Gary Gygax - Rest In Peace

Note: this entry is a cross-post.

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax passed from our world yesterday, and while initially I had no intention of posting about it, I find that it keeps coming into my mind repeatedly.  I am saddened by this news, more than I would ever have thought, and I am not at all sure I understand why.

I never met Gary Gygax, I don’t know much about him as a person, and rarely (if ever) have I spent any time thinking about him, yet Dungeons & Dragons has had a profound impact on my life.  Maybe that’s it.

When I was a child, my family moved a lot.  As anyone who has grown up in a military family knows, this makes it insanely hard to form lasting friendships or a sense of stability.  By the time I had reached my early teens, I had lived in so many places that I cannot recall them all.  It is such a blur to me that I cannot, in fact, even remember my early childhood.  All that I can recall is a sense of frustration and the feeling that we always had to “start over again”.

At one point, however, we moved to the state where I now reside, and I have (mostly) remained here since.  When I was newly come into this area, I remember sitting on my porch watching some of the neighbor kids play.  They were having a great time playing some sort of “army” game, and I was far too shy to introduce myself, and making new friends was a very difficult thing for me to do.  I was so painfully shy, in fact, that I got my toy rifle from the toybox and just sat on the porch pretending to shoot the neighbor kids as if I was playing with them - only from three houses down.

One of them eventually noticed me, and much to my surprise he stood up and walked straight over with a very big grin on his face.  He introduced himself and asked if he could see my gun.  We started talking, and it turned out that he was extremely likeable and friendly, and even invited me to come over to his house in the mornings before school to play some games on his Commodore 64.  I was ecstatic.

Turns out that this fellow had many friends in the area, more than I had ever imagined any one person could ever have, and among the things that they liked to do was to play Dungeons & Dragons (surprise!).

They introduced me to the game, and while at first I thought it was kind of silly, it turned out that my new friend was a masterful storyteller with an amazing flair for really pulling people into the game.  Suddenly I had a whole bunch of friends and something fun to do with them, and we spent countless nights over the years bonding over what I originally thought was a “silly little pretend game”.

That period of my life was the brightest and happiest I can recall, and while I no longer play D&D, I still call some of those friends my brothers.  We’ve all moved apart by now, and only communicate long distance and get together a few times a year at most, but never could I imagine a better bunch of guys, and I love them dearly.

God, how I miss sitting hunched over a character sheet in my friend’s basement with a map in front of me and a Crown Royal bag full of dice and books everywhere, sipping on a giant Mountain Dew and chattering excitedly about whatever epic adventure we were on that night.  It truly was the very best time of my life.

Rest in peace, Gary Gygax.  And thank you so very much.