Gary Gygax: An Appreciation

You may have heard that E. Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, lost his final saving throw with the great dungeon master in the sky this morning.

Perhaps I should have called this post “Dungeons & Dragons: An Appreciation,” since I really didn’t know Gary Gygax from Elric of Melniboné. I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak or saw his picture until this afternoon. I may have read an interview or two with him over the years, but they certainly didn’t make any lasting impression.

But to me, Gary Gygax was not primarily the inventor of a popular role-playing game; he was an unparalleled author of fantasy. Gary Gygax wrote three volumes that were highly influential to me as a kid. I speak of the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. I present them below in the editions that will forever be branded in my memory:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual

My experiences as a player of Dungeons & Dragons have generally been pretty miserable. I played my first game at perhaps the age of eight, with my brother as dungeon master and my older sister serving as co-adventurer. I’m guessing this was 1979, because the module we were playing, In Search of the Unknown, was published that year. I believe we were playing the Basic rules, using the set pictured below. (Gawd, do these pictures bring back memories…)

Basic Dungeons & Dragons set

We made an awful team. My sister and I spent a couple of hours building our characters — I was a dwarf, if I remember correctly — and got into a horrific argument about how we should order our party for the inevitable foray into the dungeon. Tears and screaming ensued. (Hey, I was eight.) Finally, we decided to just put aside our differences in the interest of pursuing adventure, but the adventure proved to be short-lived. We found ourselves shooting arrows at a band of ravenous giant centipedes, which we pictured as these enormous Dune-sized worms with enormous jaws and enormous sharp teeth. Then my brother cheerfully informed us that these giant centipedes were only about a foot long, at which point the game dissolved into a fit of giggles and never resumed.

Over the next half-dozen years, I was determined to find a good game of Dungeons & Dragons and become one of those legendary dungeon masters you read about in Dungeon Masters Guide. But despite fervent evangelism to my elementary school friends, the most that ever materialized was a rather pathetic playthrough of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. I served as dungeon master to my then-friends, who wandered disinterestedly through a haunted house killing everything that moved, without ever realizing that the place was just a ruse set up by pirates to scare the locals away from their smuggling operation.

When I finally found a group of guys who were serious AD&D players, we were all heading into the dungeon of puberty. We had weekly sleepovers where eight or nine of us would earnestly head off for adventure, and then quickly drift off into Giggling & Gossip after an hour or two. This continued for a couple of years until my friend Geoff and I brought the entire role-playing phase of the group to a close by creating a game called Chutes & Dungeons & Ladders & Dragons. The raucous game, played only once, went something like this:

ME: You turn the corner and you see a giant ladder.

PLAYER: I’ll climb the ladder.

ME: You get to the top of the ladder, and you see Matt’s dad yelling at you to take out the trash. He summons Cthulu, who zaps you with a lightning bolt that costs you four million hit points.

PLAYER: I’m rolling a saving throw… it’s a 3! That means the lightning bolt bounces off me and kills Matt’s dad instead. [throws Cheetos]

And that, in a nutshell, is my history with fantasy role-playing.

Despite the fact that I never had a satisfactory Dungeons & Dragons gaming experience, I spent years poring over those books you see above. I read them cover to cover multiple times. I studied the artwork. I sketched out a million dungeons and was never far from a pad of graph paper and a felt bag full of 20-sided dice. I would daydream about the world of Greyhawk and psionic powers and what would happen if I gathered a group of a hundred adventures and we all screamed “Hastur!” at the top of our lungs. (Readers of Deities & Demigods get the joke.)

Through those books you see above (along with others like The Fiend Folio, Deities & Demigods, The Monster Manual II, and Oriental Adventures), Gary Gygax opened my eyes. He introduced me to Norse mythology, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. He gave me a hard-on for imagination that’s been with me ever since. (And if you’ve ever spent any time poring through those books, you can imagine that they produced hard-ons of a more literal variety too. Let’s just say that in the ’70s, topless large-breasted she-demons were about as hard core as it got for a preadolescent kid in Orange County, California.)

What was so fabulous about Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks?

I think it was a combination of Gygax’s boundless enthusiasm, his slightly cornball sense of humor, and his ability to gleefully cannibalize any piece of film or literature in the service of adventure. It wasn’t armor classes and spell requirements that I was learning by reading those books. I was learning how to turn life into an adventure that would never end no matter how good you got at it. I was learning how to size up the world around me with a rigid set of rules and statistics and dice rolls. I was learning a handy set of moral rules in the alignment chart, which taught me more about human nature than eight years of Hebrew school ever did.

Detractors of D&D often stereotype RPG fans (as well as SF fans) as people with poor social skills. (And I suppose one must admit that there does seem to be some kind of correlation.) But to me, the hallmark of the D&D player is the tendency, on unfolding a map of Greyhawk, to look at those peculiar countries on the edge, the ones with the strange names about which the accompanying booklet simply says “not much is known about this land,” and instantly want to be there, to yearn beyond all else to jump into that map and be the first one to trek through it and map it out and provide a complete description of its history, customs, and politics for the world’s edification.

E. Gary Gygax unlocked that tendency in me in the late ’70s. And the fact that he’s gone now makes the world that much poorer. Damn it, how come there’s never a 25th-level Cleric with a Wish spell around when you need one?