Great Article about Dave Arneson and his bringing a new type of game to the world

“Looking back more than half a century later, it’s very easy to see the development of roleplaying games as a succession of innovations, like individual characters, experience points and levels, dungeons, and so on. A lot of work has been done by people more knowledgeable than I about who first introduced which element into the mix and when. I find such questions interesting, as anyone who’s read this blog should know well. Even so, I sometimes wonder whether concentrating too heavily on them causes us to miss something more fundamental about Arneson’s achievement, namely, that Blackmoor wasn’t simply a collection of game mechanics. Rather, it was a place.“