplaying genre would be in the hands of some now defeated rival.

TSR was made to be for gamers by gamers, but these gamers had more of a sense for fun than they did for business, and as success swept in, they made more and more hilariously terrible decisions.

Part of this can be understood, I think, by reckoning with the abject poverty of Gary Gygax. If you’ve never been so poor that you skipped meals or did the arithmetic to figure out how far a pound of rice and a few cans of beans could get you, this may be difficult to understand.

But imagine going from making less than $5,000 in a single calendar year to being the owner of a company doing tens of millions of dollars in sales, and the difference between those circumstances were about two years.

You may find that you spend money on some absolutely wild and stupid things.

Gygax and TSR tentacled out into Hollywood, into physical retail stores, and on into ventures that had no relation to gaming at all, like pulling a ship out of Lake Michigan. The company was also being ravaged by giving family members key positions within the company and using company funds for personal use, and on and on.

And so this empire of fun that Gygax ushered in was nearly destroyed by himself and the people he surrounded himself with, including the people whose money he relied upon to get TSR off the ground, the brothers Blume.

Many gamers, gamemakers, and fans of D&D hated how Lorraine Williams handled and managed TSR, but I also think that D&D would’ve died without her. She may not have understood games or even how to treat creative talent, but D&D also refocused on gaming while expanding its reach. This was most obvious into publishing fantasy novels, and especially those by RA Salvatore.

So while she kept D&D going, helped expand its reach and even mainstream fantasy (there’s an argument to be made that the Lord of the Rings movies don’t become the same success without millions of fantasy fans whose gateway was D&D or D&D novels), she also helped drive TSR to its final demise.

Wizards of the Coast, founded by Peter Adkison, a huge D&D nerd, who made Magic: The Gathering in part through his love of D&D, bought TSR and assumed its $30,000,000 of debt in order to keep D&D alive.

He helped course correct, brought back old gamemakers and writers, tried to heal wounds, including the rift between Gygax and Arneson, and ushered D&D into what it became for the rest of us. D&D is now more mainstream than ever before, helped in part by Stranger Things and a global pandemic.

But I want to return to id Software since I read a few books³ about them as well, and I think the contrasting elements are fascinating.

The mismanagement of TSR is really astounding and I think an interesting contrast is id Software, the developers of Wolfenstein and Doom and Quake.

Like TSR, id Software was made by gamers who had more sense for fun than anything else, who were making just ridiculous amounts of money through the games they created, which were no less groundbreaking. They essentially invented the First Person Shooter and were instrumental in developing 3D game engines, which basically every game you’ve played in the 21st century relies upon.

Interestingly, Doom came out of a D&D campaign. They also faced the same kind of Satanic Panic that TSR faced.

The difference between id and TSR is really that these guys sought expert help at a certain point. Too, they kept their eyes focused on the real goal: making more and better games.

One of the most important elements, too, was John Romero (I really cannot recommend his autobiography enough for a deep look at creativity). Romero had been part of a number of gaming companies previously and had even started a few, so he had an understanding of organization, revenue flow, and so on. And I think it’s true that the long development of Quake could have bankrupted the company or caused them to cut corners in order to get the game out faster had it not been for Romero creating other development pipelines for games that were not made by the core id team.

It’s also worth remembering that Romero was in his twenties, whereas Gygax was in his forties when they were creating some of the most influential and important games of all time.

The youth and inexperience of the id Software founders led to conflict that resulted in Romero getting ousted from the company. From there, he started a new company that famously set cash on fire to produce a game that bombed commercially and critically.

But there’s something to be learned there, too.

Where id began as a group of likeminded people who became friends, TSR and Romero’s subsequent company, Ion Storm, came together more through business interest. TSR needed cash to publish D&D and Ion Storm didn’t really consider how different work and management styles can poison a company and, by extension, every product.

The clash of personalities, of competing interests, with the regular employees taking the brunt of it, causing them to quit or get fired or become stressed to the point of breaking down all led to TSR’s demise but also Ion Storm’s.

Despite everything that ended up going wrong, I found Romero’s autobiography full of so much compassion and understanding, even for those who you’d imagine he had great bitterness for. Even when John Cormack, his partner in id that changed gaming, kicked him out of the company, he reflects on it with generosity and understanding, going so far as to take Cormack’s side into account.

And there is a lesson here for creative endeavors.

Roleplaying Games came out of a community. Out of friendship and shared passion. Out of joy and love. The same is true of Doom and Quake.

When business and the actual dollars and cents came into play, poison slowly dripped into the well. Amounts of work got tallied and assigned values, which led to bitterness and resentment in all directions. This festered into a full-blown disease that threatened to destroy everything once beautiful.

I think the truth of any creative endeavor that begins to make money is that you need both kinds of expertise:

• Creatives, obviously

• The business minded

When I do regulatory work for my customers, I always encourage them to do what they do best and to let me do what I do best. I can’t make their products and I don’t want to. But they also don’t know the regulations, but I do. So let me take that work on while they keep on doing what they know.

I mean, ideally, the creative founders also know how to handle business. But such people are rare.

And now I leave you with something completely different: a 3.5 hour review of id Software’s Doom. But I do it for good reason, which those who know or who watch may be able to piece together for themselves.

This is also a clue for an upcoming project.

1. Slaying the Dragon

2. Empire of Imagination, Game Wizards, and Of Dice and Men

3. Masters of Doom and Doom Guy