He rolled a natural 1 on his save vs. heart attack!
My (obscure and in-poor-taste) joke aside, this really sucks. Gary Gygax, the man largely responsible for creating Dungeons & Dragons, has died at the age of 69. As horribly, horribly geeky as tabletop roleplaying is (and it is), it's a hobby that means a lot to a great many people, myself included, and it wouldn't exist if not for Gygax and the rest of the Lake Geneva crowd, not to mention the indirect influences that he had on the video-game and fantasy-film industries. A sad day for gamers worldwide.
EDIT: How many people are responsible for bringing an entire hobby/lifestyle into being? How many people create something that has brought hundreds or thousands of hours of enjoyment to millions of people over a span of four decades? Without D&D, there probably wouldn't have been the resurgence of interest in heroic fantasy in the late '70s that revived the popularity of The Lord Of The Rings and created an audience for the thriving fantasy publishing industry that exists today. No World Of Warcraft, Final Fantasy or (insert your favorite video game here), no Magic: The Gathering, no tabletop roleplaying at all, at least in the form we know it today. People who might not otherwise have been able to endure the isolation of adolescence found an outlet and a means to socialize that were otherwise unavailable. Damn.
EDIT: How many people are responsible for bringing an entire hobby/lifestyle into being? How many people create something that has brought hundreds or thousands of hours of enjoyment to millions of people over a span of four decades? Without D&D, there probably wouldn't have been the resurgence of interest in heroic fantasy in the late '70s that revived the popularity of The Lord Of The Rings and created an audience for the thriving fantasy publishing industry that exists today. No World Of Warcraft, Final Fantasy or (insert your favorite video game here), no Magic: The Gathering, no tabletop roleplaying at all, at least in the form we know it today. People who might not otherwise have been able to endure the isolation of adolescence found an outlet and a means to socialize that were otherwise unavailable. Damn.