Gary Gygax, Gaming God... Goodbye.

indio · Post by **indio** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 4:01 am

Gygax's name stretches a long way back into my past. Always loved the name. I've been re-reading one of his early Gord novels lately, playing his game regularly, and make plans to continiue my hobby well into the future.

A legend.

Holy_Rage · Post by **Holy_Rage** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 3:48 pm

*grimly leaves a bag of onyx dice over GG's grave*

He will be missed. Rest in peace, Father.

Swift · Post by **Swift** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 12:24 am

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/03/04

Joos · Post by **Joos** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 3:14 pm

Plenty of gold for those who searches:
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertrep ... eId=163315
Last one down!

Also check:
http://xkcd.com/393/

I understand he liked rules. Like, a lot. Lots of gratitude for putting it all in writing for us though. Changed all our lives forever. *smiles*

Mulu · Post by **Mulu** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 3:57 am

"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."

I remember reading an old Dragon Magazine that quoted Gygax as saying that too many smart, creative people had spent too much time and energy on this game. I consider it all time well spent. Playing D&D is more than just playing a game, it's living your imagination, and making friends.

If there is an afterlife, I hope it has D&D.

And on that note, an old post.

Developmental Stages of the D&D Gamer:

Stage 1: Egg, Newbie
"Which dices do I roll for a one to five?"

Stage 2: Grub, Powergamer
"Ha ha, my 22 level fighter/thief throws a javelin at his 20th level anti-paladin, and it's got dragon venom on it, with a minus eight to saves."
"Hey, jokes on you, I'm immune to everything."
"My gnome takes a swing at him with my +10 two-handed sword. A triple critical!!!"

Stage 3: Pupae, Rules Grognard
Player: "And I get a +1 on that save v. poison."
DM: "From what?"
Player: "My Boots of Striding."
DM: "Boots of Striding don't give a bonus on your save v. poison."
Player: "These have an extra enchantment."
DM: "THAT'S NOT IN THE RULES! Just for that, you're stripped to your underwear and a club."
Player: "It's a customized item."
DM: "You want a customized item, carve your initials in the club."
Player: "With what?"

Stage 4: Adult, Roleplayer/Improvisational DM; Hint: "There are no rules." E. Gary Gygax
Player: "Mulu want good magic, to fight bad magic."
DM as witchdoctor: "Mmmm, I can give you tattoo, protect you from evil spirits."
Player: "What is price?"
DM as witchdoctor: (Smokes pipe) "Not what you think. You strong barbarian, strong spirit. I need essence of your spirit."
Player: (Eyes go wide) "You not take Mulu's spirit!"
DM as witchdoctor: "No, not take, just use for awhile."
Player2: "Don't do it Mulu, Panther god will be angered."
Player3: "I consult the cabbal, to determine the probable outcome of this tattoo."
DM: (rolls) "The cabbal tells you the tattoo will be beneficial."
Player3: "Mulu, I have consulted the cabbal. The numbers of the gods say the tattoo will be good."
Player2: "Well, if it looks good, maybe I can runeweave another power into the tattoo, but only if it's done in the form of a mandala."

Stage 4 1/2: Second molting, campaigner
Player 1: "Crop yields are down again this season. We should investigate to determine if it's natural or unnatural in origin."
Player 2: "I will go to the chapel and attempt to divine."
Player 3: "I think my wife is having an affair with the Duke of Blackacre."
Player 1: "We could invite them both to a play, then scry on them afterwards...."
Player 4: "Can anyone remember when we used to go adventuring?"

Stage 5: Breeding Adult, Occasional gamer
[-borrowed from Garnak]
DM: Okay everyone, this is Jerry, he's going to take the place of Tim, who has a date tonight.
Player 1: Why did he bring his kids?
Player 2: *passes note to DM that reads: I pickpocket his moneypurse*
Player 3: He doesn't get to start at the same level we're at does he? That's not fair!
DM: Jerry, time to roll your stats!
Jerry: Stats? Isn't this a board game? Cool little figurine here!
Players 1, 2, and 3: *groan*

Stage 6: Aged, Old Fart gamer
"I remember back at Gen Con 2, I ran into Roger Zelazny. Well, we got to talking about the multiverse, theories of alternate universes and whatnot, and lo and behold, the next Amber novel that came out had some of those ideas incorporated in it. Now this system I'm using, which is a variant of a cross between AD&D 1st. edition, Traveller, the Amber novels, and chess, was first playtested in 1980. I've still got all the original documents on 5 1/4 inch floppy disk, in Commodore 64e standard...." (BTW, roasting aside, this guy was the greatest).

