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From numerous sources, we have the sad news that E Gary Gygax has died.
It’s hard to estimate the effect that Dungeons & Dragons has had on nerd culture — and by extension, the general culture. Like science fiction fandom before it, D&D provided a forum for imaginative play, and fostered an international social network for bright, quirky kids where they could find praise (and even get paid work) for their wit and creative work at an age when adults were more likely to ignore them or treat them as threats.
D&D is also a forerunner of the modern mashup-and-share approach to pop culture. You can find clear influences from JRR Tolkien, Friz Leiber, Jack Vance, Michhael Moorcock, Avram Davidson, and RA Lafferty in Gygax’s D&D writing. D&D eagerly adapted and combined the works of other authors, and shared them with each other through APAs and letters and early computer networks. It wasn’t uncommon, in a D&D game, to see a Norse viking hunting a minotaur, or even a Tolkienesque elf warrior fighting alongside one of Larry Niven’s kzinti against HR Giger’s alien. Role-playing games in general are great promoters of the make-your-own-fun habit I wrote about a couple of months back.
Gygax had his own quirks (ask me sometime about Lee Gold’s phone conversation with him), but I’m pleased to hear that, despite his health problems, he was still hosting weekly D&D games as recently as January.
I met him only briefly, but know many who worked with him and his, and for some the memory alone makes steam come out their ears. But for all of his curmudgeonly and irascible qualities, he was a luminous and creative mind, who gave us a great gift, and we are the poorer for his passing.
Rest to him, and comfort to those who mourn him.
More seriously, about D&D's cultural effects: hasn't Charlie Stross theorized the future "feel" of virtual reality is going to be derived from MMORPGs, and by extension, from D&D?
Odd. That was about half of my post. oh well.
Sad news indeed. My best friend introduced me to the game in 1980, when I was ten, after I'd already found Tolkien and McCaffrey and LeGuin, but before I'd discovered fannish culture. It was through the writeups in Deities & Demigods that I learned about Moorcock and Leiber and Lovecraft.
I haven't played in years, but I can still discuss political philosophy in terms of alignment or explain people's attributes on a scale of 3-18 without thinking twice.
He will be remembered.
And I'm really curious about his conversation with Lee Gold!
"hasn't Charlie Stross theorized the future "feel" of virtual reality is going to be derived from MMORPGs, and by extension, from D&D?"
I recall that concept first showing up in the background material provided with R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk tabletop RPG. At the time, I remember thinking that sounded utterly ridiculous...
Also, my friend Dan Johnson has what I think is the best reaction to this news.
"What we should do is...
...every gamer nerd on the planet should chip in some dough and we should build Gary Gygax an enormous tomb filled with the deadliest traps ever devised.
That is unfortunate. D&D sparked a whole movement, and informs every RPG to this day. I guess that's the finest tribute--that his ideas are still being used.
I have drunk a farewell beer in his name tonight, and now I'm off to dig up the dice I haven't used in a decade, just for one ritual saving throw.
The thread linked in #6 is great - yes, I too stepped into that sphere, damnit.
For maybe 10 years now, I pretty much always carry a d6 and d20 in my pocket. Some part of my identity, I guess. Not many folks get to change the world so obviously as did GG. Salut!
Back in summer camp, I ran "Tomb of Horrors" for some friends. They all walked into the Sphere of Annihilation. I hastily improvised an adventure taking place in the metaphysical Realm of Annihilation (where annihilated objects go), because it was either that or start over or give up.
jh woodyat wrote -
"hasn't Charlie Stross theorized the future "feel" of virtual reality is going to be derived from MMORPGs, and by extension, from D&D?"
I recall that concept first showing up in the background material provided with R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk tabletop RPG. At the time, I remember thinking that sounded utterly ridiculous...
Mike P. might have scaffled that idea from Dream Park (there were, AIR, some oblique mentions of Dream Park being part of the Cyberpunk continuity long before R. Talsorian did the Dream Park RPG), but I'm not sure - it would have been in the original 2013 version (when every net-cowboy had their own Interface (assuming they went to the trouble of souping up their own, instead of using one of the standards - 'Tronnic, Dungeon, or Mega City), before the Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithm Set up Ein Interface, Ein Protocol, Ein Internet! for all runners, weefle to pro, console jockey to amped-up special purpose AI)*.
Of course, back then (CP2013 edition came out in 1988, and I started working on 2020 stuff in '91), we caught more crap for even presuming that the Internet might have a mandatory graphical interface (even though Neuromancer, Hardwired, Ghost In The Shell, etc. all presumed one), instead of a "much more useful text-based environment" - presumably, people would want to download sensies via FTP before viewing them, or something... :-/
*umm... yeah, actually, I did all that off the top of my head, except for looking up the actual dork (and dorkette) behind the I-G Algorithm. Scary, yeah.
Reposting my reactions from the Steve Jackson Games board:
Well, crap. No one lives forever, but 69 is too damn young these days.
Decade and a half year old recollections:
EGG was a frequent guest of I-Con, a campus SF convention I helped run back in the day. One year I was assigned as his driver. Got to go to dinner with him and some friends, and gave him a big laugh and big thrill half-floating, half-driving down a hillside road awash with water after a torrential Long Island rain storm. Man, he got a kick out of that . . . I was almost peeing my pants in fear.
At the time, Gygax was getting happy and grounded again after some really bad times, and some heady crazy times in Hollywood (script editor, as I recall, for the D&D cartoon . . . if you ever wonder why that show was kind of trippy, there was a contribution from consumption of a certain pipeweed). He had a new wife, and a few years later a new son. He was a good guest, in the sense of being there for the fans. He'd rather skip speeches and panels and just grab some people to game with. A real pro at having fun.
His work influenced me more than most authors ever did. He will be missed.
OK, here's the story. Since 1975, Lee Gold has been editing an APA called Alarums & Excursions, originally devoted to D&D, later to RPGs in general. Not long after she started, she got a phone call from Gygax himself, which went a little something like this:
LG: Hello?
GG: Hi, this is Gary Gygax, and I'd like to talk to Lee Gold.
LG: Oh wow! This is Lee Gold, and we love your game, Mr Gygax, and--
GG: No, I mean the Lee Gold who published Alarums & Excursions.
LG: Yes, this is she. As I was saying, we play your game a lot, and--
GG: You're a woman!
LG: Yes, Mr Gygax. Now, your game has quite a fandom here, and--
GG: You're a woman!
LG: Yes, all my life. Now, if we could get back to D&D, I'd just like to say that--
GG: You're a woman!
...and on like that for a while.
I used to game. I recall the various dust-ups (my gaming days were, oh, 1980-1990), about who did what with D&D. I have the original box set of the rule.
I can't say as I am grieving at his loss, but my life would be the poorer for his not having been.
There's an excellent article about Gygax in the Believer a few months back.
