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Subject: Gary Gygax dies
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vandemonium wrote:
NPR had a nice mention of him last night as I drove home.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8790143...

In the middle of the story my phone rang, I just ignored it. I had to hear the article.

This morning on the drive in there was another piece.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8791237...

edit (cross posted above - sorry...)




Thanks for that, it was a fitting tribute. I must say its nice to see the mainstream media giving this some attention. 20 million people... thats alot of D-20's being rolled ya know.
Jon Yonce
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07
I got a 20 sider on call
dressed up and ready to roll
I got the real world blinded
dressed up and ready to roll

Midnight, torchlight down in the haunted cave.
Get some platinum the D.M. will turn the page.

Check out my thief he's got the black shield
dressed up and ready to roll
Check out my sickly cave tan
dressed up and ready to roll

Lawful, evil a moral catastrophe
Half-orc, full-dork; the myth and reality

We may not know any girls
But we got graph paper guiding our way
We got confusion, delusion
And all of Friday night to kill.

Pick up the phone the pizza's still late dressed up and ready to roll
Pick up from where your mule died dressed up and ready to roll

That was by far the best time that we ever had.
That was by far the best time that we ever had.

Get to the tavern have a few beers
dressed up and ready to roll
Pick up an Elven bar whore
dressed up and ready to roll


-"Ready to Roll" by Flashlight Brown

Listened to it a lot since I heard this sad news yesterday. RIP Gary.
Last edited on 2008-03-05 09:12:09 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Chapel‽
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citizen k wrote:
You'll notice my memorial avatar is lifted from the cover of the original AD&D Player's Handbook. My first AD&D book and I got it 27 years ago, almost to the day.




That is my favorite cover art. My Avatar of course is from unearthed arcana. I thought the dude looks a lot like Gygax.
ctalbot wrote:
You all rock. Since I logged off yesterday, you've all filled an additional ten pages of memories about Gary Gygax, D&D and the man's impact on gaming.

This is the thread that informed me of his passing. That knowledge hit me pretty hard. I had difficulty working yesterday. Memories kept flooding back to me, and I even got up at one point to go pull my old Red Box books (the box itself is long gone) off the shelves so I could flip through them.

My introduction to D&D was in the summer of 1986. I was ten years old. A friend told us he had this really cool game he wanted us to play. We agreed. Before long, that GM (Sean), my brother (another Sean) and my best friend Tim were all sitting in my parents' garage rolling up characters. I don't remember what our characters were, but I do still have images of that first gaming session. We fought a horde of skeletons, which the GM scribbled down on a piece of paper as a bunch of X's. We rolled dice. We let our imaginations run wild.

That GM moved away not too long afterwards, and it would be a full year before I wandered into Leisure World in the local mall, discovered the D&D Red Box on the shelf and forked over the $20 (or was it $25?) in my wallet.

Over the next few years, I scrimped and saved my allowance just so I could continue to buy D&D boxed sets (between my brother and I, we had them all -- from Basic up through Immortal). We played all the time. We never had a plot. I rarely bought or ran published adventures. Our games were very spontaneous and chaotic. We got good out of those wandering monster tables, and I (as de facto GM) built dungeons as I went along, scribbling them down on pieces of paper ("Uh ... okay, it takes a sharp right turn and opens onto a ten by ten room. There's a ... *clatter of dice* ... uh ... six kobolds in the room. Roll initiative.")

We got together on the spur of the moment to play D&D -- on weekends, after school and most likely just about every day during summer vacation.

D&D gave me a connection with my brother and my friends that I likely never would have had if we hadn't discovered the game.

I remember trying to play D&D in the back of my parents' car in the late '80s as we drove to Florida for a vacation. I remember meeting people I probably wouldn't have met if not for D&D. Some of my oldest friends are people that I gamed with back when I was in high school.

Gary Gygax is at least partially responsible for this. Thanks for the good times, Gary. Even just looking at my old Red Box books gives me a sense of nostalgia that nothing else in this world can top.

Chris


I love that your rocking the Companion set for your avatar. I cannot tell you how many times I just gazed into that cover image of the knight about to engage the green dragon. Hell Larry ELmore along with Frank Frazzetta are two of my favorite artists of all time.
For all of you basic set fans (I played both, but started with the basic red set)

Here is a great archive of the materials around that release and more.

http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd/dd.htm
Big Guy
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johnnyrobo wrote:
harris_family wrote:

As is entirely appropriate for said online comic, 'The Order of the Stick' (or OOTS to it's friends), here is the latest episode, a Gygax tribute.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0536.html

Simon

That was great -- my first character in D&D was a gnome illusionist!




I had a girlfriend who played a gnome illusionist. And another who played a half-elf illusionist. Hmm... Whatever happened to those girls? Why did I let them get away? Gamer chicks are such a rare find...
Chris Talbot
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thedude05 wrote:
I love that your rocking the Companion set for your avatar. I cannot tell you how many times I just gazed into that cover image of the knight about to engage the green dragon. Hell Larry ELmore along with Frank Frazzetta are two of my favorite artists of all time.

I would have went with the Red Box image, but you beat me to it. ;)

Chris
Big Guy
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Osiris Ra wrote:
I am weeping now that this has set in after a few hours.

Back in 1978, as an extremely geeky 12 year old with a poor grasp of English, I was introduced to the world of D&D by someone who had the original books, before they were put into boxed sets. My mind opened up. I made an assassin as my first character; one that worshipped Asmodeus, because I loved the description of his intelligence -- supragenious. There were only two of us in that party, but we played and had fun exploring the world within our heads. This lasted only about one Summer, but I could not stop thinking about this game.

By 14 I had hooked up with another group, one with six-eight players. My English improved in no small part to reading the stuff in the first 2 boxed sets and the Monster Manual....



Osiris, it looks like we had parallel trajectories in our D&D experience. I was also 12 in 1978, though I didn't start playing until 1979, when I got a hold of the boxed set with the dragon on the front.

I played with a school friend, just the two of us, taking turns as DM. In time, I recruited my younger brother and his friends into sessions, where I was the DM. We played through the Drow modules, all the way up to the encounter with Lolth (Q1, I believe).

In college I joined a group that became the longest lasting campaign of my life, going for over ten years. I usually played a fighter/thief hobbit named Arlo, who became a legend in our circles. I took him from 1/1 to 7/7, and under a DM who was very stingy with levels. He had a Sword of Sharpness, and it was always fun to roll that 20 and lop off a head! Those were the best days of my life.

Really amazing to read all these stories of thirty-ish and forty-ish folks whose lives were transformed by the great Gary Gygax.
Peer Sylvester
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As my avatar indicates, I owe him a lot. There is no game designer (or any designer) that gave me as much good moments as Gary did.

May he roll dice in peace !

Debbie Ohi
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I was saddened to hear about the death of Gary Gygax. :-(

I still remembering eagerly waiting for my copy of the original D&D boxed set to arrive in the mail when I ordered it after reading about it in Games magazine. I also still have my original players' manual.

I tried playing with my family (I was the DM, though I didn't really know what I was doing) but it was too scary for my younger brother and sister so we never played it again.

I went to my high school Games Club because I heard they were playing D&D, but quit when it became clear that the guys were incredibly uncomfortable with having a girl playing with them. It was only in university that I started actually playing the game on a regular basis.

Like many others who have already posted, D&D was a big influence in my life in my younger years, both in the friends I made (many of whom are still my friends) and the worlds it opened up for me in terms of storytelling and personal growth (I was pretty shy; roleplaying helped me come out of my shell).

Last edited on 2008-03-05 09:45:07 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Tony Wai Kit Fung
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I often mention that my gaming life was started by Gary Gygax when i was in high school in 1989. Saddening.

And I am sure I developed my interests (and started collecting) dice and dragons since then.
Last edited on 2008-03-05 09:44:34 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
Eric Jome
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