I'm not exactly the only one to write on Gygax, but hey why not. I originally started writing this for Slate but didn't finish in time. However the good part is that means I can put in a bit of autobiographical and D&D-specific stuff that would never make it in Slate.
On Gary Gygax's Ideas
I was once a D&D player – okay! I've said it. My first real character was a strong and charismatic paladin named, yes, “Timothy.†He was perfect in every way, more or less, and advanced slowly through the levels, and since he was basically supposed to be me, I was rather attached to him. One day, however, I made the mistake of going into a place called the Tomb of Horrors. (created, I might add, by Gygax). Rather, I was lured. Jason the dungeonmaster, who was also our babysitter, had a sadistic streak, and he goaded my brother and I and even Onil into playing a game that was way too hard for us. After a promising start Timothy was crushed lifeless by a large marble juggernaut. When the death came it was sudden, unavoidable, and completely devastating.
It was only a character but I took the death of “Timothy†a little hard. Hey – I was nine years old! I kept thinking there must be some way to bring in him back; but he lay buried under thousands of pounds of rock. And for some reason my babysitter never thought to say, poor kid, and bring him back to life somehow. He just packed up the game and said, too bad. Later on I realized that he had actually cheated to make us die – and I'm still bitter.
(The Tomb of Horrors)
After that my next character was a much safer choice. He wasn't me -- Drowdabeer was a dwarf whose chief attribute was that he was very hard to kill. Under D&D's rules he could jump off a 100' cliff and just brush himself off. I didn't really like Drowdabeer quite as much as Timothy, but at least he didn't die on me.
Instead and unfortunately Drowdabeer was a bit of a bully. For some reason I can't quite remember, I'd often find a way to kill my friend Cory's characters. Just as Cory was about to grab the treasure he'd find a poisoned crossbow bolt in his back. Maybe still bitter about the Tomb of Horros, I took it out on Cory. Luckily Cory and I are still friends, and maybe his D&D misfortunes played some tiny role in making Cory into the hugely successful author and Boing-Boing blogger that he is today.
(Cory Doctorow)
I could go on about our old D&D game but this is actually supposed to be about Gary Gygax, who died last week. I never knew much about Gygax the man, and in fact I didn't know what he looked like until just now. But I know an awful lot about Gygax's ideas. For Gygax was our patron saint – the man who had his name on every book; the guy who played the game first and played it right. It goes without saying that D&D affects your mind in all kinds of ways. (At some level, for example, I think of the classes I teach as just a sort of academic D&D campaign.) But Gygax had his own ideas within that world -- a sort of ethos, a way of thinking, that affected all of us D&D players.
(Gary Gygax)
1. The main thing that Gygax taught is that you have to be very serious and rigorous about fantasy. I hasten to mention that this is an idea that can go too far. It can turn you into to someone who wears chain mail to work or refuses to associate with anyone who isn't “chaotic neutral.†But what Gygax was teaching is that you sometimes have to lose yourself completely to get anything. Like Daniel Day Lewis acting, you have to inhabit the fantasy completely.
2. Along those lines Gygax also taught that the project of fantasy is collective. When I was in elementary and junior high school, the golden years of D&D, this was easy. Onil, Sean, Cory, Raja, my brother David, even Jason – we were all kids ready to get out of our heads. It helped that we went to an alternative school (the Alternative Learning Program) that regarded cynicism as a sin. And we actually had time set aside for playing D&D at school - it was great!
But of course when we got older, we stopped playing, for an obvious reason: we all lost some of that capacity for shared hallucination. Of course, it didn't help that most of the kids who kept playing D&D wrote off any chance of losing their virginity.
(Relatedly, at the the time I could never quite understand while girls, who could spend enormous amounts of time fantasizing about Duran Duran, couldn't get that excited about D&D. In retrospect its obvious that girls liked fantasy fine – they just didn't happen to think that spending hours fighting 30 hobgoblins was much of a fantasy.)
3. Back to Gygax. The second Gygax principle was this: you had to suffer. He structured the game to create a kind of protestant rigor. Under the original and very harsh rules, your characters were destined to be fairly average – more like Bilbo the hobbit then super-man. The magic-user, in particular, was a pathetic creature to begin with – almost any blow would kill you, and you could cast but one spell a day. The life of a new character was most likely to be unpleasant and short.
(the mighty owl-bear)
In this sense there was something very English to the whole thing. Gygax created a natural D&D narrative that began with suffering but sometimes led to greatness. The natural narrative was like Oliver Twist or Charlie from the Chocolate factory. Mostly, you could expect to die with nothing. But if a character made it he'd be like Harry Potter – the boy who lived. That led to a lot more emotional investment than playing a superstar from the outset would.
3. A related Gygax idea was that most of the world was way out of your reach. Gygax andhis friends created all kinds of great powers and capabilities, and then made them generally unreachable – a sort of fantasy within the fantasy. There were spells of unbelievable power (like “Wish,â€) monsters who could kill by touch, artifacts of unspeakable age and abilities, deities and so on. But most players would never encounter any of this stuff, if you played by the rules. It would remain far, far out of reach for many years. Instead, most players would remain in modest dungeons fighting orcs – stuck in the middle management of the D&D world.
(Orcus)
As strange as it may sound for the creator of a fantasy game, delayed gratification was what Gygax was all about.
4. A final Gygax idea, and maybe the most famous one, was the concept of "cheating fairly." While Gygax envisioned a hard world of death, suffering, and glories that would forever remain out of reach, he also believed in the necessity of miracles. The Dungeon Master was allowed and even encouraged to cheat for the right reasons. When the harshness of the rules were creating just too much bleakness, the DM was supposed to create a little hope. A spell might work a little better than expected. When all was about to be lost, reinforcements might arrive. And so on.
The absolute trick was for the DM to cheat – to create small miracles – without the characters realizing it. The world had to be harsh even if secretly it was being softened. Even in a fantasy world, you want to think that your accomplishments are, well, real.
That's what made me so bitter about the death of poor Timothy. The babysitter cheated all right, but to kill us, not to save us. But all is forgiven. For who among us, in the end, is as perfect a DM as Gygax was?
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