Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

[Image]Gary Gygax at GenCon Indy 2007. Photo by Alan De Smet.

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died today.

More reaction later, but I had to post as soon as I heard.

Monte Cook reacts on his blog.

I guess my dream of getting him to autograph the random harlot generation table from the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide will never come to pass.

The AP and BBC have brief articles.

The D&D welcome site is currently black in his honor.

Wow, well, this hits hard. Gygax didn't just co-create a game. He helped create an entire genre of games. Back in the mid-seventies, geekitude didn't have mainstream outlets it has today. Dungeons & Dragons was a profoundly influential idea. Every role-playing game owes it a debt of gratitude, and it's hard to find a computer RPG that doesn't base some mechanics on the old D&D system. More importantly, it served as a vehicle for the imagination, stimulant to the intellect, and an occasion for social interaction and friendship. As a child I hungered for these things, and Dungeons & Dragons was there to provide them.

If D&D were introduced today, I'm not sure how well it would do. It requires storytelling skills, time, dedication, and coming together with other people. This is hard to do these days. With a job (from which I'm currently taking unofficial mourning leave in order to write this post), a wife, and a child, it is very hard to find time to play, or even to geek out about character creation. But I do have a game scheduled for tonight, and I'm going to play via Internet (Vassal) the 15th. It's important to me.

In a lot of ways, the game has advanced a lot beyond Gygax's vision. He was fond of sadistic mazes, "gotcha" traps, clues embedded in cheesy poems, and hideous death that could happen with a single die roll. Now, there's often a lot more emphasis on story, world development, and atmosphere and pacing. The game system itself is much better, too: more options, better balance, more consistency.

But in other ways, we are still very much walking in Gygax's shadow. Every time I see something about Drizzt, for example, I can't help but think that all the drow stuff (society, religion, weaponry, personality, etc.) was basically completely outlined in D3: Vault of the Drow, and everything since has basically just been fleshing out the outline he created.

I will also miss Gygax's idiosyncratic style. My verbal SAT score was at least 60 points higher because of Gygax's predilection for recondite vocabulary (milieu, denizen, enervate, and the whole gamut of Latin abbreviations: i.e., cf., e.g., qv., et al.). My knowledge of mythology and folklore was expanded and reinforced by the minotaurs, centaurs, medusae, chimera, hydra, basilisks, and other monsters that populated the dungeons of which Gygax was so fond. My ability to do basic arithmetic quickly in my head was exercised countless times at the tabletop. I learned more about group dynamics and conflict resolution from Dungeon Mastering than from just about anything else. And I'm sure my acting abilities owe a lot to the constant use of the imagination and the role-playing I did as a child.

When I graduated from 3rd grade, my teacher, Peter Hanson, wrote a limerick for each graduating student. Here's mine:

Zachary Drake can compete
With any dude on the street
He know every rule
For a D&D duel
His intensity is hard to beat.