Interview with Gary Gygax

the_bahua writes "Have a look at this one-on-one with Gary Gygax, over at KCGeek.com. It's a tell-all, see-all, look into the mind of the man behind the second-best thing to do at four in the morning. Responsible for one of the cornerstones of geekdom, he is largely unknown to many, including many RPG fans."

Comments

Gary Gygax's contributions to gek culture

[WTC Survivor]

Gary Gygax is a bit of a personal hero of mine; I recently completed a research project in which I charted the life and times of Mr. Gygax. Some of the more interesting biographical links I referenced are:

• His recent interview with RPG.net
• An insightful writeup at GameSpy
• A fairly thorough biography of the man
• And, of course, Gary's homepage

Gygax. Nice public speaker.

[derinax]

13 years ago (*gak*) we invited him to speak at our dorm at Stanford; it became a campus-wide event and was quite well-attended by some 100+ people.

As I recall, he was witty, self-effacing, yet very respectful of the community he helped create (in sharp contrast to some other cult figures, esp. amongst the Trek cast). This was in the midst of his fall-out with TSR, so he didn't exactly have glowing words for the company that booted him.

Afterwards there was a long line of Ur-geeks with Monster Manuals and Players Handbooks in-hand for him to sign. I'm glad I brought my DM Guide... :)

He's a great public speaker; consider him if you are involved in any kind of college / geek community.

Re:TSR gaming standards as used by others

[sam_handelman]

At the moment it is literally an open standard - WoTC introduced some kind of license to use their basic rules in your own products (it is at the back of the 3rd edition PHB.) A number of other companies are churning out 3rd edition supplements under this license.

A long, long answer to your question:

The early history of RPGs is somewhat convoluted and murky - very little was actually published and it is not certain that Gary Gygax really invented the roleplaying game and he certainly didn't invent table top miniature gaming, although he popularised both - but many of the early xeroxed rules sets mentioned in the article were not, in fact, xeroxes of Gygax' rules, but xeroxes of other rules sets (Warlock and a pre-publication version of Arduin are two of these early RPGs which I have actually played - these days, you'd think of them as just house rules for D&D, not seperate games) some of which were eventually printed in small commercial releases and said things like "Major D&D variant" or the like, on the cover. Many of the rules appearing in subsequent editions of Greyhawk/D&D actually first appeared in these house rules sets that were floating about, and TSR/Gygax earned a certain amount of emnity from people for failing to credit them with their ideas (to be fair, some of them were somewhat obvious and Gygax could've come up with them on his own, or encountered them via third parties who didn't know who had invented a particular rule, making it impossible to give proper credit.)

At one point, TSR initialised some sort of legal action against the people who printed Warlock, claiming a combination of infringement on the Dungeons and Dragons trademark (which I'll grant) as well as some malarky about owning the concept of the roleplaying game. After that, and some other similar events, there was a certain movement among people who printed roleplaying games to avoid using TSR's game mechanics.

In the mid 1980s, Palladium (among other game companies) starting getting away with more-or-less duplicating TSR's game mechanics, without any repurcussions or legal trouble to my knowledge. Also, I think Dave Hargrave (Arduin) had been doing it all this time.

All of this is based on interviews I did with older gamers as part of an abortive anthro project (I dropped the course and never finished it,) most of whom do not like Gary Gygax AT ALL (about a third of the interview material, which I haven't saved, consisted of reasons he's a jerk), so take them with a grain of salt. Don't accept them as gospel like you would any other slashdot post :)

Nowadays, if you wanted to print a game and copy any number of rules-as-ideas (as opposed to verbatim text) from 3rd edition D&D, or any of a number of other games, you could certainly get away with it. You can get an idea of this by looking in the back of a Vampire rulebook, which (at least used to) credit all of the games it had "borrowed" ideas from.

Most of these games, or information about them, can be found on the net, except for Warlock (Warlock: The Black Spiral, which I found doing a search just now, is not related to the 1970s Warlock D&D Variant in any way.)