A Passing, Noted During Friday Night’s Game
SCENE: The rec room in a basement of a suburban home.
At a table strewn with lead figurines and hex-graph paper sit FOUR PLAYERS and a DUNGEON MASTER, behind his dragon-emblazed standing folder.
DUNGEON MASTER: Did you hear about Gygax?
JAPHETH BLIGH (8th-level warrior): What’s that? A troll? I’m taking out my +5 Longsword–
HELVETICA the MEDIUM (6th-level Cleric) –I’m reaching into my robe for a scroll–
DM: No. Gary Gygax.
DELINDIR The ELFMASTER (7th-level Paladin) Gary? That’s a dumb name for a Troll.
MIGHTY MOGENKELLER (2nd-level dwarf) I have a +1 pointed stick! I’m jabbing him!
MogenKeller rolls twelve-sided dice. It comes up 1.
DM: That doesn’t count, Mogenkeller. Gary Gygax is a real person. He just passed away. He had a influence that far exceeded his own creations. He co-developed “Dungeons and Dragons,” which was sort of a phenomena in itself– But the genius of his legacy lies in the details. The role-playing game, where one inhabits a character and is guided on adventures by the Dungeon Master, a sort of movie director, was unique enough. But he added quantifiable elements such as ability scores: each character has an admixture of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, all mediated by Experience and Hit points. Run out of too many of these attributes or hit points, and your character is toast. This gaming system, initially kept pencil-on-paper, translated easily into computer-based attribute scoring. First-person shooter games like Half-Life, Doom, and Halo are merely computer-based applications of this basic system, first codified in 1974.
H. the M.: I knew that.
J.B.: Geek.
DM: The immersive, interactive world of D&D could also be considered a real-world dry run for virtual-community online games like The Sims and Second Life. In tone, details and type of play, the universe of D&D is virtually indistinguishable from World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
H. the M.: Hey, why aren’t we playing that?
J.B.: Perhaps because there is something more intrinsically creative and imaginative about a role-playing game that is played face-to-face, and largely occurs inside the players heads, not on a computer screen.
D. the E.: Maybe you’re too cheap to afford $20 a month to subscribe to Warcraft.
J.B.(quietly): Let’s talk about this at home, okay?
M.M.: I have a pointed stick!
H. the M.: Hush, now.
DM: As stigmatized as D&D seems to be in popular culture (”geek!”) it’s mythical lexicon, culled from the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, has though it’s direct and indirect influences kept open a popular-culture window to fantasy entertainment. Would the Lord of the Rings trilogy have taken in nearly $3 billion if the core audience were strictly Tolkien fans– aging 60s college students– rather than the generations of people familiar with the strongly Tolkien-like D&D universe?
J.B.: That dude must have had total wealth points!
DM: You’d think so. It’s somewhat illustrative that Gary Gygax never got really, really rich off his fecund co-invention. Wizards of the Coast, a bunch of RPG publishers who got rich off of Magic: The Gathering (a very D&D-like collectible-card game) bought Gygax’s company outright in 1997, a case of the imitators acquiring the original.
D.the E.: Still, an impressive legacy nonetheless.
H. the M.: Quite the visionary.
M.M. I have a pointed stick!
J.B. (in character): I’m turning rouge… And I’m turning and stabbing Mogenkeller with my +5 Longsword!
Japheth rolls a 12.
DM: You killed him.
J.B.: Hah! Now you have to go out and get more Dr. Pepper. We’re all out.
–Skot C.