Sadness...

Well, I was just trolling for election coverage and found this on CNN.com. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead. This makes me sad.

I know that many Christians slam role-playing games as a convenient whipping-post, I'm not one of them. The fact that my parents surrounded me with books growing up (their house continues to resemble a library) and the fact that you had to read to play D&D are really two huge factors in my love of reading. I haven't played in years, and eventually I moved on to the 2nd Edition of Gamma World as my game of choice, but D&D and AD&D and I spent many hours together. The irony of my immersion into AD&D was that the mythology I was later introduced to as a Bible Major already made sense to me - I'd been reading modern versions of those stories for years.

Role-Playing was also one of the big factors my discovery that participating in stories told you a lot about who you were (and then, later, about who God is). I think I would have liked to meet Gygax, now I won't get a chance.

While I did have the Greyhawk game setting, my favorite Campaign setting of all time is Dragonlance. What's yours?

Comments

CoffeeZombie said…
I only played a little bit of AD&D in high school. We did two campaigns developed by a friend of mine. I managed to ruin the second campaign (I'm guessing it wasn't as well planned out as the first one) when I inadvertently incited a war between a larger city and the village we were trying to save from dragons. On the upside, we no longer needed to save the village from dragons. On the down side, there were no more villagers left, so we didn't get paid.

I've wanted to find a game of AD&D somewhere, although, I understand there's a Firefly-based RPG out there now...maybe I should get in on that...

Anyway, perhaps when my kids are old enough, I'll get them into AD&D... :-D
Unknown said…
I never played REAL D&D, i.e., paper and dice. I'm familiar with it through D&D-based PC games: Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, etc, and through reading the Dragon Lance books, which are really good.

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