Letters to the Editor
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Rest in peace, Mr. Gygax!
Add me to the list of those who spent many an hour happily engaged in imaginative campaigns with friends, boxes of pizza, and lots of laughs. Everyone who "gets" D&D knows exactly how special and significant this game has been for multiple generations. And those who don't...well, we never had much use for them anyway, did we? :)
Among many other benefits to playing the old game, one I always come back to is vocabulary--for a kid, playing D&D was a great way to expand your library of words, concepts, and references to history, literature, and mythology. Of course a lot of the cultural/historical references were translated somewhat for use in the game, but you can still learn an awful lot from, say, the old Deities & Demigods book.
Speaking of those old books, they still hold a special place for me. Anytime I pull one of those old, time-worn editions off the shelf, with their marvelous black & white ink illustrations (especially those by Dave Trampier), I get a good feeling.
Thanks for everything, Gary. Hope the transition to NPC is a good one.
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D&D was based on cooperative imagination
D&D was analogous to reading while modern games like World of Warcraft are analogous to movies.
With Dungeouns and Dragons, the Dungeon Master would describe events to players and they would all imagine the scenario together, asking questions for more details, filling in the story, and then taking turns participating in it. The Dungeon Master rolled dice and carefully followed rules written on various pages of the guidebooks, and everybody had a stake in every aspect of the process.
The current games don't require any of that imagination, as it is all filled in by the graphically sophisticated programming. The play's the thing -- the only thing. Which is fine, I suppose, but it's a different type of experience.
I admit, I dabbled in D&D, though my interest in girls and punk rock soon overtook it. I also had religious friends who encouraged me to stop, claiming that Satan himself was in the books and dice. (One of Tom Hanks's first dramatic appearances was in "Mazes & Monsters," a TV-movie about a guy who plays too much of a D&D-like game and goes insane.)
I still have all the books, modules, dice, Dragon magazines, and everything (including maps and modules I made myself), stored away. I was going through it just a day or two ago, noticing the name Gary Gygax emblazoned on everything, and wondering about what became of him in the age of computer gaming. I'll bet he loved those "Lord of the Rings" movies, since so much of D&D is rooted in the mythology started by that book.
Rest in peace, King of the Geeks (take that as a compliment)
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"Mah na mah na" is from an Italian soundtrack by Piero Umiliani
He's a contemporary of Ennio Morricone. The film was "Sweden Heaven & Hell." Great soundtrack.
The song was later co-opted by Jim Henson and the muppets.
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Still a gamer; Will be one forever
Ahh Gary Gygax, whatever did people who lived in their parents' basement do prior to your ingenious invention?
May he ascend to the outer plane of his choosing before Demogorgon even knows he's left us.
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A Life-Long Gamer Mourns...
I was ten years old in 1980 when my best friend and I first played AD&D in much the same way that Andrew Leonard and his friends did: myself and 2 friends with characters being wailed on by an army of orcs and kobolds led by my best friend/sadistic DM.
Twenty-seven years later, my best friend and I still play, what his 13-year old son mockingly calls, "paper and pencil RPGs", while he and his young teen friends go off and play WoW.
AD&D was like a fusion reactor powering my imagination. I don't think any MMORPG or other online experience can compare to the pleasure, sorrow, and esprit-de-corps of the traditional RPG (although I do have all the appropriate respect for them of course). Even today, I still look forward to playing on those occasional weekends when my best friend and our small group of die hard "paper and pencil" RPGers get together for pizza and the sword.
Thank you, Mr. Gygax. May your soul live forever in the mythical Asgard of our imaginations.
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RIP
Just the kind of news I did NOT need today...
I remember being a kid in high school, the tallest scrawny teen of a group of proto-geeks. We were the first in our class to get computers (Apple ][, Commodore 64) and the first to play D&D. We would get weird looks from all the other students all the time.
Sometimes, we would even play that game at the back of the class, trying to hide the weird dices and play books under our desks. Mostly, that was when the end of the school year was near, and teachers were too busy planning their vacations than really keeping an eye on us.
I miss the late-night games each saturday, the weird scenarios the DM would cook up and the dozens and dozens of even weirder monsters, each with a little description and cartoon appearance. I miss a lot of these friends and the good times we had. Life seemed both more simple and more complicated that it is now.
R.I.P., Mr Gygax: you made my teen years a lot more bearable.
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What's most sad...
Thinking about this, is how little I game nowadays, a fairly selfish comment I'll admit. All the Dragon magazines #2-200, pretty much all of the modules & books until the d20 scheme took over (which now that I've looked into it is fairly cool & reminds me of my own homebrew AD&D/Hero combo)... and that's before looking at other game systems like Traveller, L5R, GURPS, Hero and who knows how many others.
Many of which, directly or indirectly, exist pretty much because of Gygax & folks. Even if only vaguely, I'd venture that even some of the interest in the LOTR movies was due to D&D keeping a low level hum about fantasy. I was terribly amused when my nephew asked why Galadriel was gifting hobbits ("which are so halflings, Uncle Joe") with D&D items - ie, "Cloaks of Elvenkind", followed by that kind of look only a 13 year old can give you when they think you're really, really daft.
Talk about a pebble that started a landslide.