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D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax Has Passed Away
Mearlus writes "In the recent past co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons Gary Gygax has worked with Troll Lord Games, a small tabletop RPG publisher. Their forums have up a post noting that Mr. Gygax has apparently passed away. Gygax was known, along with Dave Arneson, as the Father of Roleplaying." Saddened reactions from well-known designers have already begun to appear online. Consider this is an in-memoriam Ask Slashdot question: How has D&D (and tabletop roleplaying) touched/improved your life? Update: 03/04 23:16 GMT by Z : With more time, official announcements have had time to appear. Many sites are featuring posts on Gygax's impact on gaming, including touching entries on Salon and CNet.
What loot did he drop?
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Spell of Silence on all the trolls!
RIP, Gary.
It kept me from ever being in danger of becoming an unprepared teen father.
Get the cleric.
I'd have been a debt-ridden teen father driving a 13 year old Japanese subcompact. Now I'm a debt-ridden middle aged father driving a 13 year old Japanese subcompact.
"Gary Gygax has passed away? I'm--"
* rolls dice *
"very sad to hear that!"
(With apologies to the writers of Futurama).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
...if only I had a 1000 GP gem.
Man failed his save roll.
RIP
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Now who's going to help Al Gore guard the space-time continuum?!
I'd like to thank Gary and D&D for ensuring my virtue in grade school.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
[rolls dice] a pleasure to know him.
Part of my childhood just failed its save vs death.
Thank you Mr. Gygax, for your role in many enjoyable hours of leisure.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Pouring out a 40 of mountain dew for my dead homie.
It says he died of health problems, but we all know his passing was the result of the most classic of roleplaying deaths, the Nethack death "touching the edge of the universe". That's a death worthy of the father of roleplaying... thanks for helping me and friends through our early teens, GG!
stuff |
Nevermind the cleric. Which funeral home?
Seriously, does anyone have funeral details yet? I somewhat envision the geek version of Mother Theresa, when she died, only with about a third as many people attending...
However, I expect twice as many people demanding that the Pope canonizes "Saint Gary", the Patron Saint of Natural Twenties, Preserver of Virginities; may your troubled heart find shelter in His mother's basement.
S.
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
"Mr. Gygax, care to explain why I wasn't included in Deities and Demigods?"
of 4th edition.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...crazy elfish-looking demon from...
;-)
:-D
That's a githyanki. Didn't even have to look it up.
D&D, specifically first edition rules, were a huge part of my childhood, too. I remember my first introduction. Being six or seven, my cousin had me take over for him while he was up from the table. Killed his shiny new cavalier (Unearthed Arcana had just come out) with a 1/1.
Wow. Until just now, I had almost forgotten. Some 10 years later, I set fire to his '90-ish Cavalier. It was a completely freak electrical fire in the dash, but it was me, just the same.
Anyway, Gary started an avalanche and I'm glad I got caught up in it.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
They're going to wonder at the legions of people in various modes of dress, from lawyers to pimply-faced geeks to Vin Diesel, that will stop by and pour out a tube of dice on his grave.
And then they'll realize they have to have someone go out and clear up the piles before they can mow. A lawnmower hitting Gygax's grave will cause a 30' radius spray of polyhedrons, doing from 1d6 to 3d6 damage depending on the horsepower of the mower.
The early versions of D&D, perhaps through 2E but certainly the earlier stuff, had a distinct charm. The combat system was certainly crappy, but is was so simple and flexible that you could do what you wanted to with it easily. World War II squad vs company of orcs and trolls? Give me 20 minutes to throw it together and we'll start. At least he went before WotC completely pissed all over his design by releasing the crap known as 4E. There's nothing left of D&D in that system, just a bunch of WoW kludge. Wonder if he dropped any good loot?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"As a side note, my sister-in-law that's currently in college was struggling with depression and a lack of friends until she started doing RPGs. Now she's got as many friends as she could wish for"
She used a ninth level spell just to get some friends?
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Everyone knows God is a killer DM. No one makes it out of *his* modules alive at the end.
Puts Gygax himself to shame.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Is this how Iran is going to shut down the Internet?
I would argue that Mendel has had no impact on molecular genetics.. His model system was horribly simplified and, for the traits he studied, wasn't even perfectly accurate.
Mendel stopped doing genetics before epistasis and population genetics were even conceived of, much less understood.
Genetics succeeded after him not because of his influence in understanding heredity, but despite it. We all know that nonhomologous recombination plays an important role in the genotype of certain offspring and that random mutations can cause drastically new traits. (I'm ignoring the fact that such traits can result in selective advantage).
The reason genetics has succeeded as a field is because molecular geneticists have worked out a lot of the mechanisms of gene segregation on the molecular level. Mendelian inheritance has mostly played a peripheral role in this.
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-1 offtopic = you admit you don't understand the sarcasm = you wasted your mod point
Just callin' it like I see it.
What, good sir/madam, is the offering required to begin worship of your august self, and the fiery blade of sarcasm you so righteously wield.
Truly a shame. His game had a profound impact on me during my formative years.
Observes 1d4 + 1 minutes of silence then loots his body.
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Rolling in his grave?