...in which, I guess, that saving throw vs. death failed, huh?
Well, Gary Gygax died last week. It is possible that nobody reading this even knows who he was, but he was important to me when I was young, so I didn’t like to let it pass without mentioning it, especially since his creation is so undeservedly maligned.
I know from conversations I’ve had on the topic over the years that most folks considered themselves “too cool” for Dungeons and Dragons. Well, fine. You can make fun of Gygax and his game as much as you like, but it was a great outlet for creativity. It stimulated my imagination like nothing else ever has. It trained me to be a storyteller. It increased my vocabulary tremendously (Gawd, the man loved them $10 words; I vividly remember little twelve-year-old me with the Dungeon Master’s Guide in one hand and a dictionary in the other). It gave me a passion for sorting and categorizing things, which has made me a better librarian. It introduced me to Fritz Lieber, one of my favorite authors, whom I certainly would have missed otherwise. Most important, it fed and fostered my lifelong interest in history, languages, and foreign cultures. Really, it contributed just as much to the man I am today as Pink Floyd or Jack Daniel’s or Kurt Vonnegut or George Romero.
So people laugh about it, but to those people I say this: if D&D’s a joke to you, that isn’t the game’s fault; it merely reflects your own ignorance. His game removed us from the ordinary, boring and strangling world, and put us down in a new world without boundaries or limits of any kind, and in the process he made us better, smarter, braver, more introspective, and more interesting people.