Gary Gygax Dies at Age 69 news from 1UP.com
The man who gave us D&D fails his final saving throw. By Mark Whiting, 03/04/2008
Gary Gygax — the godfather of the pen-and-paper RPG and the man largely responsible for giving the world a little something called Dungeons & Dragons — is dead.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Gygax died at his home in Lake Geneva early on Tuesday morning after struggling with health problems for several years. He was 69 years old.
For more than three decades Gary’s name was absolutely synonymous with the core DNA of the modern RPG. Even the term "roleplaying game" as we understand it today is derived directly from the early designs of Gygax and friend Dave Arneson, who co-created the original D&D First Edition rulebook back in 1974.
And as soon as 1978, I started playing this game, as it was just about the only thing that could pry my nose out of the books I read obsessively otherwise. It turned a total teen-age social recluse into a rather more normal kid.
As the article mentions, there was controversy. If the kids today and of 10 years ago think they caught trouble from the close-minded Christianists over Harry Potter & Hogwarts, they ain’t seen nothin’ compared to what we had to deal with when the D&D craze hit. About as obsessively as we played D&D (and had a blast doing it), these other folks would obsessively circulate stories about kids killing themselves after their favorite game character died, or how we’d beat on each other with real swords. Yeah right… The reality? There were ‘Raise Dead’ and ‘Resurrection’ spells in the game. And if that didn’t work out, you could just create a new character. Fact of the matter was, many of us enjoyed playing as many different and varied characters as we could imagine.
In that, D&D was gold: It encouraged imagination, creativity, and socializing.
For me, in high school, college, and even through the first five years or so of my career afterwards, that game — Dungeons & Dragons — formed the basis of my social life. And no, most of my friends weren’t social outcasts or geeks. Just regular kids (then later, adults) who enjoyed the complexity, imagination, and open-endedness of D&D in its many incarnations. They became my best friends…and my adult D&D circle (which included professionals and managers) comprised a rather large part of my first marriage’s wedding party.
Early on though, when I first started, my parents (especially my father) were worried that it was some kind of weird devil-worshiping cult. With swords and quasi-pretend magic.
So I did the only sensible thing: Hosted a game at our house. A couple times my parental units came in, watched for a while as the half dozen of us rolled our dice, marked down stuff on papers, constantly looked up saving throws, to-hits, and spell stats in the books, and the Dungeon Master would describe the various rooms and monsters we encountered.
Later on, I remember my father asking me, "So that’s it? You sit around a table and roll dice, and make up stories?"
Me: "Yeah, that’s pretty much it."
Him: "Okay. I guess it’s all right."
It was better than all right. Through D&D, I learned social skills and found my place in the world. For that, I owe Mr. Gygax (and all the other creative minds behind D&D over the years) my eternal gratitude.
-Becca
p.s. One of the main characters in my first novel was based on a D&D character from a game I created and ran for my adult friends in the late 1980s.
Appalling hypocrisy
I had to pick my jaw up off the floor after reading this, before I could muster the umbrage to compose a coherent response.
Being sent off to fight a war in a far off land, and then forgotten by your own C-in-C because he’s jonesin’ to attack a different country instead, for reasons that reek of Oedipal compensation…
Hell, war is the opposite of ‘romantic’. It’s hell. Pure bloody, violent hell, and confronting danger, as demonstrated how Mr. Bush has conducted his entire life, is antithetical to his entire character. He is a bullying coward, ever happy to have others fight his wars and pay for his mistakes.
Moreover, he HAD his chance to confront danger. Instead he had his daddy pull strings to land an undeserved billet in the Texas Air National Guard, where a barely competent young Georgie spent his early adult years defending Texas from…well, nothing, and getting in trouble with booze and coke. Then, when he decided he had other priorities, he skipped out on his Reserve duty, going AWOL — and having the records cleaned up after the fact. (Nevermind the DUI arrest…)
What is it, Mr. Bush? Are you envious because you joined TANG (via your father’s political connections) instead of signing up for GROPO duty in ‘Nam? Or is it because you sent in those forms asking NOT to get sent there? Or perhaps because you know you could’ve upped from Reserve to Active, but instead simply decided to bail on your required service and run off to get yourself an alumni legacy C-Plus MBA from Yale?
Are you envious of those who actually have had the courage to go towards the danger, rather than running from it? Do you find yourself daydreaming about the ‘romance’ of having the moral conviction and character necessary to do one’s sworn duty, because you yourself ran from every responsibility, every duty and have never had a thought for anybody but your useless self?
It shouldn’t be ‘envy’ and ‘romance’, but guilt and shame he’s feeling…but I honestly don’t think he’s capable of those latter emotions, because those would require character, empathy, and simple human decency. It would require a sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, he’s mistakenly conflated "whatever Dubya wants" with "god-like good"…and there’s just no talking someone like that out of their pathological sociopathic narcissistic megalomania.
Mr. Bush’s comments are just about the most specious, hypocritical and craven things ever to fall from the mouth of a man who first learned to teethe on a gold-plated spoon. Disgusting.
/rant-off.