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Posted on March 7, 2008 - by deCadmus

Off To His Next Great Adventure

Forty-two

As a certified geek — a pedigreed geek even1 — I would be remiss if I should fail to note the passing of E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and the undisputed father of the role playing game.

I was not your typical gamer. The first time I rolled for initiative was a good seven or eight years after I’d first kissed a girl, rather than before. I didn’t game in high school. That may have had something to do with the fact that the high school I attended was a Catholic seminary, which is an environment that doesn’t lend itself toward games that feature fantastical gods and demons; that would have been superfluous, indeed. (The irony of this is not lost on me.) It could be noted that a Catholic seminary is also an environment that doesn’t naturally lend itself toward kissing girls, but that didn’t prove an especially great impediment.

When I first gamed I was a twenty-something kid who had his first real job and a car payment and a girlfriend. I’d already had a few hard lessons on the differences between Intelligence and Wisdom. Still, I was captivated. Enthralled by a world built out of the collective imagination of our brilliant, conniving Dungeon Master (hello, Brian!) and the odd assortment of my fellow nerds, those weekend gaming sessions were a gratifying and indispensable diversion from an increasingly “grown-up” world. Dungeons & Dragons offered explicit permission to play let’s pretend, long after my school days were over, and even as the workaday world threatened to stamp out my sense of wonder and extrude my imagination into a maze of twisty little org charts, all alike.

Thanks, Gary. In a good many ways you helped armor me for the real world.

Notes and Links

  1. Yes, my father before me was — and remains — a massive geek. He was programming computers in the day when you programmed them by rewiring them. ↩
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  1. Visit My Website

    March 10, 2008

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    Brian said:

    I was more than conniving – ruthless and evil seemed to be common descriptors. In my new job I find myself working alongside an avid gamer who still plays even with two jobs and four kids to fill his time. Makes me miss those games.

    In a different context I came across this quote earlier today and it seems suited to remembering Gygax.

    “When I was 10, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things—including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown-up.”
    –C. S. Lewis



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    March 10, 2008

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    deCadmus said:

    I wondered how long it would take for this post to goad you into making a comment. ;)

    You, of course, are in the singular position of judging your own ruthlessness; only you know how many times the roll of the dice on your side of the screen was merely by way of sound effect.

    As for me, I have a peculiar sound-induced recollection, triggered by the rattle of a single die rolling. It takes me back to the occasional too-long pause in play, wherein an argument among players over tactics or game play might be interrupted by the lonely sound of a single die roll on the other side of the screen, and the admonishment: “The monsters are getting impatient…”



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    March 10, 2008

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    Brian said:

    Only took me a few minutes after I read it. I have just been too busy to keep up with reading. My new job came with deadlines that were already whooshing past before I started. As for whether the rolling of dice was just sound effects, I’ll keep that secret to myself. I will, however, admit that some encounters had predestined events that were going to happen regardless of the dice. I also had one d20 with a remarkably predictable rolling pattern that let control high side vs. low side about 80% of the time depending. All I had to do was run a few test rolls to judge the table bounce.



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    March 10, 2008

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    deCadmus said:

    “I also had one d20 with a remarkably predictable rolling pattern that let control high side vs. low side about 80% of the time depending. All I had to do was run a few test rolls to judge the table bounce.”

    There’s a neat conversation going on over at Making Light that started out as a bit of remembrance of Gygax, and has segued into a thread about dice, superstition and vices (of the bench variety, used for making an example of misbehaved die.) See this one, for example:

    In 1986, one of my players (and future Best Man at my wedding) became frustrated one evening with his dice rolling and forced the rest of his dice to watch as the offending d10s were squeezed into shards in a large bench vise. He kept the shards and showed them to other under-performing dice as he exhorted them to improve their performance. Over the years, several other players punished lackadaisical dice in that same vice. “Getting the vice” became (and still is) the phrase for any item (animal, mineral or vegetable)that needs to be destroyed or discarded. The threat is still offered to dice on a regular basis, although the vice itself is long gone…



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