Hidden in Shadows

 If you want to find the details for one of the characters that Gary Gygax made and played as a PC, perhaps to use as an NPC in your own game, it isn't terribly difficult. Likewise for the characters of Rob Kuntz, David Megarry Greg Svenson  and others among the early developers and players of D&D.

Perhaps surprisingly though, finding a player character sheet by D&D's co-creator Dave Arneson is not an easy exercise. Sure you can find NPC's and pre-gens Mr Arneson rolled up, but that's about it.

I'm not saying there aren't any which have yet to see the light of day, but at present none are publicly available or even privately circulated to my knowledge. Except maybe one.

 Boot Hill has a list of Fictional Non-Player Characters and their stats. In the second edition (1979) the character creators are anonymous, but by the third edition player names had been attributed to each, and the character of Ben Cartwheel, Rancher is attributed to Arneson.

 Here are the stats:

  Ben Cartwheel (Dave Arneson)

Now I want to point out that we have no way of knowing, as far as I know, if Arneson actually rolled up this character or if someone else did. We also don't know if he actually played the character. I asked David Megarry, who also has a character attributed to him in Boot Hill, and he said that, at least in his case, he didn't remember making the character and thought maybe Brian Blume had made it for him.

All I can say for certain is that this Ben Cartwheel character was attributed to Arneson and may or may not have been made by him. The name is certainly right in Arneson's wheelhouse, so I think the odds are good that it really was Arneson's player character. In any case, unless you are familiar with Boot Hill the stats probably don't mean much to you, but if you are like me, you immediately wonder if they will convert to D&D. Luckily there is a conversion guide published in the 1e AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. 

Most of the stats don't in fact convert to anythin in D&D because they are derived from Speed (spd) and Bravery. Per the AD&D conversion guide we are told the Strength score stays the same and a method is given for converting Speed (spd) into Dexterity. We also are told to determine the character level by adding 2 to the EXP score and that Rancher would translate to a Fighter. The DMG suggests the Bravery scores can be derived from the wisdom score when converting an AD&D character to Boot Hill but not the reverse - there is no D&D Bravery equivalent. However Arneson's Bravery score is quite high in Boot Hill - the near equivalent of rolling a 17 on 3d6 - and I think we should convert the Bravery score to something, but Wisdom is probably not the best choice - perhaps Constitution or maybe Charisma. Lets go with Constitution for now and see what we have so far for Ben Cartwheel D&D Fighter:

That leaves Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. AD&D suggests the player simply roll for these. That’s a bit of a problem now, but we could potentially steal these score from an NPC Arneson had already created, preferably of similar class and level. Such an NPC can be found in the Pregens he rolled up for the Origins convention in 1977. In fact there is a character that lines up well  - #5, a tenth level lord with the following Stats: Str: 14 Int: 12 Wis: 13 Con: 16  Dex: 12 Chr: 17

Conveniently, this character matches exactly Ben Cartwheel's Strength and Dexterity scores, so this is a good match to fill in the blanks. We could translate the Bravery score of 17 to Charisma, but I like the idea of swapping the stats and giving Ben a 16 Charisma and 17 Constitution so Ben is a little less of a clone of character #5. Also, one of the roles of Bravery in Boot Hill is giving the character a "steady hand" in a gunfight, and that seems more in line with Constitution to me. Here is the result:

Ben Cartwheel                                                                       Level  12 Fighter, Hit Points 60                                                    Str: 14 Int: 12 Wis: 13 Con: 17  Dex: 12 Chr: 16