Letters to the Editor
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Failed the saving throw.....
CLERIC! CAST RESURRECT! :-)
(Not the first to say it, won't be the last, but it is that type of gallows humor that made sessions of D&D some of the most fun from junior high through grad school.)
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I Was Unaware That Freddie Kreuger Was A Character in WoW
Who or what is that THING in the hat??
And as to Gygax, for some reason everyone I knew who played D & D - both in high school and college - hated his guts. Never understood it. Sorry he's gone.
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Gary Gygax
I started playing D&D in 1978, and have played practically every week since (sometimes more than once). In fact, my involvement in Dungeons & Dragons has lasted longer than all of my relationships put together. In the busy hustle of jobs, families and endless responsibilities, D&D has been a constant source of entertainment and constitutes (this may be sad) most of my social life.
My thanks to Gary Gygax...D&D will never be the same.
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Delayed Blast Fireball
Dang....
I'm a defense attorney in a prestigious firm, a husband, a former scientist and outwardly probably appear to be a totally mundane guy. But I'm not. Secretly I'm an elven multi-class fighter-thief (chaotic good). Part of my soul will forever dwell in the Village of Hommlet. I left another part smoking on the floor in the Tomb of Horrors.
Thanks Gary.
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LEEEEEROOYYYYY ahh JENKINSSSSS!!!!
'God Dammit Leroy!!!'
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goodbye gary gygax
I think about how totally life changing D+D was for me and multiply that by tens of millions - Gary Gygax was arguably one of the most influential cultural figures of the second half of the 20th Century.
In seventh grade I changed almost literarlly overnight from spending all of my time playing sports to playing D+D and other wargames. This is not to say that playing D+D is somehow superior to playing sports. However, for me this was the beginning of a transition to more intellectual pursuits. I can't say what would have happened had I not started playing D+D, but I can't disentangle the long path to my current career as a scientist (which I am very happy with) from those early days playing D+D.
Walka fayn, Gary Gygax!
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He changed the world for the better
for millions of people - added a bit of fun and magic to their lives. How many can say that?
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dwelling in memories
I wasn't going to comment, but I smiled as I read most of the others here, so had to add my own small voice.
I didn't even 'discover' D&D until university, when moving to the big city. I was one of oh, 3 women studying computer engineering. A bunch of friends introduced me to it; the rest, as they say is history. Sure, shortly after I plunged into the world of darkness, and D&D seemed so bland in comparison.
Tribe 8, Star Trek, Mage, Star Wars, buffy, LOTR, traveller, etc. you name it, my crazy friends and I tried it. Our bi-monthly get-togethers became like a sanctuary, putting our hectic, bland lives aside for a few precious hours while we tromped around so many rich exotic worlds. Someone would go 'hey look what I picked up, we should try X!' and off we went, shoving the story aside to maybe or not be returned to later, leaving me with a thick binder of much loved but tired sheets of characters, sketches, ideas.
Now at 30 something the faces have changed, but we still muster a night every month or so. My computer has enough backgrounds and settings documented to fill a bookcase of fiction. Yes, I still LARP, some of my best friends were met in larps, to this day we grin as we swap old stories of us running around the city trying to outsmart the other players.
All this because peope like Gygax took Tolkien's wonderful rich world and made it accessible to us, made it seem real.
(I admit I also feel old when to teens now RPGs mean computer games with flashy graphics. I play them too; heck I met my fiance on one. There are also many better ones out there than the overhyped WoW, ah well.)
The world seems a bit more dim without Gygax. May his memory live on in as many games, movies, books that fuel our imaginations.
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Nice video
But, "l33t" is pronounced like "elite" not "leet".
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Thank Gary
My mom introduced me to D&D when I was somewhere between 8 and 10. While that might not be so odd for kids today, this was in the late 70s and D&D was still pretty new. Mom thought it'd be fun for my brother and I to play and that it was a good use of imagination. She was right.
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Your son is how old?
Paranoid concerns about pedophiles on the Internet aside, I think 10 is too young to play WoW. And this is from someone with five level 70 characters (and a professional white-collar job, tyvm). I'd have no problem if WoW were a standalone game, but it's an MMO, with all the trappings of a large public place.
There's a reason the game is rated T. I honestly don't care about all the violence your child is exposed to from killing murlocs, but I don't think the social environment is appropriate for a 10-year-old.
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Game Over
I was 8 years old when I first played it, way back in '78, managed to get the basic set as a gift from a relative. I loved it. It framed my childhood neighborhood gatherings -- imagination, writing, dreaming, scheming, acting, storytelling, arguing, debating, calculating -- all in one handy box. I learned about life and death and about putting oneself in another's shoes, and pondered Alignment, what it really meant. I figured early on that I was Chaotic Good, one of the "extreme" alignments, the troublemakers.
D&D definitely influenced my childhood in all the best ways. I never understood how incendiary imagination could be in the popular consciousness, how people got so afraid of it, so panicked about it, was amazed at the uproar about Dungeons & Dragons.
How scary: kids playing pretend (and crunching serious numbers). Far better for them to passively consume entertainment by wholesome, instructive television, instead, what "normal" kids did. I think it's funny how much computer gaming took off, likely by the same people who sucked their teeth at the pen-and-paper gamers.
Gygax was truly a gaming wizard. Human, but brilliant. People who don't even know his name owe him a debt of gratitude, and Dave Arneson. Most people will never get it, the power of imagination and storytelling, but packaged as a computer game, and they're all over it like stink on a troll. It's funny how and when it's okay. Imagination wedded to intelligence maintains its subversive power.
Thank you, Mr. Gygax. We'll miss you, those of us who know.