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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.
How has D&D (and tabletop roleplaying) touched/improved your life?
It's almost cliched now but as a Dungeon Master in my early teen years, Gary Gygax's work helped to refine creativity, learning, communication, strategy and logic in a way that few other tools or experiences (including school) were able to accomplish. The rule sets were were a revolution to me at the time that helped inspire an understanding of how to engineer environments, social interactions and most of all communicate in conventional and unconventional fashions. All of these tools have certainly helped in my personal and academic lives.
I will forever be grateful to Gary Gygax and the team at TSR.
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I had the opportunity to talk with Gary at a GenCon (when it was still hosted in Milwaukee) back in the 90's. I was a teen and full of questions having played rpgs for many of my years growing up.
He was friendly, and a fun guy to talk to. I was actually quite amazed at how interested he was at talking to my friends and I about the game and actually was very interested in what we thought of the 2nd Generation of D&D.
I only had the chance to meet him once, but I was glad I had the opportunity.
Farewell, Gary. Thanks for the great games and entertainment.
I remember playing a round of D&D once in the cargo bay of a C-141, on the way to a TDY exercise... beat the hell out of playing the same card games over and over again, and you're right - it led to meeting a lot of great people overall.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
While I wasn't a big D&D fan, I loved the idea and always enjoyed tinkering and making up stories. When Bioware put out Neverwinter Nights, I started my own campaign, which was received quite well. When Neverwinter Nights 2 came along, I started yet another and don't plan on stopping.
At one level, it's simply a hobby that combines a lot of skills I enjoy practicing. The scripting language is C-like, which probably helped me get over a long habit of programming in Basic-like languages. Modding is also something I can share with my kids, as my son enjoys tinkering around with the toolset and putting together simple modules.
On another level, I'm in awe of the people who have played my modules and how I've touched their lives. I remember getting an e-mail from a woman who was dying of cancer and how a particular moment in my game made her husband laugh for the first time in a long while. I got another letter from a young man in the Israeli army, talking about how my games were a bright moment in an otherwise terrifying life.
I think Dungeons and Dragons has ended up being something larger than it was originally envisioned. My kids make up these elaborate "playing pretend" stories. D&D has turned this instinct for adventure into something adults can do without too many funny looks. We all need to play the hero and live a life bigger than ourselves. Gary helped give that to us, and for that I am most grateful.
I met the woman who would later be (and still is, to be clear) my wife through my gaming friends.
Other friends of mine have changed careers and gotten much better jobs through friends they met gaming.
Clearly D&D is a gift to the world that's touched a lot of lives, and not just those of parents'-basement-dwelling pasty teenagers.
I might not have been become a computer journalism without his influence. Some of the first stories I ever published were 'tech analysis' D&D stories. You wouldn't believe how much a volume a D&D fireball actually takes up in an enclosed area. Well, not until you've been fried by one anyway, or the fine art of bouncing lighting bolts off obstacles.
Beyond that, I can't begin to count the number of hours I spend enjoying first D&D in 1975 and then all the other RPGs that followed it.
Good-bye Gary.
Steven
I've made a similar post once before, but it seems appropriate now.
;) love of video games and computer graphics.
D&D was my entire reason for becoming interested in programming computers. In the early 80's what I realized is that D&D is the "software" of games. Modules expand the original game in new ways that nobody thought of before. They expand the core system in new and interesting ways.
Sure, software was already doing this on computers at the time, but it really helped my brain make that leap at a young age - software is extraordinarily powerful.
It also seemed to foster a healthy (or unhealthy of you believe Jack Thompson
Thank you Mr. Gygax. You will be missed.
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Really: Ernest Gary Gygax was a god. He turned the wargaming world on its head when he created a fantasy-based game, and did it again with the little supplement in the back that dealt with more individual encounters. His legacy was this new attention to detail, a whole genre, richly inspired by Tolkien's similar work, and spawning universes of imagination to touch generations. ... for this reason, I'd say he was a creation god, having created the world of role-playing games, significantly influencing the Fantasy genre itself, and even brining polyhedral dice to a more mainstream world. Gods don't die; Gygax will live on as only the most significant fathers of ideas do.