On the more sober topic - those of us in the Industry - whether full-time pros, part-time dilettantes like myself, or folks who have moved on to bigger and better (or at least more lucrative) things, pretty much all owe Gary a debt - if nothing else, for starting the crazy madhouse of an almost-industry we call home.
Back in 1976, I got a funny looking box for Christmas. Inside was a book with a blue cover, some funny-looking dice,* and another booklet with a removable cover with some maps on it. I was eight, and soon I was enthralled.
Soon, my brother, myself, and anyone we could drag in to play a game were building dungeons out of legos, pestering our mother for trips to Campaign HQ (the city's only gaming store at the time) to spend hard-earned allowance on miniatures, modules, and other games (Traveller, whose Little Black Box enthralled me almost as completely as D&D did), and playing almost anywhere you could drop a D20 and let it stand. I can't say that we were very good players, at least at first, but we sure as hell were enthusiastic (and loud...).
A decade and a half later, I got my first chance to work on a gaming project, when the crew I had fallen in with at the UofR was tapped to work on Chromebook 2 for Cyberpunk (three of us - Benjamin Wright, Mike Roter, and I - later came to be unofficially known sometimes as "Talsorian East" because we had so much work in the Cyberpunk stable). The money wasn't much (but it wasn't bad, either), and ever since, it's been a near-constant (if sometimes slow-flowing) source of additional revenue - and a useful float in hard times.
But... that's not the reason I owe Gary. I mean, the money is nice, and I likely wouldn't have met many of the people I now know, love (or at least like a lot), etc. without gaming (including the guy who got me into my first IT job).
No, I owe him for the countless hours of enjoyment his games - and the games that followed on, from Traveller to The Fantasy Trip to Runequest, GURPS, Cyberpunk, four (five?) different flavors of Star Trek, Villains&Vigilantes, Champions, the World of Darkness, Exalted, Savage Worlds, Mutants&Masterminds, CORPS, EABA, and nigh-countless others - have brought me and mine over the years.**
In the playing, and in the reading. In the scheming, and the hours spent perched over sheets of graph paper, miniatures with paint-laden brush in hand, or glowing computer screen. In the conventions and the discussions online (r.g.frp.advocacy, how I miss your early, more innocent days... sometimes).
In all the myriad ways that gaming has brought fun into my life (even if it sometimes has also brought screeching ass-cannoning howler monkeys,*** loss of hair (and eyesight), and other evils (if minor ones) into my life as well), Thank you, Gary Gygax. You made my life better - or at least weirder, and richer - for having been around at the right place, at the right time, for getting this whole shebang rolling.
Rest in Peace.
*and soon after, the Parcheesi set was never safe again...
**pretend they're italicized where appropriate, okay?
***screeching ass-cannoning howler-monkey is (TM) Clayton Oliver, used with permission... :-)
My father used to give me hell about the amount of time I spent playing my "imaginary games with no real rules."
He assumed it would never amount to much.
I called him when I received my first freelancer's payment for fantasy art and sent him a copy of the Dragon Magazine it appeared it (it was, by the time they were done with only an inch by inch and a half--- but it was there).
I have nothing but fond memories of running campaigns in D&D settings --- I'm happy to say that I will continue to game.
Thank you Gary.
JKRichard, my father had such an opinion of the whole field, "why are you writing that? All the stories have been told!"
Until I had my first sale to Marion Zimmer Bradley. That just left him dumbstruck.
I'd never had my father shut up about one of his opinions. It was awesome.....
I'm on the fringes here. I've never been much of a gamer (although I do like Talisman, which is sort of a board-game version of D&D), but so many of my friends are that I've learned the language and the concepts by osmosis. Like Rikibeth, I find that gaming alignments, jargon, and stats are useful shortcuts for describing real-world events.
Here's a funny story about one such event. Russ was doing a little grocery shopping late one Saturday night, and there was only 1 checkout lane open, and he and another shopper arrived at the end of the line simultaneously from opposite directions. Russ looked at the cart's contents (chips, cookies, sodas) and the guy pushing it (heavyset, long-haired, wearing a fantasy T-shirt), and said, "Roll for initiative?"
The guy was a little chagrined at being ID'd so easily by someone who looked (relatively) mundane! But really, what would you have thought?
Re #6. I'm too lazy to actually organize anything. But if others do my money is there. What a perfect idea.
Russ looked at the cart's contents (chips, cookies, sodas) and the guy pushing it (heavyset, long-haired, wearing a fantasy T-shirt), and said, "Roll for initiative?"
Hee! You meet the nicest people that way - I began a long and informative conversation by sidling up to a complete stranger, of similar description but with a Chthulu/Cheney tshirt, and muttering "The Stars Are Right." Mind you, a Type 2 geek (type 1 is the little skinny type) with either abundant or absent hair is more than likely someone I know, at least by association or mutual aquaintance, in Melbourne.
Without Gygax, I'd be hustling chess for pizza money instead of gaming for fun. Still got my 1st Edition, frayed from use, holding court over newer, lesser games in my storage room.
I have never played D&D, but I have played other RPGs and LARPs, so I know the debt that I owe to Mr. Gygax. Most of my closest friends are folks I met through gaming.
A woman I knew, in her late thirties at the time, was with her husband visiting his brother for Christmas. She was sitting chatting with the two of them while her brother-in-law's kids, between the ages of 9 and 13, were playing D&D in the corner.
She heard one of them say "...I'm going to sneak up and attack him from behind," and she stopped her conversation, turned to them, and said, rather sharply, "Dude, you're a paladin!"
They were aghast, confronted by a) an adult who b) knew what they were doing and c) really knew what they were doing.
There is a very long memorial thread up at RPG.net.
A huge part of my life revolves around gaming. D&D was what got me into it, and for that, I owe Gary Gygax a great deal. I hope his passing was peaceful. You will be missed by millions, including me, Gary.
You can find clear influences from ... RA Lafferty in Gygax’s D&D writing.
Maybe it's because I internalised them at about the same time, in the early eighties, but I'm having trouble working out where the Lafferty footprint in Gygax's work are. Not that it wasn;t very possible to use Lafferty in D&D; I did so in the second D&D adveture I ever ran, which eventually ran away into a scenario that took several years to play through.
EGG didn't really adapt very well to the way that everyone could make RPGs into whatever they liked; lots of his work is full of "the official way" and other attempts to impose his own vision. Dave Arneson's contribution is also often neglected. But yes, EGG was where the ideas condensed and role-playing games took their form.
John Dallman @ 27: "EGG didn't really adapt very well to the way that everyone could make RPGs into whatever they liked; lots of his work is full of "the official way" and other attempts to impose his own vision. Dave Arneson's contribution is also often neglected. But yes, EGG was where the ideas condensed and role-playing games took their form."
