Dave Arneson's True Genius Review
What is this gobbledygook?
I think most of you know my purpose for reading all these sources came about because Jon Peterson was spouting lies and nonsense about Gygax in his Playing at the World 2E (2024). That there is an anti-Gygax agenda driving many of the foremost writers on D&D’s history is obvious, but I did not expect to find it also in 2017 with Kuntz’s book. While I hoped it would help clear up some questions I had about his 4th Category, quite often this book is impenetrable. This is coming from a guy who likes Kant.
It also lacked any biographical information, so unfortunately Dave Arneson will continue to be quite the enigma. To demonstrate the absolute BIJ I have been experiencing with this book, let me share some screenshots:
IF Dave Arneson’s Method can only be intuitively known by him, THEN we cannot divine how he did it. IF we cannot divine how he did it, THEN any attempt to do so will immediately fail.
See, whenever we just follow intuitions they’ll immediately set out to contradict themselves, while being irreducible to any kind of scientific inquiry, which Kuntz attempts. Hell, one can make a decent attempt by analogy, since Arneson ultimately put so many concepts into a blender and made something great out of it. The problem is that Arneson had trouble communicating it.
Gygax then busted his ass to get it into print and start the hobby, taking the risk with Don to print those first thousand copies. And make Arneson a little fortune once it caught on.
Still more, Kuntz hates AD&D and its modules because they keep a DM from engaging their own imagination (pg. 27). Mind you, Kuntz sells his own modules.
There is also this bizarre segment of the book where Kuntz wants to show that Arneson was wholly sui generis by claiming that neither Chainmail nor Braunstein really affected Arneson’s gaming. This is dumb because Arneson said he used the former for Blackmoor, and the latter is actually demonstrated in the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary, though that came out two years later, so perhaps Kuntz was unaware.
Now, the pattern of the last several years has been one of undermining the man who delivered D&D, either through insidious usage of sources, or by claiming he “redacted” or “closed” Arneson’s “open” system. The goal is, naturally, money and power over the hobby, and we can’t let it go unchallenged.
Gary Gygax’s rags-to-riches story, as well as his downfall, makes a story as American as any, and the collaboration between the two of them demonstrates that iron sharpens iron. That may actually give me a working title: Dungeons & Dragons: An American Institution.
And yes, any ambiguity about the last word is intentional.
I need to exorcise this book from my head, so I will rip out one more page to leave you with:
