I was saddened to hear of the passing of Gary Gygax. Mr. Gygax invented D&D. As I thought of the many ways his invention blessed our family I thought I'd record a little tribute.
- Thank you Gary for my marriage. This is going to sound funny but on "my side" of our courtship story, I set Lin up on a blind date with another woman and ended up falling for him instead. To hear the story from Lin's point of view, he began to realize I was someone special because of D&D. Lin was in Park City with the Shakespearean Festival. I stopped in for a visit and everyone left a really great D&D game to welcome me. Lin says that moment he realized that if so many of his friends thought I was worth abandoning a D&D game=then I must be something pretty special. It was a big turning point for Lin.
- Thank you Gary for helping me find a place among Lin's old friends. These were the dear and wonderful friends made during his time at BYU and marriage to Karen. They are the ones who can tell the stories of Nathan's birth, the water ballon catapult bra, and being chased by BYU security. I bonded with Dave, Melinda, and Jeff playing D&D. I was 12+ years younger than anybody else at the table. I was intimidated and really hoped to make a good impression. D&D at its best is a game of cooperation and trust. We bonded playing some of the best D&D ever. Jeff's ranger, Melinda's magic user, and Dave & Malia as the dwarves are still some of my favorite characters and we had wonderful adventures.
- Thank you Gary for helping us find new friends in CA. Francis & Karin Thompson were two of our first friends in CA. Francis grew up in Kansas and actually played some of the original D&D game. Lin's games were several incarnations older. It was interesting to see how much the game had evolved and how much Lin's talent as an actor/DM enhanced the basic game.
- Thank you Gary for the Doxeys. The friends like family that you bond with in the early years of marriage sure are special. We spent many wonderful nights enjoying a potluck dinner and then D&D with Kaio, Jeanenne, Jack, and Denise. Our "little ones" were truly little as we only had BrieAnn, Shauna, Tessa, Mackay who loved to play together. Soon Kaio, Luke and many others would follow.
- Thank you Gary for helping our children learn to love reading. At first, Nathan really didn't like reading. Lin and I knew it was important to introduce him to a series that would excite his imagination and make him want to read. For Lin, that magic book had been Edgar Rice Burrough's "A Princess of Mars" - the John Carter of Mars series. For Malia it was the Pam & Penny Howard Series by Rosamond DuJardin and the old fashioned Harlequin Romances like Jacqueline Gilbert's "Dear Villian". For Nathan and Jared, a love of reading was helped along by D&D. Jared's reading comprehension skills grew as he devoured the many D&D rule books. Nate learned to love reading when he discovered the Dragonlance series which was based on a series of D&D campaigns.
- Thank you Gary for bonding our family. Our nieces, nephews, and children have learned love, loyalty, trust and cooperation around the D&D table. It has bonded generation to generation better than anything I've ever seen. Over the years we've played face to face, by fax machine, and on-line. D&D, when properly used is a blessing to many families. Lin adapted role-playing games to suit the ages and skills of the players. He invented "Halloween" just for our family. Jared coined "the D&D Test" for bringing new spouses into the family. When the first group of players (Dave, Nate, Kent, Lynette, and Jared) moved onto new jobs, schools, and missions, it was nice to see the next group of cousins, led by Brian, also bond around the table with Uncle Lin.
- Thank you Gary for building testimonies. Tracey Hickman, one of the Dragonlance co-writers, uses his personal website to share the gospel. http://www.trhickman.com/Spirit/Faith.html Lin engaged the cousins, and many young man in the scriptures by inventing "Missionary Halloween" which required reading and understanding the scriptures to play. Uncle Greg and Lin both bonded their Young Men's groups in Bellflower and Buena Park by playing D&D with them.
So thank you Gary Gygax for creating, as a BYU study explained, the ultimate Rorschach inkblot test. Our family has been able to build beautiful things with your framwork.
Here's a great article I found on-line that explains the game to someone who's never played it. He also does a great job of explaining Gary Gygax's contributions to gaming. Two points her didn't make is that D&D is played in Steven Spielberg's movie "ET" and that the movie "Dungeons and Dragons" starred Tom Hanks (yes, really.)
Farewell to the Dungeon Master
How D&D creator Gary Gygax changed geekdom forever.By Jonathan RubinPosted Thursday, March 6, 2008, at 12:17 PM ET
Gary Gygax was the salvation and curse of nerds worldwide. The co-founder of the
Dungeons & Dragons franchise, who
passed away on Tuesday at 69, created a form of fantasy escapism that you could share with others. D&D unified geeks, giving them accoutrements (multisided
dice, colored figurines) and a language that bound them together. It was a secret club of sorts, a playground where social outcasts could be themselves and vent over life's frustrations. That wasn't always a good thing—playing Dungeons & Dragons didn't generally lead to activities like going outside or talking to girls. Still, a caffeine-fueled marathon D&D session was a place where your geeky tendencies were something to be celebrated rather than an affliction to be overcome.