I think it has to start that way: someone authoritatively saying, "This is the way it is!" You have to have that kind of ridiculous confidence of vision to invent a whole new idea about how to play. Then, afterwards, people can say, "Well, why does it have to be like that? Why not like this?" and create new, more flexible systems. But there's no way to start with something like GURPS or Champions--those things only make sense in the context of "Huh, I really wish I had more freedom than in D&D." Rules on how to do whatever you want is a bit of a strange sell.
Paula Helm Murray #19: That reminds me of a conversation with my father years ago about an item in the newspaper about which he was going on at length, and about which I disagreed. When he inquired as to why I disagreed I said 'I wrote it.' Never heard a man shut up so fast.
D&D was actually fairly late for me, since Swedish gaming went down the route started by "Basic Roleplaying" (think RQ and CoC). I think I had been gaming for 4-5 years before seeing class-based RPG systems.
Nonetheless, it is a VERY notable person in gaming history that has now had his charsheet shredded and binned, even if I have much less sentimental memories of the gaming system he is most connected with.
Gygax's influence and D&D's... One of my buddies, who was a D&D player, once told me of the time in 1981 when he and others had gone to see Boorman's Excalibur. When Mordred ran his spear thru Arthur, the whole audience went silent. Until someone exclaimed:
"Man! That must be at least 5000 points of damage!"
Fire, and fleet, and candle light / And Christ recieve thy soul!
[FX: the huge barge, made from dead men's character sheets, sails slowly out to sea while flames lick around the body of EGG. A dragon's hoard beneath him, his hands clutch a d20 at his breast.]
His influence can't be overstated - nearly all the existing MMOs are very heavily invested in the same vision he & Arneson started off. That can be frustrating for the designers sometimes, having an obsessive focus on killing and looting, but dammit... it WORKS to make a playable, happy game. And when we get more than usually irritated, we can remind ourselves that D&D wasn't just about monsters and money, but also about the wonderful imaginative magical toys, the spectacular effects you could have, and the quirky little fun things for players to find scattered in corners.
John Dalman #27: OK, the Lafferty influence is pretty minor. One of the characters in a combat example in one of the first edition AD&D books is named "Gutboy Barrelhouse".
They were aghast, confronted by a) an adult who b) knew what they were doing and c) really knew what they were doing.
I get that reaction fairly frequently, substituting "woman" for "adult". The folks at the local gaming store have mostly gotten to know me, but I still get the occasional annoyed-rolling-of-eyes from patrons of the place when I presume to interrupt their bull sessions with the clerks to ask a question. At least until they hear the question and realize with shock and horror that I know what I'm talking about. :) I admit I sometimes do it just for the Zaphod Beeblebrox moment*.
Gygax was the reason for a lot of the crap I hate about RPGs--the Adversarial GM stance, most especially. On the other hand, he was also a big part of why there are RPGs at all. I carry a tube of dice in my purse, just in case; like Terry, I won't mourn him personally, but my life would be poorer had he never lived.
*: "Don't try to outweird me, boy; I get weirder things than you free with my breakfast cereal." Compounded by the fact that I look so much like a girl. And I'm not buying White Wolf...
My experience amounts to a little D&D, some Champions, and a short flurry of Shadowrun. It was fun. Thanks, Gary.
RPG'ers don't die. They just create a new character sheet and move on to a new game.
I first starting playing D&D in 1982, when I was 13. I have been semi retired from it since 2000.
In 1985 I went to my first Gen Con and went to a talk by Gary Gygax. I took a back hall to get there and lo behold in that same back hall was Gary Gygax, walking along side a man who turned to be Famous Amos himself.
In that hall was just me and a couple of buddies, along with Gygax and Famous Amos. I was severely fan boy stricken by the sight of The Man but he was very nice and pleasant, and radiated a fatherly warmth. We talked as we walked but I don't remember what he talked about. I do remember just before the stage door to the conference hall he turned to me and handed me an open package of cookies and said, "Here, try my friend's cookies." and he said goodbye.
A good soul has passed on and the world is a little poorer from for his absence. Gary Gygax was amazing writer and creative mind, the father of D&D and roleplaying games.
His First Edition Dungeon Master's guide stands as a classic roleplaying reference, an epic work of game genius.
Good bye, Gary Gygax.
I have no personal memories of Gary Gygax myself, but I have fond memories of evenings and weekends spent with the toys he gave us. D&D helped get me through the 80s intact and sane. Though I haven't played in 20 years or more, all my manuals, character sheets, etc. are still right downstairs in my office where I can get at them easily, neatly tucked away in the case I used to carry them to the dungeon in.
If ever someone deserved to belong to the species Homo Ludens, it was Gygax. I bet he's right now telling whoever's DMing the cosmic game how to run his NPCs.
I was shocked when I heard the news last night. I think I assumed Gygax would remain the vaguely godlike, eternally youthful guy we all revered when I was a kid in the 80s.
I haven't played in years, but I still have my dice bag. Because you never know.
My brother used to DM for my cousin and me well into our 20s. My favorite memory from those days: my brother, shaking the dice in one hand, breaking into a protracted argument between me and my cousin. "So, are you going to eat the bread or not?" Good times. :)
Although I never got into RPGs, despite having purchased the first edition of D&D when it was released, I'll remember Gary for his advocacy of miniatures in the wargaming world of the late sixties and early seventies. My friends and I spent many happy hours with such TSR rule books as Chainmail, Hardtack, and Tractics. He was a giant in the gaming hobby even then.
For those of us who still game, I propose calling a natural 20 a Gygax in memory of the man who helped bring us the RPG.
"When he inquired as to why I disagreed I said 'I wrote it.'"
Why did you disagree with what you wrote?
This is a major bummer. I still miss the Dungeons & Dragons games I used to play with my friends. Let me also second the notion in # 6 - a giant tomb filled with hideous traps would be the perfect memorial.
Alex
Ave atque vale, EGG, we never met, but your invention (and those that sprang from it) gave me endless hours of fun.
I first played D&D at Bob Asprin's house in Ann Arbor (1975?). Bob was the DM, I'd come up to spend the weekend and happened to arrive just as the game was starting that evening.
Bob and friends cajoled me into rolling up a character, and off into the dungeon we trundled.
(Now what I didn't know is that Bob had set a trap for this crew. Seems they had the very bad habit of everyone facing the door they were trying to open, whilst getting it open.)
So we reach a set of doors which face each other, and the group picks one to try to open. I looked the situation over, and with Thufir Hawat's injunction to Paul ringing in my head, piped up "My cleric is going to face the door that's behind us while so-and-so opens the other one...")
Bob closed his eyes a moment and sighed, and just as they got the one door open, a monster popped out of the other and killed my character.
Because my character took the brunt of the attack the rest of the group survived. Bob later told me how amused he was that the beginning player spotted the "trap" right from the get-go. I never found out if this broke the group of ignoring their 6...
j h @6: These replies top it off perfectly:
"I would totally chip in for that. Particularly if the prizes were the Hand and the Eye of Gary."
"Man oh man, the Hand of Gygax..."
