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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.
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
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.
He wrote wonderful pulp fantasy that my students enjoy to this day.
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.
"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.
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.
You gave me a lot of my favorite childhood memories.
Thanks Gary. We'll miss you.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I'm currently on the play test team with Jeff T. in Gary's current works (Castle Zagyg). Gary was was the Progenitor of all modern gaming. Imagine a world that did not have D&D. Computer games would not have developed in the way they have, they would be 3d versions of Chess etc. Gary's work, and the work of the people that have followed have entertained us for decades, and through Gary's work we will be entertained for decades and centuries more... Bob H.
MacOSX, because making *NIX better is a lot better than waiting for Micro$loth to fix Windows
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.
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.
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
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.
Pouring out a 40 of mountain dew for my dead homie.
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.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
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
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.
A good D&D game combines sitting around talking with friends about movies, school, your life with
* puzzle solving
* ensemble acting
* lots of calculating
* making moral choices that give you practice for real life
* or just reveling in being bad since it doesn't really count
* painting
* collecting
* drawing
* writing stories
* telling jokes
* a lot of laughter-- sometimes so hard you can't breath.
Even a bad game has most of these-- but often drops the acting part. The worst are where the referee seems themselves competing with the players instead of entertaining them since they can always win by adding more foes or an unsolvable puzzle.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
For the uninitiated, I will attempt an explanation of D&D. You and a number of your friends all get together, one of you comes up with an idea for a story, and everybody else plays a character in that story. The actions of the characters in the story are moderated by the person who is telling it (the dungeon master), the choices of the friends acting in it, and the whims of random chance(dice rolls). The reason geeks are so fascinated by it, is it's a chance to hang out with friends, it's a way to be creative and tell a story, it's a chance to let your imagination go wild. In theory, it's interactive story telling with dice rolls. In practice, it's an opportunity for a bunch of friends to get together, and have some fun while exercising their imaginations just a bit. If you've never tried it, I suggest you go to a local hobby shop, and find out if they host any games. You might like it, you might not. But it is the only way to truly understand what D&D is.
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!
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.
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?
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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?"
Except when he play a module himself and casts Resurrection...
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 ...
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.
--
-1 offtopic = you admit you don't understand the sarcasm = you wasted your mod point
Just callin' it like I see it.
Yeah, the bastard is always giving his son special favors. That's why I stopped playing in his game. At least in Cthulhu's game, I know that everybody is going to get eaten.