THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CLIKC => Topic started by: Alex C on 04 Mar 2008, 11:13
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Just thought I'd throw this in here since it's become the general repository for all things nerdy, although technically D&D is communicated through books. Gary Gygax finally failed his Saving Throw vs. Death at the ripe age of 69. He had a good run and without him I wouldn't have spent so much time pondering THAC0, tossing d20s and thinking up new ways of killing my players for next week. Thanks Gary.
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RIP Gary.
So should his tombstone be shaped like a 20 sided die?
Edit: You know this is more of an affect on me than I would've thought. Damn. I started playing back in the old days. Like '79-80.
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Nope. The original player's handbook, bordered with the platonic solids.
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Better! But maybe it should be from the original small box set. Maybe showing the covers of the first three books.
This is the box set I'm referring to. I bought it back in 1979 I think.
(http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/5/5a/175px-D%26d_Box1st.jpg)
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I remember when I was about seven or eight, finding a book on Dungeons and Dragons at my grandparents' house, spending an entire weekend reading it, and then being given the old Basic set (http://paizo.com/store/downloads/wizardsOfTheCoast/classicDAndD/rulebooks/v5748btpy7mvl). I'd been interested in wargames for a while, but this was my first introduction to RPGs. THe perfect thing for a kid who had probably read Lord of the Rings about five times by then, maybe started reading the Silmarillon. Gary Gygax is one of the reasons I love being a nerd, and he's a name I will always remember.
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Let's have 1d6 minutes of silence for our old pal Gary. Finally hit -10 hit points.
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Who was this guy and what did he create?
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Okay it is official, Teh Geek Lord is a troll
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I don't play anymore, but I followed the hobby for years. Mr. Gygax's work was for me, like many others, a gateway to new worlds and fantastical places. He will be missed.
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Okay it is official, Teh Geek Lord is a troll
What did I do? I'm really not trying to be offensive, I really don't know who this guy was.
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Maybe you should read the thread? I know basically nothing about D&D but a quick wiki search confirms my suspicion that he co-created it.
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oh, sorry D&D wasn't mentioned until the edit. I didn't re-read the first post when I asked the question, either way I feel like a dumbass now.
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The edit that was a good hour and forty five minutes before you asked. Nice try, though.
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five times at age 7-8? Man, I was still reading The Hard(l)y Boys at that point.
Maybe not five times, but I know I had read it a couple of times by the time I was in second class (so before I was eight).
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It is always a shame to lose such creative individuals.
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I played DnD today, I was sitting with Kelsey (Nezumi Shaman who also went down -10 hitpoints today) at the library. Sara's mother, who works at the library (I play with Sara), comes up to us with a CNN article printed out.
It was about Gary Gygax
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I disagreed with the man on so many things over the last 19 years I've played D&D, but it's still a great loss to the tabletop world and I'm greatly saddened by it.
...
On the other hand I can't help but think he failing his Fortitude vs. Heart Failure save. I may be a bad person.
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He will be missed. He's left behind quite a legacy.
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http://wkbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=7963395
Short news article confirming it.
I am saddened. Old-school D&D will always live with me. RIP Mr. Gygax.
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He is gaming with the saints now. On the bright side, plenty of people willing to be clerics up there.
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not a fan of d&d but without it, some of the best pc rpg's wouldn't exist so RIP gary.
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RIP Gary.
So should his tombstone be shaped like a 20 sided die?
Edit: You know this is more of an affect on me than I would've thought. Damn. I started playing back in the old days. Like '79-80.
me too. Like '78 I think for me.
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I somehow can't comprehend that GG has departed for the outer planes. Someone get me 13th level cleric, please.
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yesterday my band played a show and i did a tribute for gary gygax by throwing 20 d20's into the audience of like (ironically) 20 people
we'll miss you gygax, father of the modern nerd, me especially
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Eric Burns of Websnark (http://websnark.com/) posted a tribute. What speaks most to Burns' depth of feeling is that, in a normally immaculate blog, he posted a multitude of grammatical and spelling mistakes.
