Gary Gygax is dead

I forgot to get gas on the way home today.

I was in a hurry to get to my house to see if the heavy rains we're experiencing today had managed to flood my kitchen by way of the water leak which has almost-inexplicably appeared in my stove. (Melting snow dripping down the chimney and snaking through the stovepipe into the inside of the oven and gathering in the bottom of the body of the stove, which eventually sprung a leak...what, do you have a better idea?) There was no flood when I got there, so I took a leisurely inspection tour of the house, stopping in the bedroom to take my Garmin GPS thingamajig out of the suitcase I keep up there. (Garmin GPS thingamajigs are easy to lose or misplace; suitcases are not.) I was planning to use the data stored in there as the basis for today's post, after I stopped downtown to fill up.

As I rolled down the hill to the older of Nanticoke's two traffic lights a story came on NPR's All Things Considered about Margaret Jones' Love and Consequences, the latest fake memoir scandal to hit the publishing world. This one sounded semi-interesting; as opposed to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - which, when presented as fiction, attracted very little interest from publishers, but which became a bestseller when recast as a memoir - this new book was apparently an elaborate hoax from the word go.

I left the radio on while I was pumping gas. (Don't worry; that won't blow up your car any more than using a cell phone while pumping gas will. Leaving your car running or getting in and out of it while pumping gas will put you and anyone around you in some danger, though.) I only heard bits and pieces of the report, but as I was finishing up I heard these ominous words on the radio:

"E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons..."

Oh, crap. They're probably not introducing him for an interview. Did he die?

Yes. Yes he did.

I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons from a Parade Magazine article back in 1980 or so. It gave some descriptions of a game in progress, some background, the requisite "college student found wandering in the sewers last year" warning. I thought it was interesting. I decided I wanted to see what it was about.

That Christmas (well, a day or two after) , I took a bus into Wilkes-Barre with my brother and sister. We were 16, 13, and 12 at the time - back then such things were not inconceivable - and our pockets were stuffed full of Christmas loot to buy the things that Santa forgot to get us. I forget what my brother and sister got, but I picked up the boxed edition of what was called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" (a.k.a. the "Blue Book" version - according to the current revision of the Wikipedia article, this would have made this 1981.)*

The contents of the box were...interesting. A blue book of rules and information something like a thick magazine, an introductory adventure ("The Keep on the Borderlands"), and an array of numbered squares (or "chits") printed on glossy cardboard. These "chits" were designed to serve as random number generators, and came with a little treatise on normal distributions and whatnot. I believe there was also a coupon included which allowed you to order "polyhedral dice" for the princely sum of $2. (I think the game had cost me $9. I had originally paid $12 for it in one store, but returned that one when I realized I could save 25% by buying at another nearby store.)

I was a little excited by this, as the "polyhedral dice" came in the shapes of the Platonic Solids that Carl Sagan discussed in one of the appendices to Cosmos. The tetrahedon, or four-sided pyramid; the cube; the eight-sided octahedron; the twenty-sided icosahedron; and, most precious of all, the dodecahedron, the twelve-sided die whose faces were pentagons. (All of the other dice, except for the cube, had triangular sides.) In D&D terms, this set was made up of a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. No d10 for us, baby! Back in my day, sonny, the d20 was numbered 0 to 9 twice, and you had to color one set of the faces to designate it as "plus ten". But this die could also serve as a ten-sider, and if you rolled it twice, or if you were rich and had two of them, you could use it as "percentile dice" to randomly generate numbers from 0 - 99 (or 1 -100, if you counted "00" as 100.) But a d20 was the essential die for "saving throws", those little chances that maybe you got lucky and managed to avoid getting hit by the point-blank shot, or happened to be immune to the poison, or didn't get fooled by someone's persuasive words.

And that was it.

Basic rules. Some funny-looking dice. Pencil and paper. Some friends. And lots of imagination.

Remember, this was a long time ago. The Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20 (with its super-fast cassette tape drive) were state-of-the-art back in the early 1980's. Video games were primitive things.

Fantasy role-playing games like D&D presented kids with the opportunity to flex their imaginations and their creative skills. At its most basic sense, the game was a form of collective storytelling. One person - the "Dungeon Master", in D&D terminology - would set the stage and provide the backdrop and plot twists; the other players would decide how the story would play out through their characters' actions. Some people played without dice. Some people played without rules. Some people played without pencil and paper. The game was flexible like that.

People who played D&D were looked down upon as freaks and weirdos, geeks and social outcasts. And maybe this was true, to an extent. Maybe the level of imagination and creativity required by the game set players apart from most kids their age. But at its heart, D&D was a social event, even if the people you were socializing with were not generally accepted by a lot of society.

The game spun off. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came out a little while later, with more complicated rules and more expensive books. The game was revised several times, and the "rules" evolved from flexible "guidelines" to hard and fast "rules" that ensured portability of play. It waxed and waned in popularity. Ownership passed from Gary Gygax's TSR to Wizards of the Coast, the people who made the Magic: The Gathering card game. In 2000 it was revised again as part of the d20 System, a codification of rules that aimed for uniformity of rule structure across role-playing game formats and platforms.

This past weekend a friend mentioned Mazes & Monsters to me. This is an ancient Tom Hanks TV-movie, a cautionary tale which, I think, involves college kids going nuts playing role-playing games and winding up wandering in the sewers. It's laughably bad, I have heard, and is watched mainly for entertainment value. My friend said that coming across this movie on the TV listings made him think of Dungeons & Dragons. He hadn't thought of it in years, since a bunch of us would get together and play it at my mom's house. I was the Dungeon Master...

Maybe I'll dust off the old books and bring out the dice sometime. I'll draw up an adventure, and a few of us will get together and pull an all-nighter, just like in the old days. Maybe even introduce a few members of the younger generation to a "game" that doesn't require an X-Box or PS3. Just some rules, some dice, some friends, and some pencil and paper. And lots of imagination and creativity.

Thanks, Gary Gygax.


*My own introductory experiences parallel those of "Unseelie" on this discussion board. I wonder where in Pennsylvania Unseelie lived?