EGG Moves On

[subplotkudzu]

Gary Gygax, co creator os Dungeons and Dragons, passed away last night. 

I never met the man, but the hobby he helped found shaped who I am in a number of ways, and for that I owe him a lot. It's easy to look at the games he wrote and tear them apart for bad design, strange concepts and his Gygaxian prose, but much of that is with hindsight, standing on the shoulders of people who stood on his shoulders. RPGs might not be here at all if not for the efforts he and his fellows took to champion them.

And I forgive his prose as being an over-saturation of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories. There are worse things.

Comments

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree. It was odd looking back on my recent discussions about Gygax's work that they were primarily negative: the overburdened prose, the incomprehensable chapter placements, the unnecessary complexity of the systems. "Gygaxian" is not a positive adjective when it comes to prose style.

His death makes it clear that this was all picking around the edges. Other people were able to take his brilliant core ideas and build on them with the benefits of millions of hours of playtesting and study. They may be improving on his work, but they are doing so by widening the trail he and his co-creators blazed. If they can see more clearly, it is only because they are standing on his shoulders.

Thanks Gary, indeed, for giving me the tools to become who I am.