Like a bunch of people here, I played D&D as a kid, and haven't thought much about it in years. And I still can flip into the model of the game (alignment, saving throws, NPCs). There was something wonderful about internalizing and living in/playing with a consistent and complicated set of rules, and at the same time keeping the mechanics of the game and the "story" being produced as separate images in your mind. I think there's an aspect of this that carries to complicated computer games (think something like Civilization or SimCity, which are basically graphic frontends on mathematical models), in programming (where you damned well *will* keep multiple levels of representations of the same thing in your head at once), in enjoying fantasy stories like the Wheel of Time series (where most of the "magic" used smells of engineering), etc.
One additional gift I got from Gygax: many years ago, my grandmother was a big fan of Pat Robertson (this went on till he became too obviously a partisan Republican; by grandmother would have sooner sent money to the devil than a Republican). I remember watching a "CBN News" special on D&D, in which these respectable guys in suits and ties with professional-looking backdrops got every important fact wrong, and created a completely made-up evil image from their intentional errors. It's hard to overstate the impact that had on me--the realization, at some very young age (maybe 12? 14?) that neither religious leaders nor TV news shows could be relied upon to tell you the truth, that just because someone looks respectable and is accorded widespread respect doesn't mean they know what they're talking about, etc.
Rest in peace.
I never found out if this broke the group of ignoring their 6...
My Friday night game has informed the DM that the SOP for entering a new area always includes "we check the ceiling" whether anyone actually says so or not. No lurkers for us!
Carrie S. @ 46:
And if I were your Friday night DM, I'd tell you the next time a Lurking Horror drops from the ceiling, "Dang! I knew I forgot to do something!"
I never let my players have SOPs like that. If they couldn't remember to do something, tough casaba mellons.
Back on topic, I met EGG at the Schectady Studio of Bridge and Games back in 1977. He was there as GOH at a week-end D&D tournament, and DM'd a game for us. Nasty, nasty DM. If there was a wayt to interpret the rules/situation that would most harm the players, that's the one he took. Made me try to raise paranoia to a new level (didn't work).
He'll be missed.
j h @ 6:
I would definitely chip in for that. In part for the delight of confounding future anthropologists.
Carrie S @ 34:
Probably doesn't matter to you, but I've always found the Adversarial DM stance to be a useful dramatic tool. It helps my players think their PCs are in danger, despite the fact that I've never killed any of them. (I don't think any of them read this board... crosses fingers)
There appears to be an actual effort on RPG.net to buy Gary's family a $1000 diamond.
My friends and I played D&D avidly through jr. high and high school - late 1970s. Glancing occasionally at the D&D world since then, I noticed how so much stuff had come to be laid out for you that it seemed like it would take some of the imaginative fun out of the game. We drew our dungeons on graph paper and our terrains on hex paper. Do players still do that? Anyway, probably my final experience - at age 17, I guess - was running an adventure as a DM completely from my head, with nothing prepared on paper and no books for reference. It worked. After that, I thought, been there, done that, and it was over.
While it lasted, we went to a D&D convention at Princeton (what an awesome adventure that was!) and spent many hours at the Compleat Strategist near Penn Station (NYC).
Gygax was certainly an important figure (and I don't mean a tiny lead figure painted by hand with tiny brushes - do players still do that?) - and will be missed.
If some TV station decides to commemorate Gygax's passing by airing "Wizards and Warriors", please do let us know. (Best line: "You might as well know - I'm not wearing a hat.")
re: Jon Sobol @ #50
These days it's plastic figures and they come pre-painted or you can paint your own. The plastic is better for disassembling and recombining to make custom poses, put on your preferred weapons, etc., and they seem to have some preference not to sell children lumps of lead these days.
Yummy, yummy lead.
Which does mess up the old standby for CofC miniatures:
1) melt down a few lead minis
2) drop the liquid in cold water, like dropping cookie dough
3) paint
Duncan @ 47: I never let my players have SOPs like that. If they couldn't remember to do something, tough casaba mellons.
I'd tend to allow a little leeway in things like that, because the players can't see what the characters can, and the bad experiences are an order of magnitude removed from what the character feels on encountering it. You watch a lurking thing on the ceiling kill half your companions, and you'll be checking every cieling you ever sit under ever again, even the one at the Inn with the quaint name. OTOH, you sit at a table and roll some dice and have a storyteller say a bunch of people die, you don't develop that knee-jerk response. But saying your player does makes sense.
The assumption that the players must state everything is also closely related to things like the classic "I attack the gazebo", where the player didn't know the word and made an assumption, but the *character* would be plainly able to see that he was looking at a wooden structure. But the GM was acting sufficiently adverserial that he didn't explain what the character was looking at.
If you really want to "get" the players, or catch them out in a dumb action, you'll find a way. (Every party I've been in has done stupid things with full information at their fingertips. And the alert GMs have noticed and done something about it. Our closest thing to a TPK came from someone trying to steal a ladder in a well-lit parking lot.)
Urk. "But saying your CHARACTER does makes sense."
I can tell my player and my character apart. I'm the player. The poor thing with statistics created from dice rools and serious PTSD is the character.
Avram @#10: Hmm. I think you've just summed up why I wasn't a very good GM. I was very creative with settings and characters, but I didn't have the flexibility to respond to the players unexpected responses. The "micromanaging" rules actually helped me there, but I got victimized by a couple of rules-lawyers, too.
I never let my players have SOPs like that. If they couldn't remember to do something, tough casaba mellons.
Then you are an Adversarial GM and I don't want to play with you.
Seriously, is it fun, every time the characters enter a room, to have the players say, "OK, we check the ceiling and have the rogue check for traps on the floor inside the entrance and scan for magic and invisible things and..."? Because to me, not so much, and, unlike my character, I am not a professional adventurer and my life doesn't depend on doing these things.
There appears to be an actual effort on RPG.net to buy Gary's family a $1000 diamond.
Good thing they're not using 3.5 rules--that's a 5000 gp diamond just for raise dead, and since gold pieces are 50 to a pound...well, a hundred pounds of gold isn't cheap.
If you really want to "get" the players, or catch them out in a dumb action, you'll find a way.
That's as succinct a summation of why Adversarial GM sucks as I have ever seen.
The GM is God. If God wants you dead, you're dead. Even if God goes out of His way to make it look "fair", She's still God and you're still dead.
The poor thing with statistics created from dice rools and serious PTSD is the character.
It's been my opinion for the last few years that RPG characters are, in the main, insane, and I don't just mean the CoC ones. After all these are people who make their livings out of going into places that they know for a fact are full of deadly traps, capital-E Evil villains, and creatures with types other than "abomination" only if they're lucky. PTSD doesn't quite explain it, as everyone has to go on some first adventure and not everyone has had their village burned to the ground by orcs.
Duncan @ 47: I never let my players have SOPs like that. If they couldn't remember to do something, tough casaba mellons.