Stage 7: Dead, Reincarnated
"Wow, this world is just like I imagined it."
>>Because, all good gamers come back in the fantasy world of their choosing as their favorite character. Why not? It makes as much sense as any other explanation for the afterlife....

Vendrin · Post by **Vendrin** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 5:43 am

He started something that will last for a long time. I'll roll a 20 for him.

Twin Axes · Post by **Twin Axes** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 3:46 pm

That name was as strange and mysterious as the worlds that beckoned from the pages of the red basic D&D set I held in my hands on that Christmas day so long ago. Life changed. Thanks.

coach · Post by **coach** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 4:53 pm

best quote i've read since his passing came from an poster known as Treebore on one of the Troll Lords forums

"I didn't know he only had 6 kids. I thought he had millions."

my gaming group will game this weekend with an empty chair at the table for Gary

Mulu · Post by **Mulu** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 6:05 pm

That is an excellent quote.

Mulu · Post by **Mulu** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 3:35 am

Geek Love
By ADAM ROGERS
San Francisco

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.

You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.

Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.

Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.

Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.

Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)

But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?

Mulu · Post by **Mulu** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:03 am

As soon as I started reading Gygax's fantastical compendiums as a kid, I realized how mundane non-gamers' lives were. They lived in flat world, where all the dice had only six sides. We had imagination and a leader who never talked down to us, even if he did sound like Yoda. "This work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another," Gygax wrote in "The Dungeon Master's Guide." "Pronouncements there may be, but they are not from 'on high' as respects your game."

But the true thrill of the game was that it made you feel smart. You constantly had to consult actuarial tables in the back of the dozens of "D&D" books to determine the results of a battle, convert currency or figure out how many kilograms your character could carry. Everything was documented in such detail that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, Gygax had left survivors a complete guide to replicate society. A society like a Renaissance Faire.

Gary Gygax fails saving throw vs heart attack

More than 5000 men and three women, clutching dog-eared rulebooks and dice, have gathered outside Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax's Wisconsin home this week, after learning the American game designer had died at the age of 69. Although official reports have blamed a heart attack, archmage Mordenkainen is claiming responsibility and demanding experience points for the kill.

According to his family, Gygax, who also created boardgames, chess variants and the phrase "goddamn rules lawyer", was found in bed on Tuesday morning. After checking for a pulse, his daughter searched the body for loot, finding 2d6 gems, a potion of healing and a mysterious map.

His widow Gail issued a statement yesterday afternoon: "Until a high-level cleric of the sun god Pelor can be found to cast a resurrection spell, Gary's body will be interred in the Tomb Of Horrors, near the Keep On The Borderlands, where it will be safe from vile necromancers."

The funeral will be a quiet, private affair, with the family asking orcs, red dragons and Demogorgon, Prince Of Demons And Lord Of All That Swims In Darkness not to attend. "We'd also ask D&D fans to refrain from rubbing their dice on Gary's corpse for luck," said Mrs Gygax.

Apparently there has been some dispute over Gygax's will, with a sum of 500 platinum pieces still to be allocated. In accordance with his wishes, and first edition D&D rules, Gary will be buried with his vorpal sword and plate mail +5.

With Gygax's passing, George Lucas has officially assumed the mantle of "Most Influential Nerd Alive".

For you facebookers:
Gary Con

indio · Post by **indio** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 8:21 am

Good stuff in those quotes. Worth reading.

Nekulor · Post by **Nekulor** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 2:54 am

Obviously good ole' Gary failed his last fortitude save.

You will be sorely missed Mr. Gygax. May you rest in peace in whichever realm you want to plop your ethereal self into. Just watch out for clerics with Turn Undead Maximized and Extended prepped. They can be nasty, even for an epic level undead.