D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax Has Passed Away 512
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.
Best game ever (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Friends (Score:4, Insightful)
Will be missed (Score:5, Insightful)
Helped me get through 13 years old (Score:4, Insightful)
RIP Gary (Score:5, Insightful)
You gave me a lot of my favorite childhood memories.
Thanks Gary. We'll miss you.
Where would we be without Mr. Gygax? (Score:2, Insightful)
RIP Gary, thank you so much (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:This sucks. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Will be missed (Score:2, Insightful)
Better words have yet to be spoken.
Re:This sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:DnD has not improved the life of anyone I know. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gary Gygax was a god. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:DnD has not improved the life of anyone I know. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:DnD has not improved the life of anyone I know. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This sucks. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Quick. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, I bow to superior rule-lore.
Re:This sucks. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:DnD has not improved the life of anyone I know. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
You are out of your mind. (Score:4, Insightful)
I never particularly cared for D&D or WOW, but I would not try to conceal its enormous influence of Gary or TSR.
Re:Best game ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Count yourself fortunate then. You wouldn't have liked those people anyway. Too worried about their status to have fun.
In any case you are right about the importance of the D&D system. Everybody changes rules they don't like, there are so many that are awkward or illogical or just plain inadequate. But the problem with improving rules it that it's hard to stop. In some ways, D&D's technical faults were an advantage. Making better and better systems eventually leads down a path away from role playing and back to its direct ancestor: war gaming.
It's not that war gaming isn't fun, it's just something different. It's not that you can't make a better role playing system than D&D, but you can't make it too much better without moving falling victim to the siren call of simulation.
Ever see a toddler running around the house pretending he can fly? In his mind he can fly. It's as close to really flying like a bird that a human being will come, even if jet powered bat suits go on the market. Adults, even young adults, are locked out of that experience. It is beneath their dignity to play.
D&D, with it s dice and tables, its miniatures and reference books, with all its war gaming inherited paraphernalia, is just a fig leaf, and not a very large one, over childhood games like Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians. People who are particularly insecure about maintaining adult gravitas immediately recognize the risk it poses to their facade of maturity or coolness.
Well, too bad for them. You can have fun and be cool, you can be cool and have fun, but only one of those things can paramount. It's like choosing a major in college; some people can double major, but most will have to choose to major in one and minor in another. Which one would you rather miss the advanced courses in?
Everybody feels like a geek inside; so many people live in dread that they will be found out. The great thing about being a grown up geek is that once you get over everybody saying it's uncool, you realize how much more simple, comfortable and fun to let those things that most people are apparently ashamed of show for all the world to see; things like playfulness, imagination and fantasy.
In that way many people's lives have been made immeasurably richer by Gary Gygax's work.
Re:They go back to HG Wells... (Score:0, Insightful)
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...
Re:This sucks. (Score:-1, Insightful)
Gary was a great man, with vision and passion. the whole RPG industry owes him a big hug, and today, for once, can we not all gather together and put down our flame wars and honor a man that gave us our hobby?
Whether 4ed sucks or AD&D was a bad rulesset is not the most important thing in the world right now.
Re:Quick. (Score:3, Insightful)