I'm with Lenora on this. One of the drawbacks to RPG and LARPing is having to go through the "Do I see anything? Do I hear anything? Do I smell anything? etc" and having the narrator purposely leave something out just because you didn't specifically ask, when the character would automatically be using all of their senses in a given situation. A good GM will recognize this and not make you spell out every single aspect of your imaginary environment that you want to check.
It makes me think of the game in which you have to give an "alien" instructions on how to make a PB&J, and the "alien" has to take all of your instructions very literally and not fill in any steps you haven't specified, so you end up with two pieces of bread covered in petroleum jelly and covering a jar or peanut butter.
I met my husband in a D&D group DMed by my then-boyfriend. Our oldest child, by dint of much begging on her part, was playing (an extremely simplified version) by age three. That Christmas, she found oversized dice in her stocking, just for her. Meanwhile, I had bought a special set for my husband, carved from obsidian. I suppose I could've told EGG that he was an honorary godfather--although I wonder how he would've reacted. (I got plenty of that from my fellow gamers, some of whom probably assumed that I would get special treatment because I was sleeping with the DM--until he unhesitatingly killed my characters one after another . . . )
The hysteria surrounding those eeeeeevilll games reached all the way up here, with one kid having about $300 worth of 2e stuff, which he had bought with his own paychecks, burned in the backyard; he wasn't even allowed to talk to his friends anymore. I also found it to be a good inoculation against trusting talking heads.
BTW, here's what you do get by sleeping with the DM:
SETTING: 2:30 AM on a weeknight.
HIM: Eheh. Eheheheheheheheh.
ME: *zzzzz* *snort* Huh?
HIM: Ohhhhh, nothing. Can't tell you. Just wait until Friday.
ME: O-kayyyyy . . . *rolls over, attempts to go back to sleep*
HIM: Heh heh heh.
CAT: *glare*
#46 Carrie S.: I love the style of thinking that RPGs encourage... Whack-ass SOPs that are really rational for the situation. Like, I was in a game where we kept getting accidentally transported to sunless, utterly dead versions of the world... Eventually, we never moved without a fanny pack full of some ration bars, water, a flashlight, an air horn in case other teammates were in the world just around the corner, a sharpie to leave notes on the walls or to draw magic symbols that let us escape, a knife in case bleeding on it helped...
I'm not sure I'd be such a freak with the earthquake kits and all if not for the continuing reinforcement from RPGs. Or maybe I enjoy RPGs in part because they let me flaunt that "detailed planning for the unlikely" groove.
Jenny, #58: one kid having about $300 worth of 2e stuff, which he had bought with his own paychecks, burned in the backyard; he wasn't even allowed to talk to his friends anymore
Is that kid still even on speaking terms with his parents now, do you know? Because I know several people who had that sort of thing happen to them, and they aren't.
Gaming with players of the give an inch take a mile type led to me learning a lot of improv world building skills. Got so good at it it no longer mattered how far from script they deviated. Looking back I owe gaming for the development of a lot of useful skills and meeting my husband of 20 years.
Order of the Stick has a lovely memorial up.
I have a D20 in my pocket, just in case, and I don't play. Never have. Because you never know.
I think I started playing D&D in 1978. I played it off and on, even DMd for a while. A friend developed a system based on it and I played that from time to time (obsessively, in other words). After moving to Hoboken, my friends and I played various systems, none of which was completely satisfactory.
When I was introduced to GURPS, I described it as "D&D for grownups." It took the emphasis off killing monsters and taking their treasure, which I had long been bored with, and put it back on playing roles, where I felt and feel it belongs. It also give specific suggestions for dealing with rules lawyers!
I ran the same GURPS campaign in the same world, with many of the same players, for 18 years. Celtic fantasy with geopolitics, all governed by a hidden layer of mathematical mysticism based on the Fibonacci sequence and related phenomena. I never really fully understood the GURPS magic system, but that was OK, because I had players who did, players I trusted not to cheat, and who likewise trusted me.
Which brings me to what I consider the prime maxim of RPGs: The game must be fun shall be the whole of the law. And that means it has to be fun for the players, or they won't come back, and it has to be fun for the GM, or s/he won't run any more. There's a correlary: Cheating against the PCs is immoral; cheating in favor of the PCs is required. Sometimes you have to fudge to keep them from being killed (or killed permanently, in a game with easy resurrections). If a player character gets killed, it's usually because the GM built an adventure that was out of level for the players.
No, I'm not an adversarial GM. Why do you ask?
I feel that the GM's role is to play neutral between the PCs and their adversaries. There's a reason the DM is called the "referee" in early TSR publications. Also, since the emphasis is on roleplaying, they win by playing their characters accurately and vividly, whether or not they "win" conventionally. So I gave them adventures that were roleplaying opportunities, and didn't always involve any fighting at all (though too many of those would have violated the prime maxim, since my players liked the occasional fight).
I was more interested in the decisions they made, and why they made them. They learned to gather full data before acting. The obviously-drugged woman about to be cast into a giant bonfire by chanting priests? She's their leader, the fire won't hurt her, and she's using it to prophesy. The toothy lizard men who reek of ammonia, just like three kinds of horrific monsters you barely escaped from in previous adventures? They're refugees from a world taken over by horrific monsters, one where virtually all life produces ammonia as a waste product.
It was a lot of fun. Eventually I ran out of stories to tell adventures to run in that world, and we closed the campaign. Now I play something even more roleplaying-oriented, even more arbitrary, and requiring even more trust between players and GM. And I don't play it nearly as often as I would like.
T.W 61: Indeed it does. For those of you who are unfamiliar with OOTS, here's a link: OOTS Gygax tribute.
Giant in the playground's server is slow today.
Apparently Something Positive, Dork Tower, Dueling Analogs, and Full Frontal Nerdity also have something up.
I'm certain Gary's guest spot on Futurama is on YouTube.
Lee, #60: I didn't know him well, but I gather that he was one of the ones who left Kodiak right after graduation and never came back. I don't blame him.
The thing is, though, his parents meant well. There was another case I heard of in a gaming group where an adult shut-in with serious physical issues got his escape by gaming--until his parents, on whom he was dependent, decided that he was going to go crazy or summon demons or something and essentially told him that he would be stuck in his room alone forever if he dared to play That Game ever again.
Luckily for him, he knew more about computers than they did and they had no idea that Those People talked to one another on the Intarwebs. But he still was careful never go to to sites that displayed a lot of D&D graphics. That really set them off.
Madeline #59: Rational for the situation. Right. That reminds me of one of the moments in my gaming career that I remember most fondly. I suppose every group of players that sticks together long enough, through enough different campaigns, eventually tries the "Hey, let's play ourselves as characters!" variant.
One Saturday afternoon, our regular DM mused aloud that one day he was going to do that, without advance warning, and what we'd have for equipment would be whatever we happened to have with us that day in our pockets and gaming bags. He should have known better -- that *was* advance warning.
