I am not one to simply post a message about the loss of a pivotal person in gaming. I was silent on Gygax’s death, and on the ills and tribulations of others. Frankly, I do this out of respect as I don’t know the person and never met them. While I could say it was a loss for a shared hobby, I certainly feel no personal loss and so I will not, out of respect for that person’s friends and family, pretend to simply because said person was part of the hobby I publish in. Dave Arneson is a different person. With his death, I am saddened, as he and I have met. He actually was influential to me, and one of the reason Ironwood exists is because of a conversation of the course of a strange evening out.
Years ago my friend Dekker still lived here in Orlando and my friends and I were all involved in a quest to get Ironwood going. We really had no idea how to do this, though we felt confident in our efforts to make it up as we went along. Dekker, however, had some contacts at Full Sail, which apparently is a school that a certain co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons was teaching at. Somehow, the connections were made and Dave Arneson and I got in touch and started talking.
In downtown Orlando there was this great little Italian restaurant. It had a great vibe, was a bit pricey for the overall quality of the food, but I loved it. I personally always did my best meet and greets there, and before I got married it had become a frequent first date place for me. I thought that it would be a great place to meet Mr. Arneson for the first time. I also thought it would be a nice place to bring my wife, so I did both.
We waited until we saw Mr. Arneson for the first time crossing the street downtown with a warm smile on his face. Strikingly, the man did not seem like the co-creator of the greatest gaming machine on the planet. In fact, he seemed a standard fan-boy, though a bit aged. He even talked like one (though we really didn’t talk about D&D). After the initial meeting (of which my wife was a huge hit with him), we walked the half block to my favorite restaurant. To our profound sadness (or at least my own) the restaurant was closed down (tax evasion or something like that). We decided to walk a few blocks down to downtown’s nightlife hub to find some food somewhere else.
The entire time we were looking around we were hanging out with Dave Arneson. This is what it was like. It was simply a trio of gamers walking around the city looking for food and talking about…nothing at all really. Just talking.
We found a Vietnamese restaurant (very good but since then closed down for tax reasons). We had a slightly better dinner for slightly more money. The entire night was more of the same. We rarely talked about business, RPGs, gaming, Full Sail, strokes, or anything else. We just talked. My wife had his attention, as she seems to do with most people. She has this personality that just makes you have to talk to her.
When we did talk about gaming it was brief. He never looked at my material. He never pried. We just talked about approaches, how I planned to publish, whether I was going to use the d20 license, etc. His single piece of advice was to work on modules, and to try just publishing that. Obviously I did not take that advice. I had already gotten more from him that that advice could ever do. I was inspired.
Dave Arneson was a gaming geek, plain and simple. He was lovable, personable, and open and honest. It is rare to meet anyone that you can just click with on a level that makes you feel like you had been friends for a long time. It becomes an opportunity to just spend time with another human being, rather than to take what you can from a legendary figure in gaming. I could have spent the entire evening not talking about Ironwood, he brought it up. It was an enjoyable experience just for that.
The single greatest gift he gave me, and the reason why I feel that the moment was a key moment for the creation of Ironwood, was that he put things into focus without actually telling me anything. As we sat there, enjoying each others company it struck me that the most important thing was not the games, or Ironwood’s success, it was that we were having a good time. The most important person at that table was not Mr. Arneson, but my wife. We were both more interested in hanging out with her than talking about gaming because people are far more interesting.
Here’s the thing that I walked away with that night: Gaming is a hobby, my wife is my life.
It is funny how that entire episode could not have a single word whatsoever about that. What was clear is that I could be passionate about Ironwood and gaming, but I should always be more interested in the conversations with my wife and the other people around me than whether or not I even get Ironwood moving. If I ever got it running my priority should never be the company or Ironwood. It showed me how much more interesting life is than fantasy, if you just enjoy it for what it is.
Thank you Dave Arneson for being such a huge influence on my life in one fateful evening. It is because my priorities are for my wife and family that I was able to create Ironwood and release Sagas. It is because I took it all a bit less seriously that I was able to publish a labor of love, rather than a product of labor.
You will be missed.
