Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, passed away today. Others are more qualified than I am to discuss his immense technical contributions to the development of D&D and roleplaying games more generally. I will only note that an incredibly high percentage of the successful academics, scientists, and intellectuals from my generation were D&D players in their teens. I don't think that is a coincidence. Playing D&D also helped get me and many others interested in ancient and medieval history, which remains a major interest many years after I gave up the game itself. Gygax will certainly be missed.
UPDATE: To clear up some confusion among commenters, I don't necessarily mean to suggest that playing D&D actually causes success in academia or science. Two variables can be correlated in a noncoincidental way even if one does not cause the other. For example A and B can be highly correlated because both are in part caused by the same third variable C. In this case, playing D&D and later success in an intellectual profession were probably caused by an underlying propensity towards interest in intellectual issues (AKA - NERDINESS). Similarly, the competitiveness and attention to detail that you need to be a good D&D player also come in handy in academia, science and other intellectual fields. However, it's also possible that some causal link did exist. The experience of of playing D&D can also help stimulate other intellectual interests, as certainly happened in my case (though those particular interests didn't become the focus of my eventual career choice).
UPDATE #2: There is in fact evidence (albeit unscientific) suggesting that playing D&D does sometimes influence later career choices. Gary Gygax's wife told reporters today that "[o]ver the years, it was one of his great pleasures to meet fans who told him that fooling around with characters, persona and dice ultimately helped them decide to becoming [sic] a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, or whatever else. 'He really enjoyed that.'" This didn't quite work in my case. My preferred D&D character classes were clerics and fighters, neither of which have much connection to my current career.
Gygax will be missed unless someone rolls a natural 20.
...but, yeah, here's to many a good hour spent in fun with real humans present, enjoying one another's company and forming many a lasting "party."
I tend to think that Gygax was chaotic good. If so, he would end up in Arborea/Olympus.
Ha ha ha! Link? Or is this completely made up?
"I don't think that is a coincidence."
Correlation =/= causation.
Ilya, you're my favorite conspirator, but come on.
Did Prof. Somin's post imply otherwise? I interpret a coincidence to be a chance occurrence not particularly likely to happen. If P correlates with Q and we observe both P and Q, it's not really a coincidence regardless of whether any causal link between P and Q exists.
For example, an incredibly high percentage of the people going into the men's bathroom at my workplace are taller than the average worker around here.
It is fallacy to conclude that using the urinal causes people to grow taller. But, it's also wrong to say that this observation is a "coincidence". I believe this is the kind of point Prof. Somin was shooting for.
she didn't say C caused D or vice versa
And now they still never go outside.
Rest in peace, Mr. Gygax, and I'm sure thousands of people the world over will pour out a little Mountain Dew for you during this weekend's regularly scheduled game night.
Unfortunately, there was only a druid nearby. He was successfully reincarnated as a badger.
That doesn't work on deaths from old age, unfortunately.
We'll miss 'ya Gary.
Sometimes you just run out of hit points.
I don't know how that compares to the average RPG-Induced-Lay-Delay.
(Fortunately I started playing guitar at 16, unlike our DM. But it has left me with survivor's guilt.)
Ilya, you're my favorite conspirator, but come on.
A correlation need not be causal for it to not be coincidence (caused by chance alone). For example, a noncoincidental correlation could be caused by an omitted variable (in this case intellectualism) which causes both of the correlated effects.
High-level Magic-users also have reincarnation spells. Clearly, there weren't any of them available either...
The role playing aspect of it isn't all that helpful, but if you are in to just gaming the system, it involves taking a set fairly closed set of rules, being able to find those rules that best work to your advantage in a particular situation and combine and argue them in such a way to get the DM to go along with your interpretation. This is basically the skill set lawyers, at least lawyers involved in litigation, need.
Oh come on, Miracle (for clerics) and/or Wish (mages) would probably work...then again, at that point, we're talking reallllly high level mages.
Where's
GandalfElminster when you need him?I disagree completely. The funnest part of D&D was NOT cheating but the exact opposite, playing by the rules as strictly as possible. I have played a lot of D&D (as well as Gamma World, Top Secret, etc) when I was younger and even in college I was the DM for a regular group who would beg me to play as much as possible. One of the keys to their fun was non-arbitrary dungeon mastering. If they thought for a second I was making it up as I went along behind the screen it would have ruined it.
Gary created an excellent game and he certianly should have been proud.
Yeah, that seems about right.
When he sat down, my jaw kind of dropped. My friend stammered, "good lord, you're Gary Gygax". The high point was after dinner, he asked everyone at the table if they wanted to help him play test a game he was working on. My friend, myself, and two others at the table accepted his offer.
It was called "King of Germany, King of France" (or "King of England, King of France", something like that). It was a truly awful game, but I won, allowing me to forever describe this story as the time I "beat Gary Gyxgax at his his own game".
