The final act

The king of the role-playing games is dead at age 69.

Gary Gygax, who created Dungeons and Dragons, lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Game Spy Magazine's interview with him in 2004 ended by asking Gygax how he wanted to be remembered:

I was gonna say, "Better here than Philadelphia," but I think somebody already did that. [Laughs] I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else.

Well, OK, but he's also the guy who spawned the debate about role playing games. So depending on your point of view, Gary Gygax is either the guy who pushed Western civilization to a new depth of depravity, or the guy who pushed a new generation toward literature, database management, critical thinking, reasoning, and resource management skills.

Your choice.

Photo: Wikimedia

(h/t Julia Schrenkler)

Who's the bigger D&D geek... Bob or Julia?

I've never played a role-playing game. I don't even care for Scrabble.

I can't speak for Julia other than to say she's much more in tune with "cool."

Julia and Bob ain't got nothin' on me! I'm the bigger D&D geek by leaps and bounds since I played with the original first edition boxed set. Badge of honor or curse of the nerd.

Your choice

Mark S. Jungmann
Member Benefits
Minnesota Public Radio

P.S. I heard about this an hour before your post.

Those links at the bottom are interesting. As a youth I dabbled in the d&d. I had the lead figurines, which I spent untold hours painting. I brought them to school, where we played with them during recess. Then one day I was told to take my 'little friends' (her words, not mine) home. A parent had apparently been informed that we'd been playing with them & notified the school that the devil had entered the building.

As an adult, I read a bit, do database work to pay the bills, and spend time thinking about & discussing public policy, to kill time. None of my old d&d buddies have yet joined the occult, to my knowledge.

It's a sad day for nerds every were. I didn't start to play D&D until I was in 8th or 9th grade. And contrary to popular belief we didn't play in someones basement. We played in my friend Ray's Bedroom which was in the attic. Ray grew up to become Rock n' Roll Ray and I grew up to Roast coffee for Caribou Coffee. None of our other friends have dabbled in the occult as well.

Steve Olson had a nice tribute here.

Well I'll 'fess up to being a D&D geek too, though I always managed to play with friends who had the necessary books, so I didn't have to put much of my money into it.

I'm still great friends with the guys who I played with, though we play other games now (Diplomacy our favorite). And none of us fell into the occult.

oh. so from reading the comments, one can assume that the super geeks of D&D get into skulls on their mantels and vampires and other occult wackery such as spanking?

I have played D&D in the past, along with various other games (of the board and computer variety).

All the breathless "won't somebody think of the children" talk gets old, and just reminds me of the song from "The Music Man:"
Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital "T"
That rhymes with "P"
And that stands for Pool,
That stands for pool.
We've surely got trouble!
Right here in River City,
Right here!
Gotta figger out a way
To keep the young ones moral after school!

If it hadn't been for D&D, Tom Hanks would've never gotten his big break in the classic "Mazes and Monsters."

The basic plot was that a D&D-like game drove one one of the players insane, to the point where he couldn't tell the difference between the game and real life. One would have assumed the distinct lack of Magic Missles may have helped keep him grounded in reality.

There's several clips of this jewel on YouTube.

Much like Harry Potter, Rock and Roll, and anything else the kids are into, Dungeons and Dragons had a fair amount of parental backlash.

Couldn't ask for better marketing.

- Michael Wells
The Current