D&D has been a part of me since 1986 or so. I've been actively playing and even designing rules for most of that time, even if I had no idea of what I was doing. How did D&D improve my life? It gave me a gateway to my imagination, allowing me to express myself in creative ways that would otherwise have been developed far less aptly. It increased my vocabulary ("what does 'proficiency' mean?), and in triggering my interest in Tolkien, it caused me to learn much of linguistics, etymology, and language, not to mention the reading of fantasy novels including RA Salvatore's Drizzt books. Its limitless possibilities make me laugh at MUDs and MMORPGs for their simplicity ... I can't play CRPGs or the like thanks to having discovered the real thing.
Thanks, Gary. From your days guiding the RPG movement, to your voice-overs on the D&D television show, to your return to the core team with WotC, you had a great run. We always wanted more, but that's only because you always provided so much. You will be missed, and never forgotten. So long and thanks for all the books.
PS: Anybody thinking of DMing or writing about a game or fantasy world (even outside the context of D&D) should take a look at his book Master of the Game, which is sadly out of print.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
There were alot of us D&D geeks in the Navy too, used to play on the aircraft carrier while out on a cruise. Everyday after that 12 hr shift you head down to the forward galley and there were at least 2 games going on, sometimes more. You didn't even have to really be a part of the campaign you could just sit down, roll up a char and play for a couple hours. Played with alot of great people, we even had some officers who played.
Gary will be missed, he gave us geeks hidden down in the basement hours and hours of enjoyment.
I will always remember Mr. Gygax as the man who, while villified by many, was responsible for introducing me to a world of unlimited imaginations where grand adventures took form. The doorway of imagination he opened through his game allowed me to dream bigger dreams and to imagine entire worlds within my own mind. More than any English teacher, Mr. Gygax, albeit indirectly, moved me to write stories of epic scale. Without Dungeons & Dragons, neither would I have known so many great friends.
Now he has passed from the game we call life. I don't think Mr. Gygax failed his last saving throw, but rather that the Great DM determined that it was time for his character to be retired. He will be missed.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I grew up in an orphanage. Playing D&D (frowned upon by the staff and houseparents) was my only escape from farm and school work during those years. It not only helped to enrich my imagination, it gave me the first real life use for the math I was learning in school. And eventually led to my love for computers (since I just had to play this "rogue" game everyone was talking about). For that, I thank the folks over at TSR and Mr. Gygax. Gary, you truly enriched my life then, and your damage system lives on in the RPGs I play today. You will be missed. Though, I'm sure you're rolling a d20 somewhere in the afterlife, even as I write this.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
I propose a 21 Cast-Magic-Missile-into-the-Darkness salute.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
...and his Little Wars: A game for boys from twelve years of age to 150, and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boy's games and books. (Dig the not-so-veiled sexism of that title!) Yes, his rule set for gaming has passed into the Public Domain, so you can use them for free if you want to.
Little Wars was initially released in 1913. A 2004 printed edition of the work comes with a foreword...by Gary Gygax.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
How has D&D changed my life? If it wasn't for D&D I WOULDN'T EVEN BE ALIVE! Proud son of two nerds who met at the table top. I can't understate what D&D means to my family and I. Some families play monopoly, or watch TV. We play D&D. I will never forget some of my dad's best characters, like the alcoholic Druid, or the Wizard who really just wanted to be a chef, or the Barbarian who was so stupid he thought he was a bard and kept trying to give stat boosts with his warcry. Rest in peace Gary. I will never stop playing D&D, and the world will never forget what you accomplished.
The best tribute I can think of is that some people get a country mounring for them, a few get the world ... for Gary the flags will be lowered in worlds without number ...