The Inventions of Dave Arneson
The man who imagined a world where you could be anyone — and the game would remember who you were.
Who Was Dave Arneson?
Dave Arneson (1947–2009) was a wargamer from the Twin Cities of Minnesota who, in the early 1970s, did something no one had done before: he let players become individual characters in a persistent world that remembered what they’d done last week.
A member of the Midwest Military Simulation Association, Arneson played in David Wesely’s experimental Braunstein games and Duane Jenkins’s Brownstone sessions. He absorbed what worked — individual characters, freeform play, persistent identity — and fused it with Tolkien, horror television, and naval wargame mechanics into something entirely new: the Blackmoor campaign (1971).
He partnered with Gary Gygax to publish Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. Their partnership was complicated and often contentious. But the conceptual breakthrough — the idea that started it all — was Arneson’s.
Born: Hennepin County, Minnesota, 1947 Key Period: 1971–1975 Died: 2009
The Inventions
Three things Dave Arneson created that didn’t exist before him.
The Tabletop Role-Playing Game
Before Arneson, games had pieces. After Arneson, games had people.
In his Blackmoor campaign, Arneson combined individual character play (from Wesely’s Braunstein), persistent identity (from Jenkins’s Brownstone), a fantasy setting, experience points that let characters grow stronger, and a Dungeon Master who built the world and narrated the story. No one had assembled these elements before. Gygax later systematized it into publishable rules — but the conceptual leap was Arneson’s.
He called it a “medieval Braunstein.” It became the foundation of an entire entertainment medium.
Hit Points
Ships had hull points in naval wargames. Arneson had co-designed Don’t Give Up the Ship (1972), where vessels absorbed damage until they sank. His insight: give that same mechanic to a person.
It sounds obvious now. It wasn’t. Wargames used instant-kill resolution — a figure was hit or it wasn’t. Arneson’s decision to let individual characters accumulate damage over time, tracked as a depletable number, created the fundamental resource-management tension at the heart of every RPG and video game combat system ever made.
Every health bar in every game you’ve ever played descends from this idea.
The Published Adventure Module
Before 1975, if you wanted to run a role-playing adventure, you had to write the whole thing yourself. Arneson changed that with Temple of the Frog, published inside the Blackmoor supplement — twenty pages of maps, room descriptions, NPCs, and encounters, pre-written for any Dungeon Master to run.
It was the first published RPG adventure module. The format was rough — embedded in a supplement, not sold standalone. But the concept was revolutionary: a professional game designer could craft an experience, package it, and hand it to thousands of other game masters to run at their own tables.
The standalone adventure module wouldn’t arrive until Palace of the Vampire Queen (1976), and Gygax’s tournament modules would perfect the format. But Arneson got there first.
What Those Three Things Built
These three inventions aren’t separate ideas. They’re one architecture.
The RPG concept gives you a character in a world. Hit points give that character something to lose — a reason to care, a resource to manage, a clock ticking down. And the adventure module means someone else can build the world for you, which means the format can scale.
Together, they created a $15+ billion industry. Every tabletop RPG — from Call of Cthulhu to Pathfinder to Blades in the Dark — runs on the framework Arneson imagined. Every video game RPG — from Final Fantasy to The Witcher to Baldur’s Gate 3 — descends from his character-in-a-persistent-world concept. Every health bar in every shooter, every open-world survival game, every roguelike — all trace back to a wargamer in Minnesota who decided that people, not ships, should have hit points.
Arneson didn’t build the cathedral. That was Gygax’s genius — the systematizer, the publisher, the evangelist. But Arneson drew the blueprint on the back of a napkin in 1971, and everything since has been an elaboration on that sketch.
He died in 2009, at 61, of cancer. The industry he invented was just beginning to understand what he’d done.