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.

Casting

Spell of Silence on all the trolls!

RIP, Gary.

How has it improved my life?

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

Re:How has it improved my life?

Oh, um, yeah, me too. It was totally D&D that kept me from getting the girls. ;)

Quick.

Get the cleric.

Re:Quick.

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

Re:Quick.

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

Which plane?

Re:Quick.

Get the cleric.

That would permanently lower his constitution by one. I don't think Gary would want to live that way.

Re:Quick.

I believe you could still reincarnate him, but he might come back as a kobold if you do that.

Funeral Details?

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.

Thank you Gary

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.

It was...

[rolls dice] a pleasure to know him.

Will be missed

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

Rest in Peace

"Gary Gygax has passed away? I'm--"
* rolls dice *

"very sad to hear that!"

(With apologies to the writers of Futurama).

RIP Gary

You gave me a lot of my favorite childhood memories.

Thanks Gary. We'll miss you.

Farewell Gary, glad I met you.

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.

Neverwinter Nights

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 [adamandjamie.com], which was received quite well. When Neverwinter Nights 2 came along, I started yet another [adamandjamie.com] 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.

Pouring...

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

D&D is IRL software

I've made a similar post once before, but it seems appropriate now.

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 ;) love of video games and computer graphics.

Thank you Mr. Gygax. You will be missed.

First chat with the Almighty

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

Gary Gygax was a god.

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 [wikipedia.org], 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 [google.com], which is sadly out of print.

Re:Friends

Same here, but in the military. Dunno about the other branches, but the USAF was packed to the rafters with D&D geeks, my former self among them.

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.

/P

Re:This sucks.

Part of my childhood just failed its save vs death.

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

Re:This sucks.

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.

Re:I don't get it

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.

Re:Appareantly he got a glimps

of 4th edition.

Nah, he just wanted to go out on His Day. Today is DM's Day! [sjgames.com]