A mythic figure passes...

Gary Gygax died this week. Most people would say "who?" He was the inventor, along with Dave Arneson, of Dungeons & Dragons, a game that had a profound impact on my childhood and provided direction for my life though I may not have always recognized it. And the impact was not wholly positive.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons Christmas 1980 when my friend Anthony got the basic set as a gift from his older brother Tim and we were off. My first character was a dwarf named Gorgy who met an ignoble end at the bottom of spiked pit. Tim was our Dungeon Master (person who creates and manages the game adventures) for our first few sessions but it did not take Anthony long to take over the reigns.

We played all through the 80s with a variety of people. My friend George was steady companion for a couple of years until his dad passed away and he had to move away. Kevin, Matt (Fish), Frierman, and Sledg were regulars at most games with a constantly rotating cast of bit players to flesh out our adventuring parties.

Any time we could get two or three people together we played. We would play before going to school at 5:30 in the morning. We would play most days after school. We would spend entire weekends playing from the time school ended on Friday until late Sunday nights. We sometimes played as many as 60 hours a week. It never got old. There was always something new to explore or if Anthony would need time he would just let us loose in a town for a while and we could always stir up something. Good times.

I never thought about what all that game playing was doing to me physically, mentally, and emotionally at the time. Now I realize that some of the stuff I learned and did was good and some was not. Some of the positive impacts were that I developed a vast imagination, improved my math skills, cultivated a love of reading, and a passion for history. Some of the most negative were the hours of inactivity laid the groundwork for massive weight gain, my poor social skills which would not see dramatic improvement until my time at Oneonta State, and a sever lack of exposure to the opposite sex because very few women, in my experience, play Dungeons & Dragons. All of these gifts, good and bad, are the legacy of how Gary Gygax touched my life.

On Sunday nights I still play regularly. We have a group of 5-6 people who meet most weeks and play for a couple hours. It's still the most fun I have regularly. And I'm looking forward to the new edition of the rules in June. I can't wait. I guess the good outweighs the bad.