Dave Arneson's Twin Cities group

[rainflower]

I joined a gaming group that has a good mix of people in it, and a few of them have been around a while. Long enough to have been players with Dave!
I can't promise anything, but I'm going to try and get some time with them and learn about their gaming with him. I'll post (with their permission) of what I find here. It might be a while before I get around to it, they are busy and I moved to this area just at the end of June.
As an intro, I asked about OD&D and one of them said she was an office manager for a game company. I asked which and she said:
Sorry to get back to you so late! My husband got started in the game business back in 1976, and worked for Dave Arneson at Adventure Games. He was spun off into his own company, and I was his office manager. We go back aways; "What are we playing, Dave?" "Something called Blackmoor." - Dave Arneson

Hopefully I'll get some good reports from them

[rainflower]

I briefly talked to Jeff, who worked for Dave and then a company was split off of that to create... Tekumel! Jeff worked for MAR Barker extensively and has hundreds of hours of play time in the Empire of the Petal Throne. He played a lot of games with Gary and Dave. He said Dave was a killer referee - he would lure players into the dungeon and slaughter them, then he would laugh at them. He thinks this is why he struggled selling his games, he was a bit of a brute DM and turned players off. He said eventually they would mess with Dave and avoid the dungeons on purpose and Dave would complain about it haha. Jeff himself didn't care for Dave's games much because of this, but he still liked Blackmoor, and at one point they played a game where Dave made a technology thing with a switch that the characters found, and it would teleport them between Blackmoor and Tekumel. When this would happen, Dave and Barker would switch seats and one or the other would DM based on the world. He said Dave was very ad lib, and while he was difficult as a DM he was an incredible player that made pretty fantastic characters, like cinematic quality. Gary ran his games very linear and more logical. Jeff and his friends didn't care so much about gaining levels and such, they liked progression but that wasn't the focus - to them it was a survival game (with a chance!) and that brought the most reward.

This was just a quick talk, I plan on scheduling some time with to get as he said "The gory details."

He shared this website that he and some old timers are on (including Mike Mornard, whom I believe is on this site?)

chirinebakal.proboards.com/

[Finarvyn]

Both Jeff and Mike used to post here. Dave Arneson did, too, back in the day.

** Jeff left because he felt he was getting too much pushback about his style of play, and he withdrew from most message boards for that reason. (Not just ours. I'd love to see him come back.) Jeff has a loose style of play which he says is NOT following those of Arneson but does mimic Arneson's style somewhat. I think he is frustrated by modern gamers, whose style is much more detail-oriented.

** Mike had his own space here for a while and was known for not really playing nice with others. I think he likes to cultivate the "grumpy old coot" persona, but in person he's a lot nicer. I'm not entirely sure why he left this place, but it may have been a conflict with a moderator. I've always enjoyed Mike's perspective, too, and miss having him around.

Glad you are connecting with some of the old guard. Take careful notes when they say stuff.

[Desparil]

Aug 7, 2023 21:10:18 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

** Mike had his own space here for a while and was known for not really playing nice with others. I think he likes to cultivate the "grumpy old coot" persona, but in person he's a lot nicer. I'm not entirely sure why he left this place, but it may have been a conflict with a moderator. I've always enjoyed Mike's perspective, too, and miss having him around.

My recollection of that thread is that people were speculating on counterfactuals about the early years of the game, but Mike didn't pick up on the fact they were talking hypotheticals and started getting upset and talking down to the other posters about how things actually were back then. I believe at that point a moderator or admin (Rafe maybe?) warned everyone that name-calling and deliberate antagonism are against the rules, but Mike continued to argue and call people stupid so he got a 24-hour timeout. When he came back he made one more post basically saying he's taking his toys and going home, then deleted his account. This was a few years ago, so I might be off on some details.

[chirinebakal]

Aug 7, 2023 21:10:18 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Both Jeff and Mike used to post here. Dave Arneson did, too, back in the day.

** Jeff left because he felt he was getting too much pushback about his style of play, and he withdrew from most message boards for that reason. (Not just ours. I'd love to see him come back.) Jeff has a loose style of play which he says is NOT following those of Arneson but does mimic Arneson's style somewhat. I think he is frustrated by modern gamers, whose style is much more detail-oriented.

I left because I'm largely irrelevant to modern gamers. The emphasis, back in my salad days, was on world-building; the assumption was that the GM was going to create their world, and players would adventure in it. The 'rules', few as they were, were tools to run the world with. What I see these days, both on-line and at the FLGS, is that the emphasis is on game mechanics; 'the build', the mechanics, 'crunch', and 'system mastery' - the latter of which got me kicked out of a Blackmoor campaign because I "didn't have system mastery of the 5e rules and so was holding the rest of the party back" - and I haven't played in a game or any sort since. I can take a hint that I'm not welcome.

I still run my sort of 'hand-wavy, loose-goosey' (as described by 'serious' / OSR gamers) games on occasion, and people seem to enjoy the 'player-character agency' and 'open-sandbox play' that my Free Kriegspiel gaming methods use. The problem that I see is that Free Kriegspiel games (or 'FKR' games, as Mr. Mornard coined the phrase, and which has led to yet more recondite on-line debates) require that the GM has to have a very good working knowledge of how their world works and exists. Phil had that with his Tekumel - which was at variance with his published Tekumel - and I do it with my Barsoom, Ancients, and Night Witches games. I'm far more interested in the world - the 'fluff' / 'lore', as people describe it - then I am in number-crunching.

Dave and Gary, in my experience with them, knew how their Blackmoor and Greyhawk worked and ran their games accordingly. Their rules, i.e. the 'OD&D boxed set' of what were their 'house rules', reflected how they ran their worlds. So, I guess you could say that I do run my games - both the RPG campaigns and the pseudo-Braunsteins - in the same style as they did, but with my own take on how to run them on the table.

If anything I do is useful in your games, then help yourself to what I can offer; I've been at this gaming lark for some 45 years, and there might be some useful nuggets of information lying around in the dustbin of my brain. I'm happy to talk, and I'm looking forward to being questioned by the OP.

[nagnar]

I want to voice my appreciation and encouragement

A few years ago when I saw your writings on those things related to playing worlds not rules and Free Kriegspiel it was inspirational and clarifying for me.

I ended up not fully going the way of running my setting all with a Free Kriegspiel method but its a valuable and flexible tool I now have in my GM toolkit. It also led me to learning about oracle tables and using them to enhance the method. I am finding it very useful for handling things I don't have or want rules for and abstracting complex situations.

For playing worlds it made me realise I should start with how I want my setting to work, then picking or designing rules to fit, rather than rules first then setting. I found no existing ruleset that worked how I wanted it to for the setting, so I've ended up having to make rules to fit.

Please don't get encouraged by what you encounter from 'modern gamers'. I've gone through similar feelings of disconnection and lack of relevance. But our perception of what is relevant is skewed by what gaming we encounter, especially at gaming stores and what is most visible online. There is so much diversity of playstyles and groups out there, they are just not immediately visible. There will always be people out there that benefit from your wisdom.
Personally I don't pay much mind to what people are doing with 'mainstream modern rpg gaming' at game stores or online. We just aren't looking for the same things. Instead I focus my gaming with the players, groups and communities I interact with that share similar interests and playstyles.

[chicagowiz]

Good to see you back, Jeff! FKR is alive and well in my OD&D/Traveller games as well!

[chirinebakal]

Thank you both for your kind words. We'll see how this goes.