Yes, we all knew, deep inside, that D&D wasn't cool. Being able to say, "I cast a Level 3 lightning bolt at the basilisk while averting my eyes so I don't turn to stone" doesn't have the social pull of "I know a guy who will buy us some alcohol." Even despite the social stigma, millions of people, me included, wouldn't have made it through adolescence without Dungeons & Dragons. A dedicated bookworm, I devoured D&D's
rule books. It was more important for me to know how to repel the undead or make a flesh golem than to watch baseball or learn karate. Becoming a dungeon master, the equivalent of a Ph.D. in geekery, gave me a sense of mastery and accomplishment, not to mention my first real leadership experience.
Gygax thought a gaming experience wasn't complete without a good group of people to play with. He co-founded the International Federation of Wargamers in 1966. A year later, the first meeting of
Gen Con—now a huge gaming convention—was held in his basement. In 1974, Gygax and his collaborator Dave Arneson published the Fantasy Game, later renamed Dungeons & Dragons.
The game Gygax created is easy to describe but difficult to imagine. My D&D pals and I basically sat around a table "
role-playing"—i.e., pretending to be people with more interesting lives. Using dice and figurines, we brought to life the fictional characters we'd created on paper. Like life, Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have specific goals. The game never quite ends. Rather, you choose your path, grow, and suffer setbacks. Sometimes you have to start all over. Most of the game takes place in your head, with the dungeon master acting as referee and director. He sets the scene by describing what your character sees or, in the case of a spear thrust into your neck, feels.
The genius of D&D is the way it parcels out rules and fantasy. The game tethers the imagination just enough to keep you focused on an imaginary world (main goal: slaying nasty things for profit) without putting limits on what you could do inside that world. Dungeons & Dragons is like the greatest Etch A Sketch on earth: It gives you the tools to create whatever you want.
While D&D certainly encourages creativity, the ingredients Gygax conjured weren't exactly original. The game's stew of swords, sorcery, and mythological beasts was mostly appropriated from pulp writers and fantasy greats like H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien. Gygax's skill in integrating fantasies, however, was unparalleled—the world of D&D may have medieval trappings, but its creatures were unbound by time or place. He took monsters from every culture and folklore, from the Greek Pegasus to the Japanese Kirin dragon to the Egyptian sphinx, and made them coexist in a single aggregate world.
Gygax was responsible for creating or adapting the game's spells, races, and character classes (cleric, fighter, etc.). Perhaps his essential contribution was to develop a way to translate physical characteristics into numbers. An American Gladiator, for example, might have a "strength" of 18, while a Woody Allen-like character might have a four. In combining math and fantasy, Gygax engineered a cocktail that no geek could resist. It was also his idea to create "levels" and "experience points," allowing a character to become more skilled as you spend more time with the game. This idea made the game impossibly addictive and helped yield $1 billion in worldwide sales (according to the BBC), scores of books, miniature sets, board games, a cartoon show, and a pretty
crummy movie.
D&D fans were often
super fans. Many painted their own figurines, went to conventions dressed up as orcs, or spent nights and weekends gaming. As opposed to other geeky addictions, though, this one was social (kind of). While it might have been socially detrimental to be known as the best dungeon master in all of middle school, it's also true that some people just don't fit in very well. D&D can provide a social outlet and a way to kick ass without being afraid of getting your ass kicked. Running a D&D campaign took a lot of paperwork, a lot of organization, and a lot of focus. I spent hours creating creatures, towns, and dungeons that that I didn't always end up using. I liked some of these scenarios so much I turned them into stories, and these experiences were one reason I decided to become a writer.
While Dungeons & Dragons has been a source of inspiration for innumerable people in the last three decades, none of Gygax's post-D&D projects proved particularly successful. Quarrels with staff led to his departure from his company, Tactical Studies Rules, in 1985. Both he and TSR
failed to take the lead in the newest role-playing sensations, most notably video games (some of the D&D games did well, but Gygax's online RPG Lejendary Adventure Online never got off the ground) and collectible card games (TSR was eventually bought by
Wizards of the Coast, owner of the mega-successful Magic: The Gathering franchise).
Some people have blamed Gygax's failings on the fact that he was always more gamer than businessman. He grew unhappy with later versions of D&D, declaring them "rule intensive" and more focused on singular achievements than group cooperation. Perhaps his purist belief in an anything-goes fantasy world became out of fashion in the greedy 1980s and disaffected 1990s. For whatever reason, people grew more interested in turning their characters into godlike beings and got less focused on the intricacies of team play. (Sort of like the NBA.)
Despite his late-career failings, Gygax's innovations have continued to spread. In creating the greatest nerd hobby of all time, he built the foundation of every future role-playing game. His idea to assign numbers for health, armor, stamina, and magic has also provided the backbone for innumerable video games, including the Final Fantasy series and the blockbuster World of Warcraft. Wherever geeks cluster, whether playing a Pokemon card game or a video game like Oblivion, they're playing by the rules that Gary Gygax laid out. It's fitting that through Gygax's creativity and inspired descendents, the realm of nerddom has found eternal life.
Randy Decker is now in Iraq. We sure appreciate their family and the many sacrifices they are making while dad is stationed so far away. Today their water heater broke. Of course, it's a holiday weekend. Randy is talking to Rachael on the phone in the first picture. Randy says it's pretty boring and he'd loved more letters. Time to send some care packages! Please remember the Deckers in your prayers. Please remember all of our soldiers in your prayers.