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Thanks for the memories, Gary. Partially because of you, I've spent many happy hours with my friends playing D&D, and I'm grateful for that.
May you roll all 20's in the afterlife. :-(
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:(
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EGG's in a newly created 8th heaven. For Lawful Awesome characters.
Lawful because you *know* he loved rules.
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Order of the Stick tribute to Gygax. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html)
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Who was this guy and what did he create?
Okay, let's assume you're not a troll, but instead a dumbass.
In the future, when people start mourning a death, try googling it. If you don't come up with the name, assume it's the death of a local member and therefore incredibly personal to the community.
If you do come up with the name, it's obviously someone public enough that a large portion of the community will feel a sense of loss.
In either case, shut the fuck up. Either say nothing or just mouth platitudes.
Sheesh. My father's sister told him that was someone like you at my mother's funeral.
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Damn, RIP. He left a huge legacy in the world.
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Eric Burns of Websnark (http://websnark.com/) posted a tribute. What speaks most to Burns' depth of feeling is that, in a normally immaculate blog, he posted a multitude of grammatical and spelling mistakes.
Thanks for linking that. I hadn't checked out Websnark in a while. That was an excellent read.
I had no idea that a) There was a Gamemaster's Day and b) It's March 4th the day EGG died.
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the geek lord is a haXX0R
you a geek? I'M NOT A GEEK and i know who gary gygax is
you should be shamed
SHAMED
*pee noises*
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saving throw, missed.
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I have the urge to start up a collection to buy 5,000 gp of diamond dust.
RIP Mr Gygax.
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Rolling in his grave. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic)
R.I.P.
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the man be rolling die in the heaven planes now.
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xkcd for the win.
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ultimate_game.png)
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Seconded. Best tribute comic so far.
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He's roleing in his grave as we speak.
I play DnD to this day. We had a moment of silence at the last game.
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xkcd for the win.
(http://snips)
you beat me to it!
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Despite being an avid RPG fan for years, I can't say I was ever into the tabletop DnD that much. However I do know how much Gary influenced a culture I've been proud to be a part of, so to see him pass is really a horrible thing. My boyfriend (far more of a tabletop geek) was distraught though, understandably.
RIP, Gary, and thanks for being so damn brilliant.
Note- xkcd and Order of the Stick both have great tributes =)
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Gary Gygax is more then just the co-author of the original D&D before TSR shanked him.
IE : Gary was voted out of his own company but the F*wits at TSR, and then recognised by Wizards.
Gary Gygax is the founder of the entire RPG Genre, without which our Gaming experience would be considerably poorer.
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Actually, what he did was transform a previously existing game style into something far more immersive and, IMO, better. There was tabletop wargaming prior to D&D, but it was pushing around soldiers, rolling dice and, in essence, pretending to be General Patton, or Grant, or the Duke of Wellington. Basically, it was Warhammer 40k without the scifi.
Gygax's genius was to reduce the scale, making it more or less one on one, and set it in a sword & sorcery universe. He then had to work really hard to develop rules to balance it.
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Ohh I know he turned war gaming into a RPG. But all the rpg's out there are based on or inspired by d&d, without gygax there would not have been any Shadowrun, GRPS, Call of Cthulu, Magic the Gathering. The modern RPG era would either not have kicked off, or taken a considerably longer time of it, and most likely poorer then what it has been. Fantasy books would not have been as richly detailed, I know Raymond E. Feist's entire book franchise came out of d&d. (it's on the dedication of the first 3 books and the rest make mention of his friday night d&d crew.)
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Maybe Steve Jackson, or the GDW crew would have come up with something RPG-like out of their various wargaming projects, but it would have happened later, and the hobby would have originally leaned more towards SF than heroic fantasy.
We owe Gary a great deal.
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Actually, what he did was transform a previously existing game style into something far more immersive and, IMO, better. There was tabletop wargaming prior to D&D, but it was pushing around soldiers, rolling dice and, in essence, pretending to be General Patton, or Grant, or the Duke of Wellington. Basically, it was Warhammer 40k without the scifi.
