It’s a sad day for geeks everywhere: Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died at age 69 of an abdominal aneurysm. As my friend Joetold me via IM: “I sensed a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of geeks in their parents’ basements cried out in mourning…” That strikes the perfect balance of respect and geeky homage this event calls for. It’s probably than joking about running out of hit points or failing a saving throw.
I certainly knew my way around a 20-sided diewhen I was a kid and remember clearly my first in-depth contact with the game. I remember sitting in on some dungeon-crawling sessions in early early grade school when the D&D phenomenon first broke in the mid-late ’70s. But it wasn’t until 6th grade that I rolled my first character, thanks to my social studies teacher Mr. Schuster (not his real name).
Thinking back on it, it was pretty edgy for him to start an extracurricular D&D club at a Catholic school where nuns still strolled the halls and the game was in the headlines for turning kids into devil-worshipping slackers. I distinctly remember rolling a pretty crappy character. I think his highest attribute was 13 or 14, and his lowest was 3 or 4. Mr. Schuster advised me to assign the low score to charisma, then made him a half-orc to explain how he got walloped with the business end of the ugly stick. To make me feel better about having an unattractive and weak character, Mr. Schuster made him an assassin and told me to keep that secret from the rest of the players. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to see my hatchet-faced killer in action because, a couple weeks later, Mr. Schuster was fired. It was nothing to do with D&D. The rumor was that he threw chalk at a student and cursed him with obscene language.
But I kept my fascination for D&D through grade school and part of high school. The weird thing is that I never actually played it that much. Few of my friends were into it, so I mostly just spent hours poring over the rules laid forth in The Dungeon Master’s Guide and The Player’s Handbook, dreaming up new characters, and absorbing the mythology of the Monster Manual andDieties and Demigods. Thanks to D&D, I had sterling instruction in fantasy taxonomy long before I read Tolkien. I learned the defining characteristics of elves, dwarves and halflings, and got schooled in the mundane nuisances of bugbears and hobgoblins. D&D introduced me to the more exotic menaces of ocre jellies, undead liches and floating, wide-eyed beholders, and taught me the names of powerful ancient evils like Asmodeus, Beelzebub, and Tiamat.
Eventually, cars, girls and stereos took over my spare time. Probably more than a decade passed before I encountered D&D again, in 1999, and this time it had been thoroughly updated for the computer age in the form of role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate IIthat featured epic 40-hour-long stories, rich characters and lush, cutting-edge graphics. Amazingly, Gygax’s 6-attribute character creation system, turn-based combat and byzantine system of bonuses and penalties affecting almost every action could be ported perfectly to computers. Given that I had been a kid who often had to play D&D — the ultimate geek social network of its day — by myself, this ability to play through a detailed campaign alone was instantly appealing.
It’s amazing the D&D still thrives today through dice, pencils and lead figurines despite the wild popularity of video games and how easy, compelling and accessible they made fantasy worlds. Gygax and his crew hit upon a magical formula that fired the imagination of generations of geeks and, along with Tolkien, is pretty much entirely responsible for the state of fantasy role-playing games today.
