David
Mar 5, 2008, 04:55 PM
It's touching to see how many people across the internet have today got out their roleplaying puns to pay their last respects to Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, who died on Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva.
In the late 80's Howard and I, and many of our friends, spent our school lunchtimes and weekends playing as Wizards, Fighters and the like, battling evil monsters. We did so without computers (which rather lacked the cinematic capabilities), just using paper, pens, an assortment of dice and a set of Gygax's handbooks to give us the basic rules. Crucially, they didn't give you the story: one of the participants would play the Dungeon Master, creating an environment and acting as all the other characters and monsters that inhabited it.
All the dice rolling and modifiers that were used for fighting monsters certainly gave you a head for mental arithmetic and probabilities... To fight or to flee? What would be the best weapon to use to get cause the most damage?
Furthermore, it was also a sort of mental arithmetic for the imagination as you tried to become the character you were playing and to do what they would do. We had to work as a team, to make the most of each character's advantages and work together to overcome their weaknesses. It's the sort of play that young children instinctively do but all too quickly grow out of.
It's funny how in the modern workplace workers get sent out on team-building outings and roleplaying sessions to get them to work better together. It turns out that was what we spent much of our teenage years doing. I don't think we realised it at the time, but Gary Gygax's work meant that our play taught us a lot.
In the late 80's Howard and I, and many of our friends, spent our school lunchtimes and weekends playing as Wizards, Fighters and the like, battling evil monsters. We did so without computers (which rather lacked the cinematic capabilities), just using paper, pens, an assortment of dice and a set of Gygax's handbooks to give us the basic rules. Crucially, they didn't give you the story: one of the participants would play the Dungeon Master, creating an environment and acting as all the other characters and monsters that inhabited it.
All the dice rolling and modifiers that were used for fighting monsters certainly gave you a head for mental arithmetic and probabilities... To fight or to flee? What would be the best weapon to use to get cause the most damage?
Furthermore, it was also a sort of mental arithmetic for the imagination as you tried to become the character you were playing and to do what they would do. We had to work as a team, to make the most of each character's advantages and work together to overcome their weaknesses. It's the sort of play that young children instinctively do but all too quickly grow out of.
It's funny how in the modern workplace workers get sent out on team-building outings and roleplaying sessions to get them to work better together. It turns out that was what we spent much of our teenage years doing. I don't think we realised it at the time, but Gary Gygax's work meant that our play taught us a lot.