Gygax's genius was to reduce the scale, making it more or less one on one, and set it in a sword & sorcery universe. He then had to work really hard to develop rules to balance it.
Ima hella geek because I had Tractics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractics) as well as D&D.
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I wish I knew what happened to my Tractics rules.
Probably lost in the great Storage Flood of '94.
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I wish I knew what happened to my Tractics rules.
Probably lost in the great Storage Flood of '94.
heh, I think I dumpstered all my miniatures while in college.
Also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
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Slate pulls a late hatchet job. (http://www.slate.com/id/2186203/nav/tap3/)
Gist: If you like D&D, you are a morally base person!
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I like the part where he completely glosses over the fact that D&D is a violent game because it grew directly from wargames. I mean, honestly, the way D&D developed makes so much sense when you realize that the game is a result of a fairly natural progression. Player builds a li'l army. Player develops favorite li'l battalions in his li'l army. Player has one li'l "block" of troops that never lets him down. Player decides he needs some way to indicate that these guys should be veterans by now. Player decides a particular figurine should be a veteran named Bob, who, by the way, has to be kind of tired of infiltrating Castle Blackmoor by now, because he's done it like a million times and has to be like, level 12 by now. Seriously, from the perspective of raw game mechanics, the big difference between proto-D&D and earlier games was the inexorable move from large scale to small scale, which then led to a deeper 1-to-1 Player-Character relationship. The real contribution Gygax made to gaming history was simply accelerating the process and embracing fantasy elements. Acting like it was Gygax himself who invented the world of table top violence is kinda missing the forest for the trees.
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That slate author has a rep-sort of...
http://gotzune.com/2007/12/idiot-of-the-day-erik-sofge-of-popular-mechanics
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I could be better better situated to respond to the Erik Sofge article given that I've played neither GURPS nor pre-D&D table-top RPGs. Nevertheless, the man is full of shit -- for a variety of reasons. The alignment systems primary purpose was to guide role-playing -- it is rarely a combat mechanic (in that it rarely gives you pluses to attack etc.). The source books focus on combat was premised less on Gygax's obsession with combat and more on the fact that for a DM, combat mechanics would be the hardest and most tedious bit to make up and explain. Furthermore, story XP almost always played a more significant role than combat XP in terms of bringing your character forward in levels. At the higher levels, story XP was almost the only thing bringing your forward -- unless you were spending every second day in the outer planes taking on demons and devils single handedly.
Of course, the significance of combat in a given campaign is up to the DM. Plenty of DMs could provide hours of gameplay with nary a combat in sight. I didn't play a lot of Gygax authored campaigns, but I'm given to understand that they were as much about puzzle solving as they were about combat. The most obvious thing a DM could do is make you regret the merciless killing of humanoids and offer you alternatives to avoid it. And then reward you for roleplaying a character who wasn't into wanton destruction (if that was consistent with the character you set out to play . . . .)
In any event, we know well that the fastest way for a marginal internet scribe to generate notoriety is to smear an icon. Sofge's article is infantile in the "Look at me! Look at me!" sort of way.
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I could be better better situated to respond to the Erik Sofge article...
Also he's a -2 Charisma Half-Orc
:wink:
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Erik Sofge in a nutshell:
I AM GOING TO TRY AND MAKE A NAME FOR MYSELF BY BASHING A GAMING ICON AFTER HIS DEATH
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While I am sympathetic to some of the points made in the article about DnD, frankly it's like writing a president's day piece on why Washington was a worthless sexist because he didn't make the constitutional convention give Mary the vote. Judging the past by the standards of the present is bad form, particularly when you're looking at the import of a figure's past contributions. As has been said before, keeping in mind that Gygax was coming straight from wargaming really is the only way to understand DnD at all. If it weren't for those first dungeon crawls all the games I love (Fading Suns, WFRP, etc) probably wouldn't exist.
Also, Gygax is this week's Economist obituary. It's a decent article, though definitely written for the uninitiated.
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Great obit (http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10838120). Was it Fark that had the fortitude save headline or Something Awful? Anyhow, I didn't know Gygax worked in insurance. That makes so much sense.