He waited a good six months, figuring we'd all have forgotten about it. Then one day he said, "OK, this is it. Let's see what you're all carrying today. Haul it out and put it on the table."
So I did. I opened up the big extra purse that I'd been carrying, unremarked, to every single session since he'd mentioned the idea... I'd had no idea what sort of world to prepare for, of course, and it all had to be items that were legal to carry around in real life in Winnipeg. Even back then, though (this was the 80s), I wouldn't have wanted to try to take it through an airport. Flashlight, rations, utility knife -- I don't now remember everything I included, but I know I had a snare wire in there, and a collapsible hunting slingshot.
I also had a non-leaking water pistol, rubber gloves (very important), and a bottle of liquid contact poison. Cygon 2E -- you get it at a garden center and, working very, very cautiously, you paint a ring around the bark of a birch tree to stop leaf miners; it works by making the entire tree toxic. The warnings on the label are, um, dire. You do not want that stuff to touch your skin. (Needless to say, in real life I had bought a brand new bottle to carry with me, and kept it sealed in the original packaging and securely wrapped against breakage.)
The look on the DM's face as he had to recalibrate all the weaponry in his scenario was worth every bit of effort I'd put into assembling that bag.
I normally lurk rather than comment here, but I couldn't not participate in a Gygax memorial thread.
Back when I was 10 or so, I saw that same CBN "D&D is of SATAN!" special that albatross@45 saw. In a fit of high dudgeon, I wrote to Gary Gygax at the TSR corporate address to tell him how horrible I thought it was that people were saying such ridiculous things about his game. (I was playing a ranger in my D&D game at that time, if I recall correctly.)
Gygax actually wrote back to me, a personal letter thanking me for writing. I wrote back to him, and we exchanged probably five or six letters over the course of a year. When a hurricane hit my city, he took the time to send a note just to say he hoped me and my family were OK.
So, when I think of him, in addition to being grateful to someone who created a whole genre of games that I've enjoyed so much, I'm grateful to a busy man who took the time to write back to a 10-year-old fan. It was a kind thing to do.
You'll be missed, Gary.
I was never as awe-inspiring as Sylvia Li #67, but I did have some tricks I was fond of. For example, the female scion-of-Amber going to a formal ball in the Castle that, you never know, might get ugly. And on home turf in Amber, sorcery doesn't work. Or gunpowder. And it's difficult to waltz with a broadsword strapped across one's back.
My solution: hair ornaments that, on closer inspection, were dangerous throwing darts, and, stashed in my dainty evening bag, along with the lace hanky, lipstick, and cigarettes (oh, c'mon, even the princesses of Amber smoke, it's all over the novels), a Zippo-style lighter and a small aerosol can of hairspray.
A lady is never without her pocket handkerchief. OR her improvised flamethrower.
Carrie @ 56:
Good thing they're not using 3.5 rules--that's a 5000 gp diamond just for raise dead, and since gold pieces are 50 to a pound...well, a hundred pounds of gold isn't cheap.
Well, sure, but why would they use 3.5? Gary hasn't had much to do with D&D lately.
D&D was a solace in HS (and I don't know what possessed my English teacher, the year I moved to that school to tell me she let people use her room for gaming at lunch).
It was instant group ID. It gave me flexibilty of thougt, encouraged me to do reasearch. We kept the group going, even as teachers retired, and members graduated. We had time, between sessions, to think on what it was we were doing; character grew and we had SOPs (because any group like that will).
Are the "adventurers" crazy? Sure, in the way that thrill seekers and thugs are crazy. They may be thugs who play the robin hood role, but only because there are people who need it, and it has rewards. What I recall was lots of time spent (in various ongoing games) with interaction that wasn't fighting, and trying to assimilate the things which had happened to the character into how that person reacted to things in the future (I had one character get killed five times. His reactions were interesting... super cautious, to super reckless (hey, it never lasted before), to something approaching balanced.
It made it easier to stand in the other guys' shoes, so it helped me when it came to dealing with other people too.
I opened up the big extra purse that I'd been carrying, unremarked, to every single session since he'd mentioned the idea...
Bwah!
Xopher, #63: I wish I'd had you as a GM, on the rare occasions when I tried to role-game. One campaign I remember vividly went roughly like this: it was Champions, and I'd very carefully built a character designed for infiltration and information-gathering -- I had Disguise, Shape-Changing, Languages, Computers, Lock-picking, all that sort of thing, but strength and fighting skills, not so much. And the GM ran a campaign in which my character was never given a chance to do anything important, and was more often than not a liability to the team. The campaign ended when 2 of the players, who had just broken up IRL, let that slop over into the game and allowed our shuttle to crash on the moon because their characters were too busy fighting to notice we were off course, and the whole party died. :-(
Jenny, #66: Yes, of course his parents meant well. So well that they probably never actually looked at the materials they were burning, just to see if what the TV told them was correct, or even factually accurate. And see what that betrayal of trust bought them in the end. "He meant well" is is what you say about the kind of person who falls for a 419 scam and loses their life savings. It's not an excuse for sheer mental laziness.
I, too, moved from AD&D to Amber (via GURPS). I got tired of all the paperwork and die-rolling in AD&D, and preferred Amber's loose rule structure. (After a time, though, Amber's universe felt too small. How many times can the Pattern be under threat before it's repetitive? I wish I'd finished running the People's Revolution in Red Amber before I quit, though.)
When I was younger, I used role playing to work through a number of puzzles about my life and how it worked. My tattoo - a phoenix - is partly a reference to one (half of one) influential character I played. I try to bring a little Phoenix into everything I do (a thought that would make my former campaign mates blench. She was...not cautious).
I also used convention GMing to work through a lot of my shyness about dealing with large groups of people. It was my first experience of both running meetings and moderation.
About a year ago, I actually made money GMing. I had to run a brief session on how my then employer dealt with project risk. So I ran it as a role playing session about the Three Little Pigs using our risk model. My boss was so impressed he gave me a four-figure (in sterling) bonus for the year.
A lady is never without her pocket handkerchief. OR her improvised flamethrower.
I reluctantly stopped carrying my lipstick-with-hidden-blade when traveling after September 11th.
My parents were somewhere between indifferent to my RPG hobby and downright pleased ("Look! She has friends at last!")
I remember being dragged into my first game in Ann Arbor, Michigan, around 1978, by an excited group of preteens at summer GSI camp. I had no idea what was going on; they just handed me a character sheet and pulled me right into the game.
I still have my dice bag, too. And all my rulebooks and modules, and a huge run of issues of Dragon Magazine. My oldest character has achieved immortality on a friend's website where she's writing out our old stories, too.
How wonderful, to change so many lives.
Sylvia @ 67: That is an utterly awesome story.
I have some D&D background and experience too, fairly limited by comparison to many, and it's all pretty much the kind of stuff you all know, blah-blah-blah.
