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.

Comments

How has it improved my life?

[StevenMaurer]

It kept me from ever being in danger of becoming an unprepared teen father.

Quick.

[RandoX]

Get the cleric.

Re:Quick.

[Anonymous Coward]

oh you are so going to hell for that one....

Which plane?

Re:Quick.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Never fear, he was an American!

Starting in 1952, the Bureau of Health Statistics which is part of the CDC, decided that you couldn't just die of old age, you had to have a reason, like you fell on your knitting needles, got hit by a bread truck, or something like that. I think they listed 130 official reasons for death.

Since he died after 1952 and was American, he died of some cause other than old age. Hence, Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection all work.

Good thing I've been maxing out Rules Lawyering since I was a level 1 rollplayer.

Will be missed

[wembley fraggle]

A better question would be what aspect of my life hasn't been influenced by Gygax. Safe travels, Gary.

It was...

[Jabbrwokk]

[rolls dice] a pleasure to know him.

Farewell Gary, glad I met you.

[binaryspiral]

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.

Re:This sucks.

[ackthpt]

Part of my childhood just failed its save vs death.

Thank you Mr. Gygax, for your role in many enjoyable hours of leisure.

Pouring...

[dbc23]

Pouring out a 40 of mountain dew for my dead homie.

First chat with the Almighty

[EricTheGreen]

"Mr. Gygax, care to explain why I wasn't included in Deities and Demigods?"

Re:Me too, if it wasn't for AD&D

[Stoick]

That's much better than being a debt-ridden subcompact father riding a 13 year old Japanese teen. Trust me.

Re:This sucks.

[LaskoVortex]

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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