I credit him for popularizing role-playing games with real rules. All modern MMORPGs owe him big time.
What would be a role-playing game without real rules? Postal Diplomacy?
I tend to agree, but I'm curious what would have happened if we hadn't had real RPGs before we developed the technology for electronic games.
The modern versions of the old class, from what I can tell, are easier to play.
But you probably never got to be a 100th level cleric/fighter/magic user with Godlike power. I was 12 years old at the time btw.
I find your comment very interesting (and contrary to my whole D&D experience):
I wonder when you played. My friends and I played most intensely in high school (1978-82). At that time, the rules were not so set in stone, and the greatest fun we had was precisely when the DM was being most creative and throwing surprises our way. At that time, the first AD&D books were just coming out and we treated them mostly as suggestions, since we thought that the best part of D&D was the enormous amount of creativity it allowed.
Almost all of our D&D gaming was based on worlds and scenarios we came up with ourselves, not store bought modules. One of the very best games our group played was when the DM (now a partner at a major New York Law firm) was literally making it up as he went along. The notion that we had no idea what might be happening next or that we would encounter monsters that we had never heard of or that a monster or character might do something totally uncharacteristic was fascinating and thrilling.
In fact, there were times when we found ourselves without any written materials, and we had to play an improvised game either with a single six sided die or no dice at all. That's when the skill of the DM was most critical.
Dan
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.asp ;-)
Probably the closest experience to table-top RPG'ing I've seen in the video game world is Neverwinter Nights - You can DM your self-created worlds on your own servers with that game - which I really enjoyed playing.
By the way, I generally played a neutral Thief. I am now a lawyer. Perhaps there is some connection.
My Con Law prof used to (and probably still does) hang out in the student lounge on Saturday mornings playing D&D with his wife and young daughters. I never did join in. Although I did enjoy the "Eye of the Beholder" computer game back in, like, 1993.
NWN is a decent game but pales in comparison to the flexibility and creativity allowed by pencil &paper gaming. If you're an electronic RPG fan you owe it to yourself to experience the real thing; look on Meetup.com or check your local gaming store if you don't know anyone who plays.
First rule of good GM-ing: just because the dice say it doesn't make it so.
I smell a Supreme Court Justice joke here, but I'm not witty enough to make it.
I was the cleric in our group, and I ended up as the lawyer. I think that clerics serve similar roles to lawyers in the modern world, particularly transactional lawyers who must bless deals before they are made. Litigators are of course more like fighters going to battle for their lords/clients.
My group of players frequently used the rules in careful and creative ways (though they were AD&D 2nd ed rules then). I often think that was helpful training for being a lawyer, though perhaps not as much as being the son of a lawyer, or many years of debate. We used to argue extensively about effects, especially for unusual uses of spell effects (for instance, mid-level users of Create Water could create hundreds of pounds of water over people's heads, which in the right circumstances could cause lots of damage, but how do you assess how much)?
Judging by the other nerdy folks who admitted to having played formerly that I met in law school, I suspect there were lots of people with similar experiences (though I am not arguing for causation here).
Contrary to various religious groups who railed against it as demonic and occultic, I believe my early exposure to D&D helped me become a Christian. It opened me to the mythical world that "existed" beyond the physical one. Eventually I came to believe, as Tolkein said to C.S. Lewis, that the Christian gospel was a myth that was also true.
RIP.
Playing games were an exercise in group cooperation, negotiation, math, organization, budgeting, etc... And you got to kill evil monsters (or play evil monsters) at the same time! My dad was always amazed at how much "voluntary homework" I'd do playing D&D and other games.
When my kids are older, I'll introduce them to RPGs as well... if I can tear them away from the xbox.
Let me get this straight... You see no connection between being a fighter and being a lawyer?
Cowboys and Indians comes to mind.
In my current job (which is not really being a lawyer, but being an academic), I rarely get to kill anything with my vorpal sword +4.
But think of how many students you've "put to sleep" with the power of your +4 pen. :P
--PtM
The pen is indeed mightier than the sword!
First rule of good GM-ing: just because the dice say it doesn't make it so.
IMO opinion this is how kids play, they cheat. For someone wanting to build their character over time short-cuts and cheats ruin it. They have to know they earned it fairly. Also players could die in my games and I wasn't going to be responsible for killing someones character. They live and die by the way they respond to situations and by the rolls of the dice.
Of course every DM has to create and invent but there is endless work doing that no need to mess with the basic rules. I would have to create the visual world, be the gods, be every non-player character, make the decisions of the NPCs and monsters, and most of all rationally restict the power-mongering nature of my friends. I absolutely understand why people who played D&D make good lawyers, so much arguing!
When I was player I was usually a Magic-User (or dual class magic user/cleric). I do miss those gaming days, it was some of the funnest times I can remember.