What I've been thinking about Gary Gygax's life is that there are damn few people who get to popularize (if not invent) not only an entire genre, but an entire medium - games as a way of living stories. That's really what the RPG experience is about.
I still play at least once monthly with my friends from college. It's the best way we have of reconnecting with each other on a regular basis. It's just that nowadays, we eat grilled salmon and homemade salsa instead of delivery pizza.
Thanks Gary.
Lee 73: I wish I'd had you as a GM, on the rare occasions when I tried to role-game.
Thank you, and I'd like to point out that our lives are not over yet, and that we may at some point be in the same place at the same time. I haven't GMd since I did a session as a birthday present in August, but I have by no means sworn off. And in an ongoing campaign, I would always try to make sure there was an occasional adventure that focused on each character, and try (though this is harder) to make sure each character had some chance to affect the outcome for good or ill.
What an extraordinarily lousy GM that was! S/he did not want you playing, clearly, and in fact (unless s/he was a teenager and just had no sense) probably did not value your friendship. Either that or was just playing canned scenarios and not creative enough to fudge them so that they were interesting for you.
As for the IRL couple breaking up...I'd probably split the party at that point, and play separate sessions with the two groups (this has become known as the FarScape Solution, but we were doing it long before that show ever aired). Certainly if it were a GURPS campaign, any time they said something out of character to snark to or about each other, they would be penalized roleplaying points. That's assuming I wanted to stay friends with both.
If not...well, one of my players would occasionally tell me "If you have a nasty monster for us to kill in this expedition, could its name be Anna*?" Since I frequently invented single-use monsters out of whole cloth, I sometimes complied: "OK, the Anna swings at you...it hits you unless you defend. OK, you blocked the Anna's claw attack, but..."
*Not her real name. It was a person at work, not an SO, if that matters.
A lady is never without her pocket handkerchief. OR her improvised flamethrower.
Having just seen the Buffy movie last night: "No--my keen fashion sense!"
Well, sure, but why would they use 3.5? Gary hasn't had much to do with D&D lately.
That was kinda what I meant. :)
it was Champions, and I'd very carefully built a character designed for infiltration and information-gathering -- I had Disguise, Shape-Changing, Languages, Computers, Lock-picking, all that sort of thing, but strength and fighting skills, not so much. And the GM ran a campaign in which my character was never given a chance to do anything important, and was more often than not a liability to the team.
Bad GM! Bad!
Kinda reminds me of the (Old) White Wolf amalgam campaign I was in once--we had vampires and mages and the GM let me play a Highlander style Immortal from some (surprisingly well put together) online rules. So I'm 500 years old and have more money than God, and of course I have a bunch of firms on retainer to handle it all for me because I don't want to deal with it. And the GM keeps telling me, "Oh, your accountants tell you something's going wrong with your investments". So I look at my character sheet, and sure enough there's Swordfighting and 17th Century Court Etiquette, but no Bookkeeping or Accounting, and I shrug and say, "I tell them to handle it." He kept trying to get me to do something about it, and I kept saying it was their job--though I was trying to track down my Archrival, who was probably responsible--and then the game imploded.
I reluctantly stopped carrying my lipstick-with-hidden-blade when traveling after September 11th.
I had a hobby for a while of collecting objects with blades hidden in them, including a couple of pens that actually did write. Never got my hands on one of those lipsticks, though.
Though I never met him, Gygax's work has been foundational to who I am. I like to remember that my father had to leave a gaming session because my mother was in labor with me.
Warren Spector writes about his introduction to roleplaying:
"I discovered D&D in 1978, about four years after Gary and Dave Arneson and their Wisconsin gaming buddies invented the game. My first Dungeonmaster was Bruce Sterling, now a well-known writer, but at that time an unpublished wannabe. The rest of the players in the group were writers or wannabes, too, of one sort or another. We met once a week for about ten years, as members of The Rat Gang, troublemakers in the River City of Shang who went on to become political and military powerhouses in the world Bruce laid out for us to explore."
Cripes, to have been in that gaming group!
I have never played RPGs (I suppose it could still happen), but I have lived among the gamers since 1976 and I thought I was fairly familiar with the subculture spawned by Mr. Gygax and his colleagues. However, there seems to be something I am missing.
In #9, Ewan writes:
For maybe 10 years now, I pretty much always carry a d6 and d20 in my pocket. Some part of my identity, I guess.
In #38 K.C. Shaw writes:
I haven't played in years, but I still have my dice bag. Because you never know.
And in #62 Manny writes:
I have a D20 in my pocket, just in case, and I don't play. Never have. Because you never know.
Exactly what are these people preparing for?
A spontaneous opportunity to play D&D, I'd guess, but that doesn't quite fit.
I can see keeping a deck of cards in your pocket in case you need to play solitaire or to invite someone to a poker game anywhere, anytime.
But if you wanted to play D&D on the spur of the moment, wouldn't you need graph paper, a big stack of rule books, and other accoutrements?
Also, even if you encountered someone who invited you to game, wouldn't that person be prepared with the necessary equipment, including dice?
Or is it the custom that each player must bring his own dice? (Monopoly comes with just one set, and everyone shares.)
Or has a significant literary allusion escaped me here?
bryan @ #41: Why did you disagree with what you wrote?
I read that as saying that he disagreed with his father's opinion of what he wrote.
Bill at #83:
Because sometimes you have to roll a saving throw in the middle of your Monday morning staff meeting, and what - you're going to use someone else's d20? As if.
Xopher, you have, now and forever, a standing invitation to play, DM, or both if you're ever out Minneapolis way... It's sad that so many of us don't have the time to play or run that we used to... My father thought, as a few others have mentioned, that this "D&D thing" was a phase to be outgrown. After 30 years investment in AD&D, I would hate to ever have to quit playing entirely...
Even though we thought that EGG was crazy as a loon, he was a brilliant loon whose vision brought me most of the friends I have today, and gave our marriage a common thread that has lasted 20 years.
We owe him more than words can say.
To this day the only version of writing that I've ever been good at is my AD&D campaign, now age 25 and standing at around 2000 pages of modules and backstory. Without it, I may have never had any creative outlet at all.
Today, Melody and I try to play by the same character-inclusive philosophy you espouse. We take turns running entire groups as the other DMs... An odd twist is that despite knowing Melody since infancy, I didn't know of her D&D interest until we had been married a couple years. Viva la mystere...
Bill @ 83 -- Paper and pencils are everywhere. Add in just a single d20, and like some other book once said, "Wherever three are gathered..."
Susan @ 75... I reluctantly stopped carrying my lipstick-with-hidden-blade
There goes your career as a Girl from U.N.C.L.E.
Bill@83: Or is it the custom that each player must bring his own dice?
You want to bring your own dice. I remember one guy I played with who had an assorted collection, various colors and sizes, and he had assigned various levels of "mojo" to individual die.
When a seriously, "I'm about to be eaten by a Grue", roll would come up, he'd dig out the somewhat smallish, pale-blue die. It, apparently, had the most mojo, and he would save it for the important rolls.
I mean, who knows what sort of mojo someone else's die might have...
;)
Jacob@81: I like to remember that my father had to leave a gaming session because my mother was in labor with me.
So... how'd you throw the dice from in there?
Come on, someone had to ask...
I carry a d20 around in my daygear, but it's more of a rosary than anything else. For gaming, I have two dice bags - one set that's free for anyone to use and another that has my 15-20 year old finely aged and carefully attuned dice in them. I am not generally superstitious, but I have a very firm rule about other people not touching them.
We were recently running a D&D next-gen (where all of our kids aged 10+ get to play*) and my nephew thought he'd be cute by grabbing my dice after I announced they were off limits. He was promptly introduced to the Guy Punch rule - just his shoulder because he's still a minor, but with a moderate degree of force in order to instill a proper combination of fear and respect for the DM :)
--------
* These sessions are some of the best adult/kid interaction time you could imagine. Everyone has a say, everyone gets to do something, everyone contributes. The looks on their faces as the story unfolds, or when one of their characters gets to be the hero of the moment is awesome.
abi @ 74 --- Fade in to indoor scene of Risk Manager Smith in Little Pig costume:
Smith/Pig: Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!
abi/Wolf: Then I'll huff and I'll puff...
abi/GM: The Wolf casts "Whirlwind" and the house of sticks is blasted...
Smith/Pig: WAIT! You didn't concentrate! How could a Wolf with IQ 6 know "Whirlwind" at level 21 ??? And how could he afford the 50 point Powerstone to cast a 7-hex radius spell? This GURPS Risk Management sucks! What if we base our risk model on the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide instead? Is there any Mountain Dew left?
:-P
My mum played in high school (1976) and in college where she got her boyfriend (later my dad) into it. Eventually they got caught up in jobs and grad school and three small children that they stopped playing. But as kids, there were always funny-shaped dice in the house.
In high school, my friends got me into 3.5, which got my parents all nostalgic and they brought out her old photocopied rulebook and lead minatures. In terms of "dice mojo" (Greg London @89), I use my mother's orange d20 as my primary die. I consider it the real-life equivilent of weilding an ancestral sword.
Now that my friends and I are in college, we only meet every couple months. Just last year after our youngest member's high school graduation, we ended our first campaign. It was six years of effort and didn't end in TPK. It was a great sense of accomplishment.
We owe a lot to Gary Gygax and he will be missed.
Did anyone else have the Gygax-designed board game called DUNGEON which came out sometime between 1987-1993? Oh how many times my brothers and I rolled snake eyes and were killed by the Dracolich!
Bill@83: I RPG'd only briefly at the dawn of D&D, but my wife (who was active for ~10 years) told me that personal dice (often in fancy little bags) were very common -- standard, in the groups she played in.
There was one person in her Philadelphia group who was legendary for favorable rolls. When pressed he explained that he'd buy many dice, set them all in a ring, pick one and tell it what to roll; if it did as instructed it was petted and put in one of the fancy bugs, but if it didn't, he would smash it in full view of all the others. I do not know whether he was kidding; gamers \do/ have a sense of humor, even if they don't always have a sense of engineering.
Xopher, #79: I appreciate the offer, but am unlikely to take you up on it. See, the other reason I never did much role-gaming is that I have ABYSMAL luck with dice! This shows up even on board-games, and to such an extent that people who are playing with me for the first time have remarked on it. I'm much happier playing things like Empire Builder, where the luck is in the draw of the event cards rather than the roll of the die.
My partner still has some of the ancient "caltrop" 4-siders in his dice bag.
Bill Higgins @ 83:
My M.Sc. research was built on Monte Carlo simulations of atom/molecule collisions. The simulations used the usual pseudorandom number calculations, but the initial seeds were the very best d10-rolled random numbers.
More recently... well, here's a completely hypothetical situation. Suppose your most critical work project is completely blocked until you get a working device driver. From someone who works for another company, in another country, whose work to date can be described charitably as "semi-competent, ill-conceived, and not conforming to the specs". And who isn't returning your calls.
... While your next critical task involves fixing a disastrous bug caused by something which randomly trashes areas of memory -- after several indirect interactions with code, but it only happens every couple of days, triggered by conditions which are unknown but appear to involve some other device occasionally sending messages that are not quite according to spec.
... And your boss, having had all this explained, keeps demanding to know how long it will take to fix these things. And you know, based on past experience, that no matter how many times he says he understands that your estimate is, at best, an extremely crude guess, any number you give him will get written into a schedule, and you'll catch grief if you fail to meet this "commitment".
... Then you haul out your dice, pick out and roll a d4 and a d8 (which looks a bit geekier than 2d6 even though the distribution of results is similar), look him in the eye, and tell him that that's your estimate, in weeks.
Bill Higgins @ 83 -
But if you wanted to play D&D on the spur of the moment, wouldn't you need graph paper, a big stack of rule books, and other accoutrements?
Newp.
We had a small little gaming crew going in Basic Training - nothing more than memory (yes, scary person that I was at 19, I knew enough of the charts, etc. that I could rebuild them from memory...), paper and pencil. Randomizers were a couple of decks of cards, with various suits used as various dice types (so clubs were d4 - pull A-4, shove all the rest back in the box). Only got to play a couple of times (not much spare time...), but it was fun.
(Steffan O'Sullivan made a game called Sherpa, which is designed to be played on the trail, etc. - characters fit onto a business card, and the randomizer is the sweep hand/stopwatch on a phone, watch, etc. - but that was much, much later).
CHip @ 94 --- 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...
Bill (from #83): While somewhat extreme, this sort of anthropomorphism is common among gamers. My own dice collection is now down to 500 or so, 30 or so of which are used ritually (and reverently) at every gaming session, and two of which sit by my keyboard to help me decide minor matters. I hope this helps shed light on the psychology of gamers...
I played D&D in 7th grade, the only girl in the group. I blame my brothers, for teaching me how to sword-fight (they were on their high school fencing team) and then giving me no castles to conquer. So I hunted up some imaginary worlds to conquer instead. I went on to other games later on - games that brought me my closest friends and fired my imagination and challenged my intellect. Thank you, Gary. You are the happy rattle of dice in a warm leather bag, forever.
Lucy S @ 93 -
Did anyone else have the Gygax-designed board game called DUNGEON which came out sometime between 1987-1993? Oh how many times my brothers and I rolled snake eyes and were killed by the Dracolich!
Izzylobo (heart) DUNGEON!...
(The first version of it came out in 1975 or so, they re-released it a number of times - the first was the same basic game, but with a more expensive presentation, followed later by "Classic Dungeon" and "The New DUNGEON!" which rejiggered the rules a little bit, included some additional options, and the like).
Comments on Greyhawk's flags at half-staff: