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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.
D&D isn't actually my system of choice, but roleplaying games in general were about the only time that my friends and I could get together. It was a way for us to force ourselves to hang out, and I've made several friends that I expect to keep in touch with for many years to come. I've always made up worlds that I play in, so for me D&D was a way to externalize those worlds and allow other people to affect them with me. It also appeals to many nerds' tendency to break down and quantify the world around them.
:D
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
A better question would be what aspect of my life hasn't been influenced by Gygax. Safe travels, Gary.
When I was 13 I spent one summer, er, not at home. I only got through it by visiting a 'friend' and his buddies and playing D&D every day. 7 days a week. All summer. That's how I ate. That's where I showered. D&D didn't make me friends with those kids, but it made us close and support one another. Well, it helped them support me.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
You gave me a lot of my favorite childhood memories.
Thanks Gary. We'll miss you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
He will be sorely missed. R.I.P. Gary.
Thank you so, so, so much.
D&D helped me through my timid teens, made me friends, made me love reading (introduced me to Tolkien) and led me to Rogue, Hack and Nethack - which, in a way, helped me fall in love with computers.
I'll be sure to break out my old, old, old D&D books and read them over for old time's sake.
Thanks Gary and rest in peace.
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I'd argue otherwise to the videogames, honestly.
Gygax's biggest impact, setting-wise, was Greyhawk. How many video games are based off Greyhawk? None, as far as I know.
He left before AD&D 2E, and AD&D 1E was horrifically broken as a rules system. The gold box games succeeded in spite of the system, not because of it.
The reason that the SSI / Bioware / Black Isle games succeeded was not because of the D&D rules, but because of good writing, good settings, and good programming. The D&D connection is mostly peripheral. Witness Fallout's success even after divorcing itself from GURPS for an example of why this is true.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
It wasn't the rule system itself that was important, but the very idea of a role playing game. D&D was the first attempt to come up with a war game system that could be applied to general storytelling with players each playing a single character. All the other RPG systems were derived from this core idea, and a lot of the fantasy and nearly all fantasy computer games can trace their influence, directly or indirectly, to this first RPG.
Of course, once someone had created one RPG, it was fairly easy to come up with others and improve upon it. It seemed so obvious... once someone else had thought of it.
Oddly enough, during the 70's a lot of former flower children tried to come up with games where players actually played together rather than against each other. They abhorred D&D for its violent content--and yet, it fit exactly the dynamics they were looking for, and RPGs are the only kind of non-competitive game that survived the decade.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"Really: Ernest Gary Gygax was a god. "
please. He created a game that allowed people to play individual pieces in a war game. It became an influential game that created an industry, but he was hardly perfect.
His comment about women being good for gaming because they bring food and tidy up says much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Using ancedotal evidence to demonstrate that D&D is bad is idiotic. There are weak and damaged people who will take on to anything, whether roleplaying, alcohol, gambling, sex or whatever.
Gygax gave us an incredible hobby which has blossomed. I've been roleplaying for nearly a quarter of a century now, have a wife, two kids, a dog, a house and a full time job. I consider myself reasonably well adjusted.
If D&D caused you problems, then quitting was a good thing, but don't extrapolate that on to entire hobby. That's ludicrous and unfair.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Really, in these respects, it's little different from any other hobby or distraction.
I know dozens upon dozens of healthy, well-adjusted adults who, shockingly, have good jobs, function normally in society, have regular consentual sex with other people, and game.
People who "piss away" their future playing D&D aren't doing it because D&D is just that addictive or compelling. They're doing it because they're so unhappy with the real life they're avoiding. What you're seeing is the symptom, not the problem.
I played D&D as a child and am better for it. It fostered a love of storytelling and is solely responsible for my love of probability theory. If everyone wasn't so busy in their lives at the moment, I'd quite happily still run a game as an adult.
Mr. Gygax, thank you for creating something so great.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
He left before AD&D 2E - actually, was forced out after his ex-wife got controlling interest in TSR and decided as a "fuck you" to mess with the company.
The gold box games succeeded in spite of the system - oddly, I find 1st/2nd/AD&D easier to use (not to mention cross-compatible) than the 3.0/3.5 rules-lawyer nonsense.
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.
Nevertheless, I bow to superior rule-lore.
Given a long enough time line, everyone rolls a 1 eventually.
No, youngdev, you haven't, assuming that the "D2" you're referring to is Diablo 2. Computer RPGs reflect the experience of in-person RPGs about as well as cybersex reflects the experience of in-person sex, if even that well.
Take your CRPG, but replace the computer's role as a mediator of what you can do and what the results are and replace it with an actual, living, breathing human who is able to assess any action you can imagine and (with the aid of the game's rules) determine what results. At the broad physical level, there's no asinine "there's a completely immovable knee-high table here that you must walk around" simply because the game engine doesn't have support for it - if you can't jump over, stand on, flip over, carry away, take a bite out of, etc. the table, there's a specific reason for it and you have a decent chance of determining that reason.
Much more importantly, though, it means that you can take on the persona of your character and interact with the other characters in the world - both PCs and NPCs - through that persona. You can set your own goals instead of or in addition to those presented to you. You can even negotiate the terms of the goals presented to you or their rewards instead of just walking up to the guy with punctuation floating above his head, click to talk, click a few canned responses, click "accept quest", kill 20 monsters, collect gold, repeat. (Admittedly, that's WoW. I haven't played D2, so I don't know whether it uses the floating punctuation or not.)
You can also change the (game) world in tabletop RPGs. Things don't respawn as soon as you turn your back (unless, as in the table example, there's an actual in-game reason). If there's a dragon threatening the city and you slay it, it stays dead instead of just waiting for the next person to accept that quest so you can go farm it. If you ignore it, then that city is going to be toast and your characters will be held at least partially accountable for their decision not to even try to save it unless they make sure that nobody knows it was their fault.
These last two combine to open up possibilities for actual stories to develop in the course of the game rather than just a series of "deliver item", "kill X monsters", and "clean out dungeon" contracts. With a good gaming group, you can get stories comparable to, and even more intricate than, the plot of a good novel or movie.
It's a whole different world.
I don't think anybody said it was. But there are a sufficient number of people out there who say that it has helped, at least in learning how to focus creativity, that I think you're off base. Because it may not have helped you doesn't mean it hasn't helped anyone. You clearly have negative experiences, but it's a mistake to lay the blame on a game.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I strongly doubt we would have World of Warcraft, or indeed most video games we enjoy today if there had never been a D&D. And I also strongly doubt the commercial success of TSR would have reached national (let alone world wide) recognition without Gary Gygax. The idea of a persistent character that gains experience and becomes more powerful the longer you play it was contrary to the wargames that evolved into D&D. D&D rules spawned ideas for hundreds of other table top RPGs, perhaps because its rules were "broken" but also because the concept was revolutionary and gave would be game designers an industry to design in.
I never particularly cared for D&D or WOW, but I would not try to conceal its enormous influence of Gary or TSR.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Dig the not-so-veiled sexism of that title!
Was it sexism, or just an understanding of the sexism prevalent at the time, that suggested that girls couldn't do the same things that boys could? The smarter women would hopefully see that as ridiculous...
Retribution for rules lawyering is stealthy, discrete and usually served cold... rules lawyering was good way to have all sorts of things go subtly wrong.
man, I feel like mold.