Plaag wrote:Nice tribute from Stephen Colbert at the end of his Wednesday night show.

http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertrep ... oId=156302

ShaneG.

This one is great. Along with Kovalic's, the best tribute to Gygax I've seen so far.

http://media.putfile.com/Gary-et-al-play-Dungeon

Pretty cool to listen to.

ShaneG.

http://goblinscomic.com/

Tarol Hunt pays tribute on his recent Goblins Comic page.

ShaneG.

Courtesy of Contrarian (thanks!   ) I have hung in the store a photo of Gary Gygax, with the 'father of Dungeons & Dragons' line and birth and death    dates. My own way to remember him.

sleepyCO wrote:Has or had anyone heard from Dave Arneson on EGG's passing?

Yeah, I know that they weren't best buddies or anything, but I was also wondering what Dave had to say about Gary's passing.  I guess Dave is just staying his quiet self.  Maybe we will hear something eventually?

~Kat

About halfway down is an interview with Arneson about Gary Gygax's death.

http://www.twincities.com/ci_8456178?so ... st_emailed

g026r wrote:Damn registration sites.  

Are you sure about that?  I didn't have any trouble and I didn't have to register.  FWIW, whoever wrote the article was kind of an idiot anyway, as he continuously refers to D&D as "DD" and also includes some out and out factually incorrect infromation such as  "DD's original "Blackmoor" campaign — including the modules "In Search of the Unknown" and "The Keep on the Borderlands," were developed during late-night gaming sessions in St. Paul, Arneson said. Gygax developed the "Greyhawk" campaign".

Actually here is the whole artivle if you can't get it:

Another giant has fallen," murmured Nick Postiglione.

It wasn't a hill giant, fire giant, or storm giant he was talking about. Nobody'd whipped out their Hammer of Thunderbolts.

"How many guys change the fundamental nature of gaming? Now he's gone," said Postiglione, vice president of The Source Comics & Games in Falcon Heights.

The Twin Cities gaming Mecca posted flyers and paid homage today upon learning Gary Gygax — co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons — died at his Lake Geneva, Wis., home at the age of 69.

Minnesota and Wisconsin are ground zero for gaming: "when (new games) are released, they only pay attention to two markets," said Postiglione. Gygax made many trips to St. Paul, especially during his early years.

And those that knew him here couldn't help but break out the DD rulebook to crack a few bittersweet jokes at his passing.

"He failed his saving throw."

"He didn't make his recovery roll."

And, of course, the bit that appeared briefly on Gygax's Wikipedia page: "Gary Gygax reached negative 10 hit points."

"That's the way the rules read," Dave Arneson, who co-created DD with Gygax, said from his Florida home this evening.

Arneson, who grew up and spent most of his life in St. Paul, had a falling out with Gygax after being ousted from the gaming business they shared, Tactical Studies Rules Inc., known by many simply as TSR. Under the auspices of TSR, the two published Dungeons and Dragons in 1974.

"He loved rules. Writing rules. The other thing going for him is he could type and I couldn't," said Arneson, who is widely credited with creating the "role playing" aspect of DD.
"We never reconciled," Arneson added. "We were polite, but things never came together that way."

But Arneson said he still remembers good times with Gygax.

"We had fun. A lot of fun. We always thought, hey, nobody's going to play this goofy game," Arneson said.

"It changed popular culture. Our choices in movies, television, everything," said John Kentner, another Source employee who created a historical documentary on the early years of gaming entitled "Dragons in the Basement."

Gygax and Arneson started off playing games using miniature models of military men, governed by rigid rule sets of how many inches each piece could travel, and their exact odds of killing the enemy.

But then they got bored.

"In a lot of our war games, we'd drag out something that was totally inappropriate. Oh look, there's a dragon. There's an elephant."

They'd make rules to cover the odd additions.

Then they got bored again.

"One of us cracked," Gygax would joke at conventions.

They added things like castles, and rules for magic... anything to make the cold Minnesota and Wisconsin nights pass easier. Gygax would travel from Lake Geneva to St. Paul to game with Arneson, and vice versa.

DD's original "Blackmoor" campaign — including the modules "In Search of the Unknown" and "The Keep on the Borderlands," were developed during late-night gaming sessions in St. Paul, Arneson said. Gygax developed the "Greyhawk" campaign.

At The Source, the titles remain legend. As does the gregarious, and sometimes gruff man who created them.

"When he (Gygax) started, he would literally pull people off the sidewalk, invite them into his house and ask them to play his game," said Burl Zorn, an employee at The Source who once owned a gaming store in Lake Geneva. Gygax's son, Alex, would come in and rent time on the computer there.

Eventually, he found out who the kid was, and spoke to the man who kept picking him up.

"He just assumed we knew who he was," Zorn laughed.

bclarkie wrote:Are you sure about that?

Yeah, kept asking me to register for some reason.  Thanks for posting the text though.

Alexander1968 wrote:The Economist, amazingly, ran an obituary for Gary Gygax!

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displ ... d=10838120

This is mostly unpexpected. I am a regular reader of the magazine since, well, never mind    but this issue will be carefully stored  

Here is the text:

Gary Gygax

Mar 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Ernest Gary Gygax, a dungeon master, died on March 4th, aged 69

thomashandkeefe.com

FOR most people, "role-playing" conjures up dreary afternoons at management retreats, pretending to be an irate customer or a difficult employee. But if you are under 45 and possibly something of a nerd, more evocative memories may surface. You are Jozan, adventurer-cleric of the sun-god Pelor, traveling the world of Greyhawk, battling orcs and evil wizards, righting wrongs and seeking treasure—at least until you and your friends run out of beer and crisps and stagger off to bed. This is Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the first of the role-playing games and the reason for thousands of misspent youths.

Gary Gygax was perfectly equipped to bring this fantastic world to basements and dining-room tables all over the world. As a boy he was fascinated by games of all sorts, from pinochle to chess. His father, a violinist, read him countless pulp novels featuring dragons, wizards and elves. Even the family name, he once said, had fantastic origins, proving that the Gygaxes were descended from Goliath.

An interest in history lured him into war-gaming, the re-enactment of historical battles with miniature men and a simple rulebook. For several months the members of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (a grand name for a group of friends that met in Mr Gygax's basement) entertained themselves by re-fighting old battles. One day, to spice things up, Mr Gygax turned a plastic dinosaur into a dragon and mixed in wizards and trolls among the men-at-arms.

His fellow-players loved it. Abandoning a career in insurance and in collaboration with Dave Arneson, a fellow gamer, Mr Gygax refined his ideas. From large groups of combatants he moved to individual characters, cooking up rules for magic spells and creating a menagerie of monsters for his heroes to fight.

Manufacturers, when he approached them, were less keen. There was no board and no way to win—and those weirdly shaped dice looked confusing. So Mr Gygax and his colleagues set up their own firm, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Business was brisk, and D&D became an underground hit on campuses around the world. A moral panic about devil-worship only drove sales higher.

As a creative endeavor, Mr Gygax's invented world was deeply unoriginal: he borrowed shamelessly from authors such as Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien. But rather than merely describing these worlds, as their authors had done, his invention—a blend of mathematics, theatre and imagination—allowed his players to live in them. Players built their alter egos by using numbers to represent characteristics such as strength, toughness and intelligence. A "games master" or "dungeon master" would create adventures and provide the opposition—an evil wizard, say, or a manipulative king. A complicated but flexible set of rules allowed players to do almost anything they liked, provided their characters were competent. The crucial element of chance was provided by rolling the game's iconic 20-sided dice.

Triumph of the nerds

As time went on, Mr Gygax became more remote from his creation. His company, having thrown him out, was sold in 1997 to Wizards of the Coast, an upstart fantasy publisher that made sweeping changes to the rules. Mr Gygax disliked that, worrying that the focus was shifting to mathematical questions of maximising players' power. He wrote several new games, working six-day weeks even in his 60s, attending conventions, replying to fan mail and taking time off only for his beloved American football. But none of his new games matched D&D's success.

The game was spreading beyond basements, particularly influencing the nascent computer-games industry. Mr Gygax didn't like that either; he thought computer graphics cheapened the experience by substituting an artist's imagination for the player's. And while computers were ideal for streamlining tedious dice rolls and arithmetic, those, for him, were never the point. He considered role-playing a social thing, a form of group storytelling. Nevertheless, his impact was enormous. One gaming website voted him the joint 18th-most-influential person in computer games, quite an honour for someone who hardly played them.

His influence extends even to people who have never conjured a fireball in anger. Today's world is a nerd's world, and Mr Gygax did much to shape it. Blockbuster fantasy films like "The Lord of the Rings" are produced and directed by people who grew up with the game. Computer games are part of mainstream culture; "World of Warcraft", an internet-based D&D clone, boasts 10m subscribers. Many of the people who built the internet (and their fortunes) spent their childhoods playing the game. The entry for D&D on Wikipedia is twice the length of the article on Proust.

But despite its influence on mainstream culture, D&D as a pastime is still a minority pursuit. Its fans perversely enjoy the opprobrium it still attracts, as well as its deeply cryptic side. "Gary Gygax Fails Fortitude Save" read one online epitaph, intelligible only to the initiated. And as for the qualities he gave his own D&D characters, Mr